Brent Simmons started a thing with his post asking who is an indie iOS developer?
The dream of making a living as an indie iOS developer isn’t dead — see Overcast as a recent example — but, if I’m right, hardly anyone believes in it any more.
I’m an independent developer. I don’t do any freelance or contract work. I haven’t had a full time job in over three years. I live in London (probably the world’s most expensive city to live in). So how on earth do I manage to do that? Through two sources of income:
- Live Football on TV: a proper “indie” app (by Brent’s definition)
- Stats Zone: an “almost indie” app (by my definition)
Both are my own iOS apps but there’s more to it than the ‘normal’ indie story… I hope sharing my experiences on these apps is a worthwhile contribution to the discussion.
Live Football on TV app
This app provides the most accurate and comprehensive listings of what live football (soccer!) is on TV in the UK. While that sounds basic, the TV rights for the sport mean that matches are spread across a whole range of channels & times making it’s difficult for people to keep track of what they can watch and when. This app makes it very simple — the tagline being “never miss a match again”.
I created the app in partnership with a fantastic guy Neil who has run the website of the same name for many years. He’s in charge of content, I’m in charge of pretty much everything app (which also included building a bespoke CMS which is feeds both the website and the app).
It launched in August 2012 and so far has made £18k (around $30k) in total revenue via a freemium model. The v2 redesign was launched last month (finally iOS7-ifying the app) providing one day of listings for free and users can pay an annual £1.99 subscription to access all full future listings and to unlock extra features.
In v1 we provided three days of listings for free so it’s been a pretty dramatic change to drop that to just one day in v2 — many users did let us know what they thought of the decision. But free users are worthwhile for us only because they might become paid subscribers — we’re not some startup trying to justify the next round of venture capital or “tell a story” to our board about next potential growth phase.
We prefer cash and thankfully the latest version has resulted in an upturn in revenue — v2 has delivered 20% of our total revenue in about six weeks and although the World Cup undoubtably contributed we’re still seeing a five times increase in revenue since it ended over the same period as last year. So I think we’ve done something right.
But this is nowhere near at a level that it would be sufficient to fund anyone working full time on it. Certainly not two of us. Neil contributes on a day to day basis to keep the listings up to date and my work on the app is sporadic — although I did invest around 10-12 weeks shipping v2.
We’ve got some potential partnerships lined up to license our match listings and have had a lot of sponsor interest. So there’s potentially other revenue streams for the future.
Stats Zone
This is where I make my living. Initially released as Total Football 2010, it was launched for the World Cup in South Africa four years ago — the first World Cup of iPhones, Twitter, Facebook etc… It was really innovative, the first product to provide live access to in-depth statistics and visualisations of all kinds of match events — shots, passes, tackles, fouls etc. It’s not necessarily mainstream but it’s had six figure downloads with the growing data revolution in the sport.
A bit of backstory… After university, I got a software development job at Multimap in London (at the time one of the top 10 UK websites, before Google Maps came to play…). I joined the company when it was almost 10 years old as a graduate developer so didn’t get or think to ask for any noteworthy share options and ended up a couple of thousand pounds from the acquisition by Microsoft a few years later. Microsoft kept me on and significantly bumped up my salary so I stayed a while and started stashing away cash for a rainy day.
I quit after about 18 months of what I would call “professional stagnation” and wanted to give myself experience with what was happening in tech at the time (AWS, App Engine, iOS etc) — Total Football is the project I started with. It was a proper indie app and on it’s own ultimately failed. I started by charging £2.99 but even four years ago the race to the bottom in app pricing was very much alive. I also realistically only had the single month of the World Cup to make an impact and had zero clue about marketing or PR (although it did get picked up by Mashable, The New York Times and some very prominent football bloggers).
My main issue in the “failure” was that the data used in the app for the statistics and visualisations was very expensive — this isn’t a podcast app where you don’t have to pay for podcast content or an RSS app that scrapes blogs for free. There’s only one company that could supply me the live, in-depth statistics and x/y data that I needed — Opta. The data costs are in the thousands of pounds per competition. For Total Football I needed to take the leap so I said goodbye to a chunk savings, signed on the dotted line and made the biggest purchase of my life… a bunch of XML files.
Despite price drops during the 2010 tournament, the app sales didn’t meet the data costs and I didn’t break even financially — that’s before taking into consideration a single minute of the time I spent on the app. So I went back to full time employment for a while. Thankfully though, the Opta guys were very keen on the app (particularly Simon Banoub, a really great guy to whom I’m eternally grateful) and were very gracious about including it in their pitch to potential customers — including FourFourTwo, the longest running football magazine in the UK and a brand I personally grew up with.
We ended up with a deal whereby I would license the app to FourFourTwo for release under their brand. They wanted to buy it from me but I knew that for me the value was in retaining ownership of the IP which I managed to do. Initially the deal was part cash, part revenue share basis but became a straight cash licensing deal.
In actual fact the contract is split in two parts one for the “Data Platform” and one for the app which makes sense because they’re really two products. The Data Platform now also services the Stats Zone web client on fourfourtwo.com and likely other client apps in future while the iOS app might not always be of interest and could be discontinued (I hope not though). But this is just one of the many variables to deal with when working on a licensing deal — and in truth it became part of the fun ;)
I’ve been licensing Stats Zone to FourFourTwo since August 2011 and other than a very small number of days working with friends on a couple of particular aspects and design input from FourFourTwo I’ve literally done everything on the app — it’s a one man show. Those three years have:
- given me a steady, reliable income that’s enough for me to live off
- shielded me from the world of end user App Store revenue
- meant I can continue the app without being liable for the data costs (we now cover 6 or more competitions per year so not exactly a feasible cost for me to consider)
- allowed me to manage my own time and make my own decisions about my future
It’s important to point out that at no stage through any of this was I risking living on the street or not being able to pay my bills. If I had stayed employed at Microsoft I probably would have earned more in the same time — but it’s also pretty likely I would have been made redundant. Je ne regrette rien…
Final thoughts
Jared Sinclair’s post on the finances of Unread provided a cautionary tale for anyone considering going indie:
I conclude from all this that anyone who wants to make a satisfying living as an independent app developer should seriously consider only building apps based on sustainable revenue models. I suspect this means through consumable in-app purchases, like those in Candy Crush Saga or Clash of Clans, or through recurring subscription charges, like those in WhatsApp. Furthermore, I have grave doubts that any solo developer would have the capacity to ship and maintain either kind of business working alone. She would probably have to consolidate her business with other indie developers in the same position. The marketing budgets of the major competitors makes me doubt that even a consolidation strategy is tenable.
And Marco had this to say on the future for indie developers:
Many will give up and leave for stable, better-paying jobs. (Many already have.) But there’s a way forward for those of us who want to stay.
When other industries mature and deal with these pressures, the survivors are those who can adapt and … do more with less.
Marco is right in that for a lot of developers, going indie will be a showcase of talent which will ultimately lead to a great full time job. Nothing wrong with that at all, in fact Total Football 2010 was a case in point for me and landed me a great job when I went looking.
Jared is right that “sustainable revenue models” are crucial and this fits with the “do more with less” ethos. My way to describe that is make sure you get paid more than once for the same piece of work — otherwise are you really all that different to a freelancer?
The Live Football on TV app achieves this through annual subscription App Store revenue — the app continues to provide new content so it makes sense to continue to pay for that. Licensing is also a great way to achieve this and can provide steady revenue but this will only be available to specific types of products — it’s probably hard to find someone to license a podcast app.
It’s also a totally different sales approach. If you find it difficult asking people to pay £2 for an app you’re probably going to need advice on how to effectively negotiate a deal and end up with a contract you’re comfortable with.
I’m immensely proud of both Stats Zone and Live Football on TV. With the former, I’ve made some concessions on the product (please don’t mention the font — there’s a redesign coming soon!) to ensure it’s a good business and it’s been working. With the latter, I’m still learning how to make an indie app successful but I’m making progress. Ultimately I’m working on two products I own that I conceived, developed, shipped, support, improve and have potential to create future opportunities and revenue for me.
Maybe I’m an indie, maybe I’m an almost indie but the label doesn’t interest me. I spend 100% of my time on my own products and for now they’re sustainable. For me, that’s good enough.
