Contrast · B2C · indie app studio
Give developers a revenue share instead of paying them by the hour
Stopped losing money on stalled projects; partners working on the side ship slowly
Mixedteam-process
What they did
After two hourly-contractor projects dragged on and never shipped (~$50K lost on each, $100K written off), from 2010-2011 worked with developer partners on a mix of pay and revenue share so they had skin in the game.
What happened
Aligned incentives, but side-project partners get busy with their jobs; Weather Up 3.0 took years partly for this reason.
- Stage
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Related topics
Get tactics like this every Monday
New tactics from the week's founder interviews, each linked to where it was said.
More from Contrast
All 6 Contrast tactics- Email the Apple evangelists shown on WWDC slides when your developer account stallsAn Apple evangelist phoned back; became a lasting contact
- Ship a phone-first app that follows iPhone design rules and gets a top blogger's linkFounder calls the link a turning point; no numbers
- Raise money from family with a written case for why the App Store is a dealFamily invested; business still running 17 years later
- Buy a spare iPhone, jailbreak it, and study the 500 apps already out
More from this episode
- Weather Up: Pitch journalists with a short demo video in a Twitter DMCovered by TechCrunch, 9to5Mac, MacRumors and BGR, even by writers who rarely cover apps
- Weather Up: Hold new features back for one big launch to get attentionDownloads fell to ~15 a day during the 4-year wait; guest calls it a big regret
- Weather Up: Launch just before Vision Pro ships to avoid 'where's your Vision Pro app?'Landed an hour before Apple's DMA news; fewer articles, no social buzz, no Apple feature
- Weather Up: Launch a weather app at $40 a year with no launch saleClose to 2,000 subscribers, but press readers balked at $40 next to a $30 competitor
- Weather Up: Relaunch with one or two new features and a limited-time sale
- Weather Up: Pre-select the yearly plan on the paywall, not the monthly oneMonthly default got ~10% more subscribers but 60% lower revenue per user in month one
- Weather Up: Put a feature demo video on the paywall, with hosted price buttons belowWent better than expected; built in under a day; guest gives no numbers
- Weather Up: Test $40 against $39.99 for the yearly plan
- Build a mirror app and rank for the word 'mirror' in the App StoreCaptured 6-8K of 10-20K daily 'mirror' searches at peak
- Make a $0.99 app free and sell themes plus a $10 bundleMany bought the $10 bundle; earned $10 a sale instead of $0.99
- Contrast: Buy ads for paid-upfront appsLost money; spent thousands of dollars in the early App Store
- Launch Center Pro: Save features for big paid-app launches that spike revenueUp to $60K in a launch week vs hundreds of dollars a day otherwise
- Dark Noise: Add interactive widgets when iOS 17 ships to land in Apple's listsPicked first in an editorial list; 'massively impactful', no numbers; other lists did little
- RevenueCat: Launch again and again, dressing up each fundraise as a launchFirst Reddit post got some traction; no numbers