21–30 of 164 posts
He made $60k or so before ultimately selling it to WikiPedia and becoming their director of mobile development.
Not too shabby!
Hello World attached to a random number generator.
It's a ton of work and is profitable in the sense that the hundreds of dollars a month in server costs are just a bit more than covered by the premium users. But otherwise, it did help land me a number of great connections, both in NYC and SF, where I just moved.
I code in the open. NewsBlur is entirely on GitHub: http://github.com/samuelclay. The iPhone app I'm working on is also there, so some folks use it as a way to send me issues, others go so far as to add their own pet features. It's kind of neat to see a community spring up around the code itself.
Admittedly, I spent probably another day in random debugging for version 3-ish of it (just went walkabout in Chicago with a debug build, logging AP details when it had bad behavior). And then ungodly amounts of time answering e-mails and on the phone with the iOS app review team, but that was long after the "weekend project" phase.
Clean Up Your Mess ( http://www.visualmess.com/ ) is just a mini visual design tutorial and not a product, but it was a side project and it's made a few hundred bucks from amazon ads. I did not intend to make money from it, so it was nice surprise that I did.
I only have 1 side project, which is a utility for Windows laptops (a battery meter). It does about $1500 to $2k per month in sales. I've been thinking about expanding it to have a Enterprise (B2B) product. I'm trying to get another idea I have into a startup, but I haven't been able to get that off the ground.
Where do you sell such apps?
I did some stuff one afternoon about 4-5 years ago and it continues to pay my mortgage ever since. It's the goose that lays the golden egg and under no circumstances do I mess with it.