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Once you had the idea for your app, what did you do next? I put an ad on freelancer.com to see what level of response I got. I had about 60ish bids on the project within a couple of days, but found 90% of them started their message with ‘we have read and understand your brief, and are able to do the job’...which would have been great, but I hadn’t actually posted a brief up. I felt the bids were a bit too spammy, so I decided I personally wouldn’t use freelancer. com, or that type of site, at all. I ended up looking a little closer to home, and posted an ad on Student Job Search and on TradeMe Jobs. The number of applicants really surprised me, and their level of experience was pretty high. As I had not been through the process, the main criteria for me was someone who had built an app before, though I didn’t mind if it was a small, hobby type app. It was just important that they had been through the process, and knew what steps were involved. I ended up finding a post grad student based in Auckland, and a designer out of Russia after looking through portfolios on Dribble. Both of them were brilliant to work with. Did you commit money to the idea? Did you pay for the development? How did you feel about spending money? Any fears it wouldn’t work out? So far the app is fully self-funded, and I’ve paid for all of the development and design costs. I was prepared to spend a substantial amount on it, and was happy to finance it myself. I also knew that because of the business model that I’ve chosen, I wouldn’t see any significant returns for a while, so at this stage it’s not something I’m worried about. I’m expecting growth to be exponential for the app, as it’s one that engages you with other people; friends will get friends on to it. I’m so pleased with how it’s come out. The feedback I’ve had so far has been great, and it’s an app that I’m hoping will be a core app for a lot of people! How did you do the development? Did you create a prototype and show people before working on it further? Did you have designs to work with to get your ideas across to the developer? I created a wireframe on an iPad using AppCooker. It’s really easy to use, and I mock up all of my app ideas on it. The wireframe was just a super basic, no colour mockup of every screen that I envisioned the app having. I had every screen on its own page with notes and bullet points of the features of that particular screen, and sent that to the developer and designer.
Doing it this way meant that the bulk of the coding was done by the time the design was finished, so it only took a couple of weeks to integrate the design into the app, rather than a few months to build the app from scratch after the designs were completed. Is it easy to get your app into the app store? From what I found, yes! Apple has quite strict guidelines for developers and apps (available online) especially in terms of user interfaces and gestures and content. If your app works within these guidelines, it takes roughly 7-14 days to get accepted.
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I love everything about the app industry. You can work from anywhere and at any time.
We worked out a system where the designer would send me a .jpg file of the final design of each screen as he completed it, which I then sent to the developer so he could start coding. That way, he could start coding with the end result of the app in mind, even though he didn’t have the physical images to work with yet.
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