Captain Danko’s JavaScript Lab — Code Smarter with Tutorials, Frameworks & Dev Insights

As I have talked about in my  previous post , my startup  My Day To-Do  has grown to the point that I have to consider getting some marketing help (get marketing interns). Now,  App Store Optimisation(ASO)  is a (relatively) new concept and I cannot expect the marketing intern to know about it, therefore I must prepare for the possibility to explain it to them. In this post I will outline my process of explaining ASO to the marketing intern working with me at  My Day To-Do . I will not be explaining what ASO is but rather my four step method of helping someone understand what ASO with the use of some online reading material and real world examples. Background It was only when I released my first mobile (iOS) app that I actually got to know about App Store Optimisation(ASO) and how? well it’s a little hard for me to remember exactly what it was? but this  app launch guide  does shed some light into it. Prior to this, I had heard about this t...

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...

My time was occupied by resolving a few personal matters this last month and a half and therefore it's been some time since I had the opportunity to write a new blog post. A few things have been happening on my end and in this post I will provide some brief info on what some of those things are, namely  A recent spike in downloads for My Day To-Do Lite My next app that I am working on The topic of my next technical blog post or what problem do I solve in it App Store Downloads I always knew about the power of ASO  and localised app name but only recently did I experience the power of ASO first hand. I released My Day To-Do Lite towards the end of December 2015 and it wasn't until September 2016 that I saw a spike in the number of downloads for it. To put this into perspective, the number of downloads I have had for the Lite version in September, October and the first half of Nov, 2016 were more than those combined of all the previous months since it's release. H...

I have already written about how  fastlane  can make uploading screenshots to iTunesConnect easier and in this post  and in this post I will talk about another one of it's very useful tools i.e. frameit . If you look at App Store screenshots for my iOS app  My Day To-Do , you will see that they look great with a nice device frame around them, something which I achieved using the frameit gem from fastlane. The documentation on frameit as of now doesn't talk about everything and learning how to use it takes a bit of effort which is fair enough I suppose. I mean they gave us a great tool so it is only fair that we contribute to it somehow so in this post, I will talk about what I learned while using frameit to frame my App Store screenshots. There were some rules I had to follow to successfully use frameit for my iOS app and here I will share what I learned so it saves the next person learning to use it some time. Ohh and in my quest to save the next pe...

So it's been over a month since I released My Day Todos on the App Store (iOS) and I have been releasing updates for it ever since. So one of the things that I would share in this post is my realisation that having a successful app is not just about writing code, it's so much more than that. Now before anyone reading this says "DUH...", well yes it is a pretty obvious thing but it's the first time I have gotten first-hand experience. So let me share some of the things that have kept me busy post app release... Marketing or just getting the word out in general... My academic background mostly involves Computer Science research and all my past jobs involved me writing code for the most part(except that one job where I was consultant). Given my background I have little or no knowledge about marketing or for that matter how to make something stand out in a highly competitive market. Sure! I can add a unique feature to my app but then how do I let people know abou...