One artist made $100,000 in 6 days by selling custom icons to iOS 14 Home screen fans

Custom iOS Home screen Icons
Custom iOS Home screen Icons (Image credit: Traf)

What you need to know

  • Someone has raked in more than $100,000 by selling custom iOS 14 icons.
  • The pack of icons sold for $28.
  • They passed the $100,000 mark in just six days.

You probably remember that we shared details of someone earning real money by selling icons just days after iOS 14 arrived. Well, turns out they kept earning money. A truckload of it.

In a blog post today, the person behind those icons shared that they were able to rake in more than $100,000 in just six days after blogs – you're welcome! – picked the story up. It turns out people want their Home screens to look aesthetic AF and, importantly, are willing to pay for the icons needed to make it happen.

And the whole thing took two hours.

As soon as I noticed the hype, I put together some icons in my own style, downloaded some widgets, and tried it all out. I thought it looked cool, so I shared a screenshot of it on Twitter. Right away, people started asking about the icons in the screenshot. So I quickly packaged them, uploaded them to Gumroad, and embedded them on a Notion site using Super. All of this took about two hours.

It probably didn't hurt that Marques "MKBHD" Brownlee got his hands on the icons, too. One video later and things blew up.

Then, MKBHD happened. He shared a video about all of this—using my icons for his setup, and linked them in the description. The next thing I knew, I was making $28 what felt like every 28 seconds. My phone turned into the ultimate dopamine dispenser (if it wasn't already). I had to disable notifications.The day after, sales jumped from $6k to about $40k, and during the time of this writing, sales are at $116,147 from 4,188 customers.

Wow.

First of all, congratulations on a job well done. Spotting a market, taking action, and reaping the rewards is the kind of thing I love to see and it helps that these icons are fire, too. But it's also interesting beyond the simple economics, too.

Would you ever have thought, when people won't pay for apps, that they would spend $28 on some icons? I know I wouldn't!

Want to have a go at making your own Homescreen all fancy-like? No problem, we've got all the deets on what you need to do. Show us the results on Twitter, too!

Oliver Haslam
Contributor

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too. Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.