Appspiration

T he last post in my personal entrepreneurship series  ( see the note on the pure coincidence at the bottom of this post ) . In this, I just wanted to share some useful tools and ideas which have helped me along this journey, for storing important things like Designs, Ideas and Book notes! Design repository When you work on so many products and screens, referring good designs becomes essential. Looking at some professional designs out there naturally inpsires us to improve our own designs or even carry some of those ideas over to our Apps and screens. That is why maintaining a place where I can store all the inspirational or nice designs comes handy and I use Google Photos for that! Some of the pictures which I have come across, stored as an album in Google Photos When I come across an app, instead of immediately jumping into using it, I take a moment to look at the design and other things. If its interesting or something which could be applicable to my own app, I store a screensho...

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...

In my previous post I wrote about how the Apps got me a job in Motorola . Now work on the Motorola MOTOACTV smart watch was going on well. On the personal front, I had also released 3 Android chess apps on the Play Store (no iOS apps yet, since this was still a side hustle using tech skills which I knew). Meeting Anand The year was 2012, and a team from Motorola with me as the captain, decided to participate in a Corporate Chess tournament in the month of July. The event consisted of team matches as well as an individual tournament. The highlight of the event was also a chance to play a game with none other than the then world champion Viswanathan Anand, provided one finishes in the top 10. There was also an option for a dinner with him (paid entry!). Although the team did not fare well, in the individual event I finished 4th, which meant I was eligible to play Anand! What a moment it was for me, not only to personally see the world chess champion face to face but try my chess skil...

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...

In my first post , I mentioned how I got started with the first App idea. This was pretty much the first step in my long entrepreneurial journey which was to follow. I just didn't know it back then! The year is 2008 and the first App "iChess" for Java/Symbian was almost ready. It was time to get it in the hands of the chess users out there. iChess Java - ready for launch! How do you know when the app is good enough for a public release? The User Interface (UI) and the User eXperience (UX) was decent for the first version and I like to make sure these two things are well in place before any release. Being a user myself, I knew the UX was fine. Being a chess player myself helped. And a decent UI made sure users don't fall off immediately. This means no outright spelling mistakes, mis-aligned items, messy layout or glitches. I have followed these two principles all these years. Never release anything till I am myself satisfied with the look and feel of what I am making...

Quick story of how I took that first baby step towards building my App business (MyChessApps.com & FollowChess.com). For this, lets rewind to the year 2007. I was posted in the US from my first job. I was already 4 years into the job as a Java Software Engineer. Back then, the  Symbian  OS platform was very popular. This was much before Android & iOS gained popularity. Being a chess afficionado, I used to learn chess and participate in chess tournaments. Learning was mostly via software on the laptop. However, when it came to mobile, there was hardly anything. I owned a Nokia Symbian S60 device and could find only on good chess app called Chess Genius. But it was mostly for playing vs the AI whereas my need was of an app or tool to help in my learning process (i.e. solve chess puzzles and view games of past chess masters) Seeing this void and trusting in my tech skills, the idea to develop something on my own popped into my head! This is when I started exploring ...