GPSpy 1.2 Available

Version 1.2 of my iPhone app GPSpy is now available in the iTunes App Store. The big change with this release is the ability to bookmark your location and then to Email those bookmarks to yourself.

If you do a search for GPSpy on You Tube you can find a demo video I put together.

Download the app, give it a try and let me know what you think.

[Posted from my mobile]

First iPhone App - GPSpy

I just completed the process of listing my first iPhone app for sale at the iTunes App Store. I've been working on a time and distance tracking tool for self-employed professionals. That application isn't finished yet, and I didn't want to use it as my first App Store experiment. Instead, I put together a simpler tool that I knew I wouldn't mind if it got messed up during the App Store listing.

I have called this first application GPSpy (pronounced "GPS Spy"). While it is very simple, it is also very useful. Basically, it makes all the internal GPS data from the iPhone available in an uncluttered interface. Previously, if you tried to use your iPhone for GeoCaching, mapping, orienteering or such, you'd have been frustrated because there was no way to get your actual GPS coordinates from the phone. GPSpy makes all of this available - nice and simply. You can check it out at the App Store.

If you'd like to download and try it out, it's only 99 cents. And if you do download it, please leave a review. Those are important for anything to be successful at the store.

The Experience

It wasn't hard to write, but like all software efforts, it took at least as much time to polish up the details as it did to write the core application. Then it took another chunk of hours to figure out the iTunes App Store and to get my software listed.

The good news is that I finally got it sorted out, and the next time I list an application it will be much easier.

Lessons Learned

1. You need a tax number from the IRS - even if you don't live in the USA. It's easy to get, but I'm not sure if I need to file US tax forms now.
   
2. Apple only pays you after you've earned $250 per "region" (Canada, US, Europe, etc). I don't know what happens if you have an unsuccessful application and you never get to $250.
3. Apple only accepts wire-transfer details for payments. If you are at a Canadian bank, this can be complicated and expensive. Some Canadian banks require US Wire Transfer to make three or four hops through other institutions. That seems like a great opportunity for your money to get lost. I wish they'd just issue and mail a check.
4. You can start selling your application without providing Apple with full bank information. You just can't get paid.
5. My simple application was approved in about four days. I know others have said it takes much longer - but mine was really quick.
6. I received an Email from Apple that my application was "Ready For Sale" nearly a full week after the application was ready and people had already started downloading it. You might want to keep a close eye on iTunes Connect instead of relying on Email notifications.
7. Getting your certificates and signing profiles configured correctly for Store deployment is complex. It was made even worse by a bug in Apple's Keychain Utility: it was creating new keystores for me without a private key, so I couldn't import the resulting certificates from Apple. Had to restart to fix that.
8. I was surprised that Apple's store only allows you to upload screenshots as JPG files and not PNG. Given that PNG is the native format for screenshots on MacOS this is weird.

Now that I have the whole process behind me it doesn't seem so bad. If you have any questions or you are looking for help in getting started, feel free to drop a comment to this post and I'll see if I can offer assistance.

iPhone and iBlogger

I've been using my iPhone since I got it on the day of release in Canada last July. It's not an exaggeration to say that it has completely changed how I work and communicate.

Today I discovered iBlogger. Now that I can easily blog remotely I might be able to give more attention to my oft-ignored blogs.

Mobile Blogging from here.

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]

Green Your Office

I was looking for a way to kick-start discussions about how our office can be more environmentally responsible. I didn't want to use Email, because that creates too much noise, and internal chat wasn't permanent or structured enough. Then I remembered Ning.com.

After a couple hours of fiddling, I now have www.greenyouroffice.ca up and running.

If you are interested in discussing ways your office environment can affect the global environment, please drop by and consider joining. I know we all have way too many web accounts already, but I think this particular issue is pretty important. This community will only be as useful as the members who join and participate. Please consider being a part.

Business of Software 2008 - day two, part one.

Steve Johnson
Steve is an instructor for Pragmatic Marketing. He is also one of the funniest presenters I've heard in a long time. Funny is good - it makes people sit up and pay attention.

Steve's presentation was a cornucopia (pulling out the big words today) of great quotes and pithy statements. Starting with my favorite: "Friends build products, enemies build documents." Are you friends, or enemies, with your development-team/product-management group?

Another great quote: "Remember, the 'L' in user is silent."

Most of us focus on stealing customers from "them" (our competitors), but who is talking to everyone else? Unless you already own the entire market, quit being so worried about the competition and focus on the non-users and evaluators.




Tom Jennings
Tom is a managing director at Summit Partners, a VC firm based on Boston. I didn't take many notes during his presentation, but I did learn a fair bit about how VC's think and work.

I think his advice for people seeking VC funding could be boiled down to the following points:

• Find a firm that understands your space
• Find a firm that can offer you concrete assistance with management, leadership, marketing, etc.
• Find a firm whose people you'd be willing to work with every day
• Avoid VCs who invest in multiple businesses in the same space - that leads to incentives that aren't in your interest

And to add my own advice (borrowed from Clayton Christensen's work): find a firm that is patient for growth, but impatient for profit.

Richard Stallman
The great geek icon of free and open software was (almost) everything I expected. I won't tell you exactly what I was expecting, but I didn't think I'd hear anything new or original from him. I wasn't dissapointed.

One idea he highlighted was how software doesn't suffer from the "perversity of matter". In software we can combine thousands of ideas from thousands of people with very little friction; at least, compared to doing the same thing when building something physical. This was a neat idea, and he provide a couple good metaphors to highlight it. Then he provided a couple more metaphors. Then a couple more. And a couple more. And more. OK already - we get it.

Most of his talk was centered around the evil nature of software patents. I am in complete agreement with Stallman that software patents should never have been granted in the first place. And I also agree that we'll have to eventually rip the whole software patent infrastructure up at the roots and dispose of it. I'm not quite as pessimistic about patents' current impact on the industry, but I agree that it is getting worse, and fast.

The other idea he shared was an analogy between composing music and writing software. Richard has been sharing this idea for years, and this part of his talk was nearly identical to the ideas he has presented a hundred times before. You can read a great summary of this idea here. If you are trying to get someone non-technical to understand the problems with software patents, this is a great place to start.

I couldn't help but think that Stallman would be more effective if he took better care of himself. I know he has a "geek reputation" to uphold, but speaking in front of a large crowd with a dirty shirt, stained pants, and socking feet, just isn't a good way to be taken seriously.

Noam Wasserman
Noam is a professor in the Business School at Harvard. I really enjoyed Noam's presentation style. I felt like I was back in school again, with Noam wandering up and down the isles and back and forth across the presentation floor. He asked us question and waited for the responses. It was one of the more engaging talks of the entire conference.

Noam presented some of his recent research on the "Rich vs. King" problem when starting a business. The essence of this problem is that most founders of a startup end up with one of two outcomes: they depart the business just as it is getting successful, but they become rich. Or, the stay at the business and help lead it into greatness, but they don't make the huge profits that often result in the other outcome. The academic community agrees that these two outcomes are well established. What isn't well understood is how a founder can choose which outcome they end up with.

Noam's research over the past decade has focused on this question and sought to understand the decisions that are pivotal in driving the outcome in one direction or the other. He shared some great startup advice with the group.

• 65% of ventures fail because of people-side problems.
• Founders should not choose friends when looking for people to start a business with. It is too difficult and leads failure.
• When dividing equity with the initial group of founders, the lead founder should propose unequal equity splits with dynamic adjustments over the first couple years. This keeps everyone focused and incents people to work hard. Many startups begin with 50-50 equity splits, but one founder works much harder than the other, leading to nasty breakups later on.
• At the start of your business, hire jack-of-all-trades, not specialists. You don't know what you'll end up needing. Hire specialists later. When hiring, focus on "Mr. Right" not "Mr. Right Now".
• If you are a founder and CEO, the best advice is to initiate your own exit before the investors do. CEO's who take this path end up wealthier and with greater control over the final outcome.

Y-combinator wrap-up

Y-Combinator just wrapped up another semester. Guy Kawasaki has some great details on his blog. My favorite new business: Posterous. Imagine a blogging service half-way between Blogger and Twitter, and something as easy to use as Email, but way smarter.

I've just started playing with it, but I'm liking it so far.

Business of Software 2008 - day one, part two.

Dharmesh Shah
Dharmesh is the founder and Chief Architect of HubSpot - a hosted software service focused on Internet marketing. He's also the author of a very popular blog on software startups. His talk was titled "Software Insights from MIT: Two Years of Graduate School, Boiled Down."

• Start your business FIRST. The good ideas only come later. It's interesting to me that this idea was repeated by at least three different speakers at the conference.
• Write a blog, not a business plan.
• Most startups SHOULD be embarrassed about their first product. If you're not, you waited too long to release it.
• Get your product out there now. Charge early and charge often.
• SAAS has much higher costs that traditional software sales. Don't forget to take those into account if you consider doing SAAS.
• Consider measuring CHI (Customer Hapiness Index). Try to determine which features customers identify as the reason they stay with your product.
• Parternships: DON'T. If you team up with a 900-pound gorilla, it rarely works to your advantage. If you team up with another small enterprise, you just have twice the number of problems to solve. I'm not sure I totally agree here, but most of the history I've seen would support Dharmesh's view.
• Don't optimize your business too soon. Sometimes things will change drastically and your optimization will become a problem.
• Create a Blog before the product. Use it to determine if there is interest there. Get your market risk down while the costs are cheapest.
  

One of the most interesting comments Dharmesh made was around Google Adwords. He reminded us that Adwords is an auction-based system. As such, you might be paying $1/click for some common phrases last month. However, some crazy new startup that doesn't know better could easily bid that phrase up to $5 before you notice and costs you hundreds (or thousands) of extra dollars you hadn't planned for. You can't control or predict this. Obviously Google doesn't care to protect anybody from this.

Round-Table Discussions
After lunch on day-one, we had a series of round-table discussions with groups of ten people. Everyone chose their topics in advance. I selected the topic "Facebook, Twitter and Web 2.0 - will they survive?" It was a pretty inflamatory title, but I figured it migh result in some interesting conversation.

The conversation really ended up with people sharing ways they have used Facebook, YouTube and Twitter to communicate with customers, recruit new employees, and market themselves. One business uses Twitter to provide up-to-the-minute status reports on the status of their hosted-service systems.

One group in Toronto had a Facebook group they had encouraged their employees to help build and invite people to join. One day they sent an unsolicited notice of a new product offering to this group; by the end of that day a good portion of the group had left. The interesting part was the people who didn't leave.

Others were using YouTube to publish internal videos, promo bits, etc. We've done similar things at GenoLogics, and I don't think this idea is particularly novel.

The consensus however, was that nobody was able to say whether these techniques were effective. Were these methods reaching new people, or people in a new way, that made them more valuable than previous methods? None of us were positive of the answer.

There was also an interesting discussion of just what Twitter is for. How are people using it that differs from merely updating your Facebook status on a frequent basis? Does Twitter enable something unique that Facebook does not? If anyone at the table felt this question was answered, it wasn't clear to me.

Jessica Livingston
Jessica is the author of the book "Founders at Work" and a founding partner of the seed-stage venture firm Y-Combinator.

• None of the "famous founders" (Wozniak, Flickr, etc) knew what they were doing when they started. Most famous founders ended up becoming famous for an idea very different from what they started with.
• Many of the greatest ideas were rejected at first. Wozniak tried to sell the original Apple-1 plans to his employer HP, but they weren't interested.
• Early-stage plans change a lot. Sometimes the official idea gets in the way of the great idea. Flickr and Blogger are great examples of this.
• Let your users design the product. Startups are flexible enough that they can do this.
• The best ideas come from personal need.
• Make something people want and don't give up along the way. I guess that's a lot better than making something everybody hates :-)
• Perseverance is critical because your initial idea is probably wrong. Lack of determination is the #1 reason for failure in the first six months of a startup.
• Adapt your idea. Commit fast and fail quick rather than waiver uncertainly.
• Scratch your own itch and look for a way to expand its market.

I really enjoyed Jessica's presentation. I especially agreed with her suggestion that they best ideas start with a "personal itch" and expand from there.

I've run a shareware business for the past 16 years. These days shareware isn't a common term, but the idea is still alive and strong. During the past 16 years I've had three reasonably successful products (and a few not-so-successful products). I couldn't have quit my job on the basis of my shareware revenue, but some years it was in the five-figure range.

In every case, the products that I was successful at selling started their life with a personal need. I wanted a particular problem solved and found a personal solution that I liked first. Only then did I start taking feedback on how to evolve things. I am convinced that this is the best way to run a software business. It's certainly not the only way to be successful, but I wouldn't start my own business unless it was premised on a personal "itch" first.

Paul Kenny
Paul is a sales trainer from the UK. His purpose was to convince all the non-sales types at the conference why they actually need a sales force. His message in a nutshell: even the best products do not sell themselves everywhere; there will always be potential customers who would benefit from your product but who don't know that yet - this is what sales is for.

When hiring a sales force he gave the following suggestions:

• Hire attitude first. Don't just hire for experience.
• Reward things other than just the deal. Offer incentives for adding to the sales funnel, filling out customer profiles, building relationships, etc.

Next post: Day Two.