Hey, this is the Daily Overpass! My name is Eric and I make apps! Now today, I want to
talk about how you shouldn't change anything in your app, until your audience sees it.
So, I was having a conversation recently with somebody who is really
struggling with the software project. Basically they had commissioned an app
to be developed by an app developer and the project was taking too long, and they
started to lose confidence in whether or not that it would actually finish.
So, basically they've come to me first, but we're just too busy we just
couldn't take on that project at the time, so I recommended somebody else.
They were calling me back saying, "You know, is there any way you can help? Is
there any way you could take over this project?" In fact, I've talked about this
before, we get contacted about a lot of projects that people are - they just - they
got tired of their app developers, they've lost confidence in them, they
just and they think the project is 80% of the way done, or 90% of the way
done. "Can you please finish it for us?" And most of the time, I say no because they
really need to get it done with the developers that are that are working on
it. One of the things I told this person was it seems like most software projects
that I've ever worked on, and I'm not talking about just ones that we've done.
I'm talking about in investment banks, I'm talking about throughout my
entire career, they all start with a lot of enthusiasm and a lot of momentum. We
talked about the 80/20 rule where the 80 percent of the software is written with
the 20% of the first effort, and then you get into the stage where you're
fine-tuning, your bug fixing, you have little issues here and there, you're
trying to eke everything out, and you stop seeing a lot of the progress in the
project because a lot of these things are not visual. You just want to get it
done. Now, the danger of that is that Scope creep usually comes in this
stage, at least in my experience, this is where scope creep comes in
because the client starts to get tired of the application. They start saying,
"I think, we need to add something else in there. I think we need to do
something else. I knew this thing that I was thinking about before, I
think it would be better if it did something else. Which is normal.
I know this because I've been in the same situation when I've
commissioned apps, when I've had developers working on
applications that take too long and we get really excited in the
beginning. We're like, "Oh, the users are gonna love this!" And then we get
towards the end of the project it's almost like we're just tired of it. It's
taken too long like we just need to get this thing live. We need to get this
out the door and you start thinking of new things to add to it, but you just
need to get that one thing live. I had to remind this person that their app
idea was still a really good app idea. They're starting to second-guess
it because the project is taking too long, but the audience has never seen it.
Their users haven't seen it. It hasn't hit the App Store yet, so
everybody else is going to have that same enthusiasm, that same excitement
about it that you had at the beginning of the project. I always wonder if
movies are like this. When they start off a movie, they write the script, I always
wonder if the writers get tired of it by the end of it. I just give this thing out
there and then when it goes live, when it's actually premieres, then everybody
gets excited about it again. But it's a lot of hard work in between. See, I told
you, guys, that I started going to these Toastmaster meetings every -
every other week, I go to this thing about public speaking because I'm trying
to get better at speaking in publi.c I'm tired of people talking about how often
I say "you know" and "um" and also I'm trying to learn to get better. But one of
the things in these speeches - so every three or four weeks is my turn to
give a prepared speech. I will sit down and I'll write it out and I will
rehearse it, because of my nervousness, I would rehearse it so much that when I
get to the end I'm kind of tired of it. So, when I'm writing the speech I think,
"Oh, this will be a funny little part or I'll put a little joke in there. Oh,
this will be a nice little story." But by the time I've rehearsed it over and over
and over again, I'm tired of it. I'm sick of the speech. And I started
thinking about maybe I should change this. Maybe I should do that. But the thing is,
the audience hasn't even heard it yet. They're gonna experience
for the first time, the first time like when I was writing it, but because I've
been through that so often. I mean, and this gets when you're testing an
application over and over and over and over again just to make sure that you've
got all the bugs out. You got everything working. I say, I mean, the
shine is gone when you have to remind yourself
that your users haven't seen it. And it's the same thing with ASO.
When people say no one's downloading my app, I think I need to
change something in the app. And it's like, "No, no, no, no. Your app idea is the
same app idea you had at the beginning. The one you were really excited about.
But your audience hasn't seen it yet for whatever reason. You have a marketing
problem, you need to get this in front of the right people because they may have
that same excitement that you did at the beginning." And a lot of times in project
management or at least what I've experienced is that, you get to this
point where you have to remind them of the excitement they've had at the
beginning and remind them that their users are going to experience that
excitement when they see that application for the first time. They're
going to experience it the way you saw and thought it would be at the beginning of
this project. But for whatever reason, the project's taking too long. This - I
mean, my message today is don't change anything until your audience sees it,
before you go live, before you get in front of people. You don't have the
proper feedback and it's that second-guessing yourself that if you
add too much time to a project, that second-guessing yourself is what causes
all the problems. This is why early beta builds are good to get it out in front
of people. To get everything out there and not change anything until
you do. Anyway, that's it for today. Let me know what you, guys, think. I'll
talk to you again tomorrow.