Do you want to make money developing applications for iPhones, iPads, and other mobile devices? I went from almost zero experience to earning a regular income from my apps in a few short months. Let me show you how I did it.

This is a long article (6,217 words). I will go through some important aspects of writing successful apps, from finding and choosing the right ideas to develop, to a very important money saving tip. Although I’m writing from the perspective of an iOS developer, the general ideas apply to other platforms like Android. Whether you develop for Apple’s devices or not, you can still benefit from the article.

While I haven’t earned anything like a million dollars from my apps, I did figure out how to create what people want and deliver it in high enough quantities that I now earn a decent income from my work. That was all I wanted, and I got it. If you have even higher goals, like earning millions of dollars from your apps, some of what you need to do will undoubtedly be different than what I outline in this article. But if your blockbuster, number one app is still a dream in your mind, it makes sense to learn how to reach an intermediate level first, even if it’s not your ultimate goal.

Why I Went Down This Path

I was a self-employed graphic designer before I became an iOS developer. After five years of trying to please clients without compromising my work and my integrity, I was fed up and exited the business. For months, I watched my bank account dwindle week by week as I lived off my savings, trying to decide what to do next. I decided that I would develop iOS apps as a source of passive income so that I could then work on other things that I was even more interested in but would take time to develop, like blogging. Besides wanting a source of income, I was actually very curious about writing apps. I had some ideas that I wanted to try out but absolutely no experience writing software for modern platforms. The challenge of achieving some success in a new field really piqued my interest, even more than the prospect of making money.

The last time I did any software development was with QBasic when I was a teenager. I had never touched anything modern, anything object-oriented, or anything more complex than Basic programs. I was ecstatic at the thought that I might be able to write an iPhone app that worked and did something useful, let alone make money. Eventually I did figure out how to create a well-designed, useful app that earned significant passive income. If I could start with virtually no experience and reach my goal, you can do it too.

What Should You Create?

The question of what you should create comes first. Maybe you want to develop apps but you don’t have any specific ideas. Maybe you have a few ideas, but you don’t know which one will generate the most sales, so you don’t know where to start. I will explain where to get ideas from and which ones are the best candidates for your effort.

I’m going to take some time telling you, briefly, why I developed my first few apps, so that you can get a better sense of the huge (and profitable) perspective shift I had later.

I didn’t have to search for an idea to start out with. I knew exactly what my first app would be. Not only was it something that I wanted to make, but it was simple enough that I thought I could actually figure out how to write it. Remember, I didn’t even know C when I started, let alone Objective C and Cocoa APIs. If you have any experience at all, you’ll be way ahead of where I was.

My first app was called Goal Meter. I came up with the idea about two years before I made it into an app. Originally, I printed a grid of 1,024 squares (32 x 32 squares) on paper to track the time I played or practiced hockey. I had just started out as a hockey player and sometimes would get frustrated with my seeming lack of progress. Whenever I spent an hour on the ice, I colored in a square to remind myself of my progress. I’m not one for meticulous record-keeping for its own sake, but I found great motivational value in doing this.

So I sat down and created Goal Meter. It took me quite a few sixteen hour days (which would become common later on — I didn’t say it was easy!) to create a finished app. Goal Meter turned out to be a simple progress bar that grows and changes color when you press a plus or minus button to indicate progress (or retreat) from your goal. You can choose any number to represent the goal, and any number for the increment. So you can track 1,000 hours of hockey practice in increments of 1 hour each, or 10,000 dollars in increments of $500 — whatever works for you.

Get this — the first version of Goal Meter only tracked one goal! I was so happy to figure out how to track one goal after many days of work, I didn’t even think I could make it track multiple goals. I had something that worked, although it was very simple. I was ready to try my fortune on the store. I submitted it to Apple and in a week, it was ready for sale.

Sales were okay, but not anything close to replacing the income from my design business. I earned $30 in the first week. After a few weeks, this declined to about $11 per week on average. Remember, I was happy just to have sales at all. I never even though I could create a functioning app.

I was especially pleased when I checked out the competition, which I did only after I was done with the app. Nobody else was doing goal tracking my way. This was encouraging, because at least I had something different to offer. Some of the apps that came up first in searches and seemed to be selling well (judging by the number of comments) looked really crummy and complicated to use. I was disappointed that I was only earning $11 a week from Goal Meter, because I thought it was much better than that.

After upgrading Goal Meter to let it handle multiple goals, I wrote six more apps before I had a hit. I figured that if I could earn $11 a week from one app, I would pick a target income and just write as many apps as I needed to reach that level. Since I had little idea what worked and what didn’t on the store, I chose to go after quantity.

Coins Found was next. It’s almost embarrassing, because all it does is count coins. To be fair, it only took me one day to write, and I had fun making the graphics. And yes, I am still selling copies to this day. It will never make a top ten list — heck, it’ll never make a top 1,000 list. But it was one step closer to having enough apps to earn a decent income from them.

MonoBanker is app number three. This one is fairly original. During a dream, I had the idea for an app that would take the place of the banker in Monopoly, so you don’t have to handle all those little pieces of paper. I saw it complete in my head and woke up and drew a diagram before I lost the idea. MonoBanker has a calculator keypad on one half of the screen and a list of players, with The Bank always first, on the other half. To make a transaction, all you have to do is enter an amount, tap the player it comes from, and tap the player it goes to. So if Top Hat crosses Go, you would enter 200, tap The Bank, and then tap Top Hat. If Top Hat lands on Mediterranean Avenue and owes Race Car $10, you would type in 10, tap Top Hat, and then tap Race Car. Simple and elegant.

After I submitted MonoBanker, I checked out the competition. Once again, I smiled because my app was clearly the best looking, easiest to use, and best designed Monopoly banker for the iPhone. There was no question about it. The other apps were way more complicated. None of them had a built in keypad for typing in numbers — the iPhone keyboard would hide and show every time you wanted to enter a new amount. And nobody handled the transfers as elegantly as I did. Some of the apps had a big “transfer” button, or even two — one to indicate “send” and one to indicate “receive”. Once again, I thought I had a real winner on my paws. And once again, I earned just a few bucks a week for my work.

My next release was Simple RPN, which is a simple calculator based on reverse polish notation. I’ve been an enthusiastic RPN user for years, and I had always been disappointed that the calculator built in to iOS only offered algebraic mode. Every third-party RPN calculator I looked at had a bunch of scientific functions, which meant that all of the keys would be really small. I wanted a calculator that worked in RPN mode and had big, easy to use keys. It makes no sense to put up with number keys that are smaller than a pea in order to accommodate a bunch of scientific functions you never use. I made Simple RPN more exciting by designing a number of nice themes for it, drawing once again upon my graphic design background. It did okay, but that’s all. Not too many people use RPN, apparently. Four apps down, ninety-six to go, right?

Hockey Player Stats was next. This one was inspired by and developed to specifications created by my hockey coach. It allows parents to track their player’s activity on the ice without having to take their eyes off the game. It’s popular in Canada.

At this point, I had released five paid apps, as well as two free apps that I will discuss later. They were just “lite” versions of what I already had, so nothing new.

Player Stats was the beginning of a big change in my trajectory, which culminated in the release of News Clocks.

What the Market Demands

The iPad had just come out. I wondered if I should bother developing an app for a device that had such a small market. Even though Apple sold one million iPads in the first month, there were already 80 million + iPhones and iPod touches out there. I didn’t own an iPad, either. My app sales weren’t high enough to allow me to purchase one, and I didn’t really want or need one. It was cool, and I admired it, but I couldn’t justify buying one for any conceivable reason.

It was a well known fact that the iPad shipped without some of the built-in apps found on the iPhone and iPod touch. Most noticeably, the iPad lacked both a calculator and a clock. I was aware of this, but it had no special meaning to me at first.

I thought about all the apps I wrote up until that time. All, except one, were my own ideas. That is, they were apps that I wanted to write and had a lot fun writing. The exception was the hockey stats app. My coach suggested the idea and even the functionality of the app. Although I’m involved in hockey and can understand the value of such an app, I never would have made it for myself. I don’t have any kids (yet) and the need for it would never have come to my mind. Player Stats is meant for young, elite hockey players. I just play hockey for fun. I don’t have any stats to track. So even though I’m involved in that world, it still wasn’t an obvious idea.

So here’s my coach telling me that he just wishes he had a hockey stats tracker, and he knew that dozens and dozens of parents would want it, too. He would know, because he’s been a hockey coach for thirty years. I realized that what he provided me was a form of market research. Previously, I did no research before creating my apps. I made things that I personally wanted to make. Now here was somebody with thirty years of experience in his field, who knows hundreds of people in hockey, both at the junior level and the college and pro levels, where many of his players have ended up. He is in tune with the needs of developing, elite hockey players, of which there are many thousands. Here he is telling me that they all need this app! I thought I couldn’t go wrong, pairing his professional evaluation of the needs of thousands of people with my creativity. I would take his concept and turn it into an intuitive, easy to use app.

Player Stats made far more money in its first week than any of my other apps. I was stunned. I thought that my other apps should have been doing as well. And they are good apps. But the thing I was missing was demand. I may have written some very nice, original apps, but there was no demand for them.

Of course, you can always create something totally new and then create a demand for it by explaining it to people and showing them how they can benefit from it. But when you create something that a market already demands, you tap into momentum that already exists. Suddenly there’s a stream of want and need flowing toward you.

I decided that creating what the market demands is the path I should take. Maybe that sounds like Business School 101, but it wasn’t obvious to me for a few months. I approached software development from a very personal perspective. I didn’t take even a moment to consider whether people would want to buy what I was creating and selling.

There are pitfalls to this approach. Some people will do nothing but give the market what it demands, even if that means breaking one’s integrity. You can make a lot of money by appealing to the worst aspects of human nature, but if you have any standards at all, you’ll hate yourself for it. You’ll end up like Gail Wynand, the newspaper magnate in The Fountainhead who prints only the crudest, trashiest newspapers demanded by the lowest common denominator of the public. If you want to know what ends up happening to him, well, you’ll have to read the book.

At first I thought I was taking the approach of being a Howard Roark, making my own vision into reality. The trouble is that, as good and pure as my vision may have been, people just didn’t want or need it in large quantities.

Developing Player Stats taught me that I had to find a nexus between what the public demands and what I am personally interested in creating. I’m not about to create things that people demand, but I hate, just to make money — that’s what I left behind by closing my graphic design business. But I knew that if I couldn’t find a way to create things that I love and that also fill the needs of other people, I wouldn’t have very many sales.

I’m not promoting the ordinary at the expense of the innovative and the original. I’m just saying that if you want to make money, it’s a lot easier to do if you can align yourself with existing demand.

News Clocks

Since the iPad lacked both a calculator and a clock, I decided that I would fill both of these needs in a really excellent way. I would upgrade my iPhone app, Simple RPN, to run on the iPad, and then create a standard algebraic calculator using the same codebase. I would also create a brand new clock app that would run on both platforms.

I decided to create a world clock. I called it “News Clocks” because I arranged some analog clocks in the way you used to see in newsrooms, with the name of the city the clock represents hanging underneath. I spent a lot of time getting the concept right and polishing the interface.

The results were phenomenal. Both calculators — Simple RPN and Theme Calc — and News Clocks came out around the same time. Theme Calc, the algebraic calculator that I had no use for myself (because I prefer RPN) far outsold Simple RPN. And News Clocks just exploded higher and faster than I ever thought possible. It was featured by Apple and rose very high on the charts. Even when it’s in a lower position, it sells very well every single day.

I made one mistake with News Clocks. When I released it, I included the standard 24 time zones of the world, represented by major cities in those time zones. The real life world clocks I was familiar with all have simple choices like New York, London, Paris, and so on. This is the model I followed.

I received dozens of emails from people asking for more cities. Apparently, a lot of people either don’t know which major city represents the time zone they need, or they really like to see their home town on a clock. It wasn’t important enough for me to include that feature in the first release. In fact, I had no plans to have more than 24 basic time zones.

I saw that my competition offered, on average, a few hundred to a thousand cities, with one app offering ten thousand. I decided that my customers had valid requests, and I would fulfill those requests. But I would do it my way, and I would do it better than anyone else.

A few weeks after News Clocks debuted, I released an update that added an easily searchable database of 64,000 cities, far more than anyone else was offering. The entire world is represented. If a place has at least 1,500 residents — I don’t care whether it’s in Alabama or Algeria — it’s probably in News Clocks.

Today, News Clocks alone sells enough copies each day to provide me with a consistent income that more than replaces what I lost by closing my design business. Of course, I can’t count on it selling that well forever. I have plans to update News Clocks with new features and keep marketing it in the future. Although I’m moving away from software development, now that I’ve reached my goal, I will continue to support my apps. It’s fun and I’m making money, too. What could be better than that?

Giving the Market What it Wants

You have to give the market something it wants to buy. I learned this through trial and error. My first apps were concepts that I personally wanted to bring to life, but there wasn’t a lot of demand for them. Once I stumbled onto an app that filled an actual market demand, I realized that to generate significant sales, I’d have to find a way to fulfill my design and engineering vision while giving the market something it actually wants. And without pandering to the lowest common denominator or sacrificing my values in the process. I accomplished that with News Clocks.

There is nothing wrong with writing apps without considering whether there is a demand for them. I did that and had enormous fun. But if you want your apps to generate significant income for you, you’ll have to create something that tens of thousands of people will want to buy.

To find out what the market wants, you don’t need a degree in marketing or lots of money. Your market research might consist of looking at the top selling apps and writing your own version of something that’s already popular. Theme Calc is one of probably hundreds of similar calculators, and yet it has earned me significant income. It’s such a simple, straightforward app that I can’t even say that it’s necessarily any better than the others — it’s just different. It took me virtually no time to create it, because I already had the calculator codebase from doing Simple RPN.

There’s nothing wrong with going up against 50 or 100 other apps that are just like yours. If you truly want to make your own version of a popular app and you can do something different or better, or many things both different and better, you have a pretty good chance of generating decent sales.

Another form of market research is trial and error. This is how I started out, just creating things that interested me and seeing how it went. Had I not done Player Stats, and then the calculators and News Clocks, I might be working on an expanded Goal Meter, because that was my best selling app. From my experiments, I would have concluded that there is a lot more demand for goal trackers than for Monopoly calculators and coin counters, relatively speaking. But not nearly as much as for world clocks.

Another thing that really worked for me was getting an idea from a well-connected professional who had a need for something but no way to create it. This is an excellent way to make money with apps. You still have to exercise a lot of judgement in who you choose and what idea you implement — does he really know his market, and is the problem you’re solving significant enough that there will be demand for it? Also, if your friend needs to be involved in the design and marketing of your app, you will want to arrange for revenue sharing and treat him as a partner. Don’t mooch off of someone’s expertise. A nice side effect of compensating your contributors is that you have another person with an incentive to market your app, thus increasing your income as well as his.

Also notice that my initial idea was to create a large number of apps with low predicted sales volume. The right app for the right opportunity is worth far more than a hundred lesser apps. Play around if you want to, but when you decide you want to make serious money, think intelligently about what you’re creating, for whom, and why. Yes, we still hear of the solo developer who writes a little game that rockets to number one and pulls in half a million virtually overnight. That is very rare, and you’ll have much better luck by engineering your luck instead of relying on random success.

Now that I’ve covered the issue of deciphering the market’s demand, let’s move on to other important and practical aspects of developing apps, so you can successfully meet that demand and make some money.

Which Business Model?

Writing and then selling apps is not the only way to make money from apps. There are many different business models to choose from, including (but certainly not limited to):

1. Offering an app that users pay for
2. Advertising within an app that you give away for free
3. Give away a lite version and encourage upgrades
4. Selling products inside the apps
5. Writing apps for hire
6. Promoting a brand with a free app, and not earning money directly from the app

I have experience with #1, #2, and #3.

Not long after I released Goal Meter, I introduced Goal Meter Lite, which was a free version of Goal Meter that could only track one goal (the main app was tracking multiple goals at that point). It had an unobtrusive link to the regular version of Goal Meter.

I didn’t know if it would bring me any sales, but I thought it couldn’t hurt. I had hundreds of downloads the first day, and incredibly negative reviews. They weren’t against the concept of the app; they hated how crippled it was.

This still seems strange to me. If you give away a free app that functions as described, how can you really complain? As it turns out, people expect a lot for free. And they get angry if they don’t get it!

While sales of Goal Meter increased a little bit when Goal Meter LE was available, they quickly went back to normal. I eventually removed the lite version from the store. It didn’t do much for my sales, and because I removed so many features, it generated a lot of negative feedback.

A few months later, I gave the free app idea another shot with Goal Meter Free. This one was not crippled in any way — it had all the features of Goal Meter, except I included advertising.

iAd wasn’t around then so I went with MobClix. To this day, downloads of the free version of Goal Meter usually run about eight times higher than the regular version. While I have made money off the ads, it hasn’t been spectacular. I now think that ads are best suited for more immersive apps. If you have a game that could be played for a half hour — heck, even a few minutes at a time — you have a much better chance of making money from ads. While Goal Meter is useful, its users tend to open it to check or add to a goal and close it just as quickly. I suspect that for many, the app isn’t even open long enough for the ad to load.

This is the extent of my experience with alternative business models. There is a lot of territory for you to potentially explore here. You can sell things through your apps or find an app that is better suited to ads or lite/regular versions. If you don’t like the results, you can always pull it off the store.

Most of my apps follow pattern #1, and I suspect that most developers prefer the classic pay for what you get model. Ideally, everyone would want to pay for what they get. Many customers don’t want to pay for anything — many developers report that free app downloads are usually ten times higher than paid downloads, even when an app costs only 99 cents.

Generally speaking, iPod Touch users are the most reluctant to actually buy an app. iPhone users are somewhere in the middle, and iPad users are not only more likely to purchase a paid app, but they are willing to pay more on average. That may be because the iPad, while pretty cheap for what you get, is seen as a luxury by most people. The customers who tend to buy iPads right now are skewed toward the group that has more disposable income. As iPads get cheaper, this will likely change.

Universal App?

Should you make one app that runs on both iPhones, iPads, and iPod touches, or create two versions? It certainly is more elegant to have one app that does it all, and it’s no surprise that this is what Apple recommends. I’ve thought about breaking my apps into separate iPhone and iPad versions, with the idea that they would appear twice in search results. Ultimately, it wouldn’t affect chart ranking (and therefore sales) much because the iPad and iPhone sides of the App Store have separate charts.

The approach that makes most sense is to do what creates the most value for the user, and that means creating universal apps that can run on any device he might own. Look at it as another selling point.

There are some cases when you have to do separate apps. For example, if you make use of the bigger screen on the iPad and radically change the interface or offer features that you can’t match on the iPhone, it’s best to have a separate iPad version. Try to make it universal, though. Most users will appreciate it, and they’re the ones buying your app.

Translation

I have significant sales overseas thanks to translating not only the content inside the app, but also the description and screenshots on the App Store. I estimate that translations have boosted my sales 2x or 3x.

I’m not fluent in any language (although I have some ability in French), so I rely upon both software and dictionaries to translate my apps. But don’t just throw some text into Google Translate and paste the results into your app. It’s almost guaranteed to be off, maybe really off. Look up each unfamiliar word and be sure that you understand the basic grammar of that language so you can spot inaccuracies. Try different ways of phrasing your text in English and notice how that changes the translated result. It’s not as hard as it sounds, and I have to say that many languages are less baffling to me after spending countless hours trying to translate them. My results are still probably a little weird, but at least there is some intelligence behind it.

LinkShare

You’ll want to sign up for a LinkShare account. LinkShare manages Apple’s iTunes Affiliate program, which pays a 5% commission on every purchase. You can use these links in your email signature, your website, or even from within your apps. Every link to an app on this site goes through LinkShare, and it’s nice to earn some extra revenue that way.

Videos

At first, I never made videos for my apps. I demand a high production value for everything I do, and with all the scripting, scene work, lighting, sound work, and editing that goes into a video, I was reluctant to try.

Videos truly do help with your marketing. Even if you have a simple app that you think is explained very clearly by screenshots, some people prefer to see it in action before they buy. Don’t assume that people know anything about your app even if you put it in writing — I’ve put important information in my app description that just gets ignored. If you can show someone how to use your app in a brief Youtube video, you take care of marketing and support at the same time.

Here’s the video I made for News Clocks. I’m not entirely happy with it, but I did it in a very efficient way that produced decent results. I used a simple digital camera to record footage of me using the app. I edited this footage into a form that was acceptable, putting things in a logical order and eliminating many unnecessary minutes. Then I recorded a voiceover as I watched the edited video. I had no script and did it extemporaneously.

Screenshots

Apple allows you to show up to five screenshots of your app on its iTunes page. I used to put up very straightforward screenshots of my apps. As the complexity of my apps increased, and since not every customer reads every word you write for the app description, I found it necessary to move beyond simple screenshots. I now put a lot of effort into designing screenshots that serve both educational and marketing purposes. Remember, you need five screenshots for both the iPhone and iPad stores in every language you support on the store (supporting a language in your app does not mean you necessarily have store pages in that language). So if you have a universal app, you need ten screenshots in each of the languages you support. It does take a lot of work to maintain all of this, but if you take a look at what I designed for News Clocks below, you can see that it’s worth it. (Click on an image to expand it).

Getting Paid

Apple pays you electronically. Each Apple financial region pays separately when your balance with them exceeds $150. While Apple in the U.S. will send your money through ACH or Direct Deposit, which normally doesn’t cost anything, your profits from foreign lands will be wired to your bank. This can cost you an extraordinary amount of money, and you need to protect yourself from high bank fees.

Now, although I have some harsh words to say about banks, first I want to say that I am not against banks earning profits, including large profits. I advocate capitalism, that is, total laissez-faire with the government taking no role in the economy, except to prosecute fraud. A bank, like any business, has the right to charge whatever it wishes for its services. You and I have the right to take our business elsewhere if we’re unhappy, or start our own bank (which ought to be a heck of a lot easier than it is now).

Wire transfer fees are just plain outrageous. I found out the hard way, when Apple S.A.R.L in Luxembourg wired me my first payment. When I saw that my bank charged me $18.50 just to receive that money on my behalf, I was shocked. Excuse me, but it is a privilege to handle my money. All they do is push around some bits, which if it’s an ACH transfer, is free. Call it a wire transfer, and suddenly it’s $18.50. Some developers aren’t making as much as I am, and those fees can actually take much of their profits. Especially because Apple’s various subsidiaries could send up to six wires a month. If your bank charges what mine charges, and you get the maximum number of transfers each month, that’s $1,332 you’re spending on wire fees every year. If you earned the minimum $150 each time, your annual profit would be $10,800. The wire fees would then eat up more than 12% of your hard earned money.

If the government wasn’t so involved in banking and we had real capitalism in this country, there would be so much competition that rates would be reasonable or nonexistent. Nobody in his right mind thinks that $18.50, or even $10, is a fair price for a simple wire transfer. It’s not 1973 for crying out loud. With today’s technology, those services can be rendered far more cheaply. It’s not like there’s some special magic to transmitting what amounts to no more than an email. Ooh, look, they’re handling my monetary electrons. They’re flowing over an international boundary now. Imaginary lines somehow make it cost a lot more.

If you plan on earning some money with your apps, Apple’s foreign subsidiaries will pay you through international wire transfers whether you like it or not. Most banks charge ridiculous fees for incoming wire transfers (and INSANE fees for outgoing ones), so you’ll do well to find a bank that treats you better. I recommend opening an E*Trade Checking account well before you are set to be paid by Apple. It’s the only one I know of that does not charge for incoming wires. Plus, like most online banks, it’s free to ACH your money in or out. ING Direct, which has better interest rates, sadly does not accept international wire transfers.

Be careful about using a brokerage account. Most brokerages don’t charge for incoming wire transfers, but they have extra rules about where the money can come from, and you often have to notify them of an incoming wire. It’s easier to open an online checking account and then ACH the money to wherever you really want it. Or keep it in that account, if you’re happy with it being there.

Also, be aware that even though there may not be an upfront fee on your international wire transfers, the amounts you receive will probably not match the amounts you expect to receive. This is because of a sneaky thing called interbank fees. The banks that process your payments along the way take their own cut without informing you. You’ll never see these fees appear on any bank statement. When I did a currency conversion on the amount I received from Luxembourg, I figured out that interbank fees cheated me out of $10 on top the $18.50 wire fee, without my knowledge or consent. I’m sure they have a contractual right to take that money, but it is not a friendly, transparent way of doing business. The banking system leaks money into pockets that didn’t do a whole lot to earn it. It will continue to be that way until we have real capitalism and real competition.

If you are an American developer, one more thing you need do is fill out some Japanese tax forms for iTunes K.K. Although you owe no tax in Japan because your company is not located there, the Japanese government requires iTunes K.K. to withhold 20% of your income unless you certify to them that you really are not located in Japan. Seriously, they can’t figure it out for themselves? Anyway, I don’t know about other countries, but if you’re in the U.S. be sure to look on iTunes Connect for those Japanese tax forms.

You Can Do It

I hope that this helps you generate some ideas for your apps and avoid some of the mistakes that I made. Above all, pay attention to what you’re doing. As you make price changes or try new marketing strategies, track the results. You will discover some pattern that might apply only to the kind of apps you’re developing.

If I could start as low on the programming totem pole as I did and achieve success, than you can do just as well — hopefully better.