Georges Simenon was one of the most prolific novelists of the twentieth century, publishing 425 books in his career, including more than 200 works of pulp fiction under 16 different pseudonyms, as well as 220 novels in his own name and three volumes of autobiography. Remarkably, he didn’t write every day.

The Belgian-French novelist worked in intense bursts of literary activity, each lasting two or three weeks, separated by weeks or months of no writing at all. Even during his productive weeks, Simenon didn’t write for very long each day. His typical schedule was to wake at 6:00 A.M., procure coffee, and write from 6:30 to 9:30. Then he would go for a long walk, eat lunch at 12:30, and take a one-hour nap. In the afternoon he spent time with his children and took another walk before dinner, television, and bed at 10:00 P.M.

Simenon liked to portray himself as a methodical writing machine—he could compose up to eighty typed pages in a session, making virtually no revisions after the fact—but he did have his share of superstitious behaviors. No one ever saw him working; the “Do Not Disturb” sign he hung on his door was to be taken seriously. He insisted on wearing the same clothes throughout the composition of each novel. He kept tranquilizers in his shirt pocket, in case he needed to ease the anxiety that beset him at the beginning of each new book. And he weighed himself before and after every book, estimating that each one cost him nearly a liter and a half of sweat.

Simenon’s astonishing literary productivity was matched, or even surpassed, in one other area of his daily life—his sexual appetite. “Most people work every day and enjoy sex periodically,” Patrick Marnham notes in his biography of the writer. “Simenon had sex every day and every few months indulged in a frenzied orgy of work.” When living in Paris, Simenon frequently slept with four different women in the same day. He estimated that he bedded ten thousand women in his life. (His second wife disagreed, putting the total closer to twelve hundred.) He explained his sexual hunger as the result of “extreme curiosity” about the opposite sex: “Women have always been exceptional people for me whom I have vainly tried to understand. It has been a lifelong, ceaseless quest. And how could I have created dozens, perhaps hundreds, of female characters in my novels if I had not experienced those adventures which lasted for two hours or ten minutes?”

Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Currey

First off, reality check.

Very few apps make real—if any—money. There are two key reasons for this: 

1.   Competition: Tens of thousands of apps have been created and more are released daily. Working through the muddle of options and being noticed is difficult. 

2.   Price: The majority of apps are available for free, and many are them are quite useful. This has made it increasingly difficult to get customers to pay for an app. And even if you sell an app, your marketplace will receive a commission on each sale. That means you need to sell a ton of product to earn real money. You should absolutely think twice before spending substantial cash creating an app, because recouping your investment is far from a sure thing.

But if you are ready and committed:

First, you must be clear about what app you’d like to create. Ideally, the app should compliment your business or reflect your unique abilities and/or interests.

It is crucially important to understand your audience, what they can most benefit from, and deliver desired content via preferred learning modes. Three proven ways to start include: 

•   Determining your client’s needs. 
•   Researching existing apps serving this market. 
•   Drafting your plan. 

Internet Prophets: The World's Leading Experts Reveal How to Profit Online by Steve Olsher

The first point is self-explanatory. 

The second may seem basic, but it’s surprising how many skim past this step with a mere cursory glance, only to find out after significant time and resources have been expended that a more sophisticated tool exists. Do not be afraid to identify competitive products that may thwart your plans. Successful entrepreneurs embrace similar products and focus on what they can do better and more effectively.

The third point is essential. You want to strategize and formulate your vision before the clock begins ticking. Thinking on someone else’s dime is not only expensive, but also unnecessary. Instead, brainstorm with partners, friends, and other trusted sources and create and refine an outline of how the product will look and how it will work. Unless you have money to burn, start the fire with the kindling of your efforts and let the professionals toss in the heavy logs.

Finding A Programmer 

With your idea formalized, the next step is identifying a suitable programmer to bring the concept to fruition. There are multiple options. FREE Numerous free development options exist. However, it’s important to note that in app-land, you really do get what you pay for. That said, if giving things a test run before fully committing is your preference, consider the following: 

•   Sencha: Sencha.com/Touch 
•   AppMakr: AppMakr.com 
•   Free iPhone App Maker: FreeIphoneAppMaker.com 
•   Free Android App Maker: FreeAndroidAppMaker.com 

Each enables you to create a functional app which can be a great tool for creating a working prototype and begin securing feedback. The downside to free is that, once your name and brand is associated with the app you’ve put forth, an impression has been made and there’s no turning back. If the app’s functionality, appearance, or value is minimal, the consumer will tie this directly to you. Make 100% sure the app is fully representative of the impression you want to make before hitting the “release” button.

Minimize costs to produce your app

A fully functional, cost-effective app can be built for less than $5,000. Many capable developers have the ability to create a professional looking product that represents your brand and image well. Three sites are solid resources to consider when searching for a developer: •   ELance: Elance.com •   ODesk: oDesk.com •   Freelancer: Freelancer.com Each enables you to provide various criteria such as developer location, experience, and total budget. Talent, of course, varies so be sure to check references and ratings. The caliber of developers available can be outstanding as many have salaried positions and moonlight to make extra cash. Ask for examples of their work and, contrary to popular belief, do not be afraid to select the lowest bid.

HIGH-END Developing a full-blown, highly robust app can be prohibitively expensive. It is not unusual for companies to spend upwards of $1 million to create an app with virtually every bell and whistle. Such apps typically involve detailed, interactive components and move far beyond the options offered by template-oriented products. For most, developing a high-end app is not an option. When it is, there are multiple companies who are more than capable of delivering per your specifications.

Internet Prophets: The World's Leading Experts Reveal How to Profit Online by Steve Olsher

How to monetize your app

Not every app is created to generate income. Many companies seek to spread goodwill and garner exposure by giving their apps away for free. This is not unusual as thousands of firms implement this approach. If generating awareness is the core objective, the app typically serves the singular purpose of being a digital brochure. If the plan is to monetize your efforts, there are three proven tactics to consider.

1.   Sell It! Fees typically range from .99 to $2.99 with more robust apps costing significantly more, such as VIPorbit’s Business version which sells for $9.99 on the iPhone and $19.99 for the iPad. While seemingly expensive, the robust functionality ofVIPorbit is equivalent to desktop software that can cost significantly more. Additionally, it is available at your fingertips 24/7, which no desktop software can claim. For example, Sage ACT! was recently available for $466.99.…on sale!

2.   Sell Ads Within Your App In similar fashion to AdSense, Google’s AdMob.com has made it extraordinarily simple to place ads on your app via their proprietary platform. AdMob “allows earnings to be generated by placing targeted ads based on the site’s content and users.” Additional options include Greystripe.com and Smaato.com. Revenue is directly tied to traffic. Therefore, as more ads are shown, income will increase accordingly. And, while a significant number of views and clicks are required before more than just pocket change will be generated, each provides a reasonable opportunity to offset a portion of development costs.

3.   Offer A “Light” Version And Encourage Upgrading This strategy can be very effective. VIPorbit offers a free “light” version, as do thousands of other apps. The free version typically provides customers with a solid user experience, but refrains from allowing access to many key components. In consumer product marketing, this is often referred to as sampling, whereby a taste is offered to whet the consumer’s appetite and, hopefully, leads to the product being purchased.

Remember:

•   Modern technology has largely killed the intimacy associated with developing tangible rapport with vendors, clients and even, employees. 
•   Few apps make real money due to competition and price. 
•   Ideally, your app should compliment your business or reflect your unique abilities and/or interests. 
•   It is crucially important to understand your audience, what they can most benefit from, and deliver desired content via preferred learning modes. 
•   Over 300,000 apps were developed between 2008 and 2010, translating to an astonishing 10.9B downloads. 
•   By the end of 2011, more than 25 percent of mobile web users reported owning no other device to access the Internet. 
•   Apps can be lucrative but must be viewed as a component of the overall marketing/branding mix.

Internet Prophets: The World's Leading Experts Reveal How to Profit Online by Steve Olsher

One of the fastest ways to grow your business online and off is to share your message and mission in high-visibility venues.

The hottest trends among top experts and online marketers today include video marketing, teleseminars, webinars, and the big kahuna of profit, live events.

But, how can you stand up and stand out in a competitive marketplace? Oren Klaff, author of Pitch Anything: An Innovative Method for Presenting, Persuading, and Winning the Deal, says: “A great pitch is not about procedure. It’s about getting and keeping attention.”

Knowing how to grab people’s attention, share your message, and close the deal is a skill that allows you to secure expert status, shine at local networking events, speak to groups, and build your marketing platform.

Be forewarned—studies show that people make approximately 11 assumptions in the first 11 seconds…and, those first impressions are long lasting and hard to overcome. Make a great first impression and people will be forgiving of later missteps. Start off on the wrong foot, and it’s a continuous uphill battle. Whether online or in person, it is important to secure a strong first impression that accurately reflects who you are, what your message is, and how you want to be perceived.

While content is crucial, it’s not what motivates people to take action or what someone is actually buying. Kristin believes moving prospects to take action is the direct result of implementing the compelling combination of content, connection, and inspiration. This is what drives someone to open her wallet and take the next step.

Internet Prophets: The World's Leading Experts Reveal How to Profit Online by Steve Olsher

Yet if the fundamental goal of entrepreneurship is to engage in organization building under conditions of extreme uncertainty, its most vital function is learning. We must learn the truth about which elements of our strategy are working to realize our vision and which are just crazy. We must learn what customers really want, not what they say they want or what we think they should want. We must discover whether we are on a path that will lead to growing a sustainable business.

In the Lean Startup model, we are rehabilitating learning with a concept I call validated learning. Validated learning is not after-the-fact rationalization or a good story designed to hide failure. It is a rigorous method for demonstrating progress when one is embedded in the soil of extreme uncertainty in which startups grow. Validated learning is the process of demonstrating empirically that a team has discovered valuable truths about a startup’s present and future business prospects. It is more concrete, more accurate, and faster than market forecasting or classical business planning. It is the principal antidote to the lethal problem of achieving failure: successfully executing a plan that leads nowhere.

Lean thinking defines value as providing benefit to the customer; anything else is waste. In a manufacturing business, customers don’t care how the product is assembled, only that it works correctly. But in a startup, who the customer is and what the customer might find valuable are unknown, part of the very uncertainty that is an essential part of the definition of a startup.

The effort that is not absolutely necessary for learning what customers want can be eliminated. I call this validated learning because it is always demonstrated by positive improvements in the startup’s core metrics.

Remember that validated learning is should always be backed up by empirical data collected from real customers.

The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses by Eric Ries

Startups are designed to confront situations of extreme uncertainty.

Usually, companies like Intuit fall into the trap described in Clayton Christensten’s The Innovator’s Dilemma: they are very good at creating incremental improvements to existing products and serving existing customers, which Christensen called sustaining innovation, but struggle to create breakthrough new products—disruptive innovation—that can create new sustainable sources of growth.

Innovation is a bottoms-up, decentralized, and unpredictable thing, but that doesn’t mean it cannot be managed.

When you have only one test, you don’t have entrepreneurs, you have politicians, because you have to sell. Out of a hundred good ideas, you’ve got to sell your idea.

When you have five hundred tests you’re running, then everybody’s ideas can run. And then you create entrepreneurs who run and learn and can retest and relearn as opposed to a society of politicians.

The amount of time a company can count on holding on to market leadership to exploit its earlier innovations is shrinking, and this creates an imperative for even the most entrenched companies to invest in innovation.

A company’s only sustainable path to long-term economic growth is to build an “innovation factory” that uses Lean Startup techniques to create disruptive innovations on a continuous basis.

I explained the theory of the Lean Startup, repeating my definition: an organization designed to create new products and services under conditions of extreme uncertainty.

Brad explained to me how they hold themselves accountable for their new innovation efforts by measuring two things: the number of customers using products that didn’t exist three years ago and the percentage

The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses by Eric Ries

The Lean Startup asks people to start measuring their productivity differently.

The goal of a startup is to figure out the right thing to build—the thing customers want and will pay for—as quickly as possible. In other words, the Lean Startup is a new way of looking at the development of innovative new products that emphasizes fast iteration and customer insight, a huge vision, and great ambition, all at the same time. 

The first feedback loop in startups is like that in a car's engine and I call it the engine of growth.

Every new version of a product, every new feature, and every new marketing program is an attempt to improve this engine of growth. New product development happens in fits and starts. Much of the time in a startup’s life is spent tuning the engine by making improvements in product, marketing, or operations.

The second important feedback loop is similar to what is in an automobile and is between the driver and the steering wheel. This feedback is so immediate and automatic that we often don’t think about it., The choreography of driving is incredibly complex when one slows down to think about it. By contrast, a rocket ship requires just this kind of in-advance calibration. It must be launched with the most precise instructions on what to do: every thrust, every firing of a booster, and every change in direction. The tiniest error at the point of launch could yield catastrophic results thousands of miles later. Unfortunately, too many startup business plans look more like they are planning to launch a rocket ship than drive a car.

They prescribe the steps to take and the results to expect in excruciating detail, and as in planning to launch a rocket, they are set up in such a way that even tiny errors in assumptions can lead to catastrophic outcomes.

The Lean Startup method, in contrast, is designed to teach you how to drive a startup. Instead of making complex plans that are based on a lot of assumptions, you can make constant adjustments with a steering wheel called the Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop.

Through this process of steering, we can learn when and if it’s time to make a sharp turn called a pivot or whether we should persevere along our current path. Once we have an engine that’s revved up, the Lean Startup offers methods to scale and grow the business with maximum acceleration.

Startups also have a true north, a destination in mind: creating a thriving and world-changing business. I call that a startup’s vision. To achieve that vision, startups employ a strategy, which includes a business model, a product road map, a point of view about partners and competitors, and ideas about who the customer will be. The product is the end result of this strategy.

The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses by Eric Ries

Do one thing, do it better than anyone else, and get paid extraordinarily well for your talent.

Choose a niche (e.g., 1960’s Mustangs) and then create a simple site and post related products and services. The easiest way to do this is to contact existing sellers (e.g., car dealers, parts manufacturers/distributors, etc.), negotiate a percentage of each sale consummated to be paid to you as a commission, and utilize their existing content.

The riches are in the niches.

Do one thing, do it better than anyone else, and get paid extraordinarily well for your specific talent.

Test the waters to determine if there’s a market for a particular idea.

Offer a meaningful discount or perk to generate initial interest (in this case, a free report).

Wait until you have an order.

Create the product.

Internet Prophets: The World's Leading Experts Reveal How to Profit Online by Steve Olsher

I just asked him to do one simple thing consistently without fail. 

At least three times per day at scheduled times, he had to ask himself the following question: Am I being productive or just active? Charney captured the essence of this with less-abstract wording: Am I inventing things to do to avoid the important?

 Learn to ask, “If this is the only thing I accomplish today, will I be satisfied with my day?”

Compile your to-do list for tomorrow no later than this evening. I don’t recommend using Outlook or computerized to-do lists, because it is possible to add an infinite number of items. I use a standard piece of paper folded in half three times, which fits perfectly in the pocket and limits you to noting only a few items. There should never be more than two mission-critical items to complete each day. Never. It just isn’t necessary if they’re actually high-impact. If you are stuck trying to decide between multiple items that all seem crucial, as happens to all of us, look at each in turn and ask yourself, If this is the only thing I accomplish today, will I be satisfied with my day?

The 4-Hour Workweek, Expanded and Updated: Expanded and Updated, With Over 100 New Pages of Cutting-Edge Content. by Timothy Ferriss

In the future, the great division will be between those who have trained themselves to handle these complexities and those who are overwhelmed by them—those who can acquire skills and discipline their minds and those who are irrevocably distracted by all the media around them and can never focus enough to learn.

Many of our earliest survival skills depended on elaborate hand-eye coordination. To this day, a large portion of our brain is devoted to this relationship. When we work with our hands and build something, we learn how to sequence our actions and how to organize our thoughts. In taking anything apart in order to fix it, we learn problem-solving skills that have wider applications. Even if it is only as a side activity, you should find a way to work with your hands, or to learn more about the inner workings of the machines and pieces of technology around you.

Many Masters in history intuited this connection.

Thomas Jefferson, who himself was an avid tinkerer and inventor, believed that craftspeople made better citizens because they understood how things functioned and had practical common sense—all of which would serve them well in handling civic needs. Albert Einstein was an avid violinist. He believed that working with his hands in this way and playing music helped his thinking process as well.

Mastery by Robert Greene

Process is King 

Documenting repeatable processes for anything you will do more than once is essential to your sanity. It’s true; you can fly by the seat of your pants and get by, but it makes you a hostage to your work. If you’ve ever been a manager you probably like process and understand its benefits. If you’re a developer you probably dislike process or see it as a necessary evil. Startups, being lean and mean, seem like the perfect place to eliminate documents, have no systems, and no processes…but that’s far from the truth. Without process it’s impossible to delegate, difficult to bring on a business partner, and easy to make mistakes. With processes in place it’s much easier to sell your product if/when you want to make an exit. The fact is, creating processes will bring you freedom through the ability to easily automate and outsource tasks. 


Start Small, Stay Small: A Developer's Guide to Launching a Startup by Rob Walling