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What It's About
How a programmer earns a massive passive income advertising apps.
Business Model
Skills Required
Complexity
Profit Potential
Words of Wisdom
Outside of his full-time gig, Steve had been experimenting with designing mobile apps. He launched his hustle—called One Zero Apps—in 2013. The work primarily involved buying source code, changing the graphics, and re-uploading them to the App store. This is a little bit technical, but the point is that he was able to creatively reposition existing apps, modifying them a bit and calling them his own. This is acceptable to some degree, especially if you modify the app in some significant way.
Fun Fact
Paper company employee Steve Delarwelle struck it rich through mobile app advertising and acting as an ad company affiliate. One example of app advertising is when you are prompted to download another app when you open an app on your phone. If you do, somebody makes money off of that. Somebody also makes money if you connect to an app advertising company through one of their links. And Steve just happened to be one of those somebodies, at least for a year.
Notes from Chris
Episode 156
Steve Delarwelle was working at a paper company when he struck gold—earning an unexpected $650,000 from his side hustle in one year. Born and raised in the small town of Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, Steve had served three overseas tours in the Army before returning to his home state, getting married, and getting trained in computer programming. Steve decided to start a blog to document his attempt to make money from apps, along with his trials and tribulations in the App store. The blog cost him about $20 a month, but apart from that, he had no setup or ongoing costs. He used the blog to publish revenue figures for all of his apps, separated out by publisher so readers knew who he was making the most money with. In ad revenue from his own apps, Steve was generating a steady $600 to $900 per month. Good story so far, right? But then things got really crazy. One day in 2015, Steve woke up and discovered $13,000 sitting in his PayPal account. And it didn’t end there. The money just kept rolling in. The next month, from the same source, his payout was $35,0000, then $45,000, then $60,000, and so on. His highest month was over $100,000. When it was all said and done, Steve had brought in $650,000 for the year. No overhead; all profit. You could say this was a lucky break, and perhaps it was, but Steve contends that if he hadn’t invested an entire year in consistently publishing for his blog, or had the foresight to become an affiliate, it wouldn’t have happened. So, he worked hard for the returns, and… perhaps he also got a bit lucky. MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:- Steven Delarwelle's App Page: Some of the apps Steve sells in the Apple App store
- RemoteJobr: The job aggregate site for Remote Tech positions that Steve now manages
- Revmob: The ad company that hosted the affiliate program Steve signed up for
- 40,000 People Use This Web Developer's Side Hustle Every Day: How a San Francisco commuter became part of the original iPhone launch with a hustle that now helps more than 40,000 people every day
- Diamond in the Rough: Engagement Ring Hunt Turns Into Hustle: A search for the perfect engagement ring leads a software engineer in Baltimore on a mission to discover the algorithm for the ideal sparkly diamond. Along the way, he creates an affiliate side hustle with major potential.
