Very nice work Dave - one thing thats probably a more interesting question - can you make a living on that? Making many small apps?
Have also been toying with an idea to start doing apps for a while now and rather than do a major idea, instead do many small apps. Like for example if 1 app brings 100$ per month - then making 20 could make 2000$ and so on - but does 1 app make 100$ on average at all?
Don't take this the wrong way, but please don't contribute to the flood of low quality apps in the app store(s) that serves to drown even the better apps out there.
I know of a person (via one of the local game dev groups I was part of in a previous city I lived in) that would just crap out a "new" app every couple of days by making a super simple game (like infinite runner) and then get some artist in Romania to reskin it 4-5 different ways for $10/hour, then SEO the title for popular keywords (names like "Runner Game for boys and girls with cute bunny! Christmas edition!").
If you have an idea for a genuinely useful app or good game, something you would enjoy working on and can imagine others enjoy using, then go for it. But don't do shotgun-dev of shit app. We have enough of those already.
This is a kind of naïveté. Experimenting at scale to sell apps and find what might be a viable business is pretty much all the AppStore offers developers. The lack of custom storefronts or advertising/marketing options makes this the only viable way to try to make money.
Just waiting til you've made the perfect app and only launching that would mean you were one of the most brilliant people in tech, having complete knowledge of your target market even before release.
And relative to your comment about not releasing 'low quality apps', you might as well tell people not to release their blogs on wordpress because all these 'low quality' websites are just re skinned versions of the same blog engine.
The value of the blog is not the engine it's the text. If their text is a blatant rehashing of someone else's content with SEO on top then yes, I would tell them to not put up crap online & try to find something of value to do.
I'm not saying don't try to release MVPs quicky to test the market, I'm saying don't log in to itunes, check out the top 10 games and then make cheap generic rip offs with different skins and optimized titles. The summery of what I'm trying to say is: do something you care about, in one way or another. It would be better for your mental health and probably also more likely to be a viable business. Don't be the ios equivalent of spammers & spyware-laden internet explorer toolbars.
I should say that I've been making a living as an independent developer for almost 3 years now so I'm not just talking out of my ass here.
Yeah but that is business. That is exactly how a good business man approaches business. Study the market, determine what is successful, emulate them but either more efficiently, to a new niche, or marketed better.
I mean the whole point of business is to maximize the return on your investment.
Now making absolute garbage may not be the right solution, and making incredible product that takes 5 years to develop is probably not the right solution either... finding the right mix is key
To me the advice sounded more like "don't spam the app store with useless crap" rather than "don't start small and experiment". Maybe it wasn't worded that great, but I agree with the sentiment.
I'll try not taking it the wrong way even though you're assuming that I'd be making low quality apps :) even though you don't really know my level of experience.
I was talking about doing specific niche apps by limiting their feature-set, not their quality.
You're right, sorry & no offense meant. I was talking against a phenomenon I've (personally) encountered a couple of times in my professional circles, there are of course many worthy apps that can be developed quickly.
emm, have you even tried my apps/games? These are not "low quality apps", in fact some have been 5 star apps for months (now settling at 4 stars and above). The ones that have no rating simply have not got the exposure needed to be rated. I understand the reaction to shovelware, and totally agree with you, but I'd like to think my work isn't that.
I haven't tried any of your work & wasn't referring to you personally, it was aimed at something the comment above reminded me of that I've (more than once) seen attempted in my local tech circles.
Thanks for the clarification, yeah I totally understand. Its one of the bigger reasons its so hard to be seen on the app stores. The good comes with the bad I suppose.
In a word, no.
All that these apps have been doing (finically) is to pay for over heads.
The most important thing for me is getting back on my creative horse this year, You'd need to produce 3x that amount to bring in a small living unless one is some kind of hit. The more you do the more likely you'll have that hit, and thats really down to experience and your community knowing who you are. Thanks for taking a look!!
What kind of marketing efforts do you put into each app? I've been working on an iOS landing page generator and I would be curious to get your thoughts on it @DaveSapien: http://bit.ly/carp-hn.
That pretty cool! For small dev's like myself building a landing page is a pain but doable. What we dont have is spare cash so we end up putting something together ourselves. Our big challenge is discoverability, if you could add some cross promotion to your service you could address that painpoint, and make it worth the 4.99 per landing page (for someone like me anyway). ta.
Curious what you define as overheads. App Store membership fee? Paying yourself a minimum wage? Depreciation on your development Mac? Thanks for your insights!
There is a question of what constitutes a "small" app. For my purposes I'll assume small is - "can be made in a month @ half time". I know someone making a decent salary on about 8-10 of these types of apps. they vary in technical difficulty and a couple required coming out of pocket a small amount of money for rudimentary design work. But it's definitely doable.
Yeah, its definitely a weird calculation I know. Was just curious if an average "small" app makes anything at all or not...
My definition of small is even stricter than yours :) I'd say something that you'd be able to make in 2 weekends - like lottery/weather apps (of course both of these have been done to death - but in that general direction). I'm not expecting those to make anyone rich - just curious if something like that could make nothing, 10$ per month, 100$, etc...
Like just from appstore exposure and no marketing... but lets assume that all the apps would be decent looking and programmed to work nicely - just with a limited feature set... and maybe a mix of appstores if I develop them in something thats able to do cross-platform compiles...
I'd say that if you copied 10 common "small" - "utility" apps that have already been done to death and worked hard on moving them up in search rankings and whatnot you could make ~ 100$ a day.
Small games would be your best bet, though I have a feeling that the indie bubble is bursting. In saying that, ultra niche is the sure way to go for small projects.
It's super competitive, and small games (that are financially viable) probably take longer to make than you realize (Super Hexagon took more than half a year to make, I was play testing early versions of it).
Yeah totaly, I'm working on a game right now that has been in development for 8 over years! But again, some amazing stuff is built at game jams though most need at least a month or so of polishing.
Do you feel that making half as many things and spending twice the time on each app would lead to better sales? Presumably the extra time would allow for more content / polish / marketting before release?
Is this an average of all of your apps? Or a minimum per app?
I've also noticed that you started doing more iOS apps towards the end of the year. Is this because (as some people previously reported) iOS apps tend to generate a lot more sales currently? i.e. could you compare different stores in terms of the number of sales?
Yeah an average on Dave Sapien ltd. Me and the Giants (my other studio) is about the same again. The reason I was releasing more iOS apps towards the end of the year was simply todo with my development schedule. The painting apps took a lot more than you would assume.
That's a good output but a little disingenuous to say 22 when several are just various themes on the same engine. (E.g. 4 paint apps)
Depending on your aim with these, next year would be a great year to focus less on dev and more on marketing. Many of these have zero reviews on the play store but are on par with other more established apps.
Yeah, I totally agree. Many failures in marketing this year. Weird thing is, PooBarr the pooping bear has some great reviews out there but it dosen't seem to catch peoples attention.
Disingenuous maybe, but the painting apps have changed dramatically through each release, my tech is now 5 times faster than at the beginning of the year. As I've been pushing ahead with new products I've been keeping the updates going with my older ones. Also I don't think 20+ illustrations for each one is a meaningless effort. But yes, I really need to come up with a better marketing strategy for my paint! ta!
Congratulations Dave, very nice work. I've been toying with the idea of starting to develop many small mobile and web apps during the course of next year, not really looking for revenue but for the sake of creating tools and games that might be useful for someone while helping me not to get creatively stuck.
Thanks a lot! I totally recommend it, a confidence builder if nothing else. My site is down at the moment so here is a mirror on pastebin http://pastebin.com/gxJyGKhG
Good for you for accomplishing and creating so much. Congrats on that. But good god, the background of your site is an eyesore. It literally hurt my eyes as I read through your list. You're going to deter a lot of people with such a bright background. Beyond that you're detracting so much attention away from your content. Feel free to completely ignore this, but I would change the background to something subtler or at least monotone if I were you. It will bring the focus back to where it belongs, your content, and it will give a far better first impression to new visitors.
Concerning making money, I think you need to explore other ways of revenue streams than just paid apps. For example freemium or ad based. I'm currently making $0.07/download, with 20,000 downloads/month on Android using an in app purchase freemium model. I'll be adding more IAPs, so revenue should be going up in 2014.
Thanks! Thats brilliant, I'm very wary of freemium myself and have tried it in the past. I just don't think its for me.
Though I'm going to give it a go next year with one or two apps next year.
Hey Dave, are you in Edinburgh? You should enter make-a-game-month (#makgammon) [1] next year. Its hosted at Edinburgh Hacklab. I think you would really fit in
The lab has a public open night every Tue and Thurs though. General hacking then. The game things is a once a year special event. (check out the Doodle app for this year)
Join the mailing list, or just email me if you want to visit.
Oh there are bitcoin talks on the 3rd of Jan I think. (check the mailing list)
Maybe you can answer a question for me - why is that the hackerspaces in the UK are not open to the public all the time? I've been quite surprised at how difficult it is to get involved in the hackerspace scene in the UK - but I guess I'm kind of spoiled with the Metalab/Vienna situation. Is there some law in the UK that makes it difficult for hackerspaces to maintain an open door policy for the public, or is it more that the hackerspace is not as vibrant in the UK as it is on the Continent, and there aren't hackers there all the time?
What city you in? Some cities are more vibrant than others. London Hackerspace is huge (>300 members??), with a pay-what-you-want policy for membership.
London Hackerspace seems to be modelled a bit like noisebridge. Lots of people, maybe too many people to make socializing all that easy because there are so many subsets.
Edinburgh Hacklab open to public twice a week. Edinburgh is a relatively small city (~800k people), so distributing everyone over the week would not be so good. Also our membership is relatively expensive (£25). So our model is about a smaller group of dedicated hackers with stronger social ties. Small means we can keep our expensive equipment running without feeling like a public service.
Newcastle Hackerspace is pretty awesome too. They are bigger than Edinburgh with a pay-what-you-want. They have a mobile CNC they bring to field events!
Maybe we in the UK are not as good as Austrians at organising regular events ("an average of 1 event per night at Metalab"). But equipment wise metalab has a similar standard of tooling as all the above have.
A lot of it comes down to the fact that there is no one such thing called "hackerspace". Everyone has their own opinions on what that constitutes.
My old space while I was still in Philadelphia was more like what you described in the UK, and we would occasionally get people who would complain about it not being more like what you described for Vienna. We had a set membership fee, only one public night a week, and membership had to be approved by unanimous vote of the current membership.
But every space is there to serve the membership. Our membership decided the space was a workshop first and foremost. I think anywhere you are out of the mainland-European anarchist scene, you're going to see hackerspaces gravitate more towards that form. A wide open space like Noisebridge with pay-what-you-want mentality takes a non-traditional mindset.
Luckily, there is room in the world for both types.
Our funding model relies on subscriptions, and public access all the time would severely erode the value. In addition, we need to make sure that everyone using "dangerous" kit is properly trained, which is more practical with a closed door model.
Thanks for explaining it to me - I honestly thought it might have been some UK law or regulation regarding assemblies of people/membership taxes and so on.
The reason I wonder about it though is that the open nature of hackerspaces is one of the huge selling points. To be honest I can gain access to much better equipment than exists in your average hackerspace, elsewhere, but the fact that some random stranger coming in off the street might have something amazing to contribute is a big reason why I prefer to participate in the hackerspace scene. The truly open hackerspaces I've been to here on the continent, too many to list now, have always been very vibrant and alive - but my experience in the UK was, to put it frank, quite a lot more gloomy in that regard.
Anyway, I understand - each hackerspace has its own thing, and I'm glad its not a government-enforced situation, which had me wondering ..
Also in Edinburgh. Interesting - thanks for the link!
For anyone in/near Edinburgh, the Hacklab is fantastic in general - if you haven't checked it out, you should. It opened my eyes to the potential of laser cutters amongst other tech last year.
Some of them, mostly I use Unity on the Me and the Giants(my kids games studio) games.
I build my own engines to power my more quirky projects. My paint tech is leading to a few games next year for example. (opengl Objective C/C)
Its a bit of a secret sauce kinda thing (feel shitty saying that). Basically I'm doing a pigment/light equation and a heck of a lot of cheating to get it run fast.
Have also been toying with an idea to start doing apps for a while now and rather than do a major idea, instead do many small apps. Like for example if 1 app brings 100$ per month - then making 20 could make 2000$ and so on - but does 1 app make 100$ on average at all?