A couple of days ago, I stumbled upon a Reditt thread which was discussing the small lifestyle changes you’ve made to have a big impact in your life. The most popular comment on that thread was about how one person improved his life by being a Producer vs a Consumer.

(Image credit: Ramit Sethi)

Here is brief excerpt of that comment -

I make sure to start every day as a producer, not a consumer.

When you get up, you may start with a good routine like showering and eating, but as soon as you find yourself with some free time you probably get that urge to check Reddit, open that game you were playing, see what you’re missing on Facebook, etc.

Put all of this off until “later”. Start your first free moments of the day with thoughts of what you really want to do; those long-term things you’re working on, or even the basic stuff you need to do today, like cooking, getting ready for exercise, etc.

This keeps you from falling into the needy consumer mindset. That mindset where you find yourself endlessly surfing Reddit, Facebook, etc. trying to fill a void in yourself, trying to find out what you’re missing, but never feeling satisfied.

When you’ve started your day with doing awesome (not necessarily difficult) things for yourself, these distractions start to feel like a waste of time. You check Facebook just to make sure you’re not missing anything important directed at you, but scrolling down and reading random stuff in your feed feels like stepping out into the Disneyland parking lot to listen to what’s playing on the car radio – a complete waste of time compared to what you’re really doing today.

Very well said. I totally agree with this philosophy. In fact this has been my approach for the last few months where I improved my productivity by not being distracted by social media. Though I try to follow this philosophy many times, I fail to follow it consistently for good length of time. But I’m not going to give up. I need to follow this discipline again more consistently. Writing this blog post can be considered as producing my own thoughts instead of just consuming a Reditt thread.

Why I believe in this philosophy?

The short answer is – producing helps us grow. If you observe your consumption activity, most of the times it’s a passive activity. When we’re watching a TV or online Video, or reading a news or blog article, for the most of the part we tend to believe in what the content producer is telling us. We rarely think on our own while we’re consuming something. So we don’t develop our own view points and our own thinking.

While I agree leisure time and rest is important, and we need to consume something entertaining without thinking much. But too much of this behavior becomes a habit and eventually it makes us weak as over the period we stop thinking.

On the contrary, when you produce something, you stretch your mind. You come out of your comfort zone, stretch your own limits, and you think on your own! You develop your own view point. Every single producing exercise is a great learning experience on many different levels – sometimes tangible and sometimes intangible. But with this constant habit of producing something, you continue to grow – both personally and professionally.

If that’s the case, then is consuming totally useless?

Of course not. While I agree that being just a consumer is not a good thing, I strongly believe that consuming is just as important as producing. If there are no consumers, then there won’t be any producers, and vice-versa as well. So we need both – producers and consumers. We just need to follow a discipline to do both things with good balance.

To produce some great stuff, you also need to consume new information, knowledge, and ideas. So you definitely need to consume what interests you. But you also need to put certain limit on it and make sure it doesn’t become just mindless consumption.

In day to day life, I would give more emphasis on producing something meaningful, but at the same time, I would allocate some time to consume something relevant and thought provoking – ideally something which will even inspire me to produce something new.

So what should you produce more and consume less?

The first thing – you need to believe that you need invest more time on producing than that you spend on consuming. Producing could mean your day-to-day office work, home tasks, replying to important emails, writing a blog post, or even Tweeting some interesting insights of your own (not retweeting someone else’s blog post link).

Even during your day-to-day work – brainstorming new ideas, architecting new design, programming some function – falls into bucket of producing Vs just attending meetings & presentations, or reading programming articles or books – falls into bucket of consuming. Similarly, just watching funny videos or someone else’s photos, watching TV serials or sports channels is most of the times mindless consumption. We just need to limit the time we spend on these consumption activities.

Final thoughts

Again, both producing and consuming activities are important, you just need to find a way to produce more stuff than what you are consuming. At the end of the day, it’s the right amount of balance will make you feel proud, enriched and excited Vs exhausted and less motivated.

Hope this blog post will inspire you to produce more stuff – let it be hacking a project in the part-time, writing a blog post, painting some picture, or anything which excites you, and pushes your limits and make you think. Happy producing!

This post is not about tips or tactics. It’s about a simple philosophy.

Ok, I’ll not stretch too long, but here is a simple secret to provide the best customer service -

Treat your customers the way you want to be treated by other businesses, and you’ll be naturally providing the best customer service.

That’s it.

Ok, I understand you might ask why do I believe this simple philosophy works. Let me share my recent experiences with you.

In last month, we released monthly subscription plans to our appointment reminder software product JustRemindIt. After launching these plans, I started getting more emails from customers regarding feature requests, pricing concerns, issues they’re facing, etc.

Since JustRemindIt is still majorly operated by me, I answer all of these customer support emails. And I follow one simple philosophy – put myself in the shoes of the customer and answer emails or treat them the way I want someone to treat me.

That means writing detailed emails on how to solve the issue they are facing, or giving them extra free credits when inconvenience is caused, or refunding their money if they’re not happy.

Here are some of the testimonials we received in last 2 weeks -

“P.S. You provide excellent customer service. Thought you would like to know that.”

“This definitely calls for me “advertising” for this app on my Facebook and twitter sites. That’s about 320 friends right there. And I can convince many of them that you guys have a price range for them, as u have many plans! :) so hopefully I can bring you more business. You deserve it PLUS I will be sure to let everyone know that you’re ALWAYS HERE for us with your first-class customer support. I know everyone appreciates that! ;)”

So far so good…but you might say that how this will work when your organization gets bigger…and you’ve to hire customer support professionals.

Same thing. Just give your customer support professionals freedom and sense of ownership of your company. Just tell them that treat your customers the way they want to get treated by other businesses. Ask them to use common sense more often that some rule book.

Recently I experienced horrible customer service experience from American Express, ICICI Bank and a local Thai restaurant. At all these places, the customer support representative was just following the corporate guidelines, was thinking their profit, and was not really concerned about how customer was feeling.

They had limited authorities to resolve my issues, and had common answer that they don’t have permission to fix certain things even though they thought it was right thing to do. They had to involve their supervisors, who also weren’t much of any help. Their apologies were also very fake and scripted.

It’s very valuable to get a new customer, but it’s extremely important to satisfy existing customers and make them your loyal fans.

And the only way to do that is to be authentic and treat your customers the way you want to be treated.

What worked well

• Improved my focus and productivity: As I said before, this was the biggest benefit I achieved by staying focused and less distracted. I could finish 2 major milestones on my plate -
  • I launched my social commerce solution company Shopalize in Private beta. It’s still not open to everyone to access yet as we’re currently working on acquiring early customers and trying to hash out product flow with them. Once we have more confidence on our product and it’s value, we’ll open it to more people.
  • I also launched major upgrades and subscription plans for my appointment & personal reminder service company JustRemindIt. It was a lot of work to add these enhancements on both Web and iPhone application at the same time. So I’m really glad I could complete this milestone as planned.
• Spent really quality time with family & friends: This is something I can’t measure quantitatively, but I would definitely say I felt lot happier and relaxed spending more and quality time with people I care about. In general, I was majorly focused on my work, but whenever I used to get tired, or stuck on something, instead of spending time on the Internet, I spent it with family or friends – either helping my wife day-to-day house activities or just hanging out and relaxing with friends. Simple tricks I mentioned in previous blog post helped me to give full attention to people or events around me, and not get distracted by other distractions.
• Improved my self control and discipline: This is kind of a side benefit. Typically you gain more self confidence when you see yourself following certain discipline consistently for good time. It’s just re-affirming that you’re disciplined and you can control your actions.

What didn’t work so well

• Missed Social media: I’m learning lot of things on both technical and non-technical fronts while building my online businesses. Every time I learned about some hack, insight or advice, I wanted to share it with the world, but I restrained doing it. My natural instinct was to be more social and vocal, but I forced myself to stay silent. I guess Social media has really become an integral part of our lives. Every time we get excited about any small thing, we want to share it with the world. Of course, if you don’t share anything, your life is not going to end, in fact you’ll live very happily. But I guess by being more social, you’re expressing your happiness, excitement and learning with the world, which might make more people happy, excited and knowledgeable.
• Might have not learned as much as I could have: Working alone means you will learn from your own readings and experiments. You don’t have a colleague or friend with whom you can brainstorm different ideas or thoughts. So by limiting how much time I spend on content consumption, I definitely must have missed many interesting articles on various different topics. But I knew that this would happen, and that’s why I had decided to consume the information reactively rather than proactively.
• Couldn’t grow blog subscribers, Twitter followers, and personal brand: No one wants to engage with your blog if it’s dormant and you don’t write valuable content. Similarly no one wants to follow you on Twitter if you don’t share interesting articles, insights and inspiring quotes unless they’re your friends. You might ask, but why one cares about these numbers? Sure, many people do not have to worry about these metrics. But if you’re building an online business, then it’s super important to build your brand and make your identity known in the industry. It opens many opportunities for you and your business to meet with new people, get word about what you’re doing, get feedback and valuable introductions, etc.

So overall, being inactive on Social media didn’t affect my personal life in any significant way, in fact it actually helped me a lot. Similarly, it also didn’t hurt my professional life in any major way, but at the same time, it didn’t help me either. In fact, it would have been helpful if I would have been more active on Social media.

Plans going forward

Since there are both advantages and disadvantages of being active on Social media, I need to find the right balance between on what activities I spend more time vs what activities I spend less.

• More Blogging & Tweeting: This is definitely valuable to build my personal brand and identity. Blogging helps me to clear my thoughts and put it in concise and crisp manner. It is improving my writing and my communication abilities in general. Tweeting enables me to share and discover thoughtful articles and insights and connect with similar minded people. Both blogging and Tweeting are related to my interests – entrepreneurship, startups, marketing, etc. So I’m going to invest more time in connecting with people who share my interests.
• Less Facebook, Foursquare, etc.: All other social activities, I’ll be spending very less or no time. I think Facebook is good enough to check 1-2 times in a day. Facebook is a true social graph. So I’m connected with people from my real life social connection – from my nephews to uncles, from elementary school friends to grad school friends. I feel comfortable sharing my personal life things – like interesting life events, inspiring quotes, funny videos, songs I’m listening or things I’m buying – something that can be relevant or interesting to all types/ages of people. But I’m not sure it will be relevant if I share my professional interests related things like articles or quotes about Startup, Internet Marketing, etc. My nephew or uncle won’t be interested in that.

This way I would be less active on certain types of Social media sites, but will be active on few of them. As a result of it, I still can be focused on my work and spend quality time with my family and friends, and also don’t need to compromise on growing my professional presence and connections with interesting people from my industry.

Here is a quick snapshot of what new features are -

• Monthly Free, Personal & Professional Subscription plans
• Monthly Free reminder credits for each plan
• SMS reminders
• Recurring reminders
• Message Templates
• Stored Contacts

Read more details on JustRemindIt’s official blog here: Announcing Monthly Free reminders, SMS & Recurring reminders, Message Templates and Stored Contacts.

To me, spending time on Social media means spending time on Email, Blogs, News Aggregators, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc. In general, I wanted to consume minimum required content – like checking important emails, reading interesting blogs or seeing friends’ updates only couple times a day instead of being hyper active. And I also decided not to produce any content at all – no blog posts, no Tweeting, not even Facebook liking.

I had not set any time limit for this experimentation. I decided to continue doing it as much as I can or until I complete important milestones on my plate. Writing this blog post may be considered as the end of this experiment, which lasted closed to 2 months. I guess part of the reason I’m ending this experiment now is because I just completed 2 major milestones on my plate and other part is because I missed being active on Social media.

So I thought what’s a better way to end my dormancy on Social media than writing about tactics I used to shut off myself from Social media and be more productive. In this article I’ll just cover simple tactics I used, but in the next blog post I’ll also write about what worked and what didn’t work so well as a result of this experiment.

So here is a list of tricks I used to improve my productivity & happiness -

1. Unsubscribe from newsletter & notification emails

I wrote about this before – now a days email has became more of a notification medium rather than a communication medium. Every single day you’ll receive tens of newsletter emails that you’ve subscribed to (e.g. Daily Deals, Events, etc.) or notification emails from web services that you’re using (e.g. Twitter, Quora, Foursquare, etc.). Most of these newsletters are not relevant and are complete distraction. All those notifications emails take your attention and waste your time. Unsubscribe from such newsletters that are not really important. Also change your email notification preferences on most of these social services to receive no email notification about any activity that happens on that site. It’s not going to matter much if you don’t learn who started following you on Twitter or Quora.

2. Consistently keep your inbox clean

I don’t read every single email I receive. In fact I delete more emails than I read ones. To be specific, I only read emails that are sent only to me. I rarely read or participate in emails that are sent to groups. Most of the times I delete them based on the subject and my judgment of it’s relevancy to me. If I have time, and if it’s relevant, then only I’ll read it. Keeping this minimum engagement with emails definitely helped me to focus on important emails, and not feel burdened with email overload. Deleting non-personal emails also helped me to keep my inbox clean and find relevant emails quickly when needed.

3. Close your email browser window

Another trick that helped me immensely was to close the email browser window when I’m done with reading/writing emails. If I keep that tab open and if I receive a new email, then Gmail shows a notification count of how many new emails I’ve received. When I see such notification, my natural instinct is to click on that tab and see who sent me emails. Seriously, do we need to be so hyper-responsive to check these emails? I don’t think so. So I simply close that email window when I’m done with checking/replying emails. As they say – ignorance is bliss. Then in few hours (1-2 hrs typically) I’ll open my Gmail, read/reply/delete emails as necessary, and close the window again. Practice it, and you’ll definitely see the results.

4. Logout from Twitter & Facebook every time you’re done browsing

This is another simple trick that works really well if you want to spend less time on Twitter or Facebook. Whenever you login to Twitter or Facebook, these services store your cookie on your computer, and next time you visit their URL, you’re already logged in to that service and you’ll be spending next 20-30 mins in browsing without even realizing it. You don’t visit these sites with the goal of spending 30 mins on it. You think that you’ll just spend 5 mins, quickly see what’s going on, and get back to work immediately. But it rarely happens that way and you end up spending 30 mins of your precious time. But next time you visit these sites, make sure to logout from them when you’re done with browsing. This way, if you try to visit their site for 5 mins, then it will redirect you to their login page and ask you to enter your login credentials. Don’t check the “Remember me” option while signing in. When typing a service URL doesn’t log you in automatically to that service, and when you’re faced with additional hurdles like entering login credentials, most likely you’ll realize that you don’t want to login now, and you’ll give up signing in saving your next 30 mins of precious time.

5. Schedule your content consumption routine and be reactive than proactive

This is a simple discipline – just schedule your day. Decide when you’ll be reading news or blogs, when you’ll be Tweeting or Facebooking, and follow that routine. News in the morning, or Facebooking after lunch, whatever it is, just plan roughly, and try to follow it. One more thing to add is – you don’t have to read every single interesting article that you found on that same day. If you don’t need that information right now, then don’t read it. Read it when you need it or when you have ample time. Be reactive to read information, not proactive. Sure, real-time information is valuable, but you’ve to judge what’s more important to you at that moment – finishing your tasks or reading some more information.

6. Use a bookmarking service

This ties to above suggestion – do not read every single article that you find interesting at that moment. When I browse news sites or blogs after I wake up, my goal is to discover as many interesting articles as possible in given short time, and bookmark them with appropriate tags (Delicious) for later reading or searching when it’s needed. Most of the times I read it during lunch break or when I’m having leisure time on the weekend.

7. Don’t keep your mobile handy when you’re at home

This is another simple self discipline to spend quality time with your family & friends. Now a days we’re consuming and producing more and more content on mobile devices. I think it’s useful to use mobile devices when you’re not at home and killing your time in some waiting queue or waiting for someone at a coffee shop. But when you’re at home with your family or at friends’ place for party, then don’t keep that device handy all the time. Develop a discipline to keep it somewhere else – far from your easy reach. If you have your mobile handy, then you’ll have that constant urge to open those Email, Twitter or Facebook apps and spend your time browsing/updating things which are not important. Instead just be with your family and friends, and enjoy being in that moment.

8. Measure how many times and how much time you’re spending on certain sites

This is just to know what you are doing now so that you know what do next. I used to visit Hacker News, Twitter, Google Reader atleast 8-10 times a day. It was a major time killer and distraction. Just by measuring how many times I visit these sites a day boggled my mind and I reduced it down to 2-3 times a day. Also measure how much time you spend on these sites. Just by knowing how much total time you’re spending on these sites will help you understand how much time you can save and use it to spend somewhere else.

So these are the tricks I used to focus on my work and finish few milestones on my plate. I typically worked 10hrs-14hrs/day and still found lot of quality time to spend with my family & friends. Whenever I used to get tired or stuck on something, instead of spending time on Social media, I spent it with my family and friends – either helping them on any day to day activities or just hanging out and relaxing with them. Shutting myself off from Social media definitely made me happier as I spent amazing time with my family and friends and I also did not need to compromise on my work and sleep hours at all.

Hope these tricks will be useful to you as well to become more productive. What tricks do you use to be less distracted from Social media noise? Please share your ideas in the comments.

I’m not interested in talking about what they will be announcing at the event. What I’m interested in is how brilliantly they have designed their invitation.

Look at above design – it’s extremely simple, detailed oriented, elegant and innovative – just like their products.

The invite has 4 icons of iPhone’s native Apps.

• Calendar icon shows the event is on Tuesday (October) 4th.
• Clock icon mentions that it’s at 10am.
• Map icon displays it will take place at Apple Headquarters near 280 Freeway.
• And the Phone icon emphasizes that it’s going to be an iPhone event (rather than an iPad/Mac event), with one unread notification alerting that there is something important you must pay attention to.

Entire invite in just 4 App icons – simply brilliant!

4 months ago I launched my part-time project – a Voice Call based reminder iPhone application – JustRemindIt. When I launched it, I had promised that I’ll keep writing my experience about launching, marketing and running an iPhone application business. But, I didn’t keep up my promise and didn’t write anything about it. I just launched the app, and then that’s it. I didn’t work more on the app after that. I did some basic feature enhancements and bug fixes, but not major feature announcements. I didn’t push for any marketing either – absolutely nothing – I know, it was a big mistake. No, I didn’t loose any interest in the project, it’s just that I got too swamped up with my other social commerce startup Shopalize that I couldn’t give enough attention to this project.

JustRemindIt is probably one of my best part-time projects. It solves a real problem for many people, it has “wow” effect in how it solves that problem, it has paying and happy customers, it is growing steadily without any efforts, and it still has great potential in future. Though I was not actively working on this project, whenever I used to get some time, I kept improving it bit by bit. I plan to launch a big update for this service very soon, so stay tuned. But there is one thing I was quite regular about this project – monitoring the stats pretty much once in every few days. I just looked at the stats today morning and thought I would share those with you all to give an perspective on how iPhone app economy works. Hope these numbers will be useful to you in your endeavors.

Setting the right expectations

Since JustRemindIt is not a “gaming”, “social” or “local” iPhone app, I didn’t expect to have huge download success. In fact, it’s a reminder application to increase your productivity, I thought the targeted audience on iOS platform will be very limited. Since iOS platform is primarily a entertainment platform and not a productivity platform, my expectations of going it viral or featuring in top charts were very low. On top of that, I also have a freemium business model, so I kept my ambitions and projections quite realistic.

Ok, now let’s dive into the numbers, and then we’ll discuss some lessons I’ve learned so far.

Stats for last 4 months

1. Number of downloads

JustRemindIt iPhone app is free to download on the app store, and it gives you few free reminder credits to try out the app before you need to buy more credits. The whole business model was based on the “pay-as-you-go” premise. I think this model worked quite well instead of charging upfront money to download the app. In 4 months, the app was downloaded close to 1400 times. First month had the highest downloads, as I had done some launch publicity that time. After that, without zero marketing efforts, the download rate is quite constant. On an average, there are 10 downloads per day.

2. Number of registered users

JustRemindIt iPhone app requires users to register to JustRemindIt service. I knew that this design strategy had a flaw and I would loose some users, but I decided to use this approach from future plans perspective. I’m planning to launch a web application of the same app in few days, and wanted a way for users to sync up their iPhone and Web app reminders in a seamless way. I could have achieved the same results using different strategies, but it would have required more work and delayed my launch. So I launched with a strategy where users need to register before they start using the app. And sure enough, I dropped 40% of users. I’ve around 60% users of all users who downloaded the app registered with JustRemindIt service.

3. Active users

Since it’s a productivity based app, my assumption was many users will not continue using this service after first few uses. Typically productivity specific initiatives generally don’t last more than first few days when our energy is high. With this understanding, I assumed that if user schedules more than 3 reminders using JustRemindIt app, then she’s an active user. Currently I’ve little more than 25% of total registered users as active users. In active users also, not all users are equally active. Roughly, 20% of active users drive around 70% activity, remaining 30% activity is driven by rest of 80% active users.

4. Number of reminders

The activity by active users is to send reminders to themselves or other people. More than 1100 reminders have been sent so far using JustRemindIt service in last 4 months. That’s about roughly 10 reminders per day. Of course, weekends are less active than weekdays, but I’m just giving you a rough idea. Anyways, this is quite less than my expectations, so this is one area where I want to focus on and improve these numbers.

5. Paid users

As mentioned earlier, I give few free reminders for new users to try out, but once they consume all free credits, they need to recharge their account with new reminders. As of today, around 5% of registered users have recharged their account after using free reminders.

6. Paid plans

I’ve $0.99, $2.99 and $5.99 paid plans to recharge your account. The $5.99 is the most popular plan with 80% users purchasing this plan. $0.99 is the least popular plan.

7. Repeat paid users

Again, people might recharge their account once, and then might not come back to recharge again. So I wanted to measure how many of these paid users have recharged their account more than once. Approximately 15% users of paid users have recharged their account more than once. Those are the truly happy and loyal customers!

8. Revenue

Finally, revenue – probably the ultimate metric you want to track. First and foremost, this is my first project, which is making real revenue by “charging users to pay to use your product”. I had few other projects in the past which made some money through Google AdSense, but this project gave totally different satisfaction and sense of achievement. In fact, having paying customers is the ultimate validation of your idea. So probably nothing keeps me motivated and excited about this project than knowing that I’ve paying customers, and that list is continuously growing. Anyways, back to numbers, I’ve made decent few hundreds in last 4 months. I haven’t reached to 1K mark though, may be it will happen in few more months once I launch the Web application with Premium features and monthly Subscription plan.

9. Profit

The app is profitable if you don’t consider the time I had put in initially in developing it. Right now, it makes more money than what I’m spending on server and call expenses. So I might like to say it’s a profitable business, but as we know, technically it’s not if we consider my time involvement.

10. Customers

Though I launched and positioned my app initially for consumers on iOS platform, and though they are the majority of registered users, the most active users are actually small professional and personal service businesses. Businesses are actually finding this service more valuable than consumers. So definitely, my next focus will be to cater these business users with advanced features.

Lessons learned so far

1. Positioning your service uniquely is very important.

There was no dearth of reminder services on both web and on iOS platform when I launched this app. There are many Email/SMS based and some Voice Call based reminders services on the Web, and there are also many Email/SMS reminder iPhone apps and very few Voice Call based reminder iPhone apps on the app store. There are also few Text to Voice Call reminder services on the Web, but there was no iPhone app in the app store which was doing Text to Voice Call conversion for reminders. So I decided to start solely on the iOS platform to position uniquely and then expand to Web application once I have enough traction. I also decided to just focus on the Voice reminders than doing all Email/SMS reminders to begin with. I think it worked quite well. I don’t think I would have gotten these many registered users solely on the Web application in 4 months, especially given so much competition in this space. Definitely now I’ll expand to Web application, and will also add Email and SMS reminders, but if I would have done that before, then I think I would have gotten compared with all other apps and services out there, and would have lost my uniqueness or “wow” factor as explained in next point.

2. Having little “wow” factor makes a good difference.

Reminder services are not new. Voice reminders are also not new. But Text message to Voice Call was something new. Or at least, it was not obvious to many people. This feature or approach added “wow” factor to my app. Many people’s eyes light up when I explain them how my app works – just type a text message and our service will call the receiver as a voice call. And naturally they download it, tell other people, and so on.

3. Having a real business model for your part-time projects makes your efforts all worth it.

Part-time projects are fun to build and launch, but not after that. No one likes to “maintain” the project. Everyone wants to “launch” cool new things. As soon as your project gets into a maintenance mode, you start loosing the interest and motivation to maintain it. That’s where having a real-business model and paying customers makes a huge difference. Not because you’re responsible to provide your customers a reliable service, but because it’s a great satisfaction that you’ve build something valuable and useful that people are actually giving you their money.

4. To make real business on the iPhone app, you’ll need a lot bigger scale and hence lot more marketing efforts.

My goal for this project was not to build a real startup out of it, but more to study and understand the app store and SAAS based app’s economy. I also priced my product with low margins because my goal was not to make lot of money out of this, but was to get more people use it and have some of them pay you that covers its cost. I also didn’t work at all on the marketing front, which I definitely plan to do more now going forward. But based on my current revenues numbers, I’ll need lot faster execution, lot more focus on marketing and sales, and lot more volume to make this as a viable business that can support me.

Plans going forward

1. Support and new development

As said earlier, I’ll be launching a web application of this very soon – may be in couple weeks with basic features. It’s primarily targeted for professional and personal service businesses. Then I will continue adding new premium features with monthly subscription based plans for these businesses. I’ll continue supporting my existing customers, in fact that’s always a higher priority for me than adding new features. I also have lot of feature requests for iPhone app from existing customers, so I’ll definitely work on those as well one by one.

2. Marketing

As said before, I didn’t good job in this, and I want to fix it for future releases. I’ve some interesting ideas and plans for this, and I think it’s just a matter of time that I need focus on it and execute it.

3. Get help

As I’ll be super busy with my other startup Shopalize, I won’t be able to give lot of attention to this project to achieve above tasks simply on my own. I’m trying to find some ways to delegate this work in some ways. I’m thinking either I’ll outsource this entire Product Development efforts to low cost centers, and I just take care of Marketing, Product Management, and Customer Support efforts going forward. Or the second option is to get someone as a partner on the board who wants to learn and build this business in his/her part-time.

Anyways, I hope this information was useful to you and hope you’ll do more right things while launching your next iPhone app business. Also, if you want to join me, or know someone who would like to help me on this project, please feel free to contact me at aditya@justremindit.com. Also, let me know your thoughts and suggestions about how should I execute it in much smarter way in the comments section below. Looking forward for your inputs.

Want to be a great leader? Work hard to develop extraordinary skills. Become an independent thinker and have the courage to follow your ideas. Show respect to others and never think more highly of yourself than you ought. Avoid bad habits of sloth, dissipation, dishonesty, and other qualities that would cause others to lose respect for you. Set goals that challenge you to do your best and follow diligently after them. Apply all this consistently to every part of your life, always striving to better yourself in even the smallest ways while maintaining integrity.

I’m super excited to announce that my first iPhone app “JustRemindIt” to send Voice (Phone) Call based reminders is ready do download in the App Store here: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/justremindit-voice-call-reminders/id408330265?mt=8. The iPhone app is FREE to download in the App Store, and you’ll also get some few reminder credits to try the app and play with it.

The Gist

For those, who don’t know what this app is all about, essentially it’s an easiest and simplest iPhone app to send Voice (phone) call based reminders to your friends, colleagues, clients and yourself and get your tasks done.

You just enter the receiver’s details like name, phone number and timezone, then you enter reminder details like message (in simple text format) and date and time at which you want to send a reminder. And then we convert your textual message into voice and call the receiver at scheduled time.

The Approval Process

A couple of weeks ago I’ve shown the pre-view of this app and shared how I got started working on this app in my post – Preview of my first upcoming iPhone app – “Just Remind It”. At that time, app was almost ready, so I submitted in the App Store for approval after couple of days of polishing. Unfortunately, just within 4 days I received a notification saying my app got rejected. It was a minor issue from my side during submission process. After fixing that issue quickly, I resubmitted the app in the App Store. But unfortunately the iTunes Connect department got closed for Christmas holidays for almost 5 days, which delayed the app review process. Now, just a couple of days ago, the app is Approved and available to download from the App Store.

You can download it for free here: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/justremindit-voice-call-reminders/id408330265?mt=8. You’ll need to create a new account to use the app and you’ll receive few free reminder credits in your account to play around with the app. You can also check out http://justremindit.com for more information on the benefits of this app and who is it useful for.

Help me spread the word

I need your help on few things -

1. Please use the app, and let me very honest feedback how did you find it? Is it useful to you? Was it easy to use? Do you have any ideas that you would like to see implemented in the next version of this app? Please, just write to me at help@justremindit.com
2. If you used the app and if you like it, then please write a review in the app store. This will be highly appreciated!
3. I’ll appreciate if you can share it with your friends on Twitter, Facebook and Email. Help your friends to get more organized and productive by recommending this reminder app.

Next Plans

I already have more than 100 users from last couple of days using this app. Few of them were very kind enough to give me features and ideas they want to see to be implemented. I already have my prioritized list to release in the next version, so definitely, adding more useful features, and at the same time making this app even more simple will be top priority. On the side, spreading the awareness of app is also high priority. I’ll be writing to few bloggers and app review sites about app launch. I’ll see how the response is received from such PR efforts. I’ll definitely write about process I followed and ROI it generated in next few posts.

Overall, I’m very excited for accomplishing the first step, i.e. building the app and having it launched in the App Store. But this is just the beginning. The real challenge begins now – growing the usage of this app. I’m excited about all these challenges and ready to fight on!

In fact, now a days I receive very few personal emails. My friends are communicating with me on the social networks like Facebook and Twitter. My family is communicating with me using phone or similar VOIP services. Very rarely my friends or family members will send me a personal email asking about my whereabouts. If at all I receive email from them, it will be mostly related to some work only.

Over the past decade we’ve been believing that email is one of the most widely used communication medium, but I think it’s not entirely true anymore. The communication part of email is slowly dying down. The communication aspect now has been taken care by other social properties on the web, and email has become more of a notification medium for your communication activities on other services.

One problem with this trend is, even though our communication is happening on other services, we still spend similar amount of time on email services to manage these notification emails – we still have to open it, read it, and then delete it. And we also spend same amount time on other services to actually communicate with our friends and family. Now a days I don’t even open these emails and simply delete them based on their subject line.

I understand that I can stop receiving these notification emails by setting some options on other services and reduce my email overload, but my problem is I do want to receive these notifications. It makes sense to have one centralized notification centre which informs me about the activities that are happening on different distributed services.

But may be the current form of email services is not efficient to receive these kinds of notifications. All modern email services are fully loaded with features that are designed to foster 2-way communication. Features like Reply, Forward, Attachements, etc. make no sense if I just want to receive a notification from other services.

May be existing email services can identify these notification types of emails automatically, and separate them out in different view, and show me in different format, and once I read it, delete them automatically. Or may be we need some stripped down version of email service as a separate application to just receive notifications from all other services. Another thing can be done is to enforce these other services to only send text-only notifications, with really short message body, and not to send lot of unnecessary junk like graphic images, other marketing material, etc. That would also make accessing these emails much faster and simpler.

Anyways, I don’t know which email service will initiate this kind of change or will someone create a separate simple notification service and take off this burden from email service. These are just my observations and expectations, and I would love to hear your observations and experiences.