iPad Review from an iPhone Developer- it's a legal pad for computing.

Clearly there’s been a lot of talk about the iPad, with such talk largely revolving around flipping a coin, selecting either the word “magical” or “evil”, and then writing six more paragraphs.

Here’s my take- it’s a revolutionary device in how mundane its uses are. I’m writing this on my balcony, comfortably, with the onscreen keyboard.

I wrote a bunch of emails in the cafe on the corner of my apartment here in Buenos Aires. I played flight control and died after 55 landings. I then caught up on my Twitter stream and checked our app rankings via applyzer.com.

Pretty normal. Pretty mundane. But doing these things on my couch and on the balcony, its more fluid. I pick up the iPad and carry it all over; I put it down when I take a call. Working on a laptop or desktop is a state of being. It’s something you actively do, often for a few hours, or an entire workday.

Using the iPad is like jotting down some notes on a legal pad- it’s a tool. It’s not something you sit down in front of. The iPad is the legal pad of computing. It’s boring in its elegance. It’s a tool, something you use while doing other things. Is that interesting to you? Get one! Do you want to do Photoshop work? Keep your laptop, but get one of these suckers too.

The iPad is the legal pad of computing- the device that lets you carry the Internet around with you throughout your day. Nothing more, nothing less.

Sent from my iPad

How We Created the #27 iPad App in One Week.

20,000 downloads in three days, #28 on the day of iPad release, a hundred reviews in 72 hours- Free Books for iPad is off to an incredible start! Here’s the story of how we built it in a week.

As soon as the iPad was announced we knew it was a perfect fit for Free Books- an entire device ideally suited for reading? A beautiful screen? Multi-touch controls for a fantastic browsing experience? Score!

The issue, though, was that we simply didn’t have the content to fill a big screen. All our covers were being automatically generated from a bunch of Photoshop templates, with mixed results. We also didn’t have descriptions for any of the books- how the hell could we fill the space? Our app focused entirely on making 23,469 classic books as easy to browse, download, and read as possible- how could we use the iPad screen to make it better?

I immediately started working on getting descriptions and covers, bringing on two illustrators as contractors, and a writer friend of mine to create some great descriptions. We needed content, and we needed it fast.

Our first mockup took our iPhone app and translated it to the iPad:

Web-sitey, plain, weird colors. It just didn’t work. We played around a bit and got to this:

Still not working. Fate intervened. As we played with mockups, our Free Audiobooks launched and took off like a rocket. The downside of fast growth out of the gate, though, is that it always exposes issues in need of updates.

We kept content creation going full tilt and focused our development efforts entirely on the iPhone.

We decided porting to iPad wasn’t very important, since Apple likely wouldn’t accept apps until after the iPad shipped- they would include some ‘blessed’ applications from preferred partners, like EA and The New York Times, to be sure, but for everyone else they wouldn’t want to risk app crashes marring launch day. Get some high quality apps from partners, show off the platform’s potential, to reviewers, accept apps starting a week after iPad release. Bada bing bada boom.

Seems reasonable, right?

The Email arrived on a Saturday, announcing a very non-Apple approach to the problem. Apple was, effective immediately, accepting iPad applications for inclusion in the launch of the iPad App Store. And, more importantly, those applications would need to be submitted by the following Saturday to be accepted.

What I hadn’t considered is the brute force approach- Apple would accept applications from everyone, and then test them on physical hardware on their end.

So, we had a week.

Step one was throwing everything out- to be included on launch day we simply did not have the time to bring over all the functionality of our iPhone app. We had to ask ourselves what really mattered. Here’s what we came up with:

We didn’t have time to do anything but the core of the app- browse, view, download, read. Deleting books? Not critical. Emailing? Not important. Search? Nice to have, but our stats show that most people browse more than they search. No, we had to keep it as basic as possible. Cutting out functionality, we came up with this:

Which evolved into this:

At last, we had a workable layout. It used the screen space to great effect, flicking and tapping through the collection in a super visual way, showing off all those high resolution covers, letting the descriptions stand out in our collection of Top 25 books. And so we got to work.

Tests, demos, descriptions, bugs, layouts, ideas, concepts- the week following The Email was a blur of activity, leading to…

Boom.

The iPad is the first Personal Computer-- what you have is a work computer.

I think that the iPad will be one of the fastest selling products in history- here’s why.

Over the past decade most of us have shifted to using laptops, making it possible to work on the go, watch YouTube videos in the living room, watch a tv show over dinner, and catch up on Charlie Rose in the morning. There’s a problem with that, though. It’s awkward to have your laptop in the living room- you can’t kick back and relax with a laptop. No matter what you do, no matter what the form factor, it’s a work computer, with a capital W and a capital C. Email beckons, Photoshop files cry out for attention, assignments are in need of completion, IM windows chatter, Skype calls ring. You cannot relax with a computer, because we all have work computers.

People have asked what the killer app of the iPad is. It’s obvious! The killer app of the iPad is chilling out. You don’t sit it down in your lap, the screen doesn’t come up and block reality- it’s something you pick up and hold. And, like a book, you can simply put it down.

Reading a Kindle in a coffee shop is a casual thing, you can sip your coffee as you linger over the words, taking breaks now and again to people watch a bit. Reading on your laptop is intense- you fall into the world of the glowing rectangle, and shifting away from that world feels awkward, stilted.

The iPad lets you use a computer like a book. You pick it up. You watch a YouTube video. You watch a tv show. You play some music. You check your email. However, each of these things happen in isolation. You are checking your email, you are watching a YouTube video, or you are reading Huffington Post. There’s no in-between. You aren’t consumed by the device, because there’s no ability to be efficient while working on it. It is a device that’s functional enough to be useful, and stilted enough to be inefficient. It’s the first Personal Computer- good for hanging out in the living room, terrible for ‘real’ work. That’s why it’s fantastic! You can leave your ‘pad on the kitchen table, wake up, make yourself a cup of coffee, and browse a couple sites as you sip coffee. Then, when you’re done, you walk away and go to your ‘real’ computer to get work done.

The iPad is there for 1 or 2 hours a day, after work, before work, at the coffee shop, on a plane. Everywhere that your goal is specifically not to be efficient, but rather to chill out. The iPad’s a personal computer. Right now, we only have work computers.

Hiring on Elance- how to get amazing people for $5 more than the awful ones.

After Max Klein’s great post on hiring developers on RentACoder, it seems opportune to write about how we constantly hire amazing people on Elance.

The trick? Refuse to hire Indian and Pakistani firms, state your preference for individuals, and go for $15-$20 instead of $10-$15.

Indian and Pakistani firms are almost universal in their awfulness- horror stories abound. Part of this is a cultural mismatch- it’s tougher to work with an Indian firm than a European or American firm, simply because the cultures are different. People are less willing to tell you when something is going wrong, far less likely to give reasonable estimates, and generally less competent. India has had wages go up quite a bit, so the people you can get for $10/hour today are not the people you could get for $10 fifteen years ago.

But here’s the thing I think is key- if you are a developer in Romania or Hungary, you have to learn English to learn to program. You have to be near fluent to get access to the resources you need to learn. If you’re from India, it’s important to learn English, but it’s not critical. You can get by on Hindi- you can’t get by on Hungarian or Romanian.

The other great thing with $15-$25 is that, when you get bids at that level from people in emerging markets, they’re usually reaching. They usually can’t get that rate full-time, not by a long shot, so they ask for that as their first quote, and then go lower. This opens the door for long-term engagements- if you can pay $5/hour more and have someone talented whom you can depend on, why wouldn’t you go for that? $20-$25 gives you the top tier of talent in Romania, for instance. $10-$15 gives you average folks. Will you get plenty of bids at $10? Sure! But you’ll get much, much better bids at $15-$25.

Finally, hire individuals. Firms bounce you around, firms have bureaucracies, you won’t ever be able to bring a firm in-house if the work goes great. You’ll be one of five clients, one of ten clients- they need to make you happy to make payroll this week, but there are another four people they need to make happy to keep the money flowing for the rest of the month. Individuals, on the other hand, usually work one contract at a time when dealing with bigger projects- they have every incentive in the world to focus their attention on making your project a success. And, if all goes well, you can even hire them full-time. Awesome, eh?

On the whole we’ve had really phenomenal success hiring everyone from illustrators to Android developers on Elance- quality’s been fantastic, work’s been speedy, billed hours more than fair. The above rules of thumb really go back to one thing- be fair to your freelancers and they’ll be fair to you. If they’re doing really fantastic work, above and beyond your expectations, give them a bonus or increase their pay. Let them know how much you appreciate them busting their asses for you. Be consistent in the amount of work you provide, bundle up requests, and make it easy for them to plan their cashflow. Filter up front to get great bids, then, when you’ve selected someone, treat them great- not only is it the right thing to do, it’s the profitable thing to do.

The Guide to App Store Marketing

Apple's Amazon

There aren’t two App Stores, differentiated by how price conscious users are- there’s three! Overall Top 100, Category Top 25, and The Great Unwashed. Since no one wants to be in The Great Unwashed, and most of us don’t have the cash to get into the Top 100, lets talk about how to get into your category’s Top 25.

The most important thing for an iPhone app is to be in the Top 25 of a category or sub-category- it doesn’t matter what that category is! As long as you are in the Top 25 of one, you’ll have a steady base of traffic.

The App Store is an Amazon River of money- pageviews, dollars, and clicks flow through in unimaginable volume. The New page at the front of the App Store gets the full torrent of that traffic- it doesn’t matter how terrible your app performs, if you are featured, you’ll get huge sales by volume alone.

We see this time and time again in the Books category- you’ll have a third tier app that’s been stuck around 50th place for months, Apple features them, and, poof! They’ll be #1 in Books and in the Overall Top 100 for about three days. After those three days they’ll slide off the Featured list and lose momentum quickly. Within another day or so they’ll be out of the Overall Top 100, and, within a week of being originally featured, begin their inexorable slide back down to the pits of the Books category.

Categories

Outside of hitting the jackpot and being featured, the best way to make money on the App Store is to focus on a category and get to the Top 25 of it. It’s almost impossible to stay in the Overall Top 100 for a sustained amount of time, without a sustained amount of advertising money. But, when it comes to individual categories and sub-categories, you can maintain a high position for quite a long time. We’ve been in the Top Ten of books for about six months straight at this point.

Categories make up the river delta of the App Store’s Amazon. From the flow of the Featured tab the traffic spreads into a dozen directions, and, from there, subdivides further in the case of Games. For Books, being in the Top 10 means $300 a day. For other categories you’ll be looking at anywhere from $50 to $500. Here’s the key, though- as long as you maintain rank, that’s money in the bank. It’s steady. It’s dependable. As long as you maintain your rank.

Even when talking about high quality, higher priced apps like Things, they still usually can be found in the Top 25 of their given category. After the Top 25 volume dissipates so quickly you might as well not exist.

Rank

Rank is everything.

The iPhone’s screen can only see four apps when pulling up a category. The fifth has only half visible. Below the Top Five, you have to swipe to reveal each additional app. After App #25 you have to reveal the next ‘page’ of 25 apps, destroying the quantity of eyeballs seeing your app’s listing.

When launching your app, your target should be to be in the Top Four- that’s where the money is, because people don’t have to swipe below the fold to see you. The #1 position in a category is obviously awesome on its own- we’re enjoying the fruits of it right now. We usually do $300-$400/day in 4th-6th place. Since going #1 we’ve been doing $700-$900/day, net. Not too shabby.

Rank to Rank

Ok, so category rank is important, and no one without TapTapTap’s advertising budget should focus in on the Top 100 right off the bat. But, given a focus on ranking in a category, how exactly do you do that?

Getting into the Top 100 of a category is the first step- if you don’t exist after the Top 25 of a category, you REALLY don’t exist after the Top 100. Fortunately, though, it doesn’t take a lot of sales to get into the Top 100 of most categories. 25/day should suffice for sneaking into 98th place or so.

It’s getting from 98th to 4th that’s the trick :)

Here’s the key- at no point are you competing with the 4th place app, until you are within a screen of them. If you’re within 2-3 ranks of them, you’re fighting for conversions. When you’re 60 spots away, it doesn’t matter. At every stage you simply have to out-convert the app in front of you.

The Three Factors

Here’s the second key- you only have control over three factors in this phase of the battle. Title, icon, and price. Based on those three factors people will decided whether to tap on your app or the app next to yours.

Seems obvious, but looking around at most titles, it seems like most folks don’t focus on this.

If you’re doing your own outside marketing, have a ball! Go with whatever you want. But, if you want to take advantage of organic App Store traffic, you’ll need to optimize the hell out of those three factors. If your title doesn’t describe your app effectively and interestingly, you won’t have a prayer of a chance of out-converting the next guy.

Further, your title is just as important in App Store search marketing as Google search marketing- the words you choose will help determine which App Store searches you show in. If you make up a word, people won’t be searching for you unless you do your own marketing.

It’s about brand versus product- if you’re a startup building a brand, you’ll want that brand front and center. If you’re releasing a product, you want to make money every month, and might not care about brand as much as conversion rate.

A great example is DailyBurn- their primary app is called - you guessed it! - DailyBurn. However, their side-product is called ‘FoodScanner’. Self-descriptive enough, it helps you keep track of what you eat. Simple, to the point, stands out in a list. People who know about DailyBurn can get DailyBurn straightaway.

People who have never heard of DailyBurn will notice FoodScanner, pay money, and get upsold from the product to the brand.

As for icon- does it describe your app? It’s one of the three things in your power at launch. Will someone have a good idea of what your app is about? Will it stand out in a list of other apps? Will it draw peoples’ eye when they just scrolled through eighty other apps? Stand out!

As for price- if you want a better shot at the Top 100, good money seems to be on 99 cents. But, again, are you really shooting for the Top 100? Are you going to be able to buy enough volume - at least 1000 sales a day - through advertising? Or, alternatively, do you already have a built-in audience waiting for your app? If not, price higher.

Being at $1.99, in our experience probably won’t hurt your sales much. And, almost assuredly, you won’t generate enough extra volume at 99 cents to justify the hit to revenue. At the very least, launch at $1.99 and see how things go. If you get into the Top 25 of your category, you’ll have significantly more revenue than an equivalent application in your slot. It seems from our testing that $2.99 can significantly hurt sales, but being 99 cents never increases volume enough to justify not being $1.99.

But… but… those are all low prices!

The App Store is about high volume, low cost distribution with a lot of software sales overhead removed. Take it or leave it.

Search

Three factors here- title, company name, and keywords. If you’re targeting something specific and have it in both your title and a bunch of your keywords, that will help you rank for the search term. If you have it in your title, keywords, AND company name, so much the better. It seems that search results are slightly weighted towards paid applications, with overall rank mixing with title/keywords/company name to determine your placement. Pick a good title, think through your keywords, rank high- search will then take care of itself.

Tools of the Trade

Appviz

The best sales tool around. Fetches your sales info from iTunes Connect, makes it look great, creates shiny grafts, and even provides a list of your app’s reviews.

Applyzer

The best rank tool around. For just a couple bucks an app it gives you access to your current rank in every market, shows you graphs of your rank over the past 30 days, and generally helps you keep tabs on what’s going on around the world. To make it even better, track your category competition as well :)

Appsto.re

You’d almost think companies like having ‘app’ in their name, or something. A free service that spits out a purchase link for your app and tells you how many of those clicks actually convert into purchases. You can do this on your own through LinkExchange and earn a 5% commission from Apple on your own app, but they make it so wicked easy I don’t bother.

Appirator

Install this in your app, immediately! It’s directly responsible for helping increase our rating rate among our most hardcore users, giving us the boost we needed to get to #1 in Books. And, yeah, it does look like App Pirator. Their name sucks, but install it anyways!

Tender

Not specifically related to the iPhone, but it’s phenomenal for support. Allows you to conduct your customer service entirely through email, but also provides a great web interface for checking your response time, checking in on outstanding issues, seeing who’s left in your support queue, and generally just making sure you don’t accidentally have an email fall through the cracks.

Heroku

We use them for our servers, so we don’t have to worry about our servers.

New Relic

Server monitoring that’s better than anything you’ll come up with for server monitoring. Pay up!

That’s it!

I’ll keep on updating this as time goes on, and keep the article at a constant URL here on Spreadsong.com. If you got some value out of it, link it up. And, naturally, if you have any questions, just hit me up via the ‘contact’ button at the top of the screen. Always happy to help.

Falling Forward- three failures on the road to profitability, and how we moved past them

I’m writing this from a hammock on a small Panamanian island, light breeze, gentle water washing up onto shore- life is damn good and sales are higher than ever. But, at the same time, there’s been a lot of near death experiences in the process of getting to a point of scalable profitability.

Here’s how we’ve screwed up!

1) Wrong market, wrong idea, wrong execution, wrong timeframe, wrong funding.

This should have killed us.

A year ago we set out to build a music company, Spreadsong, to make music free and free music profitable. Where dozens of companies fought tooth and nail to build businesses around a mess of RIAA lawsuits and licensing deals, we would blaze a trail forward into independent, free music- download everything! Spread the music! Tap into the Creative Commons and craft an amazing service.

The truth is, we did build a damn good service- just the wrong damn good service. We built the free service first and got it to the point where it was really, really solid. As we drew closer and closer to launching one big problem became apparent- the paid part sucked! It wasn’t useful, it wasn’t fun to use, and it was nowhere near as good as the free component.

Little detail: when dealing with music, freemium with 0% premium is a recipe for disaster. In recognizing this, after a year of hard work, we immediately took a deep breath, regrouped, and moved forward to build a side-business around another idea atop another platform. That side-business was Free Books, and its since become our entire focus. Something about profitability on a Panamanian island is kind of addictive, call me crazy.

2) Wrong structure.

This is a biggie- we originally brought on a third guy. Very experienced, background on the tech side of the music business, great backend skills, really into what we were doing. We agreed to vesting over IM, stating that we’d all work for equal amounts of equity. Little problem- nothing was written down.

After about four months he decided that he didn’t want to continue- the three of us weren’t gelling as a team, he had much higher fixed expenses that needed to be paid, there was a lack of distillation on what we were really building, and in general it was just a low point for the company. He announced without warning that he was going to quit- bad enough. But, to top it off, he intended to use our code for his own projects, despite the earlier agreement.

This elicited a moment of panic, given that this wasn’t what had been agreed to- we had all been working for a to-be-formed company in return to sweat equity, being paid for our contributions in equity and returning back the intellectual property of our work. But, we didn’t have a written agreement- just agreements spread through various conversations in email and IM.

We wound up getting properly incorporated, got vesting set up officially, and did indeed resolve the IP dispute. Doing so was expensive, however, and lots of time was eaten up, time that should have been used to get to market sooner.

Morale of the story- it’s ok not to incorporate, but you absolutely MUST have a written contract between all parties. Braindead simple, and I feel like an idiot for not having done so originally, but just get it done. Write it out in plain English, hit the major points- you’re all vesting into x% equity with a one year cliff, four years vesting, and all work done related to so and so belongs to a to-be-formed company. Boom, easy!

3) Not recognizing the signs of success.

After deciding to get revenue flowing before going back to work on Spreadsong, we set out to throw stuff against the wall left and right. iPhone apps, web apps, Adsense plays, even a Facebook app. Over the course of two months we just churned out concepts left and right working to get a hit.

The problem emerged when got a hit- Free Books’ sales started increasing. At first it was $10/day (cool, that’s half of rent!), then $20/day (rent’s paid, awesome!), $50/day (that pays for all expenses in Budapest, we’re ramen profitable!), and $300/day (shit, I guess we need to turn this into a business now!).

It’s that last step, “shit, we have to turn this into a business now”, that we didn’t execute on as well as possible. While we had support emails ready to go from day one, while we had a plan forward from day one, we basically shipped Free Books and then got to work on other things- back to churning things out.

But, as we hit the $100/day point, we didn’t immediately cut the other things- we kept on throwing against the wall until we were already at the $250/day. Problems became clear. We hadn’t tested the app thoroughly enough, first of all, and as a ‘throw it against the wall’ release some key functionality was missing. In general it was a first draft to prove an idea but, by waiting the extra two weeks, we screwed up the transition. In so waiting we allowed negative reviews to proliferate and wound up postponing an update much too long for comfort.

At this point, we are 100% focused on Free Books and other Free Books related work- we’re about to ship an update that does a deep, deep fix of all the various bugs that have appeared in previous versions, along with adding some really great features. Thoroughly tested, professional in affect, and just an all around high quality application, our next version is a properly realized version of our first draft.

However, in waiting too long to switch gears, and in failing to focus solely on Free Books after we shipped the update, we wasted too much time. Survivable, and revenue is doing just fine today, but I feel bad that we left folks hanging in our rush to get a hit. Our processes have improved, our focus has been tuned, and our path forward is clearer than ever. We’ve made it work. But that doesn’t mean we executed perfectly. We failed forward, we made mistakes, we screwed up, but we’re still standing- because, even while failing, we failed forward.

The ICBM Economy- global competition and the missile shield of travel

The world is a battleground of ideas- anyone, anywhere can launch a first draft of most ideas within a couple of weeks, leveraging years of work on a pay per usage basis. Ideas don’t occur in a vacuum, and when the idea to launch time window is measured in weeks instead of years, you damn well better have a better environment for idea generation than your competition.

We’ve gone from a world of cavalry charges to one of ICBM strikes- when the next guy’s missiles are arcing over the Arctic you better have yours firing back, and fast.

Travel as a missile shield.

Spreadsong’s a new company and there’s a million things that have to be done to keep revenue growing in the right direction. It means product launches, major updates, major initiatives, and just generally killing it across the board- it means having awesome ideas and executing better than anyone else. Because of this, I work a ton- Spreadsong’s growing fast, we have a lot of customers, there are support needs, emails to answer, strategies to execute on, ideas to test, new things to try. And that’s awesome! I’ve been working my ass off to make that sentence a reality for years, and it’s incredible satisfying to see it come true.

I’m not a Four Hour Work Week man, if but for the simple reason that I like what I do. However, in spending huge swathes of time building, it’s also easy to get lost in the swirling tide of crisis. It’s easy to have each day a Donnie Darko like line from bed to shower to breakfast to office to bed once more. That sucks. It’s no way to live, and definitely no way to come up with great ideas.

So, the question is, how do you come up with better ideas than the next guy? And, not just the next guy, but an entire planet? How do you come up with profitable ideas and then execute relentlessly on them?

Travel.

By being more aware, more interested, more engaged and excited about the day to day, it gets easier to create. And that’s what making money is about now- creation. Creating something new, whether derivative or original- creation. It’s being surrounded by other language, the moment to moment crush of the new- the combination makes it easier to be focused on the moment.

That brings us to serendipity- in being more aware, more opportunity comes. I’ve found it to be universally true while traveling, and friends who live abroad have found the same to totally true. It’s really all over the place- talking to people in cafes who don’t speak a lot of English I get enormously helpful feedback on how we phrase stuff, making for a more usable app. And just that act, getting to know people from other countries, in another country, opens up a huge swathe of opportunity.

An anecdote.

Just as I came in to the cafe I’m writing this from- one of the girls who works here waved and brought over a friend of hers. They had just been talking about what we’re doing, since I come in pretty regularly- as we all talked, her friend actually brought up something about the way book lists are distributed that I’d never even considered.

It had huge implications for the future. A random conversation with a Hungarian art student, but one with far-reaching implications. Will it turn into something big? I think so, because it’s the kind of small occurance that points to a broader, large-scale occurence. And it’s easy to test! So, as we move forward, as we launch our next few products, we have more information to act on, and better ideas to execute upon- we’ll be there before anyone else, because of a random serendipitous experience.

Travel is our missile shield- what’s yours?

Three Steps to Kickass Customer Service - and why it's the best investment your company can make

from paypalsucks.com

It absolutely blows my mind how terrible most companies are at customer service- form emails, useless responses, nothing personal, nothing actionable, just the dregs of mediocrity. Whenever I call Bank of America I’m put on hold for fifteen minutes as a robotic voice informs me how much of a valued customer I am. Really feeling the love, guys.

Maybe it’s just me, but I’d prefer they just hired enough people to not waste my time. And that’s for our corporate account! It’s even worse when I call a bank for my personal one.

On the other hand, whenever I email an early stage company I usually get a quick, personal, helpful response. It’s not any single thing that makes me walk away from the interaction feeling happy, but rather three core things- things that we try to apply in Spreadsong each and every day.

A lot of companies (hi PayPal!) seem to consider offering great customer service as a cost center to be minimized. Huh? Customer service is an investment in your company- it’s an investment in happy customers that stick with you for years, tell their friends about your products, and, most importantly, feel really good about their purchase of your product.

Customer service makes you money!

But only if done well.

1) Approachability

The most important thing, I think, is approachability- don’t make people feel bad for emailing you. This means taking every opportunity to answer questions and be easy to get ahold of. When we send an email we make it a point to tell people that while the email’s automated, their reply will go straight back to us. We sign the email with our names, not some vague “Spreadsong Customer Service” ridiculousness. On all contact forms we make it clear we want people to contact us- we even have a big Contact Us button within our app, Free Books for iPhone.

Exactly the same approach holds true for a large company- they’d be extremely well served to just sign each message with the name of a random person from their customer service department, complete with direct line phone number and email.

Make it easy for your customers to contact you, and take every opportunity to reduce friction.

2) Write like you talk.

Professionalism gone wild, what’s going on? It seems like a lot folks are afraid to actually sound like human beings when sending an email from their company. That doesn’t mean you should be rude, just that you should be friendly- like if you were meeting a new person in real life. Ok, you’ll want to avoid casually swearing, but outside of that it’s the same- you’d be yourself. You’d use their first name, you’d joke, you’d act like a human being. And, if you did something boneheaded, you’d be sure apologize and take responsibility. You’d have a conversation.

When a customer emails you, there’s usually one of two things going- something is awesome or something is screwed up. If it’s awesome, you want to thank them for their support and offer something cool- we usually ask people if they’d like to get early versions of the app, and are sure to ask if they have any suggestions. You want to thank them for making your company successful, and treat them like you would anyone who helps you out- offer to help them out! Especially when it comes to working in a feature request they have.

That doesn’t mean you want to integrate every request, of course. But it does mean you want to always be problem solving- the question isn’t the feature, the question is the goal. Do they want to read their own collection of quotes they’ve collected on their computer from Free Books? Well, they might ask for a desktop app, but what they really want is a way to get their own content onto Free Books.

We always try to figure out a way to work in customer requests into our development plan- if it’s going to be a long-term addition, I’m upfront with them about the timeframe and offer to let them be among the first to check it out.

3) Take responsibility, offer a solution, present a path forward.

But, wait, you say! It could be a feature request! If you get a feature request, something has gone wrong- your customer used the app, wanted something cool to happen, and that something cool wasn’t there. Suck. They then let you know about it- and, no matter how positive the email, something has gone wrong.

The most important thing here is to offer a path forward- a solution, a timeline, a quick explanation of what’s going wrong, and assurance that you’re on the job in fixing the specific issue at hand. And, in the case of a bug report, we usually have to ask for another piece of information to help track down the issue.

Even when someone requests that we add Twilight or Harry Potter to Free Books, I still like to explain how the app works with public domain content, and that, indeed, we’ll be trying to get the book onto Free Books as soon as possible, even if that’s sometime around the year 2071. “Jetpacks, hover cars, and Harry Potter- a good year all around!”.

This stuff isn’t rocket science, but it is critical to building a business. Make your company easy to reach, be a person, offer a solution, and present a path forward- easy!

Bootstrapping Abroad: why we do it and why it's awesome

Bootstrapping abroad, a wanderlust in two acts. Ira Glass eat your heart out.

There’s been a lot of buzz lately about travel and business, and not a lot of real hard info. It’s a bit of an out there thing, I guess- start your business from Argentina for the low, low price of $1,000 a month! Call today, supplies are limited! There’s a lot of mythologizing around travel, and a lot of dreams. The latter is especially dangerous, especially for folks who work on their laptops- I think most of us love the idea of living in a tropical paradise, working from the beach and creating to the sounds of surf sweeping up onto the sand.

So what’s it really like?

I’ve now worked for at least three months from three places internationally- Buenos Aires, Koh Tao, and Budapest.

Whenever the the topic of working abroad comes up, there’s usually a list of concerns everyone has in the back of their mind. Here’s the bottom line: everything is fixable with money, and if you managed to luck out by having savings in a strong currency, it won’t cost much. It costs less each month to work on the tropical island of Koh Tao, Thailand than it does to work in San Francisco, Austin, Boulder, or New York. I won’t count Seattle because the weather sucks and it’s always overcast, so whatever. Though it’s also true for Seattle. Not that I’m counting Seattle.

Anyways.

In general, if you choose to move on over to an emerging market like Argentina or Thailand, you can count on costs being cut by two thirds for an equivalent lifestyle to what you might have in San Francisco or New York- in reality, though, if you cut to a third you’ll be tempted to spend more, go out a bit more, and drink a bit more- you’ll really wind up with a net halving.

Most expats I know don’t live an equivalent lifestyle to what they had in the States, they live it up a bit in their apartment and their day to day life. Not a lot, but a little bit in every area across the board. So, while you can definitely cut costs to a third or a quarter, most wind up cutting by a half and improving their quality of life.

So, live better life, pay less money, double your runway! Fucking score, eh? A lot of this depends on what kind of lifestyle you want- if your business is selling products on the internet to consumers, without a enterprise or B2B aspect that requires you be able to go pitch the product in person, there’s an enormous degree of flexibility in the day to day life you can craft for yourself and your company.

Life in every place is different, there’s no broad ‘bootstrap abroad’ conclusion- if you want to live on the beach, give it a go! Koh Tao was beautiful but the environment didn’t really jell for me- there’s a lot of great people living there, but it’s like living in DisneyLand- everyone is there to forget about their troubles for a week, then return to their soulcrushing job at a big multinational.

You meet a lot of folks who have checked out in a lot of respects- working real estate, one day decide that they’re sick and tired of it, move to Koh Tao, get a job as a scuba instructor, and spend every day teaching people to surf and swimming through some of the most gorgeous reefs you’ve ever seen in your life.

Amazing gig! But not exactly the ideal atmosphere for building a new company. For me, it wasn’t a good fit- but for someone else it might be perfect. The fact is, there’s tons of amazing, beautiful emerging markets that would be great to live in- I can’t recommend Buenos Aires enough, for instance.

For me, the biggest benefit is intangible- when you live in one place for years, it starts to feel a bit stale. You drive on autopilot, you walk around without really seeing the beauty around you- normalcy. And normalcy is stifling, and uncreative. When I travel, everything is new- obvious, right? But if everything is new, you always have to be a bit more on your game, a little more aware, and a little more in the moment. It’s creative, and in its moment to moment creativity, there’s a moment to moment focus that makes starting a business feel like a more natural outgrowth… of lifestyle.

And that’s what it’s about- lifestyle. Imagine working your ass off for three years starting a business only to wind up having to commute 40 minutes into a downtown highrise every day. What’s the point? Transitioning from one high rise office to a slightly larger high rise office, albeit that you happen to cast a vote on a board in favor of?

Having a business is art, and I don’t care how off the wall that might sound. A corporation is a political entity- it brings together people to make shit happen, just like a nation-state does, except on a smaller scale, and sans F22’s. When you start a business you’re creating a new organization, and a new lifestyle- you have the opportunity to create something new in the world not just in terms of product, but in terms of the day to day of each and every employee. So create!

If you want to build not just a product but an organization, go where you’re most creative, go where you have the best shot at starting something new. Make something people want, to be sure, but put yourself in a position with the cards stacked in your favor. Living somewhere where you’re more creative on a day to day basis, moving somewhere you have a higher quality of life, moving somewhere where costs are a third- these are all good things. These are all amazing things. And, at the very least, these are all things worth trying- so book your ticket and give bootstrapping abroad a go!