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

Chapter 7: Harbor Master

If you take a guided tour of the Harbor Master team’s “World Headquarters,” the “first executive suite” turns out to be a kitchen table. The “deluxe executive suite” looks suspiciously like a bedroom. And, as Natalia Luckynova and Keith Shepherd show you around their workspace, the truth quickly becomes obvious: This is in fact their apartment — this husband-and-wife team who created Harbor Master work from home on a near-zero budget. Yet their company, Imangi Studios, is one of the most successful iPhone publishers on the planet. Until recently it only had two employees, both of which still sleep just a few feet from where they work.

Imangi Studios has a YouTube video tour of their office that you can watch online. It’s an irreverent parody of the self-important marketing dross of traditional video games publishers. In a very real sense, Luckynova and Shepherd have embarrassed the multinational developers, outshining this competition despite working out of a tiny apartment in Washington D.C. It would be hard to find a more powerful example of how the bedroom app developer has risen to fame and fortune thanks to the uniquely meritocratic landscape of the App Store.

Romancing the App

Luckynova and Shepherd met and married while working for the healthcare industry developing web applications — neither had any proven experience in making games, although they both held degrees in Computer Science. As a kid, Shepherd had entertained the idea of working for ...