Nice! I'll be changing my Mac system tray app HackerBar over to use this instead of some Objective-C scraping magic that it uses now: http://hackerbarapp.com/
I have a plethora of niche-based iOS apps for skydivers, beer enthusiasts, and people in direct sales. Bring in about 1-2k a month, but I actively maintain about half of the apps and am actively developing new apps.
Since January, I've netted roughly $13,000 after Apple's 30% cut. I also make income through Apple's affiliate links that are automatically applied to my apps on my website - http://mohawkapps.com
TLDR: "We just started using this thing. It's pretty cool, but we're not going to tell you anything other than you should use it. Here's some DSLs for it."
I've built a successful side business (http://www.mohawkapps.com) and was even featured in an e-book: http://www.sideprojectbook.com/ - by creating iPhone apps for niche markets and marketing heavily to them through facebook and in-person tradeshows. I gross about $2k-$4k a month but I haven't quit my day job yet.
Apple does a lot of my marketing for me but I also rely heavily on word of mouth. I make sure to have a screen in all my apps that allow users to tell their friends through texting and email about the app. I'm also an apple affiliate so all the traffic that goes to the app store through my site nets me another 7% of all that user's purchases during the session... it makes up for the gigantic chunk of change that Apple takes from my sales.
Recently, I've started branching out into more generic apps that are useful to a wider market, but my niche apps make way more money than the broad-audience apps.
Think affiliate marketing, or niche product creation (targeted ebooks and the like), that require a bit of upfront effort, but little ongoing maintenance, and can scale out to many of these products/revenue streams. Lots of ongoing small hits, rather than one big payoff for one big product :)
