Topping from the bottom

Someone actually used this term at a panel discussion yesterday on the topic of corporate entrepreneurship. Apparently I was the only one who noticed.

His usage on the term was on how to innovate in a large company. I spoke with him afterwards, stressing that actually I'm not into that scene but am aware.

The lesson learnt in this post is that if you want to remember something write it down.

Several of the panel talked about the need of a good mentor. I agreed and made a note of it. A mental note which I immediately forgot.

That's also my take-away: we (and all startups) need a mentor.

The steam problem

I had to get out of the flat. Even though I should be meeting the Crazy Chicken this evening I had to escape now.

So, I am sitting in a San Francisco Coffee Shop (in Munich) - think Starbucks without the grotty carpets.

To avoid any incidents I didn't get a coffee - already had one - but tea.

They handed it over with a second saucer on top. So I didn't realise that they had put two - TWO - tea bags in the cup.

Oh well.

Why is this post labelled as a lessons learnt?

Well, I've been looking at colour swatches. Purple is our corporate colour which is used on our flyers, window stickers, logo and most of the app itself.

But to make the app less monochromic I am looking for a colour that is complementary to purple. There are lots of free colour matching sites out there. But I am kinda thinking that maybe we should have asked our designer to give us a series of colours.

A few days ago the latest version of the app rolled out. This gives us usage information. Appery supplied a view of this but we couldn't download it and analyse it - I guess for security reasons.

So I had to create a work-around.

From this we deduced that one phone (apart from ourselves) is using the app. Well, it's a start.

I'm hoping that by this weekend I will have submitted a more colourful and enticing version of the app with some bugs fixed and some new features.

Still no tequila

But another good meeting with the investment facilitator, this time with the Crazy Chicken.

One thing though, check meeting placed beforehand to ensure they are acoustically satisfactory, which is unlikely to be the case with beer halls. Fortunately it was warmish so we sat outside.

Actual progress

The development of the iPhone version has been driving me crazy.

But in the last few days I got it to work.

I then got it into iTunes Connect and then TestFlight.

Initially Apple rejected it because I hadn't put in a demo account for them to test it. Actually I had and re-explained it.

Then Apple rejected it again from the App store as it has the word "beta" in it. But they allowed it to be used in Test Flight with selected users (this is why it's a lesson learnt - don't forget FB and other social media and sources of assistance).

But I didn't know anyone else with an iPhone. The Crazy Chicken suggested PMing friends in Facebook. I did and three people responded that they were happy to try it out.

So now I have an app in test mode and hope to correct it and release it onto the Apple app store soon.

I also recorded a YouTube video on how to use it. This took a few attempts as I was using Apowersoft to mirror the screen of the mobile  and it kept timing out.

Worthwhile

It's nearly always worthwhile, if not immediately obvious.

This evening I battled through a storm (which never was) and went to an AWS user group.

The talks didn't really do it for me but at the end I talked to the organiser (who I know) and he reminded me of AWS Activate - VCs partnered with AWS Activate can have their businesses use AWS at a reduced price. But it is also a great source of potential VCs. He also said he'd put me in contact with the head of Activate.

Foreign

With the apps all nicely working and being regularly updates I, and the Crazy Chicken, totally didn't notice that one of the apps was back to English.

I had reverted back to it a couple of weeks ago when trying to get the last bit of the code working. I'm not fluent in German (it's my third language - I don't have a second one) but I can read quite a bit of it without noticing that I am seeing actually foreign words.

We both need to keep aware of this risk.

Less mush

Today I felt much better, though not fully recovered.

Appery.io had sent some advice to the last problem I was having and strangely everything seemed to work now.

It's like for the last three weeks I haven't been able to think with sufficient rigour and have missed obvious things.

Bit lesson learnt - sometimes when ill just accept and don't try

Chart your dev progress

In retrospect I wish I kept more of the old versions of the two apps I've been developing.

It would have reminded me of the progress made in quite a short time (for a n00b).

The answers are there

Christmas was spent in England.

A bit boring but there was some eating out and drinking Sussex ales - a nice Holiday from Helles (which is the local name for lager).

There was also quite a bit of development work and I made good progress.

Back in Germany for the New Year and continuation with the development. The Crazy Chicken is working on the business plan while I get my geek on ... the only thing is I'm more used to telling people to tell people to do technical stuff. This time, however, there is no one else. Just me.

The last couple of days were spent trying to get authorisation working for the app.

I decided upon Auth0 as it will work across platforms quite nicely (I think).

But I couldn't get it to work following the Appery tutorial. After a break where I watched The Machete I revisited the problem.

The answer was just about hidden in plane sight ... the clues were in the error messages referring to frames. Also there was a short but effective answer in Apery's own database of problems.

I need to go into more authentication work tomorrow.

Take-aways from yesterday's AGBC Exchange meeting

... none really.

But, I did observe that Germans are very territorial about data and don't like it in the cloud.

They would prefer it within their domain. It's very difficult to get across that the cloud is just an off-site, shared set of data centres with lots of certifications and security which very few companies could afford (or even think of).

After the main meeting someone explained to me that the German experience left them wary of entities having their data. He pointed out that the Nazis were able to quickly round up Jews in The Netherlands because the Dutch had just held a census where people had to put down their religion.

The tech is there

Here is the first of (hopefully) quite a few lessons learnt - so one day when I am rich and a poster-boy for the start-up community I can use them to give an inspiring speech. And then all the hot babes at the speech (there is always at least one, although maybe after consuming a few free beers first) will want me.

From my mobile app development oddyssey I have relearnt that the tech is there.

Having spent an IT career successfully avoiding any coding now that I am in a startup there is no one around to write the code we need.

But no one will give us money, even seed money, without some sort of prototype.

So I  had to roll up my sleeves and do it. Not easy as learning Java, or even JavaScript, isn't a quick activity. But eventually I found appery.io which I can relatively quickly use to create a prototype.

Now it ain't - or won't be after the trial period - free but it cheaper than hiring a bunch of developers just to write a prototype.

The products from this appery.io service is a little bit clunky but it is good enough.

If you need to do something the technology is there - quite probably free or cheap and relatively easy to use - at least in the early stages.