App Life Podcast: Recent Episodes
Anchisa
We are a family of three who pursues freedom. Currently, we are living in Chiang Mai, Thailand. We have an app company. In this Podcast we want to share our experience in the app business. We hope to get more suggestions, questions, recommendations.
At last, we hope you will enjoy our Podcast.
In this episode we talk about our new process of hiring A players. As we got more applicants for certain roles, we added another interview to the process.
We talk about:
- Our current process of selecting and interviewing candidates
- The screening interview
- The case study interview
- The Who interview
- The reference interview
- Interview best practices
Resources mentioned:
Geoff Smart - Who https://www.amazon.de/-/en/Geoff-Smart-ebook/dp/B001EL6RWY
Our previous episode on hiring: https://anchor.fm/app-life-podcast/episodes/36---How-Do-We-Hire-A-Players-esei1s
Today we talk about ways to analyze your app and web audience with Google Analytics 4.
We cover
- Ways to setup Google Analytics 4 on mobile and the web
- The difference between Google Analytics 4 and Google Analytics Universal
- What events to track inside an app
- How to plan your tracking
- Limitations of Google Analytics
- Alternatives to Google Analytics
In this episode, we talk about sponsored startup programs and our experience with it.
We talk about
- The programs we successfully applied for
- What are the benefits of sponsored programs?
- How to apply?
- Pitching best practices
- What to do when you're excepted?
- Examples of local government programs
This episode is all about in app purchases!
We talk about
- What types of in app purchases exist (one offs, subscriptions)
- How to implement in app purchases in your app
- Should you use your own server?
- Apple's and Google's payment system vs Stripe
- Consequences of the recent decision in Epic's lawsuit against Apple
- Frequent in app purchase problems and how to fix them
Resources mentioned: https://www.revenuecat.com/
Let's talk about our blog today, https://ling-app.com/blog . It's been a wild ride from starting the first few posts about learning Thai to creating a content machine that churns out over 20 articles per week (and counting).
We cover:
- Why we started our language learn blog in the first place
- Initial strategy and how we shift over time
- When should you start hiring content writers?
- Tips and best practices for SEO
- What kind of content should you focus on?
Note: We decided to switch to a bi-weekly release schedule from now on. Stay tuned!
- Resources mentioned: Auto video creator via AI https://lumen5.com/
This time we talk about our experience with working with clients. How does this compare to developing your own product?
We share
- The pros and cons of working with clients and making your own products
- What do to when you're just getting started
- Things we learned when working with clients
In this episode, we talk about our 3-monthly retrospective sessions and how they helped us building a great company culture.
We talk about
- The beginnings: How and why we started the retrospective with 3 team members
- How to organize a retrospective
- Best practices when running the sessions
- Examples of what we learned from the feedback
Today's episode is all about translating your app, or app localization.
We cover
- Why you should consider translating your app
- How to find out what languages to translate into first
- How to find good translators
- How to setup a process to ensure great translation quality
- Take it to the next level: Automate the process via OneSky app
Resources mentioned:
- Translation service: https://gengo.com/
- OneSky app: https://www.oneskyapp.com/
In this episode, we discuss the Getting Things Done (GTD) method invented by David Allen. Simon has been using this method for the better part of a year, and has had a great experience with it.
We talk about
- What Getting Things Done is and why you might wanna use it
- The method in detail: Collect, clarify, organize, review
- The value of cleaning your inbox daily and having a weekly review
- Tips and best practices
- Alternatives to GTD
While we focus on learning languages at Simya, this week we talk about an app we built for a completely different industry. Smart Court is an app that lets people book badminton courts easily. The idea of the app originated when Simon regularly took badminton training and realized the bookings were all done manually.
We cover
- How we validated the idea & decided to create Smart Court
- Requirement gathering and staff interviews
- Building the MVP
- Challenges along the way
- Where we stand now and future plans
Try the app here: https://simyasolutions.com/smart-court/ Only Chiang Mai is supported at this point in time ;)
Time for another installment of the "How We Built..." series! This time, we talk about our brand new app, Ling Live. It's a platform app to connect students and teachers, enabling everyone to book a language lesson in seconds.
We talk about:
- How we came up with the idea of Ling Live
- How we did market research
- How we validated the initial prototype
- Marketing and business development
- Challenges along the way
- What's next?
Check out the app here and book your free Thai trial lesson (trial lessons are limited): https://live.ling-app.com/
Today, we talk about team outings. At Simya we're doing them regularly and are amazed again and again how much fun they are.
We cover
- Why we do team outings
- When and how we got started
- 3 examples of our past team outings
- Best practices and benefits of outings
Enjoy!
This episode is Khwan's turn to talk about her experience before we started our app business. She shares how she grew up in a village in the North East of Thailand, how she came to Germany to study and eventually worked as management consultant before quitting her job. Learn about her challenges, lessons learned, and turning points in her life that lead her to where she is today.
How was our life like before we quit our jobs, went to Thailand and started an app business? This episode, Simon talks about his life story and some lessons learned along the way. Enjoy!
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/
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
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
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!
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/
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?
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/
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
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.
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/