Micro-ISV Insights Blog » books https://www.dextronet.com/micro-isv-insights A blog for mISVs, startup maniacs, and everyone in the software business. Fri, 31 Jan 2014 18:30:24 +0000 en-US hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.5.1 Appillionaires https://www.dextronet.com/micro-isv-insights/appillionaires/ https://www.dextronet.com/micro-isv-insights/appillionaires/#comments Thu, 01 Mar 2012 20:52:40 +0000 Jiri Novotny http://www.dextronet.com/micro-isv-insights/?p=639 Appillionaires is a post from: Micro-ISV Insights Blog

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Appilionaires
I’ve been reading a lot more since getting Kindle. It’s no wonder – Kindle is extremely convenient, and I can buy and start reading any book literally in less than 60 seconds, even when there is no Wi-Fi (Kindle comes with free 3G internet access). To this day, this is still mind-blowing to me. I used to wait for 3-4 weeks for books to arrive to Czech Republic from Amazon in the past.

As a software author, the little book called “Appillionaires” written by Chris Stevens has caught my attention and found its way to my Kindle. Just as Kindle revolutionized the book industry, the Apple App Store has revolutionized the mobile applications industry. Let me share with you what I learned in the book.

Appillionaires – How it all started

The story starts with the iPhone. Without iPhone, App Store simply wouldn’t be possible. Before iPhone, the carriers had strict control over the design and functionality of cell phones. Cell phone manufacturers had to stick to hundreds of pages of specifications; otherwise carriers wouldn’t distribute and subsidize their phones. Apple’s first attempt at smart phone was called Motorola ROKR. Because Motorola and the industry were tied by the old ways, the phone was a failure. Steve Jobs has realized that Apple will have to build the iPhone entirely on its own. And it did – in complete secrecy. iPhone entered the market thanks to a unique deal with AT&T, which allowed Apple to have complete control over the software and hardware of iPhone, which was unheard of at the time.

iPhone originally came only with inbuilt apps, and it was not possible to download additional apps (unless you “jailbreaked” the phone). Apple realized the opportunity, and launched the App Store, which became instant success. Apple leveraged the payment information it already had for millions of iTunes users. For them, purchasing from the App Store was ridiculously easy.

The gold rush

The astonishing success of the App Store has started a gold rush. Everyone wanted to play the App Store lottery. After all, the successful apps started earning many millions of dollars! But still, it was a lottery, because the luck factor was, and is to this day, a big factor when it comes to success on App Store.

Media has popularized the first successful apps that made their authors appillionaires. Today it’s virtually impossible not to see any Angry Birds reference in any given week.

The media popularization of the App Store success stories skewed the public opinion about the app store market – it might seem that attaining riches there is easy, but the reality is that it is a very tough market.

Some interesting facts

Did you know that…?

  • There are over 530.000 apps in the App Store
  • Over 20.000 news apps are submitted each month
  • It takes about 5 days on average for App Store to approve a submitted app
  • Over $250 million dollars is spent on App Store every month
  • The average app price is $1 for games and $2 for other apps (But there are also thousands of apps priced at $9.99, $14.99, $19.99 or more)
  • The most popular app categories are games, books and entertainment
  • The total cost to buy all apps is over one million USD. Tough for collectors!
  • Apple keeps complete editorial control over the App Store content
  • The entry barrier is relatively low – you just need to pay the $99 sign-up fee and adhere to Apple’s guidelines
  • Apple takes a 30% cut, but you can set any price you want

About the “Appillionaires” book

The book is very well structured. It has three parts, each of which has several chapters. Every chapter has a bulleted summary at the end. The three parts are:

  1. The Birth of the App – the history of the App Store and iPhone
  2. The Appillionaires – covering personal stories of the most successful App Store authors
  3. The App Revolution – talking about the current trends happening in the app business. Large game companies and publishers desperately want to jump on the bandwagon by acquiring app developers left and right.

The Appillionaires stories cover the developers of:

  • Doodle Jump
  • Harbor Master
  • Pocket God
  • StickWars
  • Angry Birds

Incidentally, all of these are games.

The stories are very intriguing – for example, it has surprised me that the Angry Birds authors released 52 games before Angry Birds and were on a verge of a bankruptcy. I was also surprised to learn that Angry Birds earn more from merchandise and licensing deals than the actual app sales (which are in tens of millions of dollars).

Yet another interesting tidbit is that the commercial success is much harder on the Android platform than on the Apple platforms: Sales of Angry Birds on the Android platform were very disappointing – you can now get Angry Birds for free for the Android. The Android version makes money exclusively from advertising – and it is significant revenue.

The unique background of the interviewed authors of these apps – almost always 1 or 2 person teams – has given their games a unique twist that was probably the secret ingredient necessary in order to succeed in the app store.

I disliked only two things about this book: First, there are no stories of successful non-game app authors, which would certainly provide additional perspective and insight useful to mISV like me.

Second, the book omits to explicitly say just how “cold” the hard cold reality is. So let me give you an idea – because it costs about $10.000 to $50.000 to develop an average iPhone app, most of apps never even cover the original expenses. 30% of apps never make more than $1000 in total and majority of apps earn less than $700 per year. The reality is even grimmer on the Android platform – iOS developers make twice as money as Android developers. And the competition is fierce – together, the Apple App Store and Android Market list over 700 thousand app.

That being said, the book is well written and certainly an enjoyable and worthwhile read. Both paperback and Kindle versions are available from Amazon. It has 224 pages, which is just about right. The most valuable part of the book are the detailed stories. The stories of the app developers from their youth might even stir some nostalgia in you. And who doesn’t like to read about the success of fellow developers? We all are “rooting for the little guy”.

- By Jiri Novotny, the founder of Dextronet.com and author of Swift To-Do List, a successful task management software for Windows.

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Appillionaires is a post from: Micro-ISV Insights Blog

]]> https://www.dextronet.com/micro-isv-insights/appillionaires/feed/ 0 30 books everyone in software business should read (and why) https://www.dextronet.com/micro-isv-insights/30-books-everyone-in-software-business-should-read-and-why/ https://www.dextronet.com/micro-isv-insights/30-books-everyone-in-software-business-should-read-and-why/#comments Sat, 21 Jan 2012 15:49:36 +0000 Jiri Novotny http://www.dextronet.com/micro-isv-insights/?p=490 30 books everyone in software business should read (and why) is a post from: Micro-ISV Insights Blog

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I have personally read every book in this list. The enormous value I’ve gotten out of these books is the sole reason I am recommending them. These books helped me to make my Swift To-Do List very successful. There are no affiliate links in this post. If you have suggestions for other books that would benefit people in software business, please post them in comments, and I will update the additional list at the end.

There are both new and old books in this list. For the naysayers: Don’t forget how easy it is to succumb to hype and to phrases like “anything older than 3 months is irrelevant”, “it’s the age of the app”, “desktop is dead”, and so on. That’s simply not true. Reading these books can be very beneficial for you and for your business. The concepts are still valid, the ideas can be still utilized. Even if the world has fatalistically moved on (and it hasn’t), you can’t catch it up without a strong foundation. Many things are cyclical or ageless. You can re-combine ideas, find patterns, get inspired and most importantly, learn new things. These books are a nourishment for your mind. And hey, it can’t hurt to read something different than you are used to read!

The books are ordered randomly; it would be nearly impossible to come with a satisfying ranking. Apples and pears, you know.

Writing this post took me 5 hours (plus 5 years to find and read the books). Enjoy.

  1. Dreaming In Code (Scott Rosenberg) – The definitive lessons about over-ambitiousness and idealism in software. True story about spectacular software failure. Dream team, dream budget, and a undreamed-of failure. Reads like a novel. The subtitle of the book is “Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software”.
  2. Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams (Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister) – Are you sure you are not chasing marginal productivity gains while the fundamentals are eluding you? Also, chances are, you are not working alone. If you have not read this yet, then better start whistling and go secretly read it under a blanket with a flash light.
  3. Startups Open Sourced: Stories to inspire and educate (Jared Tame) – Entertaining read. Not immediately actionable, but definitely worthwhile. Even if you have a mature business, the fresh look from the startup perspective can give you some ideas what you might improve upon. Interesting tidbit – reddit founders used to create hundreds of fake user accounts, submissions and comments to get their site started. Kindle edition is listed separately.
  4. GUI Bloopers 2.0 (Jeff Johnson PhD) – If you think your GUI design could use some improvement, read this. It even includes images! ;-) Negative examples are not only useful, but also fun, and they give you warm fuzzy feeling that your GUI is better. Or is it…? Some of the bloopers reminded me of Interface Hall of Shame.
  5. The Elements of Style – You write a lot of text. This will help you write it better. Your code, writing for web, blog, emails – all that is text. (The book is public domain now.)
  6. In Search of Stupidity (Merril R. Chapman) – The subtitle of this book is “Over Twenty Years of High Tech Marketing Disasters”. It’s fun to read because it’s about failures. It will make you feel good, because you are not failing on such a huge scale. But do not be deceived by that false positive feeling – unless you are not failing at least a bit, you are not experimenting enough, which is a failure by itself. Even giants like Google are constantly scraping ambitious projects because they simply didn’t work out.
  7. Do More Faster: TechStars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup (Brad Feld and David Cohen) – Similar to Startups Open Sourced, basically stories of new startups that were supported by TechStars startup accelerator (which is similar to Paul Graham’s Y-Combinator).
  8. Content Rules (Ann Handley, C.C. Chapman) – A must read. And if you are struggling to grow your businesses to a certain extent, chances are, this book will tell you exactly how to do that.
  9. Code Complete – In case you have not worked in any software company or team, but just on your own, your code will be probably greatly enhanced once you implement the ideas presented in this awesome book. Many developers swear by it; it’s their bible.
  10. Maximum Achievement (Brian Tracy) – There is not much self-help books that I would readily recommend to mISVs. However, Maximum Achievement will help you to live up to your potential, and that has significant impact on your bottom-line.
  11. Founders At Work (Jessica Livingston) – Inspirational and motivational read. Not immediately actionable, but might make you excited again about the fact that you are are in software business.
  12. Blue Ocean Strategy – If you are feeling like innovating, or feel stuck with your current market positioning or product/services portfolio, read this. The subtitle of this book is “How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant”. It is written by example – lots of cool stories. The stories clearly tell how important is the presentation of your products/services.
  13. Hackers & Painters (Paul Graham) – Really great stuff (that you’ve probably already read). Paul is excellent essayist, and has some refreshing insights. If you don’t know Paul Graham, he is the founder of Y-Combinator. All his essays are also freely available on his website. The book includes only some of them. My favorite essays are How to Make Wealth and Why Nerds are Unpopular.
  14. Joel On Software (Joel Spolsky) – Joel is my hero. Joel is a spectacular pragmatist and software business owner with deep knowledge of Microsoft technologies. This book will bring you loads of ideas to improve your business, and will definitely change your views on many things related to technology, Microsoft, development and software business.
  15. More Joel On Software (Joel Spolsky) – Same as above. Really, you can’t get enough of this stuff.
  16. Best Software Writing (Joel Spolsky) – That’s right, Joel now occupies 10% of these 30 books.
  17. Outliers (Malcom Gladwell) – Ever wondered why is Bill Gates so successful?
  18. Eric Sink On The Business Of Software – This is a classic book from a man who coined the term “Micro-ISV”. Everyone in the TBoS community knows the book. You’ve probably already read it; if not, you can still pick a thing or two out of it.
  19. Words That Sell (Richard Bayan) – If you do your own copywriting, this book will save you hours of work, help you quickly overcome writer’s blocks, and enable you to create texts that you will finally feel proud about. Just don’t overdo it with the buzz words ;-)
  20. The Pragmatic Programmer (Andrew Hunt and David Thomas) – Another classic full of great guidelines and principles related to programming. For example, if it has never occurred to you that it is fairly easy to write code that writes code, and you could probably utilize that in your own projects with great success right now, then this book is a must read for you.
  21. The E-Myth Revisited (Michael E. Gerber) – At first, the principles presented in this book might seem not much applicable to mISVs, but if you switch the word “employee” for “script”, the book gets whole new (and useful) perspective.
  22. The Business Of Software (Michael. A Cusumano) – Another (perhaps outdated) classic. Read it, it’s well worth the time only if to gain some structured thinking about (your) software business.
  23. Anything You Want (Derek Sivers) – Useful for gaining high-level perspective. Reminder that there is more than money in business (and life).
  24. Permission Marketing (Seth Godin) – If your email marketing is underutilized, this book will give you the basics for successfully building relationships with your customers via email.
  25. Ikigai (Sebastian Marshall) – This book presents sharp unique thinking related to many areas of life. It is not directly related to software business, but to personal achievement, individualism, productivity, negotiation, and similar things. Both enlightening and entertaining read. For Kindle only.
  26. Copy Hackers (Joanna Wiebe) – If you write text for web, you are a copywriter. In such case, definitely read these 4 short e-books. Highly actionable advice that can improve the bottom line of your business.
  27. Head First Design Patterns – If you don’t know what is a “design pattern” in the OOP world, don’t think twice before buying this book. Don’t be discouraged by the fact that the samples are in Java, the sample code is easy to understand even if you don’t know a thing about it.
  28. The Art Of Ignoring (Alwin Hoogerdijk) – This is not really book, but a presentation with slides (and an accompanying video), but reading this stuff is simply not optional. And it’s free!
  29. The Dip (Seth Godin) – Not sure if you should abandon one of your products/services, or not abandon them? Subtitle: “A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick)”.
  30. Personal Development for Smart People (Steve Pavlina) – This is probably the best book on conscious self growth ever written. The ageless principles described in this book can be actually implemented into your business, which gives this book a whole new perspective.

Books that didn’t made it into the list

These books were a bit disappointing to me, but they might be awesome for you.