Monthly Archive for November, 2008

AppStore: Where It’s At

Published on November 19, 2008 in Apple, castcatcher and marketing. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

This post is a follow up to Marketing an iPhone App. Apple approved CastCatcher 1.3. Good stuff for just about everyone involved. r7 gets to sell the latest version of its software, iPhone users get some indication that Apple isn’t just out there to knock off every bit of software that grabs a few KBs off the cell network, and Apple gets to keep making money off CastCatcher. Win. Win. Win.

CastCatcher is selling reasonably well, but it’s no Trism. The press did boost sales for a short period of time, which makes it worth while to invest more time into the application (and I’ve done so — significant time over the past two evenings). Funny: every so often someone wants a refund but doesn’t understand that we haven’t been paid for the sale yet, if we had been paid we’d only get 70% of the total, and even if we wanted to we’d have no way to verify who actually bought from us and who didn’t. It can be amusing :) . It’s rewarding when people do like one’s apps, though. It’s also rewarding to spend a bunch of time on some issue and finally figure it out. It’s kind of like saying “boo-yah” in the 90s after winning a game of HORSE only with more programming and less basketball. I’m better at the former.

No, I didn’t get rich off the App Store. I never thought I would. If you’re wondering how to get rich using the App Store you should stop as you’re already looking at it from the wrong perspective (unless you intend to dedicate your full attention to it). That expectation is just plain dumb. You need not only a solid idea (easy), but solid implementation and solid marketing to make Trism-like bucks. The App Store is saturated with thousands and thousands of applications and Apple’s the little games people could play to bump their sales. Those games included putting spaces at the beginning of an application’s name so it would float to the top, releasing “updates” to jump to the beginning of a category, etc.

We’ve decided to go the low time-investment, crank out as many apps as we can route for a few months. I’ll let you know how it pans out.

Connections

Published on November 12, 2008 in networking. 2 Comments Tags: , .

For the sake of brevity, I’ll try to keep the intro short so I can get to the meat of the post.

I’ve been fortunate to have a lot of doors opened up to me over the past couple of years. I interviewed for an internship at Vocalocity to get a bit of experience under my belt. It went under. I google mapped “software development atlanta” and the now defunct AppForge popped up. I interviewed, they offered an internship and later a full-time position. It also went under. Such is life with startups but the experience was invaluable. I learned a lot and met a lot of great people in both instances.

The day AppForge shut down, I sent an IM to Jeff and I was at Hakano (now Appcelerator) a few days later. They literally offered to have me start the following day, which was very kind. I got my current position in a similar way — a tweet.

It’s my opinion that the best way for local entrepreneurs to recruit talent is simply through networking. You can often find great employe(es)(rs) through established recruiting services like RP (a firm that’s highly respected in Atlanta), but I think it’s best to just get out there and meet people

Get out of your shell — go to events like Startup Weekend and Barcamp, spend some time outside of work hanging out at Octane w/ the guys from atlhack or any other group of people trying to tinker with interesting things in the community. Perhaps it’s not as easy as commenting on Lance’s blog or putting Skribit on your site. It takes more effort and time than that. You have to take matters into your own hands if you want to be successful. You’ll fall flat on your face from time to time, but that’s how it goes. Use social networks like twitter to find people connected to people you already know. Get introduced and meet up to discuss possible business ventures. If nothing else, you’ve made a contact that may be able to answer a question for you later. A great idea like Sanjay’s GivingTi.me could be another great tool in helping simplify networking in the Atlanta area (and beyond), but I don’t think it’ll change the fundamentals — meet people, help them out and they’ll usually return the favor. It probably goes without saying but it helps work hard, too. What I mean is, we already have the best platform to find local talent to aid in building the best startup community in the country. Get to work Atlanta!

Marketing an iPhone App

Published on November 10, 2008 in Apple and iPhone. 3 Comments Tags: , , .

This post will have at least one follow-up, depending on the result of the “CastCatcher debacle.” Also, it’s probably a bit of a rant so skip to the next to last paragraph if you don’t want to hear about Apple behaving like the Microsoft of the late 90s.

Mobile apps are a strange beast. Users don’t want to pay much (<$5 in most cases), but they want a desktop application’s worth of functionality. Maybe the rationale is along the lines of paying less for something “physically” smaller (i.e. a mobile app fits in your pocket since it’s on your phone unlike the desktop version of Quicken). Until Apple’s iPhone and App Store, your best bet was to buy directly from the developer, through Handango or similar. This sucked. It was a major pain, support was shoddy at best, and you had no idea what you were getting into.

Today, Apple’s App Store eases the distribution pain for developers and gives users trust that the apps they purchase are worth it (screenshots, reviews, etc. all help). It doesn’t solve the support problem, but at least it makes it easy for a user to buy my apps. Cool.

There are some issues with the App Store, though. Some have been addressed, like the review system being open to anyone. You can now only review an application if you’ve purchased it. Other issues, like lengthy delays for Apple’s “approval” haven’t. This delay, though, is manageable. I can deal with waiting a week so Apple makes sure my application isn’t going to take over the world. No problem.

The first major pain of marketing an iPhone app is Apple’s closed policies. Apple prevents developers from releasing competing software on their platform. It’s all very reminiscant of the troubles Microsoft had with IE being bundled with Windows and the United States DOJ. I’m not entirely clear on how Apple gets away with it when Microsoft was unable to. Maybe it’s Steve’s good looks. It’s Apple’s platform, after all, so I won’t fault them even though I disagree. What is a problem, however, is the inconsistency of Apple’s app reviews. One of return7’s applications was just rejected for “using too much bandwidth.” We were asked to neuter the application by turning it into a WIFI-only streaming application. Two things come to mind: that’s total bullshit and I wonder if Apple is going to add streaming functionality to iTunes in iPhone in 2.2 or 2.3. There are at least seven other streaming applications I can think of, off hand, that aren’t subject to this limitation on the App Store. Also, three prior versions of CastCatcher have already been approved. The streaming code is shared among all versions, save for minor bug fixes and feature additions (like Icecast support). The latest version of CastCatcher does not use more bandwidth than many other version and most likely uses LESS bandwidth than most other streaming applications since it does not load its list of stations from an outside source. Bandwidth consumption is strictly based on the streams a user wants to listen to. CastCatcher’s rejection seems like some sort of mistake. Apple has generally been helpful in the past so this was pretty shocking to me.

The second pain is the actual marketing part. Assuming you can get your application on the App Store, you have to make sure it’s an immediate hit or it’s unlikely you’ll make enough money to make it worth your while. You need a well-designed (and built!) application with a leg up on competitors. Originality helps too. Advertising on the App Store probaby pays off in a big way, but I’ve not looked at the costs or tried it so I can’t help there. An alternative is AdMob but I’ve only heard that it’s expensive and I know from experience that the company is not generally responsive (where’s the $250 credit you promised me 2 months ago?) so the return may not be worth it unless you have an application with very high sales. If you fail to make the top 100 list, or at least have a popular application, you’ll be doomed to the 5-15 sales per day grave yard. Bad times.

So what happens now? I suppose it depends on whether or not Apple lets us release the latest version of CastCatcher (we’d really like to get this update in the hands of our users).

More to come.

Atlanta Startup Weekend 2 #asw2

Published on November 9, 2008 in Atlanta, startup and weekend. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

Holy cow. What a crazy weekend. So we started out Friday evening doing the usual vote and be bored session. That part pretty much always sucks, mainly because there are so many people who bring ideas to the table without first seeing if they’re out there or at least making their clone interesting via some twist or another. Some things were also just not feasible to do in such a short period of time. Joe Uhl said it best: “I didn’t come to startup weekend to get another job.”

Having said that, there were some really great, original (and some not so original but still interesting) ideas that came out of ASW2. The coolest ideas, in my estimation, were twitpay.me, givingti.me (very original, Sanjay), and Mark’s (Still) Horrible Idea (let me explain…and yes, I’m biased).

Twitpay was neat, not because it rides on the whole twitter-doesn’t-make-money bandwagon, but because it made money the first night. It was simple enough to do in a weekend, it was clever although I dislike the public stream business. My preferred format would have been something like “d twitpay @lance $5.” It was, however, well executed and designed. Well done. They get top honors, in my book.

Second place definitely goes to GivingTi.me. This is simply because it was the most original idea there (as opposed to “hey, lets build this iPhone app that uses GPS and like trade stuff with it since that concept hasn’t been done 90 times”). The GivingTi.me team got a lot done and I’m sure we’ll see it turn into a full blown app pretty soon — very good stuff.

Mark’s Horrible Idea started off as a joke, and since we were up to the challenge, we took the horrible idea and turned it into this (not so horrible idea), then ended up putting it up on ebay (also for fun). Will it sell? I doubt it, but it’s still amusing. It was pretty fun working on it simply because everyone else thought it was a joke the entire weekend. I still don’t think they fully understand that it could actually be used for useful PR stuffs, but that could be due to Tejus’ amazing marketing skills. ;)

Another cool deally that came out of ASW2 was the Skribit folks from ASW1, Calvin and Paul, implementing a new feature (on the left side of this blog, actually so take a look). I don’t know that we had as many designers as last year, which was disappointing, but then again my group was comprised entirely of engineers and a guy who really, really liked postgresql. Yes. We. Can.

I was pretty sad to see so many teams implode, though. There were some cool ideas that didn’t get to see the light of day due to resources or disagreements.

All in all, I can’t wait for ASW3…well, maybe just a week or two off would be nice.