21–30 of 104 posts
The coolest part of this post, IMO, is that by finding that niche you freed yourself up to work on whatever you want to work on. Legitimate residual income.
I've decided with the latter, which will play out for at least the next year. Jury still out whether it was the right decision.
Case proven by this guy! The next time you think to yourself that there is anything needed to make money on software besides persistence, thoughtfulness, and picking something you know people want, you're in a trap of your own creation.
People who don't make money on their apps typically fail because they try to be too novel, try to make the app too good, or they don't stick in there long enough.
Whenever anyone complains to me that its hard to make money on software, and/or the App Store is rigged, I always tell them I think anyone can make a living by making a bible app. You don't even have to be the best one, just pretty good, and iterate - it's the canonical product that you know has a big audience, willing buyers, and poor competition on the low end of the market. Case proven by this guy! The next time y…
Most people do over think. But it really depends on your goals. If you're only looking for a small side income there's no reason to try something 100% new.
Sticking it out too long on these small projects can be dangerous though. We probably agree here more than not, but the trick is knowing when to drop something. If it's not selling and there's nothing fatally wrong with it, I say stop and move on.
Just my two cents though.
I'm sure you'll make it clear in later posts, but are you a developer?
I'm not a dev or a designer. I'm tech savvy enough that I'm still the computer repair guy for my entire extended family, but I'm def not fluent in Objective C.
Beside that, great story, great spirit, congratulations, I admire everyone actually getting things done :)
Whenever anyone complains to me that its hard to make money on software, and/or the App Store is rigged, I always tell them I think anyone can make a living by making a bible app. You don't even have to be the best one, just pretty good, and iterate - it's the canonical product that you know has a big audience, willing buyers, and poor competition on the low end of the market. Case proven by this guy! The next time y…
I agree with everything except your last clause. :) Most people do over think. But it really depends on your goals. If you're only looking for a small side income there's no reason to try something 100% new. Sticking it out too long on these small projects can be dangerous though. We probably agree here more than not, but the trick is knowing when to drop something. If it's not selling and there's nothing fatally wro…
Maybe it's the persistence of business that makes so much invention come from commerce. People in their garage get bored, people at work get paid to keep trying.
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I'm not a dev or a designer. I'm tech savvy enough that I'm still the computer repair guy for my entire extended family, but I'm def not fluent in Objective C.
If so, and only the later posts are about hiring, what, I assume, means you were hiring only after you've found about initial success, how come the first version ever came out? Beside that, great story, great spirit, congratulations, I admire everyone actually getting things done :)
I outsourced 95% of it. I created the initial mockups by hand and did some of the debugging, but the core app development was done by contractors. And yes, for $500.
The point is it wasn't great, but it was good enough to test the market.
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Thanks for the comment Nathan. Initially it was all via search. Since then I've started collecting email addresses the very 1st time the app launches. I'm up to over 30,000 emails now so every new product launch starts relatively well.
Impressive...How do you collect the email email addresses? Do you just ask people for their addresses?
They can cancel out easily and never see the form again. But when you have a free app that quite a few people download, email addresses start accumulating pretty quickly.
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I'm not a dev or a designer. I'm tech savvy enough that I'm still the computer repair guy for my entire extended family, but I'm def not fluent in Objective C.
Did you develop it yourself, or outsource it?
How much time did you spend researching potential app categories?
Was your category decision driven by any hard data, other than anecdotal knowledge that Spanish bibles were a category that was selling and had search volume?