"Let’s say a $100-per-night room is booked for a conservative 20 nights out of the month. That’s $2,000 of income every time you flip the calendar! At that rate, you can fully fund a basic $10,000 app in five months. "

Only if you don't tell the IRS, or New York City, or New York State about your extra income.

Do people usually report AirBNB income to the IRS?

You basically have to.[1] I just recently got a notice from AirBnB where I had to verify my info for a 1099 issuance. If I recall correctly, it's fairly hard to ignore this (systematically speaking).

[1]http://www.airbnb.com/help/question/122

And don't forget about the costs of furnishing, laundry bills, cleaner bills, and so on ;)

This was my thoughts too... all that income has to show up come tax time or someone might come knocking. I feel sorry for this guy if he didn't put money aside for his tax bill.

I'm spitballing here so I could be wrong, but assuming a few things, one this is all being done by a single person (or the airbinb side and app side are being done by a single member LLC) if you took all the airbnb income and plugged it back into outgoing app dev costs shouldn't these two streams offset for tax purposes (ie 10k in from airbnb - 10k out for dev = 0 taxes)?

You'd then just be paying taxes on the income for the app sales.

If you've already got a nice pad in NYC or SF, is it really that likely you can't come up with $10k? At most that's only a few months rent...

It's quite likely. I live in NYC, and pay $1000 a month rent. So "a few months" = 10 months = most of a year.

While I have over $10k in savings, I don't have so much money than I can just throw $10k of it into risk. I don't think I'm that uncommon.

I get what you're saying, but the guy in the article is talking about renting an "extra bedroom in a nice neighborhood". Look at that guy's place -- he's got a duplex penthouse in what appears to be fairly nice shape with at least 2 bedrooms. Most likely substantially more than $1000/mo.

I have a two bedroom condo and use one of the rooms as an office/storage. After reading this article I am seriously considering moving my desk to my bedroom and getting rid of some other stuff to make a spare bedroom.

I'm sure there will be some hassle dealing with guests, but it seems pretty close to "free money" in my opinion.

Is it not just easier to learn Objective-C / Cocoa touch, than have strangers filing in and out of your spare bedroom for 5 months?

It is possible that the OP is not capable of doing that and thus needs to hire someone to do it for him.

Very cool. I've used AirBnB as a means to travel and live abroad for an extended period of time while working on my startup. I've connected with developers in countries like Germany (lots of iOS developers here) and am building something together with one of them now. It's a fascinatingly global market place.

"How I used Airbnb to fund a hit iPhone app"

Is it possible to know how many downloads or how much revenue this "hit" app is getting right now? Anyone care to share some numbers?

While I'm unaware of a way to determine stats on downloads or revenue... you can use App Annie (http://www.appannie.com/cloth/) to get a reasonable idea of how the app is doing.

From App Annie: They've been featured roughly ~110 times on the app store in various more prominent areas. And their ranks look semi-decent.

My 2 cents: He's at least made his money back and probably a little extra on top.

Is 10.000$ really a problem to raise if you call an apartment your own which sells a room for 125$ a day?