033 : Bestselling indie games with A Dark Room’s Amir Rajan

awake. head throbbing. vision blurry.

So begins one of the most unique games to ever hit the App Store. What follows is an experience that takes the player through a dystopian world that starts with the simple gathering of wood and slowly grows in scope to places you’d never expect.

Amir Rajan discovered the original web-based A Dark Room (developed by Michael Townsend) on Hacker News and knew it needed to be on mobile. He negotiated the rights to create the iOS app and began his journey into RubyMotion and Objective-C development. He shares how he promoted his app and what it felt like to have a meteoric rise to the top of the App Store.

You should listen to this episode if you’ve ever wondered what it takes to have a best-selling app.

NOTE: It’s highly recommend that you finish A Dark Room before listening to this episode!

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032 : Building an app business not just a product with Dan Counsell

Dan Counsell Realmac Software What is one of the biggest mistakes made by aspiring app entrepreneurs? Confusing a product with a business. If you build and release an app, you’re selling a product. What happens when sales dwindle? Do you have a plan for sustainable revenue?

Dan Counsell is the founder of Realmac Software, creators of applications such as RapidWeaver, Ember, and Clear. He’s been in the software business for a while now, and has learned some extremely valuable lessons along the way. In this episode, he shares the story of his very first piece of software, and his shock when people started sending him money for it.

He also walks me through the design, development, and launch of his most recent app, Clear (which I personally use every single day). The app is available for both iOS and an OS X, and he talks about why all developers should be targeting both App Stores.

This episode is about creating an app business, not just a product.

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030 : A carefully crafted app launch with Jeremy Olson

Jeremy Olson Tapity It’s easy to look at somebody like Jeremy Olson and think, “wow, this guy came out of nowhere and just dominated the app scene!” His created his first app, Grades, while still in college, and it won him Apple’s prestigious Design Award in 2011. From there, he founded Tapity, an app development company that just launched its newest app Hours. He’s also the co-author of the popular App Design Handbook.

But creating a beautiful product is only one step in the process of releasing successful apps. In this interview, Jeremy takes me back to the beginning, and shares how he used a journal-like blog to make industry connections and build an audience before he even knew what he was doing. He also talks about turning app releases into launch events, which explains why Hours was covered by almost every major tech news website.

With over a million apps in the App Store, app success really is all about the launch. Jeremy shares exactly how he does it.

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Why massive web traffic is mostly worthless

The other day, I was browsing Reddit when I stumbled upon a question in r/blogging:

reddit-blogging-question

I got this! I got this! — I thought. I shared my story: how I managed to use my old personal blog to escape the retail world and get a staff writer job at Laptop Magazine.

I got a few upvotes out of it…but more importantly, there were a lot of great questions. One of the things I saw asked, time and time again, is how bloggers can get more traffic to their website.

The problem is: this is the wrong question to be asking. Continue reading →

021 : Pitching, press, and passion with TechRadar’s Joe Osborne

Joe Osborne of TechRadar When I was in high school, I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. I ended up taking a theater class as an elective freshman year (my mother’s suggestion) and loved it. I took more and more classes until I was eventually staring in almost all my high school plays (oh god, don’t click that link).

It only seemed natural to carry that passion over to college (as I still had no idea what I wanted to do) so I enrolled as a Theater major. But when I got to college, I just didn’t feel like acting any more. It was my creative writing classes that were the most fun for me, so I switched to an English and Creative Writing tract. For my honors thesis, I wrote a play.

But I still didn’t know what I wanted to do. When I graduated, I got a job in the mall at French Connection selling clothes. I was still working retail when I launched my first blog, IAmDann.com, and just wrote about random stuff. Seriously, go back to the first posts on IAmDann.com and check out the unorganized and unfocused content I was producing.

But I kept writing, and kept posting content. And after a couple years, I had a realization:

I was a writer who wrote a play and had a two-year-old blog.

As I was doing all that work, it didn’t feel like I was accomplishing anything. And even though I didn’t have much focus during any of that time, I suddenly had a pretty impressive sounding CV.

I used that blog to land a full-time writing job at LAPTOP Magazine, and the rest is history.

When people say that you should follow your passion and do what you love, it’s because someday it’ll be valuable. If you love video games, and write a short post after every video game you play, it won’t feel like work. You might not even get any traffic. But eventually you’ll have a massive portfolio of work and you can turn that into a real, paying job.

My guest today is Joe Osborne, Reviews Editor at TechRadar, who is passionate about technology and video games. Unlike me, he had focus from early on, writing for small local blogs and systematically working his way up to his current position. In this episode of the podcast, he shares exactly how he did it, what he looks for in pitches, and shares his thoughts on the future of tech.

This episode is just plain fun, and it goes to show that you really should be pursuing your passion, even if it doesn’t feel like you’re getting anywhere as you’re doing it.

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