The advent of app stores empowered individual developers and small teams once again. We feel that we can make our own products again and don’t need huge budgets to do that. We know how to write good, manageable code. We may even know how to design a good product. And we believe that we will build it and users will come.

The road to app store success

When you are embarking on the app entrepreneur journey you should definitely dedicate a sizeable chunk of your time to activities other than design and coding.

While most developers understand this on a logical level, over the years I’ve seen a lot of frustration which I can attribute to the fact that most of the developers – even those working as contractors and freelancers – just aren’t wired this way.

Developer’s work cycle

At the high level the business process of every employed developer or those running their own consulting businesses looks something like this:

We get the task (either in a form of project or position in a company), we deliver what’s expected of us (completed project or a part of it) and we get paid. When we switch to the app entrepreneur world the overall process looks pretty much the same: our app idea is the task, completed app – a deliverable and the app store brings us money. But there’s one major difference, though.

As employee or contract developers we are used to doing all of our sales activities before we even get started:

We go to job interviews or prospective client meetings and we try to sell our skills. At that stage we’ve only made a minor investment into the “project” ranging from a couple of hours to a couple of days of our time. Failed a job interview? Sad, but not a big deal. On to the next opportunity.

Everything changes when you are an entrepreneur. You have to decide if your idea is commercially viable and most of the times there’s no sure way to determine this. So you have to decide to invest a significant chunk of your time (and money) into a task with a lot of uncertainty.

This is just common sense and every developer understands this. Having said that, we are still internally wired to consider delivery of the completed product as our final destination. We pop the champagne the minute the app goes live in the store. And we get depressed when we don’t see the immediate monetary return as per the scheme above.

The reality is that app’s publication is just the beginning of our sales activities and you have to work on your sales and marketing for the complete lifetime of your app.

The difference is subtle and huge at the same time. I see depressed developers-turned-app-entrepreneurs over and over again. And it’s not the quality of their app that’s at fault. Sometimes it’s the fact that they’ve decided to implement commercially unsound idea. But more often than not, even with great product-market fit, the cause of the disappointment is imagining a finish line in the middle of the marathon.

“My app is done” doesn’t mean that you’ve finished coding it. Your app is only done when you stop supporting it and unpublish it from the store. Otherwise you are still working on it.

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This post is part of the series and an upcoming ebook on the business side of Windows 10 apps. If you are a successful Windows app or game developer, or you’ve learned a valuable lesson from your app business misgivings, the whole community would appreciate your input! Please, get in touch and contribute a chapter or an aside. Thank you!

Congratulations on deciding to build a Windows app or game! We will get into making it a successful business in the next part. But let’s start by analyzing your motivation. Understanding what was the main driver behind your decision is very important to structure your business model and strategy. Let’s cover four typical scenarios that led developers into launching Visual Studio, Unity, etc. and coming back to the tool until they have a product ready for the prime time in the Store.

Making apps as a hobby

Quite often our primary occupation is not directly related to building mobile apps or games, but we still have an interest in trying the new mobile tech. We are happy with what we do during the day, happy with the paycheck, and have no intention of changing careers to become an indie app developer. However, making apps or games is what we enjoy in the spare time.

Does this description match you? If so, it also hints at your optimal business model and monetization strategy – enjoy doing what you like to do and forget about all the business stuff (unless that is your hobby too). Trying to make a few bucks on the side without investing significant time and attention into the business side is a sure way to make no money and starting to hate your own hobby.

You will be much happier doing what you like to do and ignoring all the other things.

Apps as a résumé

You may dream of a career as an app or game developer, or may already have one, but can’t put any of the work on your résumé because of NDAs or other things. Making your own apps in your free time is a great way to get a new dream job.

@MarkXA quite probably. Ideally, my perfect ROI would be a job offer 😉

— Scott Lovegrove (@scottisafool) November 17, 2012

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Your goal is to show your skills to as many potential employers as possible. What’s the main obstacle to doing this? Monetization! When building apps to beef up your chances of getting a perfect job offer, you don’t want anything to stand in the way of potential employer seeing the manifestation of your skills.

On the other hand, you want to invest some time into attracting as many eyeballs to your work as you can. One of them could be your next awesome boss!

Happy to report that my first day at Microsoft went well 🙂

— Scott Lovegrove (@scottisafool) May 13, 2013

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Building apps for clients

Are you looking to break out as a trustworthy contractor building apps for other people? Releasing your own apps is as great a way of attracting potential clients as it is for finding jobs.

When we set out to build AppRaisin we were looking for someone to help us work on the app, especially in the UX department. Naturally, we thought about the other apps we’ve used and liked and the people who built them. That’s how LazyWormApps (the team behind Tweetro and Metrotube) came out on top of our potential partner list and the rest is history. We are happy with the results of their work and, I believe, they are happy with us as a client.

The scope of the effort you put into monetization of your own apps depends on the type of contracts you want to get. Developers looking to sell their technical proficiency should forgo any monetization activities in order to maximize exposure. On the other hand, if you are trying to become a one-stop-shop for your clients, you may want to have a showcase to demonstrate your abilities in the app business department.

Apps are my business!

You are the person this book is for! While all the other developers can benefit from most of the future chapters in one way or the other, you are the one who should be able to get some value from every one of them.

We will discuss ways to monetize and promote your apps and games throughout this book, but let’s start by talking about your attitude in the next chapter…

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This post is part of the series and an upcoming ebook on the business side of Windows 10 apps. If you are a successful Windows app or game developer, or you’ve learned a valuable lesson from your app business misgivings, the whole community would appreciate your input! Please, get in touch and contribute a chapter or an aside. Thank you!

Windows Store doesn’t make headlines with flashy numbers of millions of dollars developers make per day or even a month. Yet, there are quite a few examples of independent developers and companies making a living off of Windows apps and games. We’ve heard about several indie developers making more than a $1,000,000 each. We’ve heard about bigger publishers like Game Insight earning “millions of dollars” on Windows. So it’s definitely doable.

Help needed: Do you have links to recent numbers from specific developers? Please, send them to me or post in the comments below. Want to post your own numbers as an aside to this post? Get in touch!

But we have to take a sober look at the whole mobile app world and realize that it’s not 2009 anymore. It’s no longer feasible to expect to make an app over the weekend, put it into one of the app stores and switch to hitting F5 in your internet bank. Accidents like Flappy Bird happen, but you can hardly bet on this happening to you.

When I was a student (in the early Windows Phone 7 days) I earned a few hundred dollars a month with a stopwatch and a fart app. That felt like a gold rush. Not that I was really proud of it, though.
Tom Verhoeff
professional Windows Developer.

The app gold rush is over. Even the best app and game developers have to invest resources into ensuring success for their top quality products. Whether you want it or not, if you care about commercial success of your creation, you will have to spend as much time (if not more) on the business side of it as you do on design and development.

Even though Windows [Phone] store is in its fourth or fifth incarnation over the last 5 years, it is still not as mature as Apple’s App Store or Google Play. And I don’t mean technical implementation of the features, discovery options and so on. In this regard every store has its strengths and weaknesses. What I mean is, that by being a pretty distant third app ecosystem Windows Store doesn’t attract enough attention from the biggest app developers and the brightest minds in app marketing and monetization.

This is a curse but could be a blessing at the same time. On one hand the supporting ecosystem of services and know-how on app business is underdeveloped on Windows. But on the other hand, as app and game developers, we gain a lot of opportunities to take advantage of it by filling the infamous “app gap”, and applying know-how and useful tricks from app marketers on other platforms that have not been overused and exhausted on Windows yet.

Making apps and games for a living and being your own boss is a lifetime dream for many of us. While you may have missed the gold rush by a couple of years, it is still a feasible goal. You just have to apply yourself or find a partner to handle areas that go beyond development. This series will try to combine the best app business practices from other mobile platforms with collective know-how of the Windows developer ecosystem. Join the ride by subscribing to the RSS feed, following AdDuplex on twitter and contributing in the comments and beyond.

Let’s go…

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This post is part of the series and an upcoming ebook on the business side of Windows 10 apps. If you are a successful Windows app or game developer, or you’ve learned a valuable lesson from your app business misgivings, the whole community would appreciate your input! Please, get in touch and contribute a chapter or an aside. Thank you!