rganguly

Love, love love this post. Your wrap up is the kicker - on the other side of the screen is a human being. Recognize it, respect it and do the kinds of things you'd do for someone you met in person who was giving your business the time of day. This is an inspirational post, thanks so much for sharing it :)

That's a good point, although I would say that part of the intent in writing this was to rebuke people on Twitter who are just saying things like "iOS 7 is stupid" or "Apple ruined the interface". I don't think that just being vitriolic and hating is very constructive. I wanted to point out that there are channels that Apple makes available to give feedback and that it's possible to be constructive through these. Of course, if Apple were to more proactively monitor Twitter and engage with customers there, I think everyone would benefit :)

This is spot on. Really important to recognize that a large swath of the population still makes phone calls, cares about voice communication and doesn't care about data as much. This probably also speaks to the rising popularity of some of the voice and video apps - a segment of the app universe that might be able to pull these customers into the data world over time.

Fun approach to sharing Seattle Startups. Really like the interview format, lots of interesting non-traditional detail comes out of it.

Definitely a good step in the right direction. The more companies and customers can connect in productive ways, the better.

Nice take on this, I think the outrage is a bit overblown here and seems to have taken on an angry mob with pitchforks mentality.

Freaking awesome app, love the update!

I think you might have taken what I said a bit too far - the point isn't that entrepreneurs are the only ones working. It's that entrepreneurial spirit is the soul of our country. The mechanic at the garage, for example, is often an entrepreneur.

"the point of business is to make money" - YES YES YES. Couldn't agree more on this. In the midst of all the noise about how focusing on revenues and profits is besides the point because you need to get tons of user adoption, it's nice use the word BUSINESS over and over and over. We're independent BUSINESS owners, creating BUSINESSES in order to remain independent, to work on what we love and believe in with people we respect and adore. Ignoring that we have to make money, that the math needs to work out favorably and that we owe it to our teammates and employees is not going to end well. Take responsibility for building a BUSINESS not a feel-good hobby.

If you want to build a successful startup, your ability to wear many hats and push more than one aspect of the product forward in the early days is super valuable. If that's your goal, continue to straddle the fence.

If you're thinking about this inside of an organization, you have to decide what kind of person you want to be: the nail or the glue.

It's possible to not specialize and to be super valuable. You can even lead teams with this approach - as long as you're very cognizant of where your people are better at one specialty than you (i.e. your designer gets to make the tough calls, not you). When you straddle the lines, you're able to translate between experts and to make sure all of the little details are covered. Often, you are the reason that things stay together instead of splintering apart: the glue.

But if you really want to be able to call the shots and be the expert in an area, to lead the team and to be ultimately responsible for "X" - you need to be focused on it. You need to have the most clear understanding of the problems you're dealing with and the person who spends the most time working on and thinking about it. Your value comes from having a sharp and accurate point of view - the nail.

To those who say that you can be expert in both, the answer is that you're fooling yourself. The world that we live in is such that it's impossible to truly be an "expert" in anything. The best we can be is to be constantly learning through practice, education and discussion.

It's impossible to constantly be on top of code and expert in design at the same time because there's so much to learn about each area that splitting your time leaves you behind the truly focused individuals.

Such a great mental set of exercises. James is an awesome writer, I've really been enjoying his stuff.

Kudos to you for following up on all the feedback! We keep hearing that while it might feel like a hassle at first, it ends up being pretty motivating to have conversations with your customers. Have you found this to be the case for your team?

This is absolutely critical to your success on an ongoing basis as an app developer. With over a million apps available in the iOS, Android and Mac marketplaces, the best chance you have of being successful, over the long haul, is to have a loyal audience. Every download represents an opportunity to win a fan and an evangelist.

We've been helping developers solve this feedback problem for the past year on all three platforms and the data is very compelling: your ratings and reviews improve, the number of people recommending you to their friends increases and your business grows. The math is stunning and we'd encourage everyone to invest time in communicating with their customers if they really believe in the app they're building.

Regardless of if you build it yourself or use our simple to integrate SDKs (http://apptentive.com) - take the time to listen to your customers. It'll go a very long way.