It turns out that I am in fact not very good at this diary writing stuff! Who knew.
It’s not the actual writing that causes me a problem. I can in fact write for England. But remembering to connect to this site and create a post seems tricky. There are probably ways I could remember to do this… But for now I guess I just need to try and make it a habit.
Anyway
The main thing that has been keeping me busy is a bit of a revamp on the website front. I am very “into” writing my apps. On the days that people buy them I am also very into the business of apps. Trouble is those days are perhaps not as frequent as one might like.
For a sales God like me… That is a bit of a kick in the nuts one has to say!
Here is the basic problem data. There is very little (tending to fucking zero actually!) data available about how people find my apps on the store, how they rank or any of that stuff. All I really know is how many impressions (in global terms) I get and how many sales (per app / per country).
Apple, bless them, do have some form of Paid add system. I tried it and found that it was not helpful. It really felt like they had had a go but actually… the tea boy had had a go.
Therefore I am resorting to more indirect marketing efforts to drive awareness and traffic. That dear read is basically a website. I have repurposed edstivala.com to now promote my apps business.
Interesting little side note. I used ChatGPT to figure out the “name” AppZian and the colour scheme and some of the content messaging. Honestly it’s not perfect (by any means), but better than I would have done left to my unsupported self.
The site is not quite finished yet but getting there. I can now start trying to drive some traffic to it. Focusing on Inventory and Gross Margin as they sit nicely together in a bit of a retail proposition.
To be honest the rest of the apps are a bit of a bloody rag tag random set of apps. Thing is they still get sales so if nothing else they generate a few pennies and help increase my profile in the App Store.
Whilst I am whittling on about apps, I have decided to write a CSV product import function for Inventory. I appreciate that my Product Management strategy lacks polish – but basically I use the app, figure out what I would love it to do or need it to do and that’s what gets built as the next use case!
I stood in the MK lock up today packing socks and thought the hill socks should be on the app. It has already proved VERY useful for sorting a stock discrepancy out with Tailwind… But I looked at the crates of socks and thought “I’m not manually entering all that bloody lot!”. There are bound to be people that buy the app and already have a large inventory. They are probably not going to want to manually rekey everything so some kind of bulk upload will be needed. Also I guess if there is a large bulk edit.
Basically the use case is to upload a file in CSV format, parse it for errors, skip duplicates and then append any valid new records. This really is not cutting edge software! But you know it will take me forever.
In other news I have a job interview on Friday!!! I suspect that I have only been shortlisted to make up the numbers. Even I can see I am not qualified for it or bring anything material to the table. But who knows I’ll go and maybe I will get it… Then I will be a Lecturer at a University. OMG!
