Cell phone apps are making people millionaires, period. There are some well-thought out apps that have been carefully built over a significant period of time. Then there are some that make people millionaires by accident.. kind of… Dan Porter is the head of digital for agency William Morris Endeavor and is best-known as the guy who created the app Draw Something that exploded onto the mobile app scene. It was successful enough that it got his studio OMGPop bought by Zynga for $200 million. WME just recently partnered with the firm that designed the popular trivia game QuizUp so expect something big shortly. Before we get to that, perhaps we should take a minute to acknowledge that Mr. Porter’s millions were an accident…
At the time Porter sound down to create an app for OMGPop, he had no idea how he was going to rival big-time apps like Angry Birds. He thought about creating a modern-day mobile version of pictionary – but with no losers. Typically, there is a standard protocol with producing Apps, but Porter threw conventional wisdom out the window. He worked backwards with his idea and before he knew it (and he really didn’t know it) Draw Something became an app store phenom. We’re talking over 1 million downloads in the first nine days and 35 million downloads within months of being released. It was success that has hardly been seen with mobile phone apps – and Porter never imagined such success. What’s even more wild is Porter released the app before it was even complete. He and the team would go on to add dimensions of the game as time progressed.
Truly unbelievable story to find that a simple app idea could lead to $200 million. However, it’s important to acknowledge that for every $200 million app idea there are hundreds of thousands of failures. In Porter’s case, it took just one app to get his name int he prominence of the cell phone app-game.
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