Sales Stats of Best Seller iPhone Game

Firemint, the company behind the best selling iPhone game ‘Flight Control‘, has put together a fascinating report outlining the sales trends the company has seen over the last month, from March 24 to April 25. The application has dominated the App Store over the last few weeks, reaching the #1 paid spot in over a dozen countries (though it’s currently fallen to #7 in the US). Since launching on March 6 the application has been downloaded over 700,000 times.

Read the whole story at TechCrunch: ‘Flight Control’ Sales Stats Offer Fascinating Look At Inner Workings Of The iPhone App Store.

Creative Funding

In times of the crisis, some people become really creative in funding their project or company. As an example, Miro, a free HD video player, started just recently with an initiative to let users adopt lines of their source code for a monthly payment. A great idea and also nicely setup in their Miro Adoption Center.

And of course, the right idea to let people spread the word about it.

Reid Hoffman: My Rule of Three for Investing

Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, describes his first three criteria to evaluate the business idea of a startup:

As a serial investor, I’ve enjoyed backing some good Web 2.0 companies, and it’s helped me develop a shortlist of criteria to cut the wheat from the chaff. After five minutes of a pitch, I know if I’m not going to invest, and after 30 minutes to an hour, I generally know if I will. Many entrepreneurs are product-focused, which leads them to pitch the brilliance of the product. Others are money-minded, so they can over think the business plan. But neither of these approaches answer the first few questions I want to know as an investor:

1. How will you reach a massive audience?

2. What is your unique value proposition?

3. Will your business be capital efficient?

Read the whole story at TechCrunch…

Is This the Time to Chase a Career Dream?

So why do so many of us perceive ourselves as being so terribly misaligned with our right work? Upbringing can have something to do with it. A client once confessed: “My father told me I had three career options. I could be a doctor, an engineer or a failure.”

I imagine that when the Grammy-winning singer John Legend broke the news that he wanted to quit his job as a management consultant at the Boston Consulting Group to pursue music full time, some of his relatives were concerned about his career stability.

Obviously, he made the right choice. Many stories don’t turn out that way.

I have received pained e-mail messages from grown offspring of aspiring entrepreneurs who chucked it all to follow one failed venture after another. A musician with a stable day job told me that after pursuing music seriously on the side, he wasn’t so sure that he could take the lifestyle full time.

What separates crazy dreams from viable business ideas? I don’t think that it has anything to do with the idea, or the profession, or the market itself. It has to do with the person.

via Preoccupations – Is This the Time to Chase a Career Dream? – NYTimes.com.

Dealing with impossible crises

Who haven’t had the situation that if you want to change something, everyone involved starts to argue about why something is not possible.

Read Daniel Tenners post on how to Deal with impossible crises for some good advice on how to cope with such situations:

To get around the brick walls which large corporations, bureaucracies and other social organisms put in our way, it is important to:

• Calm down, smile and remain polite to maintain any chance of success
• Become a human being rather than a faceless number
• Be persistent to grind away the brick wall
• Be prepared to lose to expand your freedom of thought and action
• Be clear about your objective so you can be flexible about how to achieve it
• Find who can, since often the first person you speak to cannot help
• Take an active part in making things happen more efficiently
• Make the other person feel good about helping you so that they are more likely to help you
• Don’t relax this stance until it’s over, it’s easy to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

Sometimes it might also help to change the question.

Heres to the crazy ones

Did you ever see Apple’s commercial “Heres to the crazy ones”? Watch it and then go and change the world…

How to Market Your iPhone Game

Here are two links to articles discussing on how to market your iPhone game:

• How to use Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to market your mobile games
  Recent months have seen an explosion in developers and publishers using social media to connect with consumers, media and each other.

  Some have done it well. Others are a bit unsure. And a fair few are (metaphorically) doing their best John Travolta steps and wondering why their family and friends are all laughing at them.

  With that in mind, here’s our stab at a five-pronged social media strategy for mobile games companies – how you can use Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and your own blog to market your mobile games, and how they should work together (that’s the fifth prong).

• Marketing Your App is More Important than You Think
  What I experienced was the effects of the new multichannel model where the developer has had to become a social media explorer, pushing into every nook and cranny of the social web.  From gamer forums to niche blogs by 12 year old app reviewers (they do exist), developers risk ignoring these communities at their own expense.  With users fatigued by so much new product noise, it is easy for an unmonitored launch to go unnoticed by these users.
  

Consider your market window as part of your product strategy

If you want to be a bad product manager, start developing a product and release it as soon as possible. If you’ve got a good idea for a product, why wait? You need to get it defined, get it developed as quickly as you can, and then release it right away, without any delay. Everyone knows that the first product to market usually wins, and the sooner it’s released, the quicker you’ll be profitable.

If you want to be a good product manager, consider your market window as part of your product strategy.

Read on…

via Consider your market window as part of your product strategy : How To Be A Good Product Manager: Product management tips.

Change the question

Sometimes there is no good answer to the question someone asks.

It could be they aren’t asking the right question to start with.

You win nothing by being part of the group trying to answer the wrong question. So rather than trying to answer their question, change the question. Figure out what the issue, challenge, problem really is and answer that instead.

Your odds of winning just went up.

via SAMBA Blog: Change the question.

Also read the first comment to this post:
When you start asking the right questions, you must be ready when you hear, “But this is how we’ve always done it.”

That phrase, along with “I’m really busy,” are the bastions of those who don’t care about solving problems and doing remarkable things.

Nothing to Lose (or Risk Tolerance is a Competitive Weapon)

I’ve been thinking a lot about the market/economy lately, and what the economic downturn means for startups. And I’ve come to the conclusion that while the economic crisis does present serious challenges to startups, it it might also offer a real opportunity to attack large entrenched players.

via Redeye VC: Nothing to Lose (or Risk Tolerance is a Competitive Weapon).