
Show/Ask HN: My side project for over a year; should I take it on full time? - makeramen
https://market.android.com/details?id=com.makeramen.noodles
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seanalltogether
Here's my opinion, build another app, or better yet build 3 other apps and
diversify your income. 1 mobile app is not enough to require full time
dedication, but having 3 or 4 apps to cycle between will keep you busy and
should provide good money.

~~~
makeramen
I upvoted, and you're not the first to suggest this either. But I must argue
that to have 3 or 4 well-ranked apps with a solid income is easier said than
done, especially for a single developer.

I wish I had the insight to know exactly what 3 or 4 other apps to write so I
can have a steady income. But chances are by the time I finish writing 3
_good_ apps a year from now, I'll be lucky if one of them has as much traction
as this one.

The other choice would be to take this app that already has traction (from
only my part time work) and pour more time an energy into it to see how big it
could really get.

Thoughts?

~~~
shareme
I am facing the exact same decision set in many respects.

1\. I have one good app in dev process in a market segment that is hot, Custom
HomeScreens

2\. I know that I need some more apps, was thinking some quick 2d games via
using andengine.

3\. I do have some fulltime inquiries that might work as base income to fund
the full 12 month weekend-evening dev cycle.

Pull Tim Bray's recent blog posts on making money in the android market. There
also was some recent HN articles on android dev's making $120,000 yearly with
a paired free and paid approach.

BTW, what dev processes are you using thus far? I am switching to combination
TDD and BDD approach using robolectric and robotium/android-mock to take some
of the pain out.

~~~
riledhel
this blog post? [http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2011/02/26/Mobile-
Mon...](http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2011/02/26/Mobile-Money)

~~~
shareme
that is one of them and he has some more in fact..

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MicahWedemeyer
As someone who's been doing the nights-and-weekends thing for a long time, my
advice is: If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Do you really, really hate your
job? Is it coming to a point where you have to choose one or the other?

Quitting your job and jumping onto your app full time might accelerate
development, but it probably won't accelerate revenue, at least not a lot.
Keep growing it on the side and take the leap when it's not a huge step down
from your current income and when sales are steady enough that you feel
comfortable.

------
aschobel
Very slick app, but discovery on Android can be tough.

Shoot me an email, aschobel (at) catch.com and I can put you in touch with our
Google Developer advocates, you definitely want to get featured.

What are you thinking of using for online sync/backup? RTM? Google lets you
backup blobs using BackupManager, might be worth looking into.

Good luck!

~~~
dpcan
I've always wondered how they chose their featured apps. Any more insight?

~~~
aschobel
You need to contact them and they have a team decide if they will feature you.

They look at how closely you follow the Android HIG, level of polish in the
app, have you been recently featured, etc.

We also send them beta version of our apps and they give us great feedback.

~~~
shareme
Thank you! I was wondering how that works even though I have contributed some
bug fixes to the android sdk before...

Is there a google page with the addy to send the betas ?

Once again thanks for the info

~~~
aschobel
_shrug_ I haven't seen any online page to send betas and such.

Meet a few of the dev advocates at IO, SXSW, and a bunch of the Android events
around SF.

~~~
shareme
I just found another way.. several of my Angel VC contacts are friendly with
Google Android Dev Advocates..

------
dmix
Catch.com will bring you some tough competition since they raised a few
million in capital and their app is free.

I've tried out a ton of todo list apps on Android theirs was the best.

Syncing with their site is key. I can type out a grocery list at home on my
laptop onto their site. Then at the store pull out the phone and its there.

That would be a great feature to offer.

~~~
makeramen
I agree, web app + sync is the big push I would need a lot of time to commit
to.

And I've definitely seen catch/3banana before. I feel like they are more
competitors to Evernote than to me. Simplenote's recent addition of a list
feature has me more troubled, even though they don't have an android client
yet.

~~~
mr_november
You're right, simplenote doesn't have a native android client but I am a
simplenote user and use mNote on my galaxy s; no complaints, syncs flawlessly
(haven't used 'lists' though). Just posting in case you haven't seen the app.

Good luck, I'm going to give your app a go.

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RiderOfGiraffes
Throws an SSL error/warning:

    
    
        This is probably not the site that you are looking for!
    
        You attempted to reach market.android.com, but instead you actually
        reached a server identifying itself as *.google.com.  This may be
        caused by a misconfiguration on the server or by something more
        serious. An attacker on your network could be trying to get you to
        visit a fake (and potentially harmful) version of market.android.com.
        You should not proceed.

~~~
aschobel
Seems to be back to normal, using Chrome 9.0.597.107

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bherms
Depends on how much $ you're making from it and what sort of growth you think
you can achieve.

I checked out the app and it looks very nice. I will be buying soon.

~~~
makeramen
I'm making anywhere from $500-$1500 a month, it really varies based on sales.
The biggest leap I want to make is to offer a web version with sync, but that
would be a rather large effort.

Ideally I'd like to see it become a Web+Device synced version of Things that
actually exists.

~~~
dpcan
Why $2.99? Have you tried other price points?

~~~
makeramen
It was originally at .99, then raised to 1.99, and eventually 2.99 without
seeing significant decrease in sales numbers. But at 2.99 I did start getting
comments saying it was expensive, so I decided that was a good price to stay
at.

------
mrchess
Diversify. The mobile app market is very volatile, and you don't want to put
your eggs in one basket. As many others suggest here you probably want to make
a few other apps which have traction just in case your big one fails.

There's a lot going against you as time goes on. Other people roll out apps,
technology changes which could suddenly cut your income -- so yea, highly
recommend you diversify.

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vicngtor
WHY DID NO ONE MENTION RTM? It's by far the best list out there

------
mattm
In my experience, when I am thinking about doing something (no matter how big
or small), it generally turns out better when I do it instead of when I don't.

