Aaron Brethorst

There’s an App for that

I have been a registered iPhone developer since day 1: March 2008. However, I didn’t ship my first iPhone application for another five months. In August 2008, I was looking through the AppStore for an application that would give me polls for the upcoming Presidential election. Amazingly, I couldn’t find one.

Recognizing the potential of the market niche, I started trying to source data for my application and came upon Andy Tanenbaum’s electoral-vote.com. He provided daily updates to a text file that offered state-by-state Presidential polling information. I emailed Andy to ask if I could use it, and replied affirmatively hours later (especially impressive given that he lives in the Netherlands).

I spent the next seven nights feverishly working on the application and submitted it to Apple. Three weeks later, the app went live. Within 24 hours, Election ’08 had received coverage on TechCrunch, Gizmodo, Gawker, and dozens of other websites.

Top Ten Paid App

Election ‘08 eventually peaked at #6 on the AppStore’s paid apps list. By the time the election was over, my application had over 50,000 users and had been used for a combined total of 238 years.

Partnerships

During Election ’08’s brief lifespan, I was contacted by a senior employee of Washington Post-Newsweek Interactive. WPNI was interested in partnering with me on the application. I readily agreed, and the application was soon-after rebranded as Slate Poll Tracker, and featured data culled from Pollster.com.