My New Posterous

I may be moving to blogging fully at my posterous site. Its just that they do so much automating things like embedding gists, video, etc that it kind of frees me up to just basically write. Its not that wordpress.com has not been kind to free user. Its that posterous ha so many more features and social on top rather than wordpress’s way of bolting social on.

Feedburner rss link, etc stuff already added and enabled. I just have some minor tweaks such as as adding more sharing links and some other stuff.

How To Hire an Android Developer Freelancer

Apparently, when someone handed out brains they left out the group called recruiters. Thus, so lets try this again.

I run a business where I develop android applications. That kind of means that I do not want to work as an employee for your client, oh dim witted recruiters. I have found in programming since I was 8 years old that the best choice of project managers and opportunities is when I have full control lover those choices instead of someone else rather than trusted those choices to someone who is domain knowledge removed from those choices such as a recruiter.

Do not take it upon yourself to email me after I have said no with rude comments and snide commentary as it is not in my interest to care where your next sale comes from or even if you get one, just accept that you did not access the situation correctly when you read my linkedin profile and saw that I operate a business.

For those that access the situation correctly,  things are required for me to talk to you via email and those are:

1. A project description

2. A budget range

3. An understanding that all freelance developers charge for their time and work and ask for advances on project costs.

4. If continuing project from a previous develoepr, the source code. And do not forget to send the NDA I signed back to me with your signature, I should not have to remind you a five-year-old-child about that either.

If I do not have those things than I cannot continue the conversation with you as much as I might like to talk to you I have things that have to be coded and built just as you in your professional time have to manage your business and thus I am very sure that if you want anyone to respect your time than you will respect mine.

And, last I only allow myself to be entered on developer lists that businesses keep because they out-source projects if the business understands that to get that right they have to at least buy me one meal.

750k for Replacement HomeScreen

You probably saw this readwrtieweb article about a replacement homescreen making $750k in 3 weeks. It is interesting from several points in that now is the time to enter the replacement homescreen category, price points, etc.

Everyone has seen the GRE and like study apps at above $20 not selling with the typical application generating about less 100 downloads over a one year period for about the same amount of develop time as a replacement homescreen.  Whereas SBP Shell hit 50,000 downloads in 3 weeks at $14.95.  In fact recently I turned down an interview invite from a Chicago startup because they had their andorid application priced above $79.

But its not the price-point alone as replacement homescreen is big market as the percentage of android device users that potentially could want the product. Student testing products run into some market limiters such as student limited resources, did they buy the android device, and limited budget to spend on testing materials. Which means in the student testing materials applications they should not be pricing premium but pricing at $2.99 as that will drive competitors out of the market while increasing the market share..

What might be a closer comparison is games in that you could price a complex 2d or 3d game at $14.95 and with some heavy duty marketing each the same revenue results. The key here is that he company that created SPB Shell did this in a year and thus had a full year to stoke the marketing fires.

Thus, I am revamping and relaunching the Zyle replacement HomeScreen under a new name and new focus. You will gin to see screen-shots and video.  The product name will be Zoquious, probably.