Chapel Hill company develops phone apps

A company based in Chapel Hill is stepping up to turn mobile application ideas into money.

Appubator, founded by Chapel Hill resident Laney Dale and his business partner Chip Royce, is a company dedicated to developing, marketing and sharing the profits of application ideas generated by users of their Web site, appubator.com.

The average successful application can earn about $3,000 per year, Dale said. The company develops ideas free of charge and shares the profits with the creator, who receives 30 percent of the earnings.

“Developing an app on your own without knowing the programming language would require a lot of money,” Scott Neidich, a senior biology and chemistry double major at UNC, stated in an e-mail.

Neidich has an application currently being developed by Appubator, though he is not allowed to share details on the idea.
While the company’s physical address is in Chapel Hill, the virtual company employs programmers from all over the United States and has clients worldwide.

“I decided to go with them since they were local,” Neidich said. “I was very surprised when I got an e-mail from them saying they planned to develop my idea.”

Dale, who has 20 years of experience with information technology, started the company at the beginning of the year.
“We came up with this idea that we could produce an incubator that would allow anyone with an idea to have it built,” Dale said.

When the company started accepting application ideas in April, they received one to two ideas per day. Now it receives around 40 daily.

Of about 1,500 ideas that have been submitted, Appubator has approved 80. Ten are already available for sale on iPhone and Android platforms, and another 40 are in testing or development.

Appubator’s most popular application is a program called “Sitter Time,” which helps baby sitters manage their clients. Some of its features include a rate calculator, an activity log and nursery rhymes to keep children entertained.

Appubator spends between three and six months developing ideas, with little input from the idea submitter.

The new company has one major competitor in the application development business — MEDL Mobile. While Appubator focuses solely on developing clients’ ideas, MEDL Mobile also develops its own ideas and custom applications for other businesses.

“Dealing with Appubator has been a pleasure,” Neidich said. “It’s kind of like throwing seeds on a field. I had no idea if any of them were any good, but just threw them out to see what would happen.”

Contact the City Editor at citydesk@unc.edu.