These are the slides from Dec 3 2012 talk at the Lean Startup conference in San Francisco. This deck talks about the first 12 months of Sincerely's development, and our strategy for
Secrets of Rapid App Development [Lean Startup Conf 2012]
1. Secrets of Rapid Mobile
App Development
Matt Brezina, Co-founder & CEO Sincerely Inc.
@brezina
matt@sincerely.com
2. Sincerely
We help the world be more thoughtful
We’ve built the world’s
largest gift network
•1.2M members
•1.6M mailing addresses
• Shipped products to 800k homes
Sincerely @brezina
3. Sincerely Products
We help the world be more thoughtful
We’ve built the world’s
largest gift network @Postagram
•1.2M members
•1.6M mailing addresses
@Sesame
@InkCards • Shipped products to
800k homes
Sincerely @brezina
4. Our first year
May June July Aug Sept Oct Nov Dec
30+
Sincerely @brezina
5. Why rapid app development?
We wanted to learn:
• How is mobile commerce different?
• Purchase flows
• Pricing
• Audience
• Positioning
• Physical delivery
• and more...
Sincerely @brezina
6. 10 tips for rapid app development
Sincerely @brezina
7. 1. MVP
Billing Library Address
photos book
Printing
Image Send to
upload others
Multiple
recipients
Sincerely @brezina
11. 5. Buy cheap, disposable users
• No cross promotion
• No PR
• Buy users from Stumbleupon,
Admob, iAds, Tapjoy, Google
Sincerely @brezina
12. 6. Be willing to kill apps
• We’re killing an app this month
• You will have upset customers
Sincerely @brezina
13. 7. Use Android for quick testing
• Android apps have no app approval
• Android updates go live in hours
• Apple updates go live in 7 days
• Closest thing we have to the web in
the mobile app world
Sincerely @brezina
14. 8. APIs are everything
Internal API
Payment processing
Order fulfillment
User accounts
Address book
Transactional emails
No Sincerely product engineers touch our database
External API
60
+
Sincerely @brezina
15. 9. Team Structure
Internal
API
Dev
Design Dev
Dev
Design
Sincerely @brezina
16. 10. Minimize interdependencies
My Goal: empower an engineer to have
4-6 hours of uninterrupted magic
each day
Sincerely @brezina
17. Secrets of Rapid Mobile
App Development
Matt Brezina, Co-founder & CEO Sincerely Inc.
@brezina
matt@sincerely.com