Ethan Nicholas- "iShoot Lite" | Internet Entrepreneurship

In 2008, Ethan Nicholas and his wife were in deep financial trouble. They couldn’t pay their mortgage and they were both out of work. Ethan Nicholas, a programmer for years, was distressed by his financial problems. Although he didn’t have much of it, in his free time he would play any iphone games he could find, downloading and deleting over and over. Nicholas had recently read about a man who had made 250,000 dollars creating an iphone game the he played, called Prism. With essentially nothing to lose, Nicholas went out and bought very inexspenive software and files, and went to work on a game he called “iShoot.”

In just a few days, he had finished the game and was granted the rights to put it on the app store a the high price of 3.99 $. Although he made around 2 grand in the first few weeks, it began to level off and reduced to nothing. He then downgraded the game to a free version called “iShoot Lite.” The game took off on the app store, going for hundreds of thousands of downloads in the first few weeks. It rose to 2 millions downloads in just a few months, and Nicholas began recieving money from ads daily. The game saw thousands of players upgrading to the better version, costing them the original price of 3.99. It’s interesting to see that more players upgraded after it became popular, when people refused to actually buy the game at first. Nicholas idea to allow the game to be a free download turned out the make him hundreds of thousands of dollars. Nicholas made around 1 million dollars off the app, and needless to say he was able to pay off his mortgage, and now works for a prominent technology company.

source: internet-entrepreneurship.com