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I'd like to hear your thoughts about mobile. Everybody seems to be stampeding in that direction right now but you seem to have ignored it so far. Is this a del

I'd like to hear your thoughts about mobile. Everybody seems to be stampeding in that direction right now but you seem to have ignored it so far. Is this a deliberate decision or just a question of sticking to tools/platforms you're more familiar with?

patio11 14y ago
I don't love the kingmaking economics of App Store distribution and don't know how to work them to my advantage. Price points for mobile apps are two to three orders of magnitude lower than software I routinely sell. The stores seem to be dominated by design, something that I am not good at. I prefer writing Rails to Java or Objective C. My consulting clients largely sell B2B software, and fairly little of that is currently mobile. That said, there is literally infinite software that I personally will never write. That doesn't necessarily mean I would recommend against HNers looking at those projects either.
- cageface 14y ago
  Good answer. I've been doing mobile for the last 18 months or so but I'm strongly considering going back to my roots on the web for a lot of the reasons you describe. The lack of insight into user behavior and acquisition is really crippling. It seems to me that people have gotten a little too caught up in the momentum of mobile. Certainly it's a very important and rapidly growing platform but I also think, as you say, there's still plenty of room for viable businesses on the "traditional" web.
  - sycren 14y ago
    Do you feel that there is more value making a desktop web app and making it responsive to work with mobile devices, rather than making a straight mobile app?
    - cageface 14y ago
      I don't feel particularly qualified to answer this question, but my opinion is that these questions should be secondary. The most important thing is identifying your target market and figuring out how to most effectively meet its needs and if you understand that well then that will probably dictate the details of your strategy. What I think is pretty overdone at this point though are approaches that revolve entirely around a mobile app. Unless you're going for an aqui-hire or your potential customers just happen to all be entirely on one mobile platform I'd think twice about betting the farm on an app.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]

patio11 14y ago

I don't love the kingmaking economics of App Store distribution and don't know how to work them to my advantage. Price points for mobile apps are two to three orders of magnitude lower than software I routinely sell. The stores seem to be dominated by design, something that I am not good at. I prefer writing Rails to Java or Objective C. My consulting clients largely sell B2B software, and fairly little of that is currently mobile. That said, there is literally infinite software that I personally will never write. That doesn't necessarily mean I would recommend against HNers looking at those projects either.

cageface 14y ago
Good answer. I've been doing mobile for the last 18 months or so but I'm strongly considering going back to my roots on the web for a lot of the reasons you describe. The lack of insight into user behavior and acquisition is really crippling. It seems to me that people have gotten a little too caught up in the momentum of mobile. Certainly it's a very important and rapidly growing platform but I also think, as you say, there's still plenty of room for viable businesses on the "traditional" web.
- sycren 14y ago
  Do you feel that there is more value making a desktop web app and making it responsive to work with mobile devices, rather than making a straight mobile app?
  - cageface 14y ago
    I don't feel particularly qualified to answer this question, but my opinion is that these questions should be secondary. The most important thing is identifying your target market and figuring out how to most effectively meet its needs and if you understand that well then that will probably dictate the details of your strategy. What I think is pretty overdone at this point though are approaches that revolve entirely around a mobile app. Unless you're going for an aqui-hire or your potential customers just happen to all be entirely on one mobile platform I'd think twice about betting the farm on an app.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]