akardell
Joined 19 years ago
Joined 19 years ago
Was the #1 app for finding garage sales (~10,000 paid downloads and ~10,000 free / lite downloads), but my primary startup has taken off and I didn't have time to maintain.
There are some pretty interesting use cases left unexplored - e.g. social aspects or other verticals (apartment rentals).
If you're interested in making a serious offer hit me up at igaragesale [at] performantdesign [dot] com.
I had some upfront expenses for a custom icon, the website design, a license for the song for the background music for the demo video (including the questionable MP3 freebie), and to run a one day roadblock on the Fusion ad network. Prior to being featured, I hadn't yet broken even on my costs (let alone my labor). The first day of being featured pushed sales past the breakeven point. If sales were to remain steady at this level, the yearly revenue for the app would be much better than an average engineer's salary. There will, however, likely be a very predictable drop in sales once it's no longer featured.
What that means over the long term, we'll see. If the data's interesting - e.g. significant drop or significant lack of a drop in sales, or more key inflection points, etc. - I'll throw up another post about it and consider including dollar figures at that point.
So - the call was just to get the change in description, not to notify of the placement. Which makes me all the more grateful Apple was persistent, and that they didn't just write it off even though they wanted the change.
I've also heard other accounts of Apple calling to request "special builds" for TV spots, etc. but don't have any first-hand direct knowledge of that.
| sed -E 's/^.*[^[:alnum:]\._\-]([[:alnum:]\._\-]+@[[:alnum:]][[:alnum:]\-]+\.[[:alnum:]][[:alnum:]\-\.]*)[^[:alnum:]\-\.].*$/\1/'
| grep -E '^[[:alnum:]\._\-]+@[[:alnum:]][[:alnum:]\-]+\.[[:alnum:]][[:alnum:]\-\.]*$'
Though they were and are still successful, Amazon and eBay had market caps of $28 billion and $17 billion respectively in early 1999 -- long before they had near-term prospects of showing a profit.
In comparison, $10 billion for Facebook today doesn't seem all that unreasonable.
References: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/01_20/b3732716.... http://www.ecommercetimes.com/story/189.html
Founder and CEO of MobileRealtyApps.com - http://www.mobilerealtyapps.com/
Author of iGarageSale, featured 3x by Apple in the App Store
Author of Facebook app, World Conquest, acquired by The Social Gaming Network (2008)
Founder of Altona Ed, acquired by Pearson (2004)
http://aaronkardell.extendr.com/