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Comment by ronyeh | Hacker News Reader

I feel bad for the couple featured in the article, but it looks like they didn't bootstrap their business very wisely. They sold their car, cashed in their 401K, and bought unnecessary hardware:

  When the newest iPhone came out at the end of September,
  the couple immediately bought two.

I've worked on iOS apps for 2 years, and still don't own an iPhone (an iPod touch suffices). Why did they have three Macbooks, an iMac, and a Mac mini for only two employees?

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Selling the car and cashing in 401K is generating cash flow. The hardware they bought would be around 8k-10k$ expenses (4k-5k$ per person). I don't consider this as a lot. Or is your point that they should have put that money into marketing instead?

Car & 401K is a terrible idea for generating cash. Keep your day job (or find a day job) and build apps on the side until you think you've found a winner.

Putting money into marketing is a difficult question. I feel like it works if you have apps that are already generating money, so that you can use that revenue stream to fund the marketing for your other apps.

But if you are just starting out, you should try the $0 marketing approach of contacting bloggers in your space (in their case, educational app blogs) to see if they'll review your app.

Selling the car and cashing in 401K is generating cash flow.

So is selling a kidney, but that doesn't make it a good idea. The wife had a job and quit. The husband appears to have some IT skills that he could have used to bring cash in on the side while looking for that hit game.

Heck, if they both kept working they could have had someone make these games for them for way less than they loss in money and opportunity costs.

The only issue I have with using an iPod touch is that the camera isn't as nice so if you want to do anything with like barcodes or such you are SOL

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