5.

5 tips for launching your first app

By In Technology

Almost everyone wants to have an app these days. But how do you go about finding the right designers, programmers, and marketers to take your app from an idea to millions of downloads in the app store?

  1. Validate your idea. Not all ideas are as great as you my think, and no one wants to call their baby ugly. Validation can be done quickly and cheaply by creating a simple “Pros and Cons” spreadsheet of your competitors, and running online surveys. But you got to do it.
  2. The planning stage is the last time your have total control – You can save a lot of money in development costs if you have drawn the entire app drawn out on paper. I’m not talking about just the main screens; I mean EVERYTHING. Each pop-up message, every menu option. It seems like overkill, but you’re really designing an architectural blueprint here. Designers and engineer have to follow these “wireframes” so they know what to build, and even so that they can give you accurate estimates. You wouldn’t give a build a blueprint for your house with a downstairs bathroom missing, and expect them to just fill in the blanks would you? If you don’t want to do this, expect to pay your developer team to do the wireframes for you, and never use a company who doesn’t offer this step.
  3. Find the right team for you. In any technical endeavor, it’s hard to pick a good team, especially if you are not very technical yourself. You can be techno-babbled to death, or won over by shinny demos. There are a few simple questions you can ask to make sure the team you’re picking is a good one:
    1. Where is the actual development done (in the US? Or is it outsourced to India?)
    2. How does the team manage their source code? You want to hear them say that they use a version control system like GIT (This is like the Track Changes function in Microsoft Word, but for software code).
    3. How is the team going to help you through the planning process? Are they going to build you a functional wireframe you can play with? How about a basic prototype? The more steps they have early on, the more likely you are to succeed.
    4. Ask to touch and play with real life examples of systems the team has worked with.
    5. Find our if they’ve worked on similar products or in similar industries. A little bit of previous experience goes a long way. Find a team who has already made their mistakes on someone else’s dime, so that you don’t have to pay for it.
  4. Understand the process – You don’t have to become a programmer yourself, but spend sometime educating yourself on the technologies and jargon you will encounter. Unlike building a house, you probably have never seen a software project being worked on as you drive down the road. So your frame of reference is very difficult. The process can be extremely opaque as a result. It’s your money; learn a little about how the sausage is made. I’d suggest learning at least a little bit about how databases work, and how source control works – these two topics alone will allow you to have much honest conversations with your developers.
  5. Don’t launch it and leave it – When your app is all done, getting it in the app store can be tricky. Start finding out what you need to do to get into the Apple store early on – this includes reading their terms of use, which isn’t as bad as you think. Make sure you have a business entity set up, and a registered Dunn and Bradstreet number if you’re going to charge money for you app, include ads, or in-app purchases. And finally, learn about how to promote your app in the stores and on the web. You’ve all heard about SEO, but there is such a thing as App Store Optimization as well.
Previous ArticleNext Article
I help cruise lines turn their technical ideas into reality. I'm experienced in all stages of innovation and technology management. I've also been programing since I was 8 years old, and have somehow retained the ability to have normal human interactions. Occasionally I speak about how Industrial Psychology and Neurophysiology can be interrogated with IT and systems management, because I spend a lot of time thinking about the subject, as strange as that may seem.

Leave a Reply

Capture The Flag Games in Role-Playing Games

In Technology

I’ve recently been running a 5e-based game with my usual role-playing nerd circle on Sunday nights. The game is called The Spy Game. It started off as a Kickstarter campaign and doubled it’s original funding goal (well done!) It’s been fairly successful, but I’m not here to talk about that. This post is about how I’ve incorporated Capture the Flag elements to our role playing.

Yes, I’m a grown man who plays D&D-style games. We play D20 games, which are role-playing games that use dice to determine the outcomes of certain actions. They have become increasingly popularized in the media, with Stranger Things being a large contributor. I did not grow up playing D&D, but started playing when my poker group decided to mix it up. Yes that is true.

What is The Spy Game?

The Spy Game is a role-playing game that is built around telling stories set in a today-like world with… spies. That means your players pick what type of spy they want to play, and make up back stories, choose classes (Infiltrator, Assassin, Medic, etc.) Then the Game Master (me) makes up scenarios and missions for them to go on. The players decide what they want to do (e.g. attack a security guard) and they roll a die to see how devastating their attack on the poor guard was. And while this is a gross over-simplification, it’s good enough for our purposes.

Quickly, What is Capture the Flag?

Capture the flag (commonly CFP), is a style of network and systems security penetration-testing simulation for fun. The idea is that a security expert creates a small, simulated computer system that players try to break into, or crack a code to find a “flag”. The flag is the indicator of the player’s success. For example, you might be given a website that has some sort of password protection that is beatable with certain techniques. Once you bypass the security, you discovery a flag. These are often written as {Flag-name} or something similar to allow the players to know they have been successful. You can read all about them on Wikipedia, or play there with Hacker101 or even Google.

Combining CTFs and Role Playing

My roleplaying group is fairly nerdy (does that go without saying?) So I wanted to make the game a little technical and different from our usual swords and sorcery chaos romps. I thought it would be interesting for those in the group who are less technically minded to learn a little about actual hacking, rather than the “roll the dice to try and hack the system” that is built into the game. The more experienced computer-people in the group could screen share as they worked, and the team could work out the problems together. Everyone wins!

It has worked out really, really well. Everyone has enjoyed these CTFs, including me. I’ve only written a few so far, but they include:

  • Breaking a password to get into a security camera interface
  • Finding the GPS coordinates of an arms deal that is going down, hidden in a base-64 string
  • Decoding a message between two terrorists, hidden in an image
  • Cracking a cipher (spoilers) to get the code words for the security team on duty needed for a break-in!

You can find them the few I’ve written so far here on Github.

These ideas were heavily influenced by the excellent CTF run by the one and only Connor Tumbleson, at Sourcetoad.

Writing CTFs with ChatGPT

I would highly recommend adding a real world CTF to your next role playing adventure. But who has the time? Enter AI with ChatGPT. One of the scary things about ChatGPT is that it writes decent code, but it is only as good as the prompts you give it, and it is NOT secure. So basically anything you tell the bot to write for you has an exploit big enough to drive a bus through. This should be scary to anyone using it for production work, but it is amazing for CTFs.

I’ve also used ChatGPT to write quick and dirty interfaces (like the security camera on-off switch). Is it pretty? No! Would I use anything like that for a client or anywhere near a production environment? Hell no! But it’s MORE that good enough for a fun evening with friends, gathered around a Zoom table, working out how to hack into a secret vault.