My Menu Bar: 16 Apps That Made the Cut

I don’t allow just any app to take up space in my menu bar. It’s prime real estate — always on the screen and accessible regardless of whatever app I’m currently using. It’s the perfect place to store small snippets of useful information, like how many unread emails I have or which apps are connected to the internet.

I’ve spent a lot of time building the perfect menu bar, and I want to share with you what I’ve crafted. Here’s my essential menu bar apps, listed in the order in which they appear. Continue reading →

002 : Getting press in a crowded marketplace with Daniel Howley

NNL Podcast LAPTOP Magazine’s Daniel Howley joins me to talk about the do’s and don’ts about pitching your product to the press. Tech journalists’ email inboxes are particularly full this time of year because of CES, an annual trade show that’s the main event for many companies in the technology industry.

But with lots of emails comes lots of inefficient emails. Did you know that out of 50 PR emails, Daniel only actually uses about five? If you’re a small startup or sole developer, you need to be one of those five emails in order to survive.

Daniel shares what it takes to get read and noticed, and these strategies can be applied immediately.

(Hint: It’s not as hard as you might think.) Continue reading →

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Welcome to the Novice No Longer Podcast

nnl-150x150 Welcome to the Novice No Longer podcast!

Every week, I’ll be talking to entrepreneurs, builders, designers, and journalists to give you information to help you build better products and get the press you deserve.

In this short introduction episode, I tell you a little bit about my own background and how this website and podcast came to be.

I hope you’ll tune in and check it out every week. Stay in touch by subscribing via iTunes or RSS.

If you enjoy the show, please rate it on iTunes! It helps me a ton and help other people find the show.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 6:55 — 7.9MB) | Embed

Quit wasting time searching for a technical cofounder

Finger wag

It’s no surprise to me that many of my students are searching for a technical cofounder.

If you have a good idea but not the ability to bring that product to life, it makes sense to try to find someone with a complimentary skill set: a coder without an idea.

But this thinking is based on flawed logic — these students are assuming that their idea alone is valuable. This is flat-out not true. It’s the execution of an idea, not the idea itself.

Even if you don’t know how to code, there are a ton of other things you can do that will actually help move your idea forward. Knowing how to code is not the be-all and end-all of building apps or other technical products. Continue reading →

Epiphanies I had while teaching myself to code

It’s been about a year since I decided to teach myself to code. At the time, I had a bachelor’s degree in English, a job in retail, and zero knowledge about programming. I’d had minute brushes with coding in the past but hadn’t even thought about math or coding since high school.

The impetus for learning to code came from my growing addiction to Hacker News. I, too, wanted to build cool things and understand how web apps and programs worked. I wanted to have an app in the App Store, dammit. I wanted to start a business.

But, for someone who couldn’t tell JavaScript from Common Lisp, I had no idea where to start. Continue reading →