There's multiple aspects of this story you can tweak such that the business becomes successful. Pick any one of them: 1) There is an extraordinarily lucrativ

There's multiple aspects of this story you can tweak such that the business becomes successful. Pick any one of them: 1) There is an extraordinarily lucrative market opportunity in iDevice contracting right now, which they allude to but mentioned that they avoided doing to keep momentum. Giving that living on a couch is presumably not momentum-enhancing, a two week consulting engagement would buy them another 6~24 months of runway at their imputed burn rates. 2) A platform/language/etc is not a death-til-us-part commitment. You can follow the money. Independent developers are not best served by the App Store, unless they get ridiculously fortunate with regard to its kingmaking economics. If you only have one chance to develop an application, you would be better served by developing for a platform where the median case pays the rent. 3) Don't develop video games. You're competing for the business of toxic people who hate paying money against the union of well-funded corporations (which have high production values and effective, ruthless monetization) and amateur hobbyist artistes (who have "that vision thing" and are willing to starve to deliver it for free). Try making something for more lucrative markets like, oh, businesses. 4) You may have deep psychological issues with comfort about charging people money. They seem to be fairly common in our community, which is unfortunate, and we seem to actively promote them, which is unfortunate++. You should first recognize that you are creating something with value for people (if not, stop) and then come to the immediate realization that, as a business, people trade value for money. (If you desire to do charity work, do it for more deserving people than gamers with iPhones and entitlement issues... and you should probably do it after having secured your ability to deliver on obligations to your family.) 5) If you've got a budget of 100 awesomeness points or focus points or whatever, spending 90 on your software and 10 on your business will have much worse results than spending 10 on your software and 90 on your business. Having people who can concentrate 100% on building software is a wonderful thing. They're called "employees" and they cost about $10k to $20k a month; you can pay for them after you've got a business. If you desire to work 100% on software, you desire to be an employee. 6) Burying the buy button three screens behind Settings: probably not ideal for conversion rate maximization. 7) Maximum customer LTV of $2.99: also not ideal. Consider anything you can do to increase this, for example, offering upsells on top of the base offering, cross-selling them to other things in your portfolio or things from others' portfolio for a percentage, or developing a permission marketing asset such as an email list. Some of these are very not viable on the App Store but I think I already gave you the advice for that. 8) If you sell X, look at the tactics used by successful sellers of X. If these tactics strike you as morally outrageous, don't sell X.