When is the right time to start marketing?

Posted on July 18, 2010 by Koen

This post is not going to give an answer to the question stated above. That is because I am actually not sure when to start. Start to early and there is no engaging news for your readers and they will not follow you. On the other hand if you start late, it might as well be too late because you have already launched your product and did not get enough feedback. Follow me? If the first version of your product gets a lot of attention thanks to the marketing but the product simply sucks it doesn’t help.

What would you do? At what point would you start to do some marketing?

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Making it a fun and rewarding experience

Posted on July 18, 2010 by Koen

How do I make submitting a typo a rewarding experience, that is the big question. I think that when it is rewarding it will automatically be fun. What options are there? To find out it’s important to do a brainstorming session. I usually grab my whiteboard and jot down things. Sometimes I connect words with directional arrows. Since my focus is on the iPhone application for the moment, I will share you two ideas I have had so far.

Mascotte ninja!

In the early sketches and mockups you might have seen this cute little ninja. One of my ideas was to change the way the ninja appears (think “pose”) when a typo is submitted. This is probably more fun than rewarding,  but an additional idea might be to have the ninja say nice things to the user. Makes the user feel like (s)he has done something cool, which in fact is true.

Top contributor list

Being able to appear on the website in a top contributor list could motivate people. People love to be in the spotlights and a list like this could easily achieve that. There are two options though. You could allow people to enter their names and get on a special list once they have submitted for example ten typos. The count is not shown after that. This would essentially allow everyone to appear on the list. If you choose for like a top 50 of top contributors many people that would help out, but not very often will be ignored. On the other hand, being able to rank #1 is an awesome motivator. Perhaps there is middle way in this problem.

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First digital mockup

Posted on July 15, 2010 by Koen

I’m focussing on the iPhone first. In one of my previous posts I showed you my first sketch (which was made on a whiteboard). I refined that sketch a bit now and made a simple mockup now. Although I think this mockup looks awesome, it probably won’t be the final one.

The process

I made the mockup yesterday, but this morning realized I needed to look how it looked when the keyboard would be shown. Just as I feared, it looked crappy. The typo text box was completely hidden. So either in the code I need to make it move up, or I would re-arrange all the elements on the screen. The second option is the most elegant, so that was what I was going for.

Next, I looked back at the ADS that I talked about in the previous post. The mockup was just not fun enough, even with the little ninja in there. After the keyboard was shown, it just wasn’t fun anymore. It would only show two text boxes and some speech balloons. The second screenshot (below) shows what I did. I moved the ninja up a bit so that his eyes would just look over the keyboard. Pretty nice, huh!?

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Application Definition Statement

Posted on July 15, 2010 by Koen

While attending the iPhone World Tour I attended a lecture where they focussed on planning. One of the things they told was about an application definition statement, or short “ADS”. This ADS consists of three parts. What the application experience is, what the application is supposed to do and the intended experience.

The ADS for my application

So what should the experience be for my application? Well, it should be really easy to submit typos. At the same time it should be rewarding, because I could imagine that’s what gets people hooked. They are helping you for free (that is, no monetary reward), so you should be able to offer something else. Something funny or perhaps some part of a site that you can only access after submitting a typo. I’m just brainstorming here, you see. Any suggestions are welcome!

Next is what the application is about. That one is simple, obviously it’s about submitting typos.

And last, but certainly not least, it is important to mention the intended audience. Why? Let me quickly show you. If my intended audience would be analysts the app would have lots of statistics about all the submitted typos. Obviously, regular uses don’t like that. Since I’m not focussing on a special niche, I’m just putting it out there for everyone.

The result

This application definition statement is for the iOS Application and the website as well. After all, a website could be an application as well.

A fun, rewarding typo submission application for everyone.

The ADS should be used to filter out certain features. Every time you think of a feature, try and see how it fits within the ADS. If it doesn’t fit, the feature won’t make it into the application. It’s that simple!

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First sketch

Posted on July 14, 2010 by Koen

First sketch of the application for the iPhone. More refined digital sketch soon!

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Step 1

Posted on July 13, 2010 by Koen

There is always a step 1. In fact, step 1 has already been taken by making this blog post. It’s simple, the first step is to start planning. And the following is what my plan for the first phase is (plan is a work in progress!).

The plan

  • Make sketches of iPhone and iPad apps.
  • Make sketches of a website for submitting typos.
  • Think about ways to make people want to submit typos.

Basically that is all for now. No analyzing, no monetizing. Just getting the various ways to let people help in place is essential. Keeping it simple is easy in projects like these I believe. If you do over-complicated stuff you get stuck and you do not know which way is left and right anymore. Taking small steps at a time is great.

I’ll post some sketches later on. That is: when I’ve actually got some. Honestly, sketching is not my strongest skill. Going to be fun!

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The first post

Posted on July 13, 2010 by Koen

It’s always tough to write the first post. What are you going to say? How long should it be? Should it be entertaining or informational? To keep things simple I’ll just make this a short informational post. Let me explain what the project I am starting is about. More detailed information can be found on the about page.

The origin

In my last year at high school we needed to write a so called PWS, which could roughly be translated to a masterpiece. The projects was supposed to be a collaboration, but things turned out to be quite different. Anyway, weeks after finishing I decided that is was fun enough to research these things that I should take it one step further. And that is exactly what I am doing.

Double project

Besides doing research on typos and how to fix them without the help of a human the project is also about something else. It is about how to get people involved, about what is important to get people hooked. Also I’m trying to see how to monetize such projects. Either by looking for sponsors, or advertisement somewhere. It sort of is my first really big project. Exciting!

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