bignoggins

I'm the single founder of Bignoggins Productions. I do sports apps for mobile devices. My apps have been pretty successful, reaching as high as #32 overall paid on iPhone and #60 overall paid on iPad. Been full time for about 9 months now. Made 75K last year, and on track for 250K+ this year. Almost all profit as my overhead is insanely low. Currently traveling the world with my wife while working on apps (our travel blog is http://www.shenventure.com). In fact, I'm writing this from an airbnb in Venice right now and headed to Milan tommorrow.

That sounds incredibly arrogant. And unless a google search of you turns up some amazing accomplishments you will end up looking like a fraud.

I don't find that mutually exclusive. Having a high priced contest on 99Designs is the best way I know of to get in touch with great designers. You can work with them further offline as well.

Darn, just missed it. Is it available recorded yet?

What good is revenue with no profit? Apple has said that app store basically break even in terms of profit, so I'd venture to guess Android is similar. Although they don't need an army of approvers so maybe their costs are less. But they most likely don't make as much from paid apps or in app purchases as the app store either.

Considering even Apple doesn't get any meaningful profit from its app store, I don't see Android Market being a profit center either. They need Android Market just to be competitive with the App Store.

I disagree, it's perfectly possible. My side project started last year and I didn't quit until my revenues matched my salary. Now I'm on course for 250-300K in revenue this year. You just need to scale the startup appropriately. An groupon competitor just is not appropriate for a bootstrapped startup, in my opinion. Whereas something like an iphone game definitely is.

I don't follow your logic. How does Apple catering to a subset of consumers mean they are not acting in the consumer's best interest. From the standpoint of the consumers they cater to, they are. From the standpoint of those they don't cater to, I suppose they don't. Having more choice at a competitive price is not "good for the consumer", it's only good for consumers who want more choice at a competitive price. And as Apple has shown, that isn't everybody.

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?

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.

Not surprised E resonates with the HN crowd =)

darn, I thought it was all the assets too.

DOOM doesn't compile, seems to be missing some files.

so how relevant is this article for startups? Seems to me this is more for owners of mature companies. Or am I missing something?

If you're doing a yogurt startup, do you need a technical cofounder who is an expert in yogurt?

This is not a joke, I'm genuinely curious whether "technical" cofounders are specific to the tech domain or if they are necessary in every startup (another example is chef / restaurants)

Sorry for the n00b question, but can someone explain the distinction between PE investor & angel/VC? Is angel/VC a subset of PE investor?

This may work for the web, but for mobile I would argue a good designer is as important, if not more so, than a good developer. I'm speaking as a developer who has realized this and hired a designer. Best business decision I've ever made.

hardware? this isn't looking like it's just an app =)

Chris, is your friend contributing anything else besides the idea? ie capital, programming, design, business contacts? If not then I hope you aren't considering a 50/50 split because that would be quite unfair to you.

and where does the company get the money to spend on R&D? That is the chicken and egg problem. That's like saying Warren Buffet is good at picking stocks because he is rich and can afford to spend more money picking stocks.

My expenses are pretty minimal, ~ 5K/year total.

both iOS and android. I use some contractors but do most of the programming myself. My apps are listed in my profile, mostly sports related.

Absolutely agree with this. I left on a round the world trip in April with my wife. We've been through Australia, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Spain, Germany, Czech Republic, Hungary, and now Austria. I spend half of my time traveling / meeting people and the other half building my mobile app business. The trip is costing us about $5000/mo (using airbnb and being fairly liberal with spending on food and attractions, we have 0 expenses in the states since we packed everything into storage), but I've managed to triple revenues this year to ~ 25K/mo, so if we wanted to we could do this indefinitely.

I know many people who are working 80 hrs/week on their startup while letting life pass them by (including a few in YC), but I wouldn't trade places with them. These days it is entirely possible to build a company and live your dreams at the same time.

thanks for the clarification. it would have been nice to mention that in the original post, that's where my confusion came from.

rank is a direct measurement of total downloads, so it's straightforward to extrapolate.

I don't see how this post answers the "how" at all. From what I'm reading it just seems like pure luck that they got featured by apple. Am I missing something?

I'm skeptical of the 30k profit/month title. I think it's just linkbait to promote their game. If you look at their app ranking history (registration needed):

http://www.appannie.com/copterkid/ranking/history/#start_dat...

they are nowhere to be found in the overall rankings, and even their rankings in the games category tops out at 700ish. Plus, they only sell the game for 99c. I've had apps that sell for 2.99 that are in the top 200 overall paid list on iphone, and I've never come close to 30K/month for a single app.

My most recent sales data (for an app that has gone as high as #97 on the iPhone top paid list) indicates that the #200 top paid app on iphone gets about 300 sales per day. If you factor in Apple's 30% thats about $210/day. So even if their app was in the top 200 (which they were never even close to), it would only generate $6300/mo in revenue at 99c.

It just doesn't add up. Unless the 30K/month is talking about a completely different app?

when you autorelease, the reference goes into an autorelease pool that is drained later. So you will likely end up using much more memory than you need to. Since iOS runs on memory constrained devices, this could mean the difference between running smoothly and crashing due to memory warnings all the time.

Jews only make up 2% of the population in the United States. I would argue that US policy toward Israel is motivated more by Christian end-times theology of the religious right than by the Jews themselves.

I love being part of a bootstrapped startup. I have 100% control of the company, don't have to answer to investors, and can actually focus on making profit instead of trying to scale. Oh, and I'm traveling the world while doing it.