031 : How to raise money to fund your app with Hunter Gray

Hunter Gray from KlutchIn 2011, Hunter Gray turned his app idea into the capital needed in order to get the product built. In this episode of the podcast, he shares exactly how he pitched his idea for the original version of Klutch to investors, and how the venture capital world has changed in just a few short years. Not everyone will be able to turn their ideas into cash, but Hunter explains the methods that worked for him and talks about what might work for you, too.

There’s so much discussion of bootstrapping today (and for good reason, it works), but it’s nice to have a different perspective on building an app business. If you’re dying to get your app idea in front of investors, Hunter explains exactly what you need to do to make that interaction as successful as possible.

Continue reading

025 : From Crash Bandicoot to a smarter inbox with Dave Baggett

Dave BaggettHow many unread emails do you have in your inbox? If you went all the way back to the very oldest unread email, do you think you’d actually need it? If not, why is it still there? When are you going to do something about it?

Email itself first came on the scene circa 1993, alongside Windows NT 3.1 and massive brick phones. Since then, our computers have evolved substantially — and just look at our smartphones — but our email inboxes remain mostly just a big dumb bucket.

Dave Baggett is using machine learning to bring your inbox up to speed. He’s the founder of Arcode, creator of Inky email client (iOS, OS X). Dave shares the interesting story of how Inky came to be, starting with working on the first two Crash Bandicoot games and then joining a travel startup that would end up taking over the industry (and eventually get acquired by Google).

He’s got an interesting story and a fresh take on email. It’ll make you think about your own projects differently.

Continue reading

022 : Why you should have started a blog yesterday

Dann Berg by Michael ShaneIn this week’s podcast episode, I share how I escaped the retail world and got into tech journalism. It’s all because of a little personal website I started. I also explain how you, too, can benefit from starting your own website — even if you don’t want to get int journalism — and how to do it.

This is a special edition of the podcast because there’s no guest, it’s just me! I ended up getting so much feedback and so many questions about last week’s podcast that I wanted to tell my story in more depth.

If you don’t yet have your own website, you need to listen to this episode. When you’re ready to get going, I’ve embedded the first tutorial in my video course.

If you found this helpful, please use my Bluehost affiliate link to get your hosting and domain!

Check out the rest of the videos here!

Continue reading

020 : Gotta keep hustling with Laura and Sara of DigitalFlash

Laura Sarah DigitalFlashHave you ever gone to an event and thought it was just “meh”? Maybe you signed up because of the awesome lineup of panelists, but the questions posed by the moderator were just boring and there wasn’t any opportunity to ask questions. Or maybe the food sucked and all you wanted was a drink.

Laura and Sara met at a networking event that just didn’t suit their tastes. But they didn’t let it bother them — they turned their experiences into opportunity. Both Sara and Laura knew that together, they could throw amazing events, and they did just that.

DigitalFlash grew out of a desire for the types of events that the cofounders wanted to attend, and people responded. In this podcast, the two co-founders share how their events grew and how they started creating digital experiences for larger companies. If you visited the Samsung booth at the 2014 SXSW, you were a part of their work.

These two women are the very definition of the word hustle — they even left a convention floor in Vegas to appear on this podcast! They never stop.

If you need some motivation to keep on keeping on, this is the episode for you.

Continue reading

Win a free ticket to the MoDev UX conference!

MoDev UX Conference in DC

One lucky reader will win a free ticket to the MoDev UX conference in Washington, DC this month! That’s a $799 value, and all you need to do is tell me why you want to go — I’ve got a form at the bottom of this post. But first, I want to tell you why I’m going and why you should want to go, too.

Why are conferences important?

Once of the first books I bought when I decided to quit my job at The Verge and start freelancing and working on this website full-time was Deduct It!: Lower Your Small Business Taxes by Stephen Fishman. Up until that point, my knowledge of the United States tax system was practically nonexistent, and I got the book to make sure that my first small business venture got off on the right foot.

But reading Deduct It! had unexpected consequences beyond simply understanding the law: each new chapter gave me a ton of new ideas for growing my business.

I was expecting a book about tax law to be extremely boring, but it read more like an instruction manual for kicking ass in small business. By learning the laws pertaining to certain types of purchases and income, I discovered new assets to buy and revenue streams I never even considered.

They say that the best way to learn a new language is through total immersion. That’s exactly what happens at conferences. And speaking this new language is the best way to think differently about your own projects and problems.

Why should I learn UX?

A computer science degree doesn’t teach how to code — it teaches how to think. Students still need to independently study individual programming languages, but the computer science background makes learning new languages much easier. When you already understand the concept of a linked list or an array, it’s easier to learn how to write them in Ruby, Java, Objective-C, or any other programming language.

Similarly, user experience teaches a different way to think about problems. Learning a new method for structuring a website or app will reveal user problems you never even realized existed.

Novice…no longer!

I define a novice as a person who doesn’t know enough about a topic to even ask the right questions. I was a novice when I decided to make my first iPhone app, and remained a novice for much longer than was necessary due to my stubborn desire to learn how to code all by myself and never ask for help.

But I’ve learned that it doesn’t actually take very long to exit the novice stage. The best way to do it is to find someone who knows more than you and make them talk about the topic of interest. Listening to the way these “experts” talk, and the specific points they make, is truly the real fast lane out of novice-dom.

Alright, so gimme my ticket

Ah yes, the free ticket to the MoDev UX conference!

The people who run the MoDev conference have been kind enough to give me two tickets — one for myself and another to give to one lucky reader. You’ll have access to all the workshops and the entire conference for the full two days. That’s a $799 value.

All you need to do is fill out the form below. You have until midnight on Thursday, May 8th. I’ll be contacting the winner on Saturday, May 10th.

Good luck, and I hope to see you there!

Contest entry is now closed.