ISBX Interviews Eddie Marks of Inedible Software

February 23, 2011
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February 23, 2011

Arthur Iinuma

We love mobile apps.  We real­ly do, and not just because it helps put food on the table, but because we tru­ly believe it is an expand­ing mar­ket with lim­it­less poten­tial.  We are known for iphone app devel­op­ment… We’ve devel­oped resource apps for law firms, engi­neer­ing cal­cu­la­tor apps, ecard apps, sur­vey apps, tele­vi­sion show apps, apps that make fart sounds, apps for celebri­ties, apps for big box retail brands, apps as a busi­ness tool for enter­pris­es, and even apps that allow you put fun­ny hats on peo­ple.  And yet, with all the apps we’ve pro­duced, we’re occa­sion­al­ly blown away by a cou­ple of devel­op­ers that man­age to trump our efforts, with just a sin­gle app.
So nat­u­ral­ly we’re quick to try and gain insight on what it takes to make a win­ning app.  And when we say “win­ning” we’re refer­ring to an app that has been down­loaded and installed on more than 7 mil­lion devices.
So what exact­ly does it take to gen­er­ate this amount of suc­cess?  For starters, maybe a dou­ble major in Math and Eco­nom­ics from Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty and per­haps an equal­ly tal­ent­ed busi­ness part­ner of the same school — but we’re sure there were a fair amount of caf­feinat­ed drinks, and absolute­ly no short­age of ambi­tion and motivation.
So meet Eddie Marks, co-founder of Ined­i­ble Soft­ware.  Eddie shares with us some insight on what it takes to be one of the top 100 devel­op­ers by vol­ume of down­loads in the Apple iTunes App Store.  We hope maybe some of his wis­dom and luck might rub off on us just by lis­ten­ing to (or read­ing) what he has to say.
Com­pa­ny Name: Ined­i­ble Soft­ware, LLC
Name: Edward Marks
Title: Co-Founder
1.       ISBX: Please tell us how you got into devel­op­ing iPhone appli­ca­tions.
Eddie: In the sum­mer before my senior year at Stan­ford I learned that there was to be a class on iPhone pro­gram­ming. For var­i­ous rea­sons this seemed like an inter­est­ing oppor­tu­ni­ty, not the least of which was that it was ille­gal. The NDA had­n’t yet lift­ed, and so devel­op­ers weren’t allowed to talk to any­one about the iPhone SDK unless they were on the same devel­op­ment team. I pro­posed the idea to my room­mate at the time, James, that we should take the class, and he agreed. 150 peo­ple showed up the first day for 50 spots, and so we had to apply to get in — one of the only class­es at Stan­ford for which that was the case. The pro­fes­sors admit­ted us, which was a bit sur­pris­ing as nei­ther of us were Com­put­er Sci­ence majors (I stud­ied Math­e­mat­ics and Eco­nom­ics, James stud­ied Physics), though we both had tak­en the CS core already. We worked togeth­er on our final project, spent most of our month-long win­ter break shin­ing it up, and released Air Gui­tar to the store mid-Jan­u­ary, 2009. Every­thing just kept rolling from there.
 
2.       Did you have an expec­ta­tion that these apps would bring in mon­ey and have high user adop­tion?
In a word, no. We cer­tain­ly had high hopes for Air Gui­tar, which was sup­posed to be like Oca­ri­na but with rock gui­tar, but we tried to be very real­is­tic with our expec­ta­tions. Rev­enue wise, we were still in school and weren’t used to hav­ing any income what­so­ev­er, so what for most peo­ple might be dis­ap­point­ing (and to most large com­pa­nies cer­tain­ly dis­ap­point­ing) was total­ly awe­some to us.
3.       How did you come up with the idea of the Shot­gun app?
The pro­fes­sors of the iPhone class (Paul Mar­cos and Evan Doll) encour­aged us to think about what made the iPhone dif­fer­ent — things like the mul­ti-touch screen, always-avail­bale inter­net con­nec­tion, and GPS. We looked at the accelerom­e­ter, looked at what the mar­ket was doing with it, and thought we could do much bet­ter. While peo­ple had shake (Urbans­poon) and tilt (Super Mon­key Ball), we thought we could do real ges­ture detec­tion. The idea that berthed Air Gui­tar was tilt­ing the phone to pitch bend the note after you strummed. We thought that would be way cool. Air Gui­tar launched and sold a good num­ber of copies, but it did­n’t blow up, and so we tabled our plans to expand its fea­ture set. We were also a bit burnt out from labor­ing on it quite so hard for quite so long. James one day men­tioned that the shot­gun cock­ing ges­ture was an icon­ic ges­ture we might be able to detect, but when I said it was a genius idea, he dis­missed it as stu­pid. I, how­ev­er, went to my room and cod­ed the ges­ture detec­tor, and only when he got a chance to test it him­self did he get excit­ed about the project, at which point we joint­ly cre­at­ed an app to house that ges­ture detec­tor.
 
4.       What do you think makes this app (and your oth­er apps) so inter­est­ing that it attracts such a large vol­ume of down­loads?
Apple has always called the iPhone a “mag­i­cal” device. I think detect­ing how the user is mov­ing the phone cap­tures a lit­tle bit of this mag­ic. It def­i­nite­ly helped that the App Store was only a cou­ple of months old and no one had real­ly start­ed to lever­age the pow­er of the device like they have today, so there was prob­a­bly an addi­tion­al sense of nov­el­ty with the idea, but even today no one but us is focused on ges­ture detection.
5.       What are the most effec­tive ways of mar­ket­ing and pro­mot­ing your new apps?
There are a lot of ways to mar­ket and pro­mote your appli­ca­tions, rang­ing from free to extreme­ly expen­sive. The prob­lem is def­i­nite­ly a lit­tle eas­i­er if you have some mon­ey to throw at it, but we did­n’t pay for almost any pro­mo­tion until our lat­est app, Shot­gun Free 2, so it’s cer­tain­ly pos­si­ble to get recog­ni­tion with­out it. By far the best bang for your buck is to shoot a YouTube video and then to email it, with an ele­va­tor pitch of what your app does, to blogs. With noth­ing but a cold-call email we got our apps cov­ered on dozens of blogs includ­ing Giz­mo­do, IGN and Mac World. The YouTube video helps because the review­ers get thou­sands of apps sent to them, and a quick video can help them iden­ti­fy whether yours is actu­al­ly worth check­ing out.
6.       What’s next?  Any oth­er busi­ness ven­tures you’re work­ing on?
After run­ning Ined­i­ble for two years, James and I decid­ed that, while we enjoy mak­ing toys, it’s time for a change of pace. To that end we’ve been explor­ing either start­ing a new ven­ture or acqui­si­tion. Unfor­tu­nate­ly I can’t say much more than that, but stay tuned.
7.       What com­pa­nies in the mobile space inter­est you?
There is an all out war going on in the social gam­ing space in mobile. Zyn­ga has shown it to be quite prof­itable on the web, and the game mechan­ic might be even more com­pelling in mobile. But since Zyn­ga has proven out the con­cept so well, there are more than a cou­ple of com­pa­nies work­ing on this in mobile. Of note are Pock­et Gems, Brook­lyn Pack­et Co, Team Lava, Cap­com, The Play­forge, Zyn­ga itself, and prob­a­bly more. I’m very inter­est­ed to see who the win­ner is and how the games trans­form as they adapt them­selves to mobile devices.
8.       What is the dis­tri­b­u­tion of your company’s income, between ad rev­enue, paid apps, and out­side work?
I will say that near­ly 100% of our rev­enue comes from our free-to-play apps, name­ly POW, Shot­gun Free, and Shot­gun Free 2. The pay lists became very com­pet­i­tive very quick­ly, and com­pa­nies like EA tend to dom­i­nate them. The free lists were much eas­i­er, and we found ways over time to make more and more mon­ey from our free apps. The break­down is rough­ly 10% from In-App-Pur­chase, 50% from ban­ner adver­tise­ments, and 40% from incen­tivized-installs. We did some con­tract devel­op­ment ear­ly on, but we had less fun and made less mon­ey than we did on our own projects, so we quick­ly wound down that part of our business.
9.       Can you give us a break­down of active users vs total down­loads of the lat­est ver­sion of your most down­loaded app?
Our apps have a rel­a­tive­ly unique adop­tion pat­tern, though one per­haps typ­i­cal of toys. We did­n’t design our apps to be use­ful on a day-to-day basis (like a util­i­ty). We did­n’t design our apps to have tons of play­time (like a game), so we don’t see huge amounts of time invest­ed over the week or so after down­load. We did design our apps to make peo­ple smile, so we get a ton of down­loads. We did design our apps to make oth­er peo­ple smile, so we get peri­od­ic and ran­dom usage as cir­cum­stances war­rant, be it prank­ing an office work­er, play­ing on the play­ground, or shoot­ing down ideas in the board room. In num­bers, any par­tic­u­lar user has about a 5% chance of using the app on any par­tic­u­lar day but a 25% chance of using it in any par­tic­u­lar month. Mul­ti­ply that over a large num­ber of users, and its turned into a business.
ISBX sin­cere­ly val­ues Eddie’s time in shar­ing his expe­ri­ences as a young mobile app devel­op­er.  And we can real­ly appre­ci­ate what it takes to be able to devel­op a rather com­plex app while going through the rig­ors of school course­work.  A lit­tle over 10 years ago, our very own CTO was pro­gram­ming in his dorm room long before the iPhone came to exis­tence, before being plucked out at the end his fresh­man year by a ven­ture fund­ed dot com company. 
Hav­ing some insight on the unique­ness of the iPhone and devel­op­ing to take advan­tage of that while keep­ing things sim­ple seems to be the win­ning for­mu­la in this equa­tion.  Often­times we’ve found that the sim­plest, sin­gle-pur­posed apps have the strongest viral ele­ment, but we’re still not quite sure what makes some of these the ones that every­one, includ­ing your moth­er, would want to down­load and play with.
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