Ask HN: What's a simple app/software that made a lot of money?

Ah, yeah there's nothing like that on the site doing six figures. A lot of these products did start off as small MVPs that could be built in a weekend or two, however. They just got more complex over time, especially as they scaled to handle additional customers. I suppose that's not a concern with a flashlight app :)

Can I ask what your goal is? Are you looking to hire a developer for cheap and then do the marketing yourself?

> Whatsapp was not simple.

Maybe not 1-2 weekends simple but compared to 18 billion dollars the technical aspect is rather insignificant. It's a chat client hugely leveraging existing technology (XMPP, at least in the beginning), not rocket science.

> Angry Birds?

If you reduce it to the basic game mechanics, maybe. All in all it's surely not that simple.

I think Flappy Bird would be a perfectly fitting example here as it's so simple that it literally can be made in one weekend and made, if you believe the news reports up to $50K per day during the hype phase.

I'm pretty sure Angry Birds took a long time to make.