[melling]

I was trying to have the conversation about "real mobile companies" today in this HN thread.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5911728

People don't seem to understand that building a company 99 cents at a time isn't going to work. Real companies have overhead. Sure someone in the Ukraine might be doing great with $1000/month in revenue but that's not going to cut it for most people.

[Steko]

I don't think moving the goalposts from $30k/month to $1k/month out of thin air makes your argument more convincing.

"building a company 99 cents at a time isn't going to work"

Except when it does. You could say the same thing about any price point.

From your earlier thread:

"It doesn't sound like the economics are there to build the next EA, id Software, etc."

Is Rovio not many times bigger than id software?

[ryanhuff]

How much of their revenue comes from the initial purchase, versus in-app purchases? 0.99 is great if you can do it over and over again, and get the customer LTV much higher.

[smartician]

I'm not sure if that is good or bad for people like me who just want to be a one man "company", build stuff on their own without all the overhead and friction. If I can pick up a few $1000/months long tail crumbs that are being ignored by the big players, I'll be happy.

Of course if the mobile economics are so bad that the big players will invent vacuum cleaners to suck up all those crumbs, I'm toast...

[TillE]

Large companies will never ever manage to fill all niches. It's just not in their nature.

A small business that makes enough for one or two people to survive is a perfectly valid goal, but it's not a "startup" as defined by pg and others.

[zmitri]

Depends what you mean by real. It's very real for a two man team to build something into an app that brings in a few hundred thousand a year (and there are examples of those for sure), but building a huge company is an entirely different discussion.