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Today’s App Developer’s Corner features Gregory Raiz, Founder and CEO of Raizlabs, a mobile software development company building “top selling, award winning” applications. The following is what Gregory shared with us about his business and his process.
Give us a quick overview about yourself–your team and company.
Our company is called Raizlabs. We’re located in Boston and have been building apps since the SDK came out. We do a lot of iPhone consulting for companies and we also build our own applications. Our focus is on creating great mobile experiences that fit in your pocket. We’ve built utilities, financial tools, fitness applications, music apps, games and travel products. We try to set ourselves apart by focusing on design and quality.
Why did you guys start to develop mobile apps and what was your experience coming into developing for the iPhone platform?
We had been developing desktop products and websites prior to the iPhone. We saw the iPhone as a catalyst for a change in how people would use their phones. It’s much more a mobile computer then a music device or just a phone. We wanted to get on this platform early. The transition for us was fairly quick. The iPhone is a fun platform to develop on. It gives us access to many tools and allows us to solve a new set of problems. In many ways it has a lot of the things we like about desktop applications and the benefits of web-based tools as well.
How do you come up with ideas for your products like Tip Calculator?
For us the idea of a Tip Calculator wasn’t a new one. It’s been done many times, in the same way. The real idea was for us to figure out what unique problems really needed to be solved. For us we focused on the scenario where everyone has a big meal while one friend has something small. We’ve seen this scenario in our own experience and splitting the check is always a problem. We wanted to build a tip calculator that would make this scenario easy and fun instead of a chore.
We try to bring this type of problem solving to all our applications. It’s not about the idea itself. Most ideas have been done before. The real trick is figuring out what unique thing you’re able to do to solve the problem.
Once you have an idea for an application, how do you go from concept, to creating an actual business?
Our business is creating great products. In general app ideas don’t turn into businesses, it’s the other way around. It’s much easier to take an existing business and develop an app to help that business grow. In our case our business is developing mobile software for other companies. Our tip calculator app isn’t our core business; it’s a tool to show off the type of work that we do. We’re not in the tip calculator business, our business is building great products.
Our process for turning ideas into products is pretty straight forwward. We do a lot of white boarding and sketching to create a compelling wire-frame. Using this foundation we can develop the core aspects of the application. While we’re doing this we also can itterate on the look and feel of the product. From there we do a lot of testing to make sure the app works the way we want. We test the application with users to make sure we got it right and ship the product. From there we listen to our customers and make sure we address issues that come up.
What would you say has been the most successful strategy/avenue for promoting and increasing visibility for your apps and your company?
Don’t build crap. It’s that simple. The best strategy for us has been to build products we believe in. Products that we care about and spend time on tend to do much better then products that are done quickly. If you care about every pixel it seems that customers notice and help socialize your apps to friends.
In terms of marketing we’ve had pretty good luck using PR channels to get the word out. We’ve also done fairly well using social tools like Facebook and Twitter to help spread the word. We’ve had less luck with advertising, especially for low cost apps.
How has Pinch Analytics helped with app development, promotion, and marketing?
We use analytics to answer questions about our target audience. This really helped us in the transition to OS 3.0. It has also helped us as we decided what languages to internationalize and how much time we should spend worrying about piracy. Pinch gives us data about who’s using our app and when it’s being used. It allows me to say things like: 72% of our tip calculator users are male. 50% are over 30 years old. There’s no other way we could have gotten that data. This tells me who I should target my message for and where I should be spending any advertising or PR budget.
Do you have any piece of advice regarding the development of a successful application or anything else that you would like to share?
We get a lot of companies that approach us about “building apps” and while we do build a lot of apps the real question companies should be asking is how to build their business. Apps are usually part of a larger puzzle and the companies that are doing really well at this are not building one-off apps such as Emoji, Flashlight or fart apps; they are building sustainable long term businesses. My advice is to focus on building a business and create apps that support the business.
Our website www.raizlabs.com has additional information on our philosophy and process as well as links to all of our apps.
If you would also like to keep tabs on user behavior, register for an account at Pinch Media and let us know if you have any questions getting started.
-Adit Shukla
Today’s App Developer’s Corner features Amro Mousa, Co-Founder of return7, a small team of iPhone Developers charged with creating “simple, inexpensive, and feature rich apps.” The following is what Amro shared with us about his experiences with the whole process of building a successful iPhone Application.
Give us a quick overview about yourself–your team and company.
Drew and I are both 20-something year old recent grads from Georgia Tech. We saw an opportunity to do something different and fun when the App Store hit, so we gave it a try. There are two of us working on iPhone “full-time” (in addition to day jobs) plus a friend who has just come on part-time.
Why did you guys start to develop mobile apps and what was your experience coming into developing for the iPhone platform?
We both had internships for mobile tools developer AppForge before they were purchased by Oracle. That coupled with the generally good form factor and SDK for iPhone drove us to develop for the platform.
How do you come up with ideas for your products like BillMinder and PlaceTagger?
We try to think of problems we need solved and write apps we would like to use. So far they have all been useful. We’re about to throw a fun app into the mix, though.
Once you have an idea for an application, how do you go from concept, to creating an actual business?
We whip up an ugly prototype, get it working, then ask our artist to rework the UI. They improve the UI from a UX standpoint as well as aesthetics. After that, we put it on the store and hope it’s a success. It’s pretty competitive — mainly marketing is difficult.
What would you say has been the most successful strategy/avenue for promoting and increasing visibility for your apps and your company?
First and foremost is making a great product. We also frequent forums like MacRumors to get feedback from users. Asking blogs like TUAW for feedback helps but they get so many requests that it’s unlikely to get their time.
How has Pinch Analytics helped with app development, promotion, and marketing?
Pinch has been critical to our success. It told things like how many recurring users we had and what features were used most so we could focus our limited development resources.
Do you have any piece of advice regarding the development of a successful application or anything else that you would like to share?
Yes, make a quality application and listen to your users. Most of our features are user suggested features. Design is just as important as development, in our opinion. Don’t skimp — pay a good designer for their time as it’s well worth it.
Anything interesting you would like to share?
Since we started using Pinch Analytics (version 1.5), 44,726 unique users have used BillMinder for a combined time of more than 12 years 79 days 4 hours.
Take a look at return7’s website or read their blog for up to date information about about their products and their findings. If you would also like to keep tabs on user behavior, register for an account at Pinch Media and let us know if you have any questions getting started.
-Adit Shukla
It’s always been possible to implement an application-level opt-out for Pinch Analytics, simply by giving the user a preference and only initializing the analytics library when the user has not opted-out. In response to some of our developers’ requests, we’ve completed two initiatives to make it easier for device owners to opt-out of Pinch Analytics’ anonymous data collection.
First, we’ve released a new version of our Pinch Analytics library that makes it even easier to add application-level opt-outs. When the device owner opts-out, no anonymous usage data is collection, and all anonymous usage data for that application cached on the phone is deleted. We’ve made the opt-out code as flexible as possible, so the opt-out mechanism can be placed inside the application itself or within the Settings application. Developers who wish to add these optional opt-outs can find full documentation and sample code within our developer portal.
Second, we reached out to one of the main developers in the jailbroken community and asked if the system-wide opt-out not possible on unaltered iPhones could be implemented for jailbroken iPhones. We don’t recommend jailbreaking your iPhone, but since a significant minority of iPhone users do (about 8% at the moment), we wanted to provide the opt-out for that community. Many thanks to the iPhone Dev Team, who made this possible on short notice.
As saurik described it in the package release notes,
Developers integrate these systems for much the same reason people use Google Analytics: to better understand how their customers use their products.
Unfortunately, due to the restrictions Apple places on their App Store, these providers are unable to directly interface with the users they affect.
Instead, they rely on developers of every single application to document what information is being logged, and allow users to “opt-out” if they desire.
Thanks to applicatons like redsn0w and Cydia, however, these restrictions are no longer important: a system-wide global “opt-out” setting is now possible.
Pinch Media realized this fact, and took the lead in contacting me regarding getting this feature out there to all the users of jailbroken devices: they care.
With BigBoss, we then contacted all of the other providers, getting not only their blessing, but also their technical expertise in disabling their systems.
The result is PrivaCy: a new Settings panel that allows you to selectively opt-out of sending anonymous usage statistics to each of these providers.
This extension was a team effort, and was able to be executed as quickly as it was thanks to the help and interest of the companies involved.
We anticipate a modest decrease in the reliability of our jailbroken iPhone statistics due to this new application – developers who use Pinch Analytics to evaluate whether to build new features specifically for jailbroken users should take this into account, as should developers using the overall statistics in our newsletter to decide whether to build applications for the jailbroken ecosystem.
System-wide opt-outs for non-jailbroken-phones will be implemented should they become technically possible.
Today’s App Developer’s Corner features brothers Jason and CC Laan of laan labs, whose app Sonar Ruler recently came out in the AppStore. Here’s what they had to say about writing and successfully promoting apps that stretch and test the limits of what the iPhone can do.
Tell us a little about yourself.
Laan Labs is what we like to call an experimental development shop. We like to play with ideas regardless of how practical they might be. As a company we are just two people (we are brothers) so where and how we spend our time is important. We initially got interested in the iPhone space last fall and have been developing apps for about nine months now on and off. Having backgrounds in computers/engineering it was hard not to get involved with a platform that seems to have gotten (most) everything right.
How did your interest in developing apps like the Sonar Ruler and 3d Compass come about?
We really enjoy thinking about apps that push the technical limits of the phone. We’re not game developers, so we tend to think about apps in terms of what is novel or demonstrates the power of the iphone. The excitement of having a perfectly capable computer in the palm of your hand sparks a lot of our app ideas.
What experience did you have coming into iphone app development?
Most of our programming experience has been with web-based technologies such as flash (actionscript), java, python, etc. Moving to Objective-c was a bit of a challenge at first, but we’ve now come to like it quite a bit. Apple has done a good job of providing frameworks that help developers quickly produce apps with good UI. That said, both Sonar Ruler and 3d Compass are done almost completely in openGL ES, so all the UI is completely custom.
What made you think of creating these apps as a starting point?
For the 3d compass we wanted an idea that was completely unique to the 3GS. Having grown up sailing, building a ‘Nautical Compass’ that would work in any orientation was a natural progression. The inspiration for the Sonic Ruler was completely CC. That was an idea that ruminated for quite some time as the both the interface and technical hurdles were unique. When you’re doing a data driven app it’s pretty easy to just crank it out so to speak, but when the idea is unique it takes quite a bit of re-working and constant evolution to get it right.
How did you go about building a company around your idea?
We would say Laan Labs is a company in progress. Many iPhone development companies have approached this space with great resources while we are more “growing” into the space. For us we mix our income from developing our own apps as well as developing apps for clients such as TweetDeck or USA Networks. It’s hard to call yourself a “company” when you are just two people, but hopefully over the next quarter that will change.
What has been the most successful strategy/avenue for promoting and increasing visibility for your apps and your company?
That is a tough one. It seems that apps primarily succeed (besides being a good idea) from their position in the app store ranking. So working in this “List Economy” is challenging to say the least. We have had apps succeed for many different reasons. Some have been slow builds, like Remote Sound Box, and others have been overnight successes, like Light Writer which shot to #22 in just a few hours. A strategy for us is to slowly build promotion around an app. Start off with your social network via Twitter and Facebook, then reach out to appropriate blogs and media. The whole time you need to constantly be babysitting price, copy, screenshots, and support advertising. At a certain point the momentum of the app store can take over.
How has Pinch helped with app development, promotion, and marketing?
Pinch has let us focus on improving features that people actually use rather than making guesses about how to update an application. Our Workout of the Day app had a large increase in downloads because we were able to improve key features of the app. We can also quickly answer questions about what devices and OS versions our users have.
Do you have any other advice you’ve learned that you’d like to share?
Well we definitely haven’t struck it rich, so it’s hard to give proven advice. But we feel like the app store is still a bit like the wild
west, so we’ve learned not to give up on seemingly dead apps. Some ideas that you think are gold don’t do well and other ideas just seem to explode. The most important thing is just not to just put an app out there and expect that it will do well on its own merit. Marketing is crucial.
The Laan brothers have consistently taken advantage of the iPhone unique technical features, in practically every app they’ve released. In some ways, the uniqueness of their apps has aided in their marketing success, which is encouraging for developers looking to experiment with the platform. Combined with traditional marketing focus and efforts, Laan Labs has managed to make a strong imprint in the App Store, over the past year.
If you would like to track how your app is being used to provide more useful updates, or have easy access to other interesting metrics, register for an account at Pinch Media and let us know if you have any questions getting started.
- Katherine Pan
