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by stevenwei 5083 days ago
In this specific case though, Sparrow was far from a low-to-modest traction product. Judging from their ranking history, they've been consistently in the Top 50 grossing overall on the Mac App Store[1], and Top 20 grossing utilities on the iPhone[2]. That's likely worth $2000-3000/day in revenue.

Those numbers are sustainable if you have a small team (1-3 people), but I'm not sure how big Sparrow's team was. Either way, I would say that they were in a very similar position to Instapaper, except the only difference being they had raised some VC funding (with all that implies regarding needing an exit in the future).

[1] http://www.appannie.com/app/mac/sparrow/ranking/history/#vie...

[2] http://www.appannie.com/app/ios/492573565/ranking/history/#v...