How I Prematurely Killed My Second Game

I was in the middle of working on my first iPhone game and was so excited about iOS games, I began having ideas for more games. Then I realized that these won’t make it through the noise and tough competition in the App Store and decided to pivot from making games. Here is the back story how I came to that realization and on what conditions should I return to making games.

Finance for Developers: A Concise Tutorial

You’re a smart developer but yet you’re having trouble planning your finances and keeping your credit card debt in control. Then it’s likely that you don’t really understand what money is and how to manage it properly. I can help you help yourself in keeping your finances under control by giving you an understanding of the invisible driving forces behind money.
Competitive Dimensions in Hiring Power

How to Get Employees for Your Startup (and Compete with MegaCorps for People)

If you’re running a startup and wanting to hire star performers for your company, you should know how to compete with the hiring power of large established companies that many good talents are drawn to. Likewise if you’re a recruiting agent and have a startup as your client, don’t repeat the same mistakes that hundreds of headhunters do every day.

The Demise of Mobile Advertising

Personal mobile entertainment devices are killing advertisements in public places. Among the casualties is Singapore’s TV Mobile that displays television-like programme for commuters in public buses, supported by advertisements. The outlook is looking bleak for advertising agencies as attention spans are getting shorter and broadcast-type advertisements are approaching a point of diminishing returns.

Employee dis-empowerment can cost you money

I experienced yet another example on how not empowering employees can cost you real money. Or perhaps from a different point of view, how Singaporeans are so engrossed on “doing things right” instead of “doing the right things”. This particular event occurred with a couple Subway baristas in Raffles City basement.It was an ordinary morning…

Comparing Android vs iPhone typical users

You might wonder, what are the characteristics of the typical Android phone user as opposed to the typical iPhone users? Here is the result of my observation from both on-line observations and off-line idle chats and questions. Android users Open-source fans, hackers, makers, and mobile hobbyist. These people made the conscious decision of buying Android,…

Bootstrapper’s Stories

Stories are interesting. Stories are motivational. Stories let you learn from other people’s successes and failures. These are my  favorite bootstrapped startups stories that I’ve collected from the interwebs so far, in no particular order. From Big Idea to Thriving Business in 8 short years How Michael Akita developed and evolved PhoneTray, a call management…

What’s the impact of hackerporn?

A commenter asked, what is the long-term impact of getting HackerNews-ed? This was asked on the post about how I lost my virginity and now became an amateur entreporn star. That is, whether there is a measurable increase in residual traffic from those hackerporn articles and whether there is an actual impact to my products’…

Now I get #entreporn ads in my Facebook

Looks like Facebook’s Skynet also realize that I am an amateur entreporn star and its now trying to sell me fill-in-the-blanks template to create business plans. I wonder whether real VCs fall for that kind of templatized science fiction essays. I doubt that  those fill-in-the-blanks “business plan” can even sell as fiction novels. (above is…