Cinemagr.am - Montreal (no remote, relocation possible)
Android Lead Dev.
We're looking for a talented developer to create the Android version of our app. This involve a lot of challenging and interesting problems: real-time filters, camera-shake reduction, video processing and all of that should work on devices with limited memory. Email me directly for more info: [email protected]
Good job, I love this. I find that FastCells are less useful these days as iphone 3G are less common. I prefer to design my complex cells in interface builder for ease of maintenance. But it's just personal taste. Otherwise, everything in there should be very useful for almost any app. I suggest you add support for external services, like Facebook for instance (which a lot of projects use).
BTW, I love DictionaryHelper, it definitely saves you a lot of headaches if you work with a JSON api!
What matters most is distribution and solving a problem that customers have. It can be an advantage in a crowded segment to have an extremely well polished app for differentiation purposes. But without distribution any app is going to die.
In your case, your app seems to be distributing mainly because you have a customer base from previous apps, which boosts your inherent distribution (pools are created by groups of friends which will talk about your app) and your search results in the app store. Also, from what I can see you are the only one that supports both Yahoo and ESPN, which is pretty cool :)
I released an app recently. First, a quick prototype with a stock UI, then a "beautiful", custom UI. Changes in downloads = 0. Still, I'm not saying it does not matter, because it clearly can, but it's very hard to pull it off. In your case, we can't really tell, unless you released a version with stock UI? Hard to prove that your UI affected sales without a test.
I wonder if awareness + the experience that we had just 10 years ago is going to limit the size of this bubble. 10 years is a very short time it's the same sector.
I know for one thing, I had my lesson 10 years ago, my dad had his lessons investing in Nortel Networks and most of my friends learned a lot about bubbles in 2000. The pain of losing that much money is still there.
We've had this debate about "catchup mechanisms" or negative feedback loops with my boardgames friends countless times. I personally tend to prefer games with a minimal amount of luck rather than a strong negative feedback loop. I dislike settlers of catan as much as as dislike monopoly. As long as luck is under control, I have no problem losing -- because I can understand where I made my mistakes and be better next time :)
Agreed. Also, what is the actual iPhone app? Where was the ad(s) placed? Different kinds of apps will have different ctr. And ad placement is also very important.
Without context we can't validate your claims and hope to reproduce them. Thanks.
From my experience, users love updates -- of course as long as you're adding meaningful features. We try to update our app every two weeks and and we get a significant increase in traffic each time (i.e. more share on twitter/fb, blog posts by fans, etc). Our customers love the fact that we listen to them and move quickly with features.
TechCrunch is not worse or better than any other news source. They want to get traffic and to achieve that they cover what is interesting to their readers, namely innovation and successful startups. It's good for them to cover the most promising stories, preferably before competitors, to increase readership. TechCrunch and co are not corrupted, but their inboxes are overwhelmed with interesting stories. To sort through that they have only a few options:
1) They know you because you had success in the past
2) You were referred by someone they trust
3) Your story is compelling (with a bonus if you give them some kind of exclusivity)
The thing is, once you have achieved 1) and 2) you can consistently get covered much more easily. And it would appear that you get preferential treatment while in fact you built that reputation over time (often with a lot of hard work).
From what I understand, he is using the 'statuses/filter' call of the stream api, filtering with users that have installed his app. This allows him to get the tweets of all his users in a single connection to twitter. 'statuses/filter' and 'statuses/sample' are the only two methods provided to all accounts and they are very limited. I mean, 100K users is a big number for sure, but not a surprising number given it's a twitter app on facebook. We are far from the firehose level!
As a work around, he might be able to go back to the REST api, use statuses/friends_timeline, and stay within the 300 per hour/per user limit.
I also think that private social networks have a bright future, especially networks targeted to close friends, family, basically smaller groups (instead of FB approach where the notion of "friend" == anyone you meet in a bar). I would definitely switch to such a network, the thing is it will take a few years before I'm able to convince my friends. I think a YC combinator company is working on something like that, I can't remember which one. Some features I would love is such a site:
* No info is available to the outside world, not even the names, not even some kind of id.
* No apps, only "core" apps useful to connecting with friends (photos, videos, chat, event planner, etc).
* Simple, clean.
* Ability to download my data and back it up locally
* Ability to delete any photo with me in it
Anyhow, those are not new ideas, but still in my mind it's obvious that such a site will eventually succeed. At some point, I believe many people will trust another source for their personal info.
As long as $5000 is enough for you to survive 3-4 months, go for it. As others pointed out, calculate your burn rate and make sure you won't call it quit after a month. You need enough time to put a MVP out there!
As a side not you will probably lose the money, but the learning experience will be invaluable :) From what I understand sounds like your burning rate should be pretty low. $5k could be enough. The risk seems minimal. You are just out of school, not leaving any kind of high paying job (anyways, you can always find one if you fail). The worst case scenario is losing that 5k.
You should expect him to work 8 hours day and depending on the culture you wish for your company, I also suggest you be laid-back with office hours. The most important is that things get done regardless of when. Losing good employees is very costly, you want to maximize your chances they are happy. Having strict rules and implying that employees are more or less "required" to work more than 40 hours (because everybody else do) will eventually burn them out and they will leave. Great developers have a lot of opportunities!
Figure out what you do better than them maybe? There must be some part of your product that's better than what they have. Can you leverage that? Finding their weak points is a good thing, but you must also know what your strengths are.
Thanks, I really like your idea of a product for professionals. It would definitely be useful for them. And tracking subjects is something we really want to do! Our first product was a "speedreader" bookmarklet that extracted the most important concepts of a webpage and generated a navigation tool that allowed you to scroll to them. Unfortunately, identifying important concepts in a document is a much harder problem than named-entities/organizations (but doable I think).
Thanks, you're right that is the biggest problem we are currently facing. We seem to have good "retention" rate with our iphone apps (people who come back often to use the app), but our downloads are low. I must admit I'm not sure what we propose is compelling enough for people to change their news reading habits. Will people really come to us to consume news or will they simply google the people instead -- that we do not know yet.
I currently use the app to track my favorite hockey team and it works pretty well. I get all the signings / analysis / articles in almost real-time. I think it's definitely useful for sports -- but then again I could probably get such news through team-specific rss feeds.
Android Lead Dev.
We're looking for a talented developer to create the Android version of our app. This involve a lot of challenging and interesting problems: real-time filters, camera-shake reduction, video processing and all of that should work on devices with limited memory. Email me directly for more info: [email protected]
Also, we have serious traction!