

IPhone Sales Figures - 78x One-Day Jump - akardell
http://www.mobileorchard.com/area-code-408-pick-up-the-phone/

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petercooper
I understand the title change for HN, but it's definitely a takeaway point
from this article that if you're an iPhone developer, it's well worth picking
up the phone for any unknown 408 number ;-)

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akardell
Also, if you're trying to start a startup (and aren't living in Silicon
Valley) - you should probably answer 408 numbers even if you're not an iPhone
developer. Lesson learned.

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mcav
Does Apple actually contact every developer that they feature on the front
page in the same manner, or was it just because of that "Free MP3" promotion
part?

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ROFISH
They do _call_ over any issues with the App Store. For example, I got a
friendly call having in my description: "free version will be up as soon as
it's approved."

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hboon
Any maybe. Not every. I haven't never gotten a call and I have problems with
every other update.

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noelchurchill
I wish there were sales figures on the graph to give an idea of scale.

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akardell
You can basically glean the gist of what the figures mean from the following
information. Sorry to be vague, but hopefully this gets to the context you're
hoping for.

I had some upfront expenses for a custom icon, the website design, a license
for the song for the background music for the demo video (including the
questionable MP3 freebie), and to run a one day roadblock on the Fusion ad
network. Prior to being featured, I hadn't yet broken even on my costs (let
alone my labor). The first day of being featured pushed sales past the
breakeven point. If sales were to remain steady at this level, the yearly
revenue for the app would be much better than an average engineer's salary.
There will, however, likely be a very predictable drop in sales once it's no
longer featured.

What that means over the long term, we'll see. If the data's interesting -
e.g. significant drop or significant lack of a drop in sales, or more key
inflection points, etc. - I'll throw up another post about it and consider
including dollar figures at that point.

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hooeezit
Cool to know there are so many iPhone developers doing well in the Twin
Cities. Found out about @akardell through @dcgrigsby's tweets. Any other
iPhone hackers around the Cities?

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akardell
These are worth checking out...

<http://groups.google.com/group/iphonedevmn>

<http://iphone.mn/>

