A success story....really?

Discussion in 'Public Game Developers Forum' started by bravetarget, Dec 3, 2009.

  1. bravetarget

    bravetarget Well-Known Member

    Sep 14, 2009
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    #1 bravetarget, Dec 3, 2009
    Last edited: Dec 3, 2009
    Chapter 1: Boobs & Random Numbers

    I read so many failure stories from indie developers while we were making our first app, e.g. all their apps making 1 or 2 sales over a 30 day period, it was fairly discouraging. Though, we invested so little into our projects (just $$ for the mac mini) it was hard not to move forward. Initially we started working on games for the app store, but I realized all these failure stories were coming from game developers. So after redesigning our project list, we ventured towards every category besides games.

    But wait, everyone in the company, my two older brothers and I, are hardcore gamers, why should we stray from our most prestigious and experienced area? Good question...

    After a long and constructive company meeting we decided to continue with the non-games project list, and throw something -- anything -- into the games category to test the waters. So while juggling code, art, and projects we kicked out our very first app into the review queue in less than 48 hours from start to finish. This app was not taken seriously at all and we still had great development towards our more thought out projects while we churned this one out. Funny thing about all this is the 48 hour app sold well, oddly well. Maybe even some of you reading this have bought it on a lonely night while browsing the games category (App Link). We made back our entire investment within the first week of it being on the store, it was (and still is) in the top paid list of it's category from day 1. It makes me question that if we can make an app that brings in this much money in 48 hours of work, why are there so many failures? Honestly I don't know, and after getting our 2nd (more serious) app onto the store, that question has yet to be answered...

    Chapter 2: Water Your Body vs. Eight Glasses A Day

    Three days after our first app went live, we got approved and ready to sell our second app. This one we put more work into it, and it showed. It also showed in the sales reports. We nearly doubled the amount we were selling from our first app. Making it onto the top charts in Healthcare & Fitness on the first day, and only moving upwards. After our successful launch, and continuing success. We said to ourselves, "There is our Healthcare & Fitness landmark." and moved on. It was pretty interesting though, how we established our spot in the category. Originally, we had a competitor on the top paid list, who had a very similar app and called himself, "Eight Glasses a Day". While we were in production for Water Your Body (which was originally titled Drink For Your Health) he was sitting comfortably in the 25-30 ranked range.

    Now, I always love to see an action create a reaction. As soon as we launched, within a few hours, he dropped 20 places down to 45, and even more the next day. Our app's both ended up around the 60's and 70's area battling it out. We would never move up or down in rank together. It was either one moves up and the other moves down or nothing. This made things a little more exciting, and so we decided to release an update that would make our app perfect for what it did, and also change a few of the design elements. This consisted of spending two days adding new art, a ton of features, redesigning the icon, and getting a new title.

    We e-mailed apple review HQ asking them to expedite the review process, they replied same-day simply saying, "We will give you a one-time exception and expedite the review process." A week later our update released and well, it's been only two days since it came out, our sales increased dramatically, our rank is in a steady increase, and our competitor is slowly but surely fading off the charts. /highfive to another FoWare victory!

    Chapter 3: Finance Category

    Coming Soon...(Waiting for Review -> In Review last night)





    Also, a heads up, we've been using a pretty awesome camera to document everything we've done in the past month of development. We will continue to document it for our entire project list and eventually make a full feature film out of it which will detail a success story of the american indie dev. Look for it Q2 2010!

    TLDR: Read it. Also, share with us your own success story to inspire developers everywhere.

    Edit: I should probably mention, for the story's sake, that we all work full-time jobs outside of software development. We don't depend on any of the income we make from the app store.
     
  2. dogmeat

    dogmeat Well-Known Member

    Apr 6, 2009
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    show me the money!

    I live right near the guy that did iGirl ( i think that's what it's called ) and he made roughly 5 mil off that app alone..
     
  3. ziggyeye

    ziggyeye Active Member

    Apr 9, 2009
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    I have a question.
    Did you get the rights for the pictures of the girls in your app?
    And if so, where do you get it?
     
  4. bravetarget

    bravetarget Well-Known Member

    Sep 14, 2009
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    Good question. Interestingly enough, the longest part of developing the app was getting girl pics.

    We did get rights to the pictures from a stock photo site. My brother had a bunch of credits left in his account on www.dreamstime.com from a long time ago so we used them on the girl pics.
     
  5. micah

    micah Well-Known Member

    Aug 24, 2009
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    It's a lot easier to make money when you're exploiting women.
     
  6. bravetarget

    bravetarget Well-Known Member

    Sep 14, 2009
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    These femmes are all models, who dressed themselves in the bikini and walked themselves to pose in front of a camera. Exploit isn't the word I would use.

    Also, if you read chapter two, you would see that we were more successful without the use of girl pics.
     
  7. dogmeat

    dogmeat Well-Known Member

    Apr 6, 2009
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    exploitation of the human body.

    Are you saying the mother who gives a blowjob on camera to make some cash so her son with cancer can get that next shot of chemicals is not exploiting her body to achieve the goal? Sure, she walked into the studio, and did the deed, her body was exploited.

    draw from; make good use of;

    are some definitions of "exploit".
     
  8. MidianGTX

    MidianGTX Well-Known Member

    Jun 16, 2009
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    Why is taking a photo of the human body exploitation? Modelling is hardly prostitution and to be honest at that level it's not even great money, so they're hardly forced into it.
     
  9. bravetarget

    bravetarget Well-Known Member

    Sep 14, 2009
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    #9 bravetarget, Dec 4, 2009
    Last edited: Dec 4, 2009
    I also believe exploit is defined as "to make use of selfishly or unethically." Which, unfortunately, is the more common use of the term.

    This is not the case, as they are doing what they wanted to do, and we supported that.
     
  10. schplurg

    schplurg Well-Known Member

    Women are exploited and also exploit themselves because us men are supposedly dumb enough to let it affect our purchasing decisions. That's why beer ads have so many boobs in them.

    So who's really being exploited...the women, or the men who are drooling over the women and paying to do so? I worked in a business for four years that involved women using their bodies to make money off of men (not illegally!)...I've seen it all.

    So what?

    To the OP...thanks for the story.
     
  11. Syndicated Puzzles

    Syndicated Puzzles Well-Known Member

    Creativity or scanning the app store!

    Let me guess "Eight Glasses A Day' was out first and was an easy target to copy. You and your two older brothers did the math and figured the amount of work was worth the risk to duplicate this particular app. You are trying to tell a story of success with this post, I am not seeing it at all. If your success is based on the money you generated from the apps than it will be short lived.

    Downloading some pictures of naked women and adding a way to randomize numbers or to copy an existing app from the store isn't worth posting as a success story.

    I am not trying to criticize your group but instead I am offering a challenge for you and your brothers to pick up the pace and invent something worth calling a success story. The app store is at your disposal!
     
  12. MidianGTX

    MidianGTX Well-Known Member

    Jun 16, 2009
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    So how is Puzzle Dice doing? :p
     
  13. Flickitty

    Flickitty Well-Known Member

    Oct 14, 2009
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    Actually, I think the story of Puzzle Dice would be more intriguing, regardless of its sales. Making a game takes work and effort, thought and process. It would be more interesting to hear where Syndicated Puzzles came up with the concept, the difficulties and obstacles and the final result. Is he proud of what he accomplished?

    This thread is simply about creating a concept that is DESIGNED to succeed. If a concept designed to succeed, succeeds, is anyone really surprised? It would be more surprising if it failed.

    Anyway, congrats to the OP and your financial success. I'll be interested to see what you guys do when you create something that you really care about.
     
  14. Syndicated Puzzles

    Syndicated Puzzles Well-Known Member

    Puzzle Dice is in and out of visibility. Creativity isn't always a guarantee to success. I just think the effort of trying to come up with new concepts is more rewarding than all the money in the world. Our brains can go places where our bodies can't follow, it is nice to push the unknown and to take the hard route once and a while. It isn't always comfortable but sometimes it opens up new pathways. Simplicity and creativity combined are the success on the iphone. I am still on the search myself.
     
  15. MidianGTX

    MidianGTX Well-Known Member

    Jun 16, 2009
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    Of course, I'd always take an unpopular yet original and entertaining game over a generic clone of a clone that for some reason sells like crazy. It just seemed odd that you were kinda taking a stab at bravetarget just 'cause he doesn't work the same way as you. If people are buying those apps then there's obviously a good enough reason for someone to make them. Maybe originality isn't his forte, maybe he's just in it for the money, but either way it's business and apparently the consumers are glad it's there.
     
  16. bravetarget

    bravetarget Well-Known Member

    Sep 14, 2009
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    #16 bravetarget, Dec 4, 2009
    Last edited: Dec 4, 2009
    A success story includes anything that returns a high positive from an investment. That's not what I'm going to post about, though.

    We definitely looked at all of the water tracker apps on the store before starting development. We pointed out what they have and, more importantly, didn't have. What got us interested in making a water tracker app in the first place wasn't the success or interest that other water apps got, but more-so our history involved with the under-recognition of the importance of water intake. All three of us have at some point been a volunteer in a committee designed to provide clean drinking water to the needy and other such organizations.

    So, given the interest we already had in such a thing, realizing the demand on the app store for it, and agreeing to avoid the games category for our initial projects. We came to a point where we thought, "Why wouldn't we?"

    Also, if you compare the drastic differences in quality between our app and the current ones on the store, using the word "duplicate" is really em inaccurate. Clearly this is increasing the standards a paid water tracker app should meet. Which is why "Eight Glasses a Day" is now ranked ~96 (from his pre-FoWare rank at 25) and we are ranked 30. So...any company out there that is increasing app standards is, in my opinion, doing it the "right" way.
     
  17. EssentialParadox

    EssentialParadox Well-Known Member

    Sep 21, 2009
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    The thing most confusing me about this whole discussion… — people pay for an app that tells them to drink 8 glasses of water each day?!? Jeez!

    Anyway, I don't think you cannot criticize the developer for knowing his target market, no matter how primitive and simple the app is. If people pay for it, he's done something right.

    It's a phenomena in every entertainment industry; television has cheap, fake reality TV shows that become hugely successful, and those terrible wayans bros. movies just won't seem to keep inexplicably being made. These consumers also exist in the App store too. Unfortunately. ;)
     
  18. BlueSolarSoftware

    BlueSolarSoftware Well-Known Member

    Oct 9, 2009
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    iPhone Developer
    Austin
    The first part of his story is not too interesting. There's nothing wrong or immoral about doing this. But we'd rather not follow that route. Our products are geared for the casual and children's market, so it's best not to confuse our company identity. I know some developers will say it's a business, and it's fine if 2 months from now, a bunch of strip poker apps come out.

    There's a lot of interesting tid bits if you dig a little deeper into the second app. Since this is a developer forum, most of us know how much time and effort it takes to make even a simple app. With 3 people and assuming it took them 2 weeks to make it since that's about the average time for an app to get approved, it would take one person 6 weeks to make a similar app. I'm sure a lot of one man teams would not go forward with such a project.

    The other interesting thing is the division of labor on this project. Were there 2 programmers and 1 artist? Or 1 programmer, 1 artist, 1 designer? Did they farm out the artwork? Did one of them have a background in marketing or UI design? Was there a project manager?
     
  19. bravetarget

    bravetarget Well-Known Member

    Sep 14, 2009
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    #19 bravetarget, Dec 8, 2009
    Last edited: Jan 25, 2010
    I'll PM you.
     
  20. HoorayForEverything

    Dec 10, 2009
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    Thanks for sharing this story. I'm kinda surprised at the defensive reactions to it, but it seems important to see other experiences.

    I think the best part of your story is that you realize that games are the most difficult to predict, so you cut your teeth on some simple apps first. In the process you've gained some insight into marketing and product support post-launch.

    Personally, I think the best game developers have better ideas and great insights for products outside games, and the updates to your Water Your Body app show some game elements and wisdom.

    People also need to remember that making games is expensive both financially and time-wise. If success with other products gives you the financial comfort to develop a game on your time line and give it the polish it needs, then that's a very good thing. I plan to keep following your studio, please keep us updated.
     

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