Hi, this is a minute of Overpass, my name is Eric and I make apps.
This week I wanna talk about why you're not an app developer until you've actually released
an app.
I talk to a lot of different app developers.
I talk to them through Mastermind groups, talk to them through email.
A lot of app developers, we kind of get together and we discuss ideas, we talk about different
ways we could improve things and stuff like that.
However, I also talk to a lot of app developers who've never actually released an app and
it's surprising how many there are.
As a software developer, I kinda understand this, software developers, we get kind of
a stage fright when it comes to going live.
I'm the worst at this.
When I've been working at like the investment banks or any of the big contracts that I've
done in the past, we'd be working for months on a project and when it comes to the time
to go live it's always like "I kinda like another week or like another two weeks" or
whatever.
And even if everything has been tested and everything is fine, you kinda got all these
variables going on in your head like, what if the server goes wrong, or what if they
don't deploy it right, or what if something else happens and there's loads of things that
could go wrong.
But the only way to really know specifically that everything is gonna work is to actually
release.
And, this is something I noticed with app developers.
We kinda get the same mentality - they'll develop but they don't actually release.
And I'm very much prone to that way myself.
It helps the fact that I commissioned apps to be developed too 'cause when I'm paying
for the app to be developed, the last thing I want is for it to be sitting in development
for another two weeks or six weeks, or whatever.
So this is one of the nice things about apps, is that they're small, they're easy to put
out, they're easy to deploy but many people don't actually take it to that step.
In fact, if you look at most of the computer books out there at the moment about building
apps - if you wanna learn how to do an app, the world is your oyster because there are
so many different books out there.
However, they're all, and mean all of them, are very weak when it comes to actually taking
your app and putting it on to Google Play or putting it on to iTunes.
For some reason, there's like a big knowledge gap when it comes to that area in and in fact,
working with outsourced developers, you would be surprised at how many people I know who
have never actually - when you get to the part where you actually release the app, they
don't even know how.
They've never actually been through that process.
So it's amazing.
So what I wanna say this week is I wanna quote this Steve Jobs/Apple quote, it's very famous,
which is "Real Artists Ship".
So until you actually release your app on to the market, you don't know anything.
The fear is that, your'e gonna put it on the app market and millions of people are gonna
download there'll be a bug and everyone will say something bad about it.
The reality is it might be thousands, well probably be hundreds, hopefully at least hundreds,
so you have time to fix things after it goes live.
The last thing you want to do is release a perfect app that you spent far too much time
and far too much money on.
Believe me, I've done this over and over again.
We've released apps where we spent, where we just made them perfect, where at the point
of releasing we decide, oh let's just put in another feature, or let's change the art,
or let's put something else in before we go live and then it just, it's a dud.
Or it takes far too long to get it up than where we could have added that stuff in later.
So my message this week is if you you're an app developer or if you're commissioning an
app, do not hesitate on shipping it.
You're not gonna get millions of downloads the first day but you will get hundreds and
you'll learn more from those hundreds than you do from weeks more testing.
That's it for this week.
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That's it, talk to you next week.
Bye!