3 Steps To Winning In The App Store And Life

3 StepsTo Winning InThe App Store And Life
www.thechocolatelabapps.com

In Conversation With
J.C. Haswell

About JC Haswell
JC Haswell was a long time wantrepreneur who finally founded Sizzle
Entertainment back in 2010. Since then he’s published over 150 apps on the
Apple App Store with over 6 million downloads to date.
In his spare time he enjoys playing competitive sports and video games,
like soccer, golf, and League of Legends. He also loves chocolate.

Here are the 3 steps you need to win in
the App Store and life.

The 3 Steps
RepeatLearnTry Stuff

Try Stuff
Average people think too much and don’t take action. They theorize about
which actions/decisions/ideas might be the best. Successful people realize
theories have very little value. They spend the least amount of time
possible thinking/theorizing about what they should do and move on to
actually doing it. When I first began building apps, I wanted to learn
everything. I started teaching myself to code. I bought 10+ Game Design
and Game Production books. I subscribed to tons of blogs.

Then I read a great quote fromTim Ferris …

“Practice just in time learning,
not just in case learning.”
~ Tim Ferris

Try Stuff
It hit me hard. I realized my whole life was an example of “just in case”
learning. I was an avid reader of business and management books. I’d often
get lost on wikipedia learning about some exotic animal/disease/location.
But I wasn’t applying the vast majority of the knowledge. So, I’ve worked
hard to change my mindset to the JTS (“Just Try Sh*t”) philosophy. JTS,
and then figure out what worked, what didn’t work, and why.

Learn
As just discussed, average people try to learn everything first, then take
action. The next problem is that when they finally get around to taking
action, they don’t put enough effort into tracking the process, their
actions, and the results. Successful people track their actions, the results
from those actions, and are able to draw meaningful conclusions (“Action A
was good”, “Action B sucked”, etc). They learn the most during and after
taking action, not before.

Repeat
At first glance, this may appear to be an ‘empty’ step, maybe it looks like a
‘fluff’ step to make the title “3 steps…” instead of “2 Steps..” I cannot stress
this enough: THIS IS THE MOST IMPORTANT STEP BY FAR! See, I put it in
all caps to emphasize it.
Perseverance is one of those behaviors that is mentioned often and
appreciated on paper, but incredibly underrated in practice.

Repeat
Everyone knows that entrepreneurship is difficult. Or at least everyone
knows that other people say it’s difficult. But it’s incredibly hard to
understand just how hard it is until you’re actually in it. Before I took the
dive to start my own company, when I heard that entrepreneurship is
“hard”, I thought, well of course it’s hard. It’s probably hard like 3-a-day
preseason soccer practices where you’re constantly physically exhausted
and in pain.

Repeat
Or maybe it’s hard like climbing a mountain, where the further you go, the
steeper, rockier, and more oxygen-deficiant the path becomes. But I still
thought of it as an exhilarating type of hard. A type of struggle that you
enjoy, appreciate, and know that when it’s over you’ll be a happier and
better person.
In my experience, this has been a rather…inaccurate…assumption.

Repeat
Instead of climbing a mountain where there is real visible progress, where
you have the knowledge that–barring absolute disaster–you’ll make it to
the peak eventually…My experience has been more like slowly wading
knee deep in the muck in a dark swamp. No visibility, a clear goal in mind
but no idea which is the best direction to take to get there, no idea if I’ll get
out, hearing ominous sounds of large animals just out of view, wondering
whether anything I’m doing is actually working, and constantly feeling like I
don’t belong, like my competitors are smarter, faster, and stronger.

Repeat
So, for me, the only answer has been perseverance. I don’t always have the
most productive days. I don’t always make the best decisions. But I am
absolutely and completely committed to keep moving forward, even when
I don’t know if I’m heading in the right direction.

Repeat
It took me about 9 months to finally get my first app launched in early 2011
(it should have taken a few weeks). The app completely bombed, costing
over $8,000 and making about $200. I looked at my strategy and realized it
sucked. But then I looked at my execution…and realized it sucked too. So I
made some adjustments and tried again.

Repeat
My next app took another 9 months to launch, going live late 2011. This
time I had a new strategy and only spent $300 to build it. But it was a
failure too, at first. Then after trying several updates, it finally gained some
traction, producing about $75/day on average since then (over $45,000 to-
date).

Repeat
I then began refining the strategy of that app and produced 3 more apps
that year, all of which have also produced significant profit.
Then in early 2013 I decided to “scale my business”…and failed again,
burning over $50,000 because of bad investments and bad management. I
would have wasted less, but for too long I ignored my own advice in this
post about paying close attention to the results.

Repeat
Now I’m in the midst of another strategic shift. It’s frightening. I may screw
up again. I don’t feel prepared to do what I’m planning on doing. I want to
go back to school and learn more. I want to read books and go to
conferences. I feel inadequate. I am stressed out. But I’m going to give it a
shot anyway, because I know I’ll learn more by just trying, with the side
benefit of having a chance of success. And also because I don’t want to
start a job search just yet.

What WereThose 3 Steps Again?
Try Stuff Learn Repeat

3 Steps To Winning In The App Store And Life

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3 Steps To Winning In The App Store And Life