Making Thousands from an $800 iPhone App
My friend Jessica Abroms was recently written up in an article about her and her success with her iPhone app based on a game little girls play called M.A.S.H. (Okay, I admit, I played this too but most of my cousins were girls and so were a lot of my friends.) It’s a great read for anyone interested in making apps. Two of the big points in the article were that she contracted out part of the work and that she hit upon a simple idea that other people were looking for.
The article mentions that Jessica found a programmer through elance.com. I’ve never used them but she seemed to have a good experience with them. Paying someone you don’t know $500 for an app whose future is uncertain is definitely a gamble. (For example, Boom Dice has made less than a third of that, although I’m hoping that’ll change once I’m done with the next update.) But if you don’t have the time or the technical know-how, it’s another option.
Another important point is that the success of an app is completely dependent on how likely it is for people to find it. One way to make that easier is marketing and publicity, two things that I don’t really focus on. But neither did Jessica. So how did she find success? She based an app on something that people were likely to search for on their own. In a way, that’s like a perpetual form of marketing that’s free. Of course, if you think of an app that people are already searching for, then someone else has probably already done so. You just have to make yours better…
