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
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