Tapbots shows how much you can do with just a little upfront | Hacker News Reader

Tapbots shows how much you can do with just a little upfront

37signals.com

19 pointsbillydean8 comments

I think these kinds of posts are a bit deceptive:

"You can keep your day job. Just two months of nights and weekends. Then launch it. Maybe it’s not perfect yet. But get it out there."

I mean I'm all for releasing early and often, but it actually does take a lot of work to make a good application. From the Tapbots guys themselves:

"We are going to write simple but incredibly polished applications that are created specifically for the iPhone/Touch devices. Two guys, lot’s of passion and a lot of hard work..."

How do you reconcile this? These guys want to spend a lot of up-front time building polished apps whereas the 37signals guys are saying get something out there even if it's not perfect. Seems like a contradiction to me.

In defense of 'release early and often', the 'often' part is more difficult (from what I understand) on the iPhone. Each update must go through the approval process. That takes time -- time during which you are getting no feedback about the updates you've made. "Release early and often" is a lot easier when you're talking about a web app on server that you control.

I do agree that the 37s post seems contradictory in light of that.

It's actually not that bad. I updated my little game "Recall" coughshameless plugcough and it only took a few days from submitting the new binary to getting it pushed through.

Yet another 37signals article that's actually about survivorship bias.

True, but you could also look at it this way: perhaps these 37signals articles are helping to illuminate WHY some of these things survive.

After all, success criteria in iPhone apps (or apps in general) may not be objectively quantifiable, but I'm sure there are plenty of do's and don'ts that will help.

Well, if you go back and read the article, they actually offer no useful information or opinions about why Tapbots might have been successful, other than the fact that it's "two guys in a basement" as opposed to some big VC-funded venture.

What gets my goat about this article is that they treat this like it's some novel idea -- as though there are not hundreds and thousands of hackers toiling away after hours and on weekends (yours truly included), to the chagrin of wives and girlfriends everywhere, trying to put together awesome applications without any kind of funding or outside help whatsoever.

Highlighting the fact that one company succeeded with this approach is not merely useless, it probably only solidifies the unfortunate myth that all it takes is a little pluck and a lot of sweat to be successful in an endeavor like this.

The tapbot products really are awesome. These two guys wanted to create their own interfaces for their products from scratch, and they succeeded.

However, I think it's worth noting that the tapbots programmer has been writing objective-c since the 80's. Even with that amount of experience it took two months of "nights and weekends" to create their weightbot app. If you're just starting with objective-c / cocoa / iphone development, I think it's unrealistic to expect to achieve their level of quality in as short a time.

But did they get paid by Apple yet? Cashflow is king and depending on one customer or partner for the majority of income doesn't make for a healthy company.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com