Dan Grigsby of Mobile Orchard gave an excellent talk at the 360iDev conference about how how developers can make a decent living off the iPhone ecosystem. He talks about contract work and making money off the developer “miners” in the iPhone development gold rush.
He also has some valuable tips for developers who want to build and sell apps. He did mention a marketing secret that remains largely untapped: Facebook. Facebook could be gold for long term, free marketing. The idea: make it easy for users to share stuff (presumably produced in your app) with their friends. Flower Garden is one of the few apps I’ve seen employ this strategy. There is a lot of potential here and I’m planning on integrating Facebook with my Grades app. I’ve actually been thinking about doing this for some time.
One item I would have liked to see addressed is the necessity of fun, quality design in iPhone apps. I would encourage design challenged developers to work with a designer partner.
Check it out: Podcast: Warm, Clothed and Fed: Developer Run iPhone Businesses
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Interesting. I hadn't thought about that but Facebook really is "free" marketing. There is a huge amount of people that you could connect with through interconnected friends, groups, fan pages, etc. Great post!
Exactly. If you can find a way to make it fun, easy, and useful for people to share stuff related to your app on Facebook, the marketing could not only be viral and free, but sustained: people keep posting stuff as they use your app.