Ethan Nicholas, developer of a tank artillery game called iShoot, quit his day job the day his app rose to No. 1 in the App Store (it now sits at No. 7 as of this writing). I’d quit my day job too if I was making $37,000 in a single day from my app.
“I’m not going to be a millionaire in the next month, but I’d be shocked if it didn’t happen at the end of the year,” Nicholas stated in a phone interview. Nicholas has made $600,000 in a single month off his app, but his winnings didn’t come easy. After leaving his job as an engineer at Sun Microsystems, he worked eight hours a day on his app while taking care of his 1-year-old son. Nicholas taught himself how to write the app by reading websites because he couldn’t afford the developer books.
In order to boost sales, Nicholas coded a free version of the app called iShoot Lite which contained an advertisement for the $3, full version of iShoot. Talk about smart marketing.
Ethan is one of several developers striking rich in the App Store, so there’s still money to be made in the iPhone App business. Go ahead, be like Ethan and quit your job to make some REAL cash.