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Comment by jashmenn | Hacker News Reader

I make ~$2,000 a month with an iPad game for cats. My co-founder and I were working on a "more serious" game and it was taking a long time. We needed a quick win, so I agreed to do it if we spent less than 4 weeks on it.

We completed the game from idea to app store in 3.5 weeks and it is now, by far, our most popular game. * face palm *

EDIT: We split the revenue 50/50, so the revenue (after apple's cut) on this game is around $4k/mo.

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Wait a second, the iPad app is free. Are you making money from cats clicking on ads?

If so, I salute you.

From the perspective of the advertiser that would be, at least, on the border of being a con job.

But the fine print on http://www.ipadgameforcats.com/ says that one level/theme is free and another is $1.99 as an in-app purchase.

Right. And sorry, I need to clarify. That number is the sum of our two cat apps. Our second app is a painting game (for cats). The code is essentially the same, just with a bit of GL painting + facebook sharing. (Yup, people post their cat's paintings on facebook.)

What exactly is an iPad game for cats?

Edit: Is this something for the untapped Crazy Cat Lady market?

http://www.ipadgameforcats.com/

If this makes money, then anyone can make money.

Not quite true.

This app makes money because anyone that owns a cat and an iPad looks for apps that their cat(s) can play with.

The same is true for baby apps. There are some super simple apps that babies enjoy, and those apps make very good money considering the development effort.

That being said, not everyone can pull it off. This particular cat app is fairly well done in my opinion. One must also keep in mind that just cause it makes $4k/month right now, it doesn't mean it'll continue to make that much 6 months from now.

I have two cats and it would NEVER have occurred to me to search for an app that my cats can play with. I am not a crazy cat woman and don't buy $1,000 cat toys. I mean, good on them for the success -- but I think anyone who actually stops and thinks "I wonder if there's a toy my cats can play with on my expensive electronic device" must be mental.

As much as I like cats, I am rather surprised people have no problem with cat claws on their >$500 touchscreen...

Gorilla Glass. If my keys don't scratch it, a cat claw definitely won't.

Even more surprising is that cat claws can't scratch those screens.

Your kidding, right? If this app makes $4,000 a month, I'm teaching myself iOS development this weekend.

FYI my dog likes to play this game too.

I'm thrilled that you've actually played our game.

I didn't play it, the puppy did. I'll try to catch some video.

Our other puppy prefers a sound board: http://www.flickr.com/photos/joshu/5702009514

WTF? This is a game for _cats_. Can't your dogs read?

I'm impressed. Super clever, and I dig the website. How did you get the game in front of jungle animals?

A friend of mine joked that we should get a tiger to play our ipad game. I immediately became obsessed with this idea. We worked for a couple weeks calling animal shelters etc with no luck. But we told everyone we knew that we wanted to do this.

My sister ended meeting someone at starbucks who's daughter worked for a shelter and the rest is history: http://conservatorscenter.org

They love us because it brought a good amount of exposure to their center. They've already asked us to make more apps specifically for them. They use it as a way for kids to interact with the animals.

Absolutely brilliant work. Site is perfectly aimed to the target market, polished, the way you made it initially free with an upgrade, and working with the zoo? Spot on.

I think I love everything about you guys. Great concept, execution, everything! It benefits you and somebody else (and a bunch of incredible animals)

I've now put that center on the list of places I need to visit.

looks like you've got some competition -> http://gamesforcats.com/

True story: I emailed friskies about this in November last year. I sent them a video of our game and asked if they wanted to work together. I had a few phone calls with them and they told us they loved the idea. Then one day: silence. They wouldn't return my calls or emails.

Now just this week they release this game, same idea, almost same domain. (I would guess the reason they didn't use the domain gameforcats.com is because I also own that domain.)

Folks say I should contact an IP lawyer, but I'm not sure I a) want to go up against big-corp (who will just claim they came up with it independently) or b) believe in that sort of thing.

Any advice?

If you actually have email responses from them, you might have a sufficient paper trail to make it worth trying. That said, assuming you only provided an idea and discussion, you probably don't have any particularly strong IP claim over their independently developed game even if you can show that they got the idea from you. So, it really depends on what result you want here. You probably won't manage to get any money out of them, but you might manage to get them to add a credit pointing at you.

I'd try to create a big stink about it in the press ("BIGCORP steals indie company's idea!!"), but not actually sue them or anything. This would have the benefit that people would hear about your product, which would benefit you both (though I assume you more because you'll have higher SEO and ranking in the App Store?).

This is the right approach. See if someone like Mossberg at the WSJ would pick this up. The traffic increase would be huge.

So this makes them the zuckerbergs of ipad cat games?

Were you at the LA iPad hackathon event right after the iPad's release? There was a team that worked on something similar.

No but I'd love to talk to the guys who did it. Do you happen to know who they are? My email is in my profile.

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