Cannot wait to see Joe Biden and Palin go at it. Worth a few beers.

Settling in for the night - wife and I planning on making a "party" out of watching the debates on Thurs.

Civ IV: Colonization for a few hours now. Time sink.

Fixed my newsletter mailing list. Minor setback, but my weekend is back on track with

Just signed up for http://www.odiogo.com/. So cool - turns your blog into a podcast. @ snoonan thx for tip.

Uggg, Facebook confuses me today

My cat has gotten locked in our closed three times this week...

Getting up early to work on my new blogs. @garyvee psyched me up yesterday.

Wow - social networking overload. Random IMs - a million Twitter clones.

Listing to the latest IBMA content

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.