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Comment by newobj | Hacker News Reader

Reminds me, I should write my own story of how I made $190 on the App Store while exercising 15 years of coding experience.

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He made something people want. That trumps programming excellence.

Keep in mind -- $20k over 10 months is a pretty low return on the investment involved in an application.

Perhaps the revenue will trend upwards ... but if we put our team on an application like this and only saw $20k in revenue in 10 months, we'd be out of business.

Though I think the point still applies. If the best computer scientists of the world had built this app, it still would have unlikely achieved greater success.

For 1 guy coding alone that is a good return. $2000 per month doing something you enjoy and that is changing peoples lives is great.

It might not be the kind of project a team or company would take on because their main goal is profit but for an individual it is great.

Our average individual software engineer salary is around $10k/month, not factoring in insurance, payroll taxes, office space expenses, etc.

But he is working on your terms. It's a choice between working at home, without a boss, on anything you like. Or working for someone, on a specific project or piece of code.

Also, I doubt you would pay a guy just getting started learning objective-c $10k/month :)

if you do pay $10k/month for entry level skills my email is....

I pulled in a good amount as a lead designer at a software company (though not 10k/month). You are absolutely right that the success of OneVoice is not enough for even a small company. But for my tiny company it is good.

Also my Objective-c skills are not worth anywhere close to $10k per month. Though someday I'll be a good programmer.

Good for you. Not having to tolerate micromanagers and pointy haired bosses? Priceless. Also the world is not America. $20,000 can feel more like $100,000 in another country. Tons of competent programmers working 12 hour days, 6 days a week, make like 1400 dollars per month (exc insurance) in my country --if they are lucky.

You're mixing up development time with sales time. Your team would probably bang this out in a few weeks and then move on to another app. In the meantime, the app would be selling in the store not costing you developer resources.

I'm not mixing them up. $20k over 10 months would barely cover the development and support costs.

Totally get it. I'm very happy for him, and I'm fully aware of why I only made $190 :) As the parent of an autistic child, I'm really happy that app authors like this can disrupt entrenched and overpriced industries and make tech like this available to a lot more people. Someone will eventually compete with him too (App Stores totally grease the wheels for competition) and then consumers will benefit even more.

If it makes you feel any better I wrote another simple app and have only made $15 from it.

My HP-41C has made maybe $5 so far.

ROFL!

edit: Just adding the name in case anyone wants to buy it; Calc41C. The source is up on github.com/watmough

You may laugh, but this is exactly the type of story we need to hear more about to balance the super hype around apps. Yeah, you could hit gold, but with a random roll you're much more likely to fire a dud.

Anyone else with a crap-app story?

It is not a crap-app story per se, but I and many other developers I know have made all of our money from client work, not a dollar from the app store.

Since we manage the provisioning etc. for the client and walk them through the initial paperwork, no one ever knows who built the (admittedly sometimes faddy) app.

We do build our own apps but just for fun and personal use.

Serious question, if I outsource my app idea to be made elsewhere through a freelanceer or agency, should I be worried? How would I protect myself here? NDA?

Trust is important. Go with your instinct (this is why a face to face meeting, if only initially, is so important - you cannot evaluate someone virtually, the nuances get airbrushed over). Basically, if we were to screw a client, the grapevine would know. Relationships are everything and that is why we get work that others could do 80 to 90 percent of.

We do sign NDAs from time to time. But really most of those NDAs are to protect the client from us revealing we did the work.

Truly unique ideas, you will need to build your own trusted network. And sell the developers on the idea (they will not commit just for money, you want to capture their heart).

I outsourced my app http://finaltouchapp.com

Its so simply anyone with a little programming flair could do it.

It's never a real problem. People most of the times, don't see what you see. Worry less get more done.

I think I may have told you this before, but your sales website there kicks ass. Very nicely designed.

"Theme" it and sell it on ThemeForest or a similar site. You'd make more from that than from your app! I would buy one.

Thanks :) It still need a lot of work though but I will make a theme soon.

I'm curious how the mechanics work for publishing an app to the iTunes store for a client? Does the client create the account and handle publishing the app? (Do they need to sign the package, deal with XCode, etc.?) Or does the client create the account and turn it over to you to publish the app(s)? Or do you - the developer - publish the app yourself and pass the money through (which doesn't seem good)?

We manage everything. We hold their hand through the initial paperwork for company registration with Apple. They never deal with Xcode. Services like TestFlight are really their only point of interaction pre-App Store.

For financials, developers can be given only development level privileges.

But of course my good sir.

My awesome puzzler fetched me a whopping $55.

Wow, you all are making me feel slightly better about the apps I've published.

I wrote an app to display traffic images for my local city - I followed all the correct avenues and got permission to use the images from local traffic authority. Part of our signed contract is that I'm not allowed to sell the application. I've had about 200,000 downloads and was number 1 on the Australian app store for a week.

There are people who don't seem to have followed any path to keep their applications and content legal (with the same app idea) and are selling theirs with the same content as mine, they seem to be on the app store with no repercussions. I guess I have that piece of mind that I won't get sued or asked to pull my app..

I've made about enough from my admob ads to pay off my developer subscription :)

Spent a few months making a (poorly conceived) "lifestyle" app, sold one copy to a user in Egypt.

Total profit -$98, Many lessons learned ;)

I made a game in high school and sold it in the android app store along with a free trial version. The trial version got about 300 downloads and the paid version sold a whopping 3 copies.

Ah well, it was a learning experience. It now no longer works despite not having been changed at all; perhaps some new android version broke backwards compatibility, or the API I was using depended on some undocumented functionality.

It would be great to actually see these apps you talk about making no money so that we all could look at them and think about what went wrong with them.

Sure - and I wrote a blog post about it: http://philbarr.blogspot.com/2011/11/experience-and-lessons-....

End of first week and I've made a full $0.40. Woop!

The first web app I ever built (about 6 years ago) was related to sharing photos of home design and architecture. I got something like 4 signups, and it was free...

Being my first effort, I did everything wrong. Too many features, delayed launching, awful code, unrealistic traffic expectations, fear of billing systems (probably warranted at the time) - pretty much everything.

But... not giving up too easily, I tried selling links on the site. (I had no traffic, so ads were a bust. I figured it might have some SEO value). Turns out that's not a bad niche for that sort of thing, and the site wound up making a few hundred dollars a month in link sales. That has since dried up (across every site on which I've sold links - I think Google is figuring this out), but it was nice that it wasn't a total waste of time, financially speaking.

Every stinker is a step forward.

I remember ordering 65 of these calculators from the states (I'm in SA). They worked out to be about $200 each. If the varsity students knew about this app, the benefit for them would've been insane.

Pretty much the same here. Then again I'm targeting cross-stitchers (pretty small market) and went with iAd over any form of payment. All things considered the fact that it's made any money at all is kind of astonishing.

Was a bit of a letdown to figure out that Apple had sent me a check at one point and I didn't notice it until two months later.

May I ask you why, being an experienced developer with an autistic child that know the actual state of the industry, you overlooked this opportunity?

It's a genuine question, because I do it all the times as well and then, when I realize it to late, I wonder why I didn't think about it in the first place. I would like to know if there is a pattern or something.

In this particular case my child is fairly high functioning and not non-verbal, so I wasn't aware of this particular need. We do use some small pictoral cards with him to help prepare him for transitions, but it's literally like laminated clip art. Don't really need something high tech. In that case presenting him with an ipad would likely just distract him...

But I sympathize with your general lament over "why didn't I think of that?" Haven't we all experienced that SO many times?

What I don't understand is why don't you make exactly the same app to compete with him right now?

Spotting commercial opportunities is its own skill. Any experienced programmer could have made the v1 of Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, etc... but figuring out that people need that is nontrivial.

Is that how it works, or do lots of people build lots of things, and when a tiny handful of them go big the creators are retroactivley deemed prescient?

I think that there's no question you have to do some things right to succeed, but many people do things right and fail, because ultimately, a lot of it is just pure luck.

It's more about recognising when you're on to something, and when you're flogging a dead horse.

And being able to double-down quickly in the first instance, and trash-can it in the second.

Everyone is convinced that their startup is the next big thing. Some of them end up being right. Part of that was prescience, part of it was the "luck" to be obsessed with the right idea.

A lot of it is that the people build things they know will work (rather than things they think will work) tend to succeed more often. (At least in my own admittedly anecdotal experience) The hard work of research, initial sales and market validation is later retroactively glossed over as "vision" by onlookers.

And getting what you built into the hands of the people that need it is nontrivial and I'd argue it's the hardest part.

True. The reason why this went well for the developer is that he did direct sales to find early advocates, and didn't rely on an app store magic wand. Of course, that is possible with a $199 app, not so much with a $1.99 one.

I think it would become more obvious if you are actually writing a check for a $X000 piece of equipment, and thinking "my iPad could do this".

And I almost fell off my chair that it wasn't a fart app - nice to see someone put in real effort, create something useful to an under-served segment and see success from that.

This made me smile. Thanks!

Pssh. I lost $99 on the App Store, with 20 years experience!

I said almost the exact same thing in December when my first android app only made $150 in 5 months.

Hang in there. I took that as education time, improved my marketing and added a new app, and now its more like 350/m avg. Its no business but not bad for a few weekends building apps I wanted for myself.

Only $190? I made about $1k with a small learning app I put up. The goal was just to recoup the developer fee and it made more than that. I still get $5-$10 from Apple deposited in my account every so often :)

$190 is probably even high for an "average" app. Plenty of $1 apps languish with sales that round to zero. Either they're no good, or they have too much competition, or they have insufficient marketing so nobody knows they exist, or they got unlucky somehow (bad choice of name, who knows).

Actually rather than being unlucky, I think it would be more correct to say that they failed to get lucky somehow. In the absence of doing something right (promotion, naming, hitting a niche at the right time, having other successful apps by the same developer) or getting lucky (being featured by Apple or a blog, etc.), I expect the natural state of an app is to have sales that round to zero.

With hundreds of thousands of apps in the App Store, it's not much different from building a random website and expecting people to somehow just show up.

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