Comment by bignoggins | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bignoggins | Hacker News Reader

I'm skeptical of the 30k profit/month title. I think it's just linkbait to promote their game. If you look at their app ranking history (registration needed):

http://www.appannie.com/copterkid/ranking/history/#start_dat...

they are nowhere to be found in the overall rankings, and even their rankings in the games category tops out at 700ish. Plus, they only sell the game for 99c. I've had apps that sell for 2.99 that are in the top 200 overall paid list on iphone, and I've never come close to 30K/month for a single app.

My most recent sales data (for an app that has gone as high as #97 on the iPhone top paid list) indicates that the #200 top paid app on iphone gets about 300 sales per day. If you factor in Apple's 30% thats about $210/day. So even if their app was in the top 200 (which they were never even close to), it would only generate $6300/mo in revenue at 99c.

It just doesn't add up. Unless the 30K/month is talking about a completely different app?

Yes, it's probably a dozen or so different apps if you go over their website: http://www.fiplab.com/

exactly :) - hence the point "Lesson #3: Don't put all your eggs in one basket"

There are so many more factors than just rank alone. Such as competition, search results, web exposure, sales, and more. They also have a lot of those "talking" apps that people with kids gobble up at one point or another once they have a smartphone.

He didn't explicitly mention that CopterKid did very well, but I'm sure he's wise enough not to give away where he's directly seeing his successes because who needs MORE competition?

we are going to explain all our successes, it's actually not that hard for someone to find out which ones they are if they take the time to check out our portfolio.

rank is a direct measurement of total downloads, so it's straightforward to extrapolate.

Is it? there are no other factors?

Agreed. There's something about his bravado that screams to me "full of shit." From the inane I-banking references to the needless jab at Indian developers, I just have a hard time buying it.

I hope they do well, but I'm predicting a future HN post "How I achieved a real $30k profit by creating an attention-grabbing series of blog posts about how I bootstrapped to a fake $30k profit."

you guys are so cynical, CopterKid isn't the app that is making us $30k profit/month. We have a lot of other very successful iOS and Mac apps (and their profit combined adds up to $30k profit/month) - check out our main website before jumping to conclusions: http://www.fiplab.com

everything is going to be explained in detail in the next few parts, we are not going to hold anything back.

thanks for the clarification. it would have been nice to mention that in the original post, that's where my confusion came from.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com