I am sure this was just a growing pain point, but I could not get any answers from them for about a week while filing my IT returns, just kept getting automated reminders. So I ended up going with Taxmantra, another e-tax filing provider and got it done within a day.
Any specific reason for doing this instead of just charging people for using the tips? Are your users generally skeptical of accuracy of tips and as such not likely to pay?
"As I understand it Amazon is demanding Hachette to sell their books at a certain price. This is highly unusual"
how is this different from Walmart deciding at what price it sells its suppliers' product. Almost all the retailers decide the final selling price of suppliers' products, that is the reason they are able to undercut mom&pop retail stores. Only exception on supplier side is Apple and to some extent Bose who have the brand leverage to dictate their prices to retailers.
I would love to know more if you are planning to do something similar for mobile games. As a mobile games developer I know that something like this will resonate with a lot of mobile game developers
I do plan on going next year. I decided to skip this year as I was not sure how valuable it will be, but now I feel I was wrong about that. Good luck with continued success for this and future games.
any tips on how to get in touch with the Apple dev relations team? We generally send emails to [email protected] around launches, but they don't seem to get any response.
We have had similar success on all 3 platforms, as it is easier to stand out on Amazon, Google play drives a lot of downloads, and Apple monetizes very well. For us, it is almost 34-33-33 in terms of revenue breakup.
The first lesson I had in this industry was to always prepare for a lean patch. In a hit driven business, you can never be sure when the next hit will come, so always good to have as large a runway as possible.
Having said that, this has been my largest worry in this startup, and has caused many a sleepless nights.
Most of our users are in US, UK and Europe. We monetize via In App Purchases (IAPs) and Ads. On average we monetize close to industry standards, 2% of people pay for hints, powerups and other IAPs, while ads give a decent $2 eCPM ($2 for 1000 impressions)
We have games on iOS, Google play and Amazon app stores. Mostly trivia games, but some arcade games too.
As an example, this is our most popular game across the 3 stores, with 1 million+ downloads https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.froods.dwt...
Our mobile games startup started in Dec 2013 is profitable. Our monthly revenues are 3-4X our monthly expenses (which includes market salary for Co-Founders.) In fact in the last 2-3 months, we have been able to save up almost 18 months worth of runway for our team of 8.
Bear in mind that the team is based in India, so our salary and other expenses cannot be compared to Silicon Valley, but in India we pay market rates.
A similar thing happened to me when I made public a previously private repo on Amazon and forgot to scrub it for AWS key. Luckily I got an email from Amazon within 24 hours of the instances being started, and as such my bill was just $360, which in any case they waived off.
You might want to check your Github repos.
An Indian startup here looking to register a C corp soon. How have you setup the two entities? Does the US corp get all the revenues, and pay the Indian company a development fee for the product? Which company pays the salary, US or Indian? Anything else to keep in mind while going down this route?
The numbers are correct. These numbers have been reported by GungHo (the company that has made Puzzles&Dragons). They have to report their revenue numbers as they are traded in the Osaka Stock Exchange. [1]
Also these are April numbers, recent revenue estimates will be even higher as the game is now climbing up the top grossing charts (iTunes) in US too.