Welcome to the first episode of our podcast series, “Appreneur Appcast.”
In this series of podcasts, we’ll be bringing you some of the biggest names in the industry and the brightest app developers on the planet to discuss app marketing, monetization and development strategies with you every week.
In this episode, we site down with Carter Thomas and extract (that sounds painful doesn’t it?) some great tactics and strategies that he’s using right now today. You’ll learn:
• Carter’s “go-to” monetization ninja tactics
• His opinion on free app vs. paid app models
• The #1 app marketing strategy that has yielded the best results
• 3 “must have” marketing tools that Carter suggests every developer integrate into their apps
• Where the app landscape is heading
• And Carter’s “do’s and Don’ts” of app development outsourcing.
Check out the video and leave your comments and feedback below…
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Download Appreneur Appcast Episode 1 MP3
Download Appreneur Appcast Episode 1 Transcripts
TRANSCRIPTS:
Len: I’m Len Wright with AppClover.com, and today I have some special guests with me. We’re going to kick it off today. I’ve got my partner Matthew Lutz, who is the cofounder and CEO of AppClover.com. I have also got Jeff Williams, from Weblance.com, and we’ve got Carter Thomas as well from Blue Cloud Solutions in our first weekly AppCast.
What I want to do is just maybe do a quick introduction for each one of you — for Carter and for Jeff, but maybe I can actually let you guys do a little introduction for yourselves and tell us just a little bit about what you’re doing and who you are, and then we can come back and get the AppCast started off. Carter, if you want to start things off.
Carter: Sure. Thanks again, Len. Basically I started a website, Blue Cloud Solutions. I started developing apps last October; I was an Internet marketer before that. What I started to do is develop these apps, and use them as a way to aggregate data and case studies that I go back and publish to the web community and the app community. I really try to pull back the curtain on the app world, and to find out the best ways to market their app, monetize their app, and do it in a really creative way. It’s kind of out-of-the-box stuff. You’re going to hear a lot of things you probably won’t hear on app marketing websites and other places; I try to give you a lot of creativity and brand-new ideas that actually work, because there are things that don’t.
Len: Awesome. We’re looking forward to hearing a lot of those insider tips during this podcast. We’re going to have a Q&A with Carter to open things up in a few minutes. Just before we get to that, Jeff, I want to introduce you as well, from Weblance.com. Tell us a little bit about what Weblance is up to and what you’re doing there.
Jeff: Weblance — I think I’m the only one out of all of us that doesn’t have their site live yet. We hoped to go live about two months ago, so hopefully we’re going to be live in maybe another month. We’ve got about 2000 sign-ups, so we’re pretty excited. When we do go live, hopefully most of those people will come back and fill out a profile. Weblance is just a freelance marketplace similar to oDesk or Elance, but we are providing serious project management tools that are for the specific purpose of building web apps, mobile apps, websites, and we expect to see folks that just need a couple pages of code written as well. I’m pretty excited about that.
Len: Fantastic. We will be dealing with some outsourcing stuff as well, and getting into that a little bit more in detail with Jeff later on in the podcast today. Last but definitely not least, Matthew. Maybe, Matt, you can explain a little bit about what AppClover has been up to and what we’re doing.
Matt: Sure. We’re pretty new to the industry, but it’s a new industry, right? Basically, we’ve got a website that’s dedicated to really showcasing a lot of — kind of what Carter was talking about earlier, a lot of information and knowledge around marketing and monetization of apps. As a matter of fact, just to let everyone know, both Jeff and Carter are regular contributors on our site. We’re really showcasing as many experts in the industry, and giving as many tips and knowledge and all that stuff just to help app developers and Appreneurs really take their games to the next level. We are building a community there.
That’s kind of our centerpiece, and we also just released our first issue of Appreneur Magazine. That’s available on iTunes now for iPad. That was another big milestone for us, which we’re pretty excited about. We’re working on our second issue right now, and Carter actually is going to be a regular contributor there too, so he’s not going to be able to get away from us. We’re excited to see the release of that second issue as well.
Jeff: I didn’t realize you guys had released already. What do I search on iTunes to get that?
Matt: You can just Google Appreneur Magazine, and it will show you. Obviously, we’re really good at getting the word out there to all of our friends and stuff about it.
Len: Jeff, it’s 32 pages of jam-packed information that you just really can’t get anywhere else. It’s really been received well.
Matt: In the first issue, too — just to keep the plug going a little bit — there are a bunch of free reports and stuff, three different free reports just to kind of give you an idea of what the future issues are going to give to you in terms of content. Again, that second one, we’re looking at next week we should be finished with that. We will be submitting that second issue pretty soon. We’re excited about that.
Probably the last thing that I will discuss, and we’ve got lots of irons in the fire, but the last thing is we’re actually building a platform. We’re calling it Appzine Machine, and that’s a program for other people to create their own magazine apps for the Apple Newsstand and submit it; build it through our platform and submit it. We’re probably about 45 to 60 days out of being live on that, and we’ve got about 15 beta testers in the funnel right now. We’re really, really excited about that, and we’ve got a lot of our energy focused on that. I think that pretty much sums up what we’re doing. If I left anything out, Len, that you want to touch on…
Jeff: Are you guys opening up your beta to anybody, or is it pretty much a private beta right now?
Matt: it’s a private beta right now. We have had absolutely no problems filling those beta testing positions. We will probably be taking another few beta testers on within the next couple of weeks, just to test the final. Then the product release, of course, then everybody will be able to test it. We have a waiting list started, and if people go to AppZineMachine.com they can sign up and get on the waiting list so that they get notified as soon as anything happens. We’re seeing that every day. A few people this morning signed up, so we’re just keeping those people up-to-date on what’s going on. As soon as it’s released, they will be the first ones to know.
Len: Fantastic. We’re doing a lot of different stuff that is really groundbreaking, unique, and we’re trying to be able to deliver the most up-to-date content, the freshest content that have more strategy and more insider tips than just — like a say all the time, “Do social media.” What does that entail? This podcast is one of those ways that we are going to be able to open up a lot of those insider tips and strategies so the Appreneurs and the developers that are creating these apps can broaden their horizons, the information to be able to drill down and be able to learn so that their apps can get the eyeballs needed.
It’s the perfect segue, really. Let’s enter into our first segment with Carter. We want to spend just a few minutes with Carter, and drill down a little bit into what he’s doing, and how other people that are watching this podcast can actually copy and emulate what Carter is already learning. Let’s just dive right into that right away. Carter, how many apps do you have in the app store right now, and what are your projections for the next six months or so regarding releasing new apps?
Carter: Live in the store right now is pretty much, I would say, somewhere in the order of 18 or 19 that are live right now. You can see behind me the list right here. There are about 35 that are being developed and monetized and everything right now. In the next three months it will probably be up to about 50, which is pretty exciting.
Len: Are those mostly games, or are they games and utility apps together? Explain a little bit more about what that’s made up of.
Carter: It’s pretty much all games at this point. I’ve got a few niche market photography apps that I’m working on. I’m going to do a test on an emoticon app to see what that sort of market is like; I’ve got a few things like that. It’s pretty much all games at this point.
Len: Right on. Maybe just explain your strategy a little bit, because you don’t really develop these apps right from the starting developing stages. Do you?
Carter: No, it’s pretty much – I guess the best term that has been coined is like flipping apps. A lot of people say it’s re-skinning or redeveloping. What I will do is basically go buy a gaming engine, or an instance of a piece of the source code. Take it back and look at it however I want to look at it, and then I’ll hire a developer and say, “Okay, this is exactly what I want you to do with this code. Here’s what I want you to install, and then I will take care of the marketing side of things.” All of a sudden I’ve got a brand-new app that’s at a fraction of the cost, and gets a lot of the upside of the business model. It works out very, very well.
Jeff: I can imagine.
Len: That’s awesome. Scalability on that and the leverage on that is awesome.
Matt: And there are very few people doing that out there, most everybody that I have been in conjunction with talking. They are developing their idea into an app, where you have sort of bypassed that and leveraged the ability that the source code that’s already existing out there. You’re basically just, as you mentioned, re-skinning, putting a new look on them, putting a new slant little bit, and then really focusing on the marketing side and the monetization side of it.
Carter: Exactly. We’ll talk about this in the magazine and the upcoming podcasts and all these sort of things, but what I can explain is you’re basically buying a business model. You can look at their history, you can look at what they did that made them successful, and very easily say, “Okay, I know I’m buying a winning model here. All I’ve got to do is put the right flavor on it, put it under my umbrella, and the chances of that being a success is 75% to 80%.” Whereas if you have a great idea and you still need to build the whole business model, that’s a pretty big gamble to take. It’s a great way to kind of mitigate your own risk, and at the same time have scalability, high profitability. You don’t need a lot of overhead. It’s a really cool model.
Len: And building a network as well with it is huge. We all know that building an app network to be able to cross-promote and so forth within is huge. You are able to really bypass a lot of the time that it takes to be able to get these apps up and running. In doing so, as Matt said, you’re able to leverage huge numbers of apps as well so you can actually start cross-promoting within your own network.
Carter: Exactly. There are a lot of really cool leverage things you can do. I don’t know how to describe it, but I kind of look at it as strategic thinkers, specifically Appreneurs, entrepreneurs, people who think or are kind of visionary don’t like to work serially. They don’t want to do step one, step two, step three, step four, “Okay, now I’m published.” They want to say, “How can a do nine things at once?” What’s nice about this model is you can say, “Okay, I can send 10 icon jobs to my icon guy. I can send 20 screenshot jobs to my screenshot guy. I have my developers working on 10 sets of code.” It all happens in the amount of time that an ordinary business model would’ve taken to do. If you had done each of the step by step, it takes a couple of years. You can get this done in a couple of weeks. It’s like a completely new way to look at that.
Len: That’s brilliant, man. A pat on the back for that, because it’s definitely ingenuity at its best, I love it. Monetization-wise, what do you see as your go-to ninja tactic right now for being able to create more revenue from it? What’s working like gangbusters right now and what’s not?
Carter: What I see in the market right now is definitely a shift toward the “freemium” model, so giving away an app for free, and then making money on the users and the downloads, specifically through ads. What I have been doing is I have spent the last three or four months auditing all of the ad networks out there, specifically ChartBoost, RevMob, Play Haven, iAds, AdMob, Flurry, all of them. What I have been using is I’ve kind of settled on RevMob; they’ve done a really good job, they have really great customer service, they are growing like crazy. What I really like is that they’ve got really, really smart developers who started the company, whereas all these other companies are people that used to work in advertising companies just kind of branched out and started their own.
Jeff: That makes such a difference.
Carter: Yeah. It’s like they are going out trying to grow their company by getting more advertisers, whereas RevMob is coming in and being like, “I want to go out and get more developers. I want to grow my base and push the market up that way.” Because of that you can get much higher revenue, you get much better code, you get much better customer service for the developers. It’s paid off; it’s definitely the best monetization I have found so far for all my apps.
Len: To expand just a little — sorry about that, Jeff, but to expand a little bit more — you mentioned on the freemium models versus the paid models, what is your opinion now on both? Just to dig in a little bit deeper, the pros and cons. Any suggestions that you would make for people out there trying to make that decision of going either freemium model or paid?
Carter: The number one suggestion is to do both. I shouldn’t say that — I should say you should test both. The reason I say you should test both is because what works for some apps doesn’t work for other apps. It depends on a lot of different factors — your design, your pitch, everything. I’ve seen paid apps do very, very well and they can be very sustainable because they have that going for them. At the same time, I have seen free apps that just crush it and make a ton of money and they go nuts.
If you have a paid app, you’ve got to have something that’s very unique. You’ve got to have a really great value proposition, and you’ve got to have something that creates a long-term revenue stream. Because of that, that can make it really powerful. With free apps you’ve got to have killer marketing, you’ve got to have a lot of downloads, and you’ve got to be able to convert people who are going to look at your app for 30 seconds and delete it; you’ve got to find a way to make money on them in that 30 seconds.
It’s just like a different business model; there are definitely pros and cons of each. I’m on the “freemium” model side of things, that’s where I’m at just because that’s what’s working for me. Going back to what I said, the number one thing you can do is test your app with both models in the course of six months, and see what works for you.
Len: Exactly. It really comes down to what I call the distraction model and how good you are at whatever your device, whatever your app is at distracting those people for that amount of time. The amount of time that you can actually “tie up” their focus or their attention on what your app is doing, the better it is to be able to create revenue with that, because you’ve got their attention for longer of course. That’s something to be able to think about when you’re creating your game or functionality app, whatever you’re doing — your utility app — is to be able to create something that actually captures that person’s attention for longer periods of time, which allows you to be able to gain access to creating more revenue streams from that user as well.
What’s the number one marketing tactic that you have done with your app marketing that has yielded you the most results over anything else? If you had to pick one thing, what would it be?
Carter: If I had to pick one thing — and like I said, this is from my experience — investing in the publishing. When I say investing it can be money, but it can also be time and energy. The publishing is the icon, the name of your app, the description, the screenshots, what categories you put it in and what keywords you choose for your app. The reason I say that that is the biggest marketing tactic that I have done is because it is the one that I have tested the most, and it’s the one I see the biggest swings in.
For Alpha Combat, my first big app, I went out and I launched it. It did what it did, and I’m sure in the future we will talk through that case study at some point. Basically, I went out and did all the reviews, and nothing really happened. I did some promotions and a few things happened. I’ve done a lot of different tests. Definitely the biggest – you’ll look at it and you will see a noticeable change, is if you design really awesome icons, invest time in your screenshots, research the keywords in the competitive area you’re in and work on it almost like an inbound marketing strategy, kind of like SEO for the app store. That’s definitely been the biggest game-changer for me.
Jeff: I just want to ask one question. Everybody says, “Just get it out there, test it, and make sure that you’ve got a business first.” I have always been inclined to design the heck out of everything, make sure it’s perfect. At what point do you invest in that publishing and get all of that stuff? Do you test first and make sure that it’s a viable app, or do you just go for it?
Carter: The short answer is that I usually find someone… I just do market research first, I guess. That’s how I determine if it’s going to be a good business model or not. I will kind of be able to extrapolate, kind of reverse engineer it. I’ll say, “Okay, this is the market that I see. Here are apps that are doing what I’m doing.” Research the hell out of that. “What have they done? Is this worth my time?” When you get to the 20, 30, 40 app mark in the store, you can start to see a little bit of standard deviation in play.
Jeff: You probably already know, right?
Carter: Yeah, it’s like, you know what’s going to work. You also know, “If I just put it in, I’m going to get like 25-30 downloads a day on the game. If I put in the publishing time and effort, it’s probably going to be around 100-200.” You just kind of start to see those. To answer your question, I think that the amount of time that I invest. I look at like a week of time as a huge investment of time right now. Other people might say, “Oh my gosh, I would definitely invest a week to make sure that I have great publishing.” As opposed to if you spent three months of your life going out and social networking and all that sort of stuff, that’s hard to get an ROI on as much.
Len: I wanted to mention too, market research is not just asking your next-door neighbor or your friend or your spouse, “Do you like my game?” It goes way beyond that. Maybe you can just touch really quickly on some of the methods that you do to be able to find out that market view. Carter, what are a few things that you do to be able to test that market out?
Matt: Real quick, Carter, just to jump in. One of the things you talked about earlier as well is before you even purchase an app or code or engine or whatever you’re going to do to build off of, that’s part of you’re buying a business model. I think that actually takes care of the first step, right? I would imagine.
Carter: Yes, that’s what’s a little different about what I do, versus someone who has an idea and they want to go out and say, “Is this a good idea?” It’s a little bit different, but, Len, to answer your question, there are a few things that I do. The first is that I look at the charts every morning. I look at my sales data and all that stuff, but then I sit down and I look at the top 100 in every category. I spend about half an hour doing that. I look and see who’s new, who just got in there, what they did. That helps me see where the market is going for every category. That’s kind of the first thing. You start to see trends very, very quickly when you look at who is in the top 100; you start to be able to predict that pretty well.
The second is that you can do a lot of keyword research now; the first being with Google’s old-school keyword tool, which is what you use for Google AdWords. That’s free, available to anyone who has a Google account. That shows you web traffic volume on keywords. That just shows you the overall demand for the market. The second part of that is you can do a keyword research. You can use a service like App Codes, which is this great SEO tool for the app store. You can also just sit down on iTunes and type in “fighter jet game” or whatever and see how many results come up, see what lands where.
That takes care of the majority of it. It’s hard to put an exact science on it, because a lot of it is just having experience in it.
Matt: Yeah, and every app is different, right? Every app is different unto itself, so it’s going to take a different strategy for research for each one.
Carter: Yes, exactly.
Len: If you had to pick the top three things that app developers should always include in their apps to help with their marketing and help them actually move forward, what would some of those be, and why?
Carter: That’s a good question. I would say the first thing you probably would put in there, especially nowadays, is the social networking implementation – Facebook, Twitter, especially with the IOS6 coming out that’s fully integrated into Facebook. You want to keep that in mind moving forward. People want to be — if they like your app, they’re going to want to share it. If they can’t share it, then you’re kind of tripping over your own feet at that point.
Matt: The ability to go viral.
Carter: Yes. Second, what I would always include is the ability to make monetization or make money at the end of the day, even if you’re not going to use it. Sometimes if I have a paid app, I will install RevMob or Chart Boost or one of these STKs, but I will put the campaign on pause. Then I will release it as a paid app so that if I ever want to change it to a free app, I can control the display on the server side. I could just press play on my dashboard on my website, and the ads start getting served up so I can control that. From a marketing standpoint, it’s just like a great way to get your data, to make money on your app to just kind of keep the process going. I would definitely recommend that for anyone, even if you’re planning on doing it six months down the road.
The third, I think would be — this is going to sound a little ambiguous, and this is more for the Alpha Combat type apps, like the big project type apps. You’ve got an idea, you build an app, sink a few thousand dollars into it and you have one big app. Really make sure that you have marketing materials. What I mean by marketing materials is like have the splash screen be a layered PSD file so that you can make banners for it. If you want to reach out to a blogger, you can give them assets that they want. Having the ability to create assets that you can share with people in a customized way, as opposed to slicing up screenshots for people, is an awesome way to make your app really unique, really special without a whole lot of extra cost to it. That’s something you can work with the designer when you first build it out.
Len: Presentation is so important.
Matt: To that point, you actually did a really good blog post on how to do those custom screenshots so they look like they’re in the phone and all that stuff. I think that was your last blog post, and that was a really good tutorial on it.
Len: We have people that are watching and listening to this, and going to be in the future here, who want to be able to get started and get driven in the right way. Maybe they have created their first app or couple of apps; maybe they have stalled. What kind of parting advice would you give to the newbie Appreneur who is just getting started, or one who has just started to roll?
Carter: The best advice I would give to someone is — in a perfect world, the advice I give is learn how to read the code that the developers are going to send you. You don’t have to be able to write it, like I can’t write code, but if they send you something, you need to be able to press play in the simulator on X Code and be able to test it yourself. Look at it and put it on your phone, and be able to do it without them hand-holding it for you. What that’s going to do is you can go back to them and say, “Look, I want you to include this, and here’s where you’re going to do it in the app.” It’s going to give you a really, really great perspective on how to develop these things very quickly and very efficiently.
To that point, even if it’s not coding, learn how to do something in the process that you can control and you can own that you don’t have to outsource, and that you can have some input on. I would say the one thing I would recommend against is sitting back not knowing anything and not wanting to know anything, and letting a team of 20 guys kind of hand you what they do and say, “Hey, good luck.”
Jeff: I just want to say with your code, you don’t have to read code, but they should know what tidy code looks like. If you’re getting sloppy code, that is the biggest red flag you can have. Your app may actually not work, and you’ll have that final payment delivered. The first time you look at their code if it’s not tidy, and there are plenty of examples out there, I think I even have a blog article on that. There are plenty of examples on the net. Google it, look at good, clean code, and if you’re not getting it, red flag.
Matt: Really quick, Jeff, to that point, this is a conversation we talked about last week a little bit. One of the services that you’re going to offer on Weblance is actually have people — if you want to speak to that about basically…
Jeff: Right, so if you’re getting code on Weblance, say it’s the first milestone. It’s not going to be a live app yet, it’s just going to be raw code. You’re really not going to know whether that code is quality or not. It could be tidy, it could be illogic. One of the things we have is that you can hire a tester at an hourly rate, $10 an hour. Have somebody who can read code look at it. If it looks good to them or if they have any questions, at least you can follow up with your developer, “A couple of things. Number one, you are fetching bad code.” The second thing, the developer knows after the first middle that you are paying attention. They’re going to put the extra effort in, because it’s being monitored. That’s a cool feature that we have added in our marketplace, and I will add that the other marketplaces don’t do that. Thank you for that.
Len: it’s so much like taking your car to a mechanic and having absolutely no idea what the mechanic is doing. You may pull into a shop that they are looking at creating some extra money through the ignorance that you just don’t know what you don’t know. It’s great information is try to find out, learn as much as possible; not just about the marketing, but even about the coding so that you know, at least from a project management point of view, what’s going on and you can actually manage it properly. That’s some great information, guys.
Carter: I think really quick on the end. It’s also important to know that it can save you a lot of money too. Looking back on the last five or six months, I spent like $800 or $900 on developers installing RevMob for me. I look at that now and I’m like, “You’ve got to be kidding me.” It’s literally three lines of code into my X Code project. I was paying guys a ton of money to do this, and now it’s like the idea of doing that is, “What was I doing?” It is very important for the project management, but also there are a lot of things that everyone out there can do themselves. The software and the programs, a lot of the heavy lifting can get done by developers, but a lot of these STKs are not as difficult as everyone thinks they are. You spend a couple of weeks learning it, you’re going to save yourself a lot of money.
Len: Right on. That’s some great, tight information. We’re going to expand on it more and more as these podcasts go, and through AppClover.com or through even your site of Blue Cloud Solutions, Carter, and yours, Jeff, at Weblance. Let’s sort of move along. Matt, let’s go to you here a little bit and get a 30,000-foot view of the app landscape. What are you seeing, how it started, how it’s changing, what it currently looks like — that type of stuff.
Matt: Sure, it’s a fascinating subject. Anyone that is involved in app creation development right now, or just paying attention to what’s going on, it’s just absolutely fascinating to see how quickly it’s moving. We always laugh because we have this phrase, we always say it’s moving like a juggernaut freight train. It is, and there’s just no way to stop it. It’s offering bigger opportunities than the boom of the Internet; that’s the reality when you’re looking at the numbers.
As far as the days of — I can’t remember, someone said this and it made me laugh. It’s one of the things that I repeat all the time, it’s like throwing a crappy app up on Monday and shopping for your Ferrari on Friday. Those days aren’t necessarily going on anymore; I’m sure there are some cases here and there. People get attracted by this sexy deals like the “draw something” or any of those big ones, InstaGram. Yeah, those are big deals, but those are the home run deals that there is so much more to those stories. There is so much time and effort and money dumped into the backend of those stories that you don’t hear about. I think it’s important to, number one, talk about what’s actually going on out there so you’re not looking at the sugarcoated view of it.
Then number two is to really examine the opportunity. The reality is it still is a big opportunity. I recently wrote about this, it was in our first issue of the magazine, as well as something that I recently went through. I was starting to get involved in the app market, and starting to really look and see what’s going out there. Len and I did a gross amount of research. I got to see it in person of what’s really going on globally; on a recent trip I went to Africa. While I was there, one of the things in the back of my head that was kind of seeded — I went there on a totally different unrelated trip, it had nothing to do with the app market or anything. It was a client I used to work for, they built a school, so just the opening of the school there. It was a really cool trip; it was big and powerful on a lot of levels.
One of the things that stood out was the fact that everyone is on a mobile phone there. This is a third-world country, and this allowed the people to change their lives dramatically. It has impacted their lives in so many ways because of apps. You look at the fact that mentally your app developers are changing the world, literally. They are changing the lifestyles of a lot of people and the betterment of a lot of people. Also, the opportunity for us as developers and stuff is a lot bigger than people are wrapping their head around, because we don’t necessarily have that abundance mentality.
Jeff: Matt, I’ve just got to add to that. You brought up a good point about how it’s changing the world. I spent a lot of time in the Philippines, also a third-world country. I have seen hospitals where there are three women to a bed, and they have just given birth. They have got no money for formula, nothing. Every single one of them are nursing, and they’re on their cell phone texting. It is amazing to me that they don’t have formula to feed their newborn baby, but they have enough load in their phone to send out text messages.
Matt: It’s incredible. That’s one of the things that, as happens with every single technology, as it progresses it gets cheaper and smaller and easier to create and everything. If you look at India 10 to 15 years ago, they were $400 for an entry-level cell phone. At the same time, if you look at like Bangladesh — I can’t remember the exact numbers, but I think that surpassed the yearly salaries or the yearly income, so there was no way of doing it. Now they’re disposable for the most part.
I will bring it back to Africa. The thing that I really look at it is one of the examples is mobile banking; having an app on your phone where you can do mobile banking. You no longer need to leave your job and walk days and days to go to the bank and deposit your money. In transit you could be robbed, because it is a poor country still; there are still things like that happening here and there. Now you are not away from your family. You’re able to produce more, you’re able to make more money, you are able to live a simpler lifestyle. Little things like that.
I want to get too far off track because I could talk for hours on this, but I think if anyone wants to spend a couple of minutes looking at number one — Carter, for instance, you have been involved now for quite a few months. What it looked like prior to getting involved or what you thought of it was, versus where you see it now. More importantly, where you think it’s heading in your opinion. Where do you think things are going? What’s the next big thing on the horizon or whatever? If you’ll talk to that for a couple minutes.
Carter: I will give you kind of a unique perspective on this in terms of the app store in general. The app market is growing like crazy, the amount of people contacting me has gone through the roof. What I see, which is very interesting, is what Apple is doing to change the app market and the app store. What I mean by that is the approval process, the strictness of getting an app into the store, the kind of apps that they are essentially getting rid of in the app store.
What’s going to happen — over a year ago you could put in almost anything that wasn’t NC-17 rated. If it had some semblance of a functionality, it would be in the app store and it would probably get some downloads. Now it’s like I get more apps rejected than I do approved. They’re like, “This isn’t providing a good enough experience. We require that you have a restore button in app purchases.” They’re unloading all of these new restrictions, which I understand it. I think in the next six months it’s not going to be as easy to get an app in the store as it was; that’s a barrier that has never really been there before. It’s never been a question of, “Can I get it in the store?” It’s, “Is this a good idea?” Now I think it’s going to be like, “Are they even going to let us in?” That’s something that definitely needs to be on the radar for some people.
Jeff: And you don’t know until after you develop the app, right?
Carter: That’s exactly right.
Matt: I think the reality of that is, we’re going to see a better user experience from the apps that you’re downloading. It’s going to improve the market; it’s going to elevate the market.
Carter: It absolutely will, I think it’s going to be like if you know what you’re doing and you’ve done your research and you’ve developed a good app, it’s going to be an awesome business to be. I think that understanding this stuff and understanding how it works, reading a lot of information and knowing what you’re getting yourself into — awesome situation to be in. The guys who were just like, “Oh yeah, I’m just going to whip up something and let it rip.” Get real.
Jeff: I’m going to make another fart app.
Len: And it goes from hobby to business. Instead of just putting an app together and throwing it on just to see what it does, it actually entails more of a business mind or an entrepreneur mind behind it where you actually need to do some strategy planning, and even strategy planning to the point of doing the marketing planning before you actually create and launch your app. You touched already on marketing and market analysis; you need to know this information. I think it’s like Matt was saying at the start, the days are leaving where you don’t need to know knowledge. I still say right now you can still be very sloppy and successful, but it’s getting less and less. As the competition grows in the app store, you are going to find — I think, it’s my prediction that you are going to find that you need to know your marketing better. You need to be more of a serious person in business and you need to take it more seriously, rather than a hobby, so that you do learn along the way. It’s going to get tighter and tighter. The competition is definitely going to bring with it a lot of new opportunities for learning for people, that’s for sure.
Matt: I think the other part of that too, which is kind of cool — and this is a little unrelated, but it’s still about the industry as a whole. We’re seeing how small our world is getting. Look on this call right now and we have got three countries covered; Carter and I are in various states in the US, Len is in Canada – eh? – and Jeff, you’re in the Philippines, right?
Jeff: That’s right.
Matt: It’s just all these things, besides the fact that technology is getting cheaper and more accessible for people, and how connected and interconnected our world is getting. It’s going to invite a lot of new developers and a lot of new talent to the market, and the ability to not just work for other people, but the ability to get involved and actually — I don’t want to say competition, but to be up here. Before you would have been… I think that’s opening up the whole new thinking about what’s happening on the horizon, and where we’re heading. I think it’s going to become a huge factor, which is another reason why it’s great and why it’s important to get involved now, to really take it seriously now.
It’s just like fast-forward from the start of the Internet now. You can put a website up and no one is going to know it exists. I always use that analogy of if a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it actually make a sound? It’s kind of the same thing with websites now. If you build one, who cares? You have to do all the work, and you have to really know what you’re doing to get it noticed. The same thing is going to happen with apps; it’s happening, and it’s going to happen exponentially faster as we move forward in time. You’re going to have to really know what you’re doing and get involved now is my point.
Jeff: And I think, Matt, what Carter was saying before about social integration. I think that’s going to have a lot to play with in the next while as well, is how much can you integrate your app into a social integration with Facebook or with other social media, so that it can be shared and you can actually take advantage of those things that are still out there now that can actually spread virally? People do — they share their interests, they share their likes. If you can get some sort of app that’s very captivating for people’s attention, it works very well with social media. Again, you have to learn how to do that. It’s not just like what I said before, “do social media.” All of these things have to be learned talents that you continually — it’s a learning curve. As you go test, tweak, repeat. You can actually gain a lot that way.
Matt: To that point, this is one of the things we’re providing by this appcast, by our site, by both Carter’s and Jeff’s sites, is mentorship. Learn from other people; learn what the successful people are doing out there, and emulate it. Seek out that knowledge, because it’s going to make you that much more successful that much more quickly. I think that’s another thing that gives us a segue piece of advice. That’s what you need to know, and you need to know what’s going on out there too.
I want to shift gears slightly, just to kind of keep things moving along, because again how quick this industry is and everything. It’s important to know what’s going on and what’s topical, and what’s happening today. One of the things we’re going to do in these podcasts, is in each one we’re going to bring you a handful of headlines of things that are happening that week. It’s just to kind of let people know, and just kind of do little news segments. With that, I will let Jeff take over and kind of tag in here.
Jeff: It’s kind of good, because we’ve been talking a lot about viral marketing. There is a new piece of legislation right now in the house that could seriously limit our users to leverage viral marketing. We have a bill in Congress called the Commercial Felony Streaming Act, and it makes unauthorized web streaming of copyrighted content — and it doesn’t matter if it’s music, sound, video, or some kid playing a shoot-up video that he uploads to the Internet. If you were to upload that, you could go to prison for five years. Here’s basically what can happen; you’re film your kid and they are dancing in front of the TV, or you’ve got a barbecue in the backyard and there’s music playing, or like I said, kids playing. He did a great headshot and he wanted to upload the video to the Internet. All eligible — it could put you in jail for five years.
As Appreneurs, that’s a big thing. If you’re putting apps out that are games or any other kind of thing, YouTube right now is one of the hottest ways for viral marketing. That’s something that we want to pay attention to. Right now there are 43 organizations that are lobbying for this; there only three that are against, Demand Progress is probably the best one. There is a link on WebLance.com for it; they have a lot more information about it. It’s just something to keep an eye on.
Matt: I’ll be curious to see how this plays out, because it’s one of those things where in every instance or at every opportunity, there is always the flipside. This seems like it’s a bad thing, and it is going to make it a little more difficult for app developers like, Carter, one of your apps. You are more than happy if people want to do a review, and do a screencast review of it and put it up on YouTube. That’s helping your cause, right? You look at how many sites are dedicated to Angry Birds. Do you think they care? No, they encourage it. While it presents some more hurdles and stuff, I think if this goes through — granted, obviously it’s looking like this is where it’s heading, but I’ll be curious to see how it plays out. Number one is how they’re going to enforce it. Who’s going to enforce it, what kind of efforts are going to be put against it?
Number two is, will this actually improve communications or relationships between app developers and their fans? People will have to get permission in order to do this. While it’s a pain because, when you think about the Angry Birds guy, you have 200 people a day that want to post a video. That’s a lot of e-mails to say yes to if they’re all asking for permission. It’s really curious to see what’s going to happen.
Jeff: Yes, this is about the sixth piece of legislation that has been reformatted, and it’s probably the most watered-down one. Fortunately, the other ones did fail. I think that railing against this regulation of the Internet is important for Appreneurs, because I think it can snowball if we let them start doing that.
The next story that we have here, there are some new developer policy rules for Google Play. This has come as a result of probably 25 press releases that were released by small blogs over the Internet, but had these huge marketing campaigns — “I smell Apple” — about malware and pirating and all that stuff. Google had to respond to it; they did update their privacy rules. Keep an eye on that, go have a look at it, it could affect your next app.
Facebook has opened up their apps center to the world, finally. Go check that out; learn about how it works, what’s possible, what you can do there. Maybe there are some integration opportunities with your mobile app, and you could be first off the starting line.
Carter: I would jump in there, Jeff, to say that you are right on with the idea that checking out communities like that, checking out marketplaces like that, those are some of the best places I have gotten ideas for building games. Not only that, but you’d be amazed — especially WebLance or any of these where you can go to the developer and show them a link to a Facebook app and say, “Hey, what’s it going to take to build something just like this?” They look at that and give you a very clear price, and cut out three weeks’ worth of, “What happens on this screen? What happens on this screen?” Type of stuff. Those type of idea engines are awesome for Appreneurs and what we’re doing, all that stuff. That’s definitely a really good resource to check out.
Jeff: Right. The final story is Doom has been released for the Windows device. This is not a huge story, but it did occur to me because we are going to be interviewing Carter today. These devices are becoming more powerful, and we’re able to put these big-box games into our phones. Are those games going to steal market share from essentially what right now is small business Appreneurs? Carter, do you see that as a possible threat?
Carter: I don’t know. I understand what you’re saying; I think it’s a little bit of apples and oranges in certain ways.
Jeff: Because they’re different types of games, really.
Carter: Yeah. It is just like there’s so much brand loyalty to the platforms and devices and things like that. I don’t see a whole lot of switchover. I think you might get people who might play it on both, but I don’t think you’ll get too many who will say, “I was going to play it here, but now I’m playing it here.” It might be more of an “and” and less of an “or.”
Jeff: Doom on an iPhone, let’s face it, it sucks. It’s not like playing it on your TV. Alright, that’s it.
Len: Alright. Real quick, as kind of a last thing to do here just because of who we have on this app cast, Jeff, obviously we have talked about the service that your site is going to serve for the marketplace as far as finding outsourcers, and a place for outsourcers to get work and projects and stuff like that. Carter, with your experience of working with outsourcers, I wonder we could spend just a few minutes talking about outsourcing. I’ve got a few questions to run past you guys just to get your thought. We’ll just do this quickly, and we can always expand upon it in future appcasts if it makes sense to do so. This is one of those bottomless pits of a subject you can talk about forever.
Jeff: Yeah, we’re running long.
Len: Yeah, we’re running long, so let me just go ahead and dive right in. Number one, this is a question you will hear time and time again, and I’m sure you guys do. Jeff, you might be a little biased with your answer on this one.
Jeff: I will be completely biased, I promise.
Len: Where do you find good developers? To take that a little step further, what are the basic vetting questions? Give us a couple of questions you would ask at the very onset, before you engage a developer.
Jeff: I have definitely hired both good and bad developers. Even today, I still occasionally will hire a bad developer. To be honest with you, it’s almost impossible not to do it on occasion. The idea is that you need to recognize it super early, like within the first week. That’s totally possible to do. I would not — there are a lot of payment schemes out there where we pay a third up front, a third in the middle — don’t do that. Get some sample code from them, put them on a very micro project and examine the micro project.
I can tell you in my own experience that when I have made a bad hire, or anybody that I know has made a bad hire, it was in a moment of laziness. The questions that should have been asked were not asked. It was really down to being prepared; having questions written down so that when that call comes to you and you’re in the kitchen and you’ve got to run to your computer, sit down at Skype and ask this person questions, that you make sure that you ask everybody the same questions and that you don’t miss one. Every single question is really important.
Number one, make sure that you have an example of their work; something that is at least as complicated as you want to accomplish. If they cannot provide it to you, or they give you a sample of work from their company, or they give you a sample of something they did two years ago, forget it. It has to be recent, it has to be the actual developer that is going to be working on your site, and it has to be at least as complicated as something that you want to build. I would say that’s probably the most important thing you can do when you hire a developer. I don’t know, Carter may have a different view, but for me that’s been the golden rule.
Carter: I would definitely say that seeing what they have done is huge, and knowing that it’s them who are the ones that are doing it. A lot of times with outsourcing it’s like, “Oh, this is our work.” It’s like okay, whatever, dude, I’ve seen that before. One thing I would throw in there — two things really quick. One, whenever I put up a job on oDesk or Elance or anything, I always put at the end of the job request, “Make sure you type in this sentence at the beginning of your response so I know you read this.” All of these guys, I will get half of them will just give me a templated thing, and then half of them will write exactly what I asked them to write. Right there, I have narrowed down 50% of the people. That’s one quick tip that I would say.
The second is that I always ask pretty specific and complicated questions in my job request. I say, “This is what I’m thinking about doing. I would love to hear your thoughts; here’s the project.” I will explain the whole thing. If they don’t come back to me with either asking me more questions or with a very good answer to that question, and wanting to continue the conversation on Skype or G-chat or whatever, that conversation is — that’s it. I’m not interested in working with them. Those are two things that I would do.
Jeff: It’s those canned e-mails where, “Yes, we have very good developers. We help you well.”
Len: That’s great advice. It’s one of those things, like I have hired numerous outsourcers as well. That was one of the things that I later on adopted was, even if it’s just an e-mail response like “make your subject line this” or whatever just that one little – that’s the first thing. Then the second thing for me is instead of having — and this goes to what you were talking about, Jeff, as far as structuring the payments and stuff — is make a really, really simple milestone be the first part of the project and release funds. For apps, “Create a screen with three buttons that look like this. They don’t need to have any functionality yet, I just want to see that they work. Do a screencast of it and let me check it out. Then I will give you instructions on the second half or what the next step is.” Just build in steps so that if they’re not the right person, that they can’t deliver that in an hour or a day or whatever, cut them loose and move on. You have to be quick to make that decision, otherwise you are just basically hurting yourself. Sorry, I didn’t mean to answer my own question.
Carter: It’s all about following directions with the outsourcer, right? You’re trying to be able to get to a point as quickly as possible to see how well they can actually not only do the work, but follow your directions. That’s where a lot of the breakdown is is in the communication.
Matt: That leads to the second question too, actually pretty well. The other part of that is you have to know how good of a project manager you are. If you are a piss-poor project manager, don’t do it all yourself. That’s huge. Or figure out a system, do a little bit of studying and figure out what the Agile Project Management System is, or some other ways to actually learn project management, and then systemize it yourself before you basically bring anyone else into your chaotic world.
Jeff: Here’s where the bias part comes in that you were talking about earlier. We have built a project management system into our freelance marketplace so that the providers have to behave in a certain way, they have to deploy those best practices. You’re going to get those updates, those tasks are going to get done according to a certain time schedule. Their payment is in the fund, and if they don’t meet those goals, if they are not delivering what they promised to deliver, they very well may not get paid. We have developed that project management tool so that when clients come, they don’t have the project management skills — and I’m not a particularly great project manager. Having this tool there will fill in those gaps, and really make sure that the project gets delivered. There is your biased answer that you were talking about.
Matt: I did not know that something is built into platform, so I do not see that at all. We had a conversation about that this morning about project management and learning. Actually, Len and I, that was one of the things we were chatting about this morning, or one tiny part of it. That is one of my biggest issues is I have a hard time letting go, and micromanaging. We’ve had a few really good outsourcers lately in a few different areas, and that’s helping me trust better. I think that’s the biggest thing is you have to let go, and you have to trust the people that you’re putting in charge. Again — measure it, manage it, but get to the point where I would imagine, Carter, you probably have people you work with on a regular basis. Build that team up of people you trust.
Len: It’s all that delegating, too. As a business owner — which is what we’ve been talking about, moving from hobby to business in the app world — delegation is always very, very important to be able to learn how to do better. You cannot wear all hats in your business.
Matt: Real quick, another question that I wanted to dive into is, again, traditionally when you think of outsourcers is in areas like Philippines, India, the Eastern Bloc, you think of these traditional areas. Along with that comes some confusion on your part. Like, “Okay, what am I going to do about the language barrier, the communication issues and the cultural differences?” Those are considerations across the board. What do you think, how do you get over, I guess, that hurdle? I don’t know if either one of you want to take this first. For instance — and this is actually something, Jeff, you shared, so I’m quoting you on this. In Southeast Asia, it’s really hard to get bad news from developers. It makes it really difficult to know when your project is running off track, or getting off the track, or any of the challenges they’re facing or whatever. How do you deal with things like that?
Jeff: There is a really great study I read, and I should have had that. Maybe I’ll bring it on the next podcast or I will post it on my blog, but it really put things together for me. What they did was they measured the power divide. In South Asian cultures, there is a very large power divide between the boss and the worker, the parent and the child, the policemen and the citizen. There is a belief there that to say no to somebody who is in a position of power is extremely rude. It doesn’t matter whether no is the truth or not, you just don’t say it. It’s this power divide that sort of gets in the way of communication.
Now, being an American and not being aware of this power divide, and not understanding that these people are not giving me the news I need to know so that I can make the business decisions to change the course of the project, or do a workaround or make some sort of decision, my team is just not giving me the information I need. I just don’t know what’s going on, and they may be having a difficult time. That you can see very quickly, if you’ve got a big project going — even a small project going — that that power divide is going to be a real problem. You have to sort of know how to cut through that and make it safe for them to tell you the truth and do those things.
My technique in the beginning was to get utterly frustrated. Then of course they lock up, they don’t want to talk to me, they get more nervous. Before you know it, I’ve got to fire them and I’ve got to go hire somebody else. It would have been a lot better if I had understood it from the get-go, sort of cultivated that communication and dealt with it in a better way. That’s what I have learned. I will tell you what, I have been dealing with Southeast Asia for 15 years, and I read this article two years ago pr three years ago. It completely changed the way that I dealt with Southeast Asia, and it has made such a difference. It’s really about understanding the power divide.
Len: Jeff, do you mind if I put you on the spot really quick?
Jeff: Go ahead.
Len: What about creating a really good article for our next issue of Appreneur Magazine? Can I get you to commit to that right now?
Jeff: Yes, I can do that, no problem.
Carter: I’ll throw in a few quick experiences that I had about working with guys in different countries. The first is that this is going to sound a little strange, but if you start to notice how they talk, like how specific people talk from different countries, they have various — like they might use words in different ways. After a while, you start to realize what they think those words mean. It’s all the same thing that we’re doing, it’s just that they learned English in a different way. I find that if I talk back to them in the same way they are talking to me, things go a lot smoother. I kind of let them set the bar for how much English we’re going to do, and work within those confines. That can be hit or miss, but I find that it goes a lot smoother when I can talk kind of in their vernacular a little bit.
Jeff: So let’s hear your best Indian accent.
Carter: I think we will get into the legal battles if I start doing that.
Matt: We’ll keep this as socially sensible…
Carter: Yes, we’re going to keep this very top-level.
Len: Cool, man. I have one last question, I know we’re going way over than what we planned to, but I’ll leave it on this, then we will just kind of close it off. The old adage “you get what you pay for” as far as developing, do you find it to be true?
Jeff: Oh, my God. You know, Carter, this is my philosophy. Please tell me if you don’t agree with this, because I’m not completely sure it’s true. What I think is that we hire folks, say we’re hiring them out of India, we hire them for $10 an hour and we get some code back. I have found that the quality of that code at $10 an hour is roughly the same as if I were to pay some college kid in the United States $10 an hour to do that code. In India, if you get a developer with, say, seven years of experience. They’re going to charge you $30 an hour. In America, you can hire a developer that has, say, 3 to 4 years of experience and they’re going to charge you $30 an hour. The quality of the code I get from both is about the same, but my communication with the American is a lot easier.
I don’t know that the economies of scale are genuine, but here’s the deal. There are not a lot of developers in the United States for less than $40 an hour, and they are very hard to find. Even now in our recession or whatever we call this that we’re in, it’s still very hard to find developers in the United States. I don’t know that – obviously, there is going to be somewhat of a cheaper price for offshore workers, but I don’t know that it’s as big as everybody thinks it is. You’re not hiring the Indian version of a $40 an hour developer. You are hiring a $10 an hour developer, and that wage will hold true around the world. I don’t know, Carter, do you agree with that?
Carter: Yeah. In my experience it’s really hard to say you get what you pay for, because I’ve had guys that will give me amazing stuff for super cheap, and I’ve had guys give me horrible stuff for a lot of money.
Jeff: That’s also true.
Carter: What I will say is that I have kind of a mental graph in my head about what this ratio looks like, but it’s like if you expect to outsource creativity or problem-solving at a low price, you’re going to get bad results. That’s kind of what I think.
Jeff: Well said.
Carter: If you have very executional work where it’s very black-and-white, literal, no question about it, that you can point to and say, “This is a yes or no answer” and it has very clear deliverables, you have a much better chance of being able to outsource that at a low rate and be able to expect to get — you shouldn’t unless you have to, and if you do you want to pay a lot of money for it. That’s kind of what I do.
Len: That actually is a really good time to be able to segue off and close things out, because that’s a really valuable piece of information. It also allows us to be able to come back in our next podcast and be able to expand on some of these topics as well. For everybody watching, I hope that you have really enjoyed this first podcast from AppClover.com — episode one, yes. We want your feedback. Different content that you want covered, let us know. We are always open to suggestions, and we hope that you can look past our first endeavors in this. You see, for example, I don’t have any kind of AppClover — my name is not below me or anything else. There are little glitches that are going to happen. We outsource that, actually.
Carter: We only paid $10 an hour for it.
Len: We needed more creativity on that one for sure. But we appreciate everyone watching, and please share this with everybody you know as well; help us spread the word. Check out AppClover.com and AppreneurMagazine.com for more information. Both of those will have the latest and most up-to-date, freshest information on marketing and monetization in the app world. Please also check out Weblance.com.
Jeff: Sign up for beta.
Len: Yes, if you sign up for the beta, there is a special offer for the AppClover community. If you sign up for beta on Weblance.com, you’re going to get premium membership free. It’s roughly a $240 savings. Again, go to Weblance.com, sign up for the beta, and you are going to get some awesome savings right away there. That’s for sure, I suggest you go to Weblance.com, and also check out what Carter Thomas is doing at BlueCloudSolutions.com and follow him. His blog is incredible; it has some great information. It really has some awesome information. We are also going to have both Jeff and Carter on Appreneur Magazine and on AppClover as well, being able to share more secrets and insider tips with us, and find out what’s really going on, building marketing and monetization. Matt, did you have anything to add at the end?
Matt: No, I just wanted to comment on a couple of things. First of all, Jeff wins the awesome mic award.
Jeff: Oh yeah, check that out.
Matt: Also, Len, I love the whole floating head thing you’ve got going on.
Len: I know, I tried to figure it out. When I put the black on this morning I’m like, “Oh, this is going to be good. I will look like this orb head floating.
Matt: Awesome. We can really concentrate on your face.
Len: It’s like the crystal ball technique.
Matt: Honestly, one of the cool things about kicking off this first one with you, Carter, is obviously you have got a great following on your site. We know a lot of people that know you as well, and we’re looking forward to, number one, you adding into the magazine as well as being on this. I’m really looking forward to seeing what the feedback is on this stuff. I want to thank you for being on it, and obviously look forward to future ones that you want to be on as well.
Len: Definitely. On our second podcast we will have another guest as well, that will be able to shed some more light on this app culture that we’re all in. For now, that pretty well does it. Like I said, definitely check back on all the sites I mentioned, and you will be able to see these podcasts ongoing in a series from AppClover.com. Until then we bid everyone a farewell, and definitely check back — continually regularly. Thank you for watching.