Welcome to another episode of The App Guy Podcast. I am your host, it's Paul Kemp. This is a different episode, because the show itself has now probably over half a million downloads plus, and I've reached a pretty high figure in terms of the number of episodes, so it's about time that I appeal to some of the new listeners who are coming on and finding this show. I want to go through the 15 of the biggest app entrepreneurial and life lessons from the last 500 episodes.
If you're listening to this show and it's your first time, this is a look at the past episodes; normally, I do a guest interview, but this around I want to go through 15 of the biggest app entrepreneurial and life lessons that I have learned from the last 500 episodes. I'm going to go through, and the order is in the order of when they first were aired. This show does go back several years.
To find these past episodes, what you best do is go into your favorite podcasting app, search for the term "Paul Kemp", that is my name, and it will bring up a lot of different podcasts, and you can then tap into the podcasts that say "The App Guy Archive", and it's either Archive Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 or Part 4, and they cover all the different past episodes. Sadly, if you go to The App Guy Podcast, you will find that it drops out after about a hundred back episodes. iTunes doesn't have a particularly good way of going back into the big archives, so I've had to do them as separate podcasts.
So that's going into your favorite podcasting app and searching "Paul Kemp", and going to The App Guy Podcast Archive Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 or Part 4. Do subscribe... You can obviously listen to other episodes, and it would be great if you could leave a review as well, if you like some of these past episodes, and also leave a review for this current episode that I'm recording. It's quite a bit of work and effort to go back into such a huge database of content, and try to record some of these wonderful tips.
I've managed to now get a list together of 15 of the biggest app entrepreneurial and life lessons that I've learned from these last 500 episodes, so I hope you enjoy it.
The first episode I want to look back on is, if you go to The App Guy Podcast Archive Part 1, you'll find episode 62. It took me a while to warm up, but I did get to episode 62, and this was a fascinating episode with Steve Olsher. It made me realize I can actually introduce and find very high profile people and just talk to them naturally and get some really great information from them.
Now, Steve Olsher is a huge figure, because he was at the time the author of "What is Your What?" and he appeared on CNN, Fox Business, ABC, NBC, Forbes, The Huffington Post, and many more shows. I think he has over 300 other media outlet appearances. He's a success coach and a keynote speaker and a strategist, and he talks about a lot of different things in regards to life lessons.
Now, the discussion that we had was really fascinating because it hit a cord with me... Prior to the podcast and prior to making a life chance, I was in finance, doing a kind of cubicle, office corporate job overlooking Buckingham Palace, actually... I was totally obsessed with the illusion of money. And Steve Olsher does talk about the illusion of money. He talks about finding what is your What, finding your What, what it is that makes you tick.
He does remind that actually it wasn't my fault that I went down the wrong path; it's not many of our faults that we do this. "No one teaches you how to live" is what I recall him saying. They'll teach you how to get a job, they'll teach you about the things that you need for that job, but no one teaches you how to live. He did see at that time - this is now going back a few years, but he did see a move from the cubicle to the working in the outdoors, because all you need is an internet connection and access to these tools that we use, especially with what we do.
He also reminded us that you don't have to be young... You can be young or old to make these life changes, as long as you find something you enjoy, plus something that you're good at, plus that it pays well... Because he said that if you don't meet all three of those criteria, then it doesn't quite work.
For example, if you do something you love but no one pays you for it, you're going to go broke, so you do have to have a minimum monthly income to keep yourself going. He talks about what is your What - something that you can identify that's in your DNA, something that has been chosen for you, rather than you choosing it.
So you 1) find what it is that makes you tick, what is your What, 2) the vehicle that you want to share your gift with to the world; for us it's obviously apps, but it could be any kind of technology or anything. And 3) a clear sense of what type of people you want to serve, and he talks about serving those people.
So that is episode 62 with Steve Olsher - a wonderful episode. It certainly makes it into the top 15 of the biggest app entrepreneurial and life lessons that I've learned from the last 500 episodes. That was Steve Olsher.
Next in this series of 15 of the biggest app entrepreneurial and life lessons from the last 500 episodes of the App Guy Podcast is - again, you'll have to go back to The App Guy Podcast Archive Part 1, and go to episode 64. This is with Jerrod Sessler. What a great episode this was! He is an ex-NASCAR driver, the founder of HomeTask. He talked about at the age of four telling his mom that he wanted to be a NASCAR driver. This is really fascinating, because I'm sure a lot of the appster tribe listening right now - you did have these dreams as a kid, like Gerard; he actually then realized his dream, even though he dreamt of it at a very young age.
He reminds us of the importance that dreaming can have for us. If you think about it, how many of us dream of a big hit? How many of us have come into the whole world of app entrepreneurialism and app startups and technology startups because we've dreamt the things that we may achieve. So a very inspiring episode... He talks a lot about spending your younger years dreaming, and it's only until you get older that reality starts to kick in... And you follow reality, rather than the dreams you had as a kid.
He does go through kids' dreaming and the fact that we do live in a culture that tells us it's impossible -- and I love the story that Gerard comes out with... He talks about the fact that often when we are young we have a dream, and we put a lot of the memorabilia of those dreams into a shoebox. That shoebox then goes with us around in life, but it remains unfulfilled. We take the shoebox to our new homes, it goes up there on the mantelpiece, he says, we sometimes open it and say "Oh, maybe it's time to start to realize some of those dreams" and then we close the shoebox and it goes back, and then we just get back to reality.
What he says is it's important to dream, important to invent something or important to change the world. It is amazing... Human beings - and what he says is very inspirational - are amazing in terms of what they can achieve if they put their mind to it. And you can do the same - if you put your mind to it, it is amazing what you can achieve. So that's Jerrod Sessler, and that's certainly made it into 15 of these biggest app entrepreneurial and life lessons from the last 500 episodes of The App Guy Podcast. Do go back, listen to that episode.
The next one, number three - again, these are in no particular order other than the date that they first aired, so it's not in an order of importance or order of my favorites... It's just 15 episodes that I picked that are the biggest app entrepreneurial and life lessons that I've learned from the last 500 episodes of The App Guy Podcast.
This is episode 70 - incredibly inspirational. Remember, these episodes have really kept me going. Meeting these people, talking to these app entrepreneurs, these tech startup founders, these inspirational individuals - these people have really kept me going and kept me inspired to keep delivering this content to you. So number three in 15 of these biggest app entrepreneurial and life lessons from the last 500 episodes of The App Guy Podcast is episode 70, with Syed Balkhi. Syed is truly an amazing individual, because he is the creator of WPBeginner, having worked with the founder of WordPress. He is the creator of List25, co-founder of that, and OptinMonster - those were the three big things that he had achieved.
Now, List25 was an idea that he had, and at the time that I interviewed him, he had been responsible for videos that had 120 million views. He's been featured in The New York Times, Wired, Yahoo! and Mashable, Business Insider and a lot more. He's got a fascinating story.
Now, why I picked out Syed Balkhi for these 15 biggest app entrepreneurial and life lessons is that it's really his story. If you often doubt what you can do in the tech space or what you can do with your own life, then you want to try putting yourself in the shoes of Syed. Now, he moved from Pakistan to the U.S.A. at a very young age - I think he was about 11 or 12 - and it was just after 9/11. So moving from Pakistan to the U.S.A. right after 9/11... It was a time of high tension, and he couldn't speak much English, and he had to school and face a lot of racism and face a lot of struggle. So what he did is he fell into the internet, and he would find that he would be playing online games, he would wake up in the middle of the night and take care of his virtual pets. At this age, his good friend said to him, "Look, why are you waking up and doing this stuff, taking care of these virtual pets? Why don't you trade domain names? You can make some money."
So instead of waking up and wasting his time, what Syed was doing was he was waking up and starting to trade domain names. Now, this was at a very young age that he starts to make money.
This is a cool story - he became one of the coolest kids. He went from this kid that suffered a lot of racism and a lot of disadvantage, and in school, he became one of the coolest kids because he learned how to build a proxy which would help kids in his school get around the school firewall. So he would meet up in the library and they would all then play these different games, and he would be considered the cool kid.
He went on to continue to poke, prod... Curious to all these different things online, just from a curious mind. The big breakout was working with the founder of WordPress. Then he realized that a lot of people needed help getting their WordPress sites up, so he created WPBeginner. That went on to huge success.
The second thing is that then he was on a trip to London (or somewhere in the U.K.). He loved castles and decided to put together a list of the 25 things to do when visiting castles, and he then elaborated that to just List 25. List 25 went on at the time to get 120 million views on YouTube. This was several years ago.
Then the final thing that he was doing at the time of recording this is he was doing OptinMonster, and working with some of the biggest names online. So if you want to be inspired, go back and listen to Syed Balkhi, episode 70. He certainly is an inspiration and definitely one of the biggest app entrepreneurial and life lessons that I've learned from, in terms of the last 500 episodes of The App Guy Podcast.
Let's move on then to number 4. Number 4 of the 15 of the biggest app entrepreneurial and life lessons from the last 500 episodes of The App Guy Podcast - this is the guy who inspired me to start the podcast. I managed to interview John Lee Dumas, a very busy man. He has a podcast called Entrepreneur On Fire, and it was a podcast that I was listening to whilst I was living in Dubai, on one of these mini-retirements that I take.
He was great to interview because it's just so cool when you interview the guy that has inspired you to start something. He certainly inspired me to start the podcast. Now, the great things that come out from John in the episode - which is why it's worth listening to - is that he talks about impostor syndrome. I wonder how many of us do sit back and think "I'm not worthy. I can't possibly do this. I'm not an expert, I don't have the credibility, I don't have the..." -- there's always an obstacle on why you can't do something, why you can't realize your dreams, why you can't realize your passions and follow something you want to do.
So we talk about overcoming the impostor syndrome, but more importantly, we talk about the art of building an audience. Of course, in the app world, we often put apps in the app store, we often build tech startups or whatever the technology is, and put the stuff out there and hope the quality of the product is enough... But there's an importance about building an audience, and he talks about how to build credibility and authority in the space. He does share a lot of success and a lot of failure stories in his podcast.
The importance of building an audience - let's go back to that because that was the big theme going through the entire episode. He said that if you think about it, when you have an audience, rather than build an app, put it out there and realize it's going to be a flop, what you can do is you can take the audience along with you. First of all, you can ask them what it is that they need, what their big challenges are, what problems they are facing with whatever the niche is... Then you can build a minimum viable product and then distribute to them a solution for the challenges that they face. That solution typically is in the form of some piece of software or an app. If you do it that way, you are building something that has already made an audience.
That's a very valuable lesson to a lot of us who are trying to carve out a living by doing tech startups and apps. So that's one episode that goes into my top 15. Now, I should have mentioned that this episode - episode 110, with John Lee Dumas of Entrepreneur On Fire - you do need to go to The App Guy Podcast Archive 2.
Number 5 in the 15 of the biggest app entrepreneurial and life lessons from the last 500 episodes of The App Guy Podcast is my chat with Hal Elrod. This will be in The App Guy Podcast Archive 2. Hal Elrod is the author of The Morning Miracle. He is also a keynote speaker, he's a number one bestselling author, he is one of America's top success coaches; he was a national champion sales manager, he's a record-breaking sales rep, he ran an ultra-marathon, and the biggest thing that I learned from Hal - a lot of us have great ordeals to overcome with our journeys. Now, Hal had the biggest ordeal. He had two massive failures, hitting rock bottom. His first was just truly inspirational, he overcame this... He was hit by a drunk driver and he was thrown to the side of the road, blood everywhere, and he was clinically dead for six minutes. And yet, he was brought back to life, and the doctors said he would never walk again.
Imagine that - you not only have been clinically diagnosed as dying for six minutes but also you have been told by doctors that it's impossible for you to walk again. Now, not only did he walk in the next several weeks, he started training for a marathon, and has since run a marathon. So whatever obstacles you have in front of you, there's no bigger obstacle than not being able to walk and then having to face that future.
He went on to become a very big success coach, and then he hit his second rock bottom. He says that his second rock bottom was actually tougher than his first, which seems quite astounding who us who haven't died for six minutes... He reached the second rock bottom being the failure of his business. At the time, he wasn't really particularly in a good place - I think it was 2008-2008, obviously the U.S. had gone through a big crash in the economy, and his business failed; he couldn't pay the bills anymore.
He went through this rock bottom and it was a friend or a mentor of his that helped him get out, simply through exercise. Of course, if you've been following my newsletter, you would have seen my results from my recent exercising; I'm working out with the personal coach to Hugh Jackman. That's made a big impact in my life, so I know the importance of exercise, so I can really resonate with what he's talking about here in episode 142. By the way, if you're not on my newsletter, you should go and sign up. You can easily sign up by going to TheAppGuy.co, and just look at where it says "Free Updates" or "Sign Up", and there's a little picture of an e-mail, and you can get access to my newsletter... And see the results of what I've been doing in terms of working out with Hugh Jackman's personal coach.
Hal did talk about in this episode that it's important to dedicate time to the things that successful people do, which is 1) wake up early, and have a very important morning ritual. 2) He talks about these "life-S.A.V.E.R.S." (Silence, Affirmation, Visualization, Exercise, Reading and Scribbling). You can always go and buy the book, The Morning Miracle, or certainly, he does give a lot away in episode 142 of The App Guy Podcast.
Let's move on then to number 6 in 15 of the biggest app entrepreneurial and life lessons from the last 500 episodes of The App Guy Podcast. Who can believe 500 episodes...? Alright, I want to refer back to episode 164. You can find this by going to The App Guy Podcast Archive 2. This is with Christophe de Courson. Now, I will warn you, his English is not particularly great, but what we learn from Christophe in this episode -- again, if you want inspiration, here's a guy working with one other individual in a very small startup, with no money. They were able to achieve over one million downloads in less than 50 days.
Christophe is the CEO of PeeeM, which is a mobile app that lets you share any type of file and any size over the internet. It's a great episode to learn about successful app launches, and you can certainly apply his success to any app launches that you may have going forward. In terms of the launch, he actually puts it down to a little bit of luck, but also the features within the app were very viral. But I think the most important thing that we learn from his app launch -- and his app launch went on to become at least the number one in a lot of Middle Eastern countries... I guess that's because of the need to share data over a new app.
He puts a lot of his success down to launching at the right time. Now, his app is in a way useful for previous Blackberry users. If you remember, the BB10 came out to very bad reviews, and they had promised to launch an app on the App Store, and they delayed by three months. He launched at the time when Blackberry was supposed to launch their app. Many of the people then came looking for that launch, and stumbled across his app. The importance of timing in terms of finding the right time, and also capitalizing on the failures of some of the bigger companies to commit to their launch cycle. So a lot of great information going through with Christophe de Courson. That's episode 164.
Seven in this list of 15 of the biggest app entrepreneurial and life lessons from the last 500 episodes of The App Guy Podcast is with episode 188 - Paul Myers. Again, go to The App Guy Podcast Archive 2, and it's episode 188. Just to remind you, if you can't find that, do search "Paul Kemp". For some reason, if you search "app" it's a little bit hard to find, but if you search "Paul Kemp" you'll see all the stuff I do and you'll see The App Guy Podcast archives, and that's Archive 2, episode 188.
It was actually one of the most interesting and funny episodes I've had. I really enjoyed my chat with Paul. A straight-talking Brit, and full of just genuine, good information. At the time, Paul was a British author, a businessman... It was actually for a record producer, and the CEO and founding pioneer of a music store called Wippit. He's a very busy entrepreneur. He also managed to build a company called BAAPZ, and built at the time the biggest independent podcast production company called Playback Media. So a lot of different things...
Now, what we talk about initially is his app building business, BAAPZ, and the fact that he managed to build apps - one for his company and one for the clients. What he did is he actually goes through the story of acquiring a team from Melbourne who were, at the time, building Facebook apps; he managed to transition over to iOS apps.
He had this team, and they developed one app for themselves and one app for the clients. It was a good way to keep the developers interested in these side projects. They managed to build an app for themselves that became incredibly popular. It was a London Tube map app, and they got three million downloads. He talks actually quite in depth -- one of the few episodes we talk in depth about advertising on the App Store in your apps. He gives some very good examples of when to include ads in your apps, what number of downloads you should have to include ads, and the importance of then sometimes switching to interstitial ads, rather than straight banner ads.
We also the talk about his project at the time, which was a dating app called BootyShake. The initial test phase of the launch was getting 50k users in the first few days. Great episode, you'll learn a lot from Paul, and that is episode 188 of the archives part 2.
We continue the journey with 15 of the biggest app entrepreneurial and life lessons from the last 500 episodes of The App Guy Podcast - we're moving on to The App Guy Podcast Archive 3, where this is at episode 200 through to 300. What I want to pick out here is number 8 on the list. Number 8 of 15 of the biggest app entrepreneurial and life lessons is an interview with Anton Lopyrev.
Anton Lopyrev is actually the founder and CEO of an app that no longer exists, but it was massive. It was called Umano. I had several thousand audio listens every episode that I put on Umano; they gave me a feature. It was a huge app, and it was actually bought out by Dropbox.
It's interesting to go through the story that Anton gives us just before the timing of being bought out. He was on the verge of a deal with Dropbox. If you want to listen to an episode where a founder has actually done something very successful -- he's got a huge, ambitious goal that he talks about, which was to become the largest audio content provider in the world, that was his aim. It's wonderful, because he does talk about starting small, and understanding users is the most important thing.
Did you realize before he got funding he was extremely small, in that Umano only had 200 users? Now, for anyone out there who is struggling to get funding, this would really inspire you because, with only 200 users, Anton was able to get funding, and he was featured by Apple. It goes to show that it's not just the initial download numbers, it's the story that you can tell to investors. Also, Apple does look at some of the better apps, irrespective of just pure downloads.
A very inspirational story there from Anton Lopyrev. He's number 8 on our list of the top 15 episodes of The App Guy Podcast.
Let's move on to number 9. Number 9, 15 of the biggest app entrepreneurial and life lessons from the last 500 episodes of The App Guy Podcast, it's episode 245 with Bram Kanstein. Go back to archives part 3, listen to this episode and get inspired, because I actually chatted to Bram ahead of the curve. He was in the process of building something called Startup Stash, which is highly relevant to us. It was nice to get him before it took off.
He talked to me about the launch, and I knew about this Startup Stash before it went live. Now, when he launched on Product Hunt -- he actually does go through the process of how it became the number one, and still is to this day at the time of recording, still the number one hit on the massive site that's known as Product Hunt... Still the number one product/website on there. It's got several thousand upvotes from the community.
Startup Stash has gone on to get loads of copycats. In fact, yours truly here did copycat the idea, and I remember working with a good friend of mine, Chris Beshore, to start up something called iOSStack. We created that together and launched that, and it got something like 20,000 views over a few days, and was a really big hit on Product Hunt.
So it was nice to get inspired by Bram, but it's interesting to go through because Bram does actually do a lot of good deeds. He was one of the guests that did hunt me in the past, and hunt this podcast show, and I'm sure like many of you listening may have even come from seeing the podcast on Product Hunt, where it got several hundred upvotes. So a great episode - episode 245, with Bram Kanstein, who actually later went on to go and work for Product Hunt, and then since quit and started his own stuff... So a wonderful, insightful chat with Bram.
Let's move on to number 10 of the 15 of the biggest app entrepreneurial and life lessons from the last 500 episodes of The App Guy Podcast. We're getting close to number 15, but this is number 10. Number 10 is Adam Wulf. I wanted to pick out this because I was going through a phase back at the time - it was a couple years ago now - where I started another podcast that was well received, called App Store Launch Stories. As a result, I was really into trying to find creators and app entrepreneurs that could talk about launches.
Adam was the creator of apps such as Loose Leaf and Remotely. He at the time had written an incredibly insightful launch strategy and a guide to launching apps. He talks a lot about it... It was actually a 7-step process on how to launch apps, and we went through every single step in this episode, so well worth listening to if you are in the process of launching an app.
He talks about some books that inspired him, such as Trust Me, I'm Lying, and a book called Traction, which is also another past episode of The App Guy podcast. He talks about making sure that you define the problem and define the audience prior to actually building the app, which is important. And also prototyping - we talk a lot about prototyping. With prototyping, it's important not to miss the big picture, and are you tackling the wrong problem?
A lot of the entrepreneurs I speak to -- and that's why we talk about pivoting so much on this show... You actually are tackling the wrong problem and you're not validating your idea ahead of time. Great tips, worthwhile listening to and going through these tips if you are in the process of having to launch an app, or even build an app and you're starting from scratch.
That's episode 333 in Archives Part 4, which is episode 301 through to 399. You'll find there episode 333 with Adam Wulf, a wonderful episode. Thank you, Adam. I do still stay in touch with many of these guests, and I'm pretty sure Adam will be listening.
The next one is actually the following episodes - I had a spate of wonderful episodes. This is number 11 in the 15 of the biggest app entrepreneurial and life lessons from the last 500 episodes of The App Guy Podcast, the countdown that we're doing. Number 11 is episode 334 with my great friend, Andreas Kambanis.
We had a great chat where we talked about one of his biggest successes, one of the biggest successes I've been involved with, which is how a $2.99 app became a number two hit on the App Store. Andreas talks in detail about the exact strategy; a big part of it was Product Hunt, where I got involved, and Reddit as well, Instagram... He talks about the success of the promotion...
We really do dissect a successful launch, so if you want to see, pick up your iPhone now and have a look - Fit Men Cook is still in the charts. If you look into the Health & Fitness or the Food category you'll see Fit Men Cook is still there, roaming high. It was a wonderful launch, and that's why we talk about a successful launch as very important in the whole process.
Moving on, number 12 in the 15 of the biggest app entrepreneurial and life lessons from the last 500 episodes of The App Guy Podcast is episode 372, a chat with John Bradford, who is the co-founder of Tech.eu and F6S, and also he recently departed as the MD of Techstars, which is an accelerator/incubator that helps entrepreneurs and startups. We've had many Techstars companies come on this show in the past - I think actually if you search "Techstars" on my website, you'll see a whole series of different Techstar interviews we've done.
It was nice to have the ex-MD, so we can talk about his insights and his knowledge. A very, very busy guy, but also completely smart and happy to give advice. He talks about giving tips to startup founders. What types of tips? I mean, the whole episode is full of these wonderful quotes, very memorable quotes. I'm thinking about the quote that he said, which is "If you want money, ask for advice, and if you want advice, ask for money."
It's interesting that this man has so many different quotes... Maybe that's part of his Irish heritage. He talks about big trends in this episode as well, and it really got me involved in Blockchain, which is obviously the technology that runs Bitcoin. It was nice to hear from him that actually that's one of the areas he sees growing. This was just under two years ago now, so it's still highly relevant and definitely worth listening to. That is episode 372. If you go back to Archives Part 4, you'll be able to hear this.
We're going to move forward now, we're on the final three of the countdown to the 15 of the biggest app entrepreneurial and life lessons from the last 500 episodes of The App Guy Podcast. There's so many really fascinating and interesting episodes... It was hard to choose, but what I wanted to do is choose episode 476, which is with Chino Lex. I loved my chat with Chino.
Let me give you some background to Chino. Chino is an app developer that went from a carpet cleaner to the top 1% of app developers, and he's got millions of downloads. If you want to know how hard it is and how many challenges you have to go through to be successful, then you've got to listen to this episode with a very young Chino Lex. He is the founder of tapTrax, but also he's created tons and tons of apps. At the time we recorded it was about 166 apps, of which 50 were top-ranking in their category.
He's got over 5 million users, and guess how much he spends in marketing? Zero dollars. It's all very helpful advice, and just basically an inspiring story. If you're listening to this and you're thinking about your future, if you're wondering what to do after quitting college, you want to listen to this.
Chino talks about his story, he talks about he actually connected with a very smart, high-profile entrepreneur in the app world and gives you some advice on how to do the same. Also, he talks about the very difficult decision that he had to start an app company, and he actually chose to go down this route rather than attend the very high profile Princeton, a top 13 university in America. He ended up making this decision, his first app failed, and the talks about the story of being in the shower, just crying, because he thinks he's made the wrong decision.
He managed to overcome that and build another 40 apps, and he just kept going and going and doing. All those apps were failures, until then after his life crisis he carried on and made a guide. It was the first guide to CandyCrush, and it was a huge hit - it hit number 200 in the charts, a paid app. That then gave him the income that he required to carry on going.
It was a nice story to go through, how he went from a carpet cleaner to an app entrepreneur with very successful hits and millions of users. That's episode 476 with Chino Lex.
I'm going to give you now the penultimate -- and again, these are only in order of when I recorded them, they're not in order of my favorites. I just had to pull out 15 of the 500 episodes, which has been quite challenging, but here we go... 14 of the 15 of the biggest app entrepreneurial and life lessons from the last 500 episodes of The App Guy Podcast is an episode that I took six hours to edit; it took a lot of time. It's an episode with Rich Pleeth, and it's the story of the Million Dollar App Startup - that's episode 495. You'll have to just go to The App Guy Podcast and it should still be in the list of episodes.
I was really fascinated about putting this episode together. I wanted to go into the story and do some editing with music, and I'm really proud of how it turned out. The actual story is of Rich, who is an ex-Google employee. He talks about dreaming of his own startup... For anyone, if you listen to Rich talk, he should have been automatically successful because of all the different experience he had - ex-Google, he was involved in lots of different successful apps...
I think he was very instrumental in bringing Chrome to the millions of web users that we have - he was very instrumental in that. So a very successful background... He ended up raising about a million dollars in funding at the time for his app idea. I'm not going to give you the spoiler if you haven't listened to this episode, but definitely worth going through the story that I tell in this episode. That is episode 495 of The App Guy Podcast, which then brings me on to the 15th.
Number 15 out of 15 of the biggest app entrepreneurial and life lessons from the last 500 episodes of The App Guy Podcast. It's been enjoyable going through and trying to pick out these. I wanted to make sure that for all the new users that come along and find The App Guy Podcast, I wanted to make sure that you had a resource where you can actually pluck out some really good episodes. Because it must be daunting to be seeing 500 episodes and wondering which ones to start with first. Well, I recommend these. If any of these episodes have interested you, then go back and listen, and you'll get a good taste of the entrepreneurs and app people that we've had on this show.
Episode 514 is my final pick, it's with Jo Overline. He is incredibly successful. He built an app that had over 30 million downloads and was number one in 94 countries. Talk about success... Incredibly successful. Actually, he had so much press attention that he realized that the press were creating fake stories just to get headlines, so quite an interesting insight into how the press works.
His app was called Ugly Meter, and it has been extremely successful. It has really propelled him into app stardom. It seemed at the time that he was getting all this attention that everyone on the planet was trying to download this app. It was a number one hit, and he talks through that story, but the fact that it wasn't all plain sailing and it wasn't particularly strategized. It wasn't like this big blueprint of "Alright, we're going to have this successful app..."
What I learned from the story is that sometimes it does just take a bit of luck for you to actually get app success. We can do everything we possibly can, we can follow all this advice that you hear on my show and from other resources, but at the end of the day sometimes is just takes a little bit of luck, and it's wonderful to hear how this was perceived and a big hit with the press. And he does actually talk quite extensively about how to make your app a story, how to make it worthwhile for the press to write about it.
That's one of the big challenges I think we all have - you end up writing to the press, trying to get influencers to take notice of your apps, and they're inundated; they're getting several hundred e-mails a day, these top journalists, so what makes it special? Well, making it a story, making it controversial perhaps, making it interesting. Ultimately, at the end of the day, journalists do want to have lots of clicks, and they want something that's interesting to read - basically a story. This is the episode where you learn how important it is to create a story.
That is it, that is my final pick... 15 of the biggest app entrepreneurial and life lessons from the last 500 episodes of The App Guy Podcast. Thank you very much for listening to this. You can really greatly help me out if you do like the shows. If you have left me a review - great, thank you very much, but please do go and leave a review. I like five-star reviews... I do read all the reviews and I do take great inspiration from especially the 5-star reviews.
Also, if you haven't gone and subscribed to some of these archives, go and leave a review for some of the archive shows as well. That will help me out.
Finally then, I just wanted to take this moment to say thank you very much for listening to The App Guy Podcast, I'm totally grateful for your time. It's been interesting putting this list together.
If you are a new listener, welcome; there's a lot of great content, and this will help you become a realist, but also inspire you to carry on in the whole world of app entrepreneurialism. Do go back and listen to some of these past episodes. They are fascinating. There are all these entrepreneurs that we learn from; these startup founders are all fascinating individuals, and I absolutely guarantee that you will learn something new from every single episode that you listen to.
I've learned an enormous amount from these people that I've spoken to, and I hope you do, too. Thank you very much for listening, and all the best.
