Adventures in Software Engineering
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Customer Acquisition is hard
Without customer acquisition you don’t have a business. Getting people to care about what you are doing, and eventually buy your product is hard. For a while I coasted off of the attention we got from launching our first product, but as I dive into the SaaS world it’s becoming clear that a better strategy…
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My journey launching a SaaS product
Since writing this article in 2014, I’ve learned a ton. I’m currently running a content marketing experiment for a brand new site, click here to read about the results. There’s a lot of blog posts out there about how to create a product, launch a product, and grow a product. The problem is that many…
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My business is successful, so I’m changing everything up
Product sales have never been better for my company AppPresser. We launched in January of this year with a product that helps people make a mobile app out of their WordPress website. It was pretty successful right out of the gate, we did $18K in the first 3 weeks, and that has grown to about…
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Thoughts on Pressgram Shutting Down
Pressgram announced they were shutting down today. There’s always something to be learned when another entrepreneur “fails.” That’s in quotes because I don’t really consider Pressgram a failure, because I’m sure the lessons John learned from this are invaluable. The strange thing is that they have had more media, exposure, and users than any company…
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How to use the Phonegap Developer App
The Phonegap Developer app just recently hit the app stores, and it’s awesome! This app basically allows you to see any changes you make update in real time on your device. For example, if you fire up a Phonegap project called MyApp through the developer app, and make a change in MyApp/www/index.html, you will see…
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Beginner Stumbling Blocks in Phonegap & Cordova
Lately I’ve been working with Phonegap a lot for my new project AppPresser. Phonegap is a great product, and it’s pretty easy to use once you get the hang of it. The problem is that there are quirks that can hang you up as a beginner. This is the stuff no one tells you until…
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Innovation Requires Sacrifice
Innovating means… You spend whole days trying things that probably won’t work, with no pay. You turn away clients to spend whole days trying things that probably won’t work, with no pay. You bang your head against the wall for weeks because everything you’ve tried doesn’t work. Everyone else seems like they are doing better…
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7 Things I Learned in 2013
Instead of a “year in review” post, I just want to pass on some lessons I learned in 2013 as a WordPress business owner. Hopefully these help you out. 1. Failure Is Not The End I failed at something this year that was a pretty big deal. It sucked, and I was pretty bummed out.…
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WordPress and Generosity
People in the WordPress community took me to school today, but not about coding or business. About generosity. First, I had a 1 hour phone call with Shane from Modern Tribe. The call was just helping Brad and I strategize about AppPresser, pricing, marketing, etc. It didn’t really help Shane build his own business at…
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Responsive Images in WordPress with Picturefill
Images are the single biggest performance hog on most websites. Serving the same big images to a desktop and a mobile device kills your site’s performance, and makes you lose site visitors. We need to be able to serve a high resolution image to a desktop, and a smaller image to a mobile device. Responsive…