One of the goals of the Appsterdam movement is to provide a place for the best and brightest from around the world to come together to make great things and train a new generation of App Makers. This is why we’ve built the world’s most advanced infrastructure for app development here.
It’s also why we’ve been quietly working to bring top names to Amsterdam. By leveraging our network of immigration, business, and tax specialists, we make the decision to come to Amsterdam easy. This is why it gives me great pleasure to welcome the Big Nerd Ranch to Appsterdam.
Big Nerd Ranch will be holding a 7-day iOS Bootcamp here from October 22-28, taught by yours truly. If you want to make apps for the iPhone and iPad, you should attend the iOS Bootcamp. After a brief introduction to my beloved Objective-C language and Cocoa framework, we’ll kick it into overdrive and make you an App Maker.
I’m thrilled to welcome Big Nerd Ranch to Appsterdam, but I’m just as thrilled to be a part of the team. I, and nearly everyone I know, learned Cocoa from Aaron Hillegass’ books. I’m also a big fan of the kind of immersive education the Big Nerd Ranch provides. I am really looking forward to it!
In addition to the upcoming public class, Big Nerd Ranch will be doing onsite classes for businesses in the Netherlands. They’ve done so for such big names as Cisco, AT+T, SAS, and many more.
Attending the Big Nerd Ranch is the quickest way to change your life, kickstart your career, and achieve your dreams. An intense, battle-tested program, and the insights of the World’s Toughest Programmer? Only in Appsterdam.
News from the front has not been promising. Tech blogs read like Tolkien short stories. Our colleagues are being overrun by patent trolls. Widget Press is about to fall, and Iconfactory may be next.
None of us are ready to take up this fight, but if we don’t bring the fight to them, they’re going to bring the fight to us.
At this point we have two options. We continue business as usual, going along our separate paths, spending each day praying we are not the next to fall. Or we stand together, here and now, and fight back.
Abandon the notion that lawyers are our enemies. There are many lawyers who would like to help stop this misuse of patent law. I know because when lawyers and others want to help App Makers, they contact the Appsterdam movement.
Our goal is to serve the interests of App Makers all over the world, and there is no greater interest than fighting the destruction of our industry, our businesses, and our way of life.
Let this be our rallying cry. We’re starting by putting the call out for attorneys and patent experts who would like to help assemble a legal team: email bmf at le.mu.rs.
In a few weeks, we’ll set up a legal defense fund to fuel that team. Then we will formulate and implement a strategy to fight these bastards.
Together, we will get the message across: If you come after indies, we will come after you. They can afford to fight, but we cannot afford to lose.
If you were ever curious what the Mayor of Appsterdam does all day, the answer is talk to people. A lot of that talking is in the form of answering questions. When I get the same questions again and again, or if the question is a particularly good one, I write about it here in this blog so I can refer people to it.
The faster I can respond to people, the more people I can talk to, and the more great stuff we can put together for Appsterdam. This also lets me spend more time teaching, which is really what I came here to do. My feeling is that my time belongs to the community, so I want to spend my time benefiting as many people as possible.
Which naturally leads to two questions I answer every day: “How do you feed your family?” and “Can you look at my app?” Good questions, and interesting answers, because it turns out, these questions answer each other.
I need to buy food and pay rent. You want some of my time to be your time. Hence, I make myself available as a consultant. I don’t have a lot of time, so rather than being picky about who I help, I set my rate to $1000 an hour. When I moved to Europe, that price became €1000 an hour.
That number usually shocks people. Has anyone ever paid me that? Yes. Have a lot of people paid me that? No. It’s a lot of money, though it’s not as dramatic as it sounds. If I go to a conference and give an hour-long presentation, for example, I’m there all day, but I’m only paid for an hour.
I really do want to help App Makers in Appsterdam make their products as successful as possible. That’s why we’ve built the world’s most advanced infrastructure for App Makers. So you can get lots of free advice to improve your products, your business, and yourself.
I also want to make myself available for individual mentoring to as many people as possible, which is why I’m introducing an Appsterdam discount. Appsterdam members can have an hour or two of my time for only €100 an hour. This reflects my feelings on how to price things: just low enough to make it an easy decision.
There are a couple of simple restrictions to qualify for the Appsterdam rate:
You or your company must be Appsterdam members.
(Suspended until the membership sign-up page is online).
No contracts, NDAs, or other legal documents.
Our meeting must occur in the city of Amsterdam.
You pick the time and place. Lunch / Beer / Coffee is on you.
Limit 2 hours per member, per week.
Cash up front.
If you’d like to book time, contact Judy.I.Chen at Gmail with a time window and location. Once she schedules you, she’ll send you an invoice, which you will pay, in cash, at the beginning of our meeting. (This ensures I can deliver a completely honest assessment and escape cleanly.) Judy will then send you a receipt.
This afternoon we saw the second Weekly Wednesday Lunchtime Lecture, hosted by SourceTag. The speaker, Raul Portales, talked about his experiences in marketing his games on the Android Marketplace. Although I’m an iOS guy, the challenges we face on the App Store are even greater on the other side.
Raul presented several graphs showing his total installed base over time as irrefutable evidence to back his assertions, and I took away several lessons that I think are relevant to all platforms, and to product engineering and marketing in general.
When we talk about the business model of your app, we’re talking about whether you’re selling it outright, or giving it away for free and trying to monetize with advertising.
Also common are the hybrid “freemium” models. You can have two versions: a lite version and a paid version. Or you can use the old shareware model, letting people download and try the app for free, then purchase it in-app to remove adds, unlock features, and remove limitations.
Raul proposed a new model, which can be used alone, or in conjunction to other models, which I call the “freebie” model. You have the main, full-featured app available to purchase. You then have a number of simplified spin-off apps you give away for free, which contain ads for the main app.
There are several advantages to this model, and Raul’s numbers prove that it works. His freebie app was featured by Google, which brought in some 80,000 new users. Although the absolute numbers are an order of magnitude lower, the growth curve for the paid app was an exact match to that of the freebie app.
It was no accident the freebie got featured. Raul shrewdly made a stripped down seasonal variant, in this case for the Easter holidays. Not only are customers looking for seasonal things to try, stores are looking for seasonal things to feature.
This is genius. Seasonal apps are a niche market. The number of entries is smaller, meaning the chances of getting picked are much higher. Getting featured is the fastest way to pick up new users, and making the app free makes downloading it a no-brainer.
Not only do a number of users follow the cross promotion to the main app, the quality of the users is particularly high. Every app has a certain “bozo penalty” of users who give it undeservedly low ratings for asinine reasons. The less your app costs, the more bozos end up trying it, with free apps suffering the worst by far.
The freebie model uses the free app to absorb the bozo penalty, and only sends over the users who actually liked the app. This means that not only are your sales higher, your reviews are higher than they would have been with similar growth from other sources, like being featured directly.
I’ve always preferred the shareware model, but this bozo shield effect is a compelling counterargument in favor of the lite model. If my app skinned easily, I think I would eschew them both and just use a pure freebie model.
Raul’s other observations included the superior performance of niche apps over apps for a general audience. Even though the market is smaller, penetration rates are much higher, meaning you capture a larger percentage of possible users. Ratings are also higher.
Why is that? There are a number of possible explanations, but the one I prefer is based on the fact that real users differ from the models of them we use in creating our products. Assuming you know what you’re doing, the closer the actual user is to the model, the more they will like the app.
By extension, the farther the user is from the model, the more they will dislike the app. Users tend to like products more as they get used to them, because mastering the product moves them closer to the model user.
When you make an app for a general audience, you are casting a wide net, and are going to get a lot more people who are so far from the model as to fall into this bozo category. Because they are focused, niche products tend to attract people already closer to the model, leading to better overall satisfaction.
Another problem Raul mentioned is that people who dislike an app are more motivated to rate it than people who actually like it. This causes all reviews to trend downward. This effect is exaggerated by the fact people overuse the lowest rating. Anyone who ever got an F knows what one low score can do to an average.
Andy Ihnatko once made this point about people leaving one-star reviews of his book on Amazon for relatively minor complaints. I am paraphrasing here, but the idea is that if the book contained nothing but insults for the reader, racist jokes, and fond remembrances of Hitler, you would also give it one star.
I think the solution to both these problems is for the store or OS to prompt users after one month, or upon deleting the app, to simply give the app a thumbs up or thumbs down.
This is how we do our speaker ratings after each Weekly Wednesday Lunchtime Lecture. No star ratings. No surveys. We simply ask people to answer a yes-or-no question: would you like to see this speaker again? We get around 75% voter participation, which is pretty damned good.
Any speaker who receives at least an 80% approval rating will be put on the Appsterdam speaker list, which will be online so journalists looking for interviewees, conferences looking for presenters, and schools looking for lecturers know who to talk to.
I spent the weekend as a keynote speaker, mentor, and jurist at Startup Weekend Amsterdam. This was an amazing event with 175 participants giving 75 pitches and forming 24 startups. After a 54 hour hackathon, we awarded prizes in 5 categories.
Expect to see more than 5 companies come out of this, as the whole field was full of great teams building interesting products. Picking winners was an agonizing process, easily as agonizing as being an Apple Design Award judge.
If you did the weekend right, you should have taken home lots of experience, even if you failed to walk away with a trophy, or even launch. Prizes are nice, and winning is nice, but they are fleeting pleasures. Knowledge is priceless.
The panel at Startup Weekend is looking for the same things any set of investors is looking for. Pitching to the jury after days without sleep is as close to the Valley experience as you’re going to get, minus the penalty for failure.
I’d like to share some of the insights I myself brought home.
The number one rule of venture capital is invest in the team. Product ideas and business plans are great, but pretty easy to come by. A great team that enjoys working together is a genuine treasure.
When you start a company, you need to be aware of every other company that has ever tried to solve the same problem. You need to study them, and you need to figure out how to differentiate yourself. You need something other than braggadocio to show that you’re better.
You might think companies that have gone out of business are no threat to you, but if you’re trying to get funding, they are your biggest threat. The only thing worse than an unproven model is a disproven model. You need to know exactly why they failed, and prove that you are different.
You know that hot space you keep hearing about? Forget about it. Investors are looking for tomorrow’s big thing, not yesterday’s. You see an open niche, but investors see a crowded space. Besides, it’s way more fun to invent the future.
When you’re pitching on stage, don’t bother giving a bio. You need that time to show off your products. Plan for failure. That means being ready to present without slides or notes. No live demos. especially ones that rely on WiFi. If this can trip up Steve Jobs, what chance do you have? Make a movie.
If you can do this in a weekend, so can anyone else. Disabuse yourself of the notion that you are particularly talented. Don’t think you’re shipping this thing on Monday. You’re only just beginning the long, hard road to creating and launching a viable product.
One thing I kept trying to drive home to the people who asked me for advice was that there’s a world of difference between Sunday night and Monday morning. Sunday night is all about giving a good demo. Monday morning is about getting down to business.
In my keynote, I talked about taking lessons from negative experiences. Here’s one such lesson: don’t be a dick. Don’t stand around after the show badmouthing the team that beat you. It doesn’t reflect well on you.
Our community is small, and word of bad behavior travels far and wide. Getting caught up in the moment and losing sight of the bigger picture can damage your most precious asset—your reputation. If you don’t have that, you don’t have anything.
Talk is cheap—smacktalk doubly so. Instead, take the loss as that rarest of opportunities to return to your lair and meaningfully say, “Fools! I’ll show them all!” If you think you should have won, prove it. The best revenge is a successful launch.
For those of you working on apps—and what startup these days doesn’t have an app—you’re in the best possible place. As the capital of the Appsterdam movement, Amsterdam has the world’s most advanced infrastructure for developing your technology.
Come work with mentors and colleagues at an Appsterdam Approved Hangout. Take in a Weekly Wednesday Lunchtime Lecture. Stop by after work for Meeten en Drinken. Join an Appsterdam Family Weekend. We’re here to help you succeed.