By Lee Sommerville 

You may have considered buying leads to help your iPhone, Android or iPad apps business? If so, we hope this post will help you.

Here we talk about the good and bad points of paid iPhone leads, and also share some statistics which you might find interesting.

A Bit Of Intel…

We have recently been doing some intel on our sales pipeline, with the aim of saving time spent on sales. In particular, we’ve been looking at the quality of the leeds we actually pay for. 

In 2009 we were fortunate to establish a UK exclusivity deal with a top lead generator in the US. It is responsible for 40%-50% of our leads; we have up to 50 leads in the pipeline at any time. We pay around $25 per lead, and get 2-4 leads a week from this source.

Overall we receive sales enquiries from four main sources:

• Word of mouth
• Our Website 
• A USA based lead generator
• Business networking events

In this post, we’re looking at how well the USA based lead generator works for us. 

Quality Of Leads From Our Lead Generator

The leads we buy from the paid lead company bring us many brilliant ideas for iPhone and iPad apps, along with some not-so-inspiring ones. Its great fun, we get to communicate with so many differing types of individuals and business’s. We are also lucky enough to get to know some of them personally.

The trouble is, our intel shows that we lose a lot of time managing these leads. Despite our 8% conversion rate, we would still rather be in the pub than waste hours on unlikely leeds :) Check these figures out:

• 25% of the paid leads come back to us and then fade away.
• 9.5% of them dont say hello back to us at all.
• 10% have been found as digital agencies trying to peep through our window.

So thats 44.5% dead leads without us even really getting started or even receiving a brief. Put another way; it’s also 16 hours a month lost! 

Apart from the two days spent each month on phantom leads, thats over 30 days lost in a year, and possibly over £3000 a year. Eek.

Of course its not all bad, there are many genuine reasons a project doesnt go ahead. And, we accept we’re not perfect for every potential client.

Over the last year we have really enjoyed building apps for our customers, and we only know of 3 potential customers who have walked away to our competitors.

Interestingly, only 1 of those potential customers actually has an app on the App Store.

Obviously, the successful leads are a major factor in us building the foundations of ERA up to a team of eight members in little over 12 months. Happy days. 

The questions we’re looking really closely at are:

• Is time wasted really waste time? Or, is it all just part of the paid lead process?
• Should we chose to ignore certain enquiries? We hate that idea.

Answers on a postcard please…

by Tobin Harris

If you’re following us on twitter, you might have heard that we’ve hired a couple of great guys over the last few months to help us with our mobile solutions development. Welcome aboard Oliver and Layik :) 

Layik Hama is focusing on  Android and iPhone development, working from our offices in Leeds. He is also fascinated and skilled in many areas of computing, and gained a distinction in his MSc Web Application Development, and a BSc in computing. Layik also speaks 5 languages, and occasionally works as a translator in court and for the police.   

Oliver Barnes has a rich background in server side development using Ruby on Rails, our first choice of back-end technology. He’s a pragmatic guru in the essential server-side technologies for mobile solutions, including RESTful web services and database optimisation. Oliver works from his home office in Brazil, although we collaborate daily using Skype, Basecamp and other awesome tools. 

By Tobin Harris

Earlier this year we built the iLegal iPad and iPhone apps. iLegal is a reference app containing all UK legislation - very handy for you legal types. The project was a joint venture with Timothy Leigh, a bright young Manchester-based law trainee.

We were amazed to see our app achieved the #1 top-grossing position for it’s category, and also made it into the “What’s Hot” list on the App Store. 

By Tobin Harris

After several months of developing and polishing, we launched the History Tools app for both iPad and iPhone last week. Hurah!

It’s available on the App Store.

Here’s some screen shots, isn’t she pretty (all thanks to Tony Pires).

In case you’re wondering what this app is all about, here’s an excerpt from the app store.

HistoryTools is a free app for the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch that lists all the famous and infamous people who were born or died on each day of the year, major news events that occurred on each day, plus feast days of saints and holidays and celebrations around the world.

The iPhone version looks pretty too, we think.

By Tobin Harris

We recently embarked upon building a virtual card wall to help us see all the work our team is doing, across all projects. It’s proving to be incredibly useful, and gives us a huge feeling of control.

The reason is that we’re learning about Kanban to help us better manage our projects.  We believe that the more visible the process and the work are, the better we can manage manage them. 

Features

The idea is that the card-wall has sticky notes stuck to it to show all the work in progress and queueing. The board is split into columns.

We’re trying to draw inspiration from the real-world. Cards can appear skewed if they have been recently touched, or grubby and faded if they’ve been sat around too long. 

We can also group cards into piles to get an overview.

Video

You can see a video of it in action here.

Technology…

The technology behind this is Sencha Touch, which allows us to use this on a large touch-screen in the office. It also means it is compatible with the iPad and iPhone.

At Engine Room we use Pivotal Tracker for actual project management, so the board basically is a birds eye view on all the information in there. It also means that, as our process changes, the card wall can be configured to reflect that.

We’re also integrating the card-wall with 37Signals Hirise to give us visibility of our sales pipeline. 

It’s all good fun!

Will we be sharing it?

We think so. Probably with free and paid options. Watch this space! 

By Tobin Harris

There’s something incredibly powerful and rewarding about giving. You get a lot from making people feel good, for example: 

• Helping people get closer to their dreams.
• Giving people more than they expected in a world where little comes for free.
• Seeing someone excited by what you’re offering. 
• Doing your best and seeing it appreciated and even reciprocated.
• Standing by someone when it’s easier to blow the deal.

If you want to be someone who gives, why limit that to your personal life? Business and pleasure are seldom separate things, we’re the same people in and out of work.

Sometimes we need to wear different hats; we need to take a harder attitude in work. This is sad. Why should we use different rules in and out of work? Why maintain different codes of conduct? Our work should let us be ourselves. 

Building relationships is mostly about giving. For me, giving is actually harder than taking. Giving requires being smart, listening closely and finding opportunities to help people. It’s a skill that you have to practice.

At Engine Room Apps, I think our small team has a giving culture. We want to help people. We want to work with clients who help us in return. We want to make the 6-12 hours a day we all spend in our offices more enjoyable and lucrative for everyone.

By Tobin Harris

Our client CrowdSpeak recently asked us to provide something that helps them see where their iElect users are in the UK.

iElect is a free political iPhone app that lets you see details of the up-coming election, including current MP, candidates and general trivia. It’s available on the App Store now. 

Who’s Using Your iPhone app?

Knowing where you’re users come from is incredibly useful; it can help you monitor the effectiveness of a press release or advertising campaign. This kind of intelligence can really help you make informed decisions in the future.

Seeing The Data

So, our mission was to help CrowdSpeak see where their iPhone app users come from. iElect asks users for a postcode when they launch the app, so we can use this data to show a UK map like this: 

This is DEMONSTRATION data only. Each dot summarises how many iPhone app users there are in that area. As the dots get increasingly darker, the more users there are in a given area. All user personal details are kept private and secure, not even CrowdSpeak look at these.  

1.8 million data points, in real-time

The map is summarising over 1.8 million data points, and is updated in real-time. As soon as a new user signs up, the folks at CrowdSpeak can see that fact reflected on the map. The map can be securely accessed by our customer using their web browser.

How did we do it?

The visualisation runs entirely in the browser using SVG. We used the great Raphael library to render the map and points. An SQL query aggregates the user/postcode data into low-resolution co-ordinates. All in all it’s only about 50 lines of code. We’ll be posting full technical details of how we created this visualisation in the near future.  

Information at your fingertips helps you make better choices

Finding ways of helping customers get insights into their data is both fun and useful. We believe that information like this can give you hard facts that let you make better choices in the future.

By Tobin Harris

Picking a name for your new company is difficult. It seems like an inconvenience when you’re worrying about winning clients and paying bills.

Of course, picking a name is seriously worth getting right. It can make a big difference in the short term, and the long term.

What Can Go Wrong?

Before I launched Engine Room, I had Socena. This is a name I picked because it looked good on paper. Seriously, I liked the shape of the letters on the page. As a bonus, Socena doesn’t sound offensive, and at the time it had a .com domain name I could buy.

Unfortunately, Socena was a stupid name for a few reasons:

• It didn’t mean anything. Really. It calls up very few connotations - good or bad.
• It didn’t have any positive connection to the business of developing software.
• No-one could pronounce it. They kept pronouncing it Sock-eena rather than So-sceena.

I chose Socena simply because I needed a limited company when I started my contracting career. All companies need a name, so I rushed to find one.

Rushing your company name is an easy thing to do when you don’t really know why you need a good name. You’re future might be one huge question mark. What kind of services will you offer? Will you be a consultant, or a small business? Will you even need to use your company when dealing with clients?

In my case, all I knew was that I would be developing software for some purpose. So, a name seemed unimportant.

Even with all this uncertainty, I could have done a LOT better with my name.

Suggestions

If you’re about to pick your own company name, try the following…

1. Pick a name that means something positive to your customers; Engine Room is pretty good; it creates positive mental imagery: work, technical, keeping things running and productivity.

2. You want your customers to talk about you, and recommend your products and services. Having a strong name will make this easier for them - no embarrassing pronunciations or connotations.

3. Pick a name that you will be really proud of. Imagine introducing your company to your perfect client. How they might respond to that name? What you would say if you had to explain to them why you picked that name?

4. Your name doesn’t have to be clever or deep, you just need to be able to have a story behind it that isn’t sucky!

5. Don’t worry too much about having a unique name. If there’s a name you really like and you find out someone else already has it, then it might not be a show stopper. It’s more acceptable if they’re in a different industry, country or county!

6. You don’t have to be fashionable. Right now lots of companies use the “pick random number with a random noun” approach (such as 22bits, phase1 and 99times). This approach is fine, but there are a lot of people doing this right now. Feel free to do something different, it might be cool in a few years time.

7. Check the .com (or co.uk). This one is obvious, but it’s good if you can buy the domain name. But…

8. It doesn’t have to be the exact domain name. There are tons of domain names that might be close to your company name. Our company - engineroomapps.com - is an example of this. We couldn’t buy engineroom.com as it was taken. A good example of a close-match domain name that works well is www.madebysofa.com. 

That’s all for now. I hope this helps you pick a great name for your company.