Mentioned on Digg - Sweet!

Three products from App Shop were in an article that made it to the digg.com front page today.  I find it very cool since I am a closet Digg.com fanboy.  The article lists 18 different iPhone apps relating to drinking.  So Beer Pad, Wine Pad and Pad Lite were all mentioned. 

You can digg/read this story here:

Digg story

http://digg.com/apple/18_iPhone_Drinking_Apps_to_Get_the_Party_Started

Putting my Time In + Positive Reports

So, this week in my business I have finally gotten some encouraging information.  Essentially, Apple has started to release daily sales reports.  From what I can tell, Wine Pad and Beer Pad are both selling very well (more than enough to make up for my lost day job income).  As you can imagine I am pretty excited about this.

There is still tons left to do before I can leave the iPhone apps alone for while.  My customers are clamoring for new types of products (even more expensive desktop style apps).  Its pretty amazing, but people will do your marketing for you if you listen to them.

The other thing I have been doing is participating in Internet Business Academy.

This is a subscription based website that basically helps you in everything you need to know about internet business.  It is well worth the cost and I attribute a lot of what I have accomplished so far to the influence of the owners of the site (and their book recommendations).

A good start...

New Product Just Launched

This week I had a major success along with a major setback.  First, the success: App Shop released another product similar to Wine Pad called "Beer Pad".  Beer Pad already had at least one sale with reviewer who gave it five stars.  When I designed Beer Pad I took all the feedback I got from Wine Pad and put it in there.  Also, the idea of Beer Pad came right from the community.  In the web 2.0 world, your customers are partners and they let you know what they want.

The setback this week is that I cannot get an update published to my Wine Pad product.  This is very frustrating since I worked on that thing day and night.  Also, if the preliminary numbers are at all correct many people have bought the app and are affected by its shortcomings.  I do not want to lose this audience, however if I really cannot get that fixed I need to consider re-publishing Wine Pad so I can get the right features in.

This is the problem when working with a huge partner like Apple.  On one hand, my website already has over 700 unique visitors with no promotion at all on my part.  And I am making sales with no advertising budget.  On the other hand, I have little control over my product.  I can't take it off iTunes and I can't update it.  Things go wrong with iTunes and I can't do anything about it while my customers suffer and my reputation suffers.

So, something to consider.  For the time being, I have the iPhone programming bug and if this can maintain some cash flow I will stick with it.  Eventually, I will have to expand this business though...

One Week Today

So its been one week since my product Wine Pad has been available for sale. App Shop is doing pretty well in the first week in spite of a few dings. I got a lot of encouraging email about the product which is very nice and this gives me some indication that people are buying it. The reviews on iTunes have been mixed, some people have encounted a bug that crashes the app. The bug is pretty serious, if you put a single quote into a text field the program can crash. Luckily, I indentified the problem and a fix is in the works.

The bottom line is that my work is just beginning and there is a lot still to do. I am putting off starting some other products and refocusing due to some other customer feedback (there appears to be a demand for Wine Pad clones (Beer Pad, Coffee Pad and even Scotch Pad). Also, there is a pretty strong interest in a desktop application.

My plan is to make sure Wine Pad is solid and has an edge over its competition over the next few weeks. Once I am satisfied with this I will make some clones but customized for the subject matter. The next step is to consider releasing free "lite" versions to help drive traffic to the paid product.

I am starting to become convinced that this business model will work out.

First Product Released!

Well, this blog has not gotten much attention lately because I have been pulling all-nighters trying to get my first product released.  So, I am happy to say that Sunday nite I officially launched App Shop's first product, Wine Pad!

Now, I can officially call myself an entrepreneur.  Since Sunday, I have gotten about ten emails and 8 official reviews so the product does seem to be selling.  Most of the feedback has been positive or has suggestions that will go into the next update of Wine Pad.

Also, the app-shop.com website is getting much more traffic than any other blog I have used.  Chalk that up to iTunes...

This is a huge personal success for me, four months ago I never would have even thought of starting a business.  Today I have a registered business, bank accounts, web presence and customers.  This is a start and the actual cash situation is still uncertain - but at least there now is a cash flow situation.

Now, I have a lot of work to do.  My main focus this month is to establish a community around Wine Pad by over delivering to my present clients.  Well, off to work!

A Small Victory

I cannot go into the details because of NDA, however, today I just got through one hurdle in the process of making a product available. Its a small victory, but I believe that at least it will be a human in the partner company that is looking at my work.

Very excited, if all goes well I cannot describe how happy I will be with this. Either way, I will be spending a lot of time over the next month on company housekeeping (bank accounts, web sites, VAs). Also, I want to release the version 1.0.1 of my product as soon as possible after things have settled down and the community comes back with some feedback.

Next on the list is that I need a real live version control system. Right now the contenders are Subversion and Git; both are open source solutions; however I will probably go with Subversion because its a cool name and intergrates with my developement environment.

Very, very busy

Even though I didn't officially start my new work schedule I have been very busy with my new company.  Since I have made much quicker progress that I anticipated learning how to do iPhone programming I decided to try and do a series of all nighters in order to get an app on iTunes by Friday. 

Sadly, I did finish my first product but for a lot of technical reason I couldn't actually get it submitted into the system.   However, I am very happy with my work and all I really need to do now is to deal with the details of putting the product on sale.

Other than that I have started work on my company's website (app-shop.com), but its not quite ready for public consumption.  I am considering hiring a VA to help setting up the various blogs and other content I want on the site.  Also, I need some help with search engine optimization.  I plan on using GetFriday and I will let you all know how that goes.

New Company Launched and more news

So, since WWDC I have felt an amazing pressure to get out and do
something. Yesterday I got two steps closer to doing just that:
My hours are officially reduced to two days per week and the paperwork
for my new company arrived from LegalZoom. July 9th will be
my official launch of my company as well as my new life. My first
milestone for this is to get my first product, WinePad, onto the
Apple App Store. I am hoping that this will be done by the App Store
launch date.

Just Read a Great Blog Post for Entrepreneurs!

The author says it better than I can so:

Here it is

Blogging is a Lot Harder than it Looks + Google Analytics

Blogging turns out to be a lot harder than it looks.  Each time I sit down to write a post I have a great writing idea that I think people would be interested in reading.  But, the execution so far has fallen flat and the idea only gets half expressed.  Maybe it is just the amount of time that I can actually put into it...

One of the reasons I am doing this blog is to get into the habit of blogging and learning about the tools that are used to understand and drive traffic.  I will write a more detailed post on this later, but an amazing tool that I am using is Google Analytics.  This tool presents all the data about the users of your sites (how many are unique, how long they stay, where they come from,  etc).

Google Analytics has this great feature that overlays an image of your site with the % of times people clicked on each link.  This is a great way to listen to your users - they tell you by clicking what they want. 

What I found is by far the most clicked link on this blog at the very bottom where there is a list of links to other independent business sites (26%).  The second most clicked thing was something like 10%.  So, what I am going to try next is to add to this list resources that I think are valuable and see if these component still gets as much attention.  I'm also thinking of a way to make that component more visible so that maybe it will draw the attention of the majority of users who simply click away from this site after being referred from StumbleUpon or Digg.

When Do You Know Its Time to Leave Your Job for Your Business?

Anyone who has thought about starting a new company has had to wrestle with the idea that their life was going to change drastically as a result.  Most people have grown comfortable in the typical 9-5 workweek that ensures a steady cash-flow and routine of a corporate safety net.

For a time, people already in the workforce may be able to run their side business as a hobby but in order to fully develop an idea most people know that they need to focus as much time on it as they can.

Lately, I have gotten to this point but frankly I didn't really know what to do.

Should I just get up and leave my job, burn my bridges and jump into my new life as many authors suggest?

Should I try and sneak my company development into my current work schedule?

Should I just drop my business?

For the truly courageous entrepreneur the best move indeed may be to simply pack up and leave and burn all your bridges.  This ensures that you will be as motivated as you can to make it work.  Honestly, especially for those of us who have enough money to support ourselves for a year this is probably the best way to go.

At this point in my life I could not stomach the first option.

A friend recently pointed out that other startups have been successful even though they spent their first year as a side project of people who had full time jobs.  37signals is the name of the company and the advice is start small and develop a cash-flow that can be built on.  Here is a link to their blog post on this.

These two approaches seem to represent extreme ends of the spectrum.  I for one did not want to burn my bridges, but I do want to move things along more quickly than I could while working at my job.  Also, my better half is not willing to drop out of paying bills completely...

So, what I am trying to do is to negotiate working only 50% with my current employer.  They are not really happy with this, but they certainly think its a better deal than 0% time.  This is my compromise and I believe it is enough for me to get my business moving over the next year.

Maybe this is something that you could try before one of the two extremes above.

To answer the question posed by this article, you know you are ready to do something drastic when you have a burning desire to start.  If you are thinking about your business idea all the time and truly want it then the time is going to come when you are going to have to start pushing the boundaries of what you are comfortable with.

The key is to come up with a plan that will work for your life and then follow it through.

Apple's bait: Application developers swarm to iPhone

This article was a great read for anyone interested in upcoming iPhone App Store business.  Of course, a lot of it is rampant speculation but it probably represents the best of the rampant speculation that we have.  Also, check out the Digg.com comments for this article - it is very telling what the attitudes among future users and current developers are.

These are exciting times to be in mobile development and I think we can expect a lot of drama in the next five years.  Is it going to be making millionaires or will the App Store be a billion dollar a year business?  Or is Apple simply courting developers to their platforms so the rapidly defecting Windows crowd will have shiny new desktop applications waiting for them on the Mac?

Well, That's About It for WWDC

Great conference, I feel like I learned a lot but at this point my brain is over saturated with the stuff.  It pretty exciting and I think that the people at this year's conference are going to be influencing what happens in iPhone development over the next few years; by extension what happens with iPhone over the next few years will be influencing the mobile market as a whole.

It will be very interesting to see what happens in July when the App Store comes online and when the NDA is lifted (so developers can talk about what they are doing).  From what I can see, the developers are sniffing out an opportunity fast.

For me, I can not wait to resume serious work on my own product.  But, right now this traveling has worn down my cognitive abilities (hence writing out a blog instead of coding).  I'm quite happy that they will be releasing videos of the content since its rapidly leaking from my brain as I type.

At any rate, I got a real sense that a future is being created in a way that will impact us in a big way.  Its pretty exciting to be a part of it.

Bare Naked Ladies @ WWDC

WWDC Beer Bash

Glossy Icon Hangover

WWDC is an odd combination of international vague coolness.  As I walk the through the conference I heard languages from rich countries like France, US, UK, Japan and Germany (or at least German speakers).  It all has a surreal techno-freaky vibe to it.  There is also a pinch of American Unix geeks through in.  You can identify these buys by their beer bellies and full beards.  There are also a lot of artists and designers thrown into this mix.

Also, there is an over abundance of glossy icons and snappy slogans everywhere at WWDC.  At WWDC you get weird associations like "Debug and Conquer" or for the App Store, "Applications Accepted Here".  That last one has Orwellian consequences to the developers hoping to get their creations on to the store.

However, I can't help but wonder if M$ is able to tap into this reptile brain in the same way as Apple.  I doubt it.  That being said, Apple's ability to engage non-engineer types into application development could be the key to their success in the future.  Technology and programming will be a fully realized technique when people who are not math majors can do it.

Resistance is ...

Cocoa Heads (Real Indy)

After the conference today I stopped by at a live "Cocoa Heads" meeting at the SF Apple store (Here is the link).  These guys are the real deal, all but one essentially work for themselves by writing Mac software.  The other guy is working on a real cool startup after escaping his other job working on the iPhone.  His company is basically creating a web application that looks like a desktop presentation tool.  And they created a web framework that behaves as desktop development environment to do it.

All of these guys are getting paid to do what they believe (and do rather well) directly by their customers.  It was great to see them in action after hearing them on a few odd podcasts here and there.

Was there a take away message?  Not sure, these are all guys who sort of fell into it or simply turned a hobby into a business because people took notice of what they were doing and pretty much demanded that the give their products to the public one way or another.  But, they were mostly normal guys who just decided to go for it.  So, I guess the take away message is to do what you need to do to bring your vision to the world.

Also, they all implied that you need to stay engaged with other people - customers and other people in the field.  They all worked with people who were friends...  Another interesting note is that many of them came from odd backgrounds - not all computer science, many had art and design backgrounds.

This makes me wonder if the Mac truly is the platform of the future.  The Mac platform has developers with a truly fresh perspective.  Programming frameworks are advancing to the point (at least on Mac) where talented people (who are not just engineers) can use these frameworks to create artful programs.  The things that these people are doing are state of the art in technology, but also lifestyle and vision.

Finally, to the Content!

Ok, now that the massive press of people has passed by after the keynote we can get on with the business of learning this stuff.  My first session today is at 9 and will be an introduction to iPhone development.  Of course, I have already been introduced but each time I heard the iPhone story I seem to pick up something new.  What I am really looking forward to are the detailed sessions of "Views and Controllers", "Table Views", and interoperating with other iPhone systems such as contacts and the camera.

Al Gore is an Apple Developer?

Wow, Al Gore is here; maybe he will announce for vice president. Hah, yeah right.