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Comment by dot | Hacker News Reader

I really want to agree with you, but I think he found a profitable little niche. The type of apps (actually concepts) he's building for $99 will end up being very cookie cutter and should take a good developer less than an hour (and sometimes 15 minutes).

I think this could scale well too if you find decent, dependable developers that want to make a quick buck here and there...

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This could end up as great lead generation for a mobile development shop. Once the customer sees what $99 buys, it's likely that he or she will want changes and probably some design work.

If you can pull together a group of designers and developers and provide the hosting and make the ever-so-painful submission process painless, you are basically creating an app-as-a-service business where the $99 prototype is the loss leader that gets you your customer base.

The cheapskate entrepreneurs might indeed want more services, but will they want it for an hourly rate that's 150% of what he paid for the whole initial app? Probably not. That's Patrick's point: This is basically an adverse selection machine. It's disproportionately attractive to people who don't want to pay you money while also putting up a big red flag to people who would like to give you money.

There might be a good business model here, but I'm pretty sure it isn't going to involve these $99 app buyers suddenly turning into worthwhile consulting leads. My guess: In the best case scenario, this process can be entirely automated and take up no time for anyone.

The assumption that people who pay $99 for a prototype are "cheapskates" who don't understand mobile development completely ignores the fact that the market for mobile development is growing like crazy in so many different directions and is at such an incredible premium right now that the bottom end of the market has been pretty much ignored (if you are a great iphone developer right now why would you even bother?)

But it is going to get huge. Think about web developers in 1997. They could charge a premium because there were few of them and few out of the box options (ie ugly template websites where you pay $50 for a full ecommerce site, 99designs, etc.).

Starting out doing consulting means you get to know a part of the market that most people are too snobby to touch (the whole "talking to your customers" thing) - though they are just as legitimate a customer segment as the people who will pay the egregious rates for custom.

Eh, I agree that it will be a large demographic, just like the large demographic of customers who want a WordPress clone written in PHP and ranked #1 in Google for $500. I suppose they are "legitimate" in the sense of being legal persons, sure — but "legitimate" in the sense of "profitable" or "preferable to other options," not so much. If you want to work for an effective rate of $12 an hour, my experience is that a job behind the counter at Barnes & Noble will probably be less of a headache.

(I once had a client whom I'd given a ~50% discount. Upon completion of the contract, he declared that he'd only pay me half of my already halved invoice. If this sounds like fun to anybody out there, by all means, pursue $99 app customers.)

Turn-key solutions for creating basic sites have lower margins but make it up by being able to sell at larger volume either by offering the same set of themes or offloading design costs to the community or customer.

If that's what he's going for, then it's workable, and I agree with you, it's a good market to target. But that's rather different from creating custom prototypes for $99.

It's probably the opposite of good lead gen. It's attracting a disproportionate share of pathological customers, for one thing, but also: for many, perhaps even most, of the potential follow-on customers, their first experience with the business is going to be of disappointment over what $99 actually got them.

Is it doing the developer community a favour by teaching people that for $99 you're going to get an absolute minimum product?

I'd be fascinated to see what kind of programming you'd get from places like Mechanical Turk. Has anyone done a $2 FizzBuzz request, and then compared all the resulting code?

Sure, let's agree that an amazing developer can build an amazing prototype for $99 and scale it.

The problem comes here: "guide you on submitting it to the app store." Good luck getting that to be scalable, easy, or worth your time/effort. I've run clients through this process. I've gone through it myself many times. It is tedious, complicated, and full of technical jargon. If someone could simplify the process so that a client can set that up in under 1 hour - I will subscribe to that service.

On second thought, maybe I should pay him the $99 to run my clients through the sign up process...

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