Six Figures in 6 days

brunojppb | 643 points

It’s funny how trends change but Apple users’ appetite for icons stays the same...10 years ago Apple made the navigation icons in iTunes greyscale instead of color. I wasn’t sold on it so I fired up ResEdit and quickly edited the old icons into the new sprite file inside the app package.

I saw other people complaining online so I posted the updated resource file on my $5/mo shared hosting and put a link on a forum...it was picked up on some blogs but I didn’t realize it had become popular, then I woke up a couple of days later and I’d blown through 10s of gigs of bandwidth and had my hosting account frozen (conveniently the day I’d planned a long roadtrip to test a gps/photo sharing app I’d been working on).

Years later people were still asking if I could help them change their iTunes icons, or even getting mad at me that I hadn’t updated the file to work with newer versions!

https://osxdaily.com/2010/09/03/get-color-icons-back-in-the-...

macNchz | 3 years ago

As an Android user, I am completely blown away by two things: #1 iPhones got this only in 2020, when Android had this since the first version, #2 iPhone owners are willing to spend $28 for a icon pack, a very nice one, but still an icon pack.

kyran_adept | 3 years ago

I would ignore most of this advice and simplify it this way:

Act Immediately

Get an influencer

All the rest of OP's journey doesn't really matter.

My newest venture this summer did 7 figures after I got motivated by watching Hamilton, this was also a week long period of sales, which came after a 2 week long period of idea and building hype. It definitely came down to doing something very trendy and having people know about it, and there is nothing organic in that process. I don't think the same venture could do that now already. It would have to be new trendy things.

vmception | 3 years ago

Of course I check the comments here and theres the usual chorus of dismissals as "just luck."

It's funny because anyone who actually believed that would never have created those icons 7 years ago. They would have never published them and they would have never stuck their neck out to promote them.

In a way it seems like the best way to ensure that you never "get lucky" is to assume that it's all just luck in the first place.

tengbretson | 3 years ago

It's like Among Us.

Published in 2018, absolutely exploded in 2020 due to a single Twitch streamer. I'm pretty sure the devs of Among Us became millionaires virtually overnight. Influencers with large followings wield awesome power.

umvi | 3 years ago

There is nothing on this blog that I can see except text and some links at the bottom, yet if I have JS disabled I just get a black page.

JS to display text. Brilliant.

LandR | 3 years ago

So the trick to being in the right place at the right time is to find the right place, then just wait there for the right time to arrive.

m12k | 3 years ago

Meta rant: Why, oh why do people use low contrast colors and expect people to be able to read their blog? Has nobody heard about accessibility? Or do they not care, because “I can read it”.

falcolas | 3 years ago

All I'm seeing is a completely black page. Wonder if it's uBlock origin, Firefox, or macOS that the page doesn't play nice with.

m12k | 3 years ago

Two questions:

- who pays $28 for icons you have to install yourself one by one?!

- most of these icons are protected by copyright/trademark laws, how is still legal?

gregcrv | 3 years ago

> Try many things once to figure out what you want to do twice.

For some reason, that was the line that stuck with me the most.

Now, the only real skill I have is in software development, but fortunately there are a lot of things to try in software development, so I can give that suggestion a try run.

luord | 3 years ago

Well, from a business perspective this is no less than very impressive. Was he just a heck of a lucky guy? I don't know, luck is everywhere now, but the guy was pretty aware of the steps his product was taking and was able to react accordingly to maximize revenue... that's the secret.

rodolphoarruda | 3 years ago

> So I quickly packaged them, uploaded them to Gumroad, and embedded them on a Notion site using Super. All of this took about two hours.

Love the software stack. Is this the norm these days? Am I out of touch with web tech?

lxe | 3 years ago

This is heartening. I've made some goofy stuff recently that I've been vacillating between releasing or not.

The most complete thing is a uhh.. parody text editor.. game. I've seen other indie projects recently that gave me all sorts of imposter syndrome and made me second guess the value in something so critical as a text editor made for laughs. I'm encouraged by a 28$ icon pack to wrap it up and put it out there, even if it's for 2$ and doesn't sell at all. Ride or die, right?

MrLeap | 3 years ago

Ah, success, luck and skill. A really interesting topic.

There is also a very good Veritasium Video about that:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LopI4YeC4I

xorfish | 3 years ago

This is a typical phenomenon of Extremistan: https://coffeeandjunk.com/mediocristan-extremistan/

delaaxe | 3 years ago

28 is too high for icons. The conversion rate is very telling. Do a 70% sale and promote it and watch it rocket. Maybe that was the plan

m3kw9 | 3 years ago

The good-ole be lucky story.

aroundtown | 3 years ago

Re: the icon set that this guy's pitching - does anyone remember the Prada phone? It was one beautifully done UI.

https://www.slashgear.com/prada-phone-3-0-by-lg-review-08215...

huhtenberg | 3 years ago

I have several side projects and blog regularly and can definitely agree that it's rain or shine for smaller creators without large audiences. I go from several sales in a day to weeks without any interest.

Edit: That being said I'm on Twitter @k0ode if you want to follow along.

bochoh | 3 years ago

Get an influencer and you can sell even an icon pack at $28 to thousands of people.

codegladiator | 3 years ago

"the idea of being annoying or over-sharing is only an idea that you invent to stop you from sharing" - I strongly disagree. It's invented by the community to prevent enormous amounts of spam.

block_dagger | 3 years ago

Anyone know which font that is? Devtools says "space" but for obvious reasons it's hard to find with Google search. Space Mono is made by Colophon but I don't see it on their website.

trwhite | 3 years ago

why when i ctrl+clicked on a link did the current tab change URL instead?

maaarghk | 3 years ago

> All from one. Single. Tweet.

Well yes, but you usually either need (a) tens of thousands of pre-existing Twitter followers or (b) a huge amount of luck that some celebrity that you @ed retweets you.

dheera | 3 years ago

Seems lots of people are jumping on the bandwagon: https://gumroad.com/l/aLnrp

wgx | 3 years ago

Hmm I can see this potentially creating a new market. The biggest issue is probably getting app developers on board with variations of their logo.

atarian | 3 years ago

Nothing is as powerful as having someone’s attention. If Brownlee can get this guy $100K with a tweet imagine what he’s pulling down himself.

ponker | 3 years ago

The most important point was missed: MKBHD happened

sturza | 3 years ago

How do these idea even pop into ones head? How can I start hustling? I’m a simple pleb engineer at FAANG, but want to get rich quick.

person_of_color | 3 years ago

Oh no I just bought this but then I looked at the instructions... It's not for the faint of heart to do this for every app.

lxe | 3 years ago

Nice coverage for super.so, too! That bump will keep boosting the earnings from this icon pack - whole ecosytem you have here.

harrisonjackson | 3 years ago

My takeaway from this is build an audience.

anderspitman | 3 years ago

I must congratulate you on having a settings icon not be a gear, or even a less meaningful tool of some sort.

ansible | 3 years ago

People what to change an X but can not make one theirself so find someone who sell an X that fits the willing

(x={icon,...})

nonsapreiche | 3 years ago

He writes "97% profit margins". How is that possible if AppStore takes 30%?

EDIT: This seems to be outside AppStore.

pulse7 | 3 years ago

the actual tweet (doesn't seem to be linked in the article) https://twitter.com/traf/status/1307707156788060160

nerfhammer | 3 years ago

Good job on the icons. They look more apple than the Appleish than the apple icons.

bb88 | 3 years ago

What blows my mind is how humble and optimistic that post is. I think the author is still a little bit sceptic: he was well prepared and after initial success he executed perfectly but still: what are the odds? Good luck!

maciejw | 3 years ago

The most important part to achieve this: Have a lot of luck

hansdieter1337 | 3 years ago
[deleted]
| 3 years ago

so how much was paid in ads on twitter and how much was paid to the influencer?

b20000 | 3 years ago

Congrats !

aceelric | 3 years ago

> In 2013, the jailbreaking days of iOS were in full effect.

I thought jailbreaking was basically over by 2013

georgiecasey | 3 years ago

it is always good to read success after the story.

erdinc | 3 years ago
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| 3 years ago

Apple users pay 28 USD for an icon pack. I'm blown away. Is this how they behave with everything? Just ask what you want and they will pay for it?

tubularhells | 3 years ago

He forgot the most important lesson: be lucky :)

andrepd | 3 years ago

So he says oversharing doesn't exist? I built https://20-things.com but I doubt anyone would care to look at its source code since it was built with ASP.NET MVC (not Core). To publish or not to publish?

dt3ft | 3 years ago

What blows me away is that this is 2020 and iOS still won't let you place icons anywhere you want on your screen.

It's not just that you're not allowed to make your home screen look the way you want it, it's that even if you decide for a certain ordering, moving the icons in the right order is tougher than a sliding puzzle.

hota_mazi | 3 years ago