Market, Marketing, Aesthetics, then Functionality

After reviewing our Trello board of app ideas that we've been collecting for the past several years, we settled on making an app to remember names.  After half a day of beginning to code, like all good programmers do, Russ said that we might want to take a different approach.  He read a quote from "Start Small, Stay Small: A Developer's Guide to Launching a Startup" by Rob Walling:

Market Comes First, Marketing Second, Aesthetics Third, and Functionality a Distant Fourth

The product with a sizeable market and low competition wins even with bad marketing, a bad aesthetic, and poor functionality. Think Quickbooks in the early days, or any niche product you've ever seen that looked like it was written by a six year old but sold thousands of copies.

In the same market, the product with better marketing wins. Every time.

In the same market with equal marketing, the product with the better design aesthetic wins. Sure, a few people will dig deep enough to find that the "ugly" product has better or more functionality, but the product that wins is the one that has the best looking website and user interface.

Functionality, code quality, and documentation are all a distant fourth. I know that this sounds sacrilegious to a software developer, but unless you're marketing to software developers, your order of importance is market, marketing, aesthetic, function.

This really rang true to us. Our tendency was to begin listing out features and coding. But what we recognized we needed to do was first get market, marketing, and aesthetics nailed down.  My next several posts will be dedicated to how we tackled each of these self-imposed prerequisites before starting coding features on Name Shark (www.nameshark.com).

Series Links

Here are the links to the four follow-up posts that I wrote to this article:

• Step 1 - Market
• Step 2 - Marketing
• Step 3 - Aesthetics
• Step 4 - Functionality

Step 1 - Market   ▶

Back in the Saddle

Six months ago we sold the company that I co-founded (www.imaginelearning.com).  Two months later and exactly ten years after we started at Imagine Learning, with harvest capital in hand, Russ Zimmerman (the best programmer I know) and I set out on a new adventure. We chased the entrepreneurial dream once again, and started working full-time at our app development company: Awesome Geekness (www.awesomegeekness.com).

I'm hoping to share some of the thoughts that we've found helpful in the hopes that other indie developers may find some use for them.

Since we developed Tiki Kaboom (www.tikikaboom.com) 6 years ago, we have been keeping a Trello board of all of our app and software ideas.  Some of them are crazy, some are probably ridiculous, and some of them are pretty good.  We decided to start with an app to remember people's names.

The resulting product of 4 months of hard work, Name Shark (www.nameshark.com), was submitted to itunesconnect on Wednesday.  Finding myself with some time while we wait for the app to be approved, I figured I'd share some of the things we hope might make this app successful.

I have truly appreciated the many developers and entrepreneurs who have shared their stories, challenges, solutions, tough questions, and brilliant answers through blogs, Stack Overflow, forums, and websites.  Our story is one of hundreds of thousands that are probably even more awesome.  But we're having so much fun, I thought I could share what makes our geekness truly awesome.

Here are a couple photos of our little space, complete with mini-fridge, foosball table, snack cabinet, 60" TV, 5.1 surround, sofa, and Quirky Aros smart A/C unit:

Foosball Tip: If you need a foosball table, the best table on the planet is the Tornado T-3000 Platinum Coin-op table, and the best place to get one is to get a tournament-used table from Charles at tornadofoosball.com.  You'll pay $600 less than a new table costs, and they will have only used it at one tournament.  We absolutely love our table.  We also love the Gamma Supreme wraps.

So there's the inside, and here's the view out our window: