One of the main reasons why I started this blog was to talk about what you can do to make money on the internet and share my results with those that would listen (hence the name of my blog). I’ve written before about what works for me including selling products on Amazon, buying websites and improving them, selling websites and creating information products about Halo (just to prove you can make money selling information about anything). Along this journey there have certainly been some challenges, but I never anticipated that I’d have as much trouble as I did when I set out to create my first iPhone app. I’ll get to the problems I faced shortly, but let me first explain why I wanted to make an iPhone app:
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Why Bother Building An iPhone App In The First Place?
I’m sure this is a question you might be thinking – ‘Why bother building an iPhone app when you’ve already had some success doing these other things?’ Well, part of what sucks about self employment is that even though I feel more secure now with my business than in the old job I was eventually fired from is that even working for yourself can get boring at times. I like to do new things and if I’m not challenging myself with new goals then it’s no different than if I was back at my old job. Don’t get me wrong I love what I do now more than anything I’ve ever done before, but half the fun is in being able to decide what to work on. It’s also just nice to focus on diversification with any business so that’s part of why I just recently bought an unusual website that makes money selling really random medical products off Clickbank and I bought another one that is a massive 20,000+ page website with miscellaneous media information that makes money with Google Adsense. So in my continuing quest to be more diversified I thought why not try building an iPhone app?
The iPhone App Idea
My idea was that I hate going to movies and waiting all the way until after the credits roll to see if there is an extra scene at the end of the movies. Why not have an iPhone app that uses crowd sourced voting to tell people that either yes it’s worth staying after the credits or no? I bought the domain name and decided that I’d try to build an iPhone app on this concept. I found some movie API’s that would automatically update the most recent movies in theaters and knew that would be an easy way to provide an auto updating method for the iPhone app that wouldn’t require the list to be constantly edited by hand. Armed with that information I set off to hire a developer to help me build the iPhone app and that’s when things started to take a turn for the worse. In all of the successful projects I’ve outsourced I’ve always focused on providing as much detail as possible so that there is little room for guess work on the part of my hired help.
Bad Help Is Easy To Find
This time around I used Odesk to hire an iPhone developer and I made sure in my job description to emphasize that I already had researched how I needed the iPhone app to be developed (use this API to pull in movies, crowd source the voting with other users etc. etc.) – again this was done to make it clear what I wanted – The person I ended up hiring didn’t have a ton of feedback and was a little less expensive than the others. When I hired him I literally thought, “How could he screw this up?” because I basically handed everything necessary to create the iPhone app I required but in the end I committed the cardinal sin of not spending enough money. In the past there are times when I couldn’t decide which candidate to hire for a job and the deciding factor would often be who charged more and I’d go with that candidate instead. With this project, I wanted to get in and test the iPhone app waters for as cheap as possible and that was my biggest problem.
Losing The Money Isn’t The Only Thing That Sucks
I spent $1,200 (paid hourly) on the iPhone app which he halfway completed. The loading screen still had a place holder graphic that said “Loading Screen Here Perhaps?” and there were spelling errors all over inside the app. He also never finished the free version which was essential to the success of the project. I needed enough active free users to be voting on which movies to stay after in order to get accurate data. The paid version he did complete was just meant to be there for people that hated ads (more of an after thought really). Losing the $1,200 doesn’t matter that much to me, what matters the most from this project was the time I wasted. I wasted time explaining the project over and over again and constantly telling him to fix things that he wouldn’t do. In total I had 110 emails and Google chat conversations combined and I could have made so many websites during that time instead.
Will I Do An iPhone App Again?
I would like to try doing another iPhone app, but the problem is that I didn’t really spend a lot of time researching what it takes to make a successful iPhone app. While you could say my idea was crappy anyway (just don’t do it in the comments as it will hurt my feelings /sarcasm) one key point of failure was in the person that I hired. So I basically failed before I was even able to get started. The app did make it up onto the app store (it’s not there anymore), but I didn’t even get to move into the fun stuff of dealing with marketing and everything else. I told my friend Pat Flynn about this iPhone app experience several months ago and he gave me some tips on what I could do differently next time and recommended I check out this eBook that his friends made that are making a ton of money with iPhone apps (see it here). I haven’t bought it yet, but when I can finish up all of the other things I’m working on right now I will buy the eBook and this time around I’ll actually document my progress from start to finish on the blog so that you can follow along.
You Want To See More Case Studies Right?
I want to continue doing as many case studies here as possible because after looking through some of my older past posts and the comment counts it’s obvious that you all like reading those more than anything else. Example 1, Example 2, Example 3, Example 4, Example 5, etc.
Would you like to follow along and see me do it? About the only thing I’d hold back is the idea during the development stages (until the app was completed).
Let me know what you think in the comments below
Bummer man. iPhone app development seems super tricky. Several months ago I actually bought that ebook you mention in the post, but I didn’t have a few thousand extra dollars to throw at outsourcing. My brother is a software developer and is working on his first app but is running into all sorts of problems. Good luck with your future app projects
And for the record, I think your app idea is pretty dang good. I’d use it.
Well I still might get it finished but I’m just so burnt out on it. Even just writing this blog post made me feel angry and annoyed all at the same time for the time that I wasted.
Hey Chris, I also think there is merit in your iphone app idea. My family always gets annoyed with me because I want to stay through the credits to see if anything funny happens at the end.
I think I should train my boys how to make apps. They are 14 and 11 and big time consumers of free apps but on Ipod Touch. If they learn what to do now, they would have a real head start for the future.
BTW, they are already impressed that I know ‘thehalogod’ ๐
David
Hey David,
Yah perhaps I’ll redo it but we’ll see… lol at thehalogod comment by the way. I had a friend who I went to high school with who is a teacher and a few years ago he overheard his students talking about this awesome video they saw with someone playing Halo and turns out it as me. When he told them that he knew me they apparently freaked out a bit hah hah.
I will toot my own horn and say that my old videos were good, but sadly I never really made a huge impact on the tournament scene where the real money can be made with Halo hah hah.
Chris
Chris,
Awesome awesome awesome. You actually got an app made and in the app store and learned in the process.
I agree with the others above, your app idea sounds great. I’m a credit watcher by nature, but knowing if there are easter eggs at the end of a movie would be fun.
I have an app idea in my head that I’m thinking a lot about & planning. I’m reading Tapworthy (Josh Clark) in preparation, I’d recommend it, and I’m planning on getting the FreeTheApps! ebook that you mentioned too…and then…I’ll have to take action.
Have you seen Trey Smith’s webinars on his app store adventures? Really interesting stuff but has always been tied to a product launch. But there has been some great free info in his webinars.
Keep us up to date if you do another app. Fun stuff!
Hey Paul,
Yah I heard about Trey’s webinars but I’ve never been a big an of the $2,000 product launches because often times the people that buy those products don’t really have that kind of money. I don’t mind charging $2,000 (or more) for consulting services to a Fortune 500 company because I know that the value I provide has a much larger effect. In any case, that’s just my own 2 cents.
Yah the app process wasn’t too bad.
Chris
Yeah, bummer, man. Well, at least I’m not the only one to get burned by someone on the internet…I’m in good company, sure makes me feel alot better! I’ve been dragging around a bit as I was scammed on Flippa a few weeks ago, but now I think I am getting ready to move on, and your story helps me with that! After my webinar is written in about 8 weeks, I am going to stayrt my next project , an APP! So I am taking this advice to heart! thanks,
take care, Kathy
Hey Kathy,
Buy a site and not get it transferred or something? In either case, sadly it’s true that if you spend any significant amount of time doing business online you’re bound to end up losing out on some money to bad programmers and everything else. Keep at it, the way I look at it is that with any online project it’s always a bit of a gamble if it will pay off, but the only way to win is if you play.
Chris
Hi Chris – Well, its embarrassing to say what happened as I was too trusting and not knowledgeable! (But let me just say I bought another site at the same time and it was fine, it was an ok experience.) But I am not a techie, I am a psychotherapist, I have a blog and I love websites. And I’d never even heard of a proxy but Google sure has! About three days after I bought the site, I realized that pgms committing fraud were bring run against it, so I asked the seller to stop the pgms. He wouldn’t, so then I closed my Google Adsense down to the website, so as not to accept fraudulent monies. But Google suspended my Adsense account anyway. I appealed on my lack of knowledge, but Google engineers are less merciful than a jury, so whatever. Then by simply googling my seller, I found he had a long list of ppl after him for the same situation, people who were actually very technical. So I took solace in that I was not the only one! Anyway, if you have the person’s real name, googling it is always a good idea before doing biz! I am still angry but it is definetly fading. Live and learn.
Hey Kathy,
Yah unfortunately researching your seller / buyer is something I always recommend these days as well. Half the people I’ve bought websites from in the past month seemed more willing to do business with me after they found my blog / saw how far out there I was online rather than being a buyer that didn’t really have any ties online.
In a sense it works out well for me because the seller knows that if I wronged them in some way I have a lot to lose in terms of my reputation being ruined on my blog and in my friend’s circles etc. In my opinion the one thing you should never jeopardize is your reputation as that can be one of your most valuable assets.
In any case sorry you got burned by a seller – that sucks.
Hi Chris! Many of the employers hire those who charge more so there is always confusion in the mind of applicant about how much to charge. Yes, many a time it is money that holds you back from achieving your goal and you can give money only if you have loads of money. All the best for your iphone application development!
Hey Chris,
Don’t get too bummed out about the $1200. It’s a good concept and I’d encourage you to continue with it.
Unfortunately, and this is something that happens to a lot of people, is that making an app is a lot more complicated for a developer than throwing together a website in PHP. The two languages are chalk and cheese, and while, yes, you CAN get an app done fairly cheap, you really won’t get the kind of quality coding you need for a project like this unless you’re spending probably twice (or more) what you paid for a developer that knows Objective C inside out.
It’s too easy to write sloppy Objective C code because you need to understand a lot more about memory management (which you don’t in PHP really). No two coders are the same and the PHP coders you’re used to dealing with on your websites have a completely different mindset to Objective C coders.
Hope that helps with some insight!
True true, I don’t care to toss any more money at the idea for now though. I’d rather just keep focusing on what works and scaling that instead ๐
I work a lot with people on Freelancer.com and have had similar issues. I just don’t get one thing – If I tell you to do something and I explain it nicely and very detailed – why don’t you do it?
Many people say it’s the language but I don’t think so. Some people are just not skilled to manage a few projects or simply get way more projects they can handle.
I would rather earn less but make sure my client is VERY happy.
FYI, the functionality you describe is built into http://runpee.com/ which also has a $0.99 app. Not affiliated, just a happy user.
Yep, at the time I don’t know if they had the functionality or rather that my only focus was on the credits. I figured as a free app it wouldn’t matter as long as users got enough value out of it ๐
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I bought the ebook, its great! very detailing, I’m doing my first game app as well=) will share my experience with you soon.
Btw, great blog you have, come say hi on mine sometimes=)