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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
On starting this blog I decided to make a habit of writing for it- hell, that makes it sound like work. In reality, it's a great excuse to take an hour out from the flow of the day, sit down in a nice sidewalk cafe and write down some thoughts over a espresso and a Heineken. It's a nice habit and I'm really enjoying it- today, however, as I started walking to the cafe I was at a loss for what I would write about.
It's really amazing how many startups fail. Not that ideas fail, no, that's a given- we only first began generating scalable revenue on our third - but that as the costs of running a business plunge ever lower so many smart people can't cover their $4,000/month "don't die" costs.
How did we get an iPhone app to 10k/month in revenue without any outside marketing? Icon driven development- design by logo!
I’ll be honest- the response to Free Books caught us totally off guard! Initially we were thinking 10-15 sales a day would be beyond awesome. Within a week we were getting 200, and, as we watched the sales counter grow and grow, our initial shock turned to a realization that we had some serious scrambling ahead of us to get Free Books up to a condition we can be proud of.
Revenue is continuing to pick up day by day across all our main markets.
Most corporate blogs start with boring stories about their genesis story- oh no! a problem! I better raise six million in venture capital and create a UNIQUE SELLING PROPOSITION!
