Right. If you build a game app, name it "Words Play" and your marketing strategy is to hope that people find it, you're playing the lottery - and losing.
I have two apps and a third about to launch. One has kind of flopped so far - too wide a niche and it hasn't gotten on any external review sites yet. But the other floats between 500-1000th place in revenue in its category - one of the smaller categories. That's on track to bring in roughly $10,000 a year. Not bad for a first app that would take me a week or two to build now. That's not winning a lottery, but it's a business - a small business.
If you want to run a small business - on the web or in the app store, you need to target a narrow niche. It has to be narrow enough that there's not much well-established competition. It has to be wide enough that there's a profitable market. Then it has to be a market that's willing to spend money. It's not easy to identify those niches, but if you don't even try, you end up throwing out apps and hoping something happens. A class like Ed Dale's Challenge (free) is a big help in identifying niches and testing those markets: http://www.challenge.co/
I have two apps and a third about to launch. One has kind of flopped so far - too wide a niche and it hasn't gotten on any external review sites yet. But the other floats between 500-1000th place in revenue in its category - one of the smaller categories. That's on track to bring in roughly $10,000 a year. Not bad for a first app that would take me a week or two to build now. That's not winning a lottery, but it's a business - a small business.
If you want to run a small business - on the web or in the app store, you need to target a narrow niche. It has to be narrow enough that there's not much well-established competition. It has to be wide enough that there's a profitable market. Then it has to be a market that's willing to spend money. It's not easy to identify those niches, but if you don't even try, you end up throwing out apps and hoping something happens. A class like Ed Dale's Challenge (free) is a big help in identifying niches and testing those markets: http://www.challenge.co/