A Million Dollars Isn’t Cool. You Know What’s Cool? A THOUSAND Dollars.
We sometimes lose track of just how work goes into making a single dollar.
At the initiation of a startup, we are dazzled with the lure of big money buyouts, or creating a service that gives us license to print money. Experience has thought me to focus on two things:
- Making a profit
- Keeping your expenses down
When you focus on these two things, the conversations you have (either with yourself or a team) are very different. You stop worrying about stuff like Facebook integration, meaning you get to market faster. You consistently ask yourself “Do my customers want this and are they willing to pay more for it?” whilst stop asking yourself things like “How will this scale when we reach over ten thousand users?”.
My upcoming game for iOS, Hipster CEO, will allow the player to run their own startup - which will involve deciding what type of business model they wish to adopt. Free up front could lead to lots of signups with no revenue and vice versa.
The amount of work involved in making a single buck can vary wildly. I’ve written apps in the past that have taken between ten and twelve hours to build and sold quite well at around the $1.99 mark. The amount of work outside development hours was tiny so that single quid (less Apple’s take and converted to Euro) was generated pretty easily.
However, if your revenue model is based around advertising (which a ton of startups that adopt the Freemium model do) then you probably looking at a huge amount of work to generate a dollar.
Just like learning to crawl before being able to walk, you’ve got to learn how to make a single dollar before you can make a thousand, never mind a million.
