Remember the ‘iBeer’ iPhone App? It Was Making $20,000 Per Day in 2008

In a recent interview with Mel Magazine, Steve Sheraton, a struggling 37-year-old magician and the creator of ‘iBeer’ app, has shared the success story of his iOS app which earned him as much as $20,000 a day (via AppleInsider).

Ibeer

Sheraton recalled how he was making money from a video file of a beer that made you feel like drinking from your iPhone, even before Apple introduced the App Store.

He uploaded a video of himself drinking a beer on his iPhone to YouTube, and the video blew up, which was making around $2,000 a day just by selling the file of the beer video.

“I built the very first iteration of this mechanism for the Palm Pilot, called E-spresso, which turned the little monochrome screen into a cup of coffee”.

But when Apple announced the original iPhone, he decided to create a different version of the app using beer. “I basically recreated Palm Pilot E-spresso, where the iPhone shows a video of the drink and you time your actions to match the video. I figured beer was more attractive than coffee.”

When Apple finally decided to launch the App Store with 500 of the best apps available, the company reached out to Sheraton to create an app for the iPhone.

Sheraton called it iBeer, developed under the name of his company Hottrix, and priced it at $2.99. “We shot to first place [in the App Store] on the very first day and stayed there for about a year,” he says. “Apart from its visual humor and sort of appealing to the lowest common denominator, iBeer was a large success because it allowed people to show their friends what the phone was capable of.

“The amount of money that was coming in was just so over-the-top. During our heyday, we were making $10,000 to $20,000 a day,”

YouTube video

By 2010, however, iBeer faded from the App Store’s most downloaded charts and was replaced by newer apps like Facebook, Skype, and Fruit Ninja. Ah, good ol’ iBeer. Those were the days.

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