13 ms·
The simplest app that makes money
- sposeray 4y ago[dead]
- iopq 4y agoWhat's next, apple watch HUD for real poker tables?
- smilespray 4y agoThe HUD's coming when Apple releases their AR gear. ...which will be immediately banned by every casino everywhere.
- powera 4y agoAn excellent example of the hacker-ethos failing. A decade ago, you could create a reasonable app in a month and make money. Now, the low-hanging fruit is gone. This app would get you kicked out of any poker-game I have ever been to, is over-priced ($20 for a glorified piece of paper), was marketed in a way that got the creator banned from Reddit, and made almost no money. That type of outcome might not be the best that is left in the field of "ideas that an app developer can do in one month" today, but it probably will be soon.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- BlueTemplar 4y agoSurely that would be the infamous "I am rich" $1000 app that does nothing ? https://www.wired.com/2008/08/eight-people-bo/ https://www.wired.com/2008/08/eight-people-bo/
- quickthrower2 4y ago& the entire crypto coin industry; ducks ;-)
- MonkeyMalarky 4y agoWow, 2008. I remember that! I think it was the first big run-in between app. developers and Apple's moderation. What's wrong with a vanity app like that? Everything apparently.
- LastTrain 4y agoI noticed the goal had nothing to do with providing value, or customers being satisfied, or even about the product being "good".
- willhinsa 4y agoJust like the goals of our tech titans!
- Dylan16807 4y agoIt looks like a pretty basic demo/full setup where a good chunk works for free and you have to satisfy the customer with the functionality to get money.
- boberoni 4y agoI have a bookmark to a personal Google Doc called “SaaS Business Ideas”, for whenever I think of a project that I think I can monetize. The Google Doc is actually view-only and says “Stop ideating about projects to make money! You probably don’t need the money. Just work on projects that you find fun.”
- mcstafford 4y agoHi, I'm Bob... welcome to ideators anonymous. If you can't stop incentivizing perspectives, and monetizing paradigms this may be the place for you.
- matheusmoreira 4y agoEven if I don't need the money, I would still very much enjoy making some.
- s3000 4y ago> Just work on projects that you find fun. Slightly off-topic: What's that fun? There is hedonistic, roller coaster riding fun, there is joy of accomplishment, there is fun in tinkering, etc. What does having fun mean? Is it a specific feeling or is it more the general idea to do something that is individually appealing?
- throw827474737 4y agoThat is the point of fun, only you (should) know, otherwise the more important point before is to find that out.. :) > Even if I don't need the money, I would still very much enjoy making some. It seems you and also that guy didn't yet?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- null_object 4y ago[flagged]
- logicallee 4y agoLooks like a great app! Congrats on getting two paying customers. One tip for the author: In setting prices, remember the price elasticity of demand, which is how much people respond in terms of the quantity they buy depending on the price. The demand curve might be such that as demonstrated two people want the app for $20 (the price charged). But perhaps ten people would buy it it for $9, maybe fifty people want it for $5, and perhaps at $0.99 no fewer than ten thousand people would buy it. (In poker terms: you're giving them a price; how many big blinds would they call? Only the 1% of hands can call a 20 big blind raise, everyone else folds and moves on.) If demand is highly elastic, setting the price at $2.99, $1.99, or $0.99 might be a great idea. The author could try experimenting with discounts to see how much demand there is at various prices. It is not an exact science and there is no way to tell ahead of time. Starting at $20 and going down from there seems reasonable. It might depend on how many customers the author wants to support. I've drawn for you this diagram about how economists talk about quantity and price, illustrating it in a simple way (you can think of it as rows in a ledger going from high to low prices and listing how many are wanted at each price, high to low): https://imgur.com/a/VzcRwlL https://imgur.com/a/VzcRwlL
- chii 4y ago> Starting at $20 and going down from there seems reasonable. slowly reducing the price doesn't work because the consumer would see that the price is being reduced, and wait for the reduction to stop, even if the current price would've been worth it for the consumer to purchase (aka, they would've gotten excess value at a higher price, but still wait for the reduction to finish). After all, buying the app isn't urgent. So therefore, a different way to discern the price sensitivity is needed. Often you will have to have a discount deal that is time limited, and may be targeted geographically.
- logicallee 4y agoGood point!
- singron 4y agoThis article is still great and covers all these tricky ideas: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-duckies/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-...
- jrm4 4y agoNow, everyone, think about how much worse the world would be if this was a lauded or primary way to think about "how to make software." While I appreciate the self-motivation idea generally - this article does nothing for me except make me grateful for free and open source types of folks. People should mostly just not do this.
- matheusmoreira 4y agoThis article made me pretty sad to be honest. This little app made more money in hours than many free software and open source projects do in years.
- ajkjk 4y agoWell that's not quite fair, it was expressly sold and they weren't.
- ceres 4y agoWell, many open source developers are quite content with making their software freely accessible without expectation of monetary gain. In fact some are strongly opposed to it (see uBlock Origin maintainer). And that’s ok too!
- j245 4y ago> made more money in hours than many free software You’re sad that free software didn’t make money ?
- powera 4y agoIf you can't make $40 off an open-source project in years, you are probably deliberately avoiding accepting money.
- jrm4 4y agoProbably the weirdest case to study right now is Dwarf Fortress? Did they hit a million yet?
- joenot443 4y ago
- pfoof 4y agoWhere "Show HN"?
- renewiltord 4y agoGood job executing. Onward to the next.
- gordoclark 4y agoSeems like the incentives are off. Making some crappy app like this to make money proves that. I guess if we're still around in a few centuries maybe we can build the systems of the future. For now, though, we're relegated to the dustbin of irrelevance.
- gnicholas 4y ago> Secondly, there were a lot of complaints about the $20 price point. Is there a free trial functionality? I hate subscriptions for mobile (and even moreso for watches!), so I wouldn't recommend that, even though it might be the revenue-maximizing solution. But it seems like it would be very useful for a one-time IAP to give people a free trial that's either time-limited or up to X uses.
- kelthuzad 4y agoInteresting: >For example, I’ve been rejected multiple times because they didn’t find IAP content on the iOS, rather than the reviewer taking the time to understand it’s a watchOS app with an iOS control interface. >edit:hooray! Apple gave me a phone call and told me they would try to work with me more effectively on app reviews, and left a phone contact number to call. Thanks Apple! Apple seems to be in full damage control mode nowadays. It's somehow after all those years of pestering developers and making their lives more difficult while asking for their pound of flesh - they realize that even the high and mighty can face consequences for their bad behavior in form of regulatory scrutiny. Being nice to the people who drive their revenue is a better business strategy I hope, but in reality only to those who can go viral on social media I guess
- j245 4y agoMy guess is that it’s in response to the EU bill that will force them to allow other app stores on iOS, and they don’t want to lose developers. There is no way they would improve out of the goodness of their heart. That kind of behaviour is worthless under capitalism.
- ajkjk 4y agoThe weird subtext of this article is that it's an example of a certain kind of person, the type for whom the entire point of making things is to make money, and it's only by accident that it's about doing something useful. Here's a person who reads entrepreneurship books and takes notes on good ways to find business opportunities, makes an app to help people basically cheat because that's where the money is, naturally explains how it's not cheating when asked, and dismisses the obvious reaction as 'negativity'... I mean, it's cool to make something, I guess, but it's possible that your life's work is to help slowly ruin the world despite doing your "job" / following all the obvious rules of society at every step... and I kinda think this is what that mindset looks like "on the inside"?
- chii 4y ago> the type for whom the entire point of making things is to make money, not do something useful. the fact that somebody is paying for said app implies that it is useful. Noone parts with money for an exchange that they don't find useful. The idea that just because _you_ don't see it as being useful doesn't make it not useful. If you suppose that the exchange ruins the world somehow, because there's some externality that causes harm to you, then it's a case of making such an exchange illegal through some democratic process, and have enforcement. Absent of that, i think it is totally legitimate, and that the person doing the entrepreneurial endeavor is just trying to improve their own situation. One does not have to have the purpose of "improving the world" - that naturally would happen as people exchange to make their own situations better.
- ehnto 4y ago> Noone parts with money for an exchange that they don't find useful. I think this is true at face value, but when we consider addiction and self-destructive behaviors it is clear that while the definition of useful my still apply, the result is a negative impact on society. The easiest most inflammatory example is drugs, but a more nuanced example might be slot machines. I won't wax lyrical about the examples, but I think they show that a transaction of money doesn't imply a positive impact on society. Another example is rent seeking and fees, sometimes the transaction of money is non-negotiable, and one side is exploiting the other, or a middleman has inserted themselves (sometimes through policy lobbying) and extracts rent that no one benefits from but them.
- 12907835202 4y agoI dug deeper and read the author's article about navigoals. I reckon the biggest lesson he could take from building this over the financial aspect, is to release early and regularly. From what I gathered from the navigoals post it has a huge feature set from the beginning and that means it risks taking forever to finish. But he's shown you can get to market very quickly in less than a month and then iterate on it. That's almost always the better choice.
- s3000 4y agoShout-out to the smallest interesting number [1] and Kolmogorov complexity [2]. How difficult is it to scale the approach, slightly adjusted for ROI [3], like a variation of kickstarter.com? People with an unfulfilled requirement could announce their willingness to pay for a service. The incentive could be that those early adopters receive shares in the resulting company. Some people may just take the ideas. Early adopters can punish them by only doing business with companies that handed out shares to early adopters. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interesting_number_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interesting_number_paradox [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return_on_investment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return_on_investment
- ljf 4y agoCongratulations to the app builder - only small bit of feedback is on the app landing page, under how much does it cost you call it a 'subscription' rather than a one of purchase. That could put some people off who think they will be charged again (weekly, monthly, yearly?)
- fullstackchris 4y agoI really liked this post, it's what so many entire COMPANIES fail to do in the early days. IMO, ideally every startup should sit down basically the day after founding and ask exactly this: how can we make money (i.e. prove the business point) within a MONTH? Also have to chime in to the fact you mentioned getting banned due to self promotion on reddit, samething happened to me and really rubs me the wrong way. I also used reddit to get my first sales with my product and then was also banned from some of my favorite subreddits. Such a weird conundrum since the reddit hive mind leans so heavily into "we hate huge companies and corporate slave life!" and whenever someone goes out on a limb as an indy dev or solopreneur to make something themselves they likewise are berated. I just don't get it. Anyways, great post, couldn't help but mix in my sourness at reddit.
- s-xyz 4y agoIts a good idea, I learned a lot from your post, and in the end its a win-win situation as you got some exposure. I would say keep it up and try to promote a bit more the app to see what comes out of it. I find the idea to charge 20USD also refreshing.
- prakhar897 4y agoI am in the same boat as the author. I decided that I'll take an year off my job to actually pursue some of these dumb ideas I get. After that, either I'll be financial independent enough to pursue more of them or realize that this isn't worth it. Hence, I'm working on a Stable Diffusion + Wordle game (https://diffudle.com/ https://diffudle.com/). I realize now that getting traction isn't easy as it looks. I'll work on this for 1-2 more weeks then jump onto my next stupid thing.
- _just7_ 4y agoAs a former poker player I can say it's quite stupid to use that kind of app at the table, because it's a massive tell. Any time somebody looks at that app the other people at the table know you have mid range hand. Cause your not gonna be looking at it if you have unsuited 2, 5, and you not gonna be looking at it when you have Pocket jacks. Reminds me of how one of the regulars I played with was one of the smartest people I knew, he always calculated the exact odds in his head while sitting at the table, but he was still a subpar player, because he had the most obvious tell, if he was staring kind of up and to the right it was because he was calculating his odds of hitting a range, meaning I could induce when I should bet to get him to leave the pool.
- sAbakumoff 4y agoThat is the most useless poker app that I've ever seen. 1) with the modern GTO strategies push/fold starts around 10BB. with 12 BB you need some range for min-raise 2) it's not realistic that everyone on the table has the same stack(f.e. 10BB). 3) the push/fold strategy on the bubble and on the FT significantly differs from a pure EV strategy. It's insane that someone actually paid for this BS.
- lauballergie 4y ago[flagged]
- WhiteBlueSkies 4y ago[dead]