I've received a lot of questions and e-mails about the story behind CollegeKidApp.com over the last couple of days, so I figured I would put together a post detailing who we are and what we've done. If you're new to the site or haven't checked our story out before, you'll probably find it to be a little different than you would expect from a typical iPhone developer. If you're a Digg user, click here to Digg this story.
We're all students at Valparaiso University and began the project in May, deciding that it would be a great way to spend our last summer before we graduated doing something that we really enjoyed. It was our one last hurrah of sorts. I know that personally, I didn't want to spend my entire summer doing real work. Mike had just lost an internship due to the recession and Jeff was working in Valpo at the IT desk, so it worked well that we were all within a few miles of each other for the entire summer.
We began on May 13th, the first day after finals, for our first day of work. We were pretty much the most inexperienced group you could find, but we still had hope for the project. Jeff would do art/design, I would handle the business/marketing, and Mike would do all of the programming even though he pretty much had no experience and had only taken one basic intro to C++ course three years ago. I think the lack of programming and general business skills were our biggest hurdle in this whole event. I mean really, Mike hadn't had a programming class, let alone anything C related, in three years. I would compare it to translating an advanced Spanish novel after you haven't had 1st Spanish in over three years. It was a daunting task to say the least. We began by also creating this blog to document our story. If you've never been to the site before, check out our archive for posts on a huge variety of development topics.
So anyways, we plugged along and worked pretty good weekends for the next month in a half. Mike would spend about 60 hours a week learning how to code, I would promote us to anyone who would listen, and Jeff would help mock and create art for graphical interfaces. We would work long hours, sleep on couches, eat PB&J or off dollar menus, and do pretty much whatever it took to develop an app at pretty much no cost because frankly, we didn't have any money to spend since we didn't have real jobs. After toying around with a few app ideas, I had the idea for Battery Go! one night before I fell asleep, calling Jeff and Mike at 2am to tell them. They figured I was drunk, but it turned out to be a pretty good call.
We spent the next couple weeks learning code and eventually developing Battery Go!, which we submitted to the App Store. Finally, we found out on Sunday that we were released, which was pretty much the most proud moments of our lives. We really didn't care if we sold two copies, it was just amazing for us to see what we made develop into a product, especially when we had no experience before we kicked off the project.
We would have been happy had the story ended there, but then Monday came and we were lucky enough to have a review of our app published on PCMag.com. The story gained a spot on Google News and our sales promoted us right to the fringe of the top 100 paid applications in the iTunes App Store, a goal that seemed impossibly beyond reach when we started, and well beyond our wildest dreams.
Tuesday morning, we found out that we cracked the top 100, seeing ourselves in the #99 spot at about 9am. Needless to say, we were pretty excited, and from there we've climbed to up #73 in the US sales charts. We're were #35 in Italy, #75 in Brazil, and are currently #1 in the Netherlands. It's just been an unbelievable experience all around.
We've seen some downs over the last couple days as well. Last night, we found out that software pirates had cracked our software and are distributing it illegally. As of right now, we've lost over $10000 in sales, which is kinda unsettling and has caused us to rethink our marketing strategy a bit. We've also gotten to see how we stack up compared to some of our favorite apps, which has been kinda neat. Yesterday, we passed apps called Koi Pond and Tweetie which were our role model apps during development and programs we wanted to model ourselves after. We don't think we're as good as those apps by a long shot, but when you pass up an app like Koi Pond which has supposedly made about a million dollars in sales over the last year, it's definitely a bit to comprehend as guys who have only been in the business for two months and the App Store for about three days. We've also used Google translation to create a computer translated Dutch version of our site, to help cater to our huge success in the Netherlands. The international success has been amazing in general, as we've seen sales in about 25 countries or so going into today.Sorry it took so long, but that was pretty much the shortest way I could find to abbreviate our story. If you'd like a little better write up, this story does the trick. In these recent economic troubles, it's been pretty cool to buck the trend and see success through hard work and dedication while learning a bunch of great business principles which will last with us for a lifetime. We didn't really even expect to have an app see the light of day by the end of summer, let alone one with as much success as Battery Go!, so this whole experience will definitely be something I keep with me for the rest of my life.
If you haven't gotten a chance to check out Battery Go!, definitely give it a download by clicking here. It's an amazing app and something we're really proud of regardless as to where it ends up over the next couple of months. If you have any other questions or comments, feel free to send me an e-mail to Cameron@CollegeKidApp.com.
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