September 2011 Monthly Income Report

I’m getting this up a bit later than I anticipated, but at least it’s up!

Every month we’ll be posting how much Dave and I make on the various mobile marketplaces. This is in an effort to both hold ourselves accountable to build our business, but also allows others to learn from what we do. He handles Android development while I take care of iPhone. With our powers combined, we hope to have a six figure business within the next two years.

What’s New With Us

September was a pretty crazy month. We’ve been trying to put together a mobile application for the Epcot Food and Wine Festival and we were hoping to launch it a few weeks ago. Unfortunately we missed our deadline, but I’ll talk more about that later.

No new apps were developed this month. Despite not building anything new, we are  continuing to generate revenue on the applications we already have on the market. That’s the best part of having passive income!

What Went Right

We increased our profit!

Despite not putting any new applications on the app stores this month, we still managed to generate more revenue than the previous month. We noticed a significant jump in downloads and clicks for our most popular app. Hopefully it will continue to generate the more money every month!

Started Blogging

We finally started our blog and wrote a few posts. For some reason it took a while to find the time and motivation to put the site together. We’re using a simple theme for now, but it feels good to finally have something up. It’s been fun watching traffic spike whenever we write new posts, and it makes managing our iPhone and Android Apps landing pages a lot easier.

Joined iDevBlogADay

In September we made the decision to join the iDevBlogADay community. This is actually a post for that community, but if you’re reading this and you’re unfamiliar with them, you should check them out. iDevBlogADay is a group of bloggers who write helpful and interesting posts about iOS development. I will be posting every two weeks on Tuesdays. This post is a make up post that I wanted to launch this past Tuesday. Expect the next one on October 18th.

Updated Street Fighter 2 Soundboard

Dave put out an update to the Street Fighter 2 Soundboard that allows users to save the sounds to their phone and use them as ring tones. This functionality is something that our users were clamoring for, so we delivered. Nearly every review under 5 stars said that it would be a 5 star app if only the user had the ability to save the board sounds as ringtones. Those e-mails and app reviews taught us the important thing we learned this month. Listen to your users’ feedback. I can’t stress how important it is to stay in tune with what your customers are asking for, and to implement the changes they want. Happy users are happy customers, and it can only do great things for your brand’s image.

What Went Wrong

Missed Our Food and Wine Deadline

We are located in Orlando, FL, so we’re constantly hearing about events that Disney puts together. One of our favorite annual events is the Epcot International Food and Wine Festival. This is a really fun event where you go between different food kiosks and sample foods, wines, and beers from countries around the world.

We wanted to put together an application that would allow users to keep track of what food and drinks they have tried. The original plan was to allow for Facebook sharing and a review system. Unfortunately, we didn’t have as much time to work on the app as much we’d have liked, so we had to cut a few features. We originally planned to allow users to submit reviews and ratings for the foods they try, but we scrapped this feature for now. Despite cutting features, we still missed our deadline. The Android version is in the Android market now, but the iPhone one is still under review. We’re about a week late, and I’m sure we’ll take a revenue loss, but it was still a fun app to work on. If anything, the app will be a great portfolio piece.

Income Breakdown

This was only our second month on the mobile marketplaces but we’re already seeing an increase in revenue. This is despite the fact that we did not submit any new applications to the app stores. I don’t really know what to attribute the growth to, but this really shows how great it is to have passive income. Despite not putting any new products out there, we are still generating income.

Android Market

• Android Earnings: $135.98 (+81.3%)

Apple App Store

• iPhone Earnings: $4.39 (-1.6%)

Total Earnings: $140.37 (+76.8%)

I still haven’t resolved the copyright issues with the iPhone apps, so we didn’t see any sort of income from those this month. Android on the other hand had a great amount of growth. I don’t expect us to continue to see numbers like that until we submit new applications, but it’s great to know that we have an increased user base that’s helping us earn more money every month.

Upcoming Plans

Dave and I have a spreadsheet full of ideas for apps that we want to build, so we’re going to take this month to get started on one or two. I’ve also been contracted by my day job to help update an application outside of normal hours, so that should keep me busy. My plan is to put out one simple app this month, so I need to get cracking.

What are your plans for this month? What are you doing today to help generate revenue for the future? I’d love to hear what you’re working on, so leave a comment below.