Over $100k so far (after google fees, but before taxes and expenses)
I don't like publishing which games they are because there's already a lot of competition in their genres, no reason to extend it. However, for each, I was actually one of the first few of their kind when the market was just getting rolling with paid apps.
Awesome success. Do you need to frequently publish new games to keep your revenue up? For games, do you find that customers expect updates for bug fixes? Or are the games mostly "fire and forget", the code never to be touched again?
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.
I just have a website. It's almost all word-of-mouth, blog posts, and people posting on forums recommending it that drives traffic. I do some Google Ads.
It's a one-time sale. It's a freemium model. You can download the app and get limited functionality. You can purchase for $10 the "Pro" version which is a serial number that unlocks the advanced features.
For a while I was doing cheaper time-limited licenses, like $1 for 6 months, $2 for 1 year, etc and $10 for lifetime.
Best source of customers is from free users. I started the app as free until version 3.0 when I switched to freemium. Sales have been fairly consistent each month for years, with spikes when a blog picks it up.
If you're referring to BatteryBar, then, yes, I do. I'd love any way you could help get the word out. If anyone has thoughts on how to get it reviewed by tech blogs, I'd appreciate it.
I think your major problem is that most people land on your website and leave again. It isn't tailored for the sale of an app that costs less than $10. Get a separate domain for Battery Bar and have a well designed product page along the lines of:
If a new website isn't possible or you want some other ideas here are a bunch:
1. Mess with your pricing a bit
I was comfortable paying $7 would i have preferred $5 and would not buy at $10 which is where it is now. I think with some A/B testing you could find a better price point.
2. Your checkout makes me want to cry
So as a potential customer i click upgrade to pro and get taken to this http://screensnapr.com/e/Rrn828.png .
Why has the price double?
Why are you trying to up sell me stuff?
Why am i on an external website that i have never heard of before?
Maybe spend some time/money setting up a more user friendly checkout system that wont cause potential customers to give up half way through the sale.
3. On your website sell benefits rather than features, to get you started
"It a bloody million times more accurate than the inbuilt one"
Marketing Ideas (preferable once you have fixed your website)
1. Make a battery app for the iphone (there are tons of free ones) and you would be a small fish in a big market but if people do get your app you can cross sell plus if you get mentioned on any blogs you can try and get them to link to BatteryBar as well.
2. Are you actively talking to blogs and app review sites or are you hoping they stumble across you?
Hopefully that helps, its a mess of ideas but and comments but hopefully that is useful. If you need some more input ill try, just send me a message on twitter @nico_kunz
On the topic of A/B Testing your pricing... please don't offer exactly the same product or benefits at each price point, that's a definite no-no and a way to lose people if they catch on. To keep the price changes legit, you might offer varying levels of support, i.e. response time.
I made a very simple iOS gym log app for my own needs and decided to sell it in the App Store. I think I've generated almost $5k in revenue. So, not a 'business', but it certainly paid for my developer account! :)
Iroically, the app isn't truly native, but was built in jQTouch. When I get around to it, I'm planning to finish a native version, which I think it desperately needs to be.
I made a few JavaScript scripts that I'm selling on CodeCanyon and the last month I made around $200. I'm thinking of expanding the business, but this time in ThemeForest building WordPress Themes.
I made an iOS application for reading comics in literally 6 hours. I released it back in May and it's currently earning me ~$1000 a month via ads. Impressions are still increasing by ~25K each day, so profits are likely to increase in the coming months.
Probably manga. The US manga market has expanded hugely since I started reading manga (~8 years ago). Just about any genre (or subject matter) you can name has manga dedicated to it, which contributes to its ability to appeal across all age groups.
The other big thing is that most of the hardcore fans (those who would also like to read on their iOS devices) like to download & read scanlations (A $10 manga volume takes at most 90 minutes to read, so this is an expensive hobby for a hardcore fan, many of whom are children. Also, the hardcore fans prefer the scanlations because they allow them access to manga that hasn't been released in America or has been Americanized by the official English-language translator/publisher.), which are easily placed on an iPhone/iPad, whereas American comics would much more often require legal licensing.
The valuation of the last round was greater than that. A combination of potential and % chance of reaching that potential. So really, plucked out of thin air by those with money :)
Pretty cool. I didn't really get it at first and was about to leave before I saw the "Watch a Video" link at the bottom. I'd probably make that stand out a bit more.
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.
The OP asked about profitable side/weekend projects. This is a project I worked on on the side, and it made money. So why did my comment get downvoted?
Most awesome to-the-point short web design booklet, I bookmarked it the first time I saw it on HN some moths ago and visit religiously. I lost the bookmark at some point and made great efforts to find the site again. Great job. (I'm a programmer not designer but I like the instant gratification of the booklet. It's similar in feeling to http://bonsaiden.github.com/JavaScript-Garden/ for JS)
Thank you! I worked very hard to keep it short and useful, and it's nice to see that appreciated. Thanks, too, for the link to JavaScript Garden. I've only scanned it, but I love the table of contents and I know that will come in handy.
Just to throw a stat out there, my forum gets 80k visitors and makes $1,000/month in Adsense revenue. And a good portion of those visitors are super-repeats that are blind to the banner ad.
Birejji - http://birejji.com Was earning $100/day with adsense as a normal chat site (with 2M+ impressions per Month), but adsense banned the site due to "fraudulent clicks" (I've always had a consistent CTR so no idea what happened there). Since then it's turned into a Paid to Chat site.
NewsBlur - http://www.newsblur.com - a visual RSS feed reader with intelligence. I have a few hundred paying users and a few thousands free users. I develop it almost entirely on the train, which I'm on for almost an hour and a half everyday.
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.
Very cool UI. May I ask what laptop you use for coding on the train? I spend ~2 hrs on the train everyday and have been trying to figure out what would be a good laptop to code on. I realize personal preferences play a role, but it seems like large laptop is a hassle to hold, and a small one is difficult to code on because of the smaller screen space.
A 15" MacBook Pro. So I bike 4 miles with this thing strapped to my back, then hop on the train (Caltrain, where bikes are treated like kings). I think I just got used to schlepping 5.5 lbs. around.
I recently came from NYC where I would use the same laptop on the A train. 15" is exactly the width of my legs and the seat, so I would comfortably take up my area, but no larger. I can't work on a dinky 13" screen, so 15" or bust for me.
http://whatportis.com - fairly simple little project, need to remove some of the Ajax and add content to get it more search engine friendly, however makes $xxx/pm as it is.
Made a wireless stumbler for iOS in about two days that sold a bit over $100k total.
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.
A program that looks out for any wireless networks it can detect. Mostly used to find an open access point, debugging wireless lans or just to map them.
See eg. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wardriving for more.
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.
iScrob - http://iscrob.com - a Last.fm scrobbler for iOS. It's free with ads, or $5 with no ads. I released it almost exactly 1 year ago, and it's averaged about $20/day in revenue since then.
It's unique because there's some trickery involved getting around the strict iOS backgrounding requirements, and most of my competitors haven't done a great job with it.
I once did a fixed bid contract that was sized by someone else at $150K.
I completed the bulk of the work over three days. I spent about 40 hours on it total including the production roll out.
I most likely could not pull that off again because I had very specific domain knowledge. I knew the software I was modifying and I knew exactly what to do over all of the various systems.
An instructional DVD I made on SEO for wedding photographers and their websites (http://photographyseo.com).
Recorded screen casts and mastered it in iDVD. Did a run of 1,000 at Discmakers for about $900. Sold out the initial run (@ $79 per disc) in under 2 years. Now we just one-off them or give them an option of viewing online.
Looking back (or if I do it again), I would probably do it as just an ebook or online videos to avoid shipping hassles.
Regardless, it's been a fairly easy ~$80k.
(BTW, if any HN folk want to see it for research purposes, let me know)
The first iPhone app I ever made was a very simple Shopify app for seeing your orders and checking inventory. I dropped the ball on keeping it up to date because of client work and Shopify ended up buying a competitor to make into the official (free) app, but at its peak it made about $2000/month and up until I pulled it from the App Store a few weeks ago it was making around $300/month.
We're building some apps for Shopify too - what was the name of your app? Which app did Shopify purchase? As a side question - what has your experience with Shopify been as an app developer?
It was called Shopkeeper, and I don't remember the name of the app they purchased but it was subscription-based (this was long before the in-app subscriptions) and supported more than just Shopify.
Developing for Shopify was great. Their API is good to work with, and they're very developer-friendly in general.
163 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 276 ms ] threadI don't like publishing which games they are because there's already a lot of competition in their genres, no reason to extend it. However, for each, I was actually one of the first few of their kind when the market was just getting rolling with paid apps.
I'd say most of the income came in over a 6-7 month period of really amazing sales.
I'm trying to get another idea I have into a startup, but I haven't been able to get that off the ground.
For a while I was doing cheaper time-limited licenses, like $1 for 6 months, $2 for 1 year, etc and $10 for lifetime.
Best source of customers is from free users. I started the app as free until version 3.0 when I switched to freemium. Sales have been fairly consistent each month for years, with spikes when a blog picks it up.
http://www.delibarapp.com/ http://www.potionfactory.com/thehitlist/ http://culturedcode.com/things/ http://sophiestication.com/coversutra/
If a new website isn't possible or you want some other ideas here are a bunch: 1. Mess with your pricing a bit I was comfortable paying $7 would i have preferred $5 and would not buy at $10 which is where it is now. I think with some A/B testing you could find a better price point.
2. Your checkout makes me want to cry So as a potential customer i click upgrade to pro and get taken to this http://screensnapr.com/e/Rrn828.png . Why has the price double? Why are you trying to up sell me stuff? Why am i on an external website that i have never heard of before? Maybe spend some time/money setting up a more user friendly checkout system that wont cause potential customers to give up half way through the sale.
3. On your website sell benefits rather than features, to get you started "It a bloody million times more accurate than the inbuilt one"
Marketing Ideas (preferable once you have fixed your website) 1. Make a battery app for the iphone (there are tons of free ones) and you would be a small fish in a big market but if people do get your app you can cross sell plus if you get mentioned on any blogs you can try and get them to link to BatteryBar as well.
2. Are you actively talking to blogs and app review sites or are you hoping they stumble across you?
Hopefully that helps, its a mess of ideas but and comments but hopefully that is useful. If you need some more input ill try, just send me a message on twitter @nico_kunz
Iroically, the app isn't truly native, but was built in jQTouch. When I get around to it, I'm planning to finish a native version, which I think it desperately needs to be.
The other big thing is that most of the hardcore fans (those who would also like to read on their iOS devices) like to download & read scanlations (A $10 manga volume takes at most 90 minutes to read, so this is an expensive hobby for a hardcore fan, many of whom are children. Also, the hardcore fans prefer the scanlations because they allow them access to manga that hasn't been released in America or has been Americanized by the official English-language translator/publisher.), which are easily placed on an iPhone/iPad, whereas American comics would much more often require legal licensing.
Also, your site looks really cool. I'll give it a spin. :)
about -> above
I absolutely love the idea and would like to integrate something like it into a project I'm working on.
Though if I execute, I could see myself building a distribution platform into it.
http://www.front9technologies.com/ijuror.html
He made $60k or so before ultimately selling it to WikiPedia and becoming their director of mobile development.
Not too shabby!
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.
I recently came from NYC where I would use the same laptop on the A train. 15" is exactly the width of my legs and the seat, so I would comfortably take up my area, but no larger. I can't work on a dinky 13" screen, so 15" or bust for me.
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.
I had to dig about on Installous to find one, what was yours called?
No revenue because my AdSense account was banned a few years back. :(
http://crookedgames.com/game.php?name=space_grabber
Almost covered hosting costs!
It's unique because there's some trickery involved getting around the strict iOS backgrounding requirements, and most of my competitors haven't done a great job with it.
Sold about $1000 worth of advertising so far and have had more than that in donations. Lots of ideas to do more.
I completed the bulk of the work over three days. I spent about 40 hours on it total including the production roll out.
I most likely could not pull that off again because I had very specific domain knowledge. I knew the software I was modifying and I knew exactly what to do over all of the various systems.
Recorded screen casts and mastered it in iDVD. Did a run of 1,000 at Discmakers for about $900. Sold out the initial run (@ $79 per disc) in under 2 years. Now we just one-off them or give them an option of viewing online.
Looking back (or if I do it again), I would probably do it as just an ebook or online videos to avoid shipping hassles.
Regardless, it's been a fairly easy ~$80k.
(BTW, if any HN folk want to see it for research purposes, let me know)
The first iPhone app I ever made was a very simple Shopify app for seeing your orders and checking inventory. I dropped the ball on keeping it up to date because of client work and Shopify ended up buying a competitor to make into the official (free) app, but at its peak it made about $2000/month and up until I pulled it from the App Store a few weeks ago it was making around $300/month.
Developing for Shopify was great. Their API is good to work with, and they're very developer-friendly in general.