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Eric: Hi 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 talking with Jim Boyle, app developer and maker of
the iPlaybook series. Welcome to the program today, Jim. How are you doing?
Jim: Doing great! Glad to be here.
Eric: Nice. Tell me a little bit about your apps.
Jim: Well, we've got a handful of apps. The one you mentioned, iPlaybook,
is a sports coaching tool. So basically for any number of sports, we've got
about a dozen sports, on iPad or iPhone. The coach can use the app to
sketch out plays, animate strategies, record them, play them back, send
them out as videos, share them with their team. Recently, we opened a store
about a month or two ago where they can purchase plays from our store and
download them to the app, so if they're looking for some new strategies
then they can do that. That's our primary app. We've got a handful of
others in the sports arena as well that we've rolled out in the past couple
of months.
Eric: Interesting. I'm sure more and more coaches are using these devices,
especially iPads, to drop and store all their plays and everything. Are you
finding there's a pretty good uptake with it?
Yeah. Absolutely. I think everywhere we go we're seeing coaches with iPads.
Apple ran an ad around Thanksgiving last year, a TV ad for iPad that opened
up with a basketball coach coming out of the huddle using the iPad and it
wasn't our app, but I think the whole category saw a big uptake. So, we had
a pretty nice run back in the fall as a result of that.
Eric: Nice. So what is the actual category? Is it sports or is it sports
utilities?
Jim: No, it's sports.
Eric: It's under sports. Talk a little about the sports category. What are
some of your competitors like and what's that category like in general?
Jim: Well, I think it's a niche category. We're not going to see numbers
out of that category that you would see in the gaming category. But it's
very active. We've had, I'd say, a half million downloads, throwing in the
free apps as well as the paid apps. We were, I guess, the number two sports
app in the United States on iPad from probably October through December of
last year. It's kind of neat because you're looking at the top ten list and
it's ESPN, CBS Golf, it's all these big names and then iPlaybook. We had a
little fun with that. I think it's a good niche. Coaches, as you said, are
definitely using iPads so we're just trying to do whatever we can to bring
quality apps to them.
Eric: Neat. Yeah, that idea of seeing your name alongside those giants, I
guess that's one of the beauties of working in the app spaces. That if you
can find the right niche and create a product that's good enough, there's
very little barrier to entry.
Right. Right. And that's, some would say, one of the downsides as well.
It's not like you can really protect against the next person coming up.
But, we just try and keep making our product the best we can be. And we
think that'll eventually, being at the top of our category, not even so
much sports but in terms of playbook apps, we think that'll pay off.
Eric: Have you had many copycats come in? Have you had many people come in
and kind of copy the app?
Jim: There are a lot of people in that space. I don't know about copying
the app per se, but it's a crowded market, that's for sure.
Eric: How many main competitors would you say you have?
Jim: Main competitors? I'd say a couple. There's another app that's done
very well in that space. I say that because I've seen them in the top ten.
They were actually the number one app for quite some time and that was
their basketball product.
Eric: OK.
Jim: There's really only one that we've kind of been – they were one and we
were two and they were top ten for a long time.
Eric: Here's a question, does your app have any social dimensions? Can
coaches upload their plays to the cloud and have other coaches run them and
test them out?
Jim: Yeah. We can do app to app sharing where you can save your app out and
send it to another coach and they can download it and play it. And then we
have Facebook integration and Twitter integration. That's been kind of
neat. We'll see. I have a crawler that runs and just searches for iPlaybook
on Twitter, and we'll see our plays being broadcast in Germany and Japan
and China. We see people posting plays to Twitter. Not so much on Facebook,
as much, but definitely on Twitter.
Eric: I guess there's a fine line with that because I guess coaches don't
always want to give away their secret sauce.
Jim: Sure.
Eric: But I could see it being really great as a high school coach or
something being able to look at the most successful plays or the highest
rated plays and try them out for your squad.
Jim: Right. Yep. And I think there's probably a lot of that going on that
we don't know about with coaches creating their playbooks and then sharing
them with their team. You can take your plays and output them through the
app to YouTube, so I'm sure they have private channels where they're
dumping their plays to YouTube and sharing that out with their team.
Eric: So that's all happening outside of your product, the actual sharing
of the plays?
Jim: We do have a sharing feature where they can share plays as well. They
can bring in plays and send out plays.
Eric: OK.
Jim: But I think most of that activity is taking place outside of the app.
Eric: Gotcha. So how big is iPlaybook? Is it basically you and some
contractors or is it from your home office?
Jim: No, I have a small office here in the suburb outside of Philly, but
it's really just me. I do outsource some stuff. If I'm just pressed for
time or if there's a piece of it that I don't want to deal with, then I'll
outsource it. But, yeah, it's a one man shop for the most part.
Eric: How long have you been programming for it?
Jim: I've been coding off and on really my whole professional career. I was
coding early in my career. I spent about seven or eight years running an IT
consulting operation in Philly that grew to about 100 people, and I
actually ended up selling that back in 2000. While I was doing that, I
wasn't really coding. We were a services organization and we were focused
on building a company and exiting, which we were fortunate to do. And then
when iPhone hit, I really got captured by that so for the last three years
I've been doing a lot of iOS coding.
Eric: And you're doing this full-time now?
Jim: I do about half-time. For the last two years I've been doing some
consulting, enterprise consulting, kind of overseeing apps for an
enterprise here in Philly. So I do that a couple days and then I spend the
rest of my time on this.
Eric: So your model with your apps, it's premium, essentially? There's the
free version with limited feature sets, and then you have them upgrade to
the paid?
Jim: We started out as a paid app. We did that for about a year. Really
just so we could figure out the whole iAd model and what we wanted to do
with the free version. I guess after the first year we launched the free
version. It was really just experimental so we could see what would happen.
The business model right now is I totally am on board with free. We don't
really lock out features, per se. We're basically just giving the app away.
We do a little bit of money on advertising through iAd and some other
models, but our goal is really to just get as many people as we can using
the app. We think we can monetize that based on volume. We're tracking
about 7,000 downloads a week right now. It's been a pretty steep climb.
Again, we're not Angry Birds or anything like that, but in terms of the
number of people that are downloading the app, we think it's enough that
eventually we can monetize it either through the playbook store or selling
other content more so than unlocking features.
Eric: Gotcha. OK, yeah, that makes sense. And so, it's iPlaybook and then
are their individual playbooks for each individual sport as well?
Jim: Yep, that's how we've done it. We had a product that was multi-sport,
and we just found that people tend not to download that at the same rate.
Something about having an iPlaybook with the name football in it seems to
drive a lot more traffic than an iPlaybook without basketball or football.
Eric: That makes sense. I'm from a search engine marketing background. That
just makes sense from a keyword perspective, right? You want something that
you feel is specialized to what you're working with. Is football the most
popular iPlaybook?
Jim: No, basketball actually. It may be because that's my background. I
have a family of professional basketball coaches. Both my father was an NBA
coach and my father-in-law was a 20 year head coach in the league. I've
just been around the game my whole life. I don't know if that made our
basketball app a little better than the other ones or not. But football's
right there, believe me.
Eric: Yeah. There's sports where drawn up plays are quite essential to
succeed more so than almost any others I can think of. I'm a huge hockey
fan and I know there's some plays, obviously, drawn up in hockey but
football and basketball you've got to run those plays to be successful, for
sure. Which team did your dad coach?
Jim: My dad was a long time college coach here in Philly at Saint Joe's
University and then he was an assistant coach in the NBA with the Denver
Nuggets and a little bit of time with New Jersey.
Eric: Interesting. So you represent that rare breed of coder/athlete. That
maybe, there's not too many of those out there.
Jim: Right.
Eric: Do you play basketball? Do you play sports still?
Jim: No, not anymore. I was a college lacrosse player. My brother was a
college basketball player. He ended up actually playing at Harvard. He was
plenty smart, but not smart enough to go to Harvard, but because of his
basketball skills he played there. He used to beat me into the ground, 10-
0, 10-1, if I was lucky. I tell everybody, some people say it makes you a
better player and I'll say that's a bunch of ***. I switched sports! I
switched to lacrosse and played lacrosse in college.
Eric: That can be a brutal sport. It used to be counted as a national
sport, but I think we finally switched to hockey. But, I've seen a couple
of lacrosse games and I have some friends who play it and it's a really
entertaining, fun sport. It can be pretty brutal as well.
Jim: Yeah, it can be.
Eric: Interesting. So you talked a little bit about monetizing your app and
hoping to kind of, with volume, be able to do that a little bit better.
What's the most successful ad platform that you've worked with?
Jim: I've mostly just used the Apple platform and more out of time. We did
a little bit with Ad [inaudible 12:46] early on, but I don't know if it's
changed since then, but at that time the pricing model was a little
nebulous. It was a little unclear as to what they were paying and how they
were paying. It was just easier to implement iAd and forget about it.
Eric: Yeah. Do you have any idea what fill rate you're experiencing with
iAds?
Jim: It does vary. I do track that. I don't look at it that closely, but it
does vary by app and it varies by device. Some of our apps, the fill rate
is 95% and then on other ones it's 25%. I haven't looked into why that
might be.
Eric: I imagine your apps are probably pretty North American centric?
Basketball is just huge in Eastern Europe, as well. I just know that it's
easier to fill ads in North America than it might be in other places.
Jim: OK. Yeah.
Eric: Just out of curiosity, for instance, your basketball app, is it a
global app or is it mostly centered in the U. S. and in Canada?
Jim: Well, it's not internationalized from a technology standpoint, but it
does sell in every country. It does best in America. But, we do see it
purchased all over the globe.
Eric: Cool, so you talked a little about monetization. What about just
marketing your app? What ways have you actually tried to get your app out
there? Or has it more or less sort of relied on being in a niche category
and, sort of, having a viral good reputation and stuff? Or have you
actually tried to actively market it?
Jim: I've done some marketing. Not aggressively. Facebook and Twitter, we
do that. We've done advertising, as well. We've run some Facebook ads.
We've run some Google ads. But, once we went free and we saw the downloads
kind of go crazy, in our world, at least, like I was saying we're doing
about 7,000 downloads a week right now, and to me I can't imagine an
advertising avenue that would get us more downloads than that. So, just
being free was marketing in and of itself. We're getting exposed to a lot
of people that way.
Eric: I've heard a lot about price drop blogs and stuff like that, so I
wonder if, when you did drop your price, if you were featured by any of
those and if that helped?
Jim: Yeah, I don't know if it helps or not. We bounced the price around a
little bit here and there. We haven't really played with the price in a
while. But, you do see those crawlers throw your name out there every time
there's a price change. I don't know if it has any impact or not.
Eric: Are you going to get an iPhone5?
Jim: Well, yeah. There's actually an Apple store, it's a funny story,
across the street from my office. So my buddy, he went over there at 5:00
this morning and I strolled over with a coffee at 9:00 to see how he was
doing. He walked out at 10:30 with a phone and I'm thinking I might walk in
there and walk out without a line. When I was over there about an hour ago
there was maybe, I don't know, 50, 60 people waiting outside. So, I think
I'll be able to go in and walk out and *** him off.
Eric: Maybe, that's part of the appeal, though, that the true Apple
diehards love getting up at five to get in those lines.
Jim: Yeah, he had fun, and he ended up talking to another developer in
line. I said to somebody, I actually threw this on Facebook, I actually
witnessed a Starbucks delivery to somebody in the Apple iPhone line.
Eric: Wow.
Jim: I don't know if you've ever seen Starbucks deliver before.
Eric: I've never seen a delivery, period, no.
Jim: No, of course not! They don't deliver but there's a Starbucks right
next to the Apple store so this guy was coming out with drinks.
Eric: Nice. And you know those baristas are sympathetic to iPhone users for
sure.
Jim: Oh, yeah. Sure.
Eric: A guy in our office, one of my good friends, Ryan, just strolled into
the office with an iPhone5 and instantly started taking panoramic photos. I
instantly welled up with rage and jealousy for my iPhone4S and its lack of
features.
Jim: Well, I think you've got panoramic with iOS 6, so you could show him
up a little bit later.
Eric: Oh, that's right! I was actually trying to download that last night
and I was having some issues, so I'll get back on that. So what's your
favorite app? The one that you use the most?
Jim: I use Runkeeper a lot. The ones everybody else use. I like to run, so
it tracks my runs. I use ESPN every day to see if the Phillies have a
chance to get into the playoffs.
Eric: Oh, they're close, right? They're three and a half back or something
in the wildcard?
Jim: Yeah, I think there's four today. But they had a nice run and then
they went on the road and dropped a couple to Houston which kind of put
them out. Those are the two. Pandora is a nice app. Nothing unusual.
Eric: Are you a Flyer's fan at all?
Jim: Yeah. I love to get down to the games. We go to a couple of games a
year. It's great being down there and watching that.
Eric: Nice. I have a bit of a bittersweet relationship with the Phillies.
I'm a long time Blue Jay's fan. I remember beating you guys in the World
Series that one year and also remember losing Halladay to you and all that.
Jim: What's that?
Eric: No, No, forget it. Never mind. So it's been great talking to you
today. I want to urge our users out there, anyone who's interested in
sports or maybe coaching their kid's teams to check out iPlaybook. Thanks
for being on the program today, Jim. It was nice chatting with you.
Jim: All right, Eric. Take care.
Eric: Bye-Bye
Jim: See you.