How to be a successful iPhone developer

July 20, 2010
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I came across this YouTube video of Brian Greenstone from Pangea Software talking about how his company made $1.5 million on a two-week port of a Mac OS game over in the comments of my online friend Andy Brice’s blog.
Andy’s post concerned the media reality distortion field cast over the iPhone, rightly pointing out that [...]

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MicroISV Digest 07/19/2010

July 19, 2010
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Community News:

Mike Stokes, HelpBurner, has released version 1 of this documentation/tutorial making tool. Have a look at this post about it, especially the comments.
Sam Howley and his partner at OakFocus.net, have released CustomerCradle, a web based subscription service for small businesses to record and report on where their potential customers come from and how effectively they [...]

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Now I know I’m in the wrong neighborhood…

July 15, 2010
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Just came across a tweet by Rapportive’s Martin Kleppmann about this cool Google Map.
So what are the geeky – and therefore desirable – parts of your city?

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Why I keep doing what I do.

July 14, 2010
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Got this email (reprinted with permission) from Mike Stokes in New Zealand yesterday on my birthday (yes, I am now version 5.3):
Hi Bob,
As a fan of your writings for years (and especially your books, which I still refer to), you are the first person I wanted to run our new software past. And, as my [...]

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Do you really mean that?

July 12, 2010
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As I was watching yesterday a 50-year-old interview of Ayn Rand by Mike Wallace on my iPhone on YouTube while loading up a movie on my iPad from iTunes I realized new tools make for new habits, new ways of doing things.
I’d always believed that one of the true evils in this world was multitasking [...]

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Are iPhones/iPads worth it for microISVs?

July 9, 2010
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My good online friend Andy Brice posed this question today over at Joel on the Software Business of Software forum, and as much as my iPhone has become the Devil’s plaything of late, I see a strong, legitimate case for microISVs and bootstrapping startups to drink the mobile Kool-Aid.
Here’s my experience:

Continuous customer support – I [...]

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Stand Out

July 8, 2010
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Want to know what your customers think of your startup? Ask them. Now you already know that, but here’s an example from HootSuite that landed in my email box which demos how to ask them effectively:

Email from the top. The From is “HootSuite — Ryan Holmes, CEO”. Those three initials still have a lot of [...]

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Visiting the Apple Temple in search of a cure.

July 7, 2010
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On weekends I try to relax, but this Sunday I must make a holy pilgrimage to my local Apple temple to beseech the acolytes there to heal my precious iPhone 3G of the cursed affliction known across the interwebs as iOS4.
After communicating with the junior gods at 1 Infinite Way this morning I was overjoyed to [...]

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Eye on the wrong ball?

July 6, 2010
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I’m struggling yet again to get a handle on all the things I should be doing: presently I have 39 projects spread out over 9 areas of responsibility and 435 tasks. (I use Things on my iMac, iPhone and iPad to organize all of this.)
This is just crazy – or at least it drives me [...]

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The courage of your mistakes

July 5, 2010

About two months ago I was convinced the best way to grow StartupToDo.com was to go to a simple 30 day trial and then subscribe. That meant ditching my ‘get them to sign up through Amazon and then start their subscription if they didn’t cancel during the 7 day trial’ approach.
After all, free is good, [...]

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MicroISV Digest 07/02/2010

July 2, 2010
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Community News:

Quiet week before the Fourth of July weekend here in the U.S.

Interesting Answers.Onstartups.com questions with useful answers:

How can we communicate our message effectively without being seen as what exists already in the market?
Would you put an open discussion forum on the products website?
Sleep schedule and startup productivity

News/posts for microISVs and Startups:

One of the great mysteries [...]

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An Apple fanboy, but not a blind one

June 29, 2010
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If you’ve been reading this blog, you’d know I’d rather sleep with my iPhone/iPad than Angelina Jolie (at least on a regular basis). Fanboy is an understatement.
However, iOS4 update for my iPhone – the 3G I waited 5 hours in line to get – has been a disaster. I tried rebooting. I did a full [...]

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Permission Slip

June 29, 2010
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Should I add that feature, talk to that investor across the room, announce my startup to the world, even do a startup? More often than not the word “should” is shorthand for do I have someone’s – anyone’s – permission to do this thing therefore if it fails they to blame, not me.
Waiting for the [...]

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Multitask? No, microtask.

June 28, 2010
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Trying something out today that’s new – at least for me: I call it microtasking.
Take all the online interaction you should be doing:

Retweeting good posts from those you follow,
Saying “hi” to online friends in Facebook,
Knocking out 5 quick replies to emails,
Read a few posts and add to the conversation, if possible,
Updating your out-of-date LinkedIn profile,
etc., [...]

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Email your problems away

June 27, 2010
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This week I’ve been struggling to set up a new mac after my trusty MacBook Pro died last Sunday (Please, no flowers.). If you’re not a rails/mysql/mac kind of developer you won’t care about the gory details and if you are, they would only keep you up at night.
But one good thing (actually 3) came [...]

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