Hi! This is A Minute Of Overpass. My name is Eric, and I make apps. Now, this week I
wanna talk about "The Importance of Your App Team".
Okay, so one of the things that I really really like about being an app developer
is being able to do a lot with very little. So like, you know, I've worked...when I
worked at in contracts for like big investment banks or even doing
work with clients now. It's unnerving to go into meeting, and you
you have like a meeting say of 10 or 20 people, and you've got the
regional head of so-and-so, and you know, the manager of whatever, and the head of
this department, and a project manager, and the the project manager of all
project managers, and then the handful of developers, and one person specializes on
this, and one person specializes on this, for this very large project which cost a lot of money,
and a lot of times fail. And to go from that to being, you know, working either on your
own. Could you have the skills and putting things out there?, or working with a..say
a handful of developers, or suppressing...putting things
together is a big, it's just so much different. It's just move move! Execute, execute,
execute! And it's not so much about looking professional but it's more about
executing it and and producing more. So you know, where as a big company might
take months to produce a product, a small company could take days or weeks to put
something out live on the market. However, there's also this romanticism about
being an app developer, which I like as well, is being able to do
everything on your own. And for a long time I tried to do everything on my own
too, but now it's....I find it, it's much more difficult, you know, you can't
scale the amount of time you have in a day. You can't...there's so much
that you can't do. Now I still consider myself to be highly skilled, but
I do work with a team of very talented people. And they...for awhile I was
working with teams in India, you know, I work with teams in the Philippines, a lot
of people, I have 4. Right now, we have 3 full-time people, and that kinda
goes up and down based on our needs. So sometimes we'll hire more people
and try them out, you know, it's when you're hiring people...it's really
difficult. You can't really tell how good a coder someone is by the way they
interview or even by the code samples, because people say things. They work
in teams. A lot of times I get to hire somebody on for say a few weeks or a few months to
see how they do. But right now, we have a pretty solid team, and I never addressed
them, you know, to look at the videos you might think I work on my own, but
I don't. You know, we do have a very good people. So I would just show you some of
these people. Now, this is...first of all Overpass consists of me, so this is
the avatar that Sandee, our designer, has done of me. I actually think I look
kind of fat, but you know, you let me know. I don't know. You know it was based
on my twitter profile and all that kinda stuff. Now the next person is Sandee. Now,
Sandee's been working with me for...I think nearly 2 years now. So she's been...she
knows the ups and downs, and you know when things were going well, if things
weren't going well, and we take on more clients than we can handle, or when we
just focus on doing our own apps. In fact, everything that's design related, or
actually no, I shouldn't say it, most things that are designed related in our apps are
Sandee's work. Cause she's been with us for such a long time, or she's had some
creative input into it. The other person is Calvin. Calvin is our...another
developer, so he's a...he works a lot of the Node.js Ionic type stuff so....so he helps
a lot with that kind of stuff, so we're doing a lot of stuff on the Manga Stack
and Calvin has been with me for maybe 6 or 8 months, and you know he's
just doing a fantastic job too! And we got our newest addition, Maribel.
Who's been with us for a month, and if you call the Overpass number it might
be Maribel who answers, and she's writing a lot of the blog posts lately, so it
whereas before it was, you know, for me I'm trying to do the apps, do the client work, you know, outreach the
clients and write the blog posts, all this kind of stuff. It's helping a lot to
have this team in place. So now, if you're like a lone developer like I
am, like I was. It's not that difficult to find people to help out. So it's
kind of thing which I highly encourage. There's....you people have left in the
comment saying "I do all the code myself. I don't outsource anything", which is
great, but it's only so much you could do, right?. And there's one thing I keep going
over and over and over again....is you might know the code really well, you
might be able to produce the best thing on your own, you might do the code and
design, and you know all the marketing, all this kind of stuff, but you can't do
them all at once, right?. If you have one app and you're so sure that it's gonna
work, that you can spend every working, you know, 30% of your time on marketing, 30% on
your time on development, 30% of your time on all that kind of stuff, then that's fine!
but more often than not, you kind of needs... you need help. You need a team in
place, and that's just something that I've found over the past few years. So that's
that's my message this week is, you know, you can't do it all alone. No man is an
island. No woman is an island, and so that's it. Look at getting a team. It's not that
difficult, and it's just....you know, it helps you so much in the long run.
So that's it! I'll talk to you next week. Hey! I really hope you liked the video. Now, I do these once a
week, so if... you if you wanna hear more, you wanna hear more about our
experiences with the App Store, either Google Play or iTunes, please go ahead and
subscribe to the channel, and please like this video and leave a comment. I love
reading the comments. I love hearing what you have to say even if it's just Hello,
or whatever, and like I said before, if you're not sure what to say in
a comment, like I never know what to say in a comment, I'll make it easier for you
like...if you like it just go ahead and say "Gnarley" which is an 80's term, or
if you didn't like it just say "Bogus", and if you didn't think any of it just say "Eh".
So that would be a big big big help, and another thing you could do which I'd
really appreciate it. If you're on the App Store and you wanna try one of our
apps, look up some of the Overpass Apps. Applications either on iTunes or Google Play,
and leave a review, and let us know what you think about it, either good or bad,
but, you know, it's a ...we're all trying to build up in the market so... so that will be a
big help. So that's it, I'll talk to you next week!