General

Focus On What Matters Or Sleep Alone

A friend of mine was getting married. As is norm in Indian culture, it was an arranged marriage. He was asked, by his parents, what type of girl would he want to be his wife. After long discussions with his friends he came up with just two:

  • she should be pretty (no brainer, all guys want pretty girl as wife)
  • she should be working (costs are escalating, so it's better to have two income)

It looked reasonable for his parents and like any responsible Indian parents, they were proud of their kid – for being thoughtful and reasonable. They went searching and one fine day he got married. His wife radiates with beauty and she works in an MNC. All were relieved at the turn of events.

On the first-night, the beautiful lovely lady said, “I don't want kids – it will spoil my career & beauty. And I don't like sex life too. So you sleep there, I will sleep here.”

When I released BlogEasy, a blogging tool for Mac & iOS, I read countless articles on increasing sales. Almost all of them emphasized the importance of analytics and elaborated how analytics is fundamental to sales and marketing.

They educated me to analyze who is searching for similar apps, how many land on the website, where they are coming from, who is downloading, how many are buying, how they are using, which age group are they from and so on and so on.

So I signed up with tracking services — Statcounter, Mixpanel, App Annie, flurry, Google Analytics and started measuring numbers. I became obsessed with analytics like a kid who got a new shiny toy to play with. It was exciting. I even started measuring twitter followers and Facebook page likes! Because…well, just because I could measure them.

I became fixated in improving each of these numbers.

But as days went by, the obsession waned off. The toy was not so fascinating anymore. I was coming to senses. And as I was coming to senses, a realization kicked in.

What matters to business is cash — cash in hand and cash-flow. Everything else should be a leading indicator of the king. Each tracking number in itself means nothing if it is not in the path of increasing cash.

Increasing twitter followers by tweeting jokes and inspirational quotes is useless because these followers won't buy; posting links in Stumble Upon doesn't help since that traffic is people with remote-control and they won't open their wallet; commenting on irrelevant blogs don't help for the same reason.

Instead of looking at irrelevant numbers, I had to focus on what matters.

If you are selling through AppStore, there are only two aspects you need to focus to improve cash: making an awesome product and marketing. Everything else1 is taken care of by Apple (or you don't have absolutely no control).

Even after ten months since released, BlogEasy doesn't have important features like adding images. Now I'm focusing on improving the product which, definitely, is in the path of increasing cash. UserVoice, a customer support tool, and Flurry give me the needed insights for new features.

It is in marketing that a solo-developer loose sight of the king and get drifted. By now, I know drifting has heavy impact. I am concentrating on focused marketing.

Hope I won't sleep alone.

This entry is posted with BlogEasy, a Blog Editor for iOS.

  1. Like hosting your app, processing payments, remitting to your bank account etc. If your app gets listed in AppStore, it increases the chance of being found, paid and downloaded rather than if you try to sell it outside AppStore (Mac apps can still be sold outside AppStore) ↩

Standard
General

Thank You

Four years ago, I became an independent consultant by capitalizing my expertise in designing processes and managing projects. As much as I enjoy process and project management, my heart is into programming. I realized developing an app will get me closer to programming and it will also be a nice addition to my technology portfolio. So last year I developed a Mac app, BlogEasy, and this year I released an iOS version.

The whole journey has been thrilling, educative and satisfying — thrilling, because I get to wake up everyday and stay late every night, to work on what I love to do; educative, since I had to learn not just programming but marketing, selling, writing and every associate business concepts; this whole business cycle from product development to selling to receiving payment was visible to me and that is satisfying.

I want to say thank you to those who helped me have such a tremendous journey.

Apple: For a comprehensive business eco-system. I wouldn't have been able to build BlogEasy, sell and collect proceeds, if not for the tight and comprehensive eco-system that Apple built. In the whole process, I deal only with Apple; that makes life easy for an indie developer.

WordPress: For an easy-to-install, blogging platform. If Apple follows a strict closed eco-system policy, WordPress is just the opposite. They open-source everything. It takes lots of guts to develop business in an open-source model and Matt has shown that it is possible to do so. If you are an open-source enthusiast and a blogger, WordPress should be your choice of blogging platform (and if you use iPhone or iPad, then BlogEasy should be your choice of blogging editor).

Prof. Paul Hegarty: For an amazing and a free iTunes course on iOS development.

Hacker News: For the success stories, lessons from failures, and constant inspiration.

Fellow developers: For the many tutorials; for answering questions in stackoverflow; for cocoapod; for Cocoa/iOS books; for their success stories. The quantum of help available is just amazing. You have to just ask.

Customers and users: For clicking the 'Buy' button (Mac Version) or 'Download' button. As I write, 76 people have bought the Mac version and about 100 have downloaded the iOS version. Their actions encourage me to code daily.

Joel & Shankar: To Joel, for the superb icon design & Shankar for testing the first version. I designed and developed all parts of this venture — proof of concept, design of both Mac & iOS app, website, marketing and so on. In all of these, I had some knowledge and could fill whatever gaps existed. But logo design was different. I had absolutely no knowledge. Joel took that load off me. And Shankar took time off from his busy days, tested the app for free, and sent me a page full of suggestions. The last line of his email read,

'I think the fact that the app brilliantly uses native UI is a killer USP. That alone is very, very impressive! I think you can do a launch. Good luck :) '

I can't express the happiness I felt when I read that line.

Wife & kids: It is not a vacuous, passing thank-you. When you are an indie, there are moments when you want to share your excitement about cracking something difficult and then there are moments you just want a laugh because you are depressed and don't see a point in pursuing whatever you are doing. I had tens of such moments. Without the support that my wife and kids gave me, I wouldn't have released these apps at all. I am grateful to have such a support not far away from my working table.

The surprising fact is, except my wife, kids & Joel, I have not met anyone else, including Shankar. All of the connections happened via Internet. Isn't it amazing? Now, whom should I thank for the Internet?

This entry is posted with BlogEasy, a Blog Editor for iOS.

Standard
General

Whatever Happened To New Year Resolutions

I made a resolution on Jan 1. There is nothing extraordinary about it. I have been making such resolutions every year. Am sure you do too.

There is one thing extraordinary though.

Unlike other years, I didn’t forget about it by end of January. I persisted in getting started and archiving it. I am glad I’m midway achieving it.

Are you curios?

I have programmed extensively for web and desktop. But never for mobile. Way back when Palm came with its PDAs, I tried my hand in developing apps for it. But I never got past the ‘hello-worlds.’ I did try many times after that, but somehow it never materialised.

The desire to develop a mobile app continued but it remained just that – a desire.

Once I developed BlogEasy for MacOSX, I was closer than ever to fulfil that desire. I decided to pursue it vigorously.

Starting Jan, I listened to the fantastic lectures by Prof Paul Hegarty of Stanford. I also bought three books (normally I don’t spend a dime on technology focused books, since they become outdated quickly). I started out slowly. I wrote small snippets, downloaded lot of code from github, searched through stackoverflow, when I was stuck. I was ready to write the app.

There was just one more issue to be handled.

I already had a packed life with two kids and a full time assignment. Finding time was a major challenge. I deactivated my Facebook account, cut down on tweeting, quit mostly on TV. Yet, I couldn’t get large chunk of time, needed for a focused development. So I would get up as early as I could and stayed as late as I could. I avoided going out on weekends; I read and replied only essential emails; and let RSS feeds remain un-read.

Progress was slow. Yet I kept at it. Everyday I would drag myself and sit at the same place and code — even if it was just few lines of code. I made no exception.

By mid-March, the app was in a good shape for testing. I tested. Then I asked around — in twitter and facebook (I activated FB by then). Shankar came forward to test. I submitted the app for Apple’s approval on 26th. May be it will be approved in one shot or may be it will take few iterations. I don’t know. I’m waiting anxiously.

It has been an incredible first quarter. I’m happy with the journey so far in this year.

Contact me if you want to test BlogEasy for iOS devices. I could surely use some helping hand.

This entry is posted with BlogEasy, a Blog Editor for iOS.

Standard
General

Challenges In ‘Consume’ Phase Of Learning

The curious learn, always.

When you are curious, you may learn about human heart valves, telecom networks, mobile programming, or equity investments. It becomes all the more fun, if you get paid for that learning, as in consulting profession.

At an early stage of learning about a domain, you begin with building an understanding of that domain. At this ‘consume’ stage, you face three types of challenges:

  • Discovery
  • Comprehension; and
  • Sense-making

When you are learning a new field, you need to learn the fundamentals. The challenge is to identify the fundamentals. For example, when I got into investing in equity, lot of folks talked about technical indicators and so I learnt them. But I quickly realised, by loosing almost all the money I had invested, that technical indicators are good only to pump adrenaline through your body. If you are looking for a) not to loose money; and b) profit from your investments, then you need to stay away from those indicators. Once I learnt the fundamental factors to measure, I could find sources that could guide me to achieve those outcomes.

Another challenge in discovering authentic sources is filtering through noise. Today, every one is an expert and they are everywhere — Quora, Twitter, LinkedIn and other god forsaken platforms, and they spew out so much that every search is polluted with their noise. Many of these noises are converted into books providing an aura of expertise around them. Crossing these noises and getting to authentic thinkers in the field is indeed a challenge.

Once you have reached authentic thinkers in a field, the next challenge is of comprehension. Language plays a major role in comprehension. When I say language, I am not just talking about words and grammar, though they could be a challenge too; much more important is the context. Within an existing group of people, context is almost always assumed. So when you get into that group, you need to learn the context to comprehend the language used.

Let me explain it with an anecdote.

I grew up in Tuticorin, a town in southern India. We have just two seasons — sweaty days and rainy days. Growing up in such an environment, I never understood the meaning of ‘white-christmas’ when we went singing carols; there was no internet in those days to google and none of my relatives or friends witnessed snow to tell me about ‘white-christmas’. So I assumed white-Christmas meant, you know, Christmas by the white men, the ones who brought Christianity to India.

I have had similar animating discussions with senior government officers when they learn of ‘cloud computing’. “What do you mean, servers are in the cloud? What happens when it rains?” Mind you, these are highly intelligent officers. Once the concept was explained they understood what that ‘cloud’ means.

The concepts that you learn have to hang together to make sense. For hanging together and to make sense, a structure is important; that is why books are still the best way to learn. Without a structure, you will form only a partial understanding like those blind-men trying to analyze the elephant.

To summarize, to learn successfully, you need to learn from authentic sources with a structure.

This entry is posted with BlogEasy, a Blog Editor for Mac.

Standard
General

Learning Phases And Its Support Systems

We live in an era where information on any topic—literature, science, project management, programming—is just a click away. But, reading through pages and pages of information doesn’t build your expertise. You need a disciplined and structured routine to become an expert.

A structure that I’ve been practicing to learn new fields is ‘consume-produce-engage’.

In the consume phase, you learn concepts, ideas, and other fundamentals of the domain. These may be learnt through classroom sessions, workshops, books, podcasts and videos. When learning fundamentals it is better to learn from the best, as they usually have a knack of simplifying even the complicated concepts.

Consumption makes you a storehouse of ideas; but it is when you take time to synthesize what you gained to produce something of value, these ideas crystallize in you. As you create, you may realize a gap in your understanding and go back to the original reference for further learning. Only, this time you’ll study with reference to the context, thus crystallizing the learning. There is no better measurement of learning than producing successful products.

By consuming you learn and by producing you crystallize. But by engaging others—in conversation, discussion and debate—you invite other’s perspectives on what you learn. Others’ perspectives will either augment or challenge your idea of the topic. Either way, you’ll enrich your learning.

This routine has to be repeated continuously until…well, there is no end to learning. Right?

For this routine to continue, it has to rest on three essential supporting elements: the learner, environment, and tools.

Fundamental to your learning is, your beliefs and discipline. A belief that a topic isn’t too high for you will get you started; and, discipline will keep you on the course through highs and lows of everyday life. You need to back your beliefs with intense, sustained efforts.

We don’t survive as an island. We live in groups and we need each other to achieve our goals. So it is essential to build an environment that is encouraging and forgiving; alternatively, you can move to such an environment. Whether you build your own environment or move to one, you need an environment that gives you ample space to make mistakes and correct them.

Finally, you need to tap readily available and facilitative tools to meet your learning goals. Tools help you in every stage of the learning path—they help you discover the best sources in a topic, synthesize different sources to build your own product, take your product to the right set of people and then to engage them in debates and discussions. Best of the tools hide their complexity and let you do whatever you do with ease and speed. Go after those tools.

When all components of this system work in their proper propositions, you learn well.

This entry is posted with BlogEasy, a Blog Editor for Mac.

Standard