"How to Make a No. 1 App With $99 and Three Hours of Work"

[CreateLiving]

I suppose the real money is in writing the source code eh?

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[MattCour]

I suppose the real money is in writing the source code eh?

Well it's a time/money trade that's the only issue, a job. If you're not building apps for buyers you have no income. When you sell code, you post your ads and let them work. You can make sales while you sleep which is pretty awesome.
I'm not suggesting this is a super Fastlane idea, but could be a nice side hustle to make more passive cash without having to actively work. Chupamobile sends you a payment once a month, Sellmyapp you can PayPal payments then email the file yourself to customers. If you spend $2-$3k let's say on a game, then collect $10k over the course of a few months that's a great ROI in my opinion!
I've also never tried any PPC ads with this strategy. That could be another avenue to bring in more sales.

 

[Karla]

Well it's a time/money trade that's the only issue, a job. If you're not building apps for buyers you have no income. When you sell code, you post your ads and let them work. You can make sales while you sleep which is pretty awesome.
I'm not suggesting this is a super Fastlane idea, but could be a nice side hustle to make more passive cash without having to actively work. Chupamobile sends you a payment once a month, Sellmyapp you can PayPal payments then email the file yourself to customers. If you spend $2-$3k let's say on a game, then collect $10k over the course of a few months that's a great ROI in my opinion!
I've also never tried any PPC ads with this strategy. That could be another avenue to bring in more sales.

MattCour, I am curious: Are you coming up with your own game ideas or do you let your developer decide? I always thought the app game business is very crowded. What do you do to make your codes stand out and get bought?

 

[MattCour]

MattCour, I am curious: Are you coming up with your own game ideas or do you let your developer decide? I always thought the app game business is very crowded. What do you do to make your codes stand out and get bought?

Well just like any other business, it all starts with research. Try looking at the source code already posted for sale on CHupa and Sellmyapp. Get a feel for what's selling and what isn't. Look at the link I posted to my game earlier and try it out. It's super simple and easy to see how you can change the theme to a million other things.

You can then tell a dev that you want a game created thats like Flappy Birds for example, but you want this and that changed. Send them links and examples of exactly what you want to create. Most great developers that are affordable are not from the US, so super clear communication is vital.

Snoop around Odesk and check out guys and gals who have the highest ratings and best rates. Again, you can negotiate everything with them.

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[CreateLiving]

Well it's a time/money trade that's the only issue, a job. If you're not building apps for buyers you have no income. When you sell code, you post your ads and let them work. You can make sales while you sleep which is pretty awesome.
I'm not suggesting this is a super Fastlane idea, but could be a nice side hustle to make more passive cash without having to actively work. Chupamobile sends you a payment once a month, Sellmyapp you can PayPal payments then email the file yourself to customers. If you spend $2-$3k let's say on a game, then collect $10k over the course of a few months that's a great ROI in my opinion!
I've also never tried any PPC ads with this strategy. That could be another avenue to bring in more sales.

Definitely a great way to make some extra cash, I really appreciate all of the great info being shared in this thread!

 

[GuestUser201]

I agree, both app reskins and selling apps on chupamobile seem like really fantastic ways to build mini income streams.
The idea is to really outdo the competition though guys, so don't think spending 3 hours dicking around one Sunday afternoon will yield you huge success.

It's like anything, you need to hustle and be better than average.

 

[dreamer]

Awesome thread!


I just want to make sure I get this right… the idea is to buy an app’s source code from chupamobile.com and sellmyapp.com, then “reskin” it… then re-sell it on the same sites? Or do you have an app designer code a game for you from scratch, then you sell the source code to that game on the above mentioned sites? Or could you do both? Lol. Very interesting ideas I’ve never heard of and am definitely interested in!

Once you bought the source code for an app, would you just use Odesk or similar site to have them “reskin” it? How much would that cost? I’d assume it’d be cheaper than buying a game from scratch right?

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[MattCour]

Awesome thread!


I just want to make sure I get this right… the idea is to buy an app’s source code from chupamobile.com and sellmyapp.com, then “reskin” it… then re-sell it on the same sites? Or do you have an app designer code a game for you from scratch, then you sell the source code to that game on the above mentioned sites? Or could you do both? Lol. Very interesting ideas I’ve never heard of and am definitely interested in!

Once you bought the source code for an app, would you just use Odesk or similar site to have them “reskin” it? How much would that cost? I’d assume it’d be cheaper than buying a game from scratch right?

Have game created by developer
Launch on App Store, make money
List on source code sites, make more money
Build more from scratch, sell more code

You could also reskin your own game since you own it. If you negotiate correctly a reskin shouldn't cost more than a few hundred bucks.

 

[dreamer]

Thanks Matt! Sent you rep transfer... was hoping you could answer a few more questions for me

I brought this idea up to my boyfriend, and he basically said... why would people want to sell the source code for their game/app? Especially if it's doing well, then they're just essentially creating competition for themselves right?

Also how do you suggest making money from the app, have it free & use ads, or charge for the app download?

And is the whole point of buying source codes on the sites you mentioned to have the "frame work" for an app, but then I hire someone to "reskin" the app for me so it's MY app, and then I could go put it up on the app store? I think that's the cheapest idea right... you said $99-$150 for the source code, then a few hundred for the reskinning... as opposed to getting a game designed from scratch which would prob costs a couple grand.

Thanks!

 

[MattCour]

Thanks Matt! Sent you rep transfer... was hoping you could answer a few more questions for me

I brought this idea up to my boyfriend, and he basically said... why would people want to sell the source code for their game/app? Especially if it's doing well, then they're just essentially creating competition for themselves right?

Also how do you suggest making money from the app, have it free & use ads, or charge for the app download?

And is the whole point of buying source codes on the sites you mentioned to have the "frame work" for an app, but then I hire someone to "reskin" the app for me so it's MY app, and then I could go put it up on the app store? I think that's the cheapest idea right... you said $99-$150 for the source code, then a few hundred for the reskinning... as opposed to getting a game designed from scratch which would prob costs a couple grand.

Thanks!

The two blogs i posted earlier have a ton of great, free info on the subject. I launch a free game with ads and IAPs and a paid version w IAPs but no ads.

That's exactly right, the source code is a framework. To reskin, the images are deleted and your new images replace them. They're called .png files. Background, icon, characters and other items. Sound and music are also typically swapped.

Most small games do not make a ton of money. According to my analytics, around 3.5 cents per download. You need to make a ton to make money. Selling the code to others is another way to generate cash.

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[dreamer]

The two blogs i posted earlier have a ton of great, free info on the subject. I launch a free game with ads and IAPs and a paid version w IAPs but no ads.

That's exactly right, the source code is a framework. To reskin, the images are deleted and your new images replace them. They're called .png files. Background, icon, characters and other items. Sound and music are also typically swapped.

Most small games do not make a ton of money. According to my analytics, around 3.5 cents per download. You need to make a ton to make money. Selling the code to others is another way to generate cash.

Thanks for the info!

Also jw... could you buy the source code, then upload the app "as is" on itunes without reskinning it first, or do you HAVE to pay to have someone reskin it. Essentially you would just have an identical app as someone else, but maybe named something different. Is this allowed?

 

[MattCour]

Thanks for the info!

Also jw... could you buy the source code, then upload the app "as is" on itunes without reskinning it first, or do you HAVE to pay to have someone reskin it. Essentially you would just have an identical app as someone else, but maybe named something different. Is this allowed?

No it's not allowed.

 

[Karla]

Well just like any other business, it all starts with research. Try looking at the source code already posted for sale on CHupa and Sellmyapp. Get a feel for what's selling and what isn't. Look at the link I posted to my game earlier and try it out. It's super simple and easy to see how you can change the theme to a million other things.

You can then tell a dev that you want a game created thats like Flappy Birds for example, but you want this and that changed. Send them links and examples of exactly what you want to create. Most great developers that are affordable are not from the US, so super clear communication is vital.

Snoop around Odesk and check out guys and gals who have the highest ratings and best rates. Again, you can negotiate everything with them.

Thanks MattCour, really appreciate your answer

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[GuestUser201]

Have game created by developer
Launch on App Store, make money
List on source code sites, make more money
Build more from scratch, sell more code

You could also reskin your own game since you own it. If you negotiate correctly a reskin shouldn't cost more than a few hundred bucks.

Yep, in theory if you guys have the money to throw around you can hire out the re-skinning process. Depending on the scope of the game and the amount of stuff that would need to be replaced a person like me would charge anywhere from $300 - $1000+ for a 2D game for UI and sprites, or $1000-$10,000 for 3D modeling, texturing, and rigging on a 3D game.

Or you can go the long hard route of learning to do it yourself, which can be tough. I almost see art as a skill that is on a level playing field with business because of the stupid amount of stuff you need to learn to be good at it.

Not exactly fastlane to be the guy doing the re-skinning work, but if you are fast there is certainly money to be made. With that said, if someone approached me looking to do an app-reskin I'd totally go for it because I've been doing this stuff for 4 years and it's a skill that I feel has been put to waste.

I'm not here to advertise, but seriously if you guys need any guidance or really need a fast, skilled artist to re-skin your app don't hesitate to shoot me a PM and ask for my help or portfolio. Game development and art is something I've spent literally thousands of hours doing in the past.

 

[Eric Jelen]

The two blogs i posted earlier have a ton of great, free info on the subject. I launch a free game with ads and IAPs and a paid version w IAPs but no ads.

That's exactly right, the source code is a framework. To reskin, the images are deleted and your new images replace them. They're called .png files. Background, icon, characters and other items. Sound and music are also typically swapped.

Most small games do not make a ton of money. According to my analytics, around 3.5 cents per download. You need to make a ton to make money. Selling the code to others is another way to generate cash.

Have you made more profit selling source code on sites like chupamobile or selling your app on the Apple Store?

How do you advertise or promote your source code on sites like chupamobile?

Thanks

 

[MattCour]

Have you made more profit selling source code on sites like chupamobile or selling your app on the Apple Store?

How do you advertise or promote your source code on sites like chupamobile?

Thanks

I've made as much if not more selling code as I have from the App Store. Go to the website and look around at other ads. They prob have a tutorial on how to advertise with them. You upload the source code to their server, create a detailed listing and they basically handle the rest. You get a payment once a month.

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[Kubson]

Everything seems ok but looking at numbers chupamobile provided, I wouldn't be such optimistic as you here. "1500+ apps and 1000000+ USD paid to authors" what gives 666$ per app, what seems to be super-low.

 

[johnp]

Some of you are thinking way too small..

A slight change to the angle will bring you in at least $3k-6k per month and closer to $16k per month if you work hard. Trust me...I just made $3.5k today.

I'm not going say how. Just think bigger...

 

[xabi]

So does the developer sign over the licence for the source code to you? Lets say the app becomes really popular, whats to stop the person that develpoed it claiming the rights to the code?

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[decaobr]

So i yesterday i submitted one of my source codes to Code Canyon ( Not available yet review period is 1 to 7 days), and today after seem this topic i decided to also send my code to Chupamobile, and i'm really impressed on how fast they review it. Now i'm thinking about removing my code from Code Canyon, since there will be sold for much less than in Chupa Mobile? What do you guys thing?

 

[CommonCents]

I'd think good money would be doing specific branding for companies targeting the same demo. Put their logo etc...in the games and give'm a turnkey game app for $5k+ a pop to give to their customers for free. Talk to them in terms of loyalty and marketing budgets they have for their target market. I'm doing similar "mass customization" now, although w/ physical products.

 

[mt_myke]

Interesting thread. My old roomate is looking at doing games so I did a bit of research on this yesterday. The one point I'll make here is be very careful about "average" game prices. Averages are based on the underlying distribution being normal. What that means is you'd expect a small number of games to make very little money, a small number of games to make a lot of money, and nearly all the games to make an amount of money that's within a fairly narrow range of the average. So if the average is $666, you might expect well over half the games to make between $400 and $800.

That kind of situation is the norm for many kinds of situations found in the real world. However, game profits (also income across the population) emphaticially DO NOT exhibit this behavior! In this case you have a very different situation, called a "power law" distribution. You may have heard of the Pareto distribution, this is a specific case of a power law distribution. In any case, in these situations the average tells you little to nothing, because these distributions are VERY skewed. One (admittedly not statistically valid) article I read yesterday found that only 3% of all games accounted for a whopping 80% of all income...leaving just 20% to split up among the remaining 97% of games.

The point of this is that just because the average comes out to be $666 does not mean the expected income of a randomly picked game is $666...in fact it's much, much less. Game income (just like real income across the population) tends to be an all-or-nothing proposition...most game devs don't make much, while a very few rake in huge profits. I see a few posters here are doing well in this area, and I hope they will give a few more hints on what they've done to become successful...from my own experience, I suspect that marketing is much more important than the quality of the game itself.

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[learnforlife]

In order to do this, is the first thing you need a Mac computer?

 

[Digamma]

Interesting thread. My old roomate is looking at doing games so I did a bit of research on this yesterday. The one point I'll make here is be very careful about "average" game prices. Averages are based on the underlying distribution being normal. What that means is you'd expect a small number of games to make very little money, a small number of games to make a lot of money, and nearly all the games to make an amount of money that's within a fairly narrow range of the average. So if the average is $666, you might expect well over half the games to make between $400 and $800.

You are right, you should not expect that. It's a dangerous thing in business to not be able to read a statistic correctly.

The only usefulness of an average is to give an idea of the size of the market in relation to the number of actors in said market.

Let me explain. If I say "the average game grosses $666", what I'm saying is that the amount of money spent in games is such that if all games split it equally each one would get $666.
It is useful because you can have an idea of how much money are in the market in function of the number of games - if that number was $12, one could easily decide that the market is very crowded; if it was $12000, one could put a mortgage on his house to jump on it.

If I wanted to tell you about the distribution, I would need to add other information (variance, percentiles, etc).
In general, beware of any statistics were you don't have the data. As someone once told me, "raw data or it never happened".

Good job on your research. Lots of people got bankrupt for statistics-reading fallacies.

That kind of situation is the norm for many kinds of situations found in the real world. However, game profits (also income across the population) emphaticially DO NOT exhibit this behavior! In this case you have a very different situation, called a "power law" distribution. You may have heard of the Pareto distribution, this is a specific case of a power law distribution. In any case, in these situations the average tells you little to nothing, because these distributions are VERY skewed. One (admittedly not statistically valid) article I read yesterday found that only 3% of all games accounted for a whopping 80% of all income...leaving just 20% to split up among the remaining 97% of games.

Most market don't, because the normal distribution is a stochastic distribution. It relates to RANDOM variables.
There is nothing random about how people spend their money. Quality is not random, marketing is not random.
If that was the case, we would be mere gamblers, and I would be in a seedy basement with a bourbon glass playing poker right now.

The point of this is that just because the average comes out to be $666 does not mean the expected income of a randomly picked game is $666...in fact it's much, much less. Game income (just like real income across the population) tends to be an all-or-nothing proposition...most game devs don't make much, while a very few rake in huge profits. I see a few posters here are doing well in this area, and I hope they will give a few more hints on what they've done to become successful...from my own experience, I suspect that marketing is much more important than the quality of the game itself.

You would be right. In general, quality only matters when the customer does its research. It matters in AAA games and in indie games because, respectively, they cost and are bought by niche customers.
The app market is made of casual gamers, and as such is incredibly skewed towards marketing.
This I know because I was really into game dev for a while.

Thank you for the great post. I would take two lessons from this exchange:
1. Study statistics: it might be one of the greatest skills you ever get.
2. Do your research: you need to understand the market before you throw money at it.

 

[Kubson]

Guys, I understand statistics very well. I am engineer and even more, I am in apps business for 3 years (not the native markets as distribution tho). I just wanted to show you, that it is not just that simple on this market like hire some Indian dev to make app for 2000$, put it on chupamobile.com and wait for profit. Random Indian freelancer won't make you app, which can be of exceptional quality over there.

Of course we still don't have enough data to say it for sure. But these that we have + a little bit of instinct tells me, that it is not worth the effort. Remember about providing support for all of the buyers later! Supporting guys, who has very little technical knowledge with compiler errors they get etc. Sounds like nightmare for me. For really little money.

I would love to hear that I am wrong and hear some success stories, with particular numbers.

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[mt_myke]

But these that we have + a little bit of instinct tells me, that it is not worth the effort.

Not to be a Debbie Downer but I have to agree. I wanted to make games for a living when I was a kid, but I'm glad I didn't. Game programmers as employees are notoriously overworked. Indy game developers are the classic starving artist types. For every Mojang (Minecraft) and Roxio (Angry Birds) there are countless great games that never make it. I know a guy in Sweden that's trying to get his mobile game launched, it's a pretty simple concept and game, but has been a ton of work for him and there's no telling if he'll even make any money on it. If on top of all that you don't even know how to code and have to outsource that as well...

 

[Ninjakid]

"Three hours of work".

Three hours of work to make an app?

Don't make me laugh.

 

[Mr.B]

Three hours a week maybe?

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[The Autobahn]

Guys, I understand statistics very well. I am engineer and even more, I am in apps business for 3 years (not the native markets as distribution tho). I just wanted to show you, that it is not just that simple on this market like hire some Indian dev to make app for 2000$, put it on chupamobile.com and wait for profit. Random Indian freelancer won't make you app, which can be of exceptional quality over there.

Of course we still don't have enough data to say it for sure. But these that we have + a little bit of instinct tells me, that it is not worth the effort. Remember about providing support for all of the buyers later! Supporting guys, who has very little technical knowledge with compiler errors they get etc. Sounds like nightmare for me. For really little money.

I would love to hear that I am wrong and hear some success stories, with particular numbers.

im not about making a game but some freelancer robber wanted to rob me by doing no work and cashing in 400$.. i disputed the process with facts and was able to get my money out.
And the whole joke was; top ranked developer from a nordish country.

 

[Ninjakid]

Three hours a week maybe?

Spread over a period of three years