Thank you for helping people spam PlayStore?<p>This tool does not help anyone other than spammers, who make fake Icons and Screenshots and spam PlayStore. I believe that is the part of the reason why Dev himself hates the tool.<p>Edit:
1) Create clone apps tutorial by dev: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_CrJkz7-4g" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_CrJkz7-4g</a>
This guy: A.) makes stuff, B.) The stuff works and is useful to other people c.) Challenged himself to drill into the "crass" business side to make himself far more profitable.<p>But would anyone here in a cool startup hire him?
Thanks for the writeup, @EO-IO. As other have said, it's a 'skeezy model', but as you've said, you know this and were sharing for the lessons learned more than to promote this model - which I can certainly appreciate. All in all, I found it to be a pretty good read - and a peak into a world of generating revenue that I may have not otherwise been as aware of.<p>I do have a question. As I read, it does seem that you're driving the point of 'native app' pretty heavily without substantiating the emphasis; as if it's a large feature/benefit/sales-point. So, "Why native?" As primarily a hybrid developer currently (Angular 4 + Cordova / some Ionic), there have been leaps and bounds made in the arena of hybrid dev - and arguably the entry point for hybrid dev is much lower than it is for native. Of course you could still have created the same business with either stack, but since the article seems to be promoting 'native', I was hoping you could share some insight into what made native superior to hybrid here?<p>Thanks!
"This guy had made hundreds of apps in less than two months, and was making 10 times what I was making from the software sales!"<p>If the only thing you wanted to change was to get a cut of your user's revenue, and you already had a product which worked, and which users found, why did you have to spend one year changing everything e.g. making it a web app, having to find new ways to find users, etc.?<p>Couldn't you have just altered your pricing model with the existing codebase? Just write an additional new server-side component to handle the billing, keep the existing client software, keep the existing methods to find new users?
> I couldn’t understand why users who were making a thousand dollars in ad revenue each month, didn’t upgrade their accounts, after all it only costs $25. Turns out, a lot of these users were living in countries where they couldn’t have a Visa card or PayPal account, and just couldn’t pay me even if they wanted to.<p>I was highly interested when the author said he moved to Morocco to lower living costs. I was hoping he would have insights in how to overcome problems like this. I find it fascinating that these users are somehow receiving money online, but can't pay for things online.
Very cool read. It's always hard trying to find the right mix of building something people want, building something that has a big enough market, and building something that you're passionate about.
This is such a well-written story about a startup! I mean, it has so many twists and turns - pivoting for auto-generating mobile apps, cloud, gamification, affiliate marketing. It's so good I would have said it's fiction, especially the part that you're not even proud of doing it.
Congrats! Two questions:<p>1. What are some of the apps made? Even the website doesn't show any link.<p>2. How do they (himself and his customers) get users for the app they made? I've built android apps, and I'm telling you, making the app is the easy part (even when coding yourself from zero).
> So I came up with the idea to get my users to share it, so that I didn’t have to. To do so, I set up a very enticing referral program:<p>>> Users could share their referral link and get a 10% cut of the ad revenue from every app the referred user makes, forever.<p>> For example, if user A brings in user B, and user B makes an app that brings in $10/day, user A would get $1 every day without lifting a finger.<p>> If user B decides to upgrade to a premium account, user A would get a commission every time user B pays his subscription.<p>This sounds like a pyramid scheme...
Good lord, that project is truly horrifying.<p>So many crap apps pumped into the store.<p>I guess at the bottom, the money is coming from ad revenue, so I guess somewhere there are people who actually use these apps?!? Or I guess maybe it is just a lot of people getting tricked.<p>Kudos, I guess, to the author, for coming clean. I never would have admitted to something like this publicly. (Then again, I never would have done this kind of thing in the first place. By the way, I don’t know if I have a price, but it sure as hell isn’t $6K/mo.)
My first real job ever, as a software developer, was developing software for internet marketers. It would spam your links to a bunch of RSS submission forms. I was relatively young at the time; this was back in high school.<p>My career stayed around that internet marketing world for a few more years after that, working as a contractor.<p>I had similar feelings as OP at the time. When I first went into it, the negative impact my software would have didn't really occur to me. I was wrapped up in the nerves of interviewing for the job, the emotions of writing my first commercial software, trying my best to do my best work. I thought of everything _but_ the impact of the software.<p>I made something like a few grand on that contract. A lot of money for me at the time. The internet marketer who paid for it made 6 figures off it. He resold it to other IMs who would then resell it to the final end users.<p>A few months after that code went out into the world, I was reading articles on one of the websites that my program spams (most popular blogs at the time had ways to submit links to them). I stumbled into an article where the website owner was complaining about the program, and how much it was spamming their site. They wanted some way to contact the author and have their site removed.<p>My stomach sank in that moment. I felt terrible.<p>Lucky for them, the program had an auto-update feature. So I removed them from the list and pushed the update. Still, I've never forgotten that horrible feeling...<p>There are always more corners of that internet marketing industry that feel "less scummy". I kept working in that world, a bit more picky in what I worked on, but the truth was ... there really was no good that comes from the internet marketing industry.<p>About half way through college I get fed up with the whole thing and abruptly quit the contract I was on at the time. I remember sending the email out, walking out of my dorm, hoping on my bicycle, and just ... riding. I rode forever. Lost in thought about what I was doing with my life. I ended up riding for several hours into the night, just trying to burn off all the emotion.<p>These days, I would never do that kind of work again. But I can appreciate why I did the work at the time. We don't really think about that kind of stuff, the impact our work can have, until later in life. It's a fact of human biology. And when you're first entering the job market, the money and getting into the swing of "adulting" is enough to fully consume you, leaving precious little thought left to give to what impact your work might have.<p>I don't think anyone should be ashamed of stories like these. It's all a part of growing up and learning about the world. We should celebrate those self aware enough to realize their mistakes and grow from them. There is so much more life left after young adulthood.
Lessons I learned from reading this article:<p>* The author had multiple opportunities to return to freelancing and stop working on a tool that he fully realized was morally bankrupt.<p>* Then, even after his partner left, the author used gamification to hook people into using the app, recruiting people into his pyramid scheme, and exploit people in countries underserved by payment systems.<p>That's some pretty solid lessons there.
Thanks for sharing. Really good and honest write-up. Everyone needs to put bread on the table. It's much more rewarding investing your time in your own project than selling your time to some corporation. At least you actually have something to show for it. Respect. And if people found your project useful - you succeeded. The mere fact that the apps were making money shows that those apps were used by some other people who found them worth using.
Seems most of the business value was in that initial spark of insight, vis a vis consistently earning money from trending niches. The product dev stuff is interesting, but I’m most curious as to how that initial targeted app was conceived.<p>(Not that I’d want to work on this kind of software, but I feel the lessons would still be applicable.)
Isn't indie hackers the same site that was bought by stripe?<p>It used to just list all the businesses. Right now I can't even find that list anymore, instead a completely free-form "search" – well sometimes I just want to browse the companies to find interesting ones I didn't think about.
Has anyone else had success 'gameifying' their app? I've been mulling over how to structure the 'getting-started' phase for a new app project and this sounds like a good idea.
What I see is someone who abandoned a user-centric desktop app in favor of a gimped cloud solution that makes the dev more money and gives users less control.
Hey, nice work there, both on the idea and execution. And, since 'don't be evil' companies spam us mercilessly on every occasion, a single guy pushing some spam up their arses should get some reward for his work.