iPhone application developer tap tap tap recently announced the sale of its ‘Where To’ application, which allows you to use your device to find points of interest based on your location, but didn’t specify who the buyer was. We now know that the acquiring party is a brand new iPhone app development house called FutureTap, who put the app back on sale and plans to release other stuff in the near future.
So how much was ‘Where To’ worth according to FutureTap’s founder Ortwin Gentz? Apparently, not all that much. In a statement, the ex-CTO of equinux shared the price tag: $70,000. FutureTap has placed version 1.5 of the app back in the App store if you’re interested, but also plans to release new localizations and a couple of new features soon. For a direct link to the purchase page, click here.
The app is on sale for $2.99 USD. Last August, tap tap tap shared sales figures, which showed that they netted just over $50,000 in revenue in their first month on the App Store, and that was after Apple took their cut. In October, tap tap tap claimed Where To had gross sales of around $200,000 for the three months that it’d been available on the App Store.
So why was it sold for only $70,000?
The reason is simple: tap tap tap founders Sophia Teutschler and John Casasanta – who you might remember for his infamous blog post titled ‘Fuck The VCs’ – split up the company mid-October because of arguments over its future direction, and Where To was just too hard to split or assign, leaving only two options: let it fade into oblivion, or organize a fire sale. The second option prevailed.
Are we happy with the outcome? Yes.
While I still would’ve preferred to keep control of the app, Sophia and I are now free of each other. I’ve managed to rebuild tap tap tap and I couldn’t be happier with the new team of extremely talented developers I’ve assembled. In addition, Sophia found herself with a new job in the deal as she’ll be continuing to develop new features into Where To.