Analysis of the Techcrunch 2009 Web App Survey

Techcrunch has released the results of their 2 month Web App Survey.  Some pretty interesting results.  I’ll highlight the ones I found most interesting. First off, the good and bad news.

A quarter of the respondents have apps that see 10,000 active users or more!  That’s 20,000 apps that are seeing some fine activity.  But 30% have 100 or less users.  24,000 apps just sitting there.  First off, I’ve seen the quality (or lack thereof) of that bottom tier so I’m not too surprised.  Too many developers cranked out ill-conceived or poorly executed apps in a rush to “the gold rush.”  I’m actually more surprised that 20,000 apps are getting a fair amount of use, given the sheer number of apps and their seriously limited channels of discovery.  But then again, there have been a purported 1 billion apps downloaded, clearly some apps are getting used.  And that bottom tier begins to make even more sense when you consider the following:

It is clear by now that the mobile app market is a very different beast than many industries, having seriously limited channels of delivery and discoverability, and with that in mind it could be argued that spending gobs of money on marketing won’t yield traditional results.  But for 54% of developers to just push it out there and then sit back and see what happens seems silly.  And of course it’s probably that same 54% reported that their app costs them nothing to maintain.

The next several slides go through the number of people working full time for the app in various capacities.  75% report zero to one full time engineer (with 34% of that reporting zero).  And with that the rest make sense, full time designers; 65% don’t have one, full time marketers; 59% don’t have one, full time managers; 59% don’t have one.

Nearly 50% have just one founder.  The picture of a lone developer, working late into the night on his/her app really seems to hold true, at least half the time.  And when you account for the other 32% of founders that are reporting being a team of two, it’s not hard to see how a whopping 82% of applications are bootstrapped. Basically one or two people working together on their own dime and time to create an app.

But I’d like to close with some good news for those wishing to develop a mobile app and make it their living. Look at the following slide:

Read one way, 79% of apps are supporting 1 or more people.  Now we don’t know what being “full time staff” really means in terms of what people are getting paid, but I have to assume that the majority of these people are making a some sort of decent living.  So it can be done.  Like all statistics I’m sure there is much more of a story here, but gleaning what we can from the above I’d say that mobile app development is still a compelling proposition.

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