Bootstrapping a $30k profit/month company from our internship earnings (Part 3) | Hacker News Reader

Bootstrapping a $30k profit/month company from our internship earnings (Part 3)

blog.fiplab.com

153 pointsn9com36 comments

I love these posts, and I am rooting for you guys, but find it a little depressing that you first started making real money by cloning someone else's crappy novelty fluff app.

Thanks doomlaser. With little money (especially back in September), it's incredibly risky to innovate, and in today's world, everything is a derivative of the other in some form. e.g., Facebook from MySpace, Lamborghini from Ferrari. Talking Gremlin was exactly this, on a smaller scale.

This is our philosophy: Find a successful business -> Discover as much as possible about it -> Re-implement it all -> Then battle them for supremacy. Having an enemy brings out our primal instincts. Boom. :)

Cloning a fluff entertainment app doesn't really bother me, but I come from a games background, and the app store is rife with shady cloning of full games that follow a monetization model similar to yours.

I have a couple that have had two of their games completely cloned, and filled with cheap 'casual appeal' graphics (one of which made it to #7 on the app store). I find this a kind of dirty way to make money.

http://www.gamepro.com/article/news/221862/hey-thats-my-fish...

Very smart. Your goal is not to innovate, it's to succeed.

This is very important as it's counter to the common belief that success is based on having a "new" idea instead of just taking over an existing market.

Perhaps, but unless you're someone like Steve Jobs you're not going to come out with a TOTALLY new idea that no one in the world hasn't done or thought of already. Even Disney ripped off Kimba to make Lion King. http://www.hemmy.net/2007/04/28/disney-lion-king-ripped-off-...

If someone is stealing your ideas and executing better than you, then maybe you need to find out what they are doing right, so your next game does just as well or better than the clones.

You get even more bang for your buck if you combine two existing products.

Combine HootSuite and SocialOomph and you have a rockstar Twitter manager.

Synergy is a wonderful thing.

Innovation is overrated- users don't care about it, they care about delivered value. Half the time the innovators have crappy executions, but are so wedded to their idea that they refuse to simplify, change, and evolve.

That's when cloners come in and beat the living daylights out of them by copying and improving upon their innovation.

There's a fantastic book on this, 'Copycats':

http://www.amazon.com/Copycats-Smart-Companies-Imitation-Str...

Incredibly well-written for a HBS book, lots of solid case studies, and some interesting research into the nitty gritty numbers behind innovation vs imitation.

HN discussions for parts 1 & 2...

Part 1: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2955214

Part 2: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2965929

There's a real nugget of wisdom in listening to angry customers. So many customers will say something nice to not offend.

When someones passionate and says you've got it wrong and here's where - you should pay careful attention. Perhaps 20% are trolls you can safely ignore but the rest will tell you what people were thinking but were too polite to say.

So many fellow entrepreneurs tell me breathlessly about this person or other who liked their startup. I always ask did anyone say they didn't like it? Usually they say sure but I just ignored them - big mistake.

You've kind of hit the nail on the head right there. We made precisely the same mistake with CopterKid, believing it to be virtually faultless in every regard. It's all about being sensible enough to decipher a well-wished constructive/negative criticism from a downright trollish one.

I believe Erik Ries said much of the same thing in a talk I saw once (can't find it now, of course). The gist of it was that nobody likes to get angry, and angry customers are therefor especially important because they actually care enough about your product to get angry at you for screwing it up.

if people complain, you know you have something worth complaining about :)

Thanks for sharing as well. Seems that you had a three pronged approach to success:

1. Create something that has a proven market, and do it well (Talking Tom Cat clone) 2. Viral marketing (Youtube videos and Facebook sharing) As well as cross app promotion 3. Create more apps with the same formula and framework already set up.

This should work for a lot of other devs as well, although they may not see the same level of success as these gentlemen.

Curious what Mac App Store revenues are like. Can you share any rankings-to-downloads stats for FaceTab and some of your other Mac apps?

Will do in Part 4!

As a fellow indie dev with some success in the app store, I'm always happy to hear of other indies become successful. I think the App Store has really flipped traditional software sales on its head and made it possible for the likes of you and I to compete head to head with billion dollar companies. It's quite remarkable and I hope this is just the beginning.

@bignoggins - Absolutely, I could never have imagined I would be running a business where we make our own products from scratch, without all the large scale corporate mumbo jumbo.

p.s. great website, good to see you're able to live the dream and travel the world!

Hmm, the shareware market before the app store was pretty lucrative too.

The app store didn't really change anything for small shops. If you compete against big money on the app store you still have the problem that they have a lot more marketing money to spend. And marketing is still of #1 importance.

The only difference is that the download portal now takes 30% of your money for the privilege of being listed there. You still have to make some buzz so that people learn about your product.

I'm on the app store with my products but I really don't like the concept.

Anirudh/Rishi,

Great story, I'm a long time lurker but created an account to comment/question. From what I could gather in the 3 posts, it looks like neither of you guys were technical at the very beginning. Did one of you eventually learn to code/design, or is that portion still hired out? What qualities did you look for when hiring coders?

Thanks!

Cool, glad we got you to sign up to HN :)

Great question, I'm pretty technical since I've was developing websites for several years before starting FIPLAB. At times, I even figure out how to code things when our programmer can't figure it out. I always look for the simplest way to build something, especially when we are under a tight deadline and need to ship before the competition does.

Also, I still do a lot of the design work myself (obviously not the 3d modelling/animation though) - but more UI/Icon design.

As for hiring coders, the number one thing we look for is a proactive and 'never give up' attitude. Can't stand it where in the past a programmer has given up after spending just 1 hour trying to code a particular feature. If they can't be bothered find/figure out the solution, then they'll never mix well with our team.

Great series, thanks for sharing.

I am especially curious how effective you guys found paid advertising to be - the conventional wisdom I've heard is that it's pretty pointless for advertising App Store apps.

Are you guys still doing any paid advertising these days, or is it mostly organic/word of mouth/cross promotion at this point?

Thanks. Paid advertising is pretty much useless, unless you have very deep pockets. We just splashed a bit of cash on it as we needed to do everything possible to break into the Top 25 'Golden Zone'. We also got a very good deal at $0.01 CPC and they matched our initial deposit of $250.

Thanks for confirming. Do you think the initial ad spend was worthwhile? (Do you think you would have gotten into the Top 25 without it?)

probably could have broken into the Top 25 without it, but didn't want to risk not advertising, just in case we didn't.

I'm really enjoying these articles. Thanks for sharing.

Since iAd eCPM has dropped from 15$ to around 1-3$, from my personal experience, have you found that your revenues have also dropped 5-15x? Or has the volume, or other monetization techniques helped recoup the difference? In other words, did you find that period to be the peak income period for the Talking Gremlin app?

Hi, Anirudh here, and thanks for reading. Although iAds eCPM has dropped, we normally still manage high single digit figures. Our revenues from ads have roughly halved, but there are the odd anomalies in eCPM rates. For instance, yesterday was pretty stellar at a $17.7 eCPM average. Certainly, late last year, especially when iAds was first launched in the UK, ad revenue and CPM rates were at their peak.

However, by moving onto the Mac App Store at an early stage with popular apps, we have shifted from solely relying on large ad revenues as our income source to paid app income. Our overall daily turnover ratio between paid app earnings and ad revenue is now roughly 50-50.

Open to answering any more questions directly here on HN, so do keep them coming.

Thank you so much for the response. It's really insightful. I haven't read too much about developer experiences on the Mac App store, so I'm really looking forward to your next blog post. Thanks again!

On your website it says "If you have an interesting project to propose to us then we’d love to hear from you." Is that still the case, or are you guys swamped at the moment ? If you are still accepting new projects, would you perhaps go into some detail on the workflow/costs etc. Thanks much.

Not currently accepting new projects, hit us up in the middle of October - we might have more time on our hands then.

I see all your apps are free, what are your thoughts on paid apps?

paid apps are great, we have a few: FaceTab Pro, MailTab Pro, Disk Doctor, London Cycle Pro etc... about 50% of our income is from paid apps.

Starting to see a pattern here with the App Store. Are you guys just -really- unlucky, or do these sorts of bugs in the charts happen a lot?

The bug at Christmas actually happened the year before too, and it was hell for a lot of developers when the same bug happened again last year.

But I guess you learn to get used to it.

Please don't take this the wrong way, this is a serious question, and I hope you give it some serious thought before you answer.

Do you feel fulfilled? Do you feel like this is the most you can contribute to human civilization? If you could, how would you most like to make the world a better place?

That's a silly question for someone starting their first business.

Most great philanthropists only dive in in their 50's and 60's.

Elon Musk started a mapping site in his 20's, which put him in position for PayPal, which gave him the capital to launch rockets into space.

If more people focused on making money in their 20's, real money, scalable money, there'd be more shoot for the stars entrepreneurs in their 30's and 40's, and more world class philanthropists in their 50's and 60's.

I always am left wondering what people think gives them the right to ask that question of other people.

Isn't it hard enough figuring that out for your own life?

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