frankphilips

I'd like to call these marketers Growth Hackers. They're a different breed of hackers, and they're just as important as the engineers. A successful startup should have at least ONE growth hacker in the team for it to be successful.

The app development business is an extremely tough market to break into right now. There are two ways of approaching it.

A) Build a services company.

This can be lucrative if you need short-term cash. However be prepared to sell your ass off. Obtaining clients is NOT easy, with the amount of offshore competition.

B) Build products

Let me tell you right now that if your product sucks, this isn't worth the effort at all. Your app will drown in the sea of other apps. Do your research, focus on big markets, and figure out ways to make successful apps even better. If you put in quality time in building kick-ass products, this is the way to go.

Most importantly, try to figure out how to get the social component baked into the app. Take Draw Something for example..in order to play, you NEED to invite friends. This is genius, because it builds a viral component into the app. Oh by the way, give the app away for free and power it with in-app purchases. Only charge for an app if you've built up enough traction with a free app.

Overall, mobile app development is a hard business, and the smart move would be to spend as little as possible, and try to break even first, then reinvest.

While I do agree that the product link should be obvious on the blog page, I don't think it should be overly pervasive. A logo on the sidebar is more then enough. The main purpose of the blog is to write engaging content that correlates with your product. Startups should stop trying to use the blogs just to increase SEO rankings, rather focus on creating conversations and build relationships with potential customers and users.

I'm confident Zynga will succeed, and this is just a temporary setback. They are incredibly smart and have a solid business model. I don't think social games are going out of fashion any time soon, although I do think they are moving toward the mobile realm. Zynga also has an amazing track record of growing companies it acquires. After the purchase of Words with Friends from Newtoy for $53M, they doubled their daily active users in 6 months. I do think they may have to focus more of an effort on figuring out new avenues of driving revenue for the company. Because ultimately that's what investors are looking for.

I think it's mainly because of Paul Graham. He's a visionary and he's excellent at spotting awesome teams (even if their ideas suck). Nobody would have thought twice about Airbnb, but Paul saw something that other investors didn't see. He noticed how effectively the team worked together. He also knew they would pivot if they needed to. Having that type of discernment has allowed YC to find & fund all these amazing startups. His hunch with the Airbnb guys paid off considering the company is valued at over a billion now!

There's nothing wrong with using bootstrap to develop a quick prototype of your web app. However, I do agree with motoford in that there is no compelling reason to use your app. As a solo developer myself, why should I switch from a kick-ass, free, awesome project management tool like Asana to use buggr? Asana is built by Dustin Moskowitz (one of the co-founders of Facebook). How is your product better then theirs? Also, I might be more inclined to use it if you offered a free demo or a video tour rather then images. And no offense, but buggr sounds a bit like booger, and you got the lime-green header to go with it! I do like your concept though..just give me a reason to switch! :)

Sounds like a startup waiting to happen.

You might be right, but it's hard to tell. With Apple's visionary gone, I don't think we should be expecting any major innovation with future iPad releases. iPad 3 and the iPhone 4S were a big disappointment.