App Life Podcast

#42 - How We Onboard New Team Members

Sun, 25 Apr 2021 11:00:00 GMT

As your team grows, it's getting more important to ensure a smooth onboarding for your new team members. In this episode, we share the process we use at Simya.

We talk about

- What to do once the employment or freelance contract is signed
- The template we use to send out to all new hires
- A simple checklist that makes sure everyone is on the same page
- The importance of a good communication guideline
- The system we use to manage holidays and sick leaves
- Last but not least: How to offboard leaving team members

Resources mentioned:

- https://hr.my/ - Free HR management system

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#41 - How We Use GSuite For Our App Business

Sun, 18 Apr 2021 11:00:00 GMT

GSuite is a great portfolio of apps you can use to make your business more effective. In today's episode we talk about

- Why we started using GSuite
- What apps we use and how to use them most effectively
- Alternatives to GSuite
- Is it the right choice for you?
- Should you get the free legacy edition of GSuite?

Resources mentioned:
- Example of a GSuite legacy account provider: https://ggslegacy.net/
- Interesting GSuite competitor: https://www.zoho.com/one/

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#40 - Being Business Owner And Mom At The Same Time

Sun, 11 Apr 2021 11:00:00 GMT

What is it like to be a business owner and parent at the same time? Today, Khwan will talk about her own journey and how her life changed after the arrival of our little daughter Layla.

She talks about

- How she managed her work and recreation before becoming a parent
- What was her life like in the months before and after birth?
- When and how to return to the work life?
- How a baby changes your priorities and time management
- Is it even possible to run a business with a young child without outside support?

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#39 - Getting Things Done As A Business Owner

Sun, 04 Apr 2021 11:00:00 GMT

It's not always easy to manage our time effectively when you're a small business owner. In this episode, Simon talks about how he manages his daily tasks and how his system evolved over time.

Here's what you'll learn:

- How to manage the transition from developer to biz owner
- The benefits of the Getting Things Done method by David Allen
- How the method works - Inbox, Context, Weekly Reviews
- Some challenges in the practical application of GTD

Ressources mentioned:

David Allen - Getting Things Done: https://www.amazon.com/Getting-Things-Done-Stress-Free-Productivity/dp/0143126563

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#38 - Working Remotely - Is It Worth It?

Sun, 28 Mar 2021 11:00:00 GMT

Since Covid 19, remote work has become pretty much mainstream across companies of all sizes. At Simya, we've been working remotely for 5 years now.

In this episode, we talk about our experience with remote work, including

- Why did we start going remote in the first place?
- What are advantages and benefits remote work?
- What are some of the challenges and how to overcome them?
- How to communicate effectively when doing home office

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#37 - How To Use Affiliates To Promote Your App?

Sun, 21 Mar 2021 11:00:00 GMT

In the past year, we started driving traffic to our biggest app Ling by asking affiliates and users to promote our app. This works best if you have an affiliate program in place, so the influencers get rewarded by attracting paying customers.

In this episode, we share

- What's the idea behind affiliate programs, and why we started it

- How to implement an affiliate program in mobile apps and the web

- How to promote your program to drive traffic

- How the signup process works

Resources mentioned: https://www.osiaffiliate.com/

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#36 - How Do We Hire A Players?

Sun, 14 Mar 2021 11:00:00 GMT

Once your business grows, hiring probably becomes your most important task as a founder.

In this episode, we talk about

- When and how we started hiring

- How we gradually discovered a good hiring process

- Strategies on how to find, interview, and select people

- How to delegate parts of the process

Resources mentioned: Smart, Street - Who (book): https://whothebook.com/

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#35 - How To Manage Finances In Your Small Business

Sun, 07 Mar 2021 11:00:00 GMT

Today's episode is all about organizing your finances.

We cover

- Should you care about accounting right from the start?

- The accounting software we recommend (Zoho Books)

- Features to look for in accounting software

- How to automate your book keeping

- How to effectively outsource your finances

Resources mentioned:

- Zoho Books: https://www.zoho.com/us/books/

- Quickbooks: https://quickbooks.intuit.com/

- Xero: https://www.xero.com/

- Stripe: https://stripe.com/

- Airwallex: https://www.airwallex.com/

- Wise: https://wise.com/

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#34 - Our 5 Favorite Wordpress Plugins To Grow Traffic

Sun, 28 Feb 2021 11:00:00 GMT

Wordpress is still the market leader when it comes to publishing content. Our site ling-app.com is powered by Wordpress. In this episode we share five of our favorite plugins to improve site speed, SEO & traffic.

Plugins covered:

RankMath: SEO Plugin
Hurry Timer: A neat little tool to create custom timers for your promo pages
LinkWhisper: Automatically build internal links
Stories by Google: A new plugin that might help pushing your traffic
NitroPack: Our favorite plugin to speed up your site

Other resources mentioned:

Yoast SEO: https://yoast.com/wordpress/plugins/seo/
Google speed test: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
WP Rocket: https://wp-rocket.me/

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#33 - 5 Tools We Use For Sharing Knowledge

Sun, 21 Feb 2021 11:00:00 GMT

As your team grows, it's more and more important to share know-how effectively. In this episode, we talk about 5 of our favorite tools we came to love in the past years:

- Google Sheets: Powerful filtering options, easy collaboration + pivot tables
- Dropbox Paper: Free for organizing your how-tos and SOPs, great formatting options
- Facebook Live: For recording/lifestreaming our regular face to face workshops
- Loom/Bubbles Chrome Extension: For recording your screen and create video SOPs
- Google Drive/Dropbox: For file management

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#32 - Drive More App Revenue With Influencers

Sun, 14 Feb 2021 11:00:00 GMT

A couple of months ago, we started to reach out to influencers to promote our apps. It has been a great success so far, so we want to share some of the lessons learned.

We talk about

- How we implemented our affiliate program

- How to find the correct influencers to contact

- How the outreach process works

- The best tips on how to get new influencers on board fast

Links mentioned:

- Affiliate tracker: https://www.osiaffiliate.com/

- Hunter: https://hunter.io/

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#31 - Hacks You Need To Know For iOS ASO

Sun, 07 Feb 2021 11:00:00 GMT

In this episode, we do a deep dive on iOS ASO. We share some useful hacks you might not know about App Store Optimization on the App Store.

Today's hacks include

- Don't use stop words
- Inflections: Do you need to use them?
- Should you mention your competitors in your store listing?
- English/Mexican keyword trick
- Much more!

To learn all about ASO, check out Simon's complete ASO course: https://thrivecart.com/affiliates/seotoollab/img-courses-monthly/

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#30 - 7 Quick Tips To Increase Your App Downloads

Sun, 31 Jan 2021 11:00:00 GMT

At Simya Solutions, we constantly test new ideas on how to increase our app downloads. This week, we share 7 tips you can instantly apply to your store listing to level up your downloads.

Here are the quick tips:

- Add social proof to your short description or screenshots
- Use horizontal screenshots
- Add a badge of the current year to your icons
- Add a call to action in the beginning of your long description
- Add emojis to your short and long description
- Include text in icons
- Put real people in screenshots

For all you need to know about ASO, check out Simon's complete ASO course (paid): https://thrivecart.com/affiliates/seotoollab/img-courses-monthly/

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#29 - How We Built Simply Learn

Sun, 24 Jan 2021 11:00:56 GMT

Just having celebrated our company's 4th birthday, we start a series covering some of our biggest projects. In this episode we talk about our first baby Simply Learn, a simple phrasebook app. We talk about how we came up with the idea, how we improved it over time and how we scaled it into over 50 apps eventually. Enjoy!

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#28 - Localize Your App To 10x Your Downloads

Sun, 17 Jan 2021 11:00:00 GMT

This episode is all about localizing your app. Localization is one of the most underrated tool to increase your app downloads. We have several apps that saw 10x increases in downloads just by translating the store listings in multiple languages.

Here's what we cover in detail:

- How to decide if you should localize your app?

- What languages should you start with?

- How to find good translators

- What technology do we use to automate part of the process

Links mentioned in the episode:

https://www.oneskyapp.com/

https://www.fiverr.com/

http://upwork.com/

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#27 - The Power of UX Interviews

Sun, 10 Jan 2021 11:00:00 GMT

This week, we talk about how we use UX interviews to continuously improve our apps. A UX interview can be as simple as asking your family and friends about their opinion on your app. If done correctly, they are a powerful tool to get feedback from your users.

We talk about

- Why did we decide to have regular UX interviews?

- How do we find interview partners?

- How to structure a good UX interview?

- Questions to ask

- How to take action based on the interview responses

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#26 - How To Hire Your First Developer?

Sun, 03 Jan 2021 11:00:00 GMT

Last time we talked about how to hire non-technical staff. As for hiring developers, the hiring task involves some interesting decisions. Should you hire a new developer on an existing project? How do you find the right person? How to check the quality if you're not a coder yourself?

We're covering all this, plus

- Hiring with existing code base vs. new project

- Why and how we hired our first developer

- Where to find developers

- Hiring online vs offline

- Should you outsource the whole process?

- How to evaluate the work quality?

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#25 - When Is The Right Moment To Make Your First Hire?

Sun, 27 Dec 2020 11:00:00 GMT

Hiring the first employee is a huge milestone in any small business or startup. But how do you know when the time has come? What are the risks? And how to find that new hire?

In this episode we talk about these questions.

Here's what we will cover:

- Our thought process behind our first hire

- Automating as an alternative to hiring

- How to get started

- How to find great people and the hiring process

- Online vs offline hiring

Links mentioned

Fiverr: https://www.fiverr.com/

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#24 - When Should You Quit Your Job To Pursue Your Business?

Sun, 20 Dec 2020 11:00:00 GMT

Many small businesses start with side projects next to a full time job. So did ours. How long should you wait before you take the leap and quit your job?

- What was our decision process for quitting our jobs?

- Our experience before and after starting the business full time

- Do you need a backup plan?

- Tips to keep going and motivate yourself

Links mentioned:

- Tropical MBA: https://www.tropicalmba.com/

- Four Hour Work Week: https://fourhourworkweek.com/

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#23 - Email Marketing For Apps

Sun, 13 Dec 2020 11:00:00 GMT

When we just got started with email marketing, we didn't know what we were doing. Blasting out 150,000 emails to an unsegmented audience was just one of our early mistakes. This episode is all about our experience with email and what we learned along the way.

Topics covered:

- Why bother doing email marketing for mobile apps?

- Our email marketing journey and lessons learned

- Tools we have used and recommend for email marketing

- Strategy we use to improve retention and sales via email

Links mentioned in this episode:

Zoho Campaigns: https://www.zoho.com/campaigns/

Sendy: https://sendy.co/

EmailOctopus: https://emailoctopus.com/

Mailchimp: https://mailchimp.com/

ActiveCampaign: https://www.activecampaign.com/

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#22 - What We Learned From Our Black Friday Promotion

Sun, 06 Dec 2020 11:00:00 GMT

Last week was Black Friday! We run our first campaign ever using landing pages, ads and email promotion. It was a big success thanks to the joint effort of many people: marketing team, developers, POs, and designer.

Today, we talk about

- How we run our first Black Friday and Cyber Monday promotions

- How we created landing pages and sales tracking

- How we promoted the pages via email marketing and ads

- Lessons learned and what to improve next time

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#21 - Our Favorite Books

Sun, 29 Nov 2020 11:00:00 GMT

In today's episode we talk about our favorite books, which include fiction and non-fiction.

We cover

- Our yearly reading goals

- Goodreads, our favorite book platform

- Eric Ries - The Lean Startup

- Ayn Rand - The Fountainhead

- Nelson Mandela - Long Walk to Freedom

- JK Rowling - Harry Potter

- The Three Kingdoms

- Jared Diamond - The Third Chimpanzee

- Will Durant - The Story of Civilization

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#20 - 5 Free Tactics to Increase Your App Downloads

Sun, 22 Nov 2020 11:00:00 GMT

Let's talk about increasing your downloads! This week, we share 5 free tactics to increase your downloads:

We share

- How we utilized Facebook Groups to drive early downloads

- Apps Gone Free strategy for 3000 free downloads in a day

- Post your app on Product Hunt

- Seeding on boards like Quora, Reddit etc.

- Instagram automation

Links mentioned in this episode:

App Advice: https://appadvice.com/

Product Hunt: https://www.producthunt.com/

Quora: https://www.quora.com/

Reddit: http://reddit.com/

Jarvee: https://jarvee.com/

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#19 - How To Make Your Customers Happy

Sun, 15 Nov 2020 11:00:00 GMT

Customer support is a very important part of our business. Today, we do a deep dive into our customer support process.

We'll cover:

- How we did customer support when just starting out

- How we transitioned from doing it ourselves to delegating it

- What software we use to do effective support

- What's our current process

- How we classify our tickets and templates

- How we ensure good service quality

Links mentioned in this episode:

Ling App: https://ling-app.com/

Zoho Desk: https://www.zoho.com/desk/

Slack: https://slack.com/

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#18 - How to Get Backlinks to Increase Your App Downloads

Sun, 08 Nov 2020 11:00:00 GMT

In this episode, we lay out our strategy that we use to get backlinks for our apps and websites. Backlinks are an important factor to rank your site on Google.

Specifically, we cover...

- Why do we want backlinks as app developers?

- Outsource or do it yourself?

- How do we identify high quality backlinks by spying on our competitors?

- How to get leads?

- How to reach out via campaigns?

- Are backlinks free? Is it worth to pay for them?

- How to close the deals.

Links mentioned in this episode:

https://ahrefs.com/
https://authority.builders/
https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo
https://hunter.io/

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#17 - 5 Great Tools for Testing Apps

Sun, 01 Nov 2020 11:00:00 GMT

In this episode, we share our top 5 tools for testing our mobile apps.

Discover how we use

1. AWS Device Farm: Amazing tool for uploading your apps to one of 100s of real devices and simulators. It lets you either manually run your apps or run automatic scripts. It also has a very generous free trial, so there is no reason not to try it today.

2. Firebase App Distribution: We use this to test our features immediately after pushing the changes to Git. All testers who installed the App Distribution mobile app will get the new builds instantly. It's like Testflight on steroids. And best of all, it's 100% free.

3. Smartlook: Watch on video what your users are doing in your mobile app. This is great for improving the UI/UX, finding bugs, and get inspired about the next killer features.

4. Firebase A/B Testing: Another free tool from Google/Firebase. This one allows you to A/B test anything you want in the app. We regularly use it to test new buttons, shop screens or even entire new features. You'll need a developer to set this up but boy, is it worth it.

5. Bugsnag: A great bugtracker. While there are many of these out there, Bugsnag integrates very nicely with React Native. It has a very good interface and allows for breadcrumbs, release monitoring and many others.

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#16 - Improve Employee's Performance with KPIs

Sun, 25 Oct 2020 11:00:00 GMT

Today we talk about KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). At Simya, we have half-yearly meetings with all employees where we review past KPIs and set new ones. KPIs are for tracking performance but also about giving and getting feedback, as well as setting effective goals for personal development.

In this episode, we talk about

What are KPIs?
Why do we use them?
How does a typical KPI meeting work?
What are good KPIs?
How do we collect feedback for KPIs?
How to effectively prepare for KPI meetings?
Tips for running good KPI meetings

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#15 - Sharing Feedback in your Agile Team - The Retrospective

Sun, 18 Oct 2020 11:00:00 GMT

In this episode, we talk about how we share feedback within our teams. An important part of this are the Retrospective meetings. They are extremely useful for reviewing the past teamwork and improving for the future.

Learn how we

- What is the Retrospective team in agile?

- What are purposes of the meeting?

- Examples of how to run a Retrospective successfully

- Schedule of a typical Retrospective

- Best Practices of good feedback

- How to take action based the Retrospective

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#14 - How to Set Goals for your Projects - OKRs

Sun, 11 Oct 2020 11:00:00 GMT

This episode is all about goal setting. In our company we do this with OKRs (Objectives & Key Results). It's a modern goal setting framework used by Google, Twitter, Amazon and others.

We will cover:

What are OKRs?
Why do we use OKRs?
How do we use them in Simya?
Examples of OKRs
How did OKRs help us to move forward?
Tips for running good OKR meetings
Tips for keeping on track with the goals you set

Resources mentioned in this episode:

John Doerr - Measure What Matters

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#13 - Grow your iOS Downloads: App Store Optimization for iOS

Sun, 04 Oct 2020 11:00:00 GMT

Today's episode it's all about growing your downloads. We talk about what App Store Optimization (ASO) is and how to do it for iOS. We apply this process to our own apps and grew the downloads of Ling App by 142% in 2 months.

What you can expect in this episode:

Basics: How to get found in the store, and how to increase conversion rate
How to get found in the store: Title, Short Description, Keywords
How to brainstorm and select keywords
What tools we use for keyword research
What process do we use for continuous ASO?
Examples and Success Stories
Trick how to get more downloads in the USA

Mentioned links:

- App Radar: https://appradar.com/

- Google keyword planner: https://ads.google.com/home/tools/keyword-planner/

- Thesaurus: https://www.thesaurus.com/

- OneLook: https://www.onelook.com/

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#12 - How We Opened a Company in Thailand

Sun, 27 Sep 2020 11:00:00 GMT

In this episode, we talk about how we opened a company in Thailand. It was by no means an easy process but it has several benefits. We applied for a Board of Investment (BOI) promotion. This allows us to hire local Thai talent, operate on a zero tax basis for years, and have equal ownership in the company (in a regular Thai company, foreigners can only hold minority ownership).

We will cover:

Why did we open a Thai company?
How to open a company? We walk you through the process.
How to get promoted by BOI?
How did we apply for BOI?
Advantages and disadvantages of a Thai company?
How does accounting work?

Mentioned in the episode:

Board of Investment Thailand: https://www.boi.go.th/en/index/

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#11 - Why and How to Open a Company in Hong Kong?

Sun, 20 Sep 2020 11:00:00 GMT

This episode is all about opening a company for your business. In 2016, we opened a company for our app business in Hong Kong and never looked back.

Today, we discuss,

- Do you even need a company?

- Why open a company in Hong Kong vs. other places?

- Is it true that you pay 0% company taxes in Hong Kong?

- Our story: How we opened a company and bank account in Hong Kong

- How to do the accounting

Links mentioned in this episode:

Corporate Agency Bridges: https://www.bridges.hk/en/

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#10 - Creating Content While Traveling the World with Greg Hung

Sun, 13 Sep 2020 11:00:00 GMT

Today's episode is very special. We have our friend Greg Hung on the show. He has been a business owner traveling the world since 2013. He sells a host of products on his websites such as video footage and online courses. He also runs a videography freelance business, several YouTube channels and a Podcast.

In this episode, he shares his learnings from years of hustling, including

- How he quit his job, sold most of his belongings, and started a business in Asia

- How he got into the Google top rankings for competitive keywords

- How he attracts customers for his local video editing business

- His tactics to grow his online presence through email marketing

Check out Greg's sites here:

Website: https://chicvoyageproductions.com/

YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/chicvoyagegroup

Podcast: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/the-greg-hung-show

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#9 - What's it Like to Run a Location Independent Business?

Sun, 06 Sep 2020 11:00:00 GMT

In this episode, we talk about what's it like to be location independent. We discuss why we chose Chiang Mai as a starting point of our journey. Some other points we cover:

- What are digital nomads/location independent entrepreneurs?

- How to choose a good location to start a digital nomad lifestyle

- What are the pros and cons of working location independent?

Khwan's digital wifestyle Blog: https://digitalwifestyle.wordpress.com/

Our Ling App to learn Thai: https://ling-app.com/

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#8 - Apps & Agile Development

Sun, 30 Aug 2020 11:00:00 GMT

This episode is all about agile development and Scrum. We talk about how we use Scrum to manage our development teams.

We cover

- What is Scrum and how do we use it?

- How does it compare to other models? Is it worth it?

- Typical actors and meetings in Scrum

- much more

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#7 - Effective Task Management with Trello

Sun, 23 Aug 2020 11:00:00 GMT

Trello is a great tool for managing all sorts of tasks. We manage all our projects with Trello, both for business and private.

In this episode, we discuss

- How we use Trello to manage multiple teams

- Cool Trello plugins that can make your life easier

- Automation and smart notifications with Trello Butler

- How does Trello compare to other project management tools, such as Jira

You can get Trello here for free: https://trello.com/

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#6 - Automate App Releases with Fastlane

Sun, 16 Aug 2020 11:00:00 GMT

Fastlane is an amazing tool that allows you to automate lots of things for free. In this episode, we talk about how we use it to make our release process faster and easier. Learn how we

- Automatically create and upload thousands of screenshots

- Integrate Fastlane with Gitlab to release a new version in Testflight with every build

- Use Slack to trigger Fastlane (Chat Ops)

You can check out Fastlane here: https://fastlane.tools/

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#5 - App Store Optimization With Android

Sun, 09 Aug 2020 11:00:07 GMT

App Store Optimization (ASO) is one of the most important things to do to increase your downloads. In this episode we talk about how we optimize every aspect of our store listing and run biweekly A/B tests. We also share some of our most successful tests, increasing the daily downloads by 5-30%.

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#4 - How To Find A Winning App Idea

Sun, 02 Aug 2020 11:00:20 GMT

Learn how we do the market research for our apps. This is an important step before even designing any screen.

We discuss:

- How we did the market research for our first own

- How to analyze competitor apps and find ideas on improving them

- How to brainstorm ideas for a new app

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#3 - How To Work Together As Couple

Mon, 27 Jul 2020 13:50:59 GMT

In this episode, we discuss how to live in a relationship while running a business. It's a lot of fun and can be incredibly inspiring, but there are also challenges.

Learn about

- Our own experience: How we started working in a relationship

- What is needed to make it work

- Challenges and how to overcome them

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#2 - Native or Cross Platform Development?

Wed, 22 Jul 2020 15:15:31 GMT

In this episode, we discuss native vs. cross platform development. Should you code in Swift/Kotlin or React Native/Flutter when creating an app?

We discuss these points:

- Pros and cons of each approach

- What are some of the limitations of cross platform development?

- What should you choose when you just get started?

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#1 - How It All Started

Wed, 22 Jul 2020 15:09:27 GMT

In the first episode we talk about how we started our mobile app business. Seven years ago, we decided to create a simple mobile app called Simply Learn Thai. It took us over 2 years to launch the app. By that time, we both were working in full time jobs.

We will talk about

- Why and how we quit our full time jobs in Germany to pursue our app business.

- How we made our first income

- Why we went to Chiang Mai, Thailand to create more apps

- How we grew our business to over 10 full time employees

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