I'll bet $100 this story is complete bullshit. It's in techcrunch's interest to publish "get rich quick" stories when in actuality the real story is "starve." I should know.
I'm not sure how common it is for apps to be making that much, but I know one of the top apps is pulling in $5,000+ a day, and it's by an individual developer.
I was making around $150 a day from an app with 100,000 monthly active (90% were CPA ads with the rest being socialmedia), and there are a fair amount with over 5 million monthly.
I agree. I totally understand ojbyrne's scepticism, but after a number of conversations in the last couple months I don't have any trouble believing TechCrunch's claim. The question is whether the money is sustainable.
Does it matter if the money is sustainable? I only ask because there is a good chance that the cost to develop the app is much less than 500k. I would take a month of that kind of revenue and parlay it into capital for another venture if it stopped suddenly.
Yeah, I absolutely agree. That's the attitude I see in developers. The apps that make money are often not very complex, so it's worth the effort even if the party doesn't last forever.
There's a lot of secrecy in the industry right now, because most developers see it as a fixed-sum game. Most apps are not technically difficult to duplicate, so saying publicly that your app is making lots of money is asking for others to copy it.
You're wrong. But in the absence of evidence, denial prevails. And most of these indie devs are not going to provide numbers because they don't want to attract attention/competition.
True, but if an burger joint run by one person started making that much money within several months of being conceived, I'd be at least a little bit interested.
The headline is quite misleading, suggesting a single "developer/hacker/coder/programmer" can make $700K a month. The reality is that they don't even name the firm that they reference as bringing in that 700k...
Potentially huge scalable rewards. I think nir said it well in the 'scalable vs non-scalable career thread':
"I realize how fortunate we are to work in software. It's one of very few fields where you can make a decent non-scalable income while at the same time (sometimes via the same actual product) being exposed to potentially huge scalable rewards."
