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 →

Pitching journalists: 5 things your competitors aren’t doing

Pitch email writer's block

I got to see a lot of pitches when I was working full-time as a tech journalist. Every morning, my inbox would be filled with a new batch of people wanting my attention — everyone from major PR companies to sole entrepreneurs launching their first product (and I’m not the only one!).

More often than not, the pitch emails would be absolutely terrible. It wasn’t just the novices that were making mistakes — even major marketing companies would churn out terrible press releases. I often wished I could reach through the computer, grab them by the shoulders, and yell, “YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG!”

Instead, all I could do was hit the Archive button. And archive I did.

But all this incompetence is great news for you: with just a little bit of work, your pitch emails will be better than 95 percent of the competition.

If you want to drastically increase the effectiveness of your press emails, here are five things you should be doing. Continue reading →

007 : Getting The Verge to take notice with Dan Seifert

NNL Podcast When you’re launching a new product or service, getting press on a website like The Verge can really be the deciding factor between massive success and slipping into obscurity. Yet entrepreneurs still make the same mistakes, over and over, when emailing and pitching journalists.

Dan Seifert is a Reviews Editor at The Verge and his email inbox is constantly full of pitches from both solo entrepreneurs and professional marketing companies. In this week’s episode of the podcast, we talk about which emails get replies and which get instantly archived. He also shares the common marketing tactic that comes off as insulting, and how to best build a rapport with journalists before pitching.

After listening to this podcast, you’ll be able to write pitches better than 90 percent of your competitors. And that’s not an exaggeration.

Continue reading →

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 34:56 — 33.5MB) | Embed

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 →

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 54:19 — 100.6MB) | 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 →