mobile-apps, product, young-entrepreneurs, applications, closingI going to close my start-up because of not enough earnings.
I’ve got 5 applications on the AppStore and I don’t know if it’s better to leave them for people or removing them.
Hope that’s not too broad or opinion based.
I really don’t know what to do.
Maybe the fact to leave my apps on the store will diserve me in the future.
If you’re the only shareholder, the IP is yours for all intents and purposes, so keep the apps around unless:
The apps will be dormant. The revenue they generate (however small) will stay for months or years. You never know when that small amount of extra revenue will make a difference. And it may turn out the apps will be a useful addition to your portfolio.
If you are not the only shareholder, the above mostly applies with the added twist of either keeping the company in existence without any employees, or liquidating it in such a way that you keep the brand names, trademarks, and IP – or at least a right to them.
That’s a tough call. I think you have to decide on a per-app basis.
Before you can make any decisions on the matter, though, you need to think about what you want out of this. Are you worried about your reputation? Are your apps serving as a force for good in the world that you wouldn’t want to remove from it? That sort of thing. Once you figure that out, the question of what to do with them will probably become a bit easier to answer. Emphasis on “a bit.”
Whether you’re worried about your reputation is really up to you. You probably should be, it’s pretty rare for a reputation to have no effect, but how much this actually affects it is pretty hard to tell.
It seems like this question is deserving of a list of pros and cons, so here’s a start:
By leaving the app up, you:
By taking it down, you:
On a more philosophical level, you’ll also want to think about the impact of having several “dead” apps out there. I’m not sold on whether that’s a good or a bad thing, but that depends how you play it. On one hand, you’ve had a lot of ventures, and you’re a go-getter with a lot of talent. On the other, you’ve had a lot of failed ventures, and you don’t know when to give up. As long as you can get people seeing the first option, first, you should be fine.
Ultimately, it’s just a decision you have to make on a per-case basis. Look at what you actually, baseline, have to put into the apps, and look at the types of jobs you’re otherwise looking for (and whether they’d benefit from a more diversified portfolio). When you have all the information, and you’re probably close enough to that, making a good list of pros and cons is probably a good way to make it clear what you should do. It doesn’t work for every decision, but I think it might for this one.
You could also try to sell off the business and/or individual apps. They might be a good compliment to what someone else is already doing.
Or you could just leave them up as the others have said. And then open source the apps. That would give you double credit.
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