You’d probably expect the link to the paid version of the app to have a decent click through rate, but you probably wouldn’t have guessed that the ads for Local Note and OneDayApp each have a click through rate of over 15%!  That’s only 3% less than the 18% click through rate I get for the advertisement of the paid version.  But it’s also 14% higher than the non-house ad click through rates!

That tells me that the thousands of people who downloaded GoodDay free share a worldview with me as a product creator. Because of this I’m upping the percentage of ad space dedicated to my house ads dramatically and may cut non-house ads altogether since people obviously aren’t finding them worthwhile.

Speaking of ads… this is just one of the tips you’ll find in my OneDayApp series.

Full OneDayApp Series

Learn how to transform yourself from web developer to mobile app building machine in less than one day! This series will walk through the entire development cycle of a full product that can be sold in the app store.

Price: $60.00

in – cu – bate

to maintain at a favorable temperature and in other conditions promoting development

It feels like you can’t turn a corner without hearing about another startup incubator or angel fund. This model has launched several successful companies including Dropbox, Loopt, Xobni, and Disqus.

So the question is… why don’t big companies drive innovation in a similar way? I’ve seen a lot of corporate “startup” teams come and go. For all that’s been invested in “startup” teams at large companies, the results are pathetic. Millions of dollars have been wasted without anything to show for it. These projects are eventually folded and the talented people are slotted back into the larger teams.

But big companies do not have to be devoid of real innovation. They could have a successful startup mentality that creates thriving new businesses. The most important success factor exists at the Fortune 500: The talented people who can form incredible multidisciplinary teams. So the people are there, but real success inside the corporate walls would depend on radical changes:

1. Financial Incentive

If you work at a Microsoft, Google or Yahoo! and ship something that changes the world and makes billions, you get … not so much. The reward factor just isn’t there, and it needs to be. There has to be the dream in place that for the 10 teams that fail, the 11th team could make its members millions. Of course this sort of incentive doesn’t exists today because big companies pay great salaries to all 11 teams along the way. But truly entrepreneurial people don’t really care as much about that regular paycheck… which makes it less required and leads to:

2. Hunger & Risk Factors

Because employees on these teams make a great salary, there is no profit incentive. This is probably the biggest problem with startup teams at large companies. You can show up at 9 and leave at 5. And getting more play money is just a snazzy powerpoint away from a well connected exec. Nothing makes them hungry.

There needs to be risk factor that weeds out people who aren’t bought into the idea. The risk could be a greatly reduced salary that is redirected into the incubation fund. This fund would be used to help reward the teams who make it big and cover the cost of running these startup teams. It’s up to each team to manage the money, prove a market, and generate real ROI. Companies could still give these employees some basic health benefits, open office space, etc.

3. Independence to Change the World

Nothing stifles innovation like having to argue about internal competition. Slippery slope politics have entrenched leaders fearing cannibalization of existing customers from new initiatives. This only prevents great stuff from being customer tested. Prezi would never ship at a large company with an existing presentation application. And from the founder perspective: why would you spend 6 moths working on something that’s just going to be killed? There needs to be freedom to let these new businesses launch before they are killed off by a scared VP.

4. Finiteness

Freedom needs to be time-boxed. These teams should be given a small seed fund that would run out if they can’t start showing returns within a short time period. It’s powerfully motivating to know that without some profit my startup has a finite life span that is not on a 3 year horizon. If the “founders” want more life… give up more of the “equity” that you would have earned in the end from the new reward system. Several of these teams will die off quickly and thats OK.

5. Mentoring

At first you may have to bring in some outside mentors for these teams, but eventually the successfully graduated teams can help the new classes learn from their wins and losses. The classes taught at these companies today just aren’t designed to make something wildly successful. Most of todays corporate curriculum is about preventing failure. Instead, these teams need education on turning small wins into crazy money with a few risks along the way.

Will anyone actually put something like this together?

I doubt it. It would take a perspective shift that most executives of the current c-level generation won’t make. But the reality is that the alternative should scare them more. The alternative is bleeding talent, a lack of innovation, and a slow decay of existing market share as it’s eaten away by the same talent you let leave. Simply because you didn’t find a system that motivates talented people to build out phenomenal innovation and new markets.

You could say that I’m a general purpose handy-man that can help you simplify the online technical and social software challenges that seem to get in the way of running your business and doing what you love.  I’ve worked with companies that range from 2 to 100,000 employees and have experience working with and managing all of the engineering disciplines while also being responsible for social strategy and feature definition.

If you are a small business I’d love to discuss how you can improve your customer connection and online presence.  If you are a larger business I can help with that as well as provide feature specifications and market analysis for you.

I can offer usage or developer training for your team on social platforms like Telligent Community, Evolution, & Analtyics as well as WordPress and Phonegap that will help you get the most out of your investments.  Having most recently been the VP of Engineering Telligent I’m also capable of helping you achieve your platform integration goals.

For more information about me and my background check out my bio or my LinkedIn profile.

If you’d like to contact me and discuss your opportunity you can fill out the form below or send mail to josh@evolvingwe.com.

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I would. It is hard to find things that combine simple and flexible these days.  There are plenty of “single purpose” web services and apps these days, but they sacrifice flexibility. And anyone that’s used Ebay lately will tell you that the other end of the spectrum is the only thing worse.

Recently it was hard to find what I would define as a “simple” wordpress theme and most applications I see aren’t simple and flexible enough.  Yes, the two can go together.

I spent a lot of time on  http://themeforest.net/ and countless other sites looking for something like this blog theme.  I would have paid $50 to $100 for something even simpler instead of the $20 I paid for this theme.  Yes… I would have paid more for less done really well in a flexible way that would enable me to do something like this. 

I classified 90% of the themes I found as unusable. Everything was image heavy, rounded,  3d scrolling , cufon font having, etc.  Let me translate these “features” for you into what they mean: 

• image heavy = not easily flexible.
• Rounded = Poor browser support
• 3D Scrolling = Bad Performance. 
• Cufon Fonts = Bad Performance and sacrificed simplicity. 

The other day someone left a 2-star review of GoodDay on iTunes that read:

“This is about as simplistic of an app as you’ll ever find.  For what it does it should be free.  There are other apps that are free or cost $1 that have way more features…”

I took this as a compliment. The goal was to create a flexible app that was so simple I could open it up, rate my day, and close it in < 30 seconds with as little need to forward, back, click, or swipe as possible.  Adding a bunch of features that the competitive apps he mentioned contain would have made it take more than 30 seconds to rate your day. This person was clearly not someone that believes what I believe and, if I could, I would get him his $1 back in iTunes.

How about you… would you pay a premium for simple and flexible?

When I was 11 years old I ran a magazine business. Well, calling it a business would probably be a stretch.  I convinced my friend we should try to make a living playing video games.  I figured that next to “Professional Toy Tester” a career playing video games had to be as good as it could get.  I fired up my Atari ST and we wrote game reviews and hard-hitting editorials that, for example, explained why it was OK for your kids to rip the heads off of characters in Mortal Kombat.

Each issue was self printed, copied, and stapled together en-mass.  We then convinced the managers of any rental shop within bike range to stock issues above the video game sections.  It turned out people liked them and the issues were being picked up by kids and parents alike.  It was awesome and it felt good to have people read what we wrote.   We simply forgot about the whole making money part at the time. We were happy with distribution and doing something we loved at the time.

But doing something you love, even for a short while, can have long lasting impact on your life.  From this experience I can trace the following path…

1. Improved writing skills.

2. Learned about the state of the part in digital publishing tools.

3. Turned that into being editor of our high school paper for two years.

4. Leveraged that as a weapon to get into Vanderbilt and turned that education into my first career at Microsoft.

I also learned that because the work had meaning I was also able to rope other kids into helping us write, copy, staple, and distribute for free.  I may have simplified a few things along the way, but the seed was planted.  I loved doing meaningful work and was rewarded for it over the long run.

If I’m lucky someone reading this will have a copy for a second edition printing.  :-)

As of today 5,321 people have experienced GoodDay!

Thanks to everyone that’s downloaded it and I hope it’s helping at least a few of you improve your lives. I know it’s helped me already.

If you like it all I ask is that you help out by rating it in the app store and leave a comment or two about how it’s helping you.

- Josh

The $114 comes from the sale of 114 copies @ $1 a piece before I released version 1.1 and made it free.  Since Apple doesn’t have a way to avoid paying their cut for charity I’m picking up their tab to cover the $34 that went to them. Here is the modern day giant check in the form of a PayPal transaction receipt…

A big thank you to everyone that purchased Goodday and shared it with other people to make this possible!  Oliver only hopes that its helping a few of your achieve your goals… whatever they may be.

• Part 1: Sales and Development
• Part 2: Consulting and Support
• Part 3: Marketing and User Experience

In part 4 I’ll explain how your PM and Leadership teams own the quality of your product/service. 

The PM Team

Because there are multiple definitions in the tech industry about what a “PM” does I’ll simplify that this is the person closest to the engineering team.  If you are on the PM team you approve requirements, build specs (tickets/user stories/whatever you want to call the definition of work), work as the bridge between disciplines, manage the schedule progress, and work with customers on direct feedback.  If this describes you how do you own quality?

• Prevent scope creep.  If a requirement is to solve problem A… but it’s only “1 week more to also solve problem B”… even you believe the cost… does solving B really matter or will no one care?  And never believe that additional cost.
• Eliminate options. Nothing kills the long term stability and usability of a product faster than the phrase “What we need is an option for…”. Options should be the last resort.  At best they something you have to explain to customers and they are most likely a failure waiting to happen because of the following equation:   Option = increased code complexity + increased test matrix requirements. This means you’ll occasionally pick something that 10% of your customers don’t want… but the other 90% will be much happier.
• Reduce dependencies that introduce points of failure into the system.  Understand how something is being built, what libraries your developers are using, what the added customer requirements are, and what 3rd party services each work item depends on.  All of these things are points of failure you may be introducing into your product.
• Define success.  It doesn’t matter if your company uses waterfall or agile methodologies.  At some point, someone, somewhere defines what success means for a chunk of work.  Vague definitions = vague results and confused users.  
• Be your own QA team. You can’t rely on the QA team to validate the customer experience of the work you owned. This is up to you.  Some things look great on paper but just don’t integrate well with the rest of the user experience.  You own the sign off of your feature and “It was built to spec” shouldn’t cover it.  “Am I proud of how this solves the problem?”  is closer.  I always found that recording demos for other team members always uncovered these flaws the quickest.
• Talk to more customers. Don’t make them up.

A pessimistic way of looking at your PM team is that these are the people that should be experts at saying no.  A better way to look at it is that they are orchestrating the delivery of the most elegant simple solutions to business problems and customer need.  They deliver bang for the buck. 

Leadership

I’ll define this as simply the people in charge and responsible for the strategy, direction, and budget for the product.  There is no one MORE important than you when it comes to making a quality product in the following ways:

• Focus the strategy around specific, real, customers and communicate that strategy frequently.  Each release should have a sub-strategy and set of target customers behind it.  Who should be elated with your products next release and why?  Everyone will have lots of good ideas about what “needs” to be in a release, but it’s your job to make the right bets and tell most of them no.  Demand strong customer validation of the big ideas from real customers that mirror your ideal.
• Understand the famous triangle of scope, quality, and time and realize that each dimension impacts the others… except that it’s worse than that…
• The larger you make the whole triangle the less connected employees will feel to the release.  Big releases are dead.  Unless you are Apple, Google, Facebook, or Microsoft you need to understand there is no such thing as a “big release”.  There are simply releases.  Making them bigger only increases risk and creates a bigger divide from the work and your biggest motivational tool… demonstrating satisfied customers.  Let the “big” guys have the customers that only want updates every three years.  Releasing frequently is your advantage over the big guys.
• Set a high quality/experience bar and demonstrate that bar by giving feedback frequently during development.  Ultimately it’s your name going on the whole package so you have to show people what it takes to make YOU proud of something.  Make it clear to your managers that people that aren’t consistently producing work you’d be proud of should find other employment.
• Make customers the focus… for better or worth everyone should have a transparent view into the good and bad feedback you receive as well as your take on that feedback… make sure you send feedback that overlaps the customers expectation with your goals for the company… these are nuggets that should be amplified.
• Create the right environment for your strategy.  I believe that a persons environment has a lot to do with the outcome of their work. For example: Social products need a happy/social environment and transparent social process  This goes all the way down to the tools  and process people use.  If you are going for “simple” in your UX then you should force the team to use simple tools and process for tracking bugs, features, collaborating, etc.  If you spend half of your day looking at a tracking tool that’s complex and demands too much information then the bar has been set for simple in your environment.  

I’ll wrap up this series with a look at what the QA team does to own quality.  Feedback is always welcome.

Pointless features that end up like the LOL cat to your left either because they were poorly chosen or poorly implemented.  I’m looking at you… Facebook Questions, Google Instant Search, and Skype <> Facebook integration.  I don’t need yet another view of my Facebook news feed… IN SKYPE.  Just work on keeping those super-mega-nodes up OK?

Marketing emails composed entirely of images -  It’s bad enough you spam me, but how can you not realize that for 90% of us the default setting in email clients, hotmail, and gmail BLOCKS your images.  Use rich text in your email and be happy I might read the first line.

Apple – The notification system on your iPhone is terrible… but that’s nothing compared to waiting 2 hours for an iPhone to “Sync” every time I connect it to iTunes… or 8 hours to upgrade my iPad to iOS 4.2. These devices are so cool but tied to anchors like ATT and iTunes. PS: It’s appalling that you get to tout amazing full screen applications that have existed since the dawn of the GUI.

Windows Phone 7 – For making a phone compelling enough I have to support one as our family IT director.  You took a different path with your live tiles and social integration.  I love and respect that.  It looks awesome.  WHY then, are you making me learn Silverlight to write a decent app for you?  Imagine the developer mindshare you could have earned if you had simply launched with HTML5 hardware accelerated browser based apps instead of some watered down IE7 DOM.

Groupon and Facebook Deals – For bringing back the modern equivalent of coupon clipping.  It wasn’t cool when newspapers were relevant and it’s not cool now. You know what is cool though… 6 billion dollars. That’s pretty cool. Saying no to 6 billion…. to be decided if that was cool or not.

Old Media & Comcast – Here’s the deal.  I want to pay you… actual money… to watch the programming I want to watch ala-cart without commercials.  I’d probably end up spending almost as much a month on season pass subscriptions as I used to spend in cable bills.  Why do you make this difficult?  Preview new shows for free with commercials and let me pay to watch clean versions.  Instead I just decided to cut a lot of TV and get rid of anything not labeled as “Limited” cable… which is actually very freeing.  I should actually thank you for the time I got back in my life to develop GoodDay late at night instead of watching Jersey Hookers and other forms of trash TV I hear is popular these days.

Ruby on Rails – Not because you provide elegant solutions to timeless problems.  My grievance is with your legion of smug fanboys driving around in their fancy hybrid cars that think everything not-ruby is evil.  Maybe my grievance should actually be with .NET failing to evolve, but that’s too easy a target.

The Red Sox - You just sucked it up this year. Good spending in the offseason. Maybe the OF will do better without Adrian “Rib – Wrecker” Beltre around.

As a thank you to everyone that’s purchased this application I now present you with a preview of version 1.1… minus one surprise.