Baby Maker Costs and Earning Report - In the Black

Posted in Baby Maker, Earnings Report. Written by admin on August 10th, 2009

Pat here:

I’m the guy on the left, Quoc is on the right. That’s our “baby” below.

So it’s been about 50 days since Baby Maker was approved by Apple and on sale in the App Store. We’re very happy to say that we’ve earned enough money from the application to cover the development costs, and any income from Baby Maker is now pure profit! This take into account Apple’s 30% commission.

We’re happy to be transparent with our costs and our earnings so you can get an idea of how much money is involved just in case you’re interesting in doing something similar. Here’s a quick breakdown:

Costs

The total cost to develop Baby Maker was about $5000.

Anyways, we were lucky that Baby Maker was able to regain it’s costs, because at first, the quality of the app wasn’t what we hoped for. But, the audience seems to like it which is what really matters.

Earnings Report

In total, after 50 days on sale, Baby Maker has netted us $5,190.24. This equates to 2,524 actual units sold. Calculating this out, Apple’s 30% commission is about $2,350.00. That’s a nice chunk of change, but that’s the cost of doing what we do. We have yet to consult with a CPA on this, but we believe Apple’s commission is eligible for a tax write-off, since it is a “cost”.

Here’s a graph showing the trend of the earnings on BabyMaker. Click to enlarge:

The natural trend of an iPhone app is to start off selling really well, then gradually earn less and less each day. As you can see, this is the same trend we’re seeing with Baby Maker, however there are a few spikes of sales here and there.

One strategy we’ve been using is to update the app frequently, which allows the app to be placed on the “new releases” area in the app store again - which increases visibility and sales for a short period of time. After newer apps bump it out of there, then the trend starts all over again.

Our highest day of earnings came on the third or fourth day of being launched (6/24/09), when it was actually ranked the Top #23 app in the Photography category and earned us $194.19 in one day. Not bad…not bad…

As of late, for the past 2 or so weeks, it’s been averaging about $50.00 a day is still in the top 100 in the Photography category, ranging between #50 and #70.

We have another update that should be approved very soon, which should increase our sales again for a few days, and then being us back to our normal $50.00 per day. We suspect, however, that this will not last forever and in about a month, we’ll be out of the top 100 and earning much less, unless something drastic happens, which we do have planned.

Although the app is app store worthy, we believe it could use a MAJOR overhaul. We’ve asked a couple of new developers for a quote on changing the mechanics of the app and increasing the quality of the results, which we’re dealing with as we speak. We plan on issuing a major update once this is finished, which would be the ethical thing to do rather than come out with an entirely different app. We want to thank those who have purchased the original and we feel like we owe them for their support. Hopefully this will put Baby Maker back in the top spots in the photography category. We’ll definitely keep you updated.

Thanks!

Thanks for your interest in our earnings report. We’ll definitely have more posts like this in the future. We also have a new app that will be submitted to the app store in just a couple of days, and hopefully approved within 2 weeks. Please check out iCaption Mobile for more information about this app, which we hope will go huge.

Thanks again!

-Pat