On why games:

Yeah, I was doing startups and working 80 hour weeks as a developer, so i went from that to working 80 hour weeks at my own bootstrapped startup essentially. (Benefit of being in my 20s, so I don't expect it to last forever.) I still do all the development work. I think it's probably my competitive advantage - I am able to do the work of many people 'for free', which allows me to say, build in 2 months and $5k worth of art contractors a game that makes me $750k over three years, while a bigger competitor would take a year, pay six salaries along the way, and thus spend almost a million developing said game and not turn a profit and call it a bust. So my products aren't the 'best' ones, but they are pretty good and they just have incredibly low overhead. I think this is a pretty easy competitive advantage to get in a mature market, but it really boils down to "work your butt off for a few years" and isn't for everyone.

I chose games because I'd worked at game startups, I'd built games as a hobby for a long time and was good at it, and I knew i understood the product/business side. And I guess this is obvious to me but I've found a lot of people don't realize it: the majority of money made in mobile is in games. It wasn't really some blue-ocean opportunity... I found some niches where I thought I could develop competitive games economically (both in terms of money and time) and made games there.

On hiring developers:

Generally I'm a control freak and probably have low expectations out of hiring outside programmers on freelancing sites. If I ever hired someone it would have to be someone I have worked with in the past, but that's just me. I'm sure some marketing types have had success finding a developer they work well with.

On analytics/choosing what market to enter: I use analytics mostly retrospectively... I think I go with my gut pretty often for making decisions about what my next game to make is. I make these choices based on cost of production, and how well I think the game's theme/idea will market. This is based on my experience in the market and my overall "be quick and cheap" strategy and it's worked for me.

If you want raw data you can look at app annie or other similar sites that offer you a lot of data about the app store (and especially games) like revenue estimates etc.