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Created a mobile app development studio

A topic related to SAAS or APPs

Joaki

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Good morning everybody,

I joined the forum sometime early 2015 at 18 years old with no specific skills but a ton of ambition and drive to become absolutely great.

The past two years have been the best and most challenging of all. I've gone from knowing absolutely nothing about programming to managing business intelligence tools for a billion dollar company, developing in over 5 different languages, and self teaching mobile development to the extent of being able to create my own development studio to provide the service to others.

I've been a long time lurker but I definitely feel that I'm in a position to bring value to other people who may want to get into mobile development but have no idea how.

When you start out, there's really so much to learn that sometimes uncovering that can scare you away from even starting. I remember thinking that there were so many programmers out there who did mobile development that if I started now I would never catch up... luckily- I knew this was my brain wanting to remain in the comfort zone and kept pushing.

The initial learning curve is very steep, but after pushing through and really putting in the work... it genuinely feels like the sky's the limit.

Just over the past 4 months, I put in over 1000 hours of development into what is the most challenging project I've ever started. I had an idea for a social media app based around being able to share your most memorable moment once a day. Very simply- you get to share something once a day and you can't again until 12:00 AM. It's called "one - a moment a day" and was released 2 days ago. If anybody wants to take a look - you can download it by searching "joaki" in the iPhone app store (apple store indexing is bad for first couple of days)... I would love to hear your feedback..

With all of that being said... if anybody has any questions about the mobile app we just released or mobile development in general. I would love to give you my input!
 
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Scot

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This thread definitely caught my attention. I've been struggling with finding a reliable app developer for my own business so I can tell you one thing right off the bat. App developers are hard to find and your skill set is in HUGE demand.

The first thing I thought about after reading your story was this thread.

How I became a millionaire at 19

Are you doing any freelancing on development? Having been looking for a developer I know that there's good money in doing a job for someone else. Don't be afraid to take on freelance in your spare time from building your own app.


Good luck!
 

Joaki

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This thread definitely caught my attention. I've been struggling with finding a reliable app developer for my own business so I can tell you one thing right off the bat. App developers are hard to find and your skill set is in HUGE demand.

The first thing I thought about after reading your story was this thread.

How I became a millionaire at 19

Are you doing any freelancing on development? Having been looking for a developer I know that there's good money in doing a job for someone else. Don't be afraid to take on freelance in your spare time from building your own app.


Good luck!

Scott, thanks so much for your reply man.

The development studio that I created does exactly that!

We develop and manage mobile apps for clients who either have an idea or an existing app they want to add features to.

We've had 2 clients and done a magnificient job on their apps. One of them being a social app for the cannabis community with over 250k users and a fitness app.

On top of developing and managing other peoples applications, we also create our own... this being the app i mentioned above.

I would love to be able to bring you value man I can share my site through message if you'd like to check it out!(not sure if posting here is against forum rules)

Thanks so much for your time I really appreciate your input!!
 

Scot

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Scott, thanks so much for your reply man.

The development studio that I created does exactly that!

We develop and manage mobile apps for clients who either have an idea or an existing app they want to add features to.

We've had 2 clients and done a magnificient job on their apps. One of them being a social app for the cannabis community with over 250k users and a fitness app.

On top of developing and managing other peoples applications, we also create our own... this being the app i mentioned above.

I would love to be able to bring you value man I can share my site through message if you'd like to check it out!(not sure if posting here is against forum rules)

Thanks so much for your time I really appreciate your input!!


Very cool. Glad to see you're using your skills to help others.

App development firms definitely have the ability to be fast lane.
 
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dave773

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Hey joaquin welcome and thanks for this thread

I got a few questions for you. How did you land a billion dollar client / how did you land your first client?

Are you looking to scale this? And how?

And lastly, my cousin just spent 2years learning software development and his opinion as well as a few others is that the mobile app industry is dieing..What are your thoughts on this?

While i agree with scot that it is hard to find a good developer. (I've had terrible experiences with indian developers.) My bias is that this is only the case if you hire someone from india on a budget.

Congratulation on your success as well :)
 

Joaki

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Hey @Joaquin glad to see another dev on the forum :)
Hey! What do you develop for??

Hey joaquin welcome and thanks for this thread

I got a few questions for you. How did you land a billion dollar client / how did you land your first client?

Are you looking to scale this? And how?

And lastly, my cousin just spent 2years learning software development and his opinion as well as a few others is that the mobile app industry is dieing..What are your thoughts on this?

While i agree with scot that it is hard to find a good developer. (I've had terrible experiences with indian developers.) My bias is that this is only the case if you hire someone from india on a budget.

Congratulation on your success as well :)

Hey Dave,

Thanks for your reply.

The billion dollar company isn't a client in connection with my mobile development. I manage that companies business intelligence and analytics needs 3 days week. Everything from creating processes that extract all their sales data and transfer it to a database designed to run specific queries as fast as possible to creating all types of reports that allow them to answer all their business questions. Imagine a slowlane job except I get to choose my schedule and have an extreme amount of leverage to do anything.

Landing my first mobile development client was actually quiet funny. I knew that it would be more difficult to persuade someone to buy the service if I had done no previous work as opposed to having atleast something in my portfolio. So, I created a very simple and clean fitness app. I wasn't fully devoted to providing the service to others at the time but I knew it would only benefit. Afterwards, I started doing everything possible to find a client while actually learning more advanced mobile development that would give me the skills to make any type of app. I would post on craiglist, every single app and place that you could think of where there was a slight possibility of getting a client (ie. 5mile, freelancer, ect).. all while focusing all of my time to learning as much as possible.

About a week after posting on craiglist as the last place, I got a call from what would be my biggest client and we went from there. Their entire app was written in Objective C and I had been learning Swift the whole time so after getting off the phone with them I bought a $10 book on Objective C for Swift developers and began learning that.... they didn't even feel a bump. They've since migrated to a full in house team but still outsource some development to us periodically.

About your cousin.. If the 2 years were used wisely... then he's probably extremely good. I didn't know how to program 2 and a half years ago and the things I'm able to build with my current skill set go from extreme to extreme. It's truly incredible what compounding knowledge through hours and hours of mastering your craft can do.

As far as the mobile app industry dying... I'm not entirely sure what that means. The mobile app industry has seen overall app usage up 11 percent year over year with the previous year (2016) seeing a 69% increase in actual time spent in app compared to 2015. I think there's tons of opportunity for quality apps to those who are willing to put in the work and appropriately pivot if required. For me, I'm selling shovels as well as digging for gold... reason being why we not only develop mobile apps for clients but create our own. It's worked out well!
 
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dave773

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++Repped . I always love to hear people's first success (e.g. first client, first stepping stone). I feel like this is one the best feelings even though I have not felt it in a while!

My cousin is decent but mostly learnt foundations to coding (through University). He focuses more on cloud but he said it would not take much to learn mobile app development if he wanted to. He is currently a slowlaner but has had many failed businesses even more than me but due to poor execution. I am thinking about telling him to buy TMF but don't want to depress him yet as he is excited about his new job lol.

The only small piece of advice I can give you (from my mistakes) is keep focusing on the execution and don't follow other people's 'success path'. Pave your own. Good luck :)
 

Joaki

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++Repped . I always love to hear people's first success (e.g. first client, first stepping stone). I feel like this is one the best feelings even though I have not felt it in a while!

My cousin is decent but mostly learnt foundations to coding (through University). He focuses more on cloud but he said it would not take much to learn mobile app development if he wanted to. He is currently a slowlaner but has had many failed businesses even more than me but due to poor execution. I am thinking about telling him to buy TMF but don't want to depress him yet as he is excited about his new job lol.

The only small piece of advice I can give you (from my mistakes) is keep focusing on the execution and don't follow other people's 'success path'. Pave your own. Good luck :)

Ha! thank you man, it means a lot.

You should definitely gift him TMF .. I think it would only help. He will either read it and take ideas from which he will build on for all his future businesses or will read it and not do anything. The possibility of it being the first one is enough for you to show him. I've told a lot of my friends about TMF and some have really derived value from it. But that's all I do... tell them about it... I don't insist or push them. If they want to get better then they will...
 

Waspy

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Just checked out the app, looks well designed.

I bailed when i had to enter my phone number. Is this a necessary step? Feels like it might put some early adopters off
 

Joaki

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Just checked out the app, looks well designed.

I bailed when i had to enter my phone number. Is this a necessary step? Feels like it might put some early adopters off

Waspy, thanks for taking a look!

Confirming phone numbers is a step that will later allow friends to add each other from their contacts. The benefits and ease of connecting users through their contacts far outweighs the slight inconvenience of the confirmation - definitely something we had to weigh out. Nevertheless, I really appreciate your feedback!
 

Figol

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Hi Joaki!

I checked your app on iPhone. As iOS dev I hope to give you valuable feedback. All three about sign up:
1) I couldn't click 'Next' after entering my 9-digit phone number ('Next' is grayed out). It becomes available after entering 10th digit. You app is not available to countries where phone numbers are different than 10-digit format.
2) Choosing international phone number country code - consider adding search to the tableview, or something else to make it easier to an user. Scrolling down through such long list is bad user experience. Unless user is from Afganistan :p
3) During next attempt to sign up I needed to change email and username to proceed, but first sign up was not succesfull. Seems like user was created anyway.

Good luck!
 
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LiveEntrepreneur

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Good morning everybody,

I joined the forum sometime early 2015 at 18 years old with no specific skills but a ton of ambition and drive to become absolutely great.

The past two years have been the best and most challenging of all. I've gone from knowing absolutely nothing about programming to managing business intelligence tools for a billion dollar company, developing in over 5 different languages, and self teaching mobile development to the extent of being able to create my own development studio to provide the service to others.

I've been a long time lurker but I definitely feel that I'm in a position to bring value to other people who may want to get into mobile development but have no idea how.

When you start out, there's really so much to learn that sometimes uncovering that can scare you away from even starting. I remember thinking that there were so many programmers out there who did mobile development that if I started now I would never catch up... luckily- I knew this was my brain wanting to remain in the comfort zone and kept pushing.

The initial learning curve is very steep, but after pushing through and really putting in the work... it genuinely feels like the sky's the limit.

Just over the past 4 months, I put in over 1000 hours of development into what is the most challenging project I've ever started. I had an idea for a social media app based around being able to share your most memorable moment once a day. Very simply- you get to share something once a day and you can't again until 12:00 AM. It's called "one - a moment a day" and was released 2 days ago. If anybody wants to take a look - you can download it by searching "joaki" in the iPhone app store (apple store indexing is bad for first couple of days)... I would love to hear your feedback..

With all of that being said... if anybody has any questions about the mobile app we just released or mobile development in general. I would love to give you my input!
Wow this seriously was an amazing read, I can't believe in 4 months you pulled that off its seriously amazing. I really want to beat my self up now lol. I wish you the best of luck.
 

Anand Mahajan

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Good morning everybody,

I joined the forum sometime early 2015 at 18 years old with no specific skills but a ton of ambition and drive to become absolutely great.

The past two years have been the best and most challenging of all. I've gone from knowing absolutely nothing about programming to managing business intelligence tools for a billion dollar company, developing in over 5 different languages, and self teaching mobile development to the extent of being able to create my own development studio to provide the service to others.

I've been a long time lurker but I definitely feel that I'm in a position to bring value to other people who may want to get into mobile development but have no idea how.

When you start out, there's really so much to learn that sometimes uncovering that can scare you away from even starting. I remember thinking that there were so many programmers out there who did mobile development that if I started now I would never catch up... luckily- I knew this was my brain wanting to remain in the comfort zone and kept pushing.

The initial learning curve is very steep, but after pushing through and really putting in the work... it genuinely feels like the sky's the limit.

Just over the past 4 months, I put in over 1000 hours of development into what is the most challenging project I've ever started. I had an idea for a social media app based around being able to share your most memorable moment once a day. Very simply- you get to share something once a day and you can't again until 12:00 AM. It's called "one - a moment a day" and was released 2 days ago. If anybody wants to take a look - you can download it by searching "joaki" in the iPhone app store (apple store indexing is bad for first couple of days)... I would love to hear your feedback..

With all of that being said... if anybody has any questions about the mobile app we just released or mobile development in general. I would love to give you my input!

Hi Joaki,

I'm glad that you did a lot on your own. Strong wills can never be destroyed by any failure. Developing an app maybe sounds like a coding thing but there are lots of passion and dedication needed. And did it buddy! I founded a company back in 2010 that helps clients to shape their own ideas in the form of apps. My company Sphinx Solutions is growing because I have strong determination.

Love to connect.

Thanks,
Anand
 

Anand Mahajan

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Being an entrepreneur and founder of a leading mobile app dev company, I completely understand your situation. I just love the fact that you didn't stop and keep doing self-learning. Life's learning curve should not be stopped rather this is the stepping stone to the success. Great read bud!
 
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