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David Huff Tim Vinsant sold the idea for an iPhone app called Pocket Reference. + Enlarge

LITTLE ROCK — Want to become an overnight sensation and make enough money to retire in only a couple months? As the iPhone slogan goes, there’s an app for that.

The trick is that you have to create the app yourself. Just like Steve Demeter, whose addictive game Trism became the first superstar app after he announced that it made him around $250,000 in only a couple months. Or Bart Decrem, CEO of Tapulous, whose music-centric Tap Tap Revenge topped a million downloads in only two weeks, thrusting the company into the world spotlight.

With a goldmine like that out there, locals are trying their hand at coming up with the next iShoot or iBeer, and local companies, whether creating an app for themselves in house or not, are recognizing the exposure a well-thought-out app can bring.

“About a year or so ago, there were three to four people hitting it big, getting a lot of attention from everyone. It made it seem like there was this bag of money just sitting there to be had,” said Sean LeCrone, who decided to try and develop apps with his co-workers in North Little Rock. With his background in programming and people on board for art and music, “it wasn’t a stretch for us to decide to do it.”

Their decision was to make a game both simple and addictive. The result — about three months in the making — was iFloat, which challenges players to tilt their phone back and forth to move a floating ball up and down in a column of air. Staying inside a moving green zone earns points; letting the ball go too high or too low ends the game.

Unfortunately, said J.T. Naylor, the artist on the project, the app was buried several pages deep on the iTunes store as soon as it was launched, and thus missed its opportunity to be spotlighted as a new release. Attempts to get the app reviewed either got no response or ended up with the so-called reviewers trying to sell them advertising.

The result? More than a hundred downloads at a dollar apiece, but certainly not enough to cover development costs, which included buying a Mac.

However, making apps doesn’t necessarily require a monetary investment, if you’re willing to lose a little cash on the other end.

At least, that’s how Tim Vinsant sees it. An electronics associate at Wal-Mart in west Little Rock, Vinsant is the man behind a recently released app called Pocket Reference. A self-described “answers guy,” he said the idea was to be able to answer all manner of questions with only a few taps on the screen. Thus, Pocket Reference contains links to more than 500 reference sites, from the CIA World Factbook to Tunezee, in more than 50 different categories.

“With two, three, four taps you can be anywhere,” said Vinsant, who did not program the app himself, but submitted the idea to Medl Mobile, an incubator company that accepts mobile app ideas and turns the ones it likes into the real thing in exchange for a share of the profits.

Of those, Vinsant could not say much earlier this month. Though out since early January, he said he had no earnings reports yet or specific numbers of downloads. However, immediately after a review in Macworld, the app jumped up to be among the top five reference apps on iTunes. Even a week later, it was still in the top 25. So it’s getting noticed — and that’s the hard thing, he said.

“Until you start getting good reviews from the good review sites, it’s hard to get out there,” he said.

That is, unless your app is free and just “getting out there” is the goal. But in that case you don’t stand to make much money.

That’s the case for Travis McElroy, founder of Little Rock’s Thick Syrup Records, who hired out a company some of his bands had worked with to make an app for the label. Being free, it gets anywhere from 30 to 60 downloads on an average day, said McElroy.

“I’ve been really happy with what it’s done,” he said. “The response has been bigger than I ever imagined.”

Plugging in to videos, music and show dates of bands on the Thick Syrup label, the app is really all about promotion, said McElroy. With it, Thick Syrup can and has spread all over the world — and that’s pretty cool, he said. And while maybe it doesn’t earn money directly, he has had people tell him they bought an album after listening to a song through the app.

Besides, he said, “it’s really cool just to have one.”

On that, the profit-driven developers agree, albeit with a certain graveyard humor.

“Even if we don’t do anything else, at least we can say we have an app,” said Naylor.

“Yeah, and so can a hundred thousand other people,” added LeCrone.