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...

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 ...