For me, I looked at the market in July 2008 and saw an opportunity in a darts game of all things. I'm not an avid darts player but I had just installed a dart

For me, I looked at the market in July 2008 and saw an opportunity in a darts game of all things. I'm not an avid darts player but I had just installed a dart board in my basement a few weeks prior to the start of the project. My thought was something like this: "I see no good darts games for the iPhone. I bet you I can create one and get all those 20-something guys from the UK to download a copy" And that basically worked. Darts went #1 in the UK in December 2008 and in the US shortly thereafter. Part of the answer for me was to just make a good app with good gameplay mechanics and 3D graphics that didn't look like a toy, and hope that my concepts of the marketplace were right. The app going #1 got me a lot of exposure, enough to leave Yahoo and work on iPhone consulting and secret big projects (way too big -- I need to ship the thing already). The ad revenue (I hate ads and am very sorry I have to put them in the app) also helps a great deal to help fund my foray into self-startup mode. For the curious, the app has 40K games played daily, about 10K downloads a day, and about 12MM downloads since day 1 in October 2008. http://fictorial.com/darts/ http://fictorial.com/darts/