Rookie iPhone Dev Hits Gold With iAssociate Game

With Apple boasting over 100,000 titles in the iTunes App Store, most independent developers have learned the hard way that gaining any kind of valuable attention for their iPhone app takes far more heavy lifting than simply giving birth to a great idea.

Finnish iPhone newcomer Fredrik Wahrman, understands the pains of that harsh reality all too well. Wahrman, who launched his debut app iAssociate ($1.99) in June of 2009 with a total of nine downloads, has since clawed his way up from virtual obscurity into the Top 10 Word games in the U.S. App Store. You can also find iAssociate currently positioned in Apple's "What's Hot" game listings, offering the kind of epic exposure most iPhone developers can only fantasize about.

Fredrik Wahrman, a 31-year-old software engineer who lives in Porvoo, east of Helsinki, never coded for iPhone prior to creating iAssociate. In fact, he was a committed PC user until November of 2008 when he made a quantum leap over to Mac. His day job still includes producing 3D modeling software for large construction projects through a major software firm he's worked at in Finland for the past five years.

An initial investment of about $1,600 dollars U.S. is bringing this one rookie iPhone dev over 500 downloads per day for his $2 dollar word association puzzle game. The iPhone gold rush that's just beginning for Wahrman, seemed light years away only a few months earlier. iAssociate now earns Mr. Wahrman three times the income of his current day job.

"When I started this, it was all about seeing if it was possible to make some extra money from creating an iPhone app," Wahrman told the iPhone Savior in a Skype interview dialed in from Finland.

"Reading about the success of Trism and iShoot were two of the contributing factors that attracted me to iPhone development. It seemed possible for anyone to launch a game and wait for the money to come pouring in. After the first couple of weeks from launching my game, I realized that this was going to be extremely hard."

The goal of iAssociate is to guess which words are associated to the word(s) already visible. For each correct word players score points that eventually unlock more levels. Fredrik quickly learned that no one could care less about his complex mind mapping puzzle when it first hit the App Store in the summer of 2009. Rather than abandoning his fledgling effort, Wahrman determined that a name change might be the right idea to draw attention to the Lite version of his app.

"I wanted to exploit Apple's alphabetical listings for apps, so I changed the name to 'Associate This' for the Lite version," said Wahrman, "That's when I started to see a huge spike in sales, making it into the Top 100 ranking for puzzle games. The first Lite version, before I changed the name performed horribly. For one reason or another it did not do much."

Fredrik has updated iAssociate with new categories only four times since June, with his fourth major update coming in version 1.4  (currently awaiting App Store approval). His latest category will be centered on U.S. only associations, which is part of his marketing plan, releasing free versions of his app with only one category like; Associate This: USA, Associate This: Movies and Associate This: Girls. The single version levels eventually get added to his paid version of iAssociate, urging users to upgrade from inside his free apps.

Almost 90-percent of Wahrman's development time these days is consumed by creating content for each new level. Roughly 15 to 25 man hours are spent on populating each level with fresh associations. He intends to build his idea into a huge brand with weekly updates delivering new levels in sports, movies history and literature via Apple's in-app purchasing feature.

I asked Fredrik what advice he had for the truckloads of developers who's creations still remain lost in the frozen tundra of App Store obscurity. His simple insight relies more on committed persistence to a single idea than it does on brilliant marketing strategies.

"I would say that if you believe in your idea then make sure you focus on it one hundred percent," said Wahrman, "Don't just send out one or two emails, but put everything you have into it.  Almost no one replied to any emails I sent out trying to get initial attention."

As the sun begins to set here in Seattle, Fredrik Wahrman is already deep into 3:00 AM tomorrow morning. That's when we ended our last phone conversation. I tried to imagine how difficult it must be juggling two extremely challenging career paths at the same time.

"I told my boss I'm taking the week off so I can focus on iAssociate the entire time," Fredrik quickly admitted, "I've found it's too hard some days to accomplish both jobs."