Inspired by Kreci’s developer earning reports I’ve decided to start publishing my own, from the start.

I don’t believe in the term passive income, but rather a long term repayment for initial effort, time and expertise. Fine it doesn’t quite roll off the tongue like the term passive income nor it as seductive, sorry.

I currently consult on web and iPhone development and although provides an adequate income I’d like to move into a more “product focused” life style. I’d like to build a lifestyle business that provides the majority of my income. What I won’t include in this is any income from consulting or non-product work.

This is the first month of actively seeking out products to build and improve. At the moment, I have a few small apps, but as you’ll see the income is insignificant. I’m in the process of throwing everything at the wall, seeing what sticks and is profitable, and working with that. Eventually I’d like the majority of my income not to come from an hourly or project based fee. In the near future, I’d like my hosting costs and developer program subscriptions to be paid for by products, so I’ll be looking for about £125 per month.

Every product that I build I plan on having a 3 year existence. Year one after launch needs to cover at least the development and design cost, years 2 and 3 are then profit. My time for internal projects is priced at the bargain-basement minimum cost of living for just me.

The Earners

iAds $47.98 from WiFi Mac Address my only iPhone app with adverts at the moment, this has been it’s biggest month ever in revenue. WiFi Mac Address was built in a day and has had very little or no work invested in it.

AdMob has raked in the princely sum of $1.62, great. eCPM for my Android app is $0.15. I think I’ll update the app once more and see what impact that has before making the decision to turn it into abandon ware.

This blog has a few affiliate ads hand picked by me and they have generated $2.18 I don’t really expect this site to earn any money but won’t complain if it does.

The biggest earner was TrackTime with $49.90 however; I don’t expect that to continue earning any money as it has moved to another developer. It was too much work to maintain an old code base of that size, and I’d like to concentrate on developing new products.

Finally, SiteAuditHQ made a total of $7 through one sale. Site Audit HQ is a content analysis tool that I built over a weekend to test an idea for a fully featured product. It’s a very manual process as automating the whole thing would have taken too much time. This will probably pivot or get scrapped over the next few months.

That gives me a grand total of $107.98 or about £69.11 before the horrific Paypal exchange rate. Seeing as I have to start somewhere, I’m not overly disappointed as I’m about £55 short of my first milestone. However, I expect to lose the TrackTime income soon so need to compensate for that.

The Dead Weight

bikecoffeebike.com is a recommendation blog that launched on the 29th of September targeted at the UK cycling market. A blatant copy of Shawn Blanc’s awesome Tools and Toys I hope he isn’t offended. It will generate income through affiliate links and shouldn’t take more than 1-2 hours a week to maintain. Total time invested in it so far has been about 8 hours.

Secret project number 1 has been taking up most evening and weekends. It’s a paid for iOS app that will probably sell in the £2.99 - £6.99 range ($5 - $10USD) As expected this is going to need quite a high level of polish and finish to sell in that range. Oh and needs to launch before christmas.

October and Beyond

During October I need to revive my Android app, as it hasn’t been touched since January 2011 when I added AdMob to the application. I also really need to think about the future of SiteAuditHQ which needs a facelift at the very least, but it will probably be easier to bin it.

Ideally I’d like to be working on as few code bases as possible with a preference to paid for apps over free with advertising. I very much doubt that I’ll get this right first time, but if bikecoffeebike.com and the Secret Project were to provide most of my future product based income, I’d be very happy. At the moment all I can say is it’s easy to build a $50 a month app, but I couldn't build and maintain hundreds.