Mush

Three weeks ago, on the Sunday I started getting things wrong with the final bit of one of the apps I've been writing.

Around 8pm I gave up and went to a local bar which has a good selection of real ales.

I have a couple there, maybe three.

The next day I felt awful. Not from the beer but fever and sore throat etc. and generally very week. I think the problems I had with the app were crypto symptoms of the virus that was infecting me.

I worsened and worsened. The next week I was able to go to the doctor who confirmed my fever and told me there was an epidemic in Munich and that expecting it to take a week to recover was a bit optimistic.

During this time I couldn't even look at the app. In fact, getting to the sofa was an achievement.

By the end of the second week I sent a support request to Appery.io who gently advised me of the flipping obvious problem.

On Monday of this week, the third week of this malaise, I was able to go into the centre of Munich and do some shopping. There's a quite good basement supermarket in one of the department stores.

I didn't buy anything there but found myself taking the escalator up to the ground floor and exit. Whilst carrying a shopping basket. I realised just in time: it was close but I narrowly avoided shop lifting an empty shopping basket.

So even this week I haven't been switched on.

I did carefully play around with the app in the last couple of days but got quite into a tizz about it. Although Appery had solved one problem for me there is now another one.

Today has been the only day I have felt up to writing a full support ticket to them (or indeed update this blog). So that is basically three weeks wasted due to influenza.

Meanwhile my business partner has also been ill. And so has another associate who has been helping out on the business plan.

And the business who was very keen to beta test our app has closed down. No doubt we will find others.

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).

Meetups

Yesterday I went to a pitch event.

I had a few take-aways but the only one I can remember (because I wrote it down) was that there are about 1000 apps  produced per minute in the world.

Actually there were some others such as:

• need to have a very solid business model
• (once again) if your business can be global say so
• (once again) it's the solution not the technology
• have a robust capitalisation plan - don't take more than is needed as that will dilute your ownership more than needed ...
• ... and don't be too blase about dilution because if you no longer have ownership of the business your investor may panic one day and tell you to take a course of action which you don't believe in. 
• It can take 5 or 7 years for investors to get a decent return (via IPO or whatever) and some of the mainstream hi tech companies that are around (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Google etc.) were started 10 or more years ago.
• Once established companies, which are successful, don't really pivot.

This morning I went to a startup event covering the legals around data protection. The main takeaway was:

• learn more German.

This evening I want to a lean startup event about Concierge MVP and "don't think about scaling when starting".

No real takeaways - it was thought provoking not that I necessarily agreed with everything, oh wait, there was one:

• develop lean and incrementally (I won't say Agile because that is hipster bull shit) but don't spend 10 months getting a system implemented and then immediately realise that it is hopelessly wrong.

Listen to this now

This being a TechCrunch podcast with Fred Destin.

Bit of a pattern

It seems that as I develop the app, as one feature is added another stops working.

Good link

Spent the whole day, and quite a bit of yesterday, recreating the app from what I have learnt from the Appery.io tutorials.

Also found this link to 50+ And Counting Websites To Post Your Product Or Your Startup  hat tip to the Startups Traction & Funding group on Facebook.

Don't actually have time to go through all of these fifty sites and am a bit surprised that this site isn't on the list.

Coding, coding, coding

Well, using Appery's visual builder.

Earlier today I went to an extremely helpful and friendly bureaucrat to talk about a founder's course run by the Bavarian government.

She helped me select the appropriate modules and didn't say - I think - that my German is so poor that I wouldn't understand what was being said.

I need to go on this course so I can convince the authorities that they should pay me benefit while I develop this business.

For some reason, although I was very tired, not mentally but physically.

After lunch I looked at the app I'm developing with Appery.

I restarted the app, copying what I had written before. My thinking about the app and building it is improving but there are some things I can't just hack and tomorrow will go through Appery's database tutorials.