Meeting notes: 2009-11-12 -- Dan Grigsby, "Warm, Clothed, and Fed: Developer run iPhone businesses"

[Igal Koshevoy]

At this month's meeting, Dan Grigsby presented "Warm, Clothed, and Fed:
Developer run iPhone businesses".

* Dan runs mobileorchard.com -- a site with articles, videos and
podcasts relating to iPhone development.
* What to focus on as an iPhone developer?
- Focusing on "getting rich" often leads to stressful projects that
don't succeed and make money for someone else.
- Focusing on being warm, clothed, and fed is more likely to help
you survive and be happier, although you're not going to get rich.
* Developer premium: Objective-C development is such a specialized skill
that few can do the work, which commands a premium rate currently, but
as more devs enter the market, this premium drops. The number of new
apps per month is dropping because the easy apps have already been
written (e.g., flashlight, etc), and more devs are working on more
sophisticated apps that require better talent.
* New apps are being built, but who is doing the development work?
- Employees are hired to build apps that are core to the business,
e.g., Pandora player.
- Consultants are contracted to build apps that support the
business, e.g., game for a soft drink.
* Contract work can command premium wages for experts, but is
problematic because you can only put so many hours in a day, and without
assets or passive income stream, you don't make money if you're sick or
on vacation.
* Selling infrastructure services to developers can take advantage of
this growing industry by selling what other developers need to build
their apps, which provides a passive income stream and scaling. Example
of such companies include:
- Urban Airship provides push notification and in-app purchase
systems: http://urbanairship.com/
- OpenFeint provides a gaming SDK: http://openfeint.com/
- Vimov creates fancy, interactive video trailers:
http://www.vimov.com/isimulate/
* Creating content provides passive income, e.g., news sites like
MobileOrchard.com, review sites, etc.
* Enterprise apps are a tempting market but haven't taken off because
large organizations have different IT requirements than consumers.
* Price and volume: You need a brand to help make more per game and move
volume. If you consider the AST Top 100 games, the branded ones cost an
average of ~$4, and unbranded ones is ~$2 ... not much. Building the
niche apps can charge more, e.g., app for chemotherapy sells for ~$30
and backed by famous doctor that's an expert in the field that speaks
and gets credibility with other doctors that have enough cash and vanity
to .
* Getting credibility and traction
- Partnering well -- e.g., the chemotherapy app's famous doctor --
can establish your brand and expose your app to people that trust them.
- Clever use of technology can help you get famous, e.g., clever but
silly app gets on CNN.
- Favor beauty and substance to strengthen your brand, build
word-of-mouth in users.
- Having app post useful updates to a user's social media stream ,
you're able to expose it to the ~150 or so people (Dunbar's number) that
care about that user, which is a much better deal than advertising your app.
- Get 20 fellow devs to submit positive comments to review sites,
and do this for their apps.
- People hate programs that whine at them to pay.
- People feel pity and disdain for the word "donate", you may want
to consider saying "support".
- Capture workflows, calculators, trackers and such.
- Sell a suite of shared apps that leverage each other's data to buy
together, rather than individual cheapy apps.
- Provide a ~15-60 second video to show off what app does and why
it's cool.

-igal

[Elia Freedman]

Thanks for typing this up, Igal. Wish I could have been there.
Elia

[Jason Grigsby]

Wow! This is great Igal.

FYI, an audio recording of Dan giving this presentation at 360iDev can
be found at:
http://www.mobileorchard.com/podcast-warm-clothed-and-fed-developer-run-iphone-businesses/

Thanks to Dan for taking time out of his packed visit to come speak to
the group. And thanks everyone for attending. We had a great audience
and a packed room to close out the year!

-Jason

--

Jason Grigsby
(503) 477-5340 o
(503) 502-7211 m
ja...@cloudfour.com
http://cloudfour.com

[Jeff Brandt]

I was bummed that I missed the event.

Was there any response to the "Get 20 fellow devs to submit positive comments to review sites, and do this for their apps."

I tried this strategy once on Mobile-portland and got no response.  I even offered promo codes with not takers. 

Has anyone else had any success with this or do you need personal contacts for this to work.

thanks,
Jeff

--
Jeff Brandt
CSI, Communication Software, Inc.
jbr...@comsi.com
cel 415.710.9923
Office 541.306.4891
Fax 541.610.1889
www.motionPHR.com  a Personal Health Record for the iPhone
www.myMedBox.info a Personal Heath Record for the Google Phone
http://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffreyleebrandt
http://twitter.com/jeffbrandt

"Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat."  Sun-Tzu, 544—496 BC

[Rob]

First, thanks to Jason for a great end of year MP meeting and Dan for sharing his perspectives in an interesting presentation last night.  I was too late arriving for a beer, but it was still well worth attendance.

Jeff, 

I've found that it can be hard to get people to jump in with positive reviews.  Knowing 20 people isn't enough, because even if you offer to give 20 people $5 just for fun, most likely only 15 or less would follow up on that out of sheer laziness.

Performing a review requires a person to open iTunes, potentially re-supply their iTunes account password, download the application, give a star rating and write something nice about the application as well.  As stated last night, maybe 1 in 10 people give apps reviews--is it likely that the 20 people you know will all make it through those steps?

My experience has been that you have to hand-hold and remind people to get on and do that.  Unless your app is very catch-all, your initial reviewers may need to be fed the specific good points about the app.  If you simply say, please give me a favorable review, they may not take the time to come up with contextually relevant points that are the essence of the "social proof" Dan discussed last night.  This is particularly true with niche applications such as the chemotherapy app example. 

Plus, the specific comments made need to sound independent of each other and have some variety of lesser-star (3 or 4), "needs improvement" tone in order to maintain legitimacy of the sharper eye.

In order to get to the magic 20 Dan discussed, you'd need to spend time, perhaps during the month leading up to the release making a list of people with active iTunes accounts and iPhones (touches) and getting them to agree in advance to install and rate and review the application favorably and quickly.  

One idea might be to make your most loyal beta testers agree during the process to writing a review and having a friend do so as well.  Beta testers, by putting up with the rickety provisioning system and multiple add/removal/sync process that haunts iphone QA, probably have enough skin in the game to want to see the application be a success.  It is necessary to relate the importance of positive reviews to them.

With that, please send me your application name again and I'll hook you up with a review ;)

Regards,

Rob Banagale

twitter: @jetsetter

[Jeff Brandt]

Rob,  Thanks for the reply.  Yes,  It does take a bit of time in our busy world and I do understand.  One of the biggest problems with the review system is that Apple asked for a review when you are deleting an app and it is so easy to just hit a star.  I wish they would provide some help with getting positive reviews.

thanks again,
Jeff

[Rob]

Sure, Jeff.  Dan addressed the idea of overcoming the negative bias resulting from uninstall reviews last night.  I believe he said the idea comes from the NY Times app: If a user runs your app a given number of times after a certain period of install, you should prompt them with a dialog to review the application with a direct link to do so.

rob

[Jeff Brandt]

Great idea.

thanks
jeff

[dcgrigsby]

I wrote this one up, along with some code to show an alert and, if the
person agrees, to launch the app store app to give them an easy way to
add a comment:

http://www.mobileorchard.com/fighting-back-against-the-app-stores-negative-rating-bias/

On Nov 13, 12:27 pm, Rob <lowtop.conve...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Sure, Jeff.  Dan addressed the idea of overcoming the negative bias
> resulting from uninstall reviews last night.  I believe he said the idea
> comes from the NY Times app: If a user runs your app a given number of times
> after a certain period of install, you should prompt them with a dialog to
> review the application with a direct link to do so.
>
> rob
>
>
>
> On Fri, Nov 13, 2009 at 12:18 PM, Jeff Brandt <jlb...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Rob,  Thanks for the reply.  Yes,  It does take a bit of time in our busy
> > world and I do understand.  One of the biggest problems with the review
> > system is that Apple asked for a review when you are deleting an app and it
> > is so easy to just hit a star.  I wish they would provide some help with
> > getting positive reviews.
>
> > thanks again,
> > Jeff
>

> >>>>http://www.mobileorchard.com/podcast-warm-clothed-and-fed-developer-r...

> >>> jbra...@comsi.com

> >>> cel 415.710.9923
> >>> Office 541.306.4891
> >>> Fax 541.610.1889
> >>>www.motionPHR.com a Personal Health Record for the iPhone

> >>>www.myMedBox.infoa Personal Heath Record for the Google Phone

> >>>http://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffreyleebrandt
> >>>http://twitter.com/jeffbrandt
>
> >>> "Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics
> >>> without strategy is the noise before defeat."  Sun-Tzu, 544—496 BC
>
> > --
> > Jeff Brandt
> > CSI, Communication Software, Inc.

> > jbra...@comsi.com

> > cel 415.710.9923
> > Office 541.306.4891
> > Fax 541.610.1889
> >www.motionPHR.com a Personal Health Record for the iPhone

> >www.myMedBox.infoa Personal Heath Record for the Google Phone
> >http://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffreyleebrandt
> >http://twitter.com/jeffbrandt
>
> ...
>
> read more »

[Jeff Brandt]

Great,

Thanks!

jbr...@comsi.com

cel 415.710.9923
Office 541.306.4891
Fax 541.610.1889
www.motionPHR.com  a Personal Health Record for the iPhone

www.myMedBox.info a Personal Heath Record for the Google Phone

[Cryptopur]

This is great material. I just found this group and the very first
post got me excited about trying some new things. Thanks so much for
creating this.

I think the idea of creating a passive income from some simple apps
makes a lot of sense and it really speaks to our first experience. We
poured our hearts (and cash) into an app earlier in the year and while
it got great reviews it isn't the money maker we need to keep chasing
that dream. But the idea that I could spend less than a week
developing something that creates even a small amount of regular
income...that's a great bootstrapping approach.