Yesterday we talked about the first two strategies from our Keynote address, today the last three.

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Ship early and often

Get your product in customer’s hands as soon as possible.  Keeping your application to one feature at launch, allows you to conserve your most valuable assets- time and money.  Any application needs to be stripped down so that after three months it is able to be in customers hands.  If any more time is required (unless you are creating an application which involves true science), there are still too many features in the application.  Facebook famously has poster’s around its Palo Alto office which say things like “Stay Focused and Keep Shipping” and “Done is better than perfect.”  Stay focused on the first release.  Following the release of the product you can continue making changes and improvements, but it is better to have something that is done than something that is perfect.  Having a product in the marketplace can help validate your idea and provide motivation to keep going and expand the product.  Reading positive reviews and press feedback can also be great encouragement to keep you improving your product and putting you on the road to success.

Tell people about it

“If you build it, he will come.”  Unless you already have a large user base to leverage this is rarely true.  Before the application is released, you should gather promo codes and sneak peaks and then contact bloggers and reporters and ask them to write about your product.  A short direct, customized email is usually all that is required.  Not everyone you contact will write about your product but everyone that does, increases your chance of success.  Try and find reporters who have written about similar products or with whom you have overlapping networks.  Paying for press sometimes works, but an article that is written because the reporter is genuinely interested in what you are doing is worth 10 paid-for articles.

Continuous Improvement

Finishing the application is only the first step.  Investing in a project’s success means investing in ongoing development of new features and new UI.  A product that is released without any updates quickly becomes a dead project.  Even if no new features are added to the project, bugs will continue to be found and the server will require ongoing maintenance.  Be ready to add features and enhance your product for months or even years.

Even the best ideas with perfect execution can fail for a number of reasons.  But failing early and often is what ultimately allows an entrepreneur to be successful.  Very rarely does someone succeed with their first attempt but there is more to learn from failing then succeeding right away.  The only way to be certain you will fail is to not try.

Dave and I recently gave a keynote address at the Planet of the Apps conference in Dubai, U.A.E.  It was a great experience and a great chance to share some of what we have learned from being in this business for the last two years with the entrepreneurs who came to our talk.  The conference asked us to speak about “Strategies to Put Your App at the Top of the Charts” and the next two posts will tell you what we told them.  If you have questions or would like to see the presentation email albert@bohemian.cc.

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“There are over half a million apps in the app store and counting.”  This can be heard on commercials around the world touting the success of the Apple app store, and the size of the Google Play marketplace is quickly catching up.  As a consumer, it is exciting to think about the number of apps available in the store, and to find new games and apps for every imaginable function.  Every week there is a new must-have application which seemingly comes out of nowhere and becomes an overnight success.  As an entrepreneur, hearing about these successes is exciting because a company that nobody has heard of makes an application, starts making 250,000 dollars per month, then gets acquired for 200 million dollars.  However, there are thousands of applications that come out per week and there are countless apps all performing the same function.  How can an entrepreneur become successful in the mobile world today?  There are hundreds of ideas for how to be successful but here are five of our favorites.

Solve one problem

There are a number of ways to find an idea for a mobile application.  Solving a problem that you encounter in everyday life, finding a hole in the marketplace, or improving upon a current product have all led to successful applications.  The one thing to keep in mind is to start with one idea and grow your features with your users.  Don’t try and create an application which does 100 things at launch because it will not be effective at doing any of them.  Identify one feature, be able to explain it in one sentence, and then do not forget this when you are developing your product.  When your application is released, and gets in the hands of customers your entire business can shift depending on what people ask for in your application.  Many companies start with one idea and then, as they adjust to customer feedback, their product is unrecognizable from the product that was launched.

The right tool for the job

There are many ways to build a mobile applications.  You can code natively, use a HTML 5 wrapper like Phonegap, or use frameworks that output native code like Appcelerator. Building an application natively allows you to create a highly performant application but often takes longer to develop.  Working with Phonegap gives you access to the large community of web developers and can speed cross-platform development. Frameworks like Appcelerator can help you build simple applications very quickly.  The secret is it doesn’t really matter which direction you choose as long as your application solves the user’s problem.

Tomorrow, see our last three strategies!

When a new year starts, I always sit down for a day and evaluate what has happened in the last year.  I try and find mistakes and missteps that I may have made and what I learned from them.  I look at the successes and see what led up to these so that I can try and replicate them.  When I got to the Bohemian section of my life, it was amazing to see what had happened in just 365 days. 

This time last year, Katie and I were making our first business cards, and trying frantically to get our website up in time for CES.  You can see the results of this endeavor as the photo in this posting.  We had a hard time deciding what to put on it because we hadn’t yet completed a project.  We had been working on iRoc for a couple months, and had managed to land a second project, Cardio Escape, while in our spare time developing an application, which we believed would change the mobile future of music, Attuned.  As CES rolled around, we spent our time at free parties trying to mingle with important people who would take an interest in our dreams not sure if we could survive to see them come true.

Fast forward to today, we have the wonderful people at Arts and Recreation in Austin designing a whole new look and feel for our company (stay tuned).  Our website is passable, as we have completed over 30 projects now.   When friends ask if we have worked with anyone they have ever heard of, I can with confidence say, “Yes”.  We took the company from two people playing with software to 20 people still playing with software.  Last year we were featured in Wired magazine.  For someone who has Wired magazines in my house from 2000, seeing Bohemian mentioned in Wired was an unreal experience.

One of the things I am most proud of is our office in Viet Nam.  In the midst of some tough times last year, I thought that what we definitely needed to do was expand internationally.  I convinced Dave to come with me to get this office overseas started and help me interview some people.  After spending a week in Viet Nam, seeing the potential for work and exciting adventures, he was ready to join us and I realized that the office overseas was the best decision I could have made.  As our team has developed over the last year, it is great to see the change in our office.  We held our first interviews in a three story house we are renting with no computers, desks or workers.  Needless to say we had a hard time convincing people to join the team when there was nothing, and our first set of interviews had disappointing outcomes.  Today, I just hung a photo in our office from Cuong, which shows the Bohemian Viet Nam soccer team on which all of our guys play.  I have to continually deny requests from our American team to work from our Vietnamese office because of the free lunches, mid-afternoon naps, and the Badminton and Soccer teams.  We have just started working with our first batch of international clients through our office in Viet Nam, utilizing our world wide presence and 24 hour workdays.

When analyzing the rollercoaster of 2011, it is almost frightening to think about what we could do in 2012.  And that’s just how we like it.