dotGEARS 的 Flappy Bird：独立开发者靠广告日入 5 万美元，巅峰时却选择下架

做的是什么生意

dotGEARS is the one-man Hanoi studio of Dong Nguyen; Flappy Bird is a free iOS/Android one-tap flying game in which the player guides a bird between pipes, monetized with banner ads.

启动资金：None disclosed — built in 'a few nights' of coding after work (The Verge, 2014).

起因

Nguyen launched Flappy Bird in May 2013, coding it in a few nights after his day job; the bird and pipes were inspired by Nintendo's Cheep Cheep and Super Mario pipes, and he monetized with ads after the model common in the Japanese mini-game market.

经过

The game sat largely ignored for months, then spiked in November 2013 and sat atop both major app-store charts for nearly a month by early February 2014; downloads passed 50 million and it earned about $50,000 per day from in-app ads, which Nguyen disclosed to The Verge on 2014-02-05. He said he would leave the game unchanged: 'anything added to the game will ruin it somehow.'

结果

On 2014-02-08 Nguyen tweeted that he would remove the game in 22 hours — 'I cannot take this anymore' — and Flappy Bird disappeared from both stores the next day; he said it was not related to legal issues (TechCrunch).

可借鉴之处

病毒式收入可能超出经营者的掌控：对独立创始人而言，压力随榜单而增，而非银行账户，巅峰时主动停止本身就是战略决策。