Kevin Holesh is an app developer who built ‘Moment’—an iPhone app which tracks how long you spend using your phone each day and helps you stop using it. He’s also behind ‘Focus’—an app which stops you texting and driving; and Move—which helps you stay active. The technology behind each of these projects is truly innovative (read: hacky!), and he’s somehow managed to skirt around Apple’s strict App Store policies. In this podcast episode, we speak about how he did that, as well as how to survive as an independent iOS developer, the best ways to market your apps and why Kevin is sick to death of people asking him to build their “killer app idea” for free.
Topics:
- What it’s really like being an independent iPhone developer and running a one-man operation
- Why Kevin is sick of people asking him to build their “killer app idea” for free
- Ideas are worthless; a good idea is nothing without good execution.
- The best ways of marketing your apps
- How do the Moment, Focus and Move apps work, under the hood? (A.k.a. What iOS hacks are you pulling to track the ‘time-using-phone’ metric, since there’s no official APIs to do this?)
- ‘Launch day profits’ vs ‘trickle profits’ over time
- Why getting mentioned in big media publications isn’t all it’s cracked up to be
- App Store pricing and the revenue splits they have with devs
- Why Kevin continues to answer support emails from his customers
Links:
- Kevin Holesh’s website
- Download Kevin Holesh’s apps:
- Moment (download app [FREE] | website)
- Focus (download app [FREE] | website)
- Move (download app [FREE] | website)
Special thanks:
- Editing by Josh Armour, from ArmourPod Productions.
- Podcast logo cover artwork by Courtney Carman
- Music from “Ghosts I–IV” by Nine Inch Nails, used under a Creative Commons licence.
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MATE podcast is a show about Marketing, Advertising, Technology and Entrepreneurship. Hosted by Adam Jaffrey: Digital Strategist and Entrepreneur. Made with ❤ in Melbourne, Australia.
MATE podcast is a production by branded podcast agency Wavelength Creative.