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In November 2017, I wanted to boost downloads of the Pro version of My Day To-Do , so I did (conducted) a little experiment. It was at this time that I thought of giving Facebook marketing another go for My Day To-Do . This time I thought of running an ad targeting app installs on Facebook. In this post, I will talk a bit about my background to Facebook marketing, some of my expectations behind this, the eventual outcome of this, my analysis of the results and what to watch out for the next time we run an ad campaign. All in all, I aim to share the lessons I learned from this and what can anyone else learn from my experience. Background Prior to this, I have tried marketing for My Day To-Do with varying amounts of success, you can read some of my posts on it below, Marketing to Chinese consumers Marketing an iOS app with Bing Ads ... and now more specifically the following posts talk about the kind of Facebook marketing that I did at My Day To-Do before, Marketing wi...

Upto this point, I had only worked with the UIWebView in iOS, even though I had heard/read about the new WKWebView . I had only read good things about it but given the limited resources at my startup, working with WKWebView was a lower priority. A few weeks ago, the time was right for me to have a more in-depth look at the WKWebView and while learning more about it I realised something. I realised that while there are a ton of useful tutorials out there, almost none of them covered it with the depth or all the use cases that I was after. One example of missing information or a use case is, if we receive a json object from the webview, how do we parse it in Swift? In this post I will be talking about how to parse json data in Swift sent from web content hosted in a WKWebView of an iOS app. Background As seen from HTMLStarterAppWithSwift , my interest in the webview is not for showing content hosted in a website but more towards working with content hosted locally i.e. a nati...

In the last few months we added a third party app analytics solution i.e. Firebase to My Day To-Do  and soon we realised that Firebase may not work every time. Hence we tried to abstract the analytics (decouple/separate) solution from the rest of the app code i.e. the app code can log analytics data without knowing about what analytics solution is in use. In this post I will talk about our analytics solution and provide some code examples for an iOS app with Firebase analytics. The aim of the code is to provide an example of how to abstract the analytics part from the rest of the app. Hence without further a due let's get to it. Background In June 2017, we added a third-party analytics solution i.e.  Firebase analytics to My Day To-Do for tracking app usage i.e. we wanted to know what aspects of our product do people use the most. At this stage I am the only developer at My Day To-Do and it was the first time I had worked with an analytics solution. Anyway I added ...

How did I get here ? yes that is the exact thought in my head right now, how did I get here? ( or this link ) Yes not long ago, I had a job that paid a somewhat decent amount, I was working on a very challenging (and interesting) project and I had plenty of time to play games. Right now: well I am still working on an interesting project, not getting paid (not yet) and I am getting very little time to play games. Ok so maybe not 'thaaat' different from my former situation except the part about the money. The point is that being a sole founder in a startup, I just have to so many things at the same time, I mean seriously think about this, I am building a Java Spring web version for My Day To-Do , I have to deploy it to AWS , learn new APIs in iOS 11, make iOS11 updates, make job descriptions, find more employees (interns) to work with me at my startup etc etc. The number of disparate (different) tasks I need to get my head around is just staggering. In this post I will be shari...

In the last few months we have experienced a significant spike in downloads for our app ( My Day To-Do ), a lot of which came from China and all this was very confusing for me at first. App Analytics in iTunesConnect reported the number of people viewing the product page of our app on the App Store was far less the number of downloads? What was equally confusing was the data being reported in our App Analytics platform (Firebase Analytics), did not match the download numbers? My frustration and confusion lead me to embark on a journey to solve this mystery once and for all. I managed to gather enough knowledge and clues to draw a logical conclusion and formulate a theory that satisfies me to a point that this is no longer my concern. In this blog post, I will share my theory in greater detail and try to justify it based on a few facts and I can only hope it satisfies others confused by all of this. Background I have talked about my efforts to capture the Chinese market in my...

A few months ago something new happened at my startup, I got the first ever person to work for My Day To-Do i.e. I found a marketing intern. Interestingly enough as it turned out it would also be the first ever person that I would 'let go'. However I had hired two marketing interns and while I had to let one go, the other one stayed and I was very happy with how he had performed. In this blogpost, I will share my story of what happened with the first intern as well as describe in detail about how I managed the other intern's time. Background to getting help I have already talked about ( here ) how as of this year my startup  ( My Day To-Do ) is finally out of my apartment and into the Catapult co-working space at UNSW. Combine that with the limitation of me trying to do and manage every single aspect of my business, I thought why not get some help? Marketing is one of the weakest aspects of my business, I mean seriously, I am a man with  a background in Computer S...