Chapter 8: Passive Income with Apps

Building an app for the Apple Store

I remember fondly when the iOS store first launched in 2008. I lived in Atlanta, GA, at the time. We had an iOS developer group there that I founded. Several members of the group created best-selling applications like the “Woo button.” Can you guess what it did? If you clicked a button, a voice, said “Woo!”.

The bar was very low for the best selling iPhone applications. A lesson is that the beginning of a new channel is a great time to be a producer on that channel. I was tentatively planning on writing an iOS application but got distracted by a job offer to work in New Zealand for Weta Digital on the movie Avatar.

When I came back to the United States and had a full-time while enrolled in an MBA program, I got an email about the OS X desktop store. I thought to myself; I can write an application during Christmas break and release it as one of the first desktop applications. I locked myself in my room for a few days and created an app I launched called “Liten” that found duplicate files on the filesystem.

It became a best-selling app at one point, and over the few years, it was for sale I made over six figures on it. I learned from this experience how incredible it felt to make money while I slept. Customers from around the world bought my product, and I communicated with them. If you are curious, you can download the source code for Liten here, it might still work.

The takeaway for readers of this book is that you can hire a team of people to build an application for you or “hunker down” and build something on your Christmas break. If an application is even a modest success and generates 10,000 dollars a year for a few years, it can fit well as a stream in your money lake.