Should you start that business/app/product?

by

So, for me people like me, the following scenario happens a lot.  You get a good idea and you imagine it would be fun and everyone would love it.  The question is whether you should turn it into a start-up or at a least a serious hobby.  I mean, geez, the idea is awesome and you’d be crazy not to work on it, right?  So, should I work on this new product/business/app idea?

I like to ask myself a couple of things:

  1. Why me?
  2. Will people pay for it?

Why me?

Are you the right person to do this?  Do you know anything about it?  Can you reasonable compete in the field if other people, presumably better suited to the project, enter, too?  If so, then fine, please continue.  However, nine times out of ten, switching to a whole new industry is a bad time to also launch a new start-up or product in that industry.

 

Will people pay for it?

This one is easy to overlook.  There is very little more important than figuring out if people will really part with their money for your product.  Sometimes, those potential should part with their more. They might be well served to do so.  They might be happier and wealthier if they do so.  But unless you are really certain that they’ll buy your product, then don’t waste your time and money building and testing the product only to find out too late that people won’t actually pay for it.

New Apple Submission Guidelines and the Independent App Producer

by

Recently, Apple posted, for the first time, app store submission guidelines. They are pretty specific, informative, and useful. Apple has been fairly opaque, in the past, regarding what would get your app rejected, so independent developers and producers, like myself, always lived at risk as to whether or not their new app idea would be summarily rejected. The new guidelines increase transparency and should help lower the Apple-related risks involved in creating new apps.

Ever since Apple introduced the App Store for their iPhone, there have been stories of apps being rejected. In the beginning, shunned developers would post their rejection letters on the Internet, and we would all commiserate and learn from each other’s experiences. Later, these rejection letters themselves were put under NDA, so the specific reasons for rejection became even murkier, and the fear factor rose. Some rejections clearly violated the developer terms and conditions, so there wasn’t much sympathy going around. Other rejections were genuinely surprising, and sometimes, even nuanced. These were scary. Every developer had to judge for themselves whether the time and money was going to be summarily flushed into the bit bucket. I noticed that my clients, even when developing innocuous apps, were concerned about the Apple risk.

So, to protect my apps and my clients, I have spent a fair amount of time over the last couple of years tracking the news sites, talking to fellow developers, and just generally keeping a finger on the pulse of the shifting rejections winds. I don’t think this will still be necessary…at least not to the same degree. For the first time, we have a document to read, and it is readable by actual humans, too. This frees up my time and lowers the risk of rejection. Largely now, I believe, rejected apps will be from software bugs, honest mistakes, and willful belligerence, but not random fate.

Some rules are funny:

  • “Apps that include games of Russian roulette will be rejected”

    This was a problem?

  • “Apps that use location-based APIs for automatic or autonomous control of vehicles, aircraft, or other devices will be rejected.”  My imagination flows with what could have been.

    "The pilot just died - does anyone know how to land a plane?" - "They made an app for that, but it got rejected."

Apple is a funny company. They have a history, mostly pre-iPhone, of being slightly indifferent towards their development community. This reputation has carried over into the iPhone age, largely because of the overwhelming influx of new developers to the Mac platform. However, in my experience, it is largely undeserved. I see them making missteps, like when the original SDK was under a tight NDA gag-rule that forbade developers from talking to each other unless they worked in the same company, and the long lack of specific app submission guidelines. So far, though, they have always, even if very belatedly, addressed those missteps. The gag rule was lifted. The submission guidelines were eventually posted. This impresses me. Their reputation should be modified to: “Will do bonehead things to developers in the short run, but the right thing in the long run, and will always try to protect the end-user.” It could be worse. The company’s DNA seems good, which for Independent Developers and Producers, makes the iPhone and iPad good platforms to invest in.

Must reads for Independent App Producers:
* Apple App Submission Guidelines (Requires Developer Account)
* PR Press Release
* HI Guidelines

Post-Mortem from Upgrading my Website -or- Planning for the Long

by

I recently upgraded this website. This post is about how well things went, and how this might apply to independent application developers. I had set up the products pages of my original site using Joomla, but I later added a blog to the site, which I powered using WordPress. The product pages highlight the apps that I’ve developed. As time continued, I realized that the schizophrenic origins of my site, having some parts powered by Joomla, while others were powered by WordPress, made some basic things, like tracking usage, ridiculously difficult. So, I’ve finally united the two sides of the site into a single WordPress backed site. Some aspects of the upgrade went well, like unifying on WordPress and making lists of existing urls for easy testing; other things, like forgetting certain urls, could have gone better.

Old Joomla Site

What went well

When I published the original site, mostly in Joomla, I knew that I might upgrade to a different Content Management System (CMS) at some point, and so I tried to plan ahead for that eventuality. It really paid off. The problem with changing CMSs is that the different systems represent their pages using different URL schemes. I, of course, wanted search engine results to still work after I upgraded to the new software because search engine rankings are always hard won and are important to marketing efforts, so I wanted the URLs to stay constant. I did that by using permalinks for each product page, like ‘/aboutwalletzero’ for the Wallet Zero product page, instead of Joomla’s default scheme that looks something like ‘/page.php?id=234’. So, when I moved to WordPress and when I had to recreate a Wallet Zero product page, I simple gave it an identical permalink url, instead of sticking with the WordPress’s default scheme, which looks something like ‘/page.php?page=123’. Now, search engines and anyone that has bookmarked a page, will see the right results because the url ‘aboutwalletzero’ that went to the product page on Joomla also goes to the product page on WordPress.

New WordPress based site

For mobile browsers, I used the WordPress plugin iqTouch (???). This tool pretty much automatically made the site nicely available for iPhones and other mobile devices by reformatting the look and feel appropriately for such a small screen. I had to do a little tweaking, but it was still quite easy. Plugins like this make my heart sing with glee. It would have taken Herculean efforts to make my old set-up mobile friendly. I had experimented with the neat mobify.mo (???), which isn’t a WordPress plugin, but will handle any website by doing the reformatting on their own servers. Mobify.mo is a good service that offers a lot of flexibility for the non-WordPress site, but iqTouch is working better for me. I can now mention my site at conferences and feel happy if an attendee looks at my site right then and there on their mobile phone.

Mobile Web Version

What could have gone better?

I forgot to create a list of urls from my old blog, and also forgot to put in re-directs from old blog posts on the old WordPress to new blog posts on the new WordPress. I was so focused upon the Joomla product pages that I forgot about the blog pages. I eventually remembered to fix it, but it was an embarrassing oversight.

I mainly wish I had made the upgrade sooner. All in all, it probably took several days of effort to upgrade the site, but I could have easily made the change happen a long time ago. It is the type of activity that usually doesn’t require your undivided attention, so you can accomplish most of the work when you need a short break from other projects, say, over your lunch break, or sitting on the couch during family reading time. It is hard to justify putting off upgrades that improve your brand and give your venture increased capabilities, like using the mobile plugin and visitor tracking.

Site wide visitor tracking

Implications for Independent Application Producers

Now, none of these observations are unique or insightful, but it underscores the importance, I think, for planning ahead for structural changes. For example, let us say you have developed several apps that are all listed under your company name, but if you hope to re-sell the app to another company, say, to eBay, then you need to know whether or not Apple will let you transfer the rights from a single app to another company. Technically, how would that work? Perhaps it would be smarter to list each of your apps under different accounts in order to facilitate the transfer. You need to plan ahead for these structural changes. Maybe your apps talk to your servers? Do they use a common domain name, or do they each have their own domain that could be transferred to a separate company? How about the name of your app? It might be available in the Apple app store, but what about for Blackberry and Android? If you ever want to branch out to those devices, you had better plan ahead.

Summary

The upgrade went well enough and I got a nice new look with a unified infrastructure. Planning ahead for these upgrades was the real key to success, but next time I’ll try to do a better job of remembering to track all of the urls that need to move. Planning ahead for infrastructure upgrades is also an important concept for independent application producers, for both technical changes, such as changing SDKs, and for business changes, like selling an app to another company. I just wish that I made the these changes sooner.

The Best Thing About iOS4 is, Wait For It… Folders

by

Screenshot Front

My New Front Screen

The iPhone 4 comes out on Thursday, and a few lucky folks have already gotten theirs. As a developer, I’ve been using the upgraded iOS4 operating system for a few weeks now (but I’m still waiting for my iPhone 4 to ship) and Apple is now allowing official reviews. So here is the only thing you need to know. The most useful feature of the new operating system is the addition of Folders. This is the one features that has impacted my day-to-day usage the most.

Now, I know everyone is excited about multi-tasking, which is cool. I added it to PowerNap and Nightlight, and am working on Time-to-Read, Meeting Timer, and Time-to-Eat, since they all have timers in them. I’m just added the first round of Retina-display graphics to Wallet Zero and added iAds to start recuperating some of my investment in that app. But, these features in my apps, and others, are not really that big of deal, compared to Folders. Those other features are simply nice improvements, but Folders have dramatically improved my daily iPhone experience.

Folders do a great job of letting me get to my apps and data faster. I can now put every app I need on the first three pages, making most of them about two away, or, at most, two taps and two swipes. That isn’t bad. Since I group apps by activity, like news sites that I read regularly, then they are typically only one tap away as I switch from one app in the group onto the next app. It is good enough that I now prefer reading on my iPhone over reading on my iPad, simply because my iPad is tending to get a little cluttered.

Folders also makes it way easier to share my phone with kids. My seven year old son hoards games, which tends to scatter icons over several screens, but I can now tell him, “These last three screens are yours, the rest are mine,” and have it work out fairly well.

iPhone screenshot

Lots of games

So, what does this mean for the independent application publisher? This brings into focus the concept of app refinement. For apps, the devil is in the details, and little refinements that impact workflow create a big payoff in user experience. From a technology perspective, folders just are not that big of a deal, but it makes everyday tasks, like finding my app, more pleasant, more refined. Your app might have the coolest technology in the world, but those ‘hard-to-do’ things are not necessarily the most important. So pay attention to how people use your app and focus on adding refinements that improve their user experience. Sometimes the biggest payoffs are the easiest to do.

Behavioral Finance for Software Developers and App Publishers

by

The Old Schoolhouse

I recently had my 10 year business school reunion. Being the business nerds we are, we had additional classes. Here are some thoughts from one of those:

Behavior Finance by Professor Malcolm Baker

From the session summary:
“At the foundation of finance theory is the idea that investors and managers act rationally… behavioral finance proposes a broader role for social, cognitive, and emotional biases”

Think of it as a bridge between psychology and economics. Economists, basically, work to find the underlying models that best describe how we make decisions in our lives. They don’t believe that we actually do complex math when deciding whether to buy the Tall vs. Grande, but they say, that on average, we all behave as if we were actually doing the the math. Do you wake up and think about your “Expected Utility”? You act like it. Psychologists focus more upon the times when individual act against their best interests. In other words, when their emotions or biases make them behave against the economists model. The press likes to point out the gap between the economists and psychologists, but it isn’t as wide as they paint.

One Hour Crash Course on Behavior Finance

… Read More

The Killer App for the iPad is, wait for it…, Writing.

by

The killer app for X. Everyone always wants to know, when a new widget is built, what it really does well. Often, it seems, it isn’t what was advertised. The killer app for the iPhone was suppose to be, according to Jobs, Making-Phone-Calls, with a heavy emphasis visual voice mail. The killer app for the personal computer, for those of us that can remember back that far, was supposed to be Cooking-Recipes (OMG!). The killer app for the iPad, again, according to Jobs, is Media-Consumption. All wrong.

The iPhone, although it needs to make phone calls, is only so-so good at it – but it is great for always-within-arms-reach-apps. Granted, there are lots of other uses for it, like games, web surfing, etc, but the Unique thing about the iPhone (and other smart phones) is that it is a little computer that you carry in your pocket that is connected to the Internet – and it does it Good-Enough(tm). I used to carry a Palm Treo 650 – which was also in your pocket and connected, but not it didn’t quite do it good-enough. It arguably did it better than others, but key functionality was really crippled if you weren’t employed by a company that could afford the Good e-mail back-end server. The Good software made the Treo very Blackberry-like. Apps were relatively difficult to install – more difficult than for a normal PC. The killer app for the Treo was the e-mail. Same thing for Blackberries. Maybe the twist for the iPhone is the ease of app installation and their security – you really can’t screw up your phone by downloading hack-apps. You could screw up your Treo, and you can still screw-up your Android phones.

So, what does the iPad do that is unique and awesome. Sure, you can read books. Sure, you get most of the benefits of the iPhone. But that isn’t unique. Browsing the web while I lounge in the living room, without having to fumble with a a mouse is truly awesome. Watching Netflix and ABC is, without a doubt, a game changer for media consumption. The Wall Street Journal app is within spitting distance of demonstrating how newspapers will survive. But, those are all, oh, how to say it, too obvious. However, when I attach my Bluetooth keyboard to my iPad, I roam to where there are no distractions, and write like I haven’t written in years (though, still, badly).

My desktop, for me, is for programming, and spreadsheets, and sort of serious endeavors. Writing, for me, is one of those things that is important to do, but never urgent. How could I ever justify writing? If I’m sitting at my computer, how can I allow myself to write when I should be programming? Well, nobody programs directly on the iPad. Nobody does serious spreadsheet work on the iPad. You get the idea. But an iPad with an external keyboard provides a wonderful, portable, low-distraction, writing environment.

I’m drafting this post at my kitchen table. I probably won’t add the links and pictures until I get back to my desktop, because rapid switching between programs, image uploads, etc., are a bit of a pain on the iPad – which is great – because I should be writing, not cropping images! The value is in the content, and thought, not the links and eye candy.

My 1st grade son and I have a semi-regular routine of going to a coffee shop, before his school starts, and we both write. Frankly, grabbing my laptop, the mouse, maybe the power supply, ejecting the external drive, grabbing the backpack, is just a bit too painful. Grabbing the iPad and keyboard, is cake. Not much bigger than my son’s composition notebook. I can grasp those two with one hand. He gets a the good influence of seeing a parent write. I get good writing time and good quality time. He gets to practice his writing and gets to see that an otherwise dull homework activity can be spiced up by just changing locations. We wrap-up by reading our creations to each other. His are more interesting.

The iPhone HD and iPad means Apple Hates Apps – That’s a Good Thing

by

According to Gizmodo, this is Apple’s next iPhone, importantly, to me, with a screen of 640×960. There has been a lot of kvetching around the Internet about the iPhone’s new case, it’s front facing camera, etc. but I think that people are missing the cooler picture here. Since the iPad’s resolution is 768×1024, and that the original iPhone’s screen is at 320×480, then we can only draw one logical conclusion: Apple hates apps.

Yup – I said it. There is no taking it back. I dare you to disagree. Well, at least some apps. The bad apps. The unloved apps.

hero-shop-pixi.png
pre-family-verizon-device.gifOne of the iPhone’s, and iPod touch’s early competitive advantages against the Android, Palm, Nokia, and Blackberry was it’s consistent development target. As a developer, a typical app that I built for the iPod touch would work just fine for the all of the iPhone platforms because they had the same input, same screen resolution, etc. If it worked on an iPod touch, then I really didn’t need to test it on, say, an iPhone 3G. Unlike, say, the Blackberry line, with several different resolutions, orientations, and input methodologies, developing for one model meant very little chance of it working on the other models. My early Blackberry development was a bit of nightmare. I screamed at Palm when, after making a game for them targeted at 320×480 on the Palm Pre, when they started shipping the Palm Pixi with resolution of 320×400. What kind of sadist company would do that to their developers? Don’t get my started on what it is like to test for a Nokia app. That fragmentation made it quite difficult to develop for them. The recent spat of resolution changes for the iPhone line, though, changes that Apple advantage (but don’t worry about Apple just yet).

pic1.jpgbb_phone_storm29550.jpgbb_phone_bold9700.jpg

Why would Apple do this? Well, partly, of course, is that they sorted of needed to get higher resolution screens for the iPad. But for the iPhones, those little screens are good enough, and Apple has never been known for introducing technology with out a corresponding and compelling uptick for the user’s experience. I think this is part of their strategy for culling their massive app catalog of the crappy apps. I don’t think you can underestimate how many of the apps in the app store basically don’t make any money. Stories abound about the app producer that spent $30,000 in development but only harvested $1,000 from the app store. There are countless more, and I know from first and second hand experience, of apps that, although costing less to develop, are only earning $100 in revenue over the life of the app. So, arguably, most, but not all, of the apps, just suck. Those developers will simply not re-invest the time and money to port them to the iPad or the higher-resolution iPhones.

This is win-win for Apple and the consumers. Apple still gets to rightly claim an un-godly number of apps in their catalog, but as the newer devices come online, those consumers will only normally see the apps designed for their device. As a new iPad owner, I really felt compelled to remove every iPhone app, except for the one or two that didn’t have an iPad equivalent and were actually important to my daily workflow.

My recent apps that I upgraded for to the iPad, Nightlight and Powernap: Forty winks anywhere meant some significant re-thinking of the app. I couldn’t just rely upon iPhone emulation mode – things didn’t look good without re-designing. Redesigning for a different screen is a big deal. The investment is significant. The looming changes in screen resolutions out of Apple is also having me revamp my whole programming workflow – something difficult for less sophisticate programmers and developers shops to pull off. Developing for the iPhone OS line just became a lot tougher.

What Apple could have done to make me think different? While in emulation mode, when zoomed in at 2x, I would have expected to see the fonts, for example, re-scaled. Imagine when you zoom-in in Safari, the text still looks awesome. Not the case for iPhone apps on the iPad. Graphic images also could also have been resampled/interpolated, like when you plop a DVD into a player attached to your fancy HD TV. Those DVDs, without extra processing, look pretty crummy. That crummy image was, originally, a big marketing angle for Blue-Ray purchases. But with good processing, a DVD actually looks pretty decent on an HD TV. Apple is a smart company – they could have done that, too, if they thought it important enough – they just didn’t.

This is all pretty good stuff. Apple wins. Consumers win. And, I think, independent developers will win because of fewer get-rich-quick developers out there trying to win the app lottery, undermining the economics. I, for one, welcome our new varying resolution Apple overlords.

iPhone App Store Sales Optimization by Tracking Ads

by

So, you’ve just put your killer app on the on the app store. You celebrated with some Schramsberg. You sadly watch your sales asymptotically approach zero when users discover that you haven’t ‘quite’ got it right. Now, you’ve fixed that one outstanding issue and you’re ready to re-invigorate your money machine.

Ok – Not that you no longer have that new-app bump, you have to get your app re-recognized the old fashioned way, through marketing. That’s marketing, with a lower case ‘m’. Probably viral marketing, reviews, and advertising. So, as some rich manager said, “If you can’ measure it, you can’t manage it.”

Measuring advertising efficacy is a problem on Apple’s app store, because you can not, until now, measure the effectiveness of different advertising channels because they only report total sales, and not their referring source. In the 9 months that I’ve been developing iPhone apps (let’s birth this baby!) I’ve focused on executing as many experiments as possible, but I’ve only been able to do one advertising experiment at a time because it was too difficult to distinguish the effects from a particular advertisement from other factors, such as normal weekly fluctuations. Now, the smart guys over at Mobile Orchard has released a clever trick to track effects of individual back to individual sales. Check it out. I’ll update this post with my own results as I get them.

Mobile Orchard also has a good article on getting your app reviewed. Although I haven’t pushed reviews, yet, everthing that I’ve heard does indicate that it is a very personal process process. Although most sites keep a journalistic separation between the money and the review, some do not. And remember, these people are only human. Perhaps a good way to think about this is like getting a job where you have to get your resume recognized and have it stand out apart all of the other resumes.

How do you get your resume to stand out? Well, I think the first step to think beyond the resume. When I was still a cadet at the Air Force Academy, I was pretty miffed when I didn’t get a prestigious summer job at the school that I thought I perfectly qualified for. I was perfect on paper. After that job went to the other guy, I went to the decider to figure out what happened. He was too tactful, so I had to read between the lines and finally figured out that I had totally misunderstood, up to that point, the hiring process. You see, up to that point in my life, I had been chosen for things based upon “Who is the most deserving?” School admissions, for example, is, I think, a good example of that. Hiring, in contrast, is based upon “Which one will make my life easier?” It makes sense.

I believe that the getting reviews is sort of the same. The reviewers, deep down, want the most popular site possible with the least amount of work. Don’t be in denial about this reality.

Making money on the iPhone App Store

by

If you haven’t read it yet, Pinchmedia recently release a good report/slideshow on the market dynamics of selling products on Apple’s app store.

You can see it here:
Title: “iPhone AppStore Secrets – Pinch Media”
Link: http://www.slideshare.net/pinchmedia/iphone-appstore-secrets-pinch-media

I have about 10 published mobile apps at this point, and although I think the Pinchmedia presentation is great, and validating, I still think that they see the world through a certain prism that filters much of reality.
From my own experience, I had created my deck on lessons and experiments of publishing on the app store. I’ve identified about, oh, twenty experiments that i’ve performed, with more to come, and put them into this short slidesow. Since it contains a lot of confidential information, I’m saving it for in-person meetings, so contact me if you’re in the Boston area.

So here are two charts from my deck:
An with pretty decent staying power.
screenshot_04.png

An app with less staying power.

screenshot_05.png

I’ve put about 10x the energy into the second app. The interesting question is, or maybe the next question is, “What make the linear decay app” vs. “What makes the exponential decay” app? I think I know the answer. I think other people know the answer, too. I think that the answer knowers aren’t talking.

Now, knowing the answer, and monetizing the answer, are, of course, two differing things….