Appillionaires: Secrets from Developers Who Struck It Rich on the App Store

Chapter 4: The Gold Rush

“The anticipation was almost too much to handle. We’d made £11,000 in a single day. We didn’t know what to do. We got really confused and ended up losing the plot, with excitement and shock. We’d let this app out into the wild and watched it go. I sat in front of Magic Rank, watching the profits go up and up. We were buzzing off it. I remember not knowing what would happen next; when the end would be. Nothing made sense. We couldn’t take it. We just shut down. I took a week off and did nothing, just stared at a wall. I had to stop looking at stats, completely. I couldn’t sleep at all, just frazzled. You know how when you’ve had too much coffee and your brain goes mad? It was like that for a week and a half. Just so buzzed. It’s that feeling of being successful. This directly affected our lives. Just two people did this.” — Max Slade, one half of Johnny Two Shoes who, with his brother Josh, created the smash hit app Plunderland.

A Taste of Success

I know first-hand the extraordinary rush of creating a global hit on the App Store. I was one half of the two-person team that created Alice for the iPad. The book became so popular that it was a star guest on the Oprah Winfrey show in the week the iPad launched in the United States. Watching your app being shown off by Oprah is hard to do without screaming and clapping: the buzz was gut wrenching. It was a realization of the dream that every developer hopes for when they sign up to the App Store. Almost as soon ...