An iPhone App developer Who Made $600,000 in a Month

Ethan Nicholas, the developer of a game called iShoot struck gold when his game hit the #1 spot on Appstore.



It’s a simple and easy to follow success story. Ethan started working on this game in his spare time; he released a free version of the game which at a point suggests the player to buy the full version of the game for $2.99. Out of 2.4 million users who downloaded the free version, 320,000 users bought the full version of the game.

This put the App on the #1 spot for about 3 weeks and helped Ethan make about $37,000 in one day. This not only highlights that the iPhone App success stories are here to stay and we will see many more of these in the time to come.

Ethan who worked with Yahoo! Publishing Tools team as a lead engineer was the original author of the Swing-based Yahoo! SiteBuilder web design application he also worked on developing JAXX, and XML-based user interface for creating Java desktop applications, even this was done during his spare time at Yahoo!. Ethan quit this job at Sun Microsystems after his App made a fortune for him.

These days Ethan is busy answering and tipping his followers on Twitter on how to be better at iShoot and replying to e-mails he receives from other iPhone game developers asking for his suggestions.

The original paid version of the App “iShoot” was released in Oct 2008 but only witnessed a limited number of downloaded before it faded away, this is when Ethan decided to release a free version hoping it will revive the original app. That’s what happened exactly!

What Ethan tried as an experiment is turning out to be a guide for the individual App developers as they are all set to release a free version of their paid apps.

Click here to Buy iShoot or here to iShoot-Lite (free version)