And while part of my hesitation had to do with my optimism about iCombat’s potential and my marketing ability, it also had to do with the fact that I rarely buy full versions of games (although I do occasionally). After just launching my lite version yesterday I can say that my concerns about the lite version were misplaced and might have cost me quite a bit in lost income. Below are my main takeaways from having waited on launching the lite version and why I think too many indie iPhone developers wrongly steer clear of lite versions:

1. Know your Apps Core value and its core user: This sounds douchey but it really is harder than it sounds to have the discipline to know the profile of your core user and then choose that feature you think will resonate most.  For example, if you are making a game it is easy to think kids and adults will like it and they will all get hooked on the game play AND the graphics AND the story equally.  Odds are your app will not resonate with everyone, and one salient feature will be the hook so the sooner you figure it out and admit it to yourself the better. You may be wrong, but better to know your target than water down your strategy by pursuing too many angles.  Needless to say once you have your app’s core value outlined it will also be that much easier to design your lite version.
2. The App store is not a lemonade stand: The App store is one of the largest, most seamless content delivery platforms ever and when it comes to pricing most of us fail to understand just how fundamentally different this is from anything we have ever seen.  As a result we apply our personal conceptions of scarcity, value or what it means to transact with someone to something that is totally different.  If you have released an app you will agree that pricing decisions or the debate about a lite version are often more emotional than rational.  I am sure more than one developer has though “I don’t want to give it to someone for free when I worked 3 months on it every night after work while my wife was screaming at me because I was never around.”  That would be okay to think if you toiled on a model airplane or a painting for that period and were selling the one unit you had created, but in the App store you can divide that effort across 40MM+ people so who really cares if 5MM users get your app for free if in the end 250k of them buy it?
3. Be careful about buying into the media hype: I am not going to preach like everyone else about how little is being made on average. I don’t care about that because no one gets into App development to be average – if we didn’t all think we were working on the next Enigmo we probably wouldn’t be doing it.   I am talking more about the marketing angle.  Don’t fool yourself about how hard it is to get noticed, especially as the bigger game makers start to move to the iPhone platform.   It is getting more and more difficult to get blog coverage  so if you don’t have either a major platform to launch from or an existing fan base to leverage, your main form of exposure will be the lite version.
4. The blogosphere is like steroids (but it won’t make you #1): Many developers see Gizmodo or Techcrunch as the definitive tipping point, and it could be for an app but if your app does not deliver the viral hook no blog will save it.  As far as I can tell there haven’t been any cases of a blog breaking an app that then jumped to #1 and stayed there for a long amount of time (please correct me if wrong).  Blogs are like steroids, can help you get from 10th to 1st or from 500th to 400th, but not from 10,000th to 1st.
5. Don’t hide from App store criticism & negative ratings. Tying back to the second point, it is hard to take criticism for something you have worked hard on and so there is a natural hesitation to launching a lite app as users can be much more harsh reviewers. Again the goal is to get die hard fans to buy a copy, so it is OK if tons of people don’t like your game or review it poorly because all you need is some that really love it to spread the word. Maybe not launching a lite version allows for more control over the reviews (as there seems to be a natural bias of paying users to give better reviews) but this helps no one. This only reduces the total amount of people discovering your app and limits your earning potential.

Bottom line developers need to stop pricing their apps and deciding strategy based on vague feelings of what is value or what is deserved.  With frictionless transaction costs and so many users, your worst enemy for getting noticed may just be yourself.  So we should all stop thinking about how our 3 months of work is selling for less than a cup of coffee (or could be given away for free) and start focusing on increasing the amount of people using our apps.

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In previous posts I have suggested to first time app developers the importance of creating proper specs when planning to create an app.  I think mockup tools like Balsamiq are even more useful than making great specs and writing out usage scenario examples.  Not only does it help you better develop your idea but it also gives you the ability to share your mockups with other people instantly.  For example, if you are thinking about outsourcing development or are talking to other team members, Balsamiq will let you share your mockups and convey clearly what you want to do (for info on how to protect your idea with outsourced developers read this post).  And by visually demonstrating the flow of how you want your app to work developers will have a much better idea of what you are looking for.  This will pay off in terms of the quality of developer you manage to get and it will also improve the accuracy of the time and budget estimates you get from developers.

Even if you plan on developing the app yourself, you can benefit from working through the fuzzy parts of your idea.  A mockup tool will give you the simple tools you need to work through EVERY aspect of your app structure before you begin the development process.  This is important because it can alert you to fundamental flaws in your idea or logic before you put the time and effort into building it.

In addition to the sketches of the iPhone and its main interface tools you also have sketches of dozens of buttons, switches, icons and other items that you can customize.  For example, when you drag an iPhone image to the drawing area, a box pops up where you can select whether to include the status toolbar at the top, change the orientation, the background look, etc.  You can even drag call out boxes into the picture as well to insert commentary about your mockup.  Check out this video for an example of what is possible.

Balsamiq includes a free trial version so you can test it out today…give it 5 minutes and you will see how quickly you get the hang of it.

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Another fascinating post was by Matt Roberts’ titled Usability and Game Design where he does a great job of reminding developers just how important the subtleties of game design and intuitiveness can be for making a game successful.  From determining if your controls are natural to making sure that the user always understands what is happening, these are hugely important albeit basic things.  As I reach the end of my game development process I think my distance from the coding has helped me focus more on these basics (relating more as a constant beta user), but still I can understand the feeling of sometimes losing a grasp on the importance of simplicity and intuitive design.

While the ngmoco gamemakers portion of the blog hasn’t been posting for more than several months and really only has a handfull of posts, everything I have seen is definitely worth reading so if you are in game development you should add it to your list.

Update: The ngmoco blog has been updated with several posts with insights from the GDC this year.  There is a really thought provoking post about the future of the App store and the evolving opportunity with the coming SDK 3.0 update.  Here they talk about how the value proposition will shift from a one time sale to a longer term outlook.  In their words, “with social gaming and microtransactions in the form of level packs and virtual items, games will become more than the first impression and need to upsell their services.  That in itself represents a new market opportunity for content differentiation.”  Exciting indeed to think that we will all have to start thinking about creating long term value as opposed to one time gimmicks or successes; this should benefit the entire App gaming market by refocusing us to the task of creating games with strong foundations upon which to build a following and deeper games.

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1.  “I need a simple iPhone app done…”

A lot of iPhone job posts at Odesk, Elance, RentACoder start like this.  This is somewhat similar to the typical “I need a simple shopping cart solution” post we often see in the web development section.  It might be interesting for you to know that when your ad starts like this there is a very high chance that it will be disregarded by developers or their sales teams that check the website.  This is because developers in most cases find the requirements for something stated to be simple as oftentimes being actually very complex software: with bells and whistles, using GPS location, chat, camera, social networking functionality and a website to support the server functionality.  All of this is just assumed to appear out of the blue built by the same developer.

Typically, there are no specification documents and the job poster has a general, unfinished idea of  what he/ she thinks is a “killer app” and they want the developer to do the rest of thinking. It is also common in such cases that the author did little or no research into what is possible with iPhone SDK and after a discussion it may well turn out that implementing such functionality is impossible at all (except for jailbroken devices) so it turns out to have been a waste of time to even sign all the confidential agreements and begin discussion at the end of the day.

So in such case one may understand the frustration of a developer reading such posts. Therefore, a bit of advice here – while it is good to let developers know that you are not a dollar printing machine and you value your money and know what is difficult and what’s not, it is better to demonstrate this by having a professional approach in making your job specifications properly.

So to summarize the most important steps are:

1. Think your idea over.
2. Do some market research.
3. Write the specs. Create mock-ups and use cases where applicable.(you may find useful our guide on writing use cases and also an Adobe Photoshop PSD file for making iPhone interface mockups)

2. Post broadly

There are a lot of great developers who just stick to one website such as Elance or Guru.com. So if you post to Craigslist or Odesk only, you might lose a chance to find the best coder/ company just because they won’t see your message. Some developers check these desks themselves, some have special sales people. Sales people are often working as a freelance force finding projects for multiple groups of developers – taking a percentage of the contract price in exchange. So in some casing posting broadly means you have a better chance to reach your developer directly and therefore save some money.

Pick those who you think might be eligible and do a better selection process on them.  Check their portfolios, talk to them, ask if they’ve done something
similar. Find out from the communication what’s their English level, what are the times they are available online, if they are responsible people. Might be a good idea to Google them.

4. Ask for a development plan

After you have your professional looking outlined specs, you have a right to expect the same courtesy from developers.  It is the developer’s responsibility to study your specs, think the technical details over and create the development plan which may include hourly breakdown for each task or, alternatively, your project might be broken down into milestones describing features to be implemented with each iteration of the development. Such plan is a must to be able to track project development progress and it can also be a convenient way to organize payments upon successful completion of each milestone.

Injoit.com

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So I’ll just lay out the harsh reality: if you have zero programming background and little more than a vague outline of what you want to do the odds are you will have little luck finding a good developer, let alone making a decent iPhone application without spending way too much money and time.  My advice if you want to execute your idea efficiently would be to first:

1. Think through what it is that you want to create – sounds obvious but I don’t mean in a half-ass way, I mean really walk through the usage scenarios and create mock-ups of what you want to create. I know this is painful if you don’t come from a programming or engineering background but it is a must do if you want to be taken seriously by developers.
2. Create full specifications of what you need – write down every single thing that you think you will need to be created. Developers are just developers, especially the ones you can afford, and if they could resolve the unknown design problems with your idea then why would they need you?  See a great post by Joel Spolsky on why specs are so important.
3. Think about how much time, money, effort you are willing to put in to the project – odds are your project won’t be done in 1 week, so you need to make sure it is an idea you are comfortable working on and marketing once it is developed.  Basically, whatever time frame you think is possible, double it.
4. Learn what the iPhone SDK can and can’t do – this makes it much easier to know what to ask for and it also helps avoid your getting screwed by inexperienced or dishonest developers

Once you have spent the time to go through these steps you need to decide if you are looking for local or offshore developers.  Offshore will be cheaper but the additional time it takes to create very thorough specs and communicate what you need is significant.  The budget question is an important one because odds are you will not find a developer partner who will work for equity alone.  See my post on finding the right developer here.  Most important steps I followed before pulling the trigger on the idea were:

1. Check the App Store thoroughly for precedents or competitors to your idea
2. Check whether there are any companies or games that replicate your product on the web (for example in the flash games world)
3. Think about pricing and what you would need to break even.  If you are creating a niche product that will move 20-30 units a day odds are it does not pay to outsource development
4. Think of a narrative for your product.  Gimmicks have been done and they give you very little to work with.  You need to think about why bloggers, journalists and users would care about your 1 app out of 30k+ in the App store.

Bottom line is if you spend the time to walk through all of the design and planning yourself and can be bothered to learn the basics of the SDK you will be in a good position to know how to spot talented developers either in the U.S. or abroad.  The best way to get developers to respect and want to work with you is to be precise and exact with your idea and your specs from the get go.  Developers are getting inquiries from dozens of “next big thing” idea people so show that you have thought through your project enough and they will choose to work with you over their other options.  That’s right, finding the right developers is just as much about you convincing them as them convincing you, especially when it comes to iPhone app development.

Update: Just found a great article about developing an iPhone app from scratch here.  Includes some good resource links at the end of the article.  Also see Joel Spolsky’s blog for great project manager tips for when you do decide to begin your app development.

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Basecamp screenshot

The team put all of our milestones into the system so now I can go to Basecamp, review the list of upcoming milestones and leave files and comments that I think are useful for the team.   Once you upload or insert a new comment you have the option of notifying specific group members which is great because it avoids spamming those people who are not relevant to the update.

I think this software is really a brilliant way to manage a geographically separated group of people where transparency can obviously be difficult and it is hard to get clarity around what each person is doing.  I seriously recommend Basecamp for anyone collaborating on not just software development, but anything that could require getting a group of people on to the same page.

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I still don’t think it is a bad deal to offer a developer: 1) an application idea, 2) a salary, 3) a flexible schedule, and 4) a portion of the returns.  I wasn’t able to find anyone experienced, however, with enough interest and skill to really dive in to the project.  While I am sure this is a symptom of the high demand for iPhone developers and my lack of being able to find / convince anyone locally (I only posted on Craigslist so wasn’t exactly scouring the city), it was still surprising how few serious inquiries I received.  Let me just add, as someone who is learning the iPhone SDK, I was amazed at how little most developers who reached out to me knew about developing with the iPhone SDK.

One thing I knew was that I didn’t want to create an SDK University where I would pay someone to figure out how to develop my game.  So if you are an outsider like I am to programming, just a warning to be careful about who you consider working with.  By no means is someone good because they can throw some jargon your way, and more importantly all programming languages are NOT the same.  True, a talented developer can pick up a language very quickly, but the reality is there are a ton of less talented developers out there so look for proven experience.  For some tips on how to find talented programmers as a non programmer see this post.

When I looked at local companies all of them had quotes that were either too high or too slow.  Again, it felt like most were traditional web developers trying to branch out into iPhone development on my dime.  This was probably because the professional local iPhone outfits were busy charging 25-30k to advertising and other companies to develop their apps so weren’t interested in my less than straightforward app.  I had heard plenty about the quality of outsourcing development to Eastern Europe so I chose to look internationally and post an add on oDesk.  I had found out about oDesk through a friend who was developing an application and when I visited the site I was extremely impressed with the quality of their services.  Clearly quantifying hours worked, developer ratings, even test skills passed as well as displaying links to portfolios made it easy to filter through applicants.

I posted an add and received about 10 responses within the first several days.  Some were developers just spamming me, others had relevant experience but were divided into a range of ratings from 3.5 to 5 out of 5.  I initially contacted the higher rated ones who had positive feedback on past assignments but with one from the Balkans I found that his English proficiency was far below what would be necessary to communicate effectively.  He clearly was very talented but I got the feeling he was using Google translate to answer my e-mails.  Another team from Pakistan spoke great English and they spent quite a bit of time on chat with me getting to understand the project.  I liked them but their estimate came in at 4 man months – roughly 2-3x longer than anybody else!  The process was tedious between getting NDA’s signed and sending out the specs to receive a quote (see Taking Care of the Legal Stuff entry) but I ended up with a few good options that I felt would work.

I decided on a team of developers from the Ukraine whom I had found worked on an application roughly similar to what I wanted to make.  I contacted them and immediately knew they would be easy to work with.  From their English level to experience with similar projects to their extensive list of published apps I knew Injoit could execute on what they promised.  For more about the process of finalizing the specs and signing up with them see the related entry Contract Signed!.  So far working with them has been great, they are timely and easy to communicate with so we will see what happens.

If you are looking for a developer make sure to:

1. Even if you are not a programmer, spend some time reading about what is possible with the SDK – you’d be surprised what developers try to convince you of (for example, Apple makes it very easy to utilize tools like the Accelerometer – matter of hours or a day to set up but I had one guy tell me that it would take a week!)
2. Find someone who has worked on something similar.  If you are developing a game, someone who has no graphics or game engine experience will slow the entire process down
3. Don’t be afraid to ask for a time and cost quote, and once you get the time estimate have them breakdown how long they see each component taking.  When you have a couple of quotes it makes it easier to figure out their skill / bs level.
4. Don’t hesitate to contact previous application users.  In most cases it will be a dude in a basement like you so no harm in dropping him / her an e-mail asking about their experience.  I actually almost signed with one team before I spoke with someone who had worked with them who told me to steer clear!
5. Think carefully about hourly versus by project.  Both have their benefits and it will largely come down to how specific your plans are.
6. Know exactly what you are looking for.  This was hard for me, but sit down and map the whole damn idea out as well as what will be required before contacting people.  Don’t expect anyone you speak to to have really creative solutions to your important application design questions (i.e. application purpose, business model, pricing, etc).  If they did, they wouldn’t need your ass and if they did have your answers they would cost way way more than you can afford.  If you need someone to figure out the other half of the puzzle then look for a partner, not contracted development.
7. Be realistic about the costs, although outsourcing development is cheaper than doing it in the U.S., it is not going to be free to develop something of quality.  If you are developing the next iFart then maybe, but honestly why bother?  Besides, in my opinion the real opportunity in the App store seems to be the tween category of 2$ to 3$ apps, not the $10 Spore’s of the world and not the $0.99 crap gimmicks that are drowning the App store.

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Being new to programming and having just started to learn the iPhone SDK I felt time pressure to get my app idea out to market before someone else beat me to the punch.  I thought about the trade off between time, money and certainty of getting a launchable product and decided that I should invest the money necessary to get a working version into the App Store as quickly as possible.  That way I could also put more time on designing the game as well as the marketing.

I’ll say from my experience so far that outsourced iPhone app development is a big business but seems to have largely remained a practice for the enterprise realm.  Many start-ups and medium sized businesses are outsourcing their work and sometimes probably don’t even know it as it is passed through local development houses.  What I have learned through the various quotes I received was that any type of iPhone app development can run in the tens of thousands of dollars in the US, both because of the demand for developers but also because of what I noticed in several cases was developer inexperience.  Many of the quotes I received were astronomical (in both time and money) and were by development houses that didn’t even have one iPhone application in the App Store.  Bottom line, iPhone application development is far from becoming a commodity so you have to be very careful about whom you hire.

So why has there been little discussion about this topic?  Part of it I’m sure was Apple’s until recent tight NDA keeping discussion on the web muted.  Also, while there is clearly altruism amongst the iPhone developer community in terms of learning (the documentation and forums for learning both Objective C and the iPhone SDK are great), there just doesn’t seem to be such a push to help non-programmers who want to create something.  This is probably because people like me who are trying to create something through an external / outsourced process, try to HIDE IT, as they are worried about sharing credit or appearing as less than a real company.  While I understand this reasoning, I think it’s important to show everyone that people without much programming experience can create something of quality as well.

So I hope this blog is helpful and more importantly I hope that the advice I give actually works out to be a testament to how to create a great application.  If my application bombs, then just do the opposite of everything I write and you should be fine.  And PLEASE share your experience or post any good sources of advice for other readers.