Hey this is the Daily Overpass, my name is Eric and I make apps. Now today I want
to talk about why we only do apps.
Okay so last week I was having a conversation with a business owner about
the future of my company. We were talking about long term goals, so his
company was about the same size as mine and we were
sort of comparing notes. And we were talking about our goals for like three
to five years, which is something I'm getting more open about admitting to
people, rather than just trying to do it on my own and hoping that I do, and then
I'll tell everybody what that goal was. So I was talking to him about it,
and one of my long-term goals, or like like a three year goal, was to expand the
offerings of overpass to also do SharePoint in Salesforce, or whatever the
big CRM systems are at the time, the enterprise stuff. Which is stuff
that I've worked with before - I'm not a big fan of SharePoint, but I've worked
with those kind of systems before and the other, person he was asking me, he was
saying "why don't you just offer that stuff now? I mean, if you could already do
it now why, don't you just offer it now?" And my whole thing was that we're
focusing on apps. Apps is what we do. That's the one thing. I want to get so
we're so good at doing apps, that there's no reason to go anywhere else.
So, my whole reason behind thinking
this and thinking about niches in general, is I think about Walmart.
So when I was living in Hawaii I was big into to biathlon
stuff, not triathlons because I am a terrible swimmer, but I was doing it a
few biathlons, I was running, I ran a marathon, I ran a bunch of half marathons,
a bunch of 10K's - well a couple half marathons, a bunch of 10K's. And
there was this one shop called 'Island triathlon and bike' - this was in Hawaii,
right. and it was 'I, T and B' I guess.
Island, triathlon and bike was kind of like an expensive shop - you get
really good bike stuff there, so if you're gonna get anything
for your bike, you would go there because it was really professional stuff
for the true athletes. Now the thing about this was you can also get
bike stuff at Walmart obviously, I guess it was Kmart in Hawaii at the time.
Well you'd also get bike stuff at Kmart but you knew that if you went to
Kmart, the quality wouldn't be as good because KMart
was much more convenient, right. You could go there, you could
get a bike you, could get a toilet brush, you could get cabbage, whatever
you need to get, it's a convenient one-stop shop. But, if you are going for
quality, you would go to Island triathlon and bike. And this is the same
with a lot of other things. There's certain services where you know because
they specialize in one thing, that they're better at that one thing. And
this is something that we've been trying to do a lot ever since we
started doing apps. I stopped doing everything else, people say why don't you
say websites, why don't you advertise for websites or PHP, or all the other things
that, especially when I was just coding myself, all the things I could do. I
was just saying, no just apps, and sometimes people call up and say 'do you do
websites?' I'd say yeah we could, but I prefer not to. We're an app
development company. And it all goes back to that way of
thinking - thinking about being a specialist. If someone's looking for
quality, they're gonna be looking for a specialist. Yesterday, or a couple of
days ago I was talking to you about how when you do a CV if you looking for
high-paying jobs, you know, my CV was really tight. A CV is different
than a corporate offering or a company offering. So my CV would
have lots of skills that I've had over the years, which increased my value to a
potential employer, because I'd be sitting in their
office doing all that kind of stuff. So that was important. Now if somebody's
hiring me to provide them with the service for apps, and if I tell
them oh we can also do a wordpress design or we could also do a SharePoint
development, that gives more of a..
it gives the impression that I'm a generalist, and I have no intention
of being a generalist when it comes to this business. Now I think I
read something once, I think it was a couple years ago, I think it was Seth Godin
who said it, that when Google started out, the conventional wisdom at the time was,
like yahoo and other portal websites, was you take a website, you put as much as
you can on that front page, as much information as you can, and you have the
search bar and you just fill it with as much advertising and everything.
But Google went and specialized, they were specialized in search, so
they went the other way, and they had a text box and two buttons.
Search and I feel lucky - has anybody ever clicked on I feel lucky?
I mean, I've maybe tried it once or twice, but I've never really found the use
of it. Who'd ever want to do that? Is that still there? I haven't even looked at it in a
while. But Google became the specialist. If you talked about search,
like if you were telling somebody to go and search for something, you wouldn't
say "go check out Ask Jeeves". After a while, you'd say go to go to Google, because
you knew that they were specialists in search, and because everything they
did showed that they were specialists. Every day, or sometimes more
than once a day, I get emails from companies - companies in India or all over
the place, and they're basically selling themselves as Walmart.
They're saying we do mobile applications - and then we also do all this other stuff.
They'll say we are specialist in PHP, SharePoint, c-sharp, enterprise system, and
usually mobile applications is down at the bottom of the list, I don't know why
they're emailing me. So they'll do all that kind of stuff and
what they're selling to me is, or at least the perception that I have of them,
is that they are not specialists. Now it is possible that they have the best
mobile developer I've ever worked with working at that company, but they're not
marketing that way. But I don't get that impression with looking
at it, and it's not worth my time to investigate any further. The same way
that Kmart may have had a better bike than 'Island triathlon and bike' back in
the day, but it wasn't worth the trip and even if I had
bought the best bike ever from Kmart, there'd be this doubt in the back of my
head "did I go the right way, should I have gone to the other place?", and that is
what we try to do when we specialize in apps. One day we'll offer more stuff. When
we start getting a decent sized client base, when our client base starts to grow,
then maybe we'll branch out a little bit. We probably won't still do the same
brands you know are the same branding, we'll probably set up a separate website,
a separate entity to handle all that kind of stuff, but right now I'm
completely and totally focused on apps, for those reasons. I believe in
niches and it's the same with applications - when you're
marketing your app, you can go general and generic and try to cast
the net wide, or you can go specific and be really optimized for search. And
that's the one thing that we find. That's one of the reasons why we do
language learning games, it's one of the reasons why I had such big problems with
Apple's 4.3 rules a few months ago, was because I don't want to cast the net
wide, I want to cast a net specifically, looking for specific people who are
looking specifically to learn that one specific language. So anyway, I hope that
makes sense today. That's it for today, hasta manana.