Hey, this is the Daily Overpass! My name is Eric and I make apps,
Now today, we're gonna go Vlogger style.
So, sometimes people ask why I don't do like a Vlogger style type of thing. I mean, somebody- when I said I was gonna
start doing daily videos, I realized that somebody else Snapchat and Draggy
suggested maybe I could just take the camera around with me the way I used to
a Snapchat and just film things as I go. But the fact is, my life isn't that
interesting you know. I'm 44 years old I'm so nearly 45, I don't have a
skateboard, I'm just sort of, you know, a lot of times it's in this office.
A lot of times it's talking to clients who probably don't want to be filmed
and that kind of stuff. But today, it's gonna be a little bit different.
Today, I've been- well, a few months ago, I was invited to teach a like a day
at the University Summer School. It was Oxford Royal Academy.
They have like an iPhone developer course and they wanted to have somebody
who was an industry person. They really phrased it well, but I don't think
it's really that as grand as I think. As I thought at the time, because it
seemed to be very disorganized, so they asked for somebody who knew a little bit
more about how the apps, app markets work and all that kind of stuff. Some of you
actually lives in it rather than just the development side. So I thought, yeah
sure, I could do something like that. Come in for a day and talk to
the students and everything. I sent through a syllabus which of
everything I planned on covering and I didn't hear anything back. I mean, for
months. Then it was like, oh my calendar for this week and so finally
yesterday I'm saying, is this thing still on? They come, oh yeah, no, we're expecting
you tomorrow. So like at 8:30 at the school. Right now at 6:30
stop in the office, I got to do a few little errands, but then I'm gonna go in
and hopefully all that goes well. I'm gonna drive, so I drove into town just
stop in the office for like an hour tops. And I'm gonna head into Oxford through
the morning traffic and all that kind of stuff I try to avoid. And yeah, head
to the school. I plan on taking you guys with me, hope you don't mind.
If you get- if you're bored with this, just go ahead and skip till tomorrow. We'll
talk about something really cool like, alright, no budget marketing. We'll talk
about that tomorrow, okay? Alright, so that's it.
Okay, so there's two things I have I do every day. Usually my routine
is messed up today because I'm going into the Oxford. But usually,
I'll go do some sort of exercise in the morning, I come in at 4:00, 4:30, 5:00 at
the latest and do all that kinda stuff. But because I have to be at the school
at 8:30 kind of like I have a job, then I have to leave a lot earlier, so what
is it? It's 6:45 now. But there's two things I always do every day or I
try not to miss unless absolutely necessary.
The first one is this video that I'm doing right now. The second one is
writing a letter to my son in the army. So you know, I've since he's been gone.
I've been writing every day, trying to- you're making a habit of it even though
you know, if you write every day it's gonna be really, really boring. But
you know, basic training is a difficult time. I could remember what it
was like being in basic training and all that kind of stuff. So, I sent him
a letter. By the way, after nearly a month I've gotten zero replies. No replies, but
I continued to mail every day because I'm the dad and that's what dads do, right?
And then also here I got my syllabus for today. So basically,
what I did- my syllabus I proposed to them and whether or not we stick to this
I don't know, was it talking about stuff after the app development side. So,
they've been learning like Swift and all this kind of Swift and Xcode and
everything, iPhone development. They have very much an iPhone, the teacher of
the course very much an iPhone guy, right? Not so much an app store guy. So, I'll
cover more stuff like discoverability, monetization,
proper ASO techniques, using keywords, stuff like that. The different types of
monetization, you know, that we've talked about here many times before.
And also just talk about life as a software developer. What it's
like finding a job, working as a permanent employee, working as
self-employed, working as a contractor all that kind of stuff. So I'm hoping
they find it interesting. It's- apparently the class is really small so
like 4 people. Anyway, we'll see how this goes. Wait, I gotta get going.
To be completely honest with you, wearing the suit- it's probably being a bit
overdressed ,but I wasn't really sure the dress code like. Whenever in doubt, I
always go for the suit. The suit is so much easier - you know, you could always
take off the tie, you could always take off the jacket, get always blend in a
little bit more. When you go in and change, your'e committed completely to
jeans. So every business meeting I go to, I wear a suit. This- because it's a school,
no idea. I could buy our tweed jacket and with patches on the shoulders
you know, which at my age I have one of those, but...
Okay, so I was told to be here like at 8:30, where everything's gonna start
at 9:00. I've talked to somebody who gave me loose instructions on, go over to
this room, the students will show up at nine o'clock and pretty much left me on
my own. But I had to stop and say is there a toilet? She said, oh, you have
to go through the secure door and you know, I need to get her to let me in and
out. Kinda if you ever worked in a corporate environment and like
the first few days, I go, oh, you're not gonna get your security pass for a few
days. Just let me know when you have to go to the loo or anything and
I'll I'll let you through. Then you have to ask somebody to let you in and
out of the bathroom like a little boy. Oh, that's kind of what this is like
today. So, already I've had to do that and now I might not film this. I haven't
decided if I'm gonna film it. I asked permission before, but nobody seems
to know what anybody else is doing. Because it's kids, I mean, not young kids.
They're like teenagers. Because of that, and because I'm just gonna be winging it,
I probably won't record anything like I was planning on doing. But you know, I'll
give you a synopsis of all this stuff- all the stuff I want to talk about over
the next few days, on the daily videos and stuff like that. Anyway, it's a really
nice room. It's a really nice room, you know, it's all very wooden, it's all very
old. It's all very classical. But you know, it's so much different than
Central Missouri State University where I would- anyway, well I'll try to
film a little bit throughout the day. Otherwise, I'll fill you guys in at the
end, and see how it goes. But yeah, we'll see also since I'm going to be the only
grown-up here. The suit- the suit is overkill, so you know...
Alright, so it's gone pretty well so far. I didn't want to film any of the class because there's
only a few students and it might be kind of awkward. Right now, it's lunchtime.
They're out at lunch and I've got like another 20 minutes before they come back.
But I want to talk to you, guys, about something that was a bit interesting.
One of the tasks that I'd come up with today was to take an app that they've been
working on with their class during the week, and see how we could market it and
make it into a product. And what they had said was, one of the apps I did
was just a simple flashlight. So it was a button and when they click the button
that turns the flashlight on. I thought, well let's have a look at that.
He said, well, there's already so many flashlight apps
there and there's already a flashlight as part of the iPhone now, so
why do we view? There's nothing there. I just wanna walk you through this. If
you have a look at my screen here, you know, before anybody comes back, so you
can see here's iTunes App Store. Alright, so if I do a search for
flashlight, you know, sure enough there are tons of flashlights. They all look
the same, they're all the same kind of young stuff. You've got the same
similar looking icon, everything like this. So how could we market something
that's different and what kind of things are actually marketed differently? So, I'm
sort of banging outside, right? As we start looking at different things, we go
through different apps. Starting at the top, going back and they're all
variations on a different thing. They have different- it's functionality,
a little bit- a lot of them have the same functionality. It's either like strobe
light or you know, or linked to music or sometimes, I have something else in there
like a compass. It's pretty much the same thing. They're all feature driven, right?
So I started asking, I said- what I said was, and this is what I would say,
"Anybody, let's have a look. Instead of looking at the features of the product,
instead of looking at what the app can do, that's different than
everything else, let's look at the audience. First, let's find the audience
and then find the product. So, what's- what kind of audience
would be different for these apps?" Sure, there's like flashlight apps for
everybody. But I want you to have a look at this one down here, which I
thought was really good. Color flashlights for children. So,
flashlights for children. You have a child maybe using a flashlight app as
too much, maybe something with some different colors, maybe you have a kid
that's afraid of the dark, gets up in the night, maybe you want
to produce a flashlight out for them. That's not what this thing is, by the way.
It doesn't look like- it's not your typical flashlight app, using the
flash on the back. But let's say. you're a mechanic and this
is just an ie. I don't know if this will work or not but you know, rather than
look at something in terms of the features of the application, let's look
at something where we look at the audience first. Let's say I'm a mechanic
and I need to crawl into or a builder, and I need to crawl into tight spaces.
And I need to use my phone to see different things. I
could use like a normal flashlight which would be fine, but maybe I need to have
different bits of information nearby. Maybe I need to take a picture of
something as I'm looking at it. Maybe I need to have different
measurements, maybe I need to have some schematics in front of me, that kind of
thing. So if I was a mechanic and I was looking for a flashlight app and I see
one that comes up say flashlight for mechanics, wouldn't I be more likely to
download that one? I know it's a smaller market, it's more niche. but
you're not serving what it is, right? You're serving the audience itself. It's
just a different way of looking at things.
I thought, the flashlight for kids, although that's not what that app is.
I think that's one of the great ideas. I told you before about
my biggest app Ear Spy. Let's go back to this over here, so we've talked before
about about Ear Spy now called Ear Agent. This is a spy app but I've also
released that same one exactly the same called Ear Assist. So, Ear Assist is the
same application with different colors and a different audience. This
one, it does okay. Doesn't do as well as Ear Spy, but it has a smaller niche
audience. If somebody's looking for a hearing aid, they're gonna find this. This
is the same concept in both places, but it serves two different audiences, right?
So, when you look at different types of applications and maybe this is just a
little part in the middle of this vlog episode, which I started thinking about
it, I thought you know, this is something that you might want to think about
rather than focus on the features of your application, can you focus on a
different audience? It's like, if you have features of the application that are
used everywhere, how can you make that different for a different group of
people? Like I say- I always say we do language learning apps because I
think language learning, language learners who are really passionate about
learning that language, are gonna be more likely to download a language app.
They're gonna be more likely to search that out than just search for a generic
game. I think like golf fans, if you ever known like somebody
who's really into golf, they talk about golf all the time. So if you had
flashlight for golfers, I don't know how that would be different. I don't know much
value you can add, but that might be a way to start with. So just an idea.
Anyway, I don't think I'm going to film anymore the rest of the day. But I might
film a little bit more today, so I'll talk to you guys in a little bit. These
guy should be back here soon. Anyway...
Okay, so I'm on the park and ride all the way back to the car. Everything went pretty well in the
afternoon session. We ended up flushing that idea a bit more and doing a little
bit more with that, you know, coming up with different in-app purchases.
All in all, it was actually kind of fun. It's fun to put together an outfit,
stuff like that and think about who your target market is. How we're going to
stand out from the other apps, how we gonna start off with key words as
opposed to just build something. And try to work it in afterwards and put
together a product, not so much the coding part, because they've been
doing that for us for the entire course. So, we focus more on doing- give them the
part that I really like to do of the marketing, the ASO, they're putting
everything together. So all in all, a good day.
I'll be back again tomorrow with something a little bit less all over the
place from the office. Anyway, that's it for today. I'll talk to you, guy,s tomorrow.
Bye.