RedLaser iPhone App reaches 750K downloads, $1M in revenue

http://www.mobilecrunch.com/2009/12/15/bar-code-scanning-redlaser-iphone-app-reaches-750k-downloads-over-1m-in-revenue/

by andrewhyde • 17 years ago

68 35 17 years ago

sailormoon• 17 years ago

Good for them! A great app, at the right time, on the ideal platform - exactly the kind of thing that should be a raging success. And now this awesome developer's got a whole bunch of money, who knows what great things he's got the resources to do ..

absmith• 17 years ago

This is very inspirational. We work with the Occipital guys on FoodScanner, and it is cool to see a product rise to the top just by virtue of being kick-ass.

ericb• 17 years ago

Most of the apps I see are pretty uninspired. This looks interesting, novel, and useful. I keep hearing how tough the app store is, but if you actually "make something people want" is that really true?

jfarmer2• 17 years ago

It's a two-fold problem. You have to make something people want, but you also have to inform people that you've made it.

Most people rely on the AppStore for the latter; I think there are more interesting models that people haven't exploited yet.

bjplink• 17 years ago

I agree. I think it's important that a lot of the people with lackluster sales or disappointing results should take a step back and be honest with themselves about whether or not their app is actually worth buying. There is plenty of moaning and belly aching online from iPhone developers who are upset their apps don't sell well (such as this semi-famous one: http://gedblog.com/2009/09/28/losing-ireligion) but few thoughts from people willing to analyze their mistakes and faults.

warfangle2• 17 years ago

Interesting. A bunch of bellyaching because a game isn't selling well - and I can completely understand /why/ it didn't sell well. Heck, it's free and I still won't install it.

Locke1689• 17 years ago

I see a bunch of people making crappy games. I don't know about the masses, but I have one game on my iPhone. It is Katamari Damacy and it is the free trial (I may end up buying the full version). I like games but usually I think of all the other things I could be doing with my time and choose not to play. On the other hand, I am always searching for useful utilities like the RedLaser app. If there were more utilities and fewer crappy games, perhaps I'd spend more money at the App Store.

Splines• 17 years ago

Plus, the games section of the app store has very aggressive pricing. Personally, I use price-watching apps to monitor for when games go for free.

Some of these games are highly polished, and to compete against them when they're available for free (even for 1 day) must put significant downward pressure on pricing for other games.

Unless I'm looking for a specific game experience (e.g., I bought Beneath a Steel Sky), I'm more than willing to wait for free games to come along to satisfy my mobile gaming fix.

antidaily• 17 years ago

Nice guys. Congrats! Go Blue!

kw_3• 17 years ago

This one is bittersweet, as we had the idea, the staff, and the time and money to implement it, but chose not to, because we substantially underestimated the size of the market.

Where by 'we' I mean 'I'. It's completely my fault that RedLaser was allowed to win this market. I killed the project.

It's nice to see that we were at least somewhat correct on the general goodness of the concept, though.

Congrats, and nice work, guys.

pclark• 17 years ago

remember its less about the idea and the nitty gritty execution :)

sorry all the same.

kw_3• 17 years ago

Yes. I'm kicking myself for halting the execution, because I made order of magnitude errors in my projections.

If I'd simply had the idea (not the idea plus all resources required for successful execution), there'd be no twinge.

tk999• 17 years ago

It is never too late. If you think some more about the bar code idea. These are actually couple more ideas related to this that you can expand and it will be even bigger than redlaser. For example, if you get the bar code for a book, it will display review and so you can determine whether to buy it or not. On the same line of thinking, you will find out that you can do even more once you "identify" the object by the bar code... email me. I am interested in building something similar.

kw_3• 17 years ago

I just went to email you, to discuss a few of the additional ideas we had in our original plan, see if there might be a way to differentiate it sufficiently from RedLaser and Google Goggles to make it work.

Unfortunately, I can't find your email address :-)

If you want to contact me, kevin at massive.io.

iron_ball• 17 years ago

I have a barcode scanner for Android that already does the book one. You scan an ISBN barcode, and it lets you immediately do a "Search inside this book".

ramanujan• 17 years ago

Why don't you get in touch with them and see if you can join? No shame in that at all, I'm sure you have a bunch of ideas, code, market opportunities and stuff that could be a big help -- and they'd also head off competition with a "merger".

credo2• 17 years ago

Great illustration of the fact that ideas are generally not unique -- and that it is the execution that matters.

In one of his essays ( http://paulgraham.com/ideas.html), pg talked about the fact there was no such thing as a million-dollar idea and that "The fact that there's no market for startup ideas suggests there's no demand. Which means, in the narrow sense of the word, that startup ideas are worthless."

trominos• 17 years ago

I really think that this "only execution matters" thing is ridiculous.

Startup ideas are worthless in the sense that you're almost certainly not gonna be able to get anybody to pay you for one. If you want to prove that they're worthless in any other sense -- in particular, if you want to prove that you can't improve somebody's chances of succeeding in the startup world by giving them a good idea -- you have a lot of work to do. In fact, I bet you can't do it, because I don't think it's true.

Now, I have almost no experience in this area -- my conclusions are mostly a priori. But I don't think anybody else really does either, and in particular I don't think Paul has actually seen enough startups succeed or fail to judge the value of ideas. How many YC startups have "succeeded"? Depends on where you set the bar, but at this point in time the answer's somewhere between "not many" and "none".

And I'm kind of surprised that you're using this as an example of how idea doesn't matter; in my eyes, it's just the opposite. This succeeded because it was a great idea executed decently, not because it was a decent idea executed spectacularly.

brandon• 17 years ago

My partner and I had a similar "oops"

We started down the path of developing a Google Latitude-like system before Latitude had been publicly announced. Our prototype apps quite literally had the same workflows and functionality that you'll find today in Latitude. So, when Google announced their intention to release Latitude for the iPhone, we killed the project.

Fast forward to today, Apple blocked Latitude from happening on the iPhone and if we'd put in another month or two of work we may have been successful. What's the moral of the story? I guess I might not stop executing in the future just because it looks like the market isn't viable or someone big is poised to eat my lunch. Then again, that could be a recipe to end up penniless or hungry.

daniel-cussen• 17 years ago

Theory: As the internet becomes a more developed medium of communication, word of mouth will approach being the only way of marketing a product. Quality will be the only way to deserve word of mouth.

ticktock3• 17 years ago

iphone users are so gullible - when you are all said and done with paying for your iphone and your service contract and your 'redlaser' app, you're over 2k in the hole, and for what? a 'mobile cuecat'? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CueCat

warfangle2• 17 years ago

Right, because RedLaser totally:

-Uses it's own special kind of barcode -Doesn't let people compare prices locally -Is simply a barcode-encoded URL

/sarcasm

Cuecat was a device that was about a decade too soon. We needed ubiquitous mobile computing (not just mobile phones, you see) before something like this could truly come into its own.

ticktock3• 17 years ago

I saw the special barcode for the cuecat in the wikipedia article but I don't remember it being restricted to only those types of barcodes. I'm pretty sure it worked for any barcode. It also says they were trying to avoid patent infringement. I suppose that patent has expired (cuecat was 10years ago! wow), but now that redlaser is worth //evil-voice One Million Dollars!, they may have to pay the piper. So again - you think it's economical to invest 2k into a device that lets me save 40 cents on Ketchup?

DannoHung• 17 years ago

Yeah, once you install this app you can't use the internet or the phone or the music playback or any of your other apps. It really freakin stinks!

ticktock3• 17 years ago

downmodded- totally not cool

augustus2• 17 years ago

I might be wrong on this but I will say it anyway.

The original idea for this came out of the Google App contest for Android. This was the idea that won the competition. So the idea was available for anyone to execute after that.

The red laser team might have come up with the idea independently or just learned about it from the Google Android contest. I am not sure if the contest or the app came out first. Someone here might know.

augustus2• 17 years ago

I guess I will answer my own question.

The app compareAnywhere won the Android ADC 1 Contest. Here is a link below: http://code.google.com/android/adc/adc_gallery/app.html?id=8

That was in 2008!

You couldn't do bar code scanning on the iPhone until 3GS came out (I think I am right on this).

So this was an idea out there since 2008. The red laser team were the first one to execute it on the iPhone 3GS.

I also have high regard for the Google team for correctly accessing the value of this idea.

vulpes2• 17 years ago

RedLaser was released on May 15, 2009. It works with original, 3G, and 3gs iPhones (although it is faster on 3gs). It was released for the pure need for that scanning barcodes was very subpar on the iPhone. They were the first (and I think still the only, most others license their tech) app on the iPhone to do barcode recognition straight on the phone (no need to take a picture or send it to a server to be 'read'). Until very recently that wasn't possible with horribly slow Android SDK.

Read Occipital's story on their blog http://occipital.com/blog/2009/08/01/2009-at-occipital-from-...

andreyf• 17 years ago

The latest version of RedLaser is much more impressive than what the Android guys were able to execute. It's able to identify barcodes before I stabilize my hand over the image, upside down, or sideways, almost as if I were swiping it. The vibration feedback and rest of the interface are a great UX touch. The app was brilliantly executed - both in UX and in hardcore vision algorithms. This wasn't an easy task - they deserve every penny of that $1m.

ahi• 17 years ago

$1 million after being top 5 app for 3 months? Urrgh. There's either 2 or 4 (two founders + two employees?) so $250k in revenue for a year's work isn't exactly huge. It's a big win I'm sure for Occipital--a million dollars is a million dollars--but if that's the pay off for a home run the iPhone is not a market I want to play in.

mzaman_net• 17 years ago

that's great

RedLaser iPhone App reaches 750K downloads, $1M in revenue

Related Stories