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Wednesday, 03 March 2010 14:54 |
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Both Elemental Dusk and Quots have received good user rewiews, but the downloads still are low, due to some lack of communication. This is the App Store, I've learnt it. But they are getting better, albeit very slowly, thanks to the improvements I added to both the apps. I'm already improving the marketing for them and I'm going to improve both apps adding some more features. But I believe that the next big feature for both apps, which I think will push them really further, will be online access. This will take a while to implement, since I'm alone and I'm also relocating to a new country, but this is the direction I'm taking. I'm actually studying a new language (Clojure) to build web apps for both the apps. I will begin developing them as soon as possible. In the meanwhile I will bring some more "little" improvements to both of them. I don't know which one I will begin with, it will depend on the challenges I will face and on the features I will plan for the first release. I'm thinking about going with Quots first, but don't take that for granted. I will decide when the time will come. So please be patient. It will take a while, but new features are coming.
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Thursday, 14 January 2010 16:57 |
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I've just released another little app for iPhone called Quots. Quots is a simple app to manage your favourite quotes from important or famous people and the like. I implemented it because it was something I really needed to manage the quotes I find surfing the web, reading books and newspapers or watching movies. It also permits you to tag the quotes with topics, to make it easier to categorize and filter them when you need to find a particular quote for a paricular situation. Is a little app I'm really proud of (in my opinion it works very well for the task) and I use constantly since I released it. So check it out here or buy it from the App Store.
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Tuesday, 29 December 2009 16:35 |
So, the 2009 is almost over and the time has come to draw conclusions from what I learned in the past year. This was not a good year and I would be tempted to say lot of grief and problems came from hardships in my own life, hardships that took me away from my business. I have to admit it was a factor, but surely I am not the kind of person who looks for excuses. You need to be able to face these sort of things everytime if you are here for the long run, wether they come from your work or from other directions. So I must not ignore what I did wrong here. As they say, you learn more in hard times than in good ones and in the end I even wish I learned more than I did during this year (but I'm not saying I wish it was harder!).
So, here there are the few lessons I learned, hoping that they will be helpful for others as well.
- It's useless and counterproductive to act like someone you are not. I've been always an advocate for honesty and in the meantime I perpetuated a hidden lie through this website. Actually this is a business run by only one person, with its pros and cons. I believed that to do business you have to look "professional". So, even if the company page said that I am the only one here, all the rest of my website spelled a lot of "we", like there had been someone else in the company. I though it looked "professional" and that doing so the website was ready for when I will hire employees, but that was simply a lie. So I apologise with all the ones that were deceived by that. No one has ever complained about this, but I felt it needed a fix, so I rewrote the company page and the sidebars.
- Quality is great, but without marketing you do not go anywere. There are so many stories around the internet of people who went to stars overnight that you are lead to think that all you need is a good product. Well, it's not. It is already common knowledge (at least in the startup world) that what matters is not the idea itself, but the execution. But what they don't tell you (at least if you do not begin to dig really hard in this world) is that if nobody sees your products (or at least nobody that cares something about your niche) you do not go anywere. I know, it seems obvious, but I had to learn it the hard way. I was misled by all the ones claiming that they built a wonderful product and they banged thanks to free publicity, reviews and word of mouth. I'm not saying they lied, I'm preatty sure they managed to do this, but as I learned they are all outliers and not the norm. So I really have to do something to increase the visits to this website. I'm a very good hacker, but when it comes to marketing and PR, I'm totally lost.
- Feedback is what I really need to improve. The real problem is getting it. Even with my poor marketing, Heicos had more than a thousand downloads from when I started to track it right (before I relied on analytics, which did lose all downloads coming from outside). So, with some thousands downloads the conversion rate is really bad, which prompts me to know why. Unfortunately I had not a single feedback on what people think about it. So I need to build some measure to prompt people to give me some feedback (but I'm not putting a barrier to downloads like a signup form).
These are the main lessons I learned this year. As I said, I wish I learned more, but this three points (expecially the second one) are surely something to work on to go to the next level in 2010.
I whish you all a happy new year.
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Tuesday, 22 December 2009 17:26 |
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Elemental Dusk is available on the App Store. You can find it here. Enjoy!
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Friday, 18 December 2009 10:00 |
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Two days ago, on december 16th, I submitted my Triple Triad based game to Apple for App store approval. The name of the game is Elemental Dusk, since it stresses more the bounds with elementals. Now I'm waiting for Apple response, which should take about two weeks. In the meanwhile you can see some screenshots here.
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