I saw a message from someone on LinkedIn today, asking about “luring” iPhone developers to do a project, by offering them a revenue share in order to “minimize the overhead”.
I thought that was pretty interesting. Here was my response:
Good app ideas are a dime a dozen. Your great idea isn’t guaranteed to make any money in the app store. Why should a developer develop your whole app for just a percentage of the money you are going to make? Just because you have a good idea? Most developers have good ideas too, and if they are going to risk not making anything for their hard work, they might as well balance that by doing their own work and making 100% of the profits.
So you have to ask what you are bringing to the table beyond your great idea. Marketing? Promotion? Something that will guarantee high sales? But if you are so sure about high sales, then why not just pay the developer for his / her time? If you are trying to mitigate your cost by only paying the developer IF the app makes money, then you are not so sure that it will. So again, what are you really bringing to the table?
To put it another way, this is your business venture. You are investing in your product and your idea. Part of that investment is development cost. I think you are not looking for a developer, but looking for a business partner that happens to be a developer. He’s going to invest his time in the app. So again, what are you bringing to the table beyond the idea for the app?
I think most developers, when they look at working on someone else’s project, are not at all interested in investing in an idea. They are looking to do some work and get paid for it. They will deliver you an application and it’s up to you to make money from it. If you find one willing to work on a percentage basis, good for you. But I think it is going to be hard, and will get harder as people realize more and more that the app store is not a guaranteed gold mine.
I don’t really have much more to say about it than that. I’m not saying that this could never be a good arrangement. There could be a situation where there’s an existing successful app on another platform that the customer wants ported to the iPhone. Or a brand name that would help guarantee sales. I’m sure there are other situations where this would work. Actually, my company is doing a project on this kind of basis, where the customer is bringing some pretty major stuff to the table. But simply having a “good idea for an app” is pretty lame.
As an iPhone developer (on the side) and a professional developer/consultant, I have to say that it is usually a bad idea to do work and not get paid for it. I know a lot of other developer/consultant types and they all have horror stories about doing work for free with the hope/promise of future work, or doing work for a % of the profits that never materialize.
I couldn’t agree with you more. If the owner of the idea has faith that his idea will make money, he should have no problem in investing cash to pay a developer for his time.
Success on the App store is very difficult to achieve, even for very good apps. It takes a lot of marketing to get the word out.
I’m with you there. I cannot tell you how many people start a pitch with “you’ll do all the programming and I’ll be the idea guy”. After that it’s usually quite a short meeting…
I have been in the web development gig for a while (10 years) and you will be surprised at how many people think that not only should you work on their idea for the distant possibility of maybe getting paid, but also letting you know that you should feel privileged to have been offered the chance to be part of their “cash cow idea”… terrible stuff. Designers and developers are professionals and should be treated as such.
Try going to your local plastic surgeon for a free penis enlargement and promise him profit share from your future career as a porn superstar… I know it sounds ridiculous in that context, but it is the same thing.
I see this all the time, for both iPhone apps and for web startups. Never do I see the person making the post explain what they’ll be adding to the relationship – I might actually think twice about the post if they were to say something like, “I believe my idea will work because of this basic market research I’ve done. I can’t write the code, but I have done my best to capture the design in this spec I have written and wireframes I have laid out. I will tirelessly QA the code and provide detailed bug reports, and am willing to learn what is necessary to pull builds/releases on my own – and of course I will provide an IT infrastructure for the project (even if this is as simple as getting the domain name, setting up a web site, setting up source control/bug tracking via one of the myriad inexpensive services available to do this, and some spreadsheets on Google Apps or a project wiki for project management). I will handle customer support and also use my friendly, established relationships with various influential bloggers or review sites to drive the marketing of the product.”
No, they all just say, “3 Harvard MBAs looking for programmer to work for company equity on social media idea for iPhone app”.
Here’s my take after 15 years of doing this kind of thing… the more precious someone thinks their idea is, the worse the idea is.
Robin, how true. 🙂 I think this whole thing is the 2009 version of “Do this one for free. You’ll get great exposure, and the next one we’ll pay you for.”
Amen!, some details though:
“Most developers have good ideas too, and if they are going to risk not making anything for their hard work, they might as well balance that by doing their own work and making 100% of the profits”
I’d guess that the iPhone apps are more developer driven as you need some particular skills to make it happen, so most deals ideally would be based on that premise and not the other way
Also I think most developers need to hire a good designer to improve their chance of success too, there are plenty of apps that show the lack of dedication on this part, and being apps aimed at the iPhone, good design is a must, maybe a revenue share deal is worth it in cases like this.
Luckily for me I don’t need a designer so often, in the cases I do, I pay for the design without thinking about it.
Good idea + good programming is worth more than good idea alone or good idea + good design
Good idea + good programming + good design is even more worthy
I have these types of offers to build the next facebook or linkedin and find it both complimentary and belittling. Complimentary because obviously we make our job look easy to do, but belittling (and amusing) because people think we don’t know how the big wide world of business works and we’ve been waiting for someone to come along.
I’ve found the best response to these offers is to ask to see the business plan, if they don’t have one, start running. If they do or can convince you they don’t need one, then offer to build a prototype which they will pay you for. After building the prototype which takes a very small percentage of the time it will take to build the whole product, you will get an idea as to how your potential business partner works and how committed they are. The client will also understand the amount of work that is required under the hood of an app.
With great open source tools like drupal, elgg etc, you can get a social networking site (which most of these ground breaking apps seem to be) up and running in 2 days and have some money in your back pocket.
😉
Like the Joker said “if you’re good at something, never do it for free”.
The world is made up different kinds of people. It’s usually the ones that are furthest away from the ‘actual’ work that make the most money. With any new platform, especially one with instant distribution and monetization prospects, comes a renewed sense of order. There are going to be more ‘business’ folks with ideas and visions of reaping the rewards while putting the lowly developer to work for them.
It seems that Apple may have changed that dynamic with the app store. Developers don’t need the middle man much anymore. Unless you’re an established app business with the marketing muscle, or control an existing and valuable intellectual property, it will be hard to see ‘business’ folk proposition developers like with previous platforms.
I suspect we’ll see this with other mobile platforms, which should carry forth this developer-favoring revolution.
absolutely great response. kudos to you!
rocksteady,
danno~
Ok, so this is off-topic and I apologise for this but I was just wondering how iPhone developers preview their work to the client remotely?
Keith, maybe you could post something on this? As a Flash/Flex developer I am used to uploading a WIP site for clients to look at but it’s occured to me that you can’t do this with iPhone apps can you. Is it possible to create an install package?
Lee: ad hoc distributions.
I did my time working for these characters at the beginning of my career and have come to realise that the worst part about it is that the job never ends where it has been defined initially (I work as a programmer and designer and its true in both worlds). Instead, there’s always “something else” that is necessary for this AMAZING idea to take off. These characters NEED you to deliver amazon.com but then update their news for the next 4 years.
My response these days is always: Hey, I’ll charge you 50%, if the idea takes off I’ll take the % minus the downpayment – if it doesn’t, you owe me the other 50%. Not because I mean to actually work for them, rather, they never do it and then leave me alone.
Keith, I know you aren’t yet an Objective-C/iPhone expert but if you’ve got a work-shop certainly a book is in order? 🙂 Do you freakin’ know just how hot that would sell? Come on, can you talk about it yet?
I can’t agree with that reply more. I’m sure every developer/designer in all capacities have come across “The Deal of a Lifetime”. I, like many others, have learned the hard way to only work under a paying contract.
This reminds me of a video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2a8TRSgzZY
hehe. Agree with what u said. I received so many similar offers.
I quite like the concept that ideas are just multipliers. Bad implementation (0) x great idea (1,000) = nothing.