Entrepreneurship

Founder journey, startup lessons, and business strategy

  • Think Weeks

    One of the things Bill Gates did was to take a semi-annual ‘Think Week’ retreat. During this week he would extract himself from all obligations and hole up in a hotel somewhere with a stack of books to read. To Bill Gates these retreats were critical to his ability to stay ahead of big picture…

  • Strategy Adjustment

    Despite my amazing singing, Birds can fly had a less than stellar first week in the store. Invader Crush essentially saw no downloads. It seems that there are just too many games in the store. It’s nearly impossible to get noticed with simple games (outside of pure luck).  I thought that the laughable graphics and…

  • Creating More Apps

    One of the goals of Halotis is to create and launch a number of robust webservices for Mobile Apps.  However, before we are ready to launch those to the public for use we want to make sure they work at scale and prove that the ideas are useful. To that end we have set an…

  • Launching Stuff

    A friend an I are on an ambitious schedule to release a lot of new games into the App Store this year. Last night I submitted my first game of the year for review to Apple.  It’s the first game I’ve released under the Halotis brand in 7 months.  Invader Crush should be on the…

  • Game Designing

    My current side project is a match 3 game like Candy Crush Saga.  They are super addictive games that work great on mobile because they are so nice and casual to play. Problem is the competition on these types of games is stiff. Differentiating my game from the crowd is difficult. Originality adds a level…

  • Top Grossing Apps Has Stabilized – Keeping you out

    I like to keep an eye on the top grossing apps in the app store.  They are the ones killing it, and rolling in much of the money players spend, they are the games that I look to for ideas to model in my own apps. The big games have it mostly figured out, and…

  • App Kontrol

    My next project has got underway and it will be launching as App Kontrol sometime in the next month.  This app will be a business dashboard that can be used to pull together download and advertising revenue numbers from various mobile services into one place.  With this information gathered we can produce metrics to help…

  • Announcing AffiliTunes

    I’m happy to say that the first service under the new Halotis.com is open now for it’s first users. Affilitunes is a simple service to geo-target iTunes affiliate links. You provide your affiliate keys for PHG and Trade Doubler and AffiliTunes will redirect clicks to the correct affiliate program depending on where the click came…

  • Minimum Viable Sale (MVS)

    One of the big things about running a business is managing risk.  As an entrepreneur I know that 25% of businesses fail within the first year, 60% have failed by year 4 and 71% have failed or closed by year 10. Given that most businesses are started with the best of intentions and usually with…

  • New Site New Direction

    With the launch of the new design for this site we have also taken a new tack on the strategy going forward for future development of products and features.  The backend services that currently have been built for Halotis iOS Apps will be re-built so that others can benefit from the work done.  Where appropriate…