We have about 9 other iPhone applications lined up for the next couple of months, so be ready for them!

You can help us out by downloading Traffic Light Changer for Free right now!

Please, check it out and have fun with it. It’s definitely like no other app out there. Seriously!

Please rate and comment with honesty in iTunes after you download. Thanks for your support!

I’m the guy on the left, Quoc is on the right. That’s our “baby” below.

So it’s been about 50 days since Baby Maker was approved by Apple and on sale in the App Store. We’re very happy to say that we’ve earned enough money from the application to cover the development costs, and any income from Baby Maker is now pure profit! This take into account Apple’s 30% commission.

We’re happy to be transparent with our costs and our earnings so you can get an idea of how much money is involved just in case you’re interesting in doing something similar. Here’s a quick breakdown:

Costs

The total cost to develop Baby Maker was about $5000.

Anyways, we were lucky that Baby Maker was able to regain it’s costs, because at first, the quality of the app wasn’t what we hoped for. But, the audience seems to like it which is what really matters.

Earnings Report

In total, after 50 days on sale, Baby Maker has netted us $5,190.24. This equates to 2,524 actual units sold. Calculating this out, Apple’s 30% commission is about $2,350.00. That’s a nice chunk of change, but that’s the cost of doing what we do. We have yet to consult with a CPA on this, but we believe Apple’s commission is eligible for a tax write-off, since it is a “cost”.

Here’s a graph showing the trend of the earnings on BabyMaker. Click to enlarge:

The natural trend of an iPhone app is to start off selling really well, then gradually earn less and less each day. As you can see, this is the same trend we’re seeing with Baby Maker, however there are a few spikes of sales here and there.

One strategy we’ve been using is to update the app frequently, which allows the app to be placed on the “new releases” area in the app store again – which increases visibility and sales for a short period of time. After newer apps bump it out of there, then the trend starts all over again.

Our highest day of earnings came on the third or fourth day of being launched (6/24/09), when it was actually ranked the Top #23 app in the Photography category and earned us $194.19 in one day. Not bad…not bad…

As of late, for the past 2 or so weeks, it’s been averaging about $50.00 a day is still in the top 100 in the Photography category, ranging between #50 and #70.

We have another update that should be approved very soon, which should increase our sales again for a few days, and then being us back to our normal $50.00 per day. We suspect, however, that this will not last forever and in about a month, we’ll be out of the top 100 and earning much less, unless something drastic happens, which we do have planned.

Although the app is app store worthy, we believe it could use a MAJOR overhaul. We’ve asked a couple of new developers for a quote on changing the mechanics of the app and increasing the quality of the results, which we’re dealing with as we speak. We plan on issuing a major update once this is finished, which would be the ethical thing to do rather than come out with an entirely different app. We want to thank those who have purchased the original and we feel like we owe them for their support. Hopefully this will put Baby Maker back in the top spots in the photography category. We’ll definitely keep you updated.

Thanks!

Thanks for your interest in our earnings report. We’ll definitely have more posts like this in the future. We also have a new app that will be submitted to the app store in just a couple of days, and hopefully approved within 2 weeks. Please check out iCaption Mobile for more information about this app, which we hope will go huge.

Thanks again!

-Pat

We’ve spent a good three months working with our developer on this, and we’re REALLY happy with the outcome We’re hoping it blows all of our other apps out of the water. The concept for iCaption Mobile is simple:

It’s an iPhone app that lets you add your own captions to photos and topics that are uploaded each day. You’ll be able to read other people’s captions and rate them within the application too!

It’s kind of like some of those Twitter trending topics, such as #3breakupwords and #robotpickuplines, but all within one iPhone app that lets you vote on other people’s responses and keep track of how other people have rated yours. Check out some of the screenshots below:

I hope you can see we’ve spent a lot of time designing a really friendly and user interface. So far, it’s been getting a lot of good “pre-reviews” from people we’ve shown it to, so we hope you like it too.

I think this app has a lot more potential than our other apps, iPopit and BabyMaker, because it has long-term entertainment value. New photos and topics will be added each day and with people constantly captioning each day, we hope the experience will be different everytime they open the app.

We’re going to price the app for FREE. Why? Because we want as many people to use the app as possible. The more people who participate, the more everyone will have fun!

If you have time, check out the iCaption Mobile website at http://www.icaptionmobile.com for more screenshots. Also, we’re accepting photos and ideas for the application on the website as well. Check it out!

We’d love to hear what you think of it based on what you’ve see so far. Again, it should be released within 2 weeks after some of the final bugs are worked out.

Note: We apologize for the lack of posts. We’ll be posting more now that iCaption Mobile is almost finished. In our next post, we’ll talk about our income from our last application that went on sale, Baby Maker.

Please visit http://www.icaptionmobile.com for more info about iCaption Mobile.

Thanks!

I’m so excited to announce that LOLer Apps’ second iPhone application, Baby Maker! is on sale today!

Our slogan: “Don’t SHAKE Babies, Make Babies!” has already gotten some buzz, and so has our app. Here’s what it does:

You can take pictures of two people and see what their baby might look like! This isn’t just any plan ol’ baby prediction tool that shows you a random picture of a baby – it actually combines the features of the “parent” faces to create a hilarious (usually ugly!) looking baby. Yes, it’s a gag app, and has gotten some nice words from beta users before the app went on sale today.

Here are some examples of what the babies might look like:

And yes…that last baby is a baby from two guys. And yes, that’s me (Pat) on the left, and Quoc on the right. The two developers. Hah. And no, we’re not dating. I’m married…to a woman. Really.

So as you can see, you can create multiple combinations and different faces, giving you an unlimited amount of possibilities with this app.

If you’re interested in checking it out, please click the link below. We’ll update you on how earnings are in a few days, but so far – the response has been great! In less than 24 hours, it’s already the top #77 application in the Photography category. That means it’s selling, which is a good sign. Thanks everyone for your support!

So it’s been a month since we’ve released iPopit! for sale in the app store, and we’d love to share the results with you.

In 30 days, we’ve sold 252 units. At $0.99 each, and a 30% commission for Apple, we’ve earned a total of $150.71. (Some of the units were free copies for friends and review websites).

We hoped to add a few more zeros on our total, but that’s ok. We now understand exactly how difficult the app store market is. We need to do more in order to succeed.

Here’s a graph of our sales so you can get an idea of the progress:

(click to enlarge)

iPopit! started out fairly strong, and then dipped like crazy. Here’s why:

When you release a new app, it gets put in the “new releases” category. Your app will be at the top of this list, until someone releases a new one after you. On this list, we were number one for about 10 minutes, in the top 25 for half a day, and almost out of the top 100 within a day and half. This should give you an idea of how many new apps are coming in each day.

We did choose a difficult category: entertainment. There seems to be a new entertainment app released every 10 minutes, which is why we got bumped off so fast. So as you can tell by the graph above, when we were on this list, we sold more than we did after we were bumped off.

Things to Consider:

There are, however, ways to promote your app after you release it that will increase your visibility and your unit sales. We are in the middle of doing these things right now.

1. We Just Released a “LITE” version of iPopit!

We just released iPopit Lite, a free version of iPopit! which only has one level (instead of 4) and ads, which should hopefully get people to “try it before you buy it”. We’ll have a post dedicated to what the lite version has done for our sales once we have enough data to tell you something interesting. As I said before, we JUST released it. I should tell you, however, in the first day – over 2000 people downloaded it.

2. We Just Released an Update to iPopit!

At any time after you release your app, you can re-release a newer version to fix bugs and change it up a bit if you’d like. The problem is – you have to go through the whole app review process again, which takes about a week (at least right now). However, when your app update is approved, you can change the release date to the day of the new approval, and you’ll reappear on the “new releases” category. Updated app = more visibility. Sweet.

3. We changed categories.

At any time after you release an app, you can change it’s category. We recently changed from the competitive entertainment category to Sports. This was Quoc’s idea, and I wasn’t sure at first, but I believe it’s going to be better for us. I mean, getting drowned in the entertainment category, we had to try something. We’ll also let you know how this is going soon. In just a few days, however, we’re already on the “top paid apps” list for the Sports category, which we never even got close to in entertainment.

There’s a lot more to iPhone app marketing than just timing. There are reviews sites, forums, blogs, and the planets have to align too. These are things that have to happen (except for the planets thing), in order to get noticed and have any success in the app store. If you create an app and do nothing, hope will do you no good. In my opinion, the app is 20%, and marketing is 80% of the equation for success. (Ahh, the 20/80 ration once again…)

Conclusion

You always hear about the guy who wrote an app and got rich, or the dude who developed the app that sold 50,000 units in just one day. That’s THE dream, and it still is for us. It’s still a dream that we believe we can reach. We’ve got a few more apps under development right now, and since we’re learning from our experience with iPopit! and gaining more exposure every day, we can only go up from here, right?

Ask the Reader

A quick question for you. We’re thinking about outsourcing our marketing campaign to experienced iPhone app marketers. What do you think? Should we go all out and do it?

Writing my very first blog post ever! Pat has been doing an awesome job so far designing all of our sites and keeping the blogs updated. I think it’s time I put in a few words as the other and only team member of LOLer Apps.

It seems so long ago that we came up with the idea for our first iPhone app while golfing on a beautiful sunny San Diego day. So we thought we had this great idea for an iPhone app, but now what? Pat is an architect / internet marketing expert and I’m a software developer of 10 years. Sounds perfect right? I would develop the applications and Pat would lead the way in marketing. We had a different plan though.

This was around the time I had just finished the book The 4-Hour Workweek By Timothy Ferriss and I had been inspired. The part about outsourcing your life and living anywhere in the world really struck a chord with me. Here is a little excerpt taken from the book about outsourcing your life that is really interesting.

With this in mind, outsourcing the development of our application was the only way to go. I was not at all familiar with Objective-C, iPhone’s programming language, so it would have taken some time to learn. Sure I could pick up a book, read a tutorial and try to get the hang of it, but I knew that it would take me 2 to 3 times as long to finish an application as opposed to hiring someone who was already familiar with the language. There would be hours wasted on forums trying to figure out a little quirk of the language that would have been cakewalk in Java or PHP. It’s nice to learn new programming languages but frankly I don’t feel like it is worth my time anymore when I can hire someone on Elance from across the world for a fraction of the price. So that is what we did. We posted our application on Elance, picked a developer and got our first LOLer Apps project, iPopIt! started.

Aside from the application development we also outsourced all of our graphic designs to a really great artist we found on 99designs.com. We are also preparing to outsource our marketing needs (more on that later). We feel that no matter how awesome you think you are at something, there will usually be someone out there more qualified, more experienced and more than happy to do the task at a cheaper per hour rate than what your time is worth. With that in mind we were able to outsource all of our needs and work on 3 LOLer Apps applications at once, and that is not considering the other individual projects that both Pat and I have going.

Currently, I am addicted to outsourcing. I love being a project manager and how cool is it to say that you have people doing work for you around the clock in Pakistan, China, Indonesia, and Minsk, Belarus. It allows me to work on so many different projects at the same time and gives me the freedom to work when I want, where I want. I don’t know about you guys but working 8 hours a day for someone else’s company really drained the creative juices out of me. Now that I’m on my own I find myself thinking of new and creative ideas all the time! So what are you waiting for? Have a great idea? There are people around the world that are waiting to make it happen for you. Just remember to check out Pat’s 10 outsourcing tips before you start.

As always, comments are welcome

I’m going to pass on a little bit of knowledge about what we learned during the process of working with a developer for our iPhone apps. Here are 10 must read tips, in chronological order, about outsourcing your iPhone app.

1. Be Professional Right From The Start

It’s very important that the business relationship between you and your developer is professional and efficient right off the bat. If not, the timeliness and quality of your final project could be compromised.

Your first impression should be one that establishes you as a client who will not stand for anything less than what is expected from the developer, but you don’t want to seem like you’re going to be a Nazi either.

Where is the first impression made? In your job posting for bids or your letter to a specific developer. Your post or email should sound professional, not only so that people will be interested in your project, but so that after a developer is hired, they will treat you with respect and want to make sure they do good work for you.

Here’s our exact project description that we posted on elance for iPopit:

Hi There!

Thanks for taking the time to read this inquiry for a new iPhone application/game.

My colleague and I seek an iPhone developer for a simple game application that uses the iPhone’s accelerometer for a shaking motion. More detailed information about the game will be given to reputable bidders.

The game will include high-quality graphics and real-life motion in three separate stages. An intro page and a high score page will be required as well.

Please send us your initial bid and we will contact you with further details if we feel you have the experience we require. Upon review of the details, we understand that bid revisions may be necessary.

Thank you again, and we are excited to work with you on our new project.

Kind Regards,

Pat Flynn & Quoc Bui

2. Don’t Choose Your Developer Based on Price Alone

If you’re posting your project on a website where developers place bids to work for you, it can be really easy to choose the developer that gives you the lowest price. Be careful here! They might be playing the numbers game and just put in a low bid because they need some work to do. I’d be worried about getting low quality workmanship from your developer if this was the case.

Instead, I recommend doing your best to ignore the prices and narrow your choices down based on their portfolios and feedback. Make note of the ones that have good reviews on similar projects and if they’ve made apps that are in the app store, download them or find a web or YouTube review to see how good they work.

If you’re not sure about some of your potential developers, ask them for more information or even get contact information of people who have worked with them before. More than likely they will be happy to give you that information. If not, I might be a little worried. Are they trying to hide something?

After you’ve narrowed your choices, if you still unsure about who to choose, then see what their bids are. If one is significantly cheaper than the other, and you’ve already done your “background check”, then go ahead and save some money at this point.

3. Communication is Key

How you and your developer communicate with each other can make or break the successful development of your iPhone app. If you’re on elance, don’t bother with the Private Message Board (PMB). I compare it to when you see two people on the news communicating with each other from opposite sides of the world. There’s a 10 second delay and it’s a waste of time and just plain annoying.

If it’s late and you can’t get a hold of your developer immediately, then I would use email – but otherwise I wouldn’t waste my time with email either.

For us, the best method is to use an instant messenger where questions and answers can be communicated almost instantaneously. Usually developers will have a Yahoo, Gmail (for Gchat or Gtalk), AIM, and/or Skype account, so you should set yourself up with a free account before you start the development process.

IMPORTANT: Make sure there’s a way you can go back into your chat history and pull out any previous conversations between you and your developer, just in case you have to quote someone if anything comes up.

Also, it’s important to know when your developer will be available to chat. A lot of developers are on the other side of the world, where they may be starting work while you are about to go to sleep. Make sure you talk about this right from the start, and figure out when are the best times to chat with each other.

4. Give Your Developer as Many Details as Possible

You have an idea of how you want your app to function and work in your head, but there’s no way your developer will know all of that information unless you tell them.

Yes – based on your project description, they know what your app is about and basically how it will function, but they can’t possibly understand everything until you tell them everything you want. The best way to communicate your ideas to the developer is to draw out some kind of “flow chart story board” using pictures and arrows of what you want to see on the iPhone, and what pages connect to which.

If you can’t do this on your own, simply explain to them what you want to happen and have them draw it out themselves. A lot of companies include this “flow chart” as part of the development process, so make sure you ask them about it when you’re working with them. This will ensure that you won’t get mad at them for doing something you didn’t tell them to, and they won’t get mad at you for expecting something you didn’t tell them about. You’ll both be on the same page.

Get as detailed as possible, or else you may be in for a surprise and get things you didn’t expect.

5. Know When To Expect Your First Iteration

Part of the app development process includes getting early versions of your app and testing it. Ask your developer right away how long it will take to get a version you can test.

Depending on the developer, they may give you a really early version that is stripped of all graphics and fancy stuff, just so you can get an idea of the flow of the app and how all the pages and screens work. Other developers will wait until they believe everything is finished before handing it over to you. That is fine too, but they should know you’ll get back to them with all of the bugs and expect another version at a later date.

Make sure you know when to expect your first version, and feel free to email them before hand to “ask how it’s going”, so you can kindly remind them of their deadline.

6. Before You Get Your First Iteration – Get An iPhone or iPod Touch!

You’re going into the iPhone app business, so you might as well get one so you can test your apps and learn from existing ones.

When we started this whole process, we didn’t have iPhones. So when our first iteration was ready for us…we weren’t, and this set things back quite a bit. Our first few iterations were shown to us via a recorded video, and although we were able to make comments about it, there’s really nothing that compares with actually playing with the app itself on your own iPhone. This was a huge mistake on our part, so do yourself a favor and get yourself an iPhone or iPod Touch (iPod Touch doesn’t require any contracts or anything, so that may be your best bet).

7. Expect Mistakes and Bugs, But Catch Them All

When you get your first or second iterations, don’t be discouraged if they aren’t up to par. That is the whole point of getting the early versions – so they can be worked out and you can have a great final product!

You should of seen the first version of iPopit we had. Oh man, it was pretty bad. Don’t get mad, just start writing…

On a notepad or on your computer, write down every problem and bug you see. Make sure you go through every possible combination of buttons, pages, links, etc. so you can catch anything that isn’t the way it should be. Look at the graphics, the flow, the speed, everything.

Compile this information into an email and notify your devloper via chat that you are sending them a list of bugs and mistakes you have found. Again, be as detailed as possible with your decriptions. They want as much information as possible so they won’t have to redo it again later.

Remember, both of you want the project to be done and done well – so help them out just as you want them to help you out too.

8. Be friendly!

Life as a hired developer must be tough. Sitting in front of a computer all day with a deadline breathing down your neck – it totally reminds me of when I used to work on AutoCAD in an architecture firm. The last thing I wanted to hear was someone telling me I was doing something wrong and to hurry it up. No $!@#!

So, as you’re talking to your developer and notifying them of the mistakes and bugs you found – don’t be rude about it, be friendly! It really does make a difference.

Feel free to mention what you like and what you’re impressed with. Your developer will feel encouraged and want to clear the mistakes and bugs so you feel that way about the entire product.

Don’t ever be rude, because then your image as a decent client will be tarnished. It’s like when you’re rude to a waiter – that’s dangerous, because you really don’t want spit in your food, do you?

9. Remember Who Hired Who…

Although you should be friendly, you shouldn’t be under the control of your developer. If they missed a deadline, don’t let them think that’s ok. If you do that, then every other deadline will be missed to, because it’s “ok” with you.

If you’ve told them 3 times to implement a certain feature in your app, and they still haven’t done it – be firm with them. That is not acceptable.

Again, don’t be rude, but be professional. You hired them, and you are their boss. You paid them to do what you expected them to do.

10. After It’s All Done – Make Sure You Pay And Leave FeedBack

After you get the final iteration of your app, it’s really easy to forget about everything else in the entire world and just focus on getting it into the app store and on sale. But wait…don’t forget!

You got your app, but you have to give your developer the things that they deserve too – their final payment and some honest feedback.

If you’re on elance, there’s a feedback system where you rate from 1 to 10 on various subjects, but you have the option of also leaving a paragraph of text. It would be nice to leave an honest and helpful review for any future iPhone idea holders that may be looking for a developer.

If you hired your developer privately, it would be really nice of you to leave them some feedback via email or by chat so they can use that for marketing purposes on their website or brochures.

In this business, Karma is for real, so do your best to have Karma work in your favor.

Thanks everyone, and feel free to check out our outsourced iPhone app, iPopit! in iTunes today by clicking here!

If you’re like a lot of people these days, an idea for an iPhone app pops into your head now and again, only to be followed by feelings of  doubt. The doubt comes not  because your idea isn’t good  (you know it’s a great idea, which is why you can’t get it out of your head),  but because you don’t know how to get it from your head to an iPhone.

A few months ago,  my friend and I had an idea for an app – and not knowing how to code or program didn’t stop us. A couple of days ago, our first app was approved and on sale in the app store. It was really an awesome feeling. We can’t wait for our next app to come out within the next few weeks.

Actually,  Quoc does know how to program. but he’ll actually be telling you why we decided to outsource our apps, instead of developing our apps himself. We’ll save that for a later post.

Map It Out

Before you spend some time to find someone to develop your app for you, you’ll need to take your idea and figure out exactly how you want it to work. The easiest way to do this is to pretend you’re using your app on an iphone, and page-by-page make note of what you want to see and where you want each page to go.  If it’s a game, think about exactly what you want to see or would want to do. Instead of making a list, you can easily organize all of this in a bubble diagram.

Now, know that even though you mapped it out your way, your app may not be able to perform exactly how you had wished. So no, a laser beam will not be able to shoot out the end of the iPhone, so you can forget about that. However, just map out exactly how you want it, and your developer will be able to tell you whether something you had asked for is not possible on the iPhone.

Where to Find iPhone Developers

In addition to your basic Google Keyword Search, you can find a load of iPhone developers hungry to work on your project on  various site such as elance.com or odesk.com. We chose elance because it’s kind of like ebay – you post your job, and people bid to work on it. You can choose your favorite bidder based on price, portfolio and/or reviews.

You might be wondering about people stealing your idea when posting your job or asking for quotes. It doesn’t usually happen, but it is something you should still be cautious about. When posting your job or asking for a quote, you can just give away the basic idea of the app (no details) and ask the potential developer to sign a non-disclosure agreements (NDA) before giving them the whole story. Note that their bids may adjust a little after you disclose all of the information and detail s about your app to them.

On elance, they will provide you with a non-disclosure agreement you can use. If you can’t find one, here’s  a sample NDA (on elance). Have them sign it and give it back to you (usually in a PDF format), and you should be good to go. If they steal your idea, you now have proof that it was yours first and you can take legal action accordingly.

Everything Laid Out in Plain English

This is obviously a quick overview of the entire process. If you’d like a proven eBook that walks you through the entire process, from start to finish, please check out How to Create iPhone Apps Without Programming Experience, a book that we’ve used time and time again to publish now 27 applications in iTunes!

For those of you who are new to this blog, we’re planning to document and report on anything and everything we do related to our iPhone apps. This includes everything from how we hired developers to create the apps for us, our submittal to iTunes, and our earnings too.

We’re working on a fairly aggressive marketing campaign for our applications, which include websites and even videos that are being prepared for a YouTube campaign. Hopefully, this will create some buzz behind our apps and the earnings reports will reflect this.

Honestly, we know we’re going to sell a few copies of our apps. We know some people will love them, and others will hate them – that’s all part of the game. More importantly,  just knowing that we were able to sell an iPhone applciation in the iTunes store that was once just an idea in our heads would be worth the most to us and give us the most satisfaction.

If sales are huge though, we definitely won’t complain.

If you want to keep updated on our latest news, please feel free to subscribe.