Looking for a Fresh Start (Up)
An Open Letter to Founders, CEOs, and Hiring Managers of startups (or friends of these people),
Hello, my name is Garrett and I am looking for a position geared towards software/business development with a startup company. I have a background in Industrial Engineering and a love of creating things. Recently, I have overseen the development of three unique pieces of software: an enterprise wide system, a technology that sits on top of Twitter, and an iPhone app that received national acclaim. I have the skills and work ethic to be a successful addition to your startup company.
Five months ago, I left my corporate job to start my own business. I have always had an entrepreneurial spirit that needed to be set free. Armed with an idea and high hopes, I left my corporate job at the leading IT Hosting provider to start a business based on an innovative idea to scale B2C communication on Social Media platforms.
My final role in the corporate world was a Project Manager on a team responsible for developing and deploying an enterprise wide piece of software. I worked with software developers and end users to create a tool that had a very successful launch and adoption. Throughout this process, I discovered that I had a skill at piecing together customer requirements, communicating them to the developers, and ensuring that the development worked holistically for the good of the entire business.
I loved the aspect of creating, and the successful launch of this enterprise wide project gave me the confidence that I could do this again. I was bitten by the development bug.
Around this time, I had created an idea with a partner that utilized Twitter in a unique way. With my new found confidence, I interviewed and selected an offshore development team and began work on the project. In working with foreign developers, I quickly learned that one thing all people love to share is their own unique culture and traditions. By taking an active interest in the people that I was working with, I was quickly able to navigate around the cultural differences and developed a strong relationship. To give them insight from where I came from, I sent them a package filled with Rico’s Cheese, Ranch Style Beans, Cholula Hot Sauce, Willie Nelson CDs, and a Lone Star Flag to make them honorary Texans.
Concurrently, I began working on an iPhone App from an idea that was generated at the bar one night with my friends (isn’t that how all great ideas begin?). I pursued a separate set of outsourced developers to create BarCards. This simple scavenger hunt game for the bar went on to garner local and national press and was something I am very proud of. I have a roadmap for further development, but I need more than a shoestring budget to make these enhancements.
While far from being a technical software developer (as this blog attests), I have successfully overseen the development of three unique pieces of software, designed for drastically different situations, created by both onsite and offshore developers. In addition to discovering a skill for this type of work, I found that it is something that I thrive on. After some self introspection I learned why: I love to create.
I realized this more and more as I read Clay Shirkey’s book Cognitive Surplus. I love taking something from a thought or concept, bringing it to life, and adding value to the world. I have tapped into this by managing software development and am looking to expand outside the digital world into actually manufacturing a tangible item. I love adding value to the world by creating a solution that had not previously existed.
I was formally trained as an Industrial Engineer and believe that gives me a unique perspective in software development. Throughout my career, I have looked at processes from end to end in a logical manner and identified areas for improvement. This skill is the cornerstone of my ability to examine how different pieces/functions of software fit together.
In looking for a job, it is tempting for me to fall back on my past experience and formal training to find an Industrial Engineering or Process Engineering job. However, I am looking to get out of my comfort zone and look for a new challenge in a startup environment. I’m writing this letter because you are the person (or you might know the person) who can help open the door for me.
By becoming a part of your startup team, there are benefits for the both of us.
WHAT YOU GET
- Hard working individual who knows that in a startup environment you sometimes have to toss theory out the window and roll up your sleeves to get the job done. Growing up working in a record store for 10+ years, we had a bathroom that had to be cleaned. While no one was officially a janitor, the job still had to get done. I’m not afraid doing the jobs (even the unglamorous ones) that just need to be done.
- An employee who recognizes that money doesn’t just grow on trees. For the first five years of my life in corporate America, I really took for granted the amount of money that I got paid. I now know how difficult it is to bring in revenue and have a new respect for it. I am going to do everything in my power to make sure your startup is successful and financially solvent.
- Someone who can bring in “slap yo’ mama” queso or enchiladas to the company potlucks.
- A person who can see the big picture of how things tie together. This is one of my strongest skills and something I credit to my Industrial Engineering education. I really have a strong sense of how things are put together and have a sixth sense of how things impact one another.
- An analytical person who can talk. Really. I promise. I know it is hard to believe, but I don’t fit the stereotypical profile of an engineer in a joke I once heard. Q: “How can you tell if you’re working with an extroverted engineer?” A: ‘He looks at your shoes when he’s talking to you.” I can communicate effectively with anyone from the cleaning ladies to the VP of Strategy and every stop in between. Give me a call to find out. I mean, come one, I was on Wheel of Fortune after all, so you know I have to have a personality.
- A person who knows that well done is better than well said. Need I say more?
WHAT I GET
- The opportunity to work with a dynamic startup. I like things being fluid, unwritten, and novel. Don’t confuse this with me being averse to having a plan. I like a plan; I NEED a vision. I want to know where your company is going and how you plan on getting there.
- The insight of how to take a product to market. This is my biggest weakness right now, and I really want to shore it up. I don’t know how to bring things to market (specifically a new idea) and I want to learn how to do this. I would ask that you share your thoughts and ideas with me so that I can grow and learn.
- The ability to broaden my network. I want to make contacts with people in the startup sphere; since I don’t really have any now, I figure the best way to make them is to work for you and do an awesome job.
- A paycheck. This is important to me right now. I have gone five months existing off of the money that I put aside to launch my business with no cash coming in. Yes, I need to get some money, but I assure you that you will get a quality employee.
Thank you so much for taking the time to read this blog post. If I have piqued your interest and you want to see my résumé, have a friend I should contact, or just want to find out how it was to be a contestant on Wheel of Fortune, feel free to drop me a line at pinojo [at] gmail [dot] com or on Twitter.
I'm Pat Sajak approved; you should definitely give me a call.
How Not To Advertise Your App
I know I have not released the updates that I have promised; this is probably one reason why I have neglected this blog. I apologize on multiple levels, but I can assure you that this will be sorted out in a months time… At least I hope.
At any rate, I thought I would make a post on How Not To Advertise Your App. It seems like so many people are looking for solutions to the problem of how to get their app to market. Well, I want to tell you of one way NOT to do it.
There is a service called TwitHawk; I had read some reviews about it and thought that it might be helpful to promote BarCards. Essentially what you do is put together a search criteria to look at all the Tweets on the Twittersphere and add the responses that you want to send out to users whose tweets match that search criteria.
The founder of TwitHawk goes to great length in explaining how his service is not spam and the restrictions he has in place to prevent users from malicious intent. Some of these restrictions include: (1) only a limited number of tweets sent out per hour, (2) a user only will get ONE message ever from the Twitter account using TwitHawk, and (3) common words are not allowed to be the only things in the search criteria. I think that while his reasoning why it’s not spam may be compelling, there are certainly differences of opinion on this topic.
I will say that it is cheap ($0.05/tweet) and I thought I would take a chance on it for just $5 and get 110 responses (you start out with 10 for free). Since my game is a bar game I searched bar drinkin’ -quit as one of my terms and bar drinking -quit as my other term; I thought to put in the “-quit” to avoid those people who were giving up alcohol.
I created 5 responses and I designed them to be catchy to entice people to click the link to be taken to the App Store:
- while you’re at the bar tonight, check out @BarCards the hot new iPhone scavenger hunt game! http://bit.ly/agGhst
- if you’re out and about, you gotta check out @BarCards the new bar game! http://bit.ly/agGhst
- if you’re drinkin’ you might as well get your buddy to pay; check out @BarCards the new bar game http://bit.ly/agGhst
- did you hear?!? Free beer?!?!?! http://bit.ly/agGhst
- while you’re out, here’s an easy way to break the ice with the person you have you’re eye on: http://bit.ly/agGhst
Of the 110 tweets, I ended up getting 41 clicks for a CTR of 37%; pretty impressive for a CTR! However, this did not translate to sales. My hypothesis mainly lies in the fact that probably only a handful of those who clicked own an iPhone. I think that if TwitHawk expanded the criteria to include the Twitter Client (e.g. Echofon or others that are just on the iPhone) I would have had a higher rate.
Finally, there is the issues with users wondering why they got this @-reply mentioning their name, and other users being downright upset that they had been spammed.
I had three users who were kind of confused by my automatic replies asking them to purchase the app. Here were their responses:
- @BarCards Oh cool! I’ll get that as soon as I get an iphone…
- @BarCards free beer!!!! Lmao…u must don’t kno me!!!! Lol
- @BarCards I rather treat someone if drinking w. someone
prefer alone.
You could tell these users weren’t particularly “mad” but more curious why I would tweet them. I did have one user who was really pissed that I sent him an @-reply:
- @BarCards That is the kind of SHIT MARKETING that I HATE on Twitter. Thats like spamming my Gmail.
Wow, I didn’t really think I would get that sort of response, but I guess that is the risk you take when signing up for an automatic service to spread your message. The user then went on to send out another tweet so that his 350 followers would know how crappy BarCards was and one of those retweeted the message to his group of followers (hitting another 200-300!)! Ouch!
Overall, I think that TwitHawk is an ineffective way to advertise an iPhone App on Twitter. This is primarily because of the fact that you can’t search of the Twitter Client which would allow you to restrict your messages to only being sent to iPhone users. However, even if that feature was enabled, I think I would still refrain from using the service again.
Old school marketing would think that having only 1 person out of 110 getting upset about a message would be a pretty good rate. However, we live in a day and time where the customer’s voice is amplified and that one person can convey his dissatisfaction to a WIDE audience. In this sample case, 550 people now have a bad impression of my product and that is something I DEFINITELY don’t want to have. This reason alone should make you shy away from this service.
The Numbers
Paying homage to Noel Llopis’ blog posts on “The Numbers”, I thought I would have a post of my own to show you the impact of different events on the download count that have happened since BarCards was released.
BarCards and BarCards Lite were initially available for download on May 7, 2010. After releasing the App, I ran some Google/Facebook advertisements since I had some free credit from GoDaddy after registering the app’s domain. If you are a sign up for these services for the first time, I think you get like $50 of free credit to advertise on both Google and Facebook. I ran the ads for the free version thinking that this might boost up some downloads and give me a little bit of online presence. You can see that they definitely worked with BarCards Lite getting a fair amount of downloads for being completely unknown.
Graph on the numbers for BarCards and BarCards Lite.
I learned a couple of things. One, if I ever spend “real money” on ads, I would definitely go with Google Keywords as I got a whole lot more value (more impressions/clicks) than I did with Facebook. Two, that $50 credit goes FAST; just be prepared to run through your advertising budget quickly if this is how you are going to get the word out.
You’ll notice that I got a few more downloads after 5/8; this was namely my friends downloading the application. Never forget that you have the ability to pander to your friends and family to not only download your app, but also to write review and post to their Facebook/Twitter to get their friends to download the app. While this can garner a few downloads, you will definitely not eat on it.
The downloads then went practically to zero. At this point in time, I thought I was dead in the water; the app was going nowhere fast. Then randomly, I got an email from a former Brazilian exchange student who stayed with my family back in high school. He was working in London and was walking down the street browsing through the Hot New Games on his iPhone and sent me an email on 5/16 telling me that BarCards was listed!
I was pretty excited to say the least, and had noticed that downloads had been picking up since 5/13. I tried to understand what being listed as a Hot New Game meant and began reaching out to different devs to see if they could offer advice. Ray Wenderlich (who I had met because his app Math Ninja was featured on Fresh Apps the same time that Barcards was), posted a link to Noel Llopis blog. From reading the blog I could tell that Noel was an experienced developer, so I reached out to him for advice.
I was surprised to receive a prompt response from him. He told me to immediately drop the price to $0.99 to encourage traffic and to begin reaching out to the major review sites (MacWorld, MacLife, TUAW, etc). It was Noel that I learned that the app was picked up as a Hot New Game on Thursday 5/13, as he told me the Apple Store refreshes on that day every week.
I am so thankful that he gave me that advice, because lowering the price started pushing up downloads (you can see the BarCards line steadily ascend from 5/13 to 5/20) and I think that was what I needed to get the next BIG push. I value his insight and mentorship and will be grateful for what he did to help me out. Being listed as a Hot New Game roughly averaged out 30 paid downloads per day; not too shabby.
Special design that we made for Apple.
On Wednesday 5/19 I was driving to my hometown because my mom was graduating from college. In the process of getting there, my email alert went off and I saw it was an email that appeared to be from Apple. The email stated that they had a potential marketing opportunity for BarCards; I had nearly jumped out of my seat. Apple requested that I provide them several images and had less than 24 hours to do so.
At first I thought this was a joke. I called up Carla and told her the news and asked her to research this email to see if it was a hoax. She called me back and told me it was legit. We were both incredibly busy, but we knew this opportunity wouldn’t come often, so we stayed up very late putting together some special images that Apple had requested.
Since this was the day prior to the refresh of the Apple store, I thought that there was no way that it would make the Apple store the next day, so I was kind of bummed that we would be taken off the Hot New Games section. Turns out something better happened.
Carla sent me a text while I was at Giorgio’s eating pizza and catching up with an old friend to let me know that we were on the FRONT PAGE of the iTunes store! I couldn’t believe it and couldn’t wait to see the download totals.
On 5/20 BarCards was listed on the front page of the Apple store under New and Noteworthy.
It was quite the boom; we ended up averaging just at 300 paid downloads per day, a 10X increase from being on the Hot New Games List. I have to say that to this day I am not sure what I did to get noticed by Apple, but I am thankful that it happened. I have Googled to try to figure out how this might have happened, but it seems that no one really knows.
Thursday 5/27 found us taken off of New and Noteworthy, but BarCards was still on the front page of the Apple store under the What’s Hot header. We even had one of the images we submitted to Apple as a small banner to boot! I was really pumped about this, and so happy that Carla’s hard work could be appreciated; she is such a talented graphical artist. Anyway, this new position found us averaging right at 100 paid downloads per day.
The Apple store refresh of Thursday 6/3 found BarCards still on the front page of the iTunes store under What’s Hot, but our banner was taken away and you had to scroll to the right to see the icon for the app. We finished the week averaging just under 50 paid downloads per day. All and all pretty good.
Here is a chart that shows the daily downloads depending where we were featured:
| Where Featured | Paid Downloads per Day |
| Not Featured | 1-5 |
| Hot New Game | 30 |
| New and Noteworthy | 300 |
| What’s Hot (with banner, no scrolling) | 100 |
| What’s Hot (no banner, scroll to right) | 50 |
I knew that BarCards was probably going to be taken off the front page of the Apple store for good on June 10, so I realized that I was going to have to drum up some more publicity. This was very important because I knew that I would not be cut a check by Apple for sometime; seeing that I am unemployed, I could not finance development until the money came in so I still needed some buzz. The amount of time you have to wait for a check is fairly long, so this is one of the reasons that you have not seen an update to BarCards.
Anyway, I had taken Noel’s advice to heart and kept on reaching out to people. I emailed everyone, multiple times, and had gotten nowhere. But with the impending doom of being relegated to obscurity, I persisted for a little while longer.
What happened was that I caught a lucky break. Through chance of emailing the right person to tell about my app, I happened to get referred to apply for Mashable’s Spark of Genius series. I thought I had a snowball’s chance in the South Texas heat of getting noticed, but I decided, “What the hell? I’ve got nothing to lose.”
I applied for it the morning of Wednesday 6/9. That night, I was putting up the Piñojo Productions website and I was Googling BarCards to link to some of the reviews that we had received. Lo and behold, I saw the Mashable link. I looked further into it, and the Mashable Twitter account even tweeted out about the app. That started the whirlwind which lead to this post as I was really pumped up trying to reach out to the people Tweeting about BarCards (again, another reason to have your Twitter account linked to inside your application; a big lesson learned).
This led to the noticeable spike seen on 6/10 (the article/tweet came out rather late at night); in particular you will notice that BarCards Lite had an appreciable spike. Equally noticeable is how fast it trailed off! This even includes a Gizmodo article written about BarCards late on 6/11. If anything, this proves how much we are about the here-and-now on the net. Also interesting is that the spike was not as large as being on the front page of the Apple Store under New and Noteworthy. With as much buzz that the Mashable post gave the app (some 1000+ tweets and retweets were made on the app), I would have thought that it would have translated to more downloads.
My final bit of publicity was an article that Jason Buch wrote about BarCards for both the print and online edition of the San Antonio Express. It was a lot of fun to get to play the game with a reporter and have someone completely new to the idea see how people react. The article was really good and even game me a little boost as well.
Needless to say, after the article came out in the newspaper, the numbers have really started to trail off. I think that I could have kept them higher if: (1) the app didn’t have such a small slice of the population who would play it – by having the word “Bar” in the app, I know that I whittled down the potential audience immediately, (2) the app was purely given away free and had In App purchases, and (3) I would have updated often while it was featured. At any rate, I will be interested to see what the new website and updated version of the app will do to the downloads.
I hope that this information can be helpful to you as you develop your iPhone app!
Late Night Post 1
I really apologize that I haven’t quite updated this in a while. I promise that I am going to post some graphs soon on how BarCards fared with the different publicity that it received, but now is not the time.
I guess this is more of a late night musing on something I had on my mind. I met up with some friends for drinks for a guy who I used to work with who is leaving the corporate world to pursue his dream of getting a degree in Philosophy. While I was at that event with a lot of folks I used to work with, they asked me how the app was going, what updates I have coming out, and some of the things I have learned. I thought this might be a good post.
Lessons Learned
I always think that you learn the most out of your failures, so I want to lead with the lessons learned (Lord knows I have learned a lot from this experience!). As I have mentioned before, I am not very technical at all, and if there is another person like me out there creating their own app, these are some of the things I would have done differently:
1.) Make only one version of the app and make it free.
I know this sounds contrary to thought, but check out Free Apps Doesn’t Mean No Revenue which was pointed out to me by Andrew over at Fingerbakery. I completely agree with him that the shift will be towards giving away free apps with In App Purchases that allow users to purchase additional functionality.
As an Industrial Engineer, this makes complete sense to me: it is easier to expand something that I currently have than to purchase a “Full Version” and have two separate applications. Think of how most paid software works, you have the demo/trial version of software and then you purchase the full version that unlocks more features on the current program. This is how it has worked for quite a while, and I think it makes sense in the App Store.
I am working on another iPhone App (a party game in the same vein as Charades, Taboo, Catchphrase but will get a LOT of laughs), and I am completely adopting this model in that game.
2.) Have a page/links to your Facebook Fan Page and Twitter Account.
You are in 2010, not 2005. If you don’t have a social media presence, then you are just kind of dumb. It is worth having a place for people to conglomerate to talk about your app or to point their network to your app.
While I had the Facebook and Twitter accounts, I did not make it easy for people to get to them from the app. This was just as stupid as not having one.
3.) Update Often
This has been the cardinal sin that I have committed. I got a lot of press on BarCards, we knew there were updates we wanted to make, and we just kind of stalled out. We do have updates coming out, but I am a little concerned that they might be too late. I guess we will see.
I will say that you don’t have to adhere to this rule all the time. This next game that I am releasing is going to be incredibly simple and we are not going to be as concerned in building a community with it like we are with BarCards. Then again, if the consumer wants it, we will be listening.
How BarCards Is Doing
Since a lot of the pub has died down, you can imagine that the downloads have died down in the same manner. This is true, though we are pulling in anywhere from 2-10 paid downloads a day and 5-15 free downloads. I guess this is pretty good considering there has not been any updates.
We also got a nice review on TechRockstar as being one of three apps that they suggested for a night out and this just happened two days ago, so we still are getting a little press. This was cool because they had actually reviewed BarCards for the first time in the middle of June in an article I completely missed!
I guess for not having an update, it is not going completely all that bad.
What Updates I Have Coming Out
The next thing is the updates that I have coming out. My devs have been working hard on two main things that will be an update for BarCards.
First, we are working on having a pretty slick website that users will be able to use some of their creativity. I think that this will really get people all excited about the game all over again. I will just leave it at that for now and hope that you drop by when it is all done.
Second, the app itself is going to have some updates. We are going to be providing some new cards which I know a lot of people are looking for. There are going to be some bug fixes and we are also adding some features to help you find the answers to some of the cards that are more trivia oriented. Overall, I think players will like it.
These are the short term features and I hope that it will regain some interest so we can pursue our long term goals.
So that is where I currently stand; I am excited to share with you some of the download history graphs along with letting you know as the BarCards updates come and App Number 2 is released!
It Cuts, It Cuts Real Deep…
…but it is so true.
Just got emailed an article from my brother that I had to repost. Oddly enough, I am reposting something that completely rails on my janky BarCards Website. I just read it and realized how true it is.
The post is by a person Matt Gemmell and is called Your App’s Website Sucks.
Now, I doubt Matt has ever come across my app, or my app’s website, however if he did he would be pretty appalled. I mean, I am not going to lie, it is really bad. But I hope that the picture of the cardboard sign conveys the skill that was put into the website — virtually none.
So let me offer my apologies to Matt in case he does approach my site, but I hope that he will understand a few things:
1) I am not technical. I am surprised I got this Word Press site up. I mean, I created the BarCards website on an old copy of Microsoft Front Page that ran on my Windows XP box…
2) I am terrible at design. My graphics artist is the bomb, but I am not.
3) I was really trying to focus on getting something out, so being worried about a website that people may or may not visit wasn’t a major concern.
I will say this, the website is a thorn in my side now. In fact, I was working with my graphic artist tonight and we have a slick new design we are working on. Even more than graphics, it is also going to have some cool features that integrate into the app that hopefully my devs will be able to fold in soon.
So yeah, my website for my app sucks. But it is only going to suck for <hopefully> just a little while longer.
Music, Snowballs, and Actual Users
I thought I would make a quick post as I had a few things to talk about.
On Music
First, I gotta give a big shout out to Andrew over and FingerBakery who has been full of a lot of good information. If you having played his game, download Pokerbot now, and when you play it you will notice that the music is really pretty good in it. I decided to ask him how he got it or if he made it himself and he gave me a couple of websites including AudioJungle and SoundRangers.
I had no idea that you could purchase stock music to throw in your app.
On Snowballs
There is a really cool designer who goes by Ugmonk who recently left his job to pursue his design business full time. His images are crisp and sharp and I bought this “Math Problem” T-Shirt a while back. Any way, he sent out a tweet referencing famous designer Johnny Cupcake’s recent blog entry on the SnowBall Effect.
I’m planning on doing exactly what he talked about; I have been fortunate to make a little money on BarCards and my partner and I are reinvesting all if it to (1) work out some of the bugs, (2) roll out an interactive website (instead of our janky website), and (3) roll out some REALLY awesome features that should make going out on a Friday night a lot of fun. Stay tuned.
On Actual Users
This past Friday we were fortunate to have San Antonio Express News writer Jason Buch go out to a local bar to play BarCards with a group of friends and me. He was able to see first hand and talk with some of the players and people they interacted with at the bar and wrote a story just released in the Express News Business Section. This is hot off the press! I am very thankful for both he and his photographer giving up a portion of their Friday night to come check out our creation.
I think one of the reasons that people like playing BarCards is that is touches on something that Clay Shirky has mentioned in his new book, Cognitive Surplus: “Our social media tools aren’t an alternative to real life, they are a part of it” (pg 37).
BarCards is a game that starts on a digital device, but in order to be successful, you must elicit real life action to complete the task. Even as we make enhancements to make BarCards more of a “digital community,” what will make it truly valuable is when the consumer uses the digital world to coordinate action in the real world. At least that is my humble hope.
Getting Publicity for Apps
Tonight I saw a really good ReTweet from @SnappyTouch (be sure to follow him for interesting articles/blogs on iPhone development) on a blog article that another iPhone dev @fingerbakery wrote today regarding purchasing a small ad buy from Admob to promote his new app Pokerbot (also going to download it to help a brother out, so @fingerbakery if you read this article, take one away from your total as I bought it independently from the ad).
You can click the article for more in depth information, but summarizing some of the key points:
1) He only spent $50
2) He paid $0.04/click and garnered appx 1250 clicks
3) He has a tip to mention the price in the ad to try to AVOID people clicking the ad; kind of counter intuitive, but the point being that you only want people clicking if they are willing to spend the money.
4) $50 bought him a campaign that ran for 4 hours
Tomorrow he will posting how many downloads that he got and attributing them to his advertising campaign. I will be interested in seeing a couple of things: (i) if the downloads covered the advertising cost (he will need roughly 70 downloads), (ii) if he thinks it was a good enough idea to try again, and (iii) if he tries a different time frame to run the ad and the results from that experiment.
I will be paying attention to his blog post closely tomorrow to determine if this is a strategy that I should employ for BarCards (the $0.99 version) as well as BarCards Lite (the free version) and to track how closely a “click” ties to a “download” in both of the examples. It might be equally interesting to change the BarCards price to the original price of $1.99 to see if the “click to download” ratio changes.
Very cool that you can stand up an ad campaign on Admob this easy. Might have to try it out.
Review Roundup 12 June 2010
Wow, it really looks like we might be getting to the tipping point for BarCards! Here are some of the latest reviews to come in.
Clement & Co.’s review actually hit before the Mashable article. They compared BarCards to an “I-Spy” game for adults. Favorite line has to be, “If you are surrounded by friends who simply don’t give shit about what people think about them or their actions, this could get pretty awesome.”
Appolicious looks like they have BarCards listed as the “iPhone App of the Day” on the right pane. I also enjoyed user jfliegel’s post on Appolicious called “Don’t Flirt Without These Apps” where he included BarCards amongst Bar Mapper, Pickup Lines That Work, and Taxi. Another Appolicious user jenniferalaine wrote another review of BarCards with the great line, “Here’s a way to turn pick up lines into a game, or maybe a game into a pick up line?”
Finally, it looks like the good folks at Gizmodo noticed our app as they named it one of This Week’s Best Apps. The epic comment belongs to user speednuts where he opines: “BarCards: Absolutely NOT endorsed by Gray Powell. On a side note, dear Gizmodo: I have an etiquette question. How long can I make jokes about losing a prototype whatever in a bar before it becomes blase? I don’t want to look foolish at a gathering of my peers!”
Well played sir, well played indeed.
Getting Developers for your Project
This article is written for anyone who is not technical or a millionaire, but who may be interested in creating an iPhone app. As I mentioned in a previous post, I am about as technical as a blue dry erase marker. I mean, I really don’t know how to do much on the computer in the way of troubleshooting, much less programming. In fact, if you take out making random designs in Logo, the obligatory “Hello World” program in C++, and getting to the Gorilla Throwing Banana game in Q-Basic, I don’t have any computer programming experience at all.
This might make it rather challenging for a person then to develop an iPhone application. In fact, 10 years or so ago prior to ease of forming communities on the web it would be rather impossible for a non techie person like me to get any program accomplished. Yes, I know that there were BBS, forums and the like, but you have to remember that 10 years ago I was purely using the net to see the weather, the sports scores, and the news (come to think of it, not too much has changed…).
What has changed is the ability and ease to form communities that Clay Shirky so elegantly states in his book Here Comes Everybody. With the transactional cost reduced almost to nothing, it was relatively easy for an Average Joe like me to search for a site, post my requirements, and receive bids on the project. The revolution of the web giving the ability for people to communicate and work together is really what has brought the world BarCards.
Now, before you go off gallivanting around trying to get someone to create your app, it is extremely important to document, document, document. You need to understand EXACTLY what you want your program to do, how you want it to do it, and how it should look. This is extremely difficult to do even when you are working in the same building with developers much less with developers halfway across the globe.
One of the jobs that I had in my previous company (I had a lot) was working with developers to create an enterprise wide piece of software. The first thing that I learned from them was the importance of them being in constant contact with the customer because they are the person who is going to accept the application or not. The second thing I learned was the importance that the customer presents the idea clearly in language for the developers to create the product. What one person envisions is not always what the other person envisions.
The devil is in the details. As you put pen to paper you are really going to find that even the most basic ideas produce complex questions. What options should I have to transition from this screen? Where is this data being drawn from? What events make a game over? This is tough work but it is vital to be explicit so that you have a clear picture of what you want and the developers have a clear picture on how to execute on it. By taking the time to vet this out as much as possible, you will eliminate a lot of ambiguity and scope creep, both of which cost time and money.
Once I had my documentation complete, I went to Elance to post the job. It is relatively simple and you put in a description of your project, any of your documentation that you want to share publicly, and your budget. It is important to note that during this phase you might not want to be as explicit as what you are looking to accomplish because this is viewable to the entire Elance community.
You will start receiving bids (I think that I got some from Latvia, Russia, US, India, and China) pretty immediately. One thing that you will notice is that many of these bids are very generic; in fact, I got the sense that a lot of these guys didn’t even read what I posted, but rather did a keyword search on “iPhone” and created a proposal. I really tried to focus on the responses that seemed to directly address my statement of work.
Elance is really good about letting you check ratings on developers from their past jobs, a synopsis of their job, and how much the job cost. I also was able to download the apps that they had created and played around with them to understand the look and feel of what they had created.
When you select your developer, you will not only settle on the terms of the price to be paid, but also when you will pay and what percentages of the total. At this stage it is important to define clear deliverables so you know exactly what should be produced and how much should be paid. I would shy away from paying more than 25% upfront prior to any work being completed, and be sure to leave the lion’s share of the payment for the final product. You must setup escrow payments within the Elance portal which is a benefit for both you and the developers.
I have been working on my main project with some developers in India and have become familiar with their culture, work habits, and the time change so I decided to contract out another group from India for BarCards. We settled on the price and began development.
Overall, I would say that I was satisfied with my developers as we had a good rapport and we were able to accomplish our goal. The fact that they did produce a workable application that garnered some attention on the web was huge. I will now be able to take the proceeds from that first version and refine and enhance the app.
The main thing that I was frustrated with was the Q/A piece of development. The devs later confided to me that they did not have a Q/A Analyst and would be hiring one given the troubles that I had throughout the project. I had to do a LOT of testing and often times they would fix one issue but have another thing (or more frustrating a previously fixed issue) fall apart. In this instance, it is important for you to have an understanding of base test cases on how your application should work and be sure to test them all every time.
My development also took longer than expected, and I found out later that this was primarily due to the fact that they had to remove the original developer from the project as he could not handle the work. Another developer was brought in (unbeknownst to me) and picked it up and knocked it out. That developer has since left the company to pursue another job. I am now in kind of a pickle because while they promised a month of debugging they have no one to do the debugging. Consequently, I am looking at moving the development over to the other, more stabile dev group that I have been working with.
In conclusion, the benefits of contracting out your dev work via Elance: (1) it is far cheaper than getting someone domestic, (2) for the most part these guys are college educated folks who have some amazing skills, (3) I have had nothing but dedicated developers who have put in a lot of hours, (4) you have a certain amount of protection by paying an escrow fund instead of paying directly, and (5) if something does go bad and you lose your money you can leave negative feedback which the community will see.
There are some negatives: (1) you are not in the same physical location, (2) off shoring can have risk that the dev you are working with leaves the company, (3) potential language barriers, and (4) you will spend a large sum of time checking the quality of the app to make sure it was done correctly.
Finally, while I do not believe that this is necessarily a negative, you must be cognizant of the cultural differences. There are going to be things that are by nature foreign to you in the other culture, but you should be patient and try to learn from the differences. By remembering the golden rule of treating people the way that you would want to be treated, you will not only have a successful project but probably develop some good working relationships.
WOW! What a night!
Oh my goodness, what a night!
I guess some of my “retroactive” posts will have to wait, because I had something HUGE happen to me tonight to talk about.
Earlier today, I came across an article that piqued my interest, so I reached out to the author to let her know about BarCards. She was incredibly friendly and encouraging (I have to admit that she made my day when she wrote back to me; it is not often that I can interact with a celebrity!) and told me that I should apply on the Mashable blog for the “Spark of Genius” series. After looking at the requirements, I thought I was a long shot, but I thought, “What the heck!”
So that brings us to roughly 3 hours ago when I was working on creating the Piñojo Productions blog. I was just going to to work on the initial story, set up my sidebar, and then maybe do one or two entries from things that I learned from a while back. Well, one of the things that I wanted to put in my side bar were all the reviews that BarCards has received so far. I went to Google and typed in “barcards iPhone” and at the top of the list was a link to a review on Mashable! I was floored!
I then did a search on Twitter for BarCards and was floored to see all the results (at the time of this post, the Mashable site was showing 856 tweets)! I know that many of them are bots that just scrape the Mashable website, but a good many of them are from real people. I also checked Pete Cashmore’s Twitter Handle and found that he had sent out a tweet on BarCards that was broadcast to his 2,019,353 followers!
I was on an extreme high and couldn’t come down; I was calling/texting everyone I could think of even in spite of it being around 11:00PM CST. I wasn’t too coherent and was bumbling all around but I was just so excited.
One thing I noticed was that the BarCards Twitter Handle was not mentioned in any of the tweets that were being broadcast out. After coming down from my rush, I started sending Tweets to anyone who had something favorable to say in addition to the standard message being retweeted. This basically kept me up for the next 2 hours or so which leads me to now.
I am beat, but really, really excited about what might happen to my download total tomorrow. This came at such a great time because Thursday is historically the day that Apple will change out what is featured in their iTunes App Store. I am hoping that I can get a good enough push to possibly keep me listed there!
The moral of the story, you got to through out a lot of lines but eventually you’ll get a bite if you have the right bait. Just stay persistent and reach out to real life people in a personable way.
