What's coming next for Gideros?

Mells

Hi all,

I was just curious : what kind of leap forward is to be expected for Gideros in the near future?
I know that the technical side is well taken care of, but I'm more asking on the business side of things (funds, investments, marketing, partnerships).

I'm watching the competition, and I am kind of curious to know how Gideros is going to compete (again, not talking feature-wise). Things are moving so quickly in this market.
I have no idea how the market share for Gideros is growing, but I see how others are competing (blog posts, freebies, partnerships, annual events, community gatherings and more due to more resources, stronger network and higher number of team members) and I'm afraid that in the long run it's going to be harder and harder for Gideros to make itself visible in the landscape of available sdks.

I would love to see Gideros grow, but I also know that it takes much more than a great product to run a profitable business.
The team being composed of really smart people, most probably you have something up your sleeve

Can we get a glimpse? This will get us excited.

ar2rsawseen

Well, we talk a lot about moving to SF:D
apart from that, @deniz probably could share much more

ar2rsawseen

But hey, while we are here, what would be your suggestions?
As in, imagine you are a CEO of a company with great product and 0 budget. go!

dr_max

Hmm ... my 5 cents. It is necessary to emphasize the technical part. The same level editor, for example, as some competitors. With the appointment of the character's actions

Mells

edit.
Who is reading anyway?

ar2rsawseen

@Mells, hey, I was just about to show it to @atilim and now theres no post, put it back, where it was

keszegh

i also read it, @mells and thought that it was quite interesting, even from a developers point of view, not just for @atilim and co. so it would be great if you could put it back.

atilim

I was marked your post as to be read later (later becomes now). please put it back

gorkem

I sent myself a link to this thread to be read, digested and understood at a later time due to the fact that it's too long to read it in a busy day. I'd like to read it if you could put it back.

ArtLeeApps

) soo funny... put it back lol (tis like who stole my cookie!.. im gonna turn away, and when i turn back, i want my cookie back. )

phongtt

Vote for putting back (actually I already read it and I think I was the 1st one!) :P

hgvyas123

#revenge

now all of us will be curious for life time what mrMells had written

bravcm

Many of us have plans to build not only games with Gideros but also (simple) business apps and for that purpose we need GUI library with input/data controls. Yes I know for HotWax and Widget Candy are comming. But ...

ArtLeeApps

Where i work, my Development manager has built an IOS app for mobility, in the transport industry. i keep telling them its expensive to provide an iphone to each truck driver in the fleet, why cant we built an android version for cheaper phones. well they finally said to me we are looking at multiplatform apps, and "i" will be involved. they have sussed out Unity, but i have mentioned im playing with Gideros... im currently a analyst writing in a language called Progress, but i would prefer the mobility development ...

Mells

dropbox history (draf text) was helpful to find the deleted comment.
@aitilim, @gorkem, @ar2rsawseen here it is :

Gideros : which strategy with 0 budget?

@ar2rsawseen well things are always easier to be said than done. (long message, you asked for it )

So I would never say : "this is how to run a business" because there are tons of unknown variables and insiders have a better view of what is really happening, but here is an attempt "from the outside" taken from my experience with businesses in other industries.
I have seen businesses in the same situation, some failed, some others could be profitable.

Gideros having 0 budget is an hypothesis, right?
(0 budget doesn't mean 0 profit though).

Let's pretend that we are not talking about Gideros (this is important, because this is not how I see Gideros), I'm CEO of XYZ company and we want to face the cold reality...
We can't talk about the future if we don't look at the past, right?

What happened?

A great product and 0 budget? = no projection in the future possible.

In my mind, having a great product is only one part of the equation. I don't believe that all great products find their market. At least startups don't have enough money to survive until that moment comes. Also, team member's motivation can fall before that happens.

So I would say that we could have done things better/differently somehow, somewhere. We have no room for expansion, we can only react to the market and have no resources to anticipate anything or diversify our risk taking.
We have little to bring partners in, because we lack of exchangeable value (money, network, exposure, etc).
Even if we found a specific, efficient and/or profitable task in our process, we have no room to scale it. That's what I would be worried about.
And if anything happens in the industry (disruption) or to one of the team members (less than 5) things can go wrong too quickly. Our vision of the future is too short to feel comfortable with it.
We were not able to secure our position until now.
We might feel ok for now, but the reality is that our margin for “rainy days” is too thin.

a) If that was the plan (create a great product first), I know it can polarize people but I would say that was a bad plan. We need to be profitable *first*. That’s a bold statement and most people would disagree, I know. But I believe you have to be profitable even before you build anything (remove any kind of uncertainty) if you want to build a business that scales and that will stay around for years.

b) If that was *not* the plan and things didn't go well, we need to analyze what/when/why things got off the track.
Learn from it, iterate.

c) I would also question : Was there a well-defined plan at all? What were the metrics? What were the milestones? What other resources (than budget) can we invest in order to get back on track and be able to project ourselves in the future in a better way.
We need to be more aggressive in our investing strategies. For that, we need resources that we can exchange.
Basically I would start with a statement : "What took us here will never take us there".

Get customer's money earlier

I would also get people's money as soon as possible.
Were we able to get some user's money *before* the product is ready? That would have validated our market and helped us to understand who our early adopters are so we can serve them better. We would have given them incentive to thank them for being part of it (like, 15% discount for first 2 years or whatever).
We could also find ways to thank them for sending us referrals.
By now, we would already be at least profitable with a clear vision of our target user.


If we have 0 budget today that could be :
1. We made a lot of profit but invested everything in our product based on customer's expectations + our own values (validated market, ability to make projections)
2. We just made enough profit to stay afloat (few paying customers, uncertainty about our target users and pain points, no way we can project ourselves)

From our profits, what was the ratio between :
a) the resources we invested to cover the most basic needs
b) the resources we were able to reinvest in our product to improve its quality (on top of basic needs)

If a is much higher than b, that means we are only reacting to the market. Our product only reached a small % of its real potential.
For a defined period and with a focus on profit more than product dev we could generate more resources, then raise our ability to scale our efforts in product dev. The result would be a better product and a proven market.
Basically our strategy should move from scarcity (product dev with existing and known resources “until the day comes when...") to abundance (find more resources now as a top priority over any other tasks then have more options for product dev).

Perceived value : get it, and scale its promotion. Talk to our customers.

So I would say : from now, get our product's value in the perception of our users (not our own perception), brand it, sell it. When it works, scale.
Find early adopters, bring them in, talk to the customers who paid and ask them what are the specific reasons why they paid.
Do we have a funnel to capture those user's feedback?
Do we have autoresponders with surveys to know exactly what they like about us, what they would like to see in the product (so we can prioritize our list for our paid customers), what we could do better?
Do we send them news regularly enough to keep them engaged, in the loop?
Do we know how long they stay engaged with us before they start looking somewhere else?
Do we create a strong enough relationship with them so that we keep them engaged, and did we automate the process so we don't need to actually talk to them for them to feel part of the community? (blog posts, autoresponders, are great for that).

Do we display the reasons why paid users like us clearly on our sales page? What about our homepage?
Are we able to articulate the value of our product with a one line sentence?
What is our elevator pitch? Is everyone in the team clear about what is our USP?

Talk to our customers (even more)

I would listen, make a user case study, bring it on my front page, ask those users if they think of 2-3 other people who might like our product.
I would talk to them too. Once I get what are my client's challenges and I know why they buy our product, I would scale the sales team and make them use this proven framework (find the kind of ppl who our product is solving a problem for, tell them the marketing message, give them a demo of the product, sell, repeat).
If you know your customer's value, then you can think about user acquisition costs and make the maths work. You can scale your team with a predictable result (profit).

Mells

What I would do?

Honestly, I would seek funds even more actively ("what took us here will never take us there"). If people in the team say "we have been doing it for months" I would answer that "we did something wrong, we need to find a better way".
I would bring more people in (need more outside feedback) and exchange whatever value I can (outside feedback incentive) but most of all invest in the sales and marketing department. If the product is good, whatever resources we have should go to marketing and sales now.
I would seek funds (and get it, do things differently, search other places, do only this of my day) and get sales people in the team. That's what I would do.
I would define what each one of us (in our team) is the best at. We would all focus on those few tasks where we excel.
Any other task where we are not able to generate the best ROI, anything that takes us time and cognition, anything that we think an expert would do better than us, I would outsource and hire someone.
That’s the kind of options that funds give you (scarcity vs abundance). Back to my top priority : profit.

If that was me alone (=can't do product dev AND sales at the same time) and I had to choose 1 thing to do, I would focus on sales only. Not product dev.

Branding

For our internal use but also for our potential customers, I would refine our branding.
What is our positioning? Do we even know what it is? Did we really understand how crucial it is to drive our product development?
This would reflect what our existing paying customers see in our product, but also what our company’s culture is.

What is our “blue ocean” strategy? How can me make our competition irrelevant?
Do we have only technical people in the team?
Do our skills cover the following : Branding. Marketing. Sales.?

If not, something is wrong.

Gideros

The good thing with Gideros is that :
1. it's a "local" business in the sense that it's easier to look bigger there than in the middle of the US. Which means better visibility in the local medias, government grants, universities and local networks of entrepreneurs.
That would help to create a community of highly engaged users.
Didn't say it's easy, but less competition for sure.
Some people would say it's a problem, but I can see an opportunity in it.
I know some companies in Switzerland that took great advantage of it, profitable with a growing community, even if they are not visible in the international scene (yet).

2. Second thing is : the product is great. Far good enough to bring it in front of people. Great product also means lower user support costs.

But *indeed* nothing can say if I would be right our wrong in my approach
That's the fun part of the business haha

ArtLeeApps

=D> WoW! great content.

Nascode

Great opinion from @Mells

thanks for sharing

ar2rsawseen

Ok now let me try to answer on some things and @deniz or @atilim could correct me

So imagine, you are developer, somewhat new to business and with no marketing skills, but have a great product. What you need to achieve, is create a user base. As you have no good marketing skills, the only way to do that is to give away a lot for free. This is exactly what Gideros was doing all the time.

Now when you gained some traction and stable user base, which I think Gideros did achieve this summer. An we have over 1K new developers signing up each month, and that only the ones who register, as the product is a free to download without registration, it would mean there are whole lot more of them, and we are currently working on some anonymous statistics of downloads for analyzitation purposes to understand the actual numbers

So now that we have achieved that, it become a time to start converting this gained free users to paid ones (something Gideros is doing now). With additional features and perks for paid users (as you see, encryption, Gideros Labs, etc, and more interesting stuff to come).

For now trying to monetize it with more service like approach for premium users, without limiting much the features of free users, but that may not be enough, so most probably we will introduce more premium only features (depending on the conversion rate we will manage to achieve).

After reaching state, where we will feel, that we pushed the conversion rate up to some limit, we will analyze and forecast the income, and come up with the strategy based on the result, spending more resources on development or on selling (as in hiring more developers, or more marketing sales person, spending more time on searches for investments or spending more time developing core features)

Because well, although there are some thoughts on what we could do, these kind of things can not be completely planned in all the details. Because everything changes so fast, and all we can do is adapt for current situation and have some possible solutions/plans, and not one single plan we will definitely follow no matter what

Mells

=D> (trying to talk less, I like your transparency and I think you addressed most questions)

ArtLeeApps

\:D/ youll have to get a bigger server, just to cater for the massive forum posts popping up

keszegh

I realized that I've written too much and they are really amateur opinions, I don't make a living from programming, i don't have experience with businesses, so it is only subjective opinions based on my experience with looking at various sdks and reading, thinking about how they work.

so summarizing:
-the team should have a clear development and marketing branch and they should not do each others work (i see some signs of this nowadays), although they should communicate a lot with each other.
-free users CAN be good for the product, contributing back with plugins etc., helping on forums, beta testing, spreading the info about Gideros on other places etc., these are all somehow open-source development values, which are all quite useful at the end. last but not least they can convert to paid users when they convert to being programmers making a living.
-one payment option that seems like it might work is per income via apps made in gideros, this would easily make money from people who can pay for it without getting rid of or limiting too much aforementioned free users who would not pay or just pay one year later.

the same just longer, maybe obsolete now:

I think one problem is that it can be understood that Mells says that developers should focus more on marketing if the time asks for that. Maybe he did not mean that but he suggests something like that at some point. Yet he also says that a business needs some business people, so i think that e.g. ar2rsawseen should not waste too much time on marketing questions, this should be someone elses job and of course all these people need to share knowledge from time to time and decide what to do next. but trying to do each others job is not efficient.

also, about free user attraction, indeed for me too Gideros was my choice as it offers so much for free. i'm happy that they offer so much for free, also i understand if they start to offer some non-essential features for money. on the other hand free users are a good testing and contributing community. also if too many of the features become paid than the sdk starts to feel crippled in the free edition and e.g. i would feel cheated as at the beginning i started using Gideros as i've seen some promise that it will stay a viable option even if I'm not successful and just program for a hobby. Of course whenever I would make enough income from it I would feel eager and be happy to pay back some.

this leads me to: i would think that the best licence would be something that if you generate this and that amount of money with your app then you need the pro licence. i don't know if that works for others but i have seen it many times, i wonder how they check your income though so at some point it is a bit dependent on developers goodwill.
this way free users could also test labs features, and many times these people can spend much more time on tinkering so they may be efficient in this. also they will be more eager to give back to the community plugins, knowledge on the forums as a form of payment until they don't pay real money.

Mells

@keszegh just to make sure :
I don't argue that free users have some value. At all.
I say that not all free users have the same value which is really different, and controlling the number of free users is crucial.

1. Free users have a cost. More users = more questions on forums, emails, asking for tutorials, etc... if the support team doesn't have enough time to answer all questions, what will remain is : "I went to xxx forums and no one answered my questions"

2. Free users are biased : most (**not all**) see price as a top priority, not value. I know that's not your case keszegh but you are part of a minority. The other ones don't even care about our discussion You want your users to understand that they should focus on the quality of what you provide. Believe it or not, but free users don't see value as much as they should. How many "free ebooks" do people have waiting somewhere on their hard disk?
If you pay a premium price for a product, you will see much more value in it than if it was free (even if the product/service/experience is exactly the same). You will use it, and get better results. It's proven.
And that leads to something surprising : people are **happy** to pay a premium price but that's another story.

3. Free users are vocal and more likely to complain (this is a fact).
People are vocal when they experience something negative. Free users (again, "the ones that have less value", not all) want everything, right now, available to them.
They are biased. They feel that's their right to complain, and that companies should compete to please them.
If they don't get what they want (and much more), they will complain everywhere.

4. You can't control the quality of the experience of all users if the base is too big compared to your resources.

Not all free users represent the same value and you want to get rid of the ones who don't.

So it's not about crippling the experience for free users.
It's about having tools to identify the ones with potential, making a great and free experience for them so upgrading to an irresistible paid version **if they feel the need** becomes a no-brainer.

Whatever tiers you offer, the experience has to be amazing. Not frustrating. Even for free users. We all agree on that.

keszegh

@Mells, i agree with these points, yet judging from this forum, the not-committed free users leave quite soon usually and thus they don't do that much harm as you suggest. maybe when gideros will have much more users what you say will be more apparent already on the forum, so far i don't see that happening luckily. in any case so far i don't see it an issue how to get rid of them as they get rid of themselves fast.

how to make people stay for long time and become committed is another thing you mentioned, which is probably a more important issue.

e.g. for me i was 'fooled' (in a positive way) with the open-source feeling of gideros into making one app with gideros, now i'm quite comfortable and happy with it and so i don't want to take time to learn other sdk's - also i still see it to be the best for mobile -, so i'm eager to do my updates and next app also with gideros. [off: as i've soon realized that i want to do apps for pc as well, i propagate pc export since a long time (also as i see that anyway it cannot be that hard to make)]. so making people comfortable with the tool for free - and give them time to realize how good it is - can be a good trick so that they don't switch to another sdk when they start to do something more seriously.

but probably at this point i'm adding nothing new to the conversation.

ArtLeeApps

1. Free users have a cost. More users = more questions on forums, emails, asking for tutorials, etc... if the support team doesn't have enough time to answer all questions, what will remain is : "I went to xxx forums and no one answered my questions"

It must be frustrating, im green here and i can see many times similar questions are asked from newer people learning the product. The amount of time spent by staff and members repeating the same answer for questions that may have been discussed is considerable. im sure most of us will try to search the forums first for an answer. so for all the time spent by staff in the forums, im amazed they actually have time to develop new features.

Crazy thought (but they said we couldnt fly too). would it be feasible to have 2 areas to the forums. Registered Members and Subscribers. In the Subscribers area, paid members have access to create posts, and Staff and other paid members can answer (as we do now). But the Registered Members (freebie) area, would be mainly used for new/free users, and answered by other Members not staff. In that way it would free up some quality time for staff to develop the product, and filter out some of the repetitive newbie questions.

That also may be another intensive to upgrade to quality support.

:-c

OZApps

3. Free users are vocal and more likely to complain (this is a fact).

Agree and I can back you up on that one Mells, specially on the app stores, these users that download apps for free are the ones that leave a poor rating or bag the app. It is almost like no one buys something and "says I made a mistake", they will scream, I got this FREE, it's a mistake, don't you go and get that.

Not all free users represent the same value and you want to get rid of the ones who don't.

That would become a bit like the BeerSDK old strategy, they tried to cull accounts and users at one point in time, not a good strategy. Being non-discriminatory works as a better strategy (in my opinion).

Free users can be like shoppers that have a look at an item and not buy it then and there but come back for it after a while after they have accumulated money for it or budgeted for it. So every user that takes the effort to create an account might end up someday using Gideros.