How I went from idea to profit in under 24 hours

You could have revenue in a matter of seconds by offering to sell $100 gift certificates to Amazon for $50 (why hello, many daily deals sites) but that would probably not be a sound business decision.<p>Can I strongly, strongly, strongly suggest that you rethink the pricing and value proposition here? You're chasing away good clients because anyone who has ever done mobile or programming thinks that custom development offered for $99 implies not-great-things about your programming savvy or likelihood of following through on this deal. The "wantrapreneurs" (hate that word) you appear to be targeting will disproportionately have wildly inaccurate expectations of what you're selling for $99, because you appear to be promising them the fantasy of having their business come from idea to actual fruition at the cost of $99.<p>I am having difficulty finding strong enough language to communicate the unwiseness of this business model vis-a-vis accurate worries like "If you’re not careful, you may end up spending an exorbitant amount of hours on a project, driving your hourly rate into the basement." All the words I'm reaching for seem hostile and yet they do not nearly capture the scope of how bad of a decision this is.

Proper accounting is to recognize the revenue and costs of a sale in the same period.<p>So you don't get to claim any profit until you complete the work you were paid to do.<p>How do you plan on finishing the apps fast enough to consider this a win?<p>To me this is the opposite of a good side project. You want your projects to generate passive income, not income that requires a non-trivial amount of work to recognize. If you can write apps, you should write apps yourself and generate ad revenue or sale revenue.<p>You should definitely reconsider this idea before you have oversold yourself to the point of never being able to meet your responsibilities.

Cool story but the word profit is not the right word to use in this case. You generated revenue which is much much easier to do than turning a profit.

They idea is nice but, i am afraid that as most of this articles the title is a little misleading... you had a sale but not yet delivered a product, that is what the customer paid for. So you still have to work and even with all the limits you pose this might take 3/4 hours... and supposing you work at an hourly rate of 20$/h witch i think(but i'm not sure) it's quite low you might "spend" 60/80 $ of your time to develop it. this gives you a profit of 10/30 $ depending on how fast you are.<p>Anyway this is a nice project and i really hope you or someone else will prove my calculations wrong! Good luck ;)

I've noticed that you are LLC. Therefore, gravitronic and chimeracoder are absolutely correct in their remarks re accounting methodology (glad to see other GAAP versed folks here) - unless you do cash based accounting, which is highly unlikely. I would recommend that you check with your accountant how this works.<p>However, putting aside accounting stuff, I do not understand what you are trying to achieve? What are your use cases?<p>There are apps for prototyping (Balsamiq), there are DIY browser based web apps for getting one's app in the AppStore (AppMkr, etc)[with some ads, ya, but that's prototype, correct?].<p>You production process is not automated and does not scale.<p>So, what's the point?

This is a strange definition of "profit", as it counts customer revenue before they've signed off on the deliverable --- or even before work has commenced. It seems to imply that the author's time has no value.

I am highly disappointed that the domain name failed to be relevant.

Whether or not you are profitable depends on the cost of the labor you put into each app. Can you actually be profitable if you spend 2 hours per app that you would have billed to a big client at $100/hour?

I think this is an awesome idea. - while I agree with patio11, that there is risk - I think the author recognized this risk clearly in the post.<p>What would be interesting, as an experiment, would be to see if there is a way to build a larger app from a bunch of $99 app legos.<p>Break your app down to a range of small blocks that will all link together.<p>Buy out each block as you go and have money.<p>Maybe there are larger blocks available. Say - proof of UX concept for 99, core functions for 500, 99 additional change/feature, etc...

I really like your idea. However, you didn't provide us with a link to signup if we're interested.<p>On that note, how does the app release work. Do you leave the client up to their own devices to submit the app? Do you provide them with all the assets upon completion(tar of code, etc)?

Well done! Now you can keep earning revenue, figure out what customers value, find more profitable projects, etc.<p>Working on products that nobody wants is the kiss of death for many projects-by actually finding customers, you've greatly reduced that risk.

I'm surprised no one else wrote this but why not increase your price to $199?<p>That is still dirt cheap for anyone who wants to get an app made.<p>You'll do half the work for the same no eyes.

How did you publish your landing page ? how did you spreed the word on your service ?

I bet I could go from idea to revenue in under 1 hour.