We've recently been negotiating a few potential partnerships with Hong Kong companies as well as Silicon Valley companies. Negotiations with Silicon Valley are usually smooth - I guess it's because they're used to dealing with tech companies anyway and so it's business as usual for them. But when we negotiated with local (i.e. Hong Kong) companies I've found they'd often try to laugh at our notion:
"We're an American cultured company"
"Hey, that's just marketing gimmick, it means nothing to us."
The response is understandable given the local business culture. But whenever I hear this kind of rebuff, I always sigh to myself, "alright, there's a lot of ground we need to cover in this meeting."
Results Oriented
You can know all the venture capitalists in Silicon Valley, talk to them until your face turn blue, and yet you won't get any funding. Some antisocial hacker in a basement somewhere, who never cared about socializing apart from DEFCON or 2600's IRC channel, may get funded instead. (Note: antisocial does not mean he cannot communicate himself - (s)he may be a great writer and public speaker) What's the difference? Results. What results means here can be anything - it may be your cash flow; it may be your customer base size; it may be your superior technology; it may be your business model is really innovative. But the point is, you've GOT to have something, something different and powerful in your hands. The usual VC pitches may sound like nonsense to traditional businessmen. But when tech companies are funded by the larger VCs like Kleiner Perkins, these is most often a good reason.
Here at Think Bulbs it doesn't matter that you're a good friend of mine, or Alvin, or Michael - if you're unable to deliver results, you'll be fired. Whenever we have our weekly company meeting the focus is always on the tasks and results - what's been done, what's to be done, is the task feasible, schedule, what's our competitor doing, is the new app a threat to us, how to negate their competitive advantage (if any). The focus is so laser sharp it feels like you're doing maths.
And the market response speaks for our effort - within the few months since Puri! was debuted, everyone was too busy (I'm also working at FCKeditor, all other people are students or have a full time job) to do any serious marketing operation (no promo video!) but we still managed to grab more than 500,000 users worldwide - this is not a fake number. Our iPhone app stayed on the #1 of Photography in a good number of countries for 2 months - we haven't updated Puri! v1.1 for a long time and the customers just keep coming in. Even to this day I can still give you a laundry list of countries where we're still firmly planted within the top 10, and then we're still the #1 in some countries like Mexico. And then for 2 weeks or more we've been within the top 5 of all free apps in a number of countries/localities like Hong Kong and Taiwan. Still don't believe it? Ask Google, search for "Puri! Lite", look at all the blog entries from people taking photos with Puri! and Puri! Lite and praising us. That, my friend, is results.
If you intend to propose a deal to us we can give you Apple's download statistics reports to prove it. And if you doubt our statistics are fabricated, feel free to verify it with Apple.
Quality, as in Doing it the Right Way
If you're not aware of it, software contractors and developers are often paid very cheaply in Hong Kong, even cheaper in mainland China. The tradeoff for the cheap prices, is quality. Good people don't want to work on cheap things, and even if you've somehow got someone good with no independent thought (there are, unfortunately, quite a number of them) - it isn't worth the time to do things correctly for cheap projects. The result? Things that "work" but fall apart at the slightest glance.
And then you have a very large number of people who totally don't know how to do things (let alone doing things correctly), but are passing off as programmers. But that's another story.
At Think Bulbs, however, we strive to do things the right way. If a bug is found (happens a lot), we take time to find out the actual reason (e.g. is it a design flaw? a logic bug? or simply a typo?) and fix it. If the bug has to be fixed by a structural change, then so be it. Unless it's extremely urgent, we don't use hacks to fix bugs. On the graphics front, you'll find that our frames and stamps are actually of pretty high quality, and the strokes you draw in Puri! 1.1 are anti-aliased - no jagged edges! If you compare our app to other photo sticker apps in App Store you'll find that many other apps have really ugly frames and icons - their designs often just look wrong to begin with, and even worse, even their own preset graphics contain jagged edges! Horrible.
Such quality differences are very easily noticeable by your users. And, contrary to what many sales and marketing people may think, users in the App Store are actually quite smart because of the free flow of information (e.g. comments, and the "what users also buy" field). So if you have a poor quality product, put it up in App Store, it'll simply be free advertisement for the higher quality app - your potential customers will simply click on one of those "what users also buy" entries and notice the other product has better ratings. Puri! Lite stayed on the top spot for so long, because of quality. And as I've said in one of the negotiations this week - it doesn't matter that your app goes to the top 10, what's important is making it STAY there.
Passion
Doing things the right way, is actually a boring task. Imagine you have an application that almost works, but you've made a design flaw in the beginning so that 1% of it isn't working - would you choose to fix it with a hack or change the whole design and fix it from the source? Most people would choose to fix it with a hack and release it right away, but with hidden costs when he goes further into the application's development, and probably causing more bugs to appear.
To write a software "the right way", you actually have to spend a lot of time NOT writing code. This is true for the design phase - you have to spend a lot of time imagining how your software is going to work and how it may break. It is also true for implementation and debugging - when something wrong happens, you have to spend a lot of time to investigate why the bug is happening, instead of using hacks to cover it up.
Somebody who went into software development just for the money (the fast money doesn't exist anymore - probably a good thing), will almost certainly not bother with these troubles. The result? Software that breaks at the slightest glance. At Think Bulbs, our development team actually care about our software. We don't see it as just a way to make a tidy profit, we take our creations as something we love. "Cookies need love like everything does" - so does software. And this is why we can have quality without me shouting for it until my throat sores - we just take it as the natural thing to have.
And that's also why I'm writing this blog entry early in the morning, despite the fact I'm feeling sick right now.
0 comments:
Post a Comment