ISteam for iPhone earns a bunch of 22-year olds $100,000 in one month | Hacker News Reader

ISteam for iPhone earns a bunch of 22-year olds $100,000 in one month

tgdaily.com

67 pointsbrk25 comments

I feel a lot of the reaction here will be, man if only I could come up with something like that! The reality is, though, they probably spent a lot of time on this project, and when you divide the $100k up between the people who worked on it and the number of hours they worked, it does not come out to a ton of money. Also the $100k in a month seems unlikely to be repeated - a bunch of people downloaded it for the "coolness" factor, but it will fade and drop off, as happens with so many apps that are basically tech demos rather than truly useful and productive apps. To summarize, this is likely not a good business model.

However, that's not to say the project wasn't worth it for the people who worked on it - just a caution that while the headline is catchy, the upside for these guys is probably the resume / VC pitch bullet rather than the money.

I.e., http://www.google.com/search?q=%22ideas+are+worthless%22

How do you get good ideas for startups? That's probably the number one question people ask me.

I'd like to reply with another question: why do people think it's hard to come up with ideas for startups?

Indeed. In fact, we had almost exactly the same idea when brainstorming about cool iPhone apps with a couple of people, but thought it was too lame and that we couldn't pull it off in a high-quality way ;) Ideas don't matter, people (with their skills, enthusiasm, etc) do :)

Upvoted not for the $100K/mo, but the cool use of microphone, gravity sensor, touch screen, and speaker to simulate a surface with condensation on it.

same here. the $100k/mo made for a catchy title. read further and you see the tech and user vision (drawing space) and implementation are hot.

"It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out why it took iSteam barely a week ... to briefly become #1 entertainment application in the App Store."

I'm not so sure it's so obvious. Why is playing with steam so popular? I downloaded it and liked it, but I still don't know what was so compelling about it.

Any pointers as to why suddenly there has been such an improvement in water simulation effects? Is it just that computers have become faster, or have some nifty algorithm ideas emerged in recent times? Even the iBeer stuff impressed me.

This is the reason I was fascinated by the app! Simulating steam believably is quite a feat. Any papers or rough algorithmic sketches out there?

I haven't seen the app, but a really good fog/water maker is Perlin Noise: http://freespace.virgin.net/hugo.elias/models/m_perlin.htm

There is a faster implementation of it, as perlin noise is pretty expensive, that get's used a lot in game design.

Hope that helps.

That's a clever use of the iPhone, but why are people so eager to be parted with their money to buy some eye candy app?

People like eye candy. People like to have fun. It's a toy. You get to show your friends, and say, "Look at this cool new toy I found."

Entertainment is a huge market.

"Make something people want."

You put this beautifully.

It's called candy for chrissakes. Who doesn't like candy?

It's a dollar. Most people (at least who own an iPhone) can afford it even if they only use it once for 5 minutes and forget about it.

I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of people buy these apps on impulse and rarely use it again after checking it out.

Really?!? You're questioning why Apple iPhone users would want to purchase an app solely because it's shiny "eye candy"? Sorry, that joke just writes itself.

This is not an Apple iPhone phenomenon.

Why do people pay billions for mobile phone ringtones? People even pay for them on phones that you can just copy an mp3 onto and use as the ringtone.

Mobile phones have a fantastic built in micropayment system - it gets added to your bill, and you probably don't even notice - there is no hurdle.

> Mobile phones have a fantastic built in micropayment system - it gets added to your bill, and you probably don't even notice - there is no hurdle.

That's the innovation: When you make micropayments easy, you make it easy to sell candy.

Think about what else in the world costs $.99 -- can't even get a 20oz soda for that anymore -- and then think about what cool software -- like games -- normally cost.

This is a cool little piece of technology for less than the cost of a soda. That's a) something you can't really get anywhere else and b) possibly the beginning of the micropayment revolution for things other than music that we've been waiting on for awhile now (unfortunately self contained to the iphone for now, but I'm sure coming to the rest of the product line soon)

Oh, okay. At $.99 I can see why it would be popular.

And I've just demonstrated that I read one too few paragraphs in the story.

Interesting -- in the end, inflation is what will let us make micropayments...

How so? The problem with micropayments is not that the absolute numbers are low (in many currencies the numbers are always pretty high).

Because of the difference between deploying infrastructure vs. maintaining infrastructure already deployed.

Companies seem to be willing to deploy infrastructure to collect e.g. 1 dollar payments, but not 10 cent payments.

I'm guessing that they'll be willing to maintain that infrastructure even as the value of the payment decreases due to inflation, since the per transaction costs are low and likely to get lower, and there's little risk in maintaining existing infrastructure.

Other iPhone apps that make excellent use of the devices features for innovative UI are Ocarina and RjDj, worth checking out.

What do you call a hack that's simultaneously extremely clever and extremely useless?

I'm sure there's some phrase for this that I'm missing.

What do you call a hack that's simultaneously extremely clever and extremely useless?

Hmmmm. Profitable?

iSteam is definitely a cool app. I'm an http://www.dreamworldsol.com myself, but I must say I'm impressed.

Sam Shaw http://www.dreamworldsol.com

Reply on news.ycombinator.com