August 2011 Income Report

Welcome to our first mobile application income report!

These posts will document our journey toward a sustainable passive income. We have just started building applications for profit, but given enough time we hope to add a few zeroes to the end of these numbers. We hope to find a way to support ourselves with our applications, and we hope we can inspire you to start giving it a go yourself!

What’s new with us

August was the first month that we began developing applications for both the Android and iPhone app markets. We were inspired by the stories found on Pat Flynn’s Smart Passive Income blog and we aim to find a fraction success that he has. We’re well on our way,  as we put together our website and launched our first five applications.

What went right

We got a few apps out the door
Dave was able to get a lot of applications cranked out this month. We decided to launch a few soundboards as our first applications, just so we could get a feel for the application submission process and gain a better understanding of how Admob integrates with our mobile apps. We sure are glad we started small since we both made mistakes, but we didn’t have to learn those mistakes after spending 6+ months working on an application. If you are getting started in this industry one of the best piece of advice I can give is to start small. You will make mistakes, and it’s better to learn those mistakes after spending a day to a week on an application rather than learning them after dedicating a lot of your time and energy on more complicated apps.

We learned how Admob works
We learned a lot about how Admob works from integration to payment. Dave and I were both new to integrating banner ads into our mobile apps and didn’t know what to expect as far as CTR and the amount of revenue we could generate. It was fun watching the clicks roll in and our revenue go up. Our most pleasant surprise concerning Admob was seeing them readjust our earnings for previous days. There were days we would log in to check our earnings and see that the previous days’ earnings were increased by a few dollars! Apparently Admob takes a day or two to come up with it’s final revenue numbers, so it was always nice to see that we earned more than we expected.

We made profit!
Finally, the best thing that went right this month was that we actually made some money. You’ll see the exact amount in the income portion of this post, but it was nice to make a decent amount of cash right out of the gate. We thought we would have to wait a few months before we saw any income, but thanks to one of Dave’s apps we were able to start making money right away.

What went wrong

The Apple approval process seems inconsistent
If you look at our products you’ll see that the majority of our applications are in the Android market. Unfortunately this is because we ran into some problems submitting applications to the iTunes store. Our initial applications were soundboards, but Apple is a bit vague in regards to what they consider an acceptable soundboard for the marketplace. Two of our applications were denied due to copyright issues despite the fact that similar applications already existed in the app store. I’m still working on getting one of the apps approved but this encouraged us to move past soundboards and start building more complicated applications.

We submitted the wrong OS version to the Apple app store
This is one of the key things we learned, and one of the top reasons I’m glad we didn’t spend months working on an application without any experience. After submitting an application to the App store your first few days of downloads are crucial to build popularity. If your app isn’t noticed by the masses within the first week of being in the store it’s doomed to be buried by all the new incoming apps. When I submitted our first application to the app store, I accidentally submitted a binary that required the user to have iOS version 4.3. This excluded the majority of potential users and caused our application to miss a lot of downloads. Unfortunately there are no second chances, and now our application is sitting at the bottom of the app store.

We over estimated how much we could do in a month
August was a very busy month for us, and we set a lot of difficult goals to hit. We wanted to have several applications launched in both the Android Market and Apple App Store, post several new articles to our blog, put together our website, and launch a template iPhone application on Code Canyon. The only goal we met was getting applications submitted to their respective market places. This month we’ve set more attainable goals, which should help keep us motivated and make us feel like we’re making progress in our business.

Most of our income was from one app
To be honest, this was a bit expected. This month in the app market really proved to us that the 80/20 rule is real. The 80/20 rule states that 80% of the work will be done by 20% of the workers, or 80% of your revenue will come from 20% of your products. One of our applications was extremely popular with the Android crowd and was the source of the majority of our income. This just reaffirms our belief that you have to keep plugging away at developing applications and hope that one of them will hit. Nothing in this industry is guaranteed, and it’s important to continue to push on building products with the hope that something will be noticed.

Income Breakdown

I’m not sure how much information Admob will allow us to disclose, so I will only list the total amount of money we made with our applications.

Android Market

• Android Earnings: $74.93

Apple App Store

• iPhone Earnings: $4.46

Total Earnings: $79.39

Upcoming Plans

Well, that’s it for our first income report! Thank you for taking the time to read about our experience. I know these posts are long, but I want to make sure I keep everybody up to date on our progress and hopefully inspire you to get out there and start building apps of your own. Good luck to you if you decide to enter this market, and be sure to come back next month for our September report.