Appspiration

I n my  previous post , I briefly mentioned what led me to quit my full-time salaried job with Motorola and jump into the world of entrepreneurship. The year is 2013 and I was starting off as a Solopreneur. I was skilled in developing Android apps as well as the technologies required to build a backend (server). But to grow the business, more had to be done. This is what I ended up doing, step by step: iOS Apps with no skills By this time, iOS was already a force to reckon with. So expanding the Apps to the iOS platform was the next logical step. For that I initially outsourced the App-work to a consultancy from Pune. After that relationship gracefully ended, I got a freelancer from Romania whom I found via freelancer.com . Interestingly, I was his first client on that website! I believed in his work even though he had no prior experience or reviews to show on that website. Hiring full-time engineers A year and a half later, I started hiring full-time Android and iOS engineer...

The year is 2009. By this time , I had already released 2 Chess apps out there in the wild. The 2nd app, a simple chess database reader: 'PGN Reader' I kept releasing more updates to the Apps. Most of it was based on user feedback. In an upcoming post I will talk more in-depth on how listening to customers and quickly responding to grievances has improved our Apps and also many 1 star ratings have changed to 4 or 5 stars! Meanwhile, I returned back to India to continue the same project which I was working on while in the US. Work had become quite monotonous by then. Coincidentally, a colleague of mine mentioned about his friend in Motorola and that they were looking for Android developers. Till then, my main skills were in developing entreprise apps using Java/J2EE. But since Android primarily used Java, I decided to give this opportunity a shot! Android was just picking up and there were not many Android engineers in Bangalore. In the tech interview, I showed the interviewer...