One year ago I quit my job and walked out of the sleek modern office block in Dublin city centre. I’d decided to take a chance, enjoy the summer and see if I could make money developing mobile apps. People thought I was crazy But I needed some time off after a busy year. I didn’t want to stay in work, being moderately happy. I didn’t want to look back in a years time and say ‘I wish I had done that’. The worst part was saying goodbye to my colleagues. One year later, here is an overview of what has happened.

10 things that changed since I quit my job.

1. How hard I work is directly related to how much I earn. In the past, hard work was directly related to how successful I was. Products were shipped on time, targets were met, everyone was happy. The difference now is that while I am still shipping on time, meeting my own targets and being happy in the process, I don’t have to wait for a yearly performance review. My salary is not dependent on other people’s decisions.

2. I can take holidays, travel, meet friends or go to the Dreaded Dentist whenever I like. I don’t need permission, I don’t need advance warning and I don’t feel guilty about temporarily abandoning my projects.

3. I can work in any country. All I need is a laptop and wifi.

4. I can pay others to do my work for me. And then I can do what I love – which is not working! This is the next stage for me. If you’ve read the 4 hour work week you can see where this is going. Ideally I want to be able to know what’s going on, steer the ship in the right direction, but have a great team working for me so I don’t need to be online every day.

5. I have an opportunity to help people. When you get a chance to help someone, and they put in the effort and execute, and you see their success it’s amazing.

6. I can go on any business trip I choose. A poll in the office one day agreed that the ultimate business trip was a conference in California. But there was zero chance or getting something like this approved with budget cuts, fiscal curtailments, etc. (I did try!) I have flown out to California on business once since then, and it won’t be the last time.

7. Constant learning. Whenever I started a new job there was always pressure because you were playing catch up, but it was always really exciting as you were learning a ton of new stuff. I really enjoyed this stage. Then after a while in your job, you tended to have it all under control and it could be more mundane, with not much to learn any more in that role. Sometimes you could be pushed to learn things you had no interest in, which can be exasperating. I learn so much every day in this job and that shows no signs of changing any time soon. Instead of learning what a million other people learn in standard professional courses taught the world over, I am learning from people who have already achieved tons, from amazing online blogs, books and international seminars.

8. You can never have too many friends. I was worried a year ago that I would end up as some kind of weird hermit, banging on the keyword and only seen out once a week while I grew my business. There’d be no office chat, no water cooler moments and things were going to get quite lonely. What actually happened is that because I was really motivated and enraptured by the app business, I didn’t notice the hours flying past during the day. I made more of an effort to catch up with friends outside of work. And this year I have met TONS of new friends that I would never have met otherwise, from all around the world. This is crazy stuff

9. My commute is about 10 seconds from my kitchen to my desk. I don’t waste time anymore.

10. I don’t get paid any more, I make money. The satisfaction that I actually have the ability to turn $100 into $200 using my own knowledge and skills is mind blowing to me. I don’t think that will ever change.

This was all possible because I choose freedom, not security. Life is too short to waste your time doing something you don’t love.

It’s been a crazy year but it’s also been a huge amount of fun. Woooohoooo we’re one year old!!

When I started developing mobile apps, learning the basics in xCode was one of the most difficult things I had to do. My issues were multiple: I didn’t like using a mac (sorry Apple!), my programming was limited to basic HTML, and xCode looked like a pretty formidable animal to conquer.

I spent nearly 2 weeks hitting buttons in my first foray into iPhone app development. I must admit I cursed. I despaired of ever being able to get an app to build. The thought of actually being able to upload my own app to Apple was like a dream. And I was getting pretty good at copying all my errors into google in the hope someone out there had figured out the answer.

The whole thing just seemed full of these complicated steps that were fairly involved to try and figure out, let alone do successfully, as a non techie person. So here is a quick overview of what you need to know to make an iPhone or iPad app in xCode.

1. PUT YOUR MONEY WHERE YOUR MOUTH IS

First up you need to be enrolled as an Apple developer for $99/year. If you sign up as an individual iPhone app developer all you need is a credit card and its all sorted in about 24 hours. If you sign up as a company then brace yourself as it’s a lot more involved, you need to prove you are actually a legal company and it can takes weeks or months to get approved. You can have multiple individual accounts and you can upgrade an individual account to a company account in the future.

2. SOFTWARE AND HARDWARE

Then install the latest version of xcode on a recent-ish mac. My first mac was a second hand mac book I got for €550. It did the job perfectly. One thing to be aware of if you are buying a mac, made sure it’s fairly recent as the current xcode software will not run on old macs. So double check the spec of your mac with the latest version of xcode (on the mac app store) before you buy your mac.

3. TWO NEW WEBSITES

When you get your Apple developer account, you get access to two important websites:

iOS developer center – this is where you do the certs, App IDs and update your device UDIDs. It is a bit techy.
iTunesConnect – this is where you put in the content people will see in the store, like icon, name, keywords, categories, screenshots, etc. It’s much simpler

4. CREATE MAIN DEVELOPMENT AND DISTRIBUTION CERTS

Once a year, and right at the beginning when you sign up to Apple, you need to make a main development certificate and a distribution certificate. You will make these in the iOS developer center. Click on the ‘certificates’ button as in the pic above. Then you clicking through a few steps and upload a file from your mac. Then download the two certs to your mac and double click to install them. Once you have them made, you can forget about them until next year.

5. MAKE A P12 (MAYBE)

If you already have an Apple account, and someone else has made these two certs for you (maybe you hired a devekoper to upload / build an app for you, and he made these certs on his mac), you will need to get a P12 made. Without a P12, only the person who made the certs can build apps with your Apple account. But the good news is that making a P12 is really easy…. here is how to make one. Once the original person who made the certs has made the P12 and emailed it to you, download it to your mac, double click on the file and then you are good to go!

6. ADD YOUR IPHONE AND IPAD

If you want to looks at apps on your iPhone or iPad, before they are published in the store then you need to add the UDID (a unique reference number each device has) of that device in the ‘devices’ section of the iOS developer center. You can add 100 devices max each year, and you can only delete them after the year is up. Here is how you find your UDID.

All everything above here you do at the start when you make an Apple developer account. Once it’s all set up you can forget about it for while anyway The next steps are what you need to do for every app you want to publish.

7. ‘APPY DAYS (SORT OF)

Log into the iOS developer center.

8. APP ID

Create an app ID. This is really quick to do.

9. DEVELOPMENT PROVISIONING PROFILE

Create a development provisioning profile on the iOS dev center (again this is fast, click through a few screens and remember the name you use). Select the app ID you just created and select the main dev cert you made at the start.

10. DISTRIBUTION PROVISIONING PROFILE

Create a distribution provisioning profile on the iOS dev center (click through a few screens and remember the name you use). Select the app ID you just created and select the main dist cert you made at the start.

Download both provisioning profiles to your mac, and double click them to install them.

A new screen should appear and you should see them in this screen. Filter by date if you have a lot of profiles already installed on your mac.

If you have got the 2 main certs on your mac, and you have made these little prov certs correctly, there’ll be a green tick beside them. If they are red back to the drawing board as they won’t work in your app.

11. BUILD YOUR APP

You should have all the correct certs etc on your mac. Now open xcode, and open your app. If you hit ‘run’ the app should build in the simulator on your mac and you’ll be able to see it.

If you want to see the app on your iPhone or iPad, then you need start to figure out where you type in your bundle ID / App ID, and where you select the correct development provisioning profiles, that you have just downloaded to your mac. Do it all correctly, plug in your iphone and hit ‘run’. The app will build on your iphone. This is a Big Deal to get this far!

12. ITC

Once it’s running nicely on your iPhone, then log on to iTunesConnect and set up your screenshots, app name, icon png etc.

13. FINAL DISTRIBUTION PROVISIONING PROFILES

Once thats all done, then its back to your mac again. Now you need to change your selected certs to your distribution provisioning profiles that you downloaded earlier. Here is quick way to upload your app from your mac to the store.

14. UPLOAD TO APPLE

15. WHAT TO DO WHEN IT GOES WRONG

It’s unlikely you will get through this process without errors the first time round… and it does seem a lot can go wrong, speaking from experience. Three things will make it easier though:

1. If you get an error (and there are thousands!!) copy the error into google and do a search

2. The first time is the worst and it definitely gets better. When you start to recognise the errors you know you are on the right path.

3. If you want more in-depth info on any sections, try the Apple overview and Ray W’s blog.

Good luck!

1. Everyone needs battles stories, so the worse yours are – the better. Make sure you’ve done it all. Burnt by rogue developers, stranded in foreign countries during a military coup, derailed by natural disasters, the dog eating your hard drive, being broadcast worldwide on the Border Security TV show as your laptop is fumigated, loosing your iPhone down the toilet, etc. Your stories should run the length of your imagination.

2. Start writing a blog. Documenting your failures and money losses will offer comfort and support to other indie developers.

3. Travel to at least one foreign country per year on an app related mission. Since late 2011, app developers qualify to get free upgrades on all international flights. These upgrades are jointly sponsored by Apple and Google. They allow treasured app developers to sleep on flights when wifi is not available on board. To get upgraded, you must be carrying at least 2 laptops, 3 mobile devices and whisper the words ‘I am an app developer, so help me God’ to the stewardess when boarding. You will then be carefully placed in first class with a complimentary glass of champagne.

4. Figure out the stuff that you do every time you publish an app. Chances are it includes repetitive boring work that you can delegate, so hire someone else to do it or outsource. Get hustling and free up your time so you can focus on growing your business, instead of being employed by it. This will also allow you time to write the aforementioned blog.

5. Statistics show that 98.75% of all developers do not get the minimum recommended amount of sleep each night. Of course the question is what are the other 1.25% doing. All app developers MUST avoid sleep at all costs. 74% of surveys have shown the longer you sleep the less work you can complete. PRO developers live primarily off natural and biochemical stimulants.

6. Fill up your trusty car with petrol/gas and head out on manovres. Identify and travel to an unnamed small village of your choice, where life moves at its own speed. Sit on a wall, eat an ice cream and enjoy the sunshine. You must have nothing else to do and nowhere else to be for at least 36 hours. This is called ‘having a day off’. It is a new concept in app development, and is currently in beta mode.

7. Tipperary Natural Mineral Water is tenderly bottled in the Devils Bit Mountain range in North Tipperary by celestial app angels. Tipperary Natural Mineral Water is proven to increase iOS iPhone and iPad app rankings 10 places, for the 7 days after the liquid is consumed. Quantities of ‘TNMW’ are now shipped worldwide to hordes of thirsty developers, including those at Queen, Pinga and Pocket Diamonds.

8. The medicinal qualities of Thai Green Curry have long been celebrated in rural Thailand. Recently scientists in Palo Alto have linked consumption of the Asian delicacy with increased cognitive and mental abilities, and a significant boost in verbal reasoning. Combined with the use appcod.es and appstorerankings.net, the intake of Green Curry has been prove to have remarkable effects in keyword optomisation leading to SIGNIFICANT increases in long tail downloads.

9. From time to time is has been known for app developers to leave their desks and venture outside to what is know as ‘the world’, to undertake various forms of exercise. A lack of fitness is ranked by leading global WHO advisors as one of the 3 main threats to our increasingly metabolically challenged society. Many leading indie developers have now integrated treadmills into their app workstation and early results have shown a marked increase in both efficiency and endless runner games. As a result Apple review times are now 14 days.

10. It has been scientifically proven that the more fun you have while making apps, the more fun your users will have playing your games. So enjoy your job and the freedom of a mobile lifestyle

Learn how to reskin iPhone and iPad mobile games. For the complete beginner. Includes many PRO tips and tricks as well.

If you want to learn the full process of reskinning an iPhone or iPad game, this course is for you. Created by Chocolate Lab Apps, publisher of over 120 apps and games with #1s in over 50 countries in the past 12 months, this course walks you through the entire game reskinning process.

You’ll need to register as an Apple developer. We show you how to do this – fast and easy. You’ll chose the right theme with proven demand and pick source code that will maximise your revenue.

You’ll learn how to hire, fire and manage a team, use SDKs and create the perfect developer kit. Right from the start you will be saving time and money,

The focus throughout is on quality and you will learn why this is. We’ll also walk you through everything you need to know about iTunesconnect, including some PRO tips.

Outsourcing isn’t something that comes naturally, so welcome to the 10 ultimate tips for working with your outsourced team. We delve deeper then and work on making you more effective with your time.

It’s all about the money, so you will learn all about IAPs and ads options.

Then the ultimate business secrets are let loose when you discover how to chase exponential growth with your app business.

Ready to get started?

COURSE REVIEWS:

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This course is perfect for the beginner, for someone who wants to get into apps but doesn’t know where to begin. Elaine’s instructions are simple and easy to understand. I highly recommend this course as well as her xcode/reskinning course. Ilyse

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When you look at the business people you really admire, they can leave you with mixed emotions:

1. Awe, admiration, inspiration… they are living proof that success is possible. They are badly needed hope that your dream is achievable. This drives you forwards with your own business.

2. Frustration and depression… you compare what you have achieved and benchmark this against someone more successful… the gap seems so large that you start to wonder what is possible. Doubts begin.

I read a great post on Quora about what it means to be CEO of a startup. A lot of this I recognised.

“Very tough to sleep most nights of the week. Weekends don’t mean anything to you anymore. It’s very difficult to “turn it off”. But at the same time, television, movies and vacations become so boring to you when your company’s future might be sitting in your inbox or in the results of a new A/B test you decide to run. You feel guilty when you’re doing something you like doing outside of the company. You begin to see how valuable creativity is and that you must think differently not only to win, but to see the biggest opportunity. You are creative and when you have an idea it has no filter before it becomes a reality. This feeling is why you can’t do anything else. You start to see that the word “entrepreneur” is a personality. It’s difficult to talk to your friends that are not risking the same things you are because they are content with not pushing themselves or putting it all out there in the public with the likelihood of failure staring at you everyday. You don’t have a problem anymore being honest with people about not cutting it. Quitting is not an option. You’ll hear not to get too low when things are bad and not to get too high when things are good. You’ll become addicted to finding the hardest challenges because there’s a direct relationship between how difficult something is and the euphoria of a feeling when you do the impossible. You learn the most about yourself more than any other vocation as an entrepreneur. You learn what you do when you get punched in the face many many times. You learn what you do when no one is looking and when no one would find out. You learn that you are bad at many things, lucky if you’re good at a handful of things and the only thing you can ever be great at is being yourself which is why you can never compromise it.”

I do not believe in overnight successess. People are not born with some innate ability to be a master in a certain business field, pre-programmed from birth to make perfect business decisions.

I had a long journey to get to where I am today and I’m still only beginning. For a lot of people I know who are running businesses, things have gone wrong. There were many bad business decisions. What you see today is a moment in time in their lives. A still photograph. But you are missing out on the movie behind it, which includes a lot of horror sub-plots, twists and turns and gut wrenching moments.

There are a few things that all these people have in common.

Do stuff.

You’ve got to DO STUFF. It’s no good talking about stuff. The greatest insult you can give anyone is to say they know some interesting things. Rather than saying they have used this knowledge and have DONE some interesting things. If the best someone could say about me was that I was interesting to talk to I’d be gutted

This doesn’t mean they always do the right stuff though. They do lots of wrong things, learn from them, and then try to do something different.

My first attempt at a business was making an educational kids cdrom. It took about a year to make, I sold a few but there wasn’t a business in it. Frustrated? Yes a little. I had spent a lot of time on this. Patient? Yes. I proved I could make and ship a good product. I realised I didn’t need to know everything as if I didn’t how how to do stuff I could find it out. I learn on the job. I also learned I could work hard on my own initiative.

Learn stuff.

Learn quick. You need to actively search for information. If you wait for an excellent course or teacher to appear in your local area, within a five minute walk, so everything is nice and easy for you, forget it. You need to do the hard work. Effort has to be put in. Imagine you are starting a business and you get the opportunity to ask a MOGUL in your business area, ONE question. You need to make that one question COUNT. I wouldn’t ask that question today. I’d build my business, learn as much as I could from them by reading their books, webcasts, videos of them on TV talking business, everything I could get my hands on. There’s no point wasting an opportunity like this asking superstars basic questions that you can find out the answer to with some effort. I’d keep this question and use it when it would have the biggest effect on my business, when I was really stuck and had exhausted all other avenues of knowledge. If you only get one shot, make it count.

The world’s a big place.

One of the biggest thing I’ve learned is that you need to operate on the international stage. If you are the best in one country, that mightn’t mean a lot. As a fairly charismatic horse trainer I know remarked about winning a competition, they only won because they were the best idiot there on the day.

Patience.

Frustration will eat you up and will cause you to think negatively about your startup. It’s one of the biggest dangers to growing your startup. You need to flip this and focus on patience. It will happen, but today you have to be patient and keeping working hard in the trenches. Try and reproduce patience that you use in other aspects of your life. I bought a new horse about five years ago. He didn’t like people, distrusted everyone and did not under any circumstances want to be touched, rubbed or petted by a human. You could not catch him. I worked with him for a day or two in the stable on really basic stuff. After this I let him out in a small paddock, with his halter still on. Hopefully to make it easier to catch him so I could continue his training. You need to be able to handle / catch a horse as at a very basic level if he gets an injury and needs the vet, it’s not good if he won’t come within a mile of you. So that first day in the paddock, it was horrendous weather. Freezing cold, damp, grey skies and totally miserable. I spent over three hours slowly and patiently working on building his confidence in me, to the point where I could clip the rope onto his halter. There were rivers of rain running down my clothes but I didn’t notice. It was me and him, and a whole lot of patience. So think of areas in your life where you are patient, and use that strength in your business.

Impulsion

This could be an Irish thing. When I get an idea, I get excited. This happens automatically. I’m not sure if you call it optimism or delusion but there’s a trait in Ireland for people to ‘give it a go’. I think it’s a glass half full thing. You’re not sure if it’ll work out but it sounds like fun so you will always ‘give it a go.’

Grasp the big picture

Knowing what you want from your life is a really strong driver to keep you working on what you want to achieve. I used to work in a job I loved in Dublin. The work was exciting and I had made some tremendous friends. I was managing a project and running it exactly as I wanted to – lean and mean but with a lot of fun – thanks to a great manager who let me do my thing. The whole thing was a blinding success. We did the impossible and I got such a kick out of it. But it was taking its toll. My big picture was that I wanted to work on stuff I liked (tick) I didn’t mind hard work (tick) but I wanted some kind of life as well and I wanted to ride my horse. While I was successful in work, I was cancelling holidays, working too many hours, I slept through one whole Christmas from overwork and I hadn’t seen the horse in years. I don’t do New Years Resolutions, but I did in 2012. It was ‘Less Work, More Adventure’. Every time I had to make a decision from then on, I based it on that. Thus doing crazy stuff like Startup Weekends in London, quitting my sensible, enjoyable, permanent job to ride my horse (and make apps, it was about 50% of each) and getting on a plane to San Diego. Figure out your big picture, then make your big decisions based on this.

Start an adventure, keep your costs low

You don’t have to quit your job though. I did lots of stuff in evenings and weekends. Everything I worked on was an adventure and while none of them made much money at the time, each one was worth the effort I put into it. I knew enough to know I needed to spend as little money as I could. So if stuff didn’t work out, I lost my time, but I didn’t bankrupt myself. You can do a lot by self teaching yourself things. Seriously. Especially in the I.T sector, sometimes all you need is Google. I wasn’t doing the most profitable stuff, but I was doing something more important – I was DOING stuff.

Stuff you can’t predict that blows your mind.

Building something, whether it’s an app, a painting, writing a book, making a game… elevates you up to whole other level. Making things is stuff you have control over. But once you hit ‘publish’ that dream you built takes on its own life. You have connected yourself to the greater world and anything can happen. Crazy, magic stuff that you could not even imagine. Stuff that goes way beyond earning money.

Your dreams start with three words. Never give up.

1. Open iTunesconnect and login. Click on your app icon and then click on the blue ‘manage gamecenter’ button on the right.

2. Select single game.

3. Click ‘add leaderboard.’

4. Choose ‘single leaderboard.’

5. Complete the following

- Type in a reference name (similar to your game name)
- Put in your leaderboard ID. You need to get this from your developer. This ID needs to be the same text as you / your developer put into the “(void) submitScore:(int)Score” in xCode.
- Score format type is integer.
- Sort order high to low
- You can leave the score range blank

6. Click the add language button.

7. Add a language as in the screenshot above and upload your app icon as the picture.

8. Press save. Now go back to the main page that has all of your app details on it and scroll down the page to the end.

9. The gamecenter button is disabled, so you need to enable it. Then click leaderboards > edit.

10. Then select your leaderboard and press save.

Job done!

Here is a quick overview of uploading an app to the store.

Well – sadly no you’re not quite there yet. The most important work is actually yet to do. Brace yourselves……

Once you upload your game to the store, have you any plan as to how people will find it and why they will download it? There are zillions of so called zombie apps up on the store which only get a few downloads every day. Not good for business and recouping the capital you invested into your app.

First up, there are a few things you need to NAIL to give your app the best chance of success:

1. You need to have more than a passing knowledge of the apps in your exact app category. If its education, study the top selling education apps in that category in the US app store. I say USA as its the place where you’ll probably earn the most money if you get everything right with your marketing. If you are doing games, don’t just look at the top games, look at your SPECIFIC CATEGORY. Uncover what is working TODAY in your category in the app store. Study everything from icons to themes to monitization methods. This market research is priceless. And word to the wise – do it yourself, don’t outsource it to a team member.

2. Your icon has to look like a million dollars. Does it look as eye catching and professional and appealing as the top 30 overall apps in iTunes? If it doesn’t, make it again. You might have to make it 10 or 20 times. The bar is set high on this one and you have got to put in the effort here.

3. People buy products based on how good the wrapper is. We like pretty, visual things. So your screenshots, which are now even more important in the store have to rock. Good just isn’t good enough any more. Spend time on these. When my apps are featured by Apple in various lists it drives downloads. Yet another reason to have a very good icon and screenshots.

Then we come to a very interesting part of the operation… the app name and keywords…

Before people even get a chance to see your eye popping ‘MUST DOWNLOAD NOW!’ icon and screenshots, they first have to find your app in the store. Looking at the table above you can see that most people find apps by using the search function in the app store.

A few basic points first:

1) You’ve got 1 app name and a 100 character keyword limit to play with
2) When putting in your keywords, don’t use any spaces, just use commas like this: car,fun,drive,speed,petrol,fly….
3) I find its useful to get your keywords written down before you finalise your app name
4) IAPs names are also searchable in the store, but only if you search for the exact full IAP name you used
5) I think there is something odd happening as well where the name of the IPA you uploaded also gets included as a search term. I’m working on figuring this out currently. If you’ve come across this, leave a comment on twitter or FB.
6) Things change… Apple mixes things up every now and again so you need to stay tuned with whats going on regularly. Changes have in the past resulted in big increases and decreases in app downloads. The whole thing still a black art in terms of trying to figure it out.
7) Your 100 character keyword limit is priceless, so use every character. You can update these after the app is published by resubmitting a new build to Apple.
8) Track your keywords in a spreadsheet or similar… you will want to refer back to them to check things.
9) It never hurts to use current popular themes or terms in your keywords as people will be searching for them. Probably best to have them applicable to your app though.

I want to run through some of the features in appstorerankings.net. There are a few things I’ve found really useful, and some more features that I want to dig into as they look pretty impressive.

One really valuable piece of knowledge is trying to reverse engineer what keywords the really popular apps in your category are using. They way it’s set up currently is that there is no place you can go to get the exact list. You can try and reverse engineer it yourself by typing guesswords into iTunes and seeing if the app in question then gets listed in the search results, but it’s a bit tedious. Appstorerankings have a keyword spy tool so I thought it’d be a really useful place to start when thinking about what keywords are popular. But first I wanted to see how accurate it was ….

TEST 1:

I used the keyword spy on one of my old games, Granny Detective. Here were the results:

And below are the actual keywords in my app. Worth noting, these keywords are not great so I wouldn’t advice using all of them in your apps Also – usually if you put in no spaces between words, they can display with spaces in ITC.

So Appstorerankings correctly found 11 of out my 14 keywords. That’s pretty good! It didn’t list the really generic terms – free, game, app. I’m pretty impressed though. Let’s try another.

TEST 2:

This is a grocery app I did about 8 months ago.

And here are the keywords that the app does use:

Again, this has nearly all of my keywords – 15 are listed out of my 18 keywords. It’s the most accurate piece of keyword software I’ve seen so far. So when you are doing your apps, its definitely worth identifying your competitors who are doing well in the store. Then use this keyword spy tool to reverse engineer their keywords to see if any are applicable to your app.

Remember as well your app titles are included in Apple’s search. So once you have a list of keywords you like and think will work well, see if you can put 2 or 3 keywords in your app title. You do not need to duplicate these in your keywords. Be careful though, you’re title should still be readable, and not just packed full of random keywords… If your title looks like it’s just full of keywords Apple will probably reject it. Be sensible about it.

There are quite a lot of features in the back end of appstorerankings as well. To begin you can enter in your own apps and track specific search terms:

There is a useful ‘optomise keywords’ tool. Once you have decided on your app name and keywords, you can plug these in here and it automatically tells you if you have made any mistakes like duplicating a word in both the title and keywords. Doing this manually you’ll often get one duplicate you’ll miss. I do anyway! Also having a tool to tell you your exact character count might make the difference to getting one extra short word in there.

The Keyword research tab looks insane.

When you type in a word it lists apps that include that word, and you can look at the release date, last update, if they use IAPs, and category ranking in the US. That’s a lot of useful information right there.

Then it goes a step further and calculates the traffic that word is currently getting (are people searching for it?) and the difficulty to get found using that keyword. Nice.

Then if you like the easiest way of doing things, you can look at the intelligent suggestions. This is crazy. I put in my keywords, pressed one button and the website generated a list of suggested words ALONG WITH their traffic and ranking difficultly. That’s insane. In a good way

I’m going to stop now as I think half of you are probably already asleep but I have to say I love this stuff. Long story short – good keywords make A BIG DIFFERENCE.

Spend a bit of time working them out. Use one of the great keywords tools out there. They will make your life a LOT EASIER and hopefully will reflect in higher rankings in the store and more downloads and revenue for you. If you’ve used any of these tools let us know on facebook.

*=approximately
**= don’t do any of these things

Just over five days ago I released two versions of a new game I had made on the app store. It’s a universal app in the games > racing category called ‘A1 Salt Flats’.

Version 1: Paid. Went live early on Wednesday morning at $4.99. No ads and no IAPs. Switched to free on Saturday with ads.

Version 2: Free. Went live early on Friday morning. Chartboost and Revmob ads. No IAPs.

Sales for the paid version were falling very fast (due to earn $10 revenue as a paid app if I left it alone on Saturday) so I switched it over to free early on Saturday morning. Revmob and Chartboost were enabled then. It’s now Monday afternoon… so it’s been just over 5 days since the first app (paid version), and just over 3 days (free version) went live. Here is the revenue for the last five days:

DOWNLOADS:

The free game has got four times as many downloads as the paid > free game to date.

RANKINGS in the US app store:

Version 1: At the start this briefly got to #97 top grossing iPad racing. It was very low in the actual paid charts though… about #871. Once I changed it to free it got to #142 iphone free racing and #123 iPad free racing. This is going up slowly so it may rise more.

Version 2: This got up as far as #73 ipad free racing US (a little more on iPhone) on Saturday (day two of release) and has moved down now since then.

OBSERVATIONS:

1. Download numbers are not as high during the weekdays so they may have hampered the initial sales of the paid version.
2. The free game made more money in 3 days, than the paid (then free) app made in 5 days.
3. Charging $4.99 for a game wasn’t sustainable… once the game started to slip off the ‘new’ lists on Apple after the first two days, sales went downhill fast. They were reducing by more than 50% daily. Day four (Saturday) based on this trend would only have earned me about $10.
4. Setting a game to free initially will rank it higher in the free charts in the first while, compared to changing a game from paid to free. Over times this will change as rankings become more dependent on keyword searches and other Apple features.
5. The boost the app got on Saturday through having its price drop tracked on various websites was not enough so far to boost its free app ranking above the free app, or boost its ad revenue past the free app.
6. Free apps get more downloads If I was to put in IAPs in a new version, the free app would be more valuable to me due to the much larger user base.
7. The paid app may have fared better as a paid app, if the free app was not available in the store.

I’m a big Chartboost.com fan. Getting to grips with all of the options available to a developer is a bit of a learning curve. The good news is their team are always on hand to help you. Chartboost allows app developers to control what ads get shown in their apps. I wanted to find what ads that were showing most in my apps, but which were not getting installs or earning me much money. Not all ads will appeal to the demographic that plays your particular game.

HUGE thanks to Shannon in Chartboost for helping me to figure out how to do this

To get started, log into Chartboost, browse to campaign>analytics and type in the name of the campaign you want to analyse. Put in dates over the last week, and select ‘group by app’. The system will then generate results which are too large to be displayed in the web brower, and you will be prompted to download a CSV file.

Open this CSV file up in Excel. Now select the whole spreadsheet, and press ‘Ctrl+F’. Find all of the ‘$’ and replace them with a blank. This is a really important step as otherwise your money earned column will not display correctly later on.

Now create a pivot table.

Select all the content in the spreadsheet, and then (in Office 2010 for PC) you can create a pivot table by selecting “insert > pivot table” from the top menu area.

When the grey popup box appears, be sure and select the ‘new worksheet’ option.

Now that you have your pivot table created in a new sheet. You should revise the parameters to show Row labels: “App Name” and Values: “Impressions”, “Click”, “Installs”, and “Money earned”. You can select these in the pivot table on the right of the screen.

Go into the ‘row labels’ column, so drag them as needed to the ‘values’ column.

Then you need to change update the ‘impressions, clicks, installs, money earned’ to the SUM of. You can do this as in this screenshot, for each of the 4 columns.

So select ‘sum’ instead of ‘count’ for these 3 columns.

Highlight the ‘impressions’ column and click on the filter button in the top menu.

Now sort the ‘sum of impressions’ from largest to smallest. Then copy all of the data to a new sheet. This new sheet is where you will calculate the CTR, IR, and eCPM.

CTR= clicks/impressions
IR= installs/clicks
eCPM= (money earned/impressions)*1000

Below is a spreadsheet with these calculations put in. The cells highlighted in red represent ads that have been shown quite a lot in my app, which I’ve earned no money for. These would be examples of ads that could be removed from my ad campaign as they do not seem to be fitting it with my target audience. (Obviously this will be different for every app).

Have fun!

UPDATE: Having played around with campaigns over the past 10 days or so, by deleting non-performing ads I’ve managed to nearly double my eCPM. I also seem to have halved (or thereabouts) my impressions. When you start deleting out ads (I’m guessing which perhaps were global ad campaigns) it look like some countries might be seeing no ads in my apps. So instead of a low ecpm rate in those countries (and low revenue for me) I was getting 0 ecpm.

So I think unless you have someone fulltime or thereabouts looking at all this stuff AND can track it by country to make sure you are displaying the best ads you can everywhere, this filtering can be useful but only on a much smaller scale. E.g. take out ‘Top Girl’ ads in a racing game for guys. So I’m limiting the app filtering to a small handful of apps max for now.

“Of course,” Ray says, “everything he told me to do I’d never done before. I’d tried everything else. I could do what he told me, but it wasn’t easy, because I had to give something I never gave, to get something I never had. It wasn’t easy. And I’m trying to help these people today. I tell them,’You’ve got to give something you never gave to get something you never had.’

I’ve always loved books. Oddly it turns out the three best books I’ve ever read happened by accident.

Rich Dad, Poor Dad

I’d gone from school (work), to college (work) to work (work) on the usual path that a lot of people in Ireland do. Get educated and get a job and keep working. Three years later I’d worked hard & well but was burnt out, so had hopped on a Quantas flight and found myself in a house on stilts in Caboolture, north of Brisbane, Australia. I was over doing some horse training and living nearby for a few weeks. One evening I was picking out a book to read, and stumbled across ‘Rich Dad Poor Dad’ on the bookshelf. I’d never heard of it before. It’s an entertaining read, with a lot about building up assets and making money from property. But what COMPLETELY clicked in my brain was the concept of earning money by making a product once, and selling it multiple times. I wasn’t sold on the property side of things as the property market was in too much of a bubble in Ireland but the asset idea stuck firmly in my head. When I came back to Ireland from then on I was always working on some type of ‘creating an asset project’ in my spare time.

App Empire

Fast forward a few years later. I was still on the ‘create an asset’ quest. I had tried a good few things… writing books, cdroms, online learning sites, jewellery, various websites and a equestrian society. I’d dabbled in apps as well publishing a range of about 30 on iOS and a few less than that on Android. All cool stuff and great fun to do, but no home runs yet.

I hadn’t used twitter much, so a friend grabbed my mobile and insisted I needed to get on it if I wanted to know what was going on in the startup scene in Dublin. About 2 mins later I was on it, and she had me following all the startup people she thought would be interesting. One day, I read a tweet about an app book some guy had published. I opened the link, saw he had a book on amazon and ordered it. That was about 10 months ago. Since then Chocolate Lab Apps was founded and things have been exciting. All totally by accident, but with a fair amount of effort.

The Slight Edge

This was another accident. I was reading a techie blog post. The author had written something along the lines of ‘if you are reading this, stop right now and order this book from amazon’. You tend to read these things and not do anything, but I thought if this guy was recommending it, it has to be worth a shot. The book arrived about a week later.

It turns out (ironically) that a lot of the stuff in it is EXACTLY how I approach my horse training. Live in the moment. Turns out with my lovely horse this is the best way not to get bucked off. Everything you do today is with the goal to be a tiny fraction better tomorrow. This is EXACTLY what I do with the horse. To succeed more you have to fail more. Doing the right stuff is painful at the start but gets easier. When you make the right choice you won’t see the results straight away, but they will come. 100% the same with horses. I was applying all this in my horse training but didn’t realise it really works in all aspects of your life, from to friends, knowledge, health, food, you name it.

So, if you are reading this post by accident, perhaps you’ll read one of these books and let me know what happens

I attended the London Startup Weekend about 10 months ago. It was a totally refreshing weekend with a lot of fun involved. That Friday I ran out of my day job, jumped on the plane at Dublin airport and before I knew it was coming up with new business ideas in the the heart of London for the next 72 hours, living on a diet of sushi, pizza and old fashioned sweets. We had so much fun. Bela & I ended up being the weekend Fussball champions, something which is always very important when starting a startup. Aside from socialising, I captained a team based around the use of brands in games. We didn’t make the final cut (perhaps due to the fussball) but I think I ended up doing about 47 pitches, and met so many great talented people it was brilliant. Long story short, it really gave me a kick up the you know what to get moving. Two months later I quit my job and founded Chocolate Lab Apps. StartupWeekend is wonderful, so if you ever get a change to attend I’d strongly advise it. Startupweekend.org very kindly published a guest blog post I wrote, if you click on the picture above you’ll see the full version. Enjoy!

Here are a list of things that are easier:

- Rocket science
- Advanced mathematical modelling
- Riding a horse well (google Steve Halfpenny from Silversand Australia)
- Hiring great mobile artists
- Training a chocolate labrador
- Setting up iOS certs and provisioning profiles for the FIRST TIME – by YOURSELF!
- Finding your way around the rabbit warren that is the south of Dublin city when driving

So in a nutshell – find good, fast, honest, devs who can stick to budgets and schedules and who are a JOY to work with is bloody tricky. And I say this after hiring and firing many developers over the last 10 months.

What I did right:

- Used mainly oDesk which has a great range of devs
- Checked they all had 5* ratings and good reviews
- Kept the post short and simple, eg. ‘dev needed to integrate ad SDKs into game app’ and a few characteristics I wanted in terms of English standard, etc…
- Got some devs to do small work samples before I hired them to prove to myself they were good and would work efficiently
- Went through oDesk using the ‘Objective C’ exam filter to find the most technically expert iPhone app developers out there
- Hired someone on a team, so when it went wrong I contacted their manager and got a newer better dev to finish the work
- Once I found some devs I liked the look of, I emailed them all asking them how long it takes to integrate chartboost and revmob. This got rid of about 80% of the shortlisted applicants who literally made up the largest figures they could think of
- I only hired using fixed price contracts
- Made sure anyone I hired had good English
- Wrote out a list of exactly what I wanted done, before the contract began, and this did not change during the project
- Answered all quickly within a few hours, or max a day so I wouldn’t be a bottleneck in the process
- Hired slowly and fired quickly
- Worked closely with all contractors, good communication regularly and motivated my team

What I did wrong:

- Nearer the start I used smaller outsourcing websites and the work standard wasn’t as high, and I didn’t have the same number of options. oDesk is definitely easier.
- Paid some upfront payments at the beginning, got useless work in and lost my deposits
- At the start, hired some devs I hadn’t worked with before for bigger projects. A Very Bad Idea. I’ve just increase by x10 the amount of money I can loose when it all goes wrong.
- At the start I was looking worldwide as I am using to managing geographically diverse teams. The more contact I personally had with devs from China, the more uneasy I got. I am suspicious there is something odd going on. A lot of the top (100% Objective C test) ranks are Chinese devs but their quotes and skills that I’ve seen do not match that. Also – purely from my experience – they are not the easiest to deal with, get a bit pushy and start to SkypeStalk you. I end up having to block them on Skype. I’m sure there are great Chinese devs out there, but I’ve been bitten a few too many times.

What happened:

- I hired what looked like a lot of great developers, and fired what turned out to be people that just didn’t work out. Schedules went out the window, the quality of work wasn’t as agreed, they wanted more money that we can agreed to, they technically could not code what they had agreed to do, etc.
- Some devs were a little on the expensive side, but did great work so worked with them for many months. Then for some reason, they stopped adhering to any schedule, the quality went south and I had to fire them as well.
- I recently hired devs for small roles, all great reviews, answered my tech questions honestly, competitive rates, etc. Within a few days had to fire a few due to 1) constant complaining 2) issues using SDKs 3) schedule doubling from what was agreed.

I’ve been interviewing lots of devs so this is what they all want when I ask them to describe their perfect client:

- A client with technical knowledge who has some idea what they are talking about

What I learned from my experiences:

- 80% of devs who reply to your job posting will assume you have no technical knowledge and tell you crazy stuff like it’ll take 10 hours to integrate revmob and chartboost. They are only trying to fleece you. When you have educated yourself on the tech side of thing you no longer live in a lovely but useless fools paradise

- The more you know about the technical xCode stuff, the more difficult it is to hire good developers. This is because you are now much better at identifing the ones who are just having a laugh

- Even if you hire a few people out of the 20% of devs who look, sound, and prove themselves to be good, it can all turn out badly as well with the work just not being done to the quality and schedule agreed at the start.

- Maybe I’m the problem? No, not really I’ve got 5 star feedback from anyone I’ve worked with (including a lot of people I’ve had to fire, who still seem to like me!), have shipped a fair few successful games in my past.

So what next?

- First up, I’m looking for great developers who are AAA players. Love coding iPhone apps, want to work on exciting games. People who want to see apps they made rock up to the top of the charts. Can work quickly, are honest, competitively priced, can integrate SDKS in their sleep, have fun and love their job! If you know of anyone ping me.

- Any major successes I’ve had have been with Eastern European developers. They seem to have great skills, and they say what they think. If it takes 3 days, they won’t promise to do it in 1 day and then not deliver. They’re fun to work with, really talented and creative and as a bonus are in the same time zone as me which helps. So last night I was up until 2am writing job descriptions on three of the major outsourcing websites. Then I emailed every single 5* Eastern European developer I could find. Will it work? I don’t know yet but I’m definitely hopeful

If there’s one thing that sends the fear of God and Paul O’Connell into people, it is trying to create a .P12 file. If only one person is working with your app in xCode using one Mac computer, then you can breathe a sign of relief. You don’t need to worry about creating a P12.

But if you have:

- Two developers in different locations using your one Apple account
- You have the certs set up on your Mac and now want to hire someone else to help you with the app

Then you need to create a (ferocious drumroll) P12 certificate. The P12 is the magic file that gives a second person the right to work with your Apple iOS developer account.

Whoever generated the current main developer and distributions certs in your Apple account is the person who needs to generate the P12. They need to use the same MAC they used to make the certficates. Once its generated, just email it to whoever else needs to work with these certs.

If for someone reason the person who made the main certs isn’t available, remember you do always have the option to revoke the main developer and distribution certs in the iOS developer center, create new ones on your MAC, and then make a P12 from those. But if you revoke certs all of the current mobile provisioning files you use to QA apps will stop working. It’s not a biggie, you just need to create new mobile provisioning files associated with your new certs, as they all have to be linked for it to all play nicely together.

‘But hold your horses’ I hear you all yell…. ‘How on earth do I make a P12, it sounds like some archaic accountancy nail-pulling tax form!!’

Don’t panic – at least not yet. You can make it in about 2 minutes.

First up, make sure you are sitting at the Mac where you made your main developer and distribution certs. On the top bar of your Mac screen, click Go > Utilities > Keychain. This now opens then Keychain program.

On the left of the keychain window, click on ‘My Certificates’.

You should then see your developer certificate and your distribution certificate in the middle of the Keychain window. Happy days Now click on the tiny grey arrow beside your developer certificate. It will open to reveal a private key.

Right click on this private key, and select the ‘export’ option.

Then choose a name for your file, and save it somewhere you’ll find easily, like your desktop.

Congratulations that’s it!!!!!! You are done. The last thing to do is to email this P12 file to the person who is also going to be working with this Apple iOS developer account. Nice work

Keeping in touch with market trends and seeing what your future customers like, what they are buying right now, and what they want is really important for anyone who wants to publish apps successfully in the app store. Two weeks ago I decided to dig deep into the store, specifically the games area to see what trends I could uncover.

I looked first at the top 30 apps in the overall top grossing charts. This chart contains all of the apps which are making the most money earned from Apple. 93% of top grossing apps are games. So I dived in a bit deeper to this category……..

Of the top 30 highest grossing games in iTunes:

- 73% of the top grossing games are free
- 4 games are $.99, 2 games are $2.99, 1 game is $4.99 and 1 game is $6.99
- 47% of games are targeted at both genders
- 33% of games are targeted at boys

The most popular games categories in the top 30 overall grossing games list were:

-Strategy (5 games)
-Adventure (4 games)
-Simulation (3 games)
-Racing (3 games)
-Casino (3 games)
-Arcade (2 games)
-Role Playing (2 games)
-Card games (2 games)
-Action (1 game)
-Family (1 game)
-Sports (1 game)
-Word (1 game)

-Over 66% of the 30 top grossing games use multiplayer.
-53% of the 30 top grossing apps use gamecenter.
-86% of the 30 top grossing games are universal (available for iPhone and iPad).

-The “free plus in-app purchases” is the most common monitization model found in the 30 top grossing games in the market today.
-93% of the 30 top grossing games use in app purchases.
-53% of the 30 top grossing games have 10 or more in app purchases.
-40% of the 30 top grossing games have between 4 and 7 used in app purchases.
-In the 30 top grossing games, the minimum price point is $.99. The max price is $99.99.
-50% of the 30 top grossing games have their lowest in app purchase $1.99 or greater.
-The most common price points are: $.99, $1.99, $2.99, $4.99, $9.99, $14.99, $19.99, $49.99 and $99.99.
-60% of the 30 top grossing apps used the same price for 2 or more items.

Have you been using any of these trends in your games? Share your thoughts in the comments below

1. Market research – choosing your app category and researching competitors
2. App strategy – putting together a plan of what, when and how
3. Hiring – finding great people to work with, who are AAA players, easy to work with and make you feel happy every time you interact with them
4. Monitization strategies – working out the monitization strategies that are working for the most successful apps in your category
5. Analytics – A/B testing, eCPMs, downloads, click throughs, Flurry reports, etc.
6. Metadata – you need to become a keyword ninja and know how to use the various online solutions like a pro

So whether you are a programmer, an artist, a game producer, a landscape gardener, a writer or concept creator, these 6 things need to be on your to do list. These are all the big things that will actually drive growth and profit in your business. If you understand these well, you have probably the most profitable and valuable knowledge a company owner can have.

The rest – creating graphics, coding apps, making a website, etc you can hire people to do. But you don’t want a bad team. You don’t want a team for average players either. You want to put together a team of ROCKSTAR PERFORMERS.

Over the last two weeks I’ve been looking to find some new artists and developers on oDesk. I’ve just hired 3 new devs and artists this week, so they are looking great. Here is what I did to find AAA artists.

Artists / graphic designers:

Finding great artists on Odesk is both easy and difficult at the same time. It’s relatively easy as you can see their portfolios and get an idea of their standard. It’s really difficult as a lot of the portfolios on Odesk are either empty, awful, or average/fine. Here are some examples. What I want to happen, is when I open their portfolio, I say the word ‘WOW’ without thinking.

These are ok, but do they make you say wow?

Then here are some that are really nice… and what you find is that the ones that are bad, or average, are often the same price as artists that are great.

1. I post up jobs on oDesk, sometimes up to 3 new jobs every day. I found if I posted at the weekend I didn’t get as many replies. When I post looking for people in Eastern Europe or Asia during their weekends or outside their working hours, I didn’t get as many replies either. So if you put up one post and don’t find anyone, don’t panic. I put up about 25 posts in just under 3 weeks, and from this found 8-9 great artists, 5 of those which were interested in working with me.

2. Keep things vague AND exciting. Right now I just want to see great art. So I put up something like “Looking for the best games artists on oDesk” and then two or three sentences saying “I want a great 2D artist, have a few small games coming up and this is a great opportunity to join a fun growing team.” In the keywords field, only put ‘adobe-photoshop’.

3. I had a few posts up for $80/90 but I found you get many more replies when you increase the price a little. But remember, just because you have posts on Odesk, you do not have to hire anyone. What people bid bears no relevance for now as they have no idea how big or small your game is.

4. You’ll need to be prepared to spend 30 mins on oDesk every day or two just searching through peoples portfolios. It’s worth it when you find someone incredible.

5. As well as being able to create great art, you need to find an artist who has created the style of great art you need. Some artists are great at fantasy and not that good at kids cartoons. Some are 3D experts and don’t really want to work on game UIs. So be aware just because they have great art, it also has to be the type/style of art that you want for your app or game as well. So – at a more basic level – if you want a games artist, make sure they have done art for games before. Don’t choose someone with lots of well designed brochures in their portfolio. Look for artists that use light and shadow in their work, and which include little details in their art.

Once I find some artists that made me say WOW, I then drop them an email, usually saying I’m developing a kids/arcade/puzzle/etc type game, and I’m looking for a great artist. If there’s a particular style or price or art I want to see, I’ll ask them to send me more art or send me a link to their online portfolio/website if they have one.

If all looks good, then I’ll shortlist again. Usually at this stage everyone on my shortlist is a super artist, so now it depends what art style suits the game I had in mind.

So I’ll usually email one or two more info about the game. I’ll send them a link of a few games with similar art styles. I’ll give them more information about how many graphics I need them to create. I’ll ask them to review all this, and then I’ll get this on a text Skype call.

During the Skype call, I’ll ask them a few questions. You want to get to know them better. What projects do they like working on best? Are they busy right now? Have they made many games? Do they work alone or with a team? What do they like about their job? What type of clients do they like to work for? Give them time to reply to each question so you can get a good idea of them. After that, then ask them if they have any questions for you. Usually they want to know your background, app history, etc.

After all that, you can ask them to send you a price for the work, and also a date when they could start and how many days it will take to complete the work. Thank them for their time & that’s the skype call done. What you were looking for was

1. Great English
2. A passion for what they do
3. A sense of fun. If you can’t have fun making apps then when can you
4. If your gut says they are ok, average, fine, ok, then they might not be right for you. If you feel excited after the call then you are on the right track. You will actually know that someone is an AAA player before you hire them. If you don’t get that feeling, move on to the next person. Do not settle for anyone who is less than AAA. If you want to make a great app which gets lots of downloads, you NEED an AAA player.

In terms of agreeing to work, make sure the know the full scope of the work. It’s also a good idea to ask them to do your screenshots and icon (1024×1024) for iTC as well. Once you both agree on the price, set up a fixed price contract and work out a few milestone payments along the way. As a rule don’t pay an upfront fee. The only exception would be if it was for under $90, to be used more as a show of goodwill than anything. On the flip side of the coin I’m sure a lot of artists have been burned by crazy clients who leave them without payment as well. The best way I’ve found is to agree on milestones. For example for a $300 art project, you can pay $100 after the first characters and one background is done. Then $200 when the remaining app artwork is sent to you and looks great. And then the last $100 when the icon and 5 iPhone and 5 iPad screenshots are sent to you.

One of the best artists I am working with, told me he was positive I would love his work. He did not want to be paid any money until he had completed ALL the work and I was happy with it. That is an AAA player. Great artists will take your ideas, and send you back something much more incredible than you had in mind. They really do add so much QUALITY to your app. Apple and your future customers LOVE incredible art quality. It’s one of the biggest keys in maxmising your downloads.

Once you’ve hired your team then remember you are working together. Communicate daily to see how they are progressing. Answer all their emails before you go to sleep every night.

And most importantly, if they are doing a great job, its really important to let them know that you appreciate their work. Everyone appreciates being complimented for their work. A ‘thank you’ means a lot. You are building a team so look on this as the beginning of a positive and fun long term working relationship.

Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it.

• Platform: Do you want to make an Android or iPhone/iPad app? They use different languages so most people usually choose one at the beginning to keep costs down. If you want to make money choose the iPhone/iPad. If you think Android suits your market demographic better, choose Android. From my experience so far it is more difficult to get downloads and revenue from an Android app.

• Money or marketing? Is your main goal to make money from your app, or do you want your app to be a promotional tool for an existing business? If your app will showcase your car dealership, boat club, local pub or community centre, then the fastest way to get it done is probably to hire a local app development company to make it for you. You don’t need to learn too much about the process. Just show them some apps on the store that you like, bring along the text, photos and videos you want in your app, and ideally if you can try & design your app so it does something useful. Apple have tightened up a lot and will not publish apps that are primarily marketing material. If you want the most possible downloads, set your apps price to ‘free’. Then once it’s live tell all your customers about it.

• Android: If you do want an app to promote a business, think seriously about Android. There are no ‘reviews’ prior to your app being published, and your app will go live automatically about 20 minutes after you have submitted it. Instant gratification in a mobile world.

• Is this a business? Is this going to be a one off app, or do you have an interest in starting your own app business? If you want to start making apps in your spare time, then I would advise that you start to learn about making apps. Learn the common pitfalls and how the app market works. Learn from success stories and what they did to get there. You can lose a lot of money at the beginning paying developers WAY too much money to make an app if you do not have a basic knowledge of what’s involved and how much effort it should take. Buy books from amazon, listen to podcasts, find great blogs and do some app courses.

• Location, location, location: Usually people have already decided what type of app they want to make for their first app. There are a few things you need to do before you go any further. If you want to make money, the app should not be targeted towards one country. You will not make money by creating an app about the mountains of Scotland. Or the pubs of Ireland. Steer clear of making an app for a seasonal event as well at the start.

• There is an app like mine in the store already That’s actually great news. Go to the website www.topappcharts.com and type in the name of the app. If it hasn’t been seen in any of the top rankings for its category, then you’ve just saved yourself a lot of time and money and you have now found out that demand for that app type is not as strong as you would like it to be.

• ‘I truly think my app idea is INCREDIBLE and I still want to make it.’ Ok great enthusiasm! What you need to do now is put that idea in a drawer. If this IS a killer idea, you want to give it every chance of success. If this is your first app and you have no experience of the app store, that might be difficult. So for the next 2 months, plan on publishing 10 small apps on any subject. A good way to keep costs low is to buy source code on the internet, change the graphics, and hire a developer to put in some ads so you can start to earn money. After the 2 months you will be MUCH more knowledgeable, hopefully profitable, and in a much better position to do justice to your big app idea.

• Graphics: If you want to do justice to you app, it has to look INCREDIBLE. It really should look like it was made by a multimillion dollar studio. People download beautifully designed apps.

• Price: Pricing works differently for different app categories. Free is very popular in games and entertainment. Unless it’s an incredibly complex, niche app, then the safest option is probably to make two versions, paid and free. See which make you the most money and work from there.

• Downloads: If you want the most downloads, make your app free.

• How do I make money from a free app? At the start I would recommend putting Revmob and Chartboost ad networks into your app. They do seem to be the highest paying ad networks out there. After a few months once you get up to speed, you can experiment with in app purchases.

• Portfolio: Aim to create a portfolio of successful apps, rather than putting all of your energy into one big app. Keep your risk low, and your prospects for success high. At the beginning, it’s easier to make money from lots of small apps than it is from one big app. You will learn a lot from every app you publish, so the quality of your apps will keep increasing.

• Debt: You will make mistakes and learn valuable lessons. So keep your costs low at the start so you don’t bankrupt yourself and get into trouble with your credit card company. I have created and published an app for as little as $6. It is possible. Google is your friend.

• ‘I don’t have any money’. It’s still possible to make apps. The cheapest way to get started is to use the machine you have right now. If you have a mac, build iPhone/iPad apps. If you have a PC, build Android apps. You do not need to buy a phone at the beginning, the software you use (xCode and Eclipse) to make the apps comes with a free phone simulator so you can view the app on your Mac or PC. To build an app, open an account with Buzztouch You can build 3 apps for free and it will get you started. To publish an app, you will need to pay Android $25, or Apple $99 for a developers license.

• Profit: Aim to be profitable as fast as you can, ideally in seven days after launch if possible!

• ‘I have this app idea but I don’t want to tell you in case you steal it’. Hhhmmm. It’s better to say ‘I have an idea for a photography/health/game/entertainment iPhone/Android app’ (delete as needed!). ‘Do you have you any experience publishing apps in this area?’

• Market demand: The best way to make money from your app is to know that there is market demand for your app before you start to develop it. Go into the US iTunes store every day, look at the top free, top paid and top grossing apps in the categories you are interested in. Download the apps & play with them. Are people downloading the type of app you want to make? If they are not, maybe put that idea to one side and move on to your next app idea. Don’t ever fall in love with an idea. (If you do, only make it from profit you have earned from your other apps!).

• Everyone loves games: From my experience and from talking to many other developers, the category with the most revenue generating potential, both from ads and in app purchases is games. And if you want to start your own app business, that’s probably the best tip I can give you.

• Publish fast: Do not spend 6, 12 or 18 months by yourself working on getting your app perfect. Get a small section of the app done, maybe just one module or chapter, and upload it to the store straightaway. Customer feedback will be invaluable to you. Validate your assumptions – pricing, app type, design, theme, features, marketing, etc – as soon as possible. The information you learn from going through the publishing process and confirming if your monitization options were correct, will allow you to make more educated choices in the future and increase your revenue.

• OK, I want to start making apps, where will I find my team? Go to www.oDesk.com. This is a huge freelancing site full of artists, developers and every other type of freelancer you can imagine.

• ‘Sounds like a lot of hard work, but I still want to make apps.’ To do it right, there is a lot of hard work involved and you will get a bit addicted to your laptop. And there’s a steep learning curve at the start and you might not see your family and friends for a good while! But if you can stick it out, and start getting things working, it is definitely worth it.

One of the reasons is the importance of a genius icon. If your icon looks great and actually describes what you app does, it’s half the battle.

A few months ago I taught myself to integrate revmob and chartboost into iPhone apps. Its pretty easy once you’ve done it once or twice. At the minute I’m looking to hire another developer or two to help me with some new apps I’m doing this month. So off I went to oDesk.com, my favourite outsourcing site.

I wanted a highly skilled and fast developer, so I was searching for devs who ranked well in the Objective C exam. This is the language you code iPhone and iPad apps in. Well, turns out I found one guy who actually got #1 in the Objective C exam. Cool, I thought, worth having a chat with him.

So my first question to him to see if he was honest was to ask him how long it’d take him to integrate revmob & chartboost into an app. Here’s how that went:

Crazy stuff.

So it looks like I can code faster than the top iPhone dev on oDesk. Who knew?

I’ve greyed out his name so he doesn’t get embarrassed.

Getting your hands dirty with xCode

A few months ago I realised that to really be in control of my business, I really needed to learn how to program the basics in xCode. Not even program though, as I’m not a programmer. Just to know enough to do 5 minute tweaks if I needed to. Things like reskinning an app, uploading to Apple, and putting in the two main ad networks, Revmob & Chartboost. I spent a bit of time and a good few sleepless nights trying to figure this all out. Got through it, and honestly this information has been truly invaluable when dealing with developers and also publishing apps quickly myself and updating ad options.

A few weeks ago I made some videos going through this all, step by step, geared towards total beginners, which is exactly what I was when I started. They’ve been live for about 2 weeks, and a lot of my friends have been going through them for me to test them and see if they work. Here is some of the feedback I’ve got so far.

“Brilliant! This course really takes you by the hand. Great intro to Xcode and covers in great detail tasks that you can easily do yourself to save on development cost. And once you’ve got your confidence up around Xcode, the sky’s the limit!” Wei L.

“Excellent and Comprehensive. This course is fantastic; invaluable to anyone trying to learn these skills, and taught by someone who really knows what she is talking about. Highly recommend this excellent and comprehensive course!” Nikki O.

“Excellent Information Just What I Needed. I have been wanting to learn this stuff and this course is a huge help. With this course you can learn in a matter of hours as compared to days or weeks trying to figure it out yourself. What a time saver this is. Thanks so much for making this available!” Don W.

“Comprehensive and Very Informative. Very useful and helpful course. Clear and concise, it is a great tool for novices like myself and provides excellent grounding for xcode – makes the prospect of dealing with xcode much less scary! Would highly recommend.” Prudence

“Bravo! Just what was needed in moving forward with app development. This course is a MUST HAVE for any app developer.” Gloryvee

“Great course and it will save you hours, no days of frustration trying to figure out this stuff out on your own.” David L.

“Great guide to re-skinning and adding ads! Just what I needed to get up and running quickly!!!” John.

“Awesome course! Really informative and easy to understand. Superb!!” Lat.

“Hey Elaine, wanted to let you know I just bought my first source code for 100.00 for ipad iphone and android not that the android mattered but it was a nice plus anyways it was from one of the sites you recommend. And I’m working my way through your videos and they are awesome, no really they are. Most of the time when I watch videos I get bored with all the nonsense chat, but you get right to the point and stay with it. So I wanted to say thank you for pointing me in the right direction and for the video.” L.

The 5 stages of integrating a new SDK into a mobile app for the 1st time

Currently focused on researching the most successful practises for revenue…. in-app types, cost, store design, UI, marketing, and of course ads, types, companies, eCPM, the works. Here’s an old one but a good one… how not to monitise a free game.

“Gasketball was released for free, with a one-time in-app purchase that unlocks the rest of the game offered for $2.99. The conversion rate to the paid version of the game sits at 0.67%.”

-93% of the top 30 grossing iOS games used in app purchases
-53% of the top 30 grossing games have 10 or more different in app purchases
-40% of top grossing games have between 4 and 7 used in app purchases.
-Nearly all app purchases end in “.99″ for the top grossing games.
-40% of the 10 top grossing games yesterday had a in-app purchase of $99.99.
-Most expensive in-app purchases in any game in the 30 top grossing games yesterday was $99.99

While doing some research on the top grossing games & in-apps at the minute so found this interesting piece: 5 Tips for Boosting Virtual Economies. Discusses how many items to display in store at a time, store navigation, location & UI. Definitely like Halfbricks ‘counterfeit machine.’ Clever stuff.

in app purchases mobile appsin app purchases mobile apps

And here’s a good reason why to use $9.99 and $19.99 price points for in-apps.

And here’s a great podcast by W3i. A few genius tips in here.

“What makes Clash of Clans a great game is the trademark Supercell winning formula approach to game development. First you take an existing social game theme. Then you benchmark and reverse engineer the best titles in that genre in order to create a strong and natural feeling core loop. You follow up by building a game around that solid core loop. Sprinkle a new and improved game play twist and dress it up in stunning graphics. Finally you polish the game to perfection with a limited beta launch by making the game available only in Canada. Once it’s polished and the KPIs look solid it’s time to come out with a bang and take app charts by storm……. “