As you know I’ve been focusing a lot on iOS development (and started doing a selected bit of consulting to help people/companies get their apps created by amazing developers via Elance), but I’ve been focusing more on utilities over games.
Carter does games, period. And he does it well. But his system, which he calls App Skinning (or app cloning) is something I hadn’t seen before. Buy an app codebase, hire a designer to skin it into a new niche/design, put ads on it, upload it, and repeat. Carter has upwards of 40 games in the app store in just his first year of app development and is generating upwards of $10k/month in revenue. (One app did $20k in 2 weeks in December.)
I’m not sure if I’ll get into game apps, but interviewing Carter definitely got my neurons firing.
UPDATE: Carter just sold his portfolio of apps for $200k.
Sites mentioned in the interview:
BlueCloudSolutions.com (auto play warning; turn speakers off at work) – Carter’s site
AppCod.es – Keyword research
GREE – Android/iOS games
AppTopia.com - Buy/Sell mobile apps
Elance.com – Hire developers/designers
Odesk.com - Hire developers/designers
### Interview Transcript ###
Karol Gajda (0:00:01) Hey guys it’s Karol here. I am here with Carter Thomas from bluecloudsolutions.com and Carter, I just discovered his website like a month ago and he builds iPhone apps and he releases them at an incredible pace. I don’t know how he does it. I just released my first three and it seems he’s releasing like three a day. And he’s had some recent crazy success with a Gangnam Style app. We’ll talk a little bit about that. Yeah so let’s get into it. Thanks Carter. Thanks for joining me here.
Carter Thomas (0:00:36) Yeah right on it’s my pleasure. This is great.
Karol (0:00:39) Cool so tell us a little bit about how you got started. What did you do before you got into apps? Why did you get into apps? That type of good stuff.
Carter (0:00:50) Sure yeah. So I was working at a start up company doing marketing for them. I was living in Maine. If no one knows it’s in the north east in the United States. It’s kind of an isolated spot and the start up was kind of going no where. It wasn’t really taking off the way I wanted it to so I started an internet marketing company. And I was doing websites for law firms mostly.
Karol (0:01:13) Okay
Carter (0:01:14) And basically I was going in and buying website templates, redesigning them and then selling them to law firms and you know kind of flipping the models that way.
Karol (0:01:24) Oh no way!
Carter (0:01:25) Yeah and it started to work out pretty well. Lawyers are a pretty interesting breed and so I was being able to talk to them and to sell it to them and so that was going along and then I started doing all of the search engine optimization and ad words and I was doing that for about a year and a half and you know it was cool and you know it was definitely making pretty good money but I was just… you could imagine a creative person doing that. You’re kind of like “What am I doing?”
Karol (0:01:51) Yeah. Yeah.
Carter (0:01:52) I met my buddy who was a contractor when I was working the start up and him and I would just like every once in a while go to a local coffee shop, drink a ton of espresso, and try to come up with these app ideas cause he was a total programmer. And he was like “Dude, this thing is gonna be huge!” And we actually still have this pitch deck when we went in on our lunch break to this big start up company and we were like “You guys got to get into apps. There’s already 25,000 apps in the store. Like this is going to be huge.” And these guys had just been like “You guys are out of your mind.”
Karol (0:02:23) Oh so this was like years ago. This was kind of in the early days of the app store, yeah? With I mean 25,000 apps was… had to be like kind of the first few months.
Carter (0:02:32) Exactly. It was like and we were looking back on that the other day. Oh my God. If only we knew. So him and I were making like… he would program it and I would do some design and the content and the publishing. Just kind of for fun nothing serious and then last October, yeah like 14 months ago, I was just like “Okay like screw this.” Actually like last August I guess I started hiring my own freelancers, getting code, figuring out what was going on. Then last October I was like if I’m going to do this I need to do this. I went and I launched my first app and you know as of probably a month ago I’ve gone completely into the iPhone world. That is now my full time job.
Karol (0:03:28) Oh killer okay. So let’s kind of step back a bit. October of last 2011 you launch your first app. How did that go about? How much did it cost? How did you find your developer? I’m assuming, you said you did some design. Did you do the design on your app or did you hire the designer as well? How did you go about that process of launching your first app?
Carter (0:03:53) So the first app… I knew that there was no way that I was going to be able to build an app from scratch. I also knew that the risk involved of building an app from was huge just from working with my buddy. So what I was doing is I was going around and I was trying to find essentially what I was doing with websites where I was trying to find templates or Gangnam games or developers that would sell me templates and that was like kind of what I was trying to do. Cause I tried cloning a few apps on Elance. I tried to have some companies do that. And it’s kind of a pain in the butt.
Karol (0:04:25) Yeah.
Carter (0:04:26) So I called this guy who had an app that had you know a couple of million downloads. It was like an arcade game and I started talking to him. You know back then there was like no market place for source codes. There was no AppTopias. There was no nothing. And so this was like I totally randomly found this guy like in a forum or a chat room or something and he licensed me a source code and it cost me about $11,000 U.S.
Karol (0:04:55) Okay.
Carter (0:04:56) And that was essentially me maxing out three of my credit cards and being like “This is it. Like here we go.”
Karol (0:05:04) Whoa.
Carter (0:05:05) I hired two designers. I hired one guy in Argentina and one guy in Russia. The guy in Argentina….so the game is called Alpha Combat and it’s like a fighter jet arcade game and it’s still in the app store. I hired the guy in Argentina to do all the graphics for the planes. Because he was a really good 3-D guy even though his…then I hired the guy in Russia to do like the icon and the screen shots and the splash screen like a little bit more of the marketing assets.
Karol (0:05:31) Okay.
Carter (0:05:33) So all in it was like $13,000 and then I spent it must have been 300 hours of my own time. Just like obsessed with that thing. You know trying to do all that.
Karol (0:05:40) Yeah
Carter (0:05:41) Yeah and so it was ready to launch and it went up on October 19th and this guy had had huge success with his app. Yeah he had made hundreds of thousands of dollars. I was like this is a great design, great theme, awesome engine, you know I’m gonna kill it. I’m gonna make my money back in a month. Oh I can’t wait. It went up on October 19th last year. And I remember checking my stats the next day and it was like 90 bucks. Man.
Karol (0:06:17) Well even so 90 bucks for even for a first day that’s pretty killer. To be honest.
Carter (0:06:21) In retrospect you know that’s not bad at all. But I was just like you know like looking at the prize and all I could think about was retirement and then the next day it was like 20 bucks and the day after that it was like ten bucks. And I remember just being like frantically searching on the internet for marketing advice or marketing information or anything. Anyone talking about their experience and trying to help and nobody was talking about this and there was nothing out there. And the people that were talking about that were the guys who were like ìI just made $50,000 a month like look at me this is amazing I’m in Tahiti now.î So that was the beginning of it all. I was still doing the internet marketing stuff this app thing on the side and everyone was like “You’re crazy. This is such a….like you’re nuts for doing this? Why focus on lucrative internet marketing thing?”
Karol (0:07:19) So how long was it before you started making a profit? You spent… you were in like you said $13,000. You started off with 90 bucks the first day and then it started going down. So what was kind of the turning point? When did it start making money?
Carter (0:07:36) Yeah so the turning point was in January. So this whole time I integrated OpenFeint which is a social gaming like community. Which is now called GREE, G-R-E-E, a Japanese company. In this process I became good friends with the account manager there. Just being like “What am I doing? How do I figure this out?” and he was like “You’re doing everything right but it just needs to get some leverage.” And I was sharing all my data with him and he was like “Okay how about this? Why don’t you make it free? And we’ll comp you a free app of the day promotion.”
Karol (0:08:13) Oh okay.
Carter (0:08:15) It was like an upwards of a $20,000 value. They were just like ìLook if you share all your information we’ll just give you this for free and you flipped it to free and rely on your in-app purchases and we’ll see what happens.î And I was like ìOkay. Sweet!î So January I believe of this year I did that. And it went to like you know 25, 30, 40 thousand downloads a day for about you know for 4 or 5 days and my revenue started coming in like $150 to $200 a day.
Karol (0:08:44.6) Cool. And so was that off in-app purchases or was that off advertising?
Carter (0:08:50) It was all in-app purchases and that’s the crazy thing too looking into that it’s like back then there was really no solution for ads I mean it was like you know you could do iAds which was a really difficult integration and you could do like ad-mob which didn’t pay at all but there was very limited advertising options back then. I was using PlayHeaven as a more games button but even then like the advertisers weren’t big enough to pay big money like the money just wasn’t that great.
Karol (0:09:17) This is so funny cause you are talking about literally just 11 months ago and how much things have changed. That’s crazy.
Carter (0:09:27) Yeah so like that promotion kinda put that game onto a new trajectory and after that it sort of established a user bank. It held it’s rankings a little bit better and from then on I was getting 400 to 500 downloads a day. The money coming in was between you know 50 and 75 dollars a day.
Karol (0:09:47) Cool.
Carter (0:09:48) That’s the whole freemium model. That’s when the light started switching for me. I think it started switching for a lot of people saying like “This new model. There’s a lot to this.”
Karol (0:09:59) So you basically, that’s what you focus on now. The free with in-app purchases or ads, yeah?
Carter (0:10:04) Yeah mostly. Typically my games will come… when I develop them they’ll come with two export targets. What that means is when you publish to Apple you export the app as a certain way. Which there’s a paid version and free version. Which basically is you can remove the ads and maybe unlock a couple of new levels.
Karol (0:10:28) Right.
Carter (0:10:29) And then (inaudible) so what I’ll do is launch a paid version and a free version. The free version typically makes you know fine or tax money. I tend to just do it just to get volume out there.
Karol (0:10:41) Okay cool. Man that’s killer. So how did you? So where do you find your kind of your ideas now. You say you still kind of do the flipping model. Where you buy a code base and you tweak it right?
Carter (0:10:58) Yeah exactly. So I gave a presentation on this two weeks ago at this big conference. This guy Chad Mureta, All About Apps, and it was all about this flipping idea so I’m gonna put that on my website for like the full breakdown. But the overview is I get the code. I kind of analyze it and make sure it’s got potential and then I’ll re-skin it for a specific theme and kind of rejigger it a little bit and then publish it. I once I find one that’s ROI positive I just kind of as you’ve seen you just make like 15 copies, versions of it with themes that you’ll think will work.
Karol (0:11:42) Right. So how does that process? Do you have a specific team you work with or do you just go back to Elance or Odesk or whatever? How much does that cost to start to buy a code base and get started again. Is it still like $10,000 for a code base?
Carter (0:12:00) No, no, no. Definitely not. I mean codes now are like well under 500 bucks. I mean I’ve gotten really nice codes for a hundred bucks to three hundred bucks. Finding the right guys. Well the obvious question for a lot of people that I get is “Well how you find these codes? Where do you go?” And there’s a lot of different ways. You know the first is a website called AppTopia and that came up about three or four months ago I think and it’s a marketplace where people sell apps. And it’s a step beyond codes because you can actually buy the entire app outright including the name and intellectual property and the icon. You essentially buy that listing.
Karol (0:12:40) Okay. Do you buy the iTunes connect account as well with that because if you buy an app from somebody they basically….you can’t move an app from one account to the other without losing all that kind of history right?
Carter (0:12:56) That’s right yeah. I mean essentially you can sometimes like negotiate like an entire account and just take it over. But if you are buying an individual app and I’ve sold like 15 or 20 apps like I sell it I upload all the assets tell them everything I’m doing and they’ll publish an identical version of it.
Karol (0:13:14) Okay.
Carter (0:13:15) And actually you know besides the user base the download volume is typically very similar after they uploaded it if not better.
Karol (0:13:26) Oh interesting.
Carter (0:13:28) I can understand the apprehension for a lot of people with that but in my experience it’s actually been very comparable.
Karol (0:13:37) Yeah.
Carter (0:13:38) And so to answer your question a little bit more AppTopia is good resource. The number one way I find them is I’ll…err well not really anymore but what I used to do was I would post listings on Odesk and Elance and I’d say like “I’m looking to develop a cool racing iPad game and keep it super generic and I would get like 50 or 100 developers responding to my requests. They’d get right back with okay “here’s my portfolio…blah…blah…blah…blah” and I would say “Okay which of these are you willing to sell me? Which of these source codes can we just use for a job and I’ll hire you right now to re-skin it or rejigger it or whatever.” But you know that’s how I would start the conversation and I would say 70% of them were like even six months ago were like “Wow I never even thought of doing that.”
Karol (0:14:31) Right. So how much did that cost you to…so the code base is around 500 or less. How much does it cost to get re-skinned?
Carter (0:14:40) Yeah so a situation like that I would say the code base would be around $200 and then the re-skinning depending on the complexity of it would be anywhere from $300 to $1000.
Karol (0:14:51) Oh wow so that’s not much at all.
Carter (0:14:54) No, no it’s not at all and a lot of that is because when your doing this kind of flipping model your using pretty basic games. I mean the Gangnam game and when you look at some of the apps I built a lot of them are built on that kind of racing source code engine. And that engine itself is you know I’ve gotten quotes between 600 and 900 and typically like I do it all from the same company and it’s usually about 7 or 800 bucks per app to re-skin that.
Karol (0:15:22) Okay.
Carter (0:15:23) And so if you wanna re-skin like a really complicated game it can be like a couple of thousand dollars. But if you just want to slap some graphics on the existing framework the designers will look at that and they’ll know all the assets they need to do already and right there is knocking 30% of their time off so.
Karol (0:15:37) Yeah. That’s Killer. So you said that you work with the same company now a days. And you found them on Elance or Odesk?
Carter (0:15:49) Oh I found them actually through a connection that I made on Elance. Someone was like “Hey you should talk to this guy. You know I think he’s got a lot of really good skills for you cause he can design and develop and he can speak English very well.” Which is a huge bonus.
Karol (0:16:07) Yeah definitely.
Carter (0:16:08) But you know I’ve developed dozens of relationships on Elance and Odesk of guys that I still work with, designers and publishers and other people. I use one company now as kind of my core company but there’s a Rolodex of people that I’ll call for specific stuff.
Karol (0:16:28) Nice. Fantastic. So okay you get the re-skinned game. You launch it. What do you do now to get downloads and make money?
Carter (0:16:40) Yeah okay cool. So this is kind of the fun part. The flipping model. When you kind of look at the 10,000 foot view of the business model it is built on essencially a 30 day analysis I guess is the word. All I really care about is the first 30 days. And after the 30 days is up it just goes into my portfolio and it spits out ten or 20 bucks a day. Which is great but the first 30 days is where I justify those upfront costs. So what I’ll do is I’ll skin it in the specifics. However I want to do it. And then I will upload it. I’ll make the title as keyword friendly as possible. I’ll add all the keywords into the iTunes connect screen shots. All that stuff. Then I will typically launch it on a Thursday afternoon. The reason I do that is because it’s going to hit the rankings on Friday morning when the database resents. And most of my games are in the racing category and the racing category has really good volume. It’s really good to…well racing you can tend to get up rankings really quick and then you get dropped really quick. Weekends the download volumes on the iTunes store is like 40% higher than it is during the week.
Karol (0:18:06) Oh wow.
Carter (0:18:07) Especially for games and on the same point advertisers will spend two to three times as much on the networks so all the installs that I’m making my ad nets those become like three times more profitable on the weekend than they do during the week.
Karol (0:18:24) Nice.
Carter (0:18:25) So when you launch a game. The way I launch my games which is just they are just kind of fun you know kids games that people use once and they make great icons. It’ll spike like over the weekend. So from Friday through Monday morning it’ll peak up you know the top 50 racing like iPad category or whatever. And I’ll get this huge influx of downloads and consequently money and typically within that first weekend it’s going to get in the big user base that’s gonna be the big spike and then that’s going to trickle down and by 30 days that will be done but because of that initial spike and the initial amount of money that comes in from that launch part that’s gonna thats ROI positive on the…let’s say I spent $700 on that design. I’ll probably make like $1100 on that 30 day launch and that’s no marketing dollars, no advertising dollars and so that’s a $400 increase which that’s not retirement money but my business is built on the volume, that flipping those small victories. And then that next month I roll that $1100 you know into one and a half projects. That’s why I can produce so many is because I have this kind of 30 day rolling window where the month. You know so pay offs are two months at a time. I’ll take the money from two months ago and reinvest it in this month’s…if it works on the same kind of logic I used the money that’s going to be there will be higher than it was today.
Karol (0:20:02) Man this is fascinating because I think most people when they start something like this whether it’s apps or some other business they’re kind of looking for kind of the huge wins and it’s awesome to hear kind of you going after the small wins as kind of the business model and it working so well.
Carter (0:20:19) Yeah absolutely. It’s I think it’s something is definitely the future of apps and I’ve talked to a lot of people I’ve actually had coffee with mathematicians and statisticians and we’ve crunched the numbers and the bottom line is you look at the standard deviations and the derivatives of everything that is happening with the bell curve of a market this size and it’s really pretty difficult to get like 40 or 50 thousand downloads but it’s really easy to get like 5000 downloads.
Karol (0:20:56) Okay
Carter (0:20:57) That’s because like competition of it all and you can aggregate you know hundreds of apps that are all getting like $5000 a year for a median like every three months or whatever. That’s going to add up. The ability to get that is to have one app that breaks through that bell curve kind of philosophy.
Karol (0:21:19) Yeah.
Carter (0:21:20) And that’s the crux of it all is like saying “Well it’s a hard market if you have a pretty good app it’s going to get enough to justify your ROI.” but if you’re trying to build one app and make a 3000% ROI in six months that’s a really really difficult nut to crack.
Karol (0:21:40) Yeah, yeah cool. So before we get into…cause I really wanna talk about the Gangnam style thing. But before we get into that I wanted to ask you what kind of research tools do you use? Like you said you kind of you buy the code base and you kind of find a small market to re-skin it and write so what do you do to find that as far as your keywords and all that other stuff?
Carter (0:22:01) Yeah so this the going into the interesting part of my presentation. The research I do…so the tools that I use, you know I use app codes I don’t know if you’ve ever checked that out.
Karol (0:22:13) Yeah actually I met the developer here in Poland in Wroclaw a few months ago so yeah I’m a member of appcodes.
Carter (0:22:20) That’s a really good research for the keywords and the tracking and that stuff. I’ll use…you know a lot of it is just watching the daily rankings just to see what’s hot, what’s going on. But more than anything what I research is actually the advertisers. I research who’s spending the most money on the advertising networks that I am publishing on. And it’s typically the top grossing games are the biggest advertisers more or less. My games I built those all because I talked to this guy Gee. I don’t know if you know (inaudible) the CEO of (inaudible) and that’s a big advertising network that I use.
Karol (0:23:03) Right.
Carter (0:23:04) It’s like 70% of our buys, this was eight months ago when I launched, it’s like 70% of our buys comes from Pocket Gems and TinyCo which were doing like Tiny Zoo.
Karol (0:23:14) Okay.
Carter (0:23:14) So I was like well if I make games that are like baby tiger games I bet my traffic is going to be worth way more money to like Pocket Gems than like…
Karol (0:23:27) Oh, that’s genius.
Carter (0:23:29) And that’s what happened like the eCPMs or the earning per thousand impression I would get were like through the roof when I was advertising to these animal type games. Typically back then they were like the big buyers. So they would pay three or four dollars per install that I could deliver where as other games would only pay a dollar. So that’s the kind of research I’m still doing is like building games with the idea that I can go to advertisers and say “You know I’ve got a game that’s going to convert really well for yours. Let’s set up a partnership and lets…I wanna create a relationship based on the fact that my game is going to sell you qualified traffic up front.”
Karol (0:24:13) That is killer. I love that. That’s awesome. That’s awesome. So okay let’s…what’s big your big surprise? I’m going to guess it’s the Gangnam style thing but I’ll let you answer it. What’s been your biggest surprise as far as an app that did really really well and maybe an app that didn’t do as well?
Carter (0:24:32) Yeah well, so yeah besides the Gangnam style we’ll talk about that uhm Table Tennis apps like Ping Pong apps.
Karol (0:24:41) Okay.
Carter (0:24:42) I bought the source code for like a hundred bucks. And I released an original version and that original one just simply on keyword, I mean it’s a terrible, terrible game. Just simply on keyword volume made like $4000 an ad so for the course of about three months.
Karol (0:25:00) Nice.
Carter (0:25:01) I re-skinned it a few times and those re-skins you know one of them went to top 15 sports games in the U.S. and you know that made about $8000 and the other one made like $3000 so that was a huge surprise cause I was just like this is not you know the best source code in the world but there’s something about that key word that did really well. I had a skiball one that was doing really well and I upped it with the key words using AppCodes and it went from like 3 or 4 hundred downloads a day to like 8000 downloads a day.
Karol (0:25:32) Wow.
Carter (0:25:33) And then I sold that to somebody on AppTopia just because as it was kind of skyrocketing I knew that it would be very appealing to somebody see. But yeah the Gangnam Style game so that was really surprising cause I was seeing some people putting these Gangnam Style games out and I actually met the guy who owns a few of these Gangnam Style games and he’s an awesome dude but he was kind of like “You know I’m the first guy to do this like this is just crazy.” and so I bought one over Thanksgiving I was just like sitting at my computer and talking to him and said “Let’s just do one.” and he was like “Yeah it took me three days it’ll be kind of a joke whatever.” And yeah it took off I mean the blog posts I wrote the other day it lays out the success of it but it made over $20,000 in you know what’s been two weeks and it taught me a lot about kind of what happens when you make a lot when you have a lot more volume.
Karol (0:26:35) That’s fascinating. So what-what happens? Like what’s the biggest take away you took from that?
Carter (0:26:39) The take away is that you can’t be as aggressive on the advertising side of that because people get really upset when you’re at the top of the charts and you’re blatantly trying to make money at the top of the charts.
Karol (0:26:50) Yeah okay.
Carter (0:26:51) So if it’s just kind of a regular app they found and you put a lot of ads in people are like “Well that’s just how it is…this is some guy who’s just kind of trying to make some money.” So as the apps get more volume you just have to be very careful about the modifications and you can still be aggressive about but you know make it so that it’s part of the game play and not just a big banner like in the middle right in their face. So that was kind of like a huge realization for me to say like “You know wow. There are people behind these devices like playing my game this isn’t just like a computer game where it’s just data these are actually people playing it.”
Karol (0:27:40) Right, right. Actually do you know Derek Sivers he wrote an article. He doesn’t do apps. He did CD baby and he sold CD Baby a few years ago but he had an article about you know there’s people on the other side so kind of keep that in mind for whatever it is as far as just as being a human being yourself you know just keep in mind that whatever you’re doing there’s other people behind it like if you’re leaving a review for somebody or if your sending somebody an e-mail. Remember it’s not a computer your talking to but an actual person.
Carter (0:28:09) Exactly and that’s a really good way to put it.
Karol (0:28:14) Cool so let’s kind of…let’s kind of just wrap this up. This has been like mind blowing to me. Fascinating. I’m amazed that it’s possible to just take a code base and for a few hundred bucks flip it and just start and basically just killing it over time with small wins. I love all the stuff you shared here. What’s something you would say to kind of close it out. Or even somebody who’s not getting started somebody who’s been doing this for a while what would you tell them to kind of I guess help them either make more money or get more downloads anything which are kind of one and the same as far as this app game is concerned.
Carter (0:29:01) Sure, yeah. I’ll answer that in two parts. The first part like if your someone who’s looking to just get started and you’re just kind of wondering there’s alot of unknowns like how to go from having an idea to publishing an app. And I would…you know I’m not trying to promote myself but if you go to my website there’s an eBook there. I don’t make any money off this at all so it’s totally free. But if you read that it’s like a 35 page PDF I wrote a couple of months ago and it’s for a lot of people if you just want to walk through like “here’s how you work with a developer, here’s how you hire a developer, here’s how you market your app, here’s what promotions do….like blah, blah, blah.” It’s really helpful for anyone who’s just looking to have a 20 minute read about what’s going on. The other answer to that question is that I think that there’s a big shift in the business model of apps. And this is kind of a bigger question I’m going to write a lot about in the future and talk to some people about but I think it’s really important to start thinking about the business model that you want to get into. And some people don’t have that conversation with themselves before they get in. They go in and they say “I’m gonna build and app or I’m gonna build a game and it’s going to make money and it’s going to be great.” That’s the end of their kind of thinking and they are thinking about how does this app produce more money. What I will say is that that is a developer style thought processes. The other end of the spectrum is like “Okay, I’m going to go build a behemoth game that I can go drive massive traffic to and it’ll convert enough traffic that will make money. And that’s the other of the spectrum where people try to get on that top grossing list.
Karol (0:30:47) Right
Carter (0:30:48) What I will say is that the next big opportunity in the app market in my opinion is to be on the publishing end of it. Then what I mean by that is whether you flip apps or build apps or whatever you do you create apps in order to sell your traffic to someone who’s willing to pay enormous amount of money. And these big companies will pay five to ten dollars for every install that you deliver of their game. So if you…has their game and their app and a user clicks through and then installs the game they will pay you like six bucks for it.
Karol (0:31:17) Nice.
Carter (0:31:19) It’s amazing to try to wrap your head around that that they can make that much money. But it’s also almost impossible for an indie developer to be able to make that much money themselves. You know?
Karol (0:31:31) Yeah.
Carter (0:31:32) I want to give some advice and this is what I’m doing. Is to go into the app market as a publisher and say I’m going to build games or build apps with the complete intention of developing a relationship with these bigger companies and selling them really good traffic and making that my business model. Making that my revenue source. And a good example of this is the Tom series. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen those where it’s a small animal and you talk through it and says exactly what you say right back to you.
Karol (0:32:10) No, I haven’t seen that.
Carter (0:32:13) Yeah like there…they have probably like 80 or 90 games and it’s like all 3-D, like really simple graphics and kids just love it. Like these guys have millions of downloads and they make all their money on publishing ads. Because they do direct deals with these big advertisers and they make four or five hundred thousand dollars a month.
Karol (0:32:32) Wow.
Carter (0:32:33) And before they started doing that they were making like $30,000 a month trying to get in-app purchases and cross platform games and now they just go and say “Look we got a huge user base that love our apps.” They do these really great integrations of saying like “Oh like check out this awesome you know tiger app for a talking tiger type of app.” and they have kind of cracked this nut. And I think as someone getting started that publishing model is definitely a really good way to make a lot of money, to have a lot of fun and it could work out really really well.
Karol (0:32:33) Cool. Well dude thank you so much. Where can people find your twitter, your website, etc…
Carter (0:33:18) Yeah I would say all my content and blog is at bluecloudsolutions.com and then I’m pretty active on facebook and twitter. You can get the facebook from the website with a link on the side there like a button. And then twitter is a twitter.com/bluecloudonline and yeah I do my best to respond to everyone uh I get a lot of e-mails but I definitely try to get back to everyone so if they want just shoot me a note on twitter is probably the best way or you know post something on facebook and I’ll read it.
Karol (0:33:55) Fantastic. Alright thank you so much Carter.
Carter (0:33:57) Man it’s my pleasure. This has been great.
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Check out Carter via Twitter and BlueCloudSolutions (auto video play warning; turn down/off your speakers if you’re at work).
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