How I Made $19,000 on the App Store While Learning to Code
Published in 2011, this chronicle by @nathanbarry details the mechanics of building a profitable, self-funded business without venture backing. Key verified financial milestone: $19,000.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Charging customers from day one acts as the ultimate filter for building software that solves genuine, high-urgency problems.
Keeping fixed overhead low and leveraging lean infrastructure allows founders to stay alive until market tailwinds kick in.
Small, repetitive improvements in customer retention and conversion rates yield massive returns over multi-year horizons.
Community Debate Themes:
The community focused on B2B customer acquisition channels, cold email vs SEO distribution, and balancing full-time employment with side-project development.
CATEGORY Bootstrapping & MRR →
HISTORICAL ERA Web 2.0 Genesis (2007–2013)
COMMUNITY SCORE ★ 498 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 137 comments
This kind of story always reads like a financial fail. He should pay himself a normal programmers salary (something around 50k/year for a beginner might be fine, also he is not a beginner, because he knows a lot about presentation and UX design) and THEN calculate his profits. Probably this App is way in the minus. Also you must consider that he just has around 1k customers and all of them on the same plattform. Also these customers only paid him once and not regularily. That are 4 big risks: low number of customers, no guaranty to get any dollar next month and a high dependence on one plattform and high dependence on the success of this one app. Another risk, I nearly forgot about, is that the core feature of his app, the speach engine, is not even his own. What if Acapela decides they make their own App in this direction.
Concluding everything I think he has a low income, unprofitable, high risk business. Not the position I want to be in, when I quit my dayjob.
edit I just now see that you posted the link yourself, Nathan. Please read all "he"s as "you". ;-)
Here's what I would do.
1) Get a copy of it in the hands of special ed departments at schools (for free). And the people who oversee the IEP's, counselors etc. You will then get referrals to sell the full priced product after people see a demo.
2) Lower the price of your product so it's a no brainer for parents.
Having the price so high is going to invite competition that will sell the same app at a lower price. While that can still happen with a lower price it is more likely at the price point you are at because people will be more motivated to compete (and anyway you will sell more at the lower price..)
3) Come up with a different name or buy onevoice.com. If the product is recommended you need people to be able to easily find your website. Not only don't you own the domain name onevoice.com but you don't come up (now) in any search results.
Edit: "search results" - as in when someone hears about it and they google it not the app store.
Nathan, that's a great market to develop applications in. There's a general need for your application, and you're helping society at the same time.
I recently saw a short segment on 60 minutes, "Apps for Autism", which demonstrated and explained applications in your applications field, autistic children. Here's the video URL: http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7385686n&tag=contentBody;storyMediaBox
I want to see you super-succeed, and in a lot of ways you already have succeeded.
The most important part is not that you made $19,000 while teaching yourself how to code, but that you are actually making the world a better place. I would angel fund this idea (if I had the money) the minute I would read gives a voice to anyone who cannot speak. I would venture fund your product that minute I would read replaces a $7,000+ medical device that is bulky and difficult to use.
Amazing. I'm so glad someone coded this. The price is a bit high for our institution(a struggling community hospital with 10 ICU beds) but hopefully I can get IT to consider it in our budget. The machine we use is a one-off and rarely works properly. I'm embarrassed to say that most of the time we avoid communicating with patients that are intubated. Coding a replacement has been on my to-do list for the last 2 months and I'm happy to strike it off.