Well it’s happened — we’ve shipped version 1.0 of Fart Battles, sending it to the iTunes Store yesterday. Now we wait to find out when our app goes live (really whether it goes live). It supposedly takes just two or three days to happen now (down from an earlier wait time of more than a week a few months back), but the fact that it could be at any moment has had the whole team on edge. Now that it’s in the process, we need to be ready on the server side and on the marketing/publicity side for a release at basically any moment in the next few days.

And that’s a daunting idea, because much is riding on it. Getting attention in the iPhone space isn’t easy or cheap. Fart Battles is a fun app that straddles the line between game and entertainment novelty. There are tons of these kinds of things in the store, and we believe that we’ve made one of the better ones, but getting it in front of people means getting their attention, famously difficult to do. On June 5th, we’re scheduled to be on freeappaday.com. We’re racing to finish the last bits of stuff on our promo video for the website and we’re working on stuff for our Facebook fan page and our Twitter stream and our YouTube channel. All of this takes time and coordination, but without it, we can’t see how we’d be able to get any sales for this thing that we’ve worked on for six months. It seems trying to gain even a small chance of rising above the considerable level of noise surrounding the app store is expensive, and knowing how to time those efforts with the rhythms of the submit/approval process is a big part of any given iPhone developer’s chance for success.