I would love to check out the book. Can you mention it here?

I am sure this was just a growing pain point, but I could not get any answers from them for about a week while filing my IT returns, just kept getting automated reminders. So I ended up going with Taxmantra, another e-tax filing provider and got it done within a day.

Would you mind sharing which bank?

Any specific reason for doing this instead of just charging people for using the tips? Are your users generally skeptical of accuracy of tips and as such not likely to pay?

Just feel it is better to provide the service for free.

Maybe at some point in the future I will consider a premium tier but it is not on the roadmap at the mo.

We have been looking for a similar solution for our games. Do link your website here, else drop me a mail, email id in my profile.

"As I understand it Amazon is demanding Hachette to sell their books at a certain price. This is highly unusual"

how is this different from Walmart deciding at what price it sells its suppliers' product. Almost all the retailers decide the final selling price of suppliers' products, that is the reason they are able to undercut mom&pop retail stores. Only exception on supplier side is Apple and to some extent Bose who have the brand leverage to dictate their prices to retailers.

I would love to know more if you are planning to do something similar for mobile games. As a mobile games developer I know that something like this will resonate with a lot of mobile game developers

I hadn't really considered games (or even games and apps), but now that you bring it up, it seems like the perfect fit. I think it's certainly feasible to merge the two ideas into the same solution.

I am curious about the Apple process for a feature. Did you write to Apple pitching your game?

I don't definitively know what caused it, but I did notify my local Apple dev relations team while it was pending review.

any tips on how to get in touch with the Apple dev relations team? We generally send emails to app_store_promotion@apple.com around launches, but they don't seem to get any response.

Go to WWDC if you can and there's a range of people you can meet. I'm not even sure if my emails had any effect

I do plan on going next year. I decided to skip this year as I was not sure how valuable it will be, but now I feel I was wrong about that. Good luck with continued success for this and future games.

Definitely go if you can. I went in 2013. I wish somebody told me ahead of time how important / valuable the one-on-one sessions with Apple engineers are though.

I realised though only during Day 3 and barely had any time with them. The sessions are a small part of the week (I mean, you can watch those online at any time).

Our mobile games startup started in Dec 2013 is profitable. Our monthly revenues are 3-4X our monthly expenses (which includes market salary for Co-Founders.) In fact in the last 2-3 months, we have been able to save up almost 18 months worth of runway for our team of 8.

Bear in mind that the team is based in India, so our salary and other expenses cannot be compared to Silicon Valley, but in India we pay market rates.

What platform? What are your games?

We have games on iOS, Google play and Amazon app stores. Mostly trivia games, but some arcade games too. As an example, this is our most popular game across the 3 stores, with 1 million+ downloads https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.froods.dwt...

pretty awesome accomplishment. are your users in india as well? how are you monetizing?

Most of our users are in US, UK and Europe. We monetize via In App Purchases (IAPs) and Ads. On average we monetize close to industry standards, 2% of people pay for hints, powerups and other IAPs, while ads give a decent $2 eCPM ($2 for 1000 impressions)

Thanks for sharing ! I'm getting started on Android app development, and those are very encouraging numbers (and thanks for sharing your app link to have an idea of what you're building).

I think I'll try my hand at some games targeted for the local audience first (I live in Uruguay, South America, I have some ideas which can be tested for the larger Argentinean and Brazilian markets) and see how it goes :) .

My goal is to make U$ 400/month in recurring revenue by year's end.

what is the most profitable platform ? iOS?

We have had similar success on all 3 platforms, as it is easier to stand out on Amazon, Google play drives a lot of downloads, and Apple monetizes very well. For us, it is almost 34-33-33 in terms of revenue breakup.

very smart to keep a large runway in the mobile game industry

The first lesson I had in this industry was to always prepare for a lean patch. In a hit driven business, you can never be sure when the next hit will come, so always good to have as large a runway as possible. Having said that, this has been my largest worry in this startup, and has caused many a sleepless nights.

A similar thing happened to me when I made public a previously private repo on Amazon and forgot to scrub it for AWS key. Luckily I got an email from Amazon within 24 hours of the instances being started, and as such my bill was just $360, which in any case they waived off. You might want to check your Github repos.