App Empire: Make Money, Have a Life, and Let Technology Work for You

Show Me the Money!

Monetizing Your Apps

Money can't buy happiness but neither can poverty.

—Leo Rosten

When I was a kid, I realized pretty quickly that I needed more money than the small allowance I was getting every week for making my bed. Like most 10-year-olds, I wanted to buy things like baseball cards and an awesome shiny red bike I had seen in a magazine.

School was out for the summer and since my cousin had similar aspirations as me, we decided to sell lemonade from a stand on the sidewalk with hopes of making some money. We were two cute little kids selling lemonade for a dollar a cup and we thought that we were going to be an instant hit.

To our surprise, we didn't make that much money. Setting up the stand and making all those drinks ended up being a lot of work. We were determined and we kept at it for a few weeks before we realized there had to be a better way. If we were ever going to get those amazing bikes, we needed to make some changes, and make them quickly.

First, we tried charging two dollars per cup thinking that would make us more money; that actually made us less money because fewer people were buying. Next, we changed the time of day when we were selling the lemonade, figuring that we'd get the most amount of buyers around five o'clock when people were getting off work. This move did increase the number of people stopping by, and we started to sell more ...