The next chapter of my life.
Monday marked 500 days since the launch of the company I started, Medialets. This was a really significant day for me. I wanted to make the announcement I’m making on Monday, but as I thought about it, I realized that waiting until today, Thanksgiving Day 2009, would be much more fitting and symbolic.
As many of you know by now, I decided to leave Medialets in October. Since then, I have been thinking about my life and what I want to do in this world, and I believe that my path has suddenly become very clear. I have become so grateful for so many things in my life ever since leaving Medialets, a decision that was exceptionally difficult to make, yet so right for me. It’s incredibly difficult to walk away from something you’ve made, something you’ve built from the ground up (in my case, literally: I slept on a concrete floor for 6 months while building the company) but ultimately, if something does not feel right, it’s not worth the pain to stick around.
I gave a talk at 360iDev that really inspired an idea in me. (Check out the talk here.) I realized after receiving tons of positive feedback from the concepts during my talk that there really isn’t a resource for understanding and learning the principles of selling applications on the App Store. iPhone developers are software engineers, not marketers. Indie developers are trying out their ideas and sharing their successes and failures with one another, but the big shops who have dedicated marketing teams have no incentive to disclose the strategies and tactics that are leading to their success on the Store.I am thrilled to announce today that I will writing a book for O’Reilly entitled Marketing iPhone Apps. The book will be released in March 2010, and as soon as we have picked a release date, you will be the first to know.
This is something I have wanted to do my whole life. I am so passionate about the mobile space and the developer community around the iPhone, and it’s my honor to be able to provide a guide to help developers succeed on this platform.
I will be reaching out to many of you in creating this guide, this primer to understanding what it takes to market and position on a new platform. I hope to create a standard for marketing strategies and to put in place a framework that supports and encourages developers to continue to create incredible applications that drive innovation in mobile.
Reach out to me anytime if you’d like to participate or to give me any feedback or ideas you may have. As always, I am here to provide support to the community I care so much about, and I am unbelievably excited for this new chapter in my life.
Thank you to everyone who has been so kind and loving to me over the past 6 weeks. I love you all very much.
Congrats to Rana! Sounds awesome. Now I’m moving to SF, so I’m sure we’ll meet up and you can show me the early drafts. :)
