
How I went from idea to profit in under 24 hours - jwwest
http://giantrobotbattle.com/2012/04/02/idea-to-profit-in-less-than-24-hours/
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patio11
You could have revenue in a matter of seconds by offering to sell $100 gift
certificates to Amazon for $50 (why hello, many daily deals sites) but that
would probably not be a sound business decision.

Can I strongly, strongly, strongly suggest that you rethink the pricing and
value proposition here? You're chasing away good clients because anyone who
has ever done mobile or programming thinks that custom development offered for
$99 implies not-great-things about your programming savvy or likelihood of
following through on this deal. The "wantrapreneurs" (hate that word) you
appear to be targeting will disproportionately have wildly inaccurate
expectations of what you're selling for $99, because you appear to be
promising them the fantasy of having their business come from idea to actual
fruition at the cost of $99.

I am having difficulty finding strong enough language to communicate the
unwiseness of this business model vis-a-vis accurate worries like "If you’re
not careful, you may end up spending an exorbitant amount of hours on a
project, driving your hourly rate into the basement." All the words I'm
reaching for seem hostile and yet they do not nearly capture the scope of how
bad of a decision this is.

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dot
I really want to agree with you, but I think he found a profitable little
niche. The type of apps (actually concepts) he's building for $99 will end up
being very cookie cutter and should take a good developer less than an hour
(and sometimes 15 minutes).

I think this could scale well too if you find decent, dependable developers
that want to make a quick buck here and there...

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inmygarage
This could end up as great lead generation for a mobile development shop. Once
the customer sees what $99 buys, it's likely that he or she will want changes
and probably some design work.

If you can pull together a group of designers and developers and provide the
hosting and make the ever-so-painful submission process painless, you are
basically creating an app-as-a-service business where the $99 prototype is the
loss leader that gets you your customer base.

~~~
tptacek
It's probably the opposite of good lead gen. It's attracting a
disproportionate share of pathological customers, for one thing, but also: for
many, perhaps even most, of the potential follow-on customers, their first
experience with the business is going to be of disappointment over what $99
actually got them.

~~~
DanBC
Is it doing the developer community a favour by teaching people that for $99
you're going to get an absolute minimum product?

I'd be fascinated to see what kind of programming you'd get from places like
Mechanical Turk. Has anyone done a $2 FizzBuzz request, and then compared all
the resulting code?

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gravitronic
Proper accounting is to recognize the revenue and costs of a sale in the same
period.

So you don't get to claim any profit until you complete the work you were paid
to do.

How do you plan on finishing the apps fast enough to consider this a win?

To me this is the opposite of a good side project. You want your projects to
generate passive income, not income that requires a non-trivial amount of work
to recognize. If you can write apps, you should write apps yourself and
generate ad revenue or sale revenue.

You should definitely reconsider this idea before you have oversold yourself
to the point of never being able to meet your responsibilities.

~~~
jwwest
Passive income is definitely a goal of mine. Getting there requires a lot more
work than just 'making an app' and throwing it at the app store and hoping
someone gives me their dollar.

As I mentioned in the post, I want to learn more about making money: what
motivates people, what can I sell my labor/ideas for, how to make conversions,
etc. It's definitely something I think I can pivot on later once I've gotten
enough attention and traffic. Alternatively, maybe I'll figure out how to
optimize the workflow.

You're right, it definitely has a scaling problem. :)

Lot's of people spend upwards to $99 for a startup weekend/hackathon to create
apps over the weekend for nothing more than a chance at prizes and fun. Why
not sell roughly 4 hours of my time for $99?

~~~
gravitronic
It's an interesting idea at least that will have no problem finding customers,
and you seem to understand the problems.

My only strong suggestion is to only take on 3-4 of these projects before
completing them 100%, then doing a complete retrospective assessment of how it
went. Keep everyone else in a queue. Do not accept money from everyone.

Maybe you'll hit a formula for "local business news feed & map view to
locations for $99" where you can put out these apps in 1/2 an hour instead of
4.

~~~
jwwest
Great idea. I've got several different points of data I can use, it would make
for an interesting blog post next week. Thank you.

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uurayan
Cool story but the word profit is not the right word to use in this case. You
generated revenue which is much much easier to do than turning a profit.

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duiker101
They idea is nice but, i am afraid that as most of this articles the title is
a little misleading... you had a sale but not yet delivered a product, that is
what the customer paid for. So you still have to work and even with all the
limits you pose this might take 3/4 hours... and supposing you work at an
hourly rate of 20$/h witch i think(but i'm not sure) it's quite low you might
"spend" 60/80 $ of your time to develop it. this gives you a profit of 10/30 $
depending on how fast you are.

Anyway this is a nice project and i really hope you or someone else will prove
my calculations wrong! Good luck ;)

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daemon13
I've noticed that you are LLC. Therefore, gravitronic and chimeracoder are
absolutely correct in their remarks re accounting methodology (glad to see
other GAAP versed folks here) - unless you do cash based accounting, which is
highly unlikely. I would recommend that you check with your accountant how
this works.

However, putting aside accounting stuff, I do not understand what you are
trying to achieve? What are your use cases?

There are apps for prototyping (Balsamiq), there are DIY browser based web
apps for getting one's app in the AppStore (AppMkr, etc)[with some ads, ya,
but that's prototype, correct?].

You production process is not automated and does not scale.

So, what's the point?

~~~
mortuus
It could scale if he sub-contracted work to local college students looking for
mobile dev experience.

~~~
jwwest
I've given this some thought, subcontracting isn't something I'm super
familiar with but it's definitely worth looking into. Things are way too early
to tell yet.

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tptacek
This is a strange definition of "profit", as it counts customer revenue before
they've signed off on the deliverable --- or even before work has commenced.
It seems to imply that the author's time has no value.

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saraid216
I am highly disappointed that the domain name failed to be relevant.

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pilom
Whether or not you are profitable depends on the cost of the labor you put
into each app. Can you actually be profitable if you spend 2 hours per app
that you would have billed to a big client at $100/hour?

~~~
jwwest
A lot of this is an experiment. You're right, I can potentially bill a client
$100+ an hour as an iOS developer but there's other costs that a lot of people
ignore including time spent finding a client and time spent courting them.

The income isn't optimized (yet) but it's a start.

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samstave
I think this is an awesome idea. - while I agree with patio11, that there is
risk - I think the author recognized this risk clearly in the post.

What would be interesting, as an experiment, would be to see if there is a way
to build a larger app from a bunch of $99 app legos.

Break your app down to a range of small blocks that will all link together.

Buy out each block as you go and have money.

Maybe there are larger blocks available. Say - proof of UX concept for 99,
core functions for 500, 99 additional change/feature, etc...

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jefe78
I really like your idea. However, you didn't provide us with a link to signup
if we're interested.

On that note, how does the app release work. Do you leave the client up to
their own devices to submit the app? Do you provide them with all the assets
upon completion(tar of code, etc)?

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jwwest
Depends on what the customer wants to do. When you're dealing with mobile
apps, it's tricky to do distribution (especially with Apple) so if they want
to put it on the app store, I'm more than happy to help them upload it or they
can give me credentials to upload myself. However, that's only IF they want to
upload it. These are very unpolished after all.

Every customer gets an archive of all assets once development is complete.

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SatvikBeri
Well done! Now you can keep earning revenue, figure out what customers value,
find more profitable projects, etc.

Working on products that nobody wants is the kiss of death for many projects-
by actually finding customers, you've greatly reduced that risk.

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wtvanhest
I'm surprised no one else wrote this but why not increase your price to $199?

That is still dirt cheap for anyone who wants to get an app made.

You'll do half the work for the same no eyes.

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jwwest
That might be in the cards. I'm trying to make the inflection point between
dirt cheap and impulse purchase and $99 seems to catch a lot of attention.

Like I mentioned, a lot of this is trial and error, but we all have to start
somewhere.

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umenline
How did you publish your landing page ? how did you spreed the word on your
service ?

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twalling
I bet I could go from idea to revenue in under 1 hour.

~~~
sequoia
I am interested in hearing this story. Please do so, make a post, and submit
to hackernews.

