The Making of App Stars!
The 2010 Appsfire App Star Award winners were announced today at the 360 iDev conference and our wild and wonderful app, Pocket Zoo, was one of the fortunate few to be named a finalist!
Sadly, we didn’t win. We were chosen as a runner-up in the Entertainment & Fun category. The number one spot went to Mixr, an iPad DJ app by Tasty Little Apps - very tough competition.
And guess what, we’re extremely happy with the final results (never knew we would be this excited about not winning)! Just being a finalist and having the opportunity to share our app with the super, influential panel of judges was enough of an inspiration to last us until launch and beyond.
Being selected as a runner-up is just icing on the cake - and receiving honorable mentions on Techcrunch, ReadWriteWeb and TUAW are the cherry sprinkles on top.
A big thanks to the team at Appsfire for providing this amazing platform, highlighting unreleased apps and providing another much-needed channel for developers to spread the word.
Building a successful app is much like breaking into Hollywood…it’s all about getting discovered - having the talent or in this case a remarkable product is the prerequisite. That pretty much sums up our strategy = make an insanely great app that we would love to use (and share with our nieces, nephews & eventually our own child) + get discovered by making it super easy for people to learn about Pocket Zoo and spread the word.
To promote an app you’ll most likely need a demo video for marketing purposes. It just so happened for us that the App Star awards were a few weeks away and it gave us a goal to work towards. The only problem was we hadn’t started developing the app - and to qualify for the App Star awards you would need a functioning prototype. We had less than two weeks to make a working app, UI, illustrations, some sample content and an awesome demo that brought it all together.
How did we do it? By assembling an awesome, nimble all-star team that included:
- my lovely and pregnant wife - content
- Rob Chia - development
- Mohamed Hashi - UI
- Adam Record - Illustrations
- Alexandria Neonakis - Illustrations
- Fawad Mehrzad - Animation, identity
- Joanna Wiebe - copy
- And me, Robleh, as the quarter-back.
As I love to say - team work makes the dream work. I look forward to sharing the details of our journey with you in future posts.
Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among App Stars.
Thanks to All the Judges (quite a few of whom are proud parents): Robert Scoble, Net Jacobsson, Tom Ortega, Patrick Jordan, Orli Yakuel, Jyri Engeström, Frank Gruber, Garry Tan, Chris Pirillo, Robin Wauters, Marshall Kirkaptrick, Zee Kane, Olivier Peyre, Chris DeVore, Krapps, Raven Zachary, Mike Butcher, Eric, Sarah Perez, Mike Eisenberg, Jean-David Blanc, Mills, John Atkinson, Mark G., Jeff Scott, Loic Le Meur, Michael T. Rose, Tamar Weinberg, Jeff Smith, Brad Jefferson!
