Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Eric: Hello, and welcome to Tap Your App. I'm your host Eric Dyck,
founder of Tap for Tap, the free cross-promotion exchange
for mobile application developers. Today we're here with
Nick and Kelly Schuster of Hello Simpson development company
fame. The dynamic duo are responsible for the upcoming Caveman
Golf App, the app that finally answers the age old question:
what did cavemen spend all of their time doing? Welcome to
the show Nick and Kelly, how are you guys doing?
Kelly: Hey, we're good! Yeah, thanks for having us!
Nick: Good, yeah.
Kelly: We're excited to be here.
Eric: I ran into you guys on Twitter and I saw you generating hype for
your app Caveman Golf and I took a look at it and
thought it looked pretty interesting. What made you decide to
start developing apps?
Kelly: We've always wanted to do something on our own, something that
we can own, but something fun that's exciting and interesting,
and games is certainly something that we found a lot of interest
in. He's sort of a game addict, if you will.
Nick: Yeah, I am.
Kelly: So that's good, that works really well. So we just, we started
in May was actually when we started thinking about ideas, and
then the app's going to come out in a couple of months. We're
hoping probably end of October, early November.
Eric: Nice.
Kelly: Yeah, so we're just getting into it.
Eric: Very cool. So you guys just came up with the concept and decided
how you wanted it to look, and then you're outsourcing
the actual development of it?
Nick: Yeah.
Kelly: Exactly.
Nick: Yeah, we came up with the concept and we created a huge deck,
designing the game and all that kind of stuff, and we decided
that we wanted to outsource. We actually outsourced to India.
We don't have any programming experience ourselves . . .
Kelly: Yes, this would not come out well if we programmed it.
Nick: Yes, totally.
Eric: It would look a lot like Pong, I'm sure, if that.
Kelly: I don't think we'd even get that far.
Eric: Cool. So how is that going so far? How has your communication
been, have they been sort of meeting your expectations
and your deadlines and things like that?
Kelly: Yeah, absolutely.
Nick: We really were slow to choose a programmer. We did a lot of
research, we worked through Elance and Freelancer and
that, and NewAppIdea.com, and we tried to get as many
programmers as we could to make bids. We kind of were slow with
the process, making sure they were going to be good communicators
with us, did a lot of Skype stuff . . .
Kelly: Yeah, did a lot of interviews via Skype to see how they
communicated right off the bat. Did a little test at the
beginning just to see how reactive they were to what we were
looking for, that they had actually read the giant 70-page
presentation that we gave them . . .
Eric: Wow.
Kelly: . . . and to get a feel for their graphics before we even moved
forward, and they've been great. They've been a really, really
good company.
Nick: They have been very good. His communication, the project manager
that we're working with, has been really good.
Eric: Nice. That's great. So the actual art design for the app, was
that all included in your 70-page instructional
manual there?
Kelly: Yes, it was! We did a mix between Nick's drawings and clip art
to kind of discuss what we were looking for, but at the same
time tried to make it open for them to be creative. I work in
advertising and work with a lot of creative designers and it's
nice to be able to give them a good amount of structure but at
the same time allow them the freedom to do what they do, because
we're not graphic designers.
Nick: No, not at all.
Eric: I've seen some of your art, and I've seen the trailers, but tell me
about what Caveman Golf is all about.
Kelly: So I guess from a functionality standpoint, the idea started
with taking a look at what's really popular right now. So doing
the market research and looking at what's in the top apps, what
are consumers already drawn to at this point? Obviously things
like Angry Birds and physics-based gaming is a huge concept, and
it's doing very, very well, to say the least. Then there's the
apps that have the flick it technology, like Flick It Homerun,
or Flick It Golf, so we kind of said how do we do something that
combines the two in a new and innovative way? But something
that can tell a story. So it's more than just a game, you know
what I mean? You want to have some sort of foundation behind
it. The idea of Caveman Golf is basically, this is how golf was
invented. So it was one caveman who's standing in front of his
cave, he needs to protect it. He's got these dinosaurs that are
coming in to attack it. He's got his giant club, he looks down,
he sees rocks, and he's like, "Okay! Let's try this!" So he's
flicking rocks at dinosaurs to kill them. That's the basic
premise.
Eric: I like it! You think about Angry Birds and they have a very, very
basic premise, which is that these pigs have stolen your eggs
and you need to get them back, so it even combines tower
defense, in a way . . .
Kelly: Absolutely.
Nick: Exactly.
Eric: . . . because you're defending your cave as well. So it combines
three really popular game means into one there, that's kind of
interesting.
Kelly: Yeah.
Nick: Like she said, we did a lot of research, we really wanted to do
something that was already up and coming and popular, to make
sure that we were going to be more successful.
Eric: Cool.
Kelly: Right, especially with the market research background and the
marketing background that I have, it's no longer – I even saw
you talking about this in one of your other podcasts – it's no
longer if you build, it they will come. That was a marketing
concept maybe 100 years ago. Now it's more figure out what
people want, what people like; understand where there's gaps in
the marketplace, but first you've got to understand what
consumers are already interested in and where the market's
going, because it's going to be very difficult to change
consumer behaviorism to create something really new an
innovative right off. We have a couple of ideas that we want to
get into later, but they're a little risky. You want to start
off first with what you know the market can bear, what the
market's interested in.
Eric: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I think there's probably a few
Scottish historians that might have something to say about your
historical research with this piece, but who knows what cavemen
were doing back then?
Kelly: That's right, that's right, that's right! Nothing can
be proved!
Nick: Maybe some anthropologists might be upset too, you know with
the cavemen and the dinos in the same time period.
Eric: Yeah, I saw your trailer there and it made me think a little of
Space Odyssey 2001, where they . . .
Nick: Yeah, right.
Eric: . . . [inaudible 06:46] the club for the first time and he sort of
becomes a human with technology at that point. I'm sure there's a lot of
comparisons between Kubrick and your game, I'm sure.
Kelly: Yeah, absolutely. Exactly.
Eric: Very cool.
Kelly: The trailer came from Nick, who's an English teacher, and only
an English teacher would come to me and say, "I think we should
do a film noir for our app." A what? Okay.
Eric: The trailer is film noir? Or the feeling of the game is?
Kelly: No, the trailer.
Nick: Just the trailer, just for fun.
Eric: You just need to get that movie guy voice in there.
Kelly: I know, I know! He worked on it!
Nick: It didn't come off very good, so I just decided to use my regular
voice.
Eric: Nice! No, I think it builds suspense well and you don't know
exactly where it's going so you're basically trying
to bat rocks and knock off dinos essentially, is that right?
Nick: Yeah.
Kelly: Exactly. But again . . .
Eric: And air dinos?
Kelly: . . . it's with that flick it tech . . . I'm sorry, say that
again?
Eric: Are there land dinos and air dinos or just . . .?
Nick: Yeah, so we've got right now in the general concept of the game,
we've got a land dino who will just stay stationary, and then a
pterodactyl which can move back and forth or up and down, and
then an Ankylosaurus dinosaur which will take more than one hit
to destroy.
Eric: They have a hard shell . . .
Nick: Yeah, exactly.
Kelly: Exactly.
Eric: . . . I seem to recall.
Kelly: Every level can be solved in one perfect hit, too,
which is also interesting. So as opposed to doing points like
Angry Birds and a lot of games have done, it's really about how
many hits it takes you, more like a golf swing [to be].
Nick: The less hits, the higher score.
Eric: Nice.
Kelly: Yeah, but you want to get a hole in one.
Eric: Yeah, yeah, I guess so, by killing . . . and then you can eat for
weeks too, I'm sure . . .
Kelly: Yeah.
Eric: . . . with the barbecue. So what's your plan with actually
positioning the game? Is it going to be a free game, a freemium
game? What's your plan there?
Kelly: We've talked about both. The freemium model is
definitely something we're interested in. it's going to have in-
app purchases, and we've gone back and forth as to whether we'll
bring it out as free or whether we'll start it at $0.99 and see
if the market will bear that. Actually watched your podcast
earlier today [with] Austin, and that's swinging us even a
little bit more in the direction of going $0.99 off the bat, and if
it's successful then fantastic, and if it's not there are so
many more free apps that maybe we need to take it to free, but
then you don't just have your original launch. You get a ton of
press and a ton of downloads from discounting it and taking it
down to free.
Eric: Yeah.
Kelly: So we're kind of more in the middle.
Nick: Yeah, we still haven't really completely decided yet, but . . .
Kelly: Any advice?
Nick: Yeah.
Eric: You know what, they're both interesting approaches. I think Austin
kind of knows what he's talking about a little bit in that
regard that it's probably easier to go from free to paid . . .
Kelly: Yeah.
Eric: . . . and makes more sense to go to free from paid, rather than to
switch the other way. If you go free right off the back you're
sort of committed to that . . .
Kelly: Yeah, absolutely.
Eric: . . . no one has a blog telling people when people raise
prices on apps.
Kelly: Yeah, and actually that was the other thing we were looking at
is, we want to leverage promo codes to help get press. You
don't have promo codes when you go with a free app, so it's a
little more difficult to figure out how to then get a review if
it's starting at free and you're not offering anything to those
consumers.
Eric: Yeah.
Kelly: So the other thing that's kind of playing it.
Nick: We really like the idea of the value proposition, assigning
your app some sort of value off the bat, and then bringing it
down to the free later.
Eric: Perceived value is greater.
Nick: Exactly, yeah, exactly.
Kelly: Absolutely.
Nick: We like that.
Kelly: But if it does wonderfully at a dollar, we'll keep it there!
Nick: Yeah, right!
Eric: For sure, and then the movie deal will be right around the
corner.
Kelly: Absolutely! We're already making the little club protectors .
. . no, I'm just kidding.
Nick: We're thinking big!
Eric: Nice. You could use [inaudible 10:45] too, you never know.
Nick: I know!
Eric: . . . Biological engineering going on, you could bring back
dinosaurs and knock them off one by one. So what are
your favorite apps? You guys are obviously smartphones, you're
gamers – or Nick, I know you're a gamer as you mentioned. Nick,
for instance, let's start with you. What's your gaming background?
Nick: Well you know, obviously I started as a kid on the simpler consoles
and just kind of worked my way up through there. In terms of
smartphone apps, I was addicted to Angry Birds for a long time,
I've played all of them. When we started getting into the flick
it stuff, we did a lot of research on what it really is like,
and the Flick It Home Run game, I've been completely addicted to
that game. I can't stop playing that game.
Kelly: It's a problem.
Nick: Even after we've done all the research, I'm still completely addicted
to that game. I enjoy lots of zombie type games, shooter games,
those kinds of things. The side scrolling games, the old school
like Contra and Mario Bros. and all those kinds of things, I
like those games and some of those were influential in how we
designed this game, that side scrolling kind of idea. We really
like that.
Eric: Flick It Home Run is an incredibly addictive game, I can- my wife
can also attest to that, with my constant paying
attention to it instead of other things around the house.
Nick: Is that right? Sometimes when we're working on a game or something,
doing research or something like that, I'll be playing Flick It
Home Run and she's like, "Did you hear what I just said?"
Eric: You're like, "It's research, honey."
Kelly: Exactly! Exactly. When we first started getting into this and
we said, "Okay, we need to do enough marketing research to
really understand the market. So I know you're playing games,
I'm playing games, but let's dive in." and Nick's eyes lit up
like a little kid. He's like, "Ah! This is the perfect job!
I have to play games for research!"
Eric: So when you say market research, let's talk just a little bit about
what that means. Is that just sort of like really checking out
all the top ten lists, finding out which categories seem to have
a holes in them? What was your approach there?
Kelly: I used to work at an ad agency doing innovation, so we did a
lot of market research, and we're working with a lot of consumer
packaged goods companies, CPG companies, so like Kraft, and
Kellogg's and Wal-mart, and you're paying then, for data. If
Kellogg's wants to know what's selling, they have to pay Nielsen
or somebody to get the RIR data, so you can actually see what's
selling both your products as well as competitors, to
understand. The best part of about the app world is you don't
have to pay for anything, it's all right there. You can open up
the charts and you can see what the top grossing, you can see
what the top free, the top paid. You can look in very specific
categories or you can look very broadly, like what as a whole
are people really drawn to, and then within gaming where's it
going? And then just following the overall trends that we're
finding.
Nick: We look a lot at the trends, like with the top app charts, look at
trends on how certain technologies were doing, like the Flick It
technology seemed to be really taking off. Obviously the Angry
Birds platform is something that has been done and redone a
million times . . .
Kelly: And very successfully.
Eric: Because it's just basically a take off from Worms, or Scorched
Earth, or some of those old tanks games, right?
Kelly: Yeah, absolutely. Exactly.
Nick: I still like Worms.
Eric: I like that idea, sort of boiling down games into some of their
essential components and then seeing how those components are
doing systematically over the charts. I think that makes a lot
of sense.
Kelly: Yeah, absolutely.
Nick: Yeah, we're hoping it will pay off for us for sure.
Eric: Cool. I noticed on your site, first of all, did you eat that giant
calzone that you were both . . .
Kelly: We gave it our best shot.
Nick: We gave it our best shot, and like I said, we spent about three days
eating that calzone.
Kelly: There was two, right? We each had our own?
Nick: Yeah, we each had our own calzone too.
Kelly: The place misled us. They should have said, when we ordered
two calzones, they should have been like, "Are you out of your
mind?" But they did not. They proceeded to let us find out the
gluttonous way, the glorious, gluttonous way. It was fantastic.
Nick: They were so cheap, too.
Kelly: They were like, $8 bucks!
Nick: $8 bucks a piece.
Kelly: If you ever go skiing – so this was down in Durango, right?
Nick: Durango, Colorado.
Kelly: Right across from the ski resort.
Eric: $8 calzones the size of your torso, that's . . .
Kelly: [Absolutely].
Eric: . . . always better to know where that's available. Really cool.
I also noticed more relevantly, that you've started to cast your net on
your site for the idea of creating a cross-promotion
network with other apps. Have you had any pick up from that at
all?
Kelly: A little bit. We've networked a lot, and we've met a lot of
really interesting companies and other app development companies
that we're in conversations with. What we're looking to do,
well, it's two-fold. One, we want to meet and just network and
understand and learn from the vast experience that people have
out there. And two, we want to cross-promote specifically on a
More page, a More button, from the promo page? So we want to
have a More button, but we have one game, so therein lies the
issue. We want to be able to put people on our More page, and
then be one their More page as well, so that when one app starts
to be a little more successful, vice a versa, it kind of helps
everybody.
Nick: It creates a network that we can all rely on each other. Especially
in the indie world, these indie apps, there's a lot of
competition out there from those big companies, and the whole
adage of we kind of have to stick together here and help each
other out as much as we possibly can.
Kelly: Yeah, and what's crazy about the app world is just how crazy
it's changing. So if you look at even a year ago to what it is
now, it's only a four-year-old industry. I think it was, what?
July of 2008 that it started.
Nick: Yep.
Kelly: So the first couple of years it was all indie apps, and it was
kind of a fair fight. Now there's a lot of really well
established companies out there that, if they just continue to
promote their new apps, they've already got such a huge network
and the eye of the consumer. So it's really easy for them to
continue to generate, to be in the top 20, top whatever list.
But for indie apps it's much more difficult now, and I think
it's just going to continue to go that direction. For indie
apps to be successful, you've got to band together to kind of
take on "the man."
Eric: Exactly. Nice.
Kelly: We're talking to you, Romeo!
Eric: That's funny. I think there's a lot to be said, that's
obviously what we're trying to do with Tap for Tap. Recently we
tweeted an article that someone high up in the Google play store
was asked a bunch of questions, and one of them was, "What do
you recommend for indie app developers?" And their
suggestion was find one of those large distribution partners
and sell you game to them, and I know that's probably not what
a lot of indie devs want.
Kelly: Yeah.
Eric: Well, I'm sure they don't mind the idea of selling something
. . .
Kelly: Right.
Eric: . . . if the price is right, obviously. But at the same time there
is a sort of indie spirit that I think you don't want to lose
from the gaming community, because there are so many people
doing lots of really cool, creative things.
Nick: Oh yeah, for sure.
Kelly: Yep. Absolutely.
Nick: Totally agree.
Eric: Yeah, so with Tap for Tap, right now we're working on our banners,
or sort of what we've started the network with,
but we're very quickly going to be adopting into AppWalls
as well as the ability to do interstitials, so ads that come
up maybe between levels, or once the user is done with a certain
activity, so we're working *** our next SDK which will
allow you to place app discovery adds for other applications
sort of anywhere you chose within your app, be it by a banner,
and interstitial, or just a little app wall. So we're really excited
for the way that's going to work.
Kelly: So cool.
Nick: That's a great idea.
Kelly: It's such a cool idea too, because as an indie developer you
don't have a ton of money to spend on advertising either, so
it's great that you're basically going back to trade, which is
how all business kind of begins, where you just . . . Tap for
Tap, exactly. I love the idea.
Eric: Well, thank you.
Kelly: We'll be doing it for sure.
Eric: Good! Well, that's great, that's a verbal contract!
Kelly: Sure! Are you recording this?
Eric: Yeah, I am. No, definitely, I 'm really excited to be able to
bring you guys on when it's ready, and I think the
system will have made some really great strides by the time
that you're coming around.
Nick: Cool.
Eric: Yeah, so that's basically it for my questions today. What was the
last good movie you saw?
Kelly: Oh, I don't know.
Nick: We saw "Ted." That movie was hilarious.
Kelly: 'Ted' was pretty good. "Ted" was good.
Eric: I enjoyed "Ted." I happen to be sitting beside a guy who enjoyed
it . . . painfully, to the point where everyone
in the theater was kind of laughing at him, he was laughing so
hard and so aggressively, but I really enjoyed the movie.
Kelly: That's hot.
Eric: He actually wore himself out about halfway through the movie, and
just kind of went into a coma for the last half of the picture,
laughing so hard. Anyway . . .
Kelly: That's awesome.
Eric: I just got a message that my startup disk is almost full, so
we're going to have to cut it short here . . .
Kelly: Okay.
Eric: . . . but thank you guys so much for coming on today, and I really
look forward to working with you in the future.
Nick: Absolutely, yeah.
Kelly: Thank you for having us!
Nick: Yeah, thank you for having us for sure.
Eric: All right, bye-bye. Take it easy, have a good night.