015 : Podcasting for business and pleasure with Steve Young

Steve YoungThe Novice No Longer Podcast is getting meta. This week’s guest is the talented Steve Young, post of the Mobile App Chat podcast. I’m so excited to have another podcaster on the show because we get to talk about one of my favorite topics ever: podcasting. Steve walks you through, step-by-step, how to create your own podcast. He’s got so many tips and tricks that I’m now completely changing around my podcast processing process!

He also talks about his new membership site, App Masters, which has a ton of great courses to help you build a business around your apps. We also talk about mastermind groups, which have been instrumental to Steve’s success. I’m now totally inspired to start my own.

This episode was just plain fun to record. I’m sure you’ll be able to tell.

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014 : The User Doesn’t Always Need It Easy with Mona Patel

Mona Patel Motivate DesignYou probably have an idea for an app or website, and you think that people would use it, but how can you find out what will really happen when you put your product out into the world? The field of user experience is about way more than laying out websites so they’re easy to use — it’s a combination of design, psychology, and science. You have to do research, create a hypothesis, test your hypothesis, and change accordingly. You have to figure out what the user really wants to do.

This week on the podcast, I talk to Mona Patel, the founder and CEO of Motivate Design and UXHires. We talk about what it’s like to found and run a UX agency and what entrepreneurs can do to instantly improve their user’s experience. We even peer out into the future a little, and Mona shares why she thinks virtual reality will completely change the way people experience the world. She says something I have never even thought about that completely blew my mind.

This episode will help you stop building products and start building products that people will actually use.

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How I built and promoted WorkBurst, my first OS X app

workburst-bts-header

My first OS X app, WorkBurst, is now available in the App Store! To celebrate, I want to share with you my entire process, from idea to app release. I did everything without writing a single line of code. The total cost? $304.

The most important lesson here is that you don’t need to learn how to code to make apps. You should learn to code if you want to know how to code. If you want to make apps, there are other, more direct paths to take.

Here’s mine. Continue reading

5 reasons why creating a popular app is harder than it looks

Flappy Bird start screen

When a game like Flappy Bird is able to hold steady at the top of Apple’s charts, it’s easy to think that creating a hit app is easy. After all, how hard could it be to create a game like that? A few pixel animations, some tap controls, and you’re done.

But, just like getting your scribbles featured in the Museum of Modern Art, creating a runaway hit application is a lot harder than it looks. Sure, learning to write the actual code can be a challenge, but these days there’s a lot more working against you than that. Continue reading

009 : Speaking Tech, the required language of the future with Vinay Trivedi

Vinay headshotWhen you come from a non-technical background, listening to developers speak can sound a lot like FDJKFJ CJ KCDJK REJISJ KLSSJ K  SKD.

Fortunately, my guest this week is here to help. Vinay Trivedi is the author of How to Speak Tech: The Non-Techie’s Guide to Technology Basics in Business. In this episode, we talk about specific things that non-technical people should learn in order to remain relevant in the workforce.

When you’re a novice, sometimes you don’t even know what questions you should be asking. Vinay helps lay a solid tech foundation so that you’ll be able to use where ever your learning takes you in the future. If you’re ready for developers to stop sounding like they’re speaking in tongue, it’s time to listen up.

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