6 ms·
New account because I don't want my employers knowing. My sideproject on iOS and Android generates 1.1M a year. About 90-100k a month. I'm still employed beca
by venusflytrap90 10y ago
New account because I don't want my employers knowing.
My sideproject on iOS and Android generates 1.1M a year. About 90-100k a month.
I'm still employed because the app runs on its own, very low maintenance, so might as well get a salary doing something else and learn new things
- ceslami 10y agoTell your story!
- venusflytrap90 10y agoOne day when If leave my full-time job!
- spelunker 10y agoWow, congrats. Are you getting those numbers from selling new copies or through a subscription?
- venusflytrap90 10y agoIn-App purchase!
- jasonkostempski 10y agoHow do you have something like that going and remain anonymous? Is your name not attached to the product in any way?
- venusflytrap90 10y agoIncorporate and use your corporation name as the App Store and Playstore publisher name
- ruler88 10y agocan you share your app?
- busterarm 10y agoThat would reveal who (s)he is.
- venusflytrap90 10y agoExactly, the corporation can easily be looked up and the ownership information can be found.
- ruler88 10y agoAlso, I don't think you should work for an organization that does not allow you to hack up projects on the side for fun! Unless you think they can prove that you used company equipment/time to develop this project.
- venusflytrap90 10y agoThey allow side projects, they have no problem with it, but when your side-project is more profitable and earns more revenue than the company itself, it can bit tricky to explain
- busterarm 10y agoAlso it hurts your position when negotiating pay & benefits and can give your colleagues a case of sour grapes.
- akhilcacharya 10y agoMy question is how do you still have employers when you're making 1.1M a year. Jeez.
- Zenfinch 10y agoCertainly is amazing! I want to know the secrets to being such a good company and/or manager that you can keep someone earning 1.1m on your staff!
- venusflytrap90 10y agoLots and lots of work! Go home at 6pm, work till midnight. Eventually it paid off for me but a lot of times I thought it was just digging a hole to nowhere.
- jaredsohn 10y agoI think the GP was asking about how your company/manager is able to keep you working there.
- TeMPOraL 10y agoI'd guess it's not the company keeping GP there; it's GP choosing not to leave.
- venusflytrap90 10y agoYou got it! Nothing that special about the company but it's in a good enough space that I choose to hang around and learn as much as I can about the space.
- swolchok 10y agoIt's by no means guaranteed to last, 1M is not enough to retire in Silicon Valley, and 1M pre-tax is ~0.6M after tax.
- jbuss 10y agoThat's awesome! I'd love for you to give some more details if you could. Do you sell the app or is it from ad revenue? What sort of app is it?
- venusflytrap90 10y agoIn-App purchases, no ads.
- nullcipher 10y agoI think the commenters are jumping to conclusion that OPs profit = 1.1M - 100k. Most of these apps have a big running cost and the profit is not so much as one imagines. Otherwise, OP won't be gainfully employed.
- venusflytrap90 10y ago39% profit margin. Server costs $350 Google Cloud Hosted
- nullcipher 10y agoVery impressive. What is stopping you from working on the product full time?
- cloudjacker 10y agoSo like $350,000/yr after the 30% cut from the app stores, and additional 40% cut from state and federal taxes? yeah I'd keep my job too and look forward to those sweet tax deductions and getting all that extra social security withholding back
- Kurimo 10y agoWhere do you live that $350,000/yr isn't enough to live on?
- cloudjacker 10y agothe first question: do I feel like debating wealth inequality to get my HN karma back up? naaaaaaaaaaaah anyway, in silicon valley (or san francisco in particular) you could not retire on that. you could coast, but you couldn't use it to buy a house (or apartment/condo), the moment you make a downpayment you absolutely have to keep working to make the monthly payments
- ZeroFries 10y ago350k after taxes and you couldn't retire? Do you mean in one year of work? You can live on 50k after taxes no problem even in SV. Also, why stay in SV if you're not working there? If you can maintain revenue for 5 years you can buy a house in cash no problem.
- cloudjacker 10y agoIf you can maintain revenue, yes, get decent cash flow on a rental property, sure you can make it work
- baby 10y agonot everyone is living in the silicon valley.
- Spooky23 10y agoThat says more about the foolishness of living in a boomtown during a boom than anything else. We're talking about annual income 7x the Per capita income in the US and 10x of countries like Italy, Spain and Israel.
- jmnicolas 10y agoI thought nobody but the big names were making money with apps ...
- venusflytrap90 10y agoSometimes the little guy sticks it to the man!
- palerdot 10y agoJust curious. Are you proficient iin both java and objective c, as in you developed both the apps natively. Again, how dependent it is on a web service? Did you do the back end yourself too? I believe answering above questions will not affect your anonimity.
- venusflytrap90 10y agoProficient in both Java and Obj-C. I like just going native and learning about the platform rather than cutting corners with cross platform frameworks. Very dependent on the API, wrote the API myself in Go. Hosted on Google Compute and using RethinkDB as the database.
- icpmacdo 10y agoIn general terms can you talk about how you obviously successfully marketed the app?