Picking A start-up to be co-founder of, etc Pickiness

[Fred Grott]

So I guess I should explain I am being so picky about picking a
start-up to be co-founder given android dev skills are in high demand.

Okay, normally most android mobile app firms spend 40% to 80% of gross
revenue in marketing. In the long term it works out you get some hits,
but the degree of the hits determines the largeness of the rewards and
marketing channels are still 'Tin_pan-Alley'. Tin-Pan-Alley? Yeah
google search it, very famous NYC stretch of early music studios,
music startups if you prefer.

What if we did not have to spend 80% gross to get the huge revenue via
marketing in these fragmented channels? I could use reducing
technical debt as the major filter. Build up a code base, and reduce
feature sets of apps..more versions, etc. Here is a little gem
android mobile apps without marketing get about 5k to 10k per month in
one of the hot categories.

One of the hot categories right now is apps that customize the android
experience. A perfect way to break into gaming is to do LiveWallpaper
game apps for android.

Now that does not seem much, but what if with that reducing technical
debt you built up some tools to do Agile Android Development in such
as way that efforts in both areas allow you to produce 50 apps in 12
months.

Okay we have 5k time 50 apps per month at end of 12 months which would
be $250,000 gross, our cut is 70% of that gross which is $175,000 or
after taxes about $87,000 per month. So that is $1 Million per year
net. Wait I am not done yet, as I never said to ignore marketing.

We do not have to resort to the pay to get the marketing juice hit
that the Tin-Pan-Alley example did. We play one app store against the
other as interest among users of one app store in our LiveWallpapers
does in fact raise the interest of the apps in the other app store.
Obviously, that is not the only trick I will be using, as there are
some ones I cannot yet make public.

And assuming that we have 10% that become hits of modest means that
would be 5.apps out of that 50 apps doing 100k downloads monthly per
app. Which pushes the $87,000 after taxes per month to $337,000 which
comes to $3.6 million per year. All that is just with one person.

Thus, I only need to do one 3-month android development freelance
price discounted for start-ups project to obtain the 12 months seed
capital. The platform is more of the system used rather than the
traditional software and services combination. and of course the
platform is dynamic as I do not expect the current market
fragmentation in mobile apps to last any more than 5 years or less.

Plus, I have this self-funded hang up I want to do one 3 to 4 month
android freelance project to fund this as than I have full control of
when to accept outside capital, terms, etc.

See folks, yes I do have good business model understanding and I am
not just saying no to things for the heck of it. Yeah, I could just do
a project take the money and run, but that is not me and I refuse to
play it forward to the start-up community in that manner.

So again this is why I ask for a meal paid meeting of several hours
when a start-up tries to pitch me on completing and android
application for them as there are out there small businesses
pretending to be start-ups that have no chance in receiving Angel/VC
interest or funding and I have to weed those out because their
interests align with being deceptive to the developer, etc as the
replacement for adequate funding.

Some of the obvious convergence areas between my other start-up goals
and the potential start-up needing an android prototype is that my
agile tools and libraries would be of use in fast prototyping an
android application and iterating through potential user feedback.

Not this is the only start-up idea as I have a particular code base
built up to pursue some other ideas as well. Thus, now you know some
more of why I am being picky and why I put start-ups though some
'paces'.


--
Fred Grott
Android Developer
Blog: http://shareme.github.com