

Bootstrapping a $30k profit/month company from our internship earnings (Part 3) - n9com
http://blog.fiplab.com/bootstrapping-a-30k-profitmonth-company-from-18973

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doomlaser
I love these posts, and I am rooting for you guys, but find it a little
depressing that you first started making real money by _cloning_ someone
else's crappy novelty fluff app.

~~~
wyldstallyn26
Thanks doomlaser. With little money (especially back in September), it's
incredibly risky to innovate, and in today's world, everything is a derivative
of the other in some form. e.g., Facebook from MySpace, Lamborghini from
Ferrari. Talking Gremlin was exactly this, on a smaller scale.

This is our philosophy: Find a successful business -> Discover as much as
possible about it -> Re-implement it all -> Then battle them for supremacy.
Having an enemy brings out our primal instincts. Boom. :)

~~~
gravitronic
Very smart. Your goal is not to innovate, it's to succeed.

This is very important as it's counter to the common belief that success is
based on having a "new" idea instead of just taking over an existing market.

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joelhaus
HN discussions for parts 1 & 2...

Part 1: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2955214>

Part 2: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2965929>

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rmason
There's a real nugget of wisdom in listening to angry customers. So many
customers will say something nice to not offend.

When someones passionate and says you've got it wrong and here's where - you
should pay careful attention. Perhaps 20% are trolls you can safely ignore but
the rest will tell you what people were thinking but were too polite to say.

So many fellow entrepreneurs tell me breathlessly about this person or other
who liked their startup. I always ask did anyone say they didn't like it?
Usually they say sure but I just ignored them - big mistake.

~~~
mluiten
I believe Erik Ries said much of the same thing in a talk I saw once (can't
find it now, of course). The gist of it was that nobody likes to get angry,
and angry customers are therefor especially important because they actually
_care_ enough about your product to get angry at you for screwing it up.

~~~
n9com
if people complain, you know you have something worth complaining about :)

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201studio
Thanks for sharing as well. Seems that you had a three pronged approach to
success:

1\. Create something that has a proven market, and do it well (Talking Tom Cat
clone) 2\. Viral marketing (Youtube videos and Facebook sharing) As well as
cross app promotion 3\. Create more apps with the same formula and framework
already set up.

This should work for a lot of other devs as well, although they may not see
the same level of success as these gentlemen.

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bignoggins
Curious what Mac App Store revenues are like. Can you share any rankings-to-
downloads stats for FaceTab and some of your other Mac apps?

~~~
n9com
Will do in Part 4!

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bignoggins
As a fellow indie dev with some success in the app store, I'm always happy to
hear of other indies become successful. I think the App Store has really
flipped traditional software sales on its head and made it possible for the
likes of you and I to compete head to head with billion dollar companies. It's
quite remarkable and I hope this is just the beginning.

~~~
wyldstallyn26
@bignoggins - Absolutely, I could never have imagined I would be running a
business where we make our own products from scratch, without all the large
scale corporate mumbo jumbo.

p.s. great website, good to see you're able to live the dream and travel the
world!

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gwhy
Anirudh/Rishi,

Great story, I'm a long time lurker but created an account to
comment/question. From what I could gather in the 3 posts, it looks like
neither of you guys were technical at the very beginning. Did one of you
eventually learn to code/design, or is that portion still hired out? What
qualities did you look for when hiring coders?

Thanks!

~~~
n9com
Cool, glad we got you to sign up to HN :)

Great question, I'm pretty technical since I've was developing websites for
several years before starting FIPLAB. At times, I even figure out how to code
things when our programmer can't figure it out. I always look for the simplest
way to build something, especially when we are under a tight deadline and need
to ship before the competition does.

Also, I still do a lot of the design work myself (obviously not the 3d
modelling/animation though) - but more UI/Icon design.

As for hiring coders, the number one thing we look for is a proactive and
'never give up' attitude. Can't stand it where in the past a programmer has
given up after spending just 1 hour trying to code a particular feature. If
they can't be bothered find/figure out the solution, then they'll never mix
well with our team.

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stevenwei
Great series, thanks for sharing.

I am especially curious how effective you guys found paid advertising to be -
the conventional wisdom I've heard is that it's pretty pointless for
advertising App Store apps.

Are you guys still doing any paid advertising these days, or is it mostly
organic/word of mouth/cross promotion at this point?

~~~
n9com
Thanks. Paid advertising is pretty much useless, unless you have very deep
pockets. We just splashed a bit of cash on it as we needed to do everything
possible to break into the Top 25 'Golden Zone'. We also got a very good deal
at $0.01 CPC and they matched our initial deposit of $250.

~~~
stevenwei
Thanks for confirming. Do you think the initial ad spend was worthwhile? (Do
you think you would have gotten into the Top 25 without it?)

~~~
n9com
probably could have broken into the Top 25 without it, but didn't want to risk
not advertising, just in case we didn't.

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scottchin
I'm really enjoying these articles. Thanks for sharing.

Since iAd eCPM has dropped from 15$ to around 1-3$, from my personal
experience, have you found that your revenues have also dropped 5-15x? Or has
the volume, or other monetization techniques helped recoup the difference? In
other words, did you find that period to be the peak income period for the
Talking Gremlin app?

~~~
wyldstallyn26
Hi, Anirudh here, and thanks for reading. Although iAds eCPM has dropped, we
normally still manage high single digit figures. Our revenues from ads have
roughly halved, but there are the odd anomalies in eCPM rates. For instance,
yesterday was pretty stellar at a $17.7 eCPM average. Certainly, late last
year, especially when iAds was first launched in the UK, ad revenue and CPM
rates were at their peak.

However, by moving onto the Mac App Store at an early stage with popular apps,
we have shifted from solely relying on large ad revenues as our income source
to paid app income. Our overall daily turnover ratio between paid app earnings
and ad revenue is now roughly 50-50.

Open to answering any more questions directly here on HN, so do keep them
coming.

~~~
scottchin
Thank you so much for the response. It's really insightful. I haven't read too
much about developer experiences on the Mac App store, so I'm really looking
forward to your next blog post. Thanks again!

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dxbydt
On your website it says "If you have an interesting project to propose to us
then we’d love to hear from you." Is that still the case, or are you guys
swamped at the moment ? If you are still accepting new projects, would you
perhaps go into some detail on the workflow/costs etc. Thanks much.

~~~
n9com
Not currently accepting new projects, hit us up in the middle of October - we
might have more time on our hands then.

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pkamb
I see all your apps are free, what are your thoughts on paid apps?

~~~
n9com
paid apps are great, we have a few: FaceTab Pro, MailTab Pro, Disk Doctor,
London Cycle Pro etc... about 50% of our income is from paid apps.

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TheSOB88
Starting to see a pattern here with the App Store. Are you guys just -really-
unlucky, or do these sorts of bugs in the charts happen a lot?

~~~
n9com
The bug at Christmas actually happened the year before too, and it was hell
for a lot of developers when the same bug happened again last year.

But I guess you learn to get used to it.

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dusklight
Please don't take this the wrong way, this is a serious question, and I hope
you give it some serious thought before you answer.

Do you feel fulfilled? Do you feel like this is the most you can contribute to
human civilization? If you could, how would you most like to make the world a
better place?

~~~
rgrieselhuber
I always am left wondering what people think gives them the right to ask that
question of other people.

Isn't it hard enough figuring that out for your own life?

