Download this episode, in which Ian and Andrey talk about antisocial haircuts, Joan Rivers, consulting, Scribbleton on Lifehacker, relaxing, doing a product from start to finish on the show, a Userscape update, Postgres, Nightstand, the Oculus Rift, Minecraft, Star Trek Bridge Commander, Wing Commander, Steam.
Great idea to develop a product on the show! Don’t know if you want to work on this, but on a previous episode Ian had talked about some (CRM?) software he wished existed.
Yeah, we actually had considered that, but that would be a pretty long project, and we’d prefer something shorter for the show.
I’m somewhat puzzled by that conversation.
Why not develop Scribbleton together?
It still needs A LOT of improvement, so it is essentially a new product.
It may benefit from a mobile viewer for, say, DropBox-shared copy, so Ian would satisfy his urge for mobile development.
And last, but not least, I personally invested into Scribbleton, thinking that the product has a potential to become big (in its category - just like was said on air: big or bust). Now though I hear that Andrey has no time for it due to the consulting (that is understandable), but also that he’s creating a yet another product that will compete with Scribbleton for his time (that doesn’t sound logical to me).
I don’t think there’d really be that much for UserScape to contribute to Scribbleton directly but it could be something to kick around.
I would expect that any show product would probably not take that much time away from paying endeavors. That’s why we want to do something really simple and as it’s just for us and our amusement it can be put on the back burner as needed.
As we don’t even have an idea yet I wouldn’t fret!
If you’re going to do the full marketing cycle for that app (otherwise why even feature it on a bootstrapped podcast?) then it cannot be very small and should do at least something useful. Hundreds of hours of work, no less.
How about scratching your own itch - are there any problems you guys face with podcasting?
I’m sure a lot goes into creating one these days - jingles, editing, transcribing plus getting a site set up and hosting the podcasts themselves plus analytics and getting advertising.
Could you provide some kind of solution to help reduce the work to get these done for the podcaster?
Too big for a simple project but for examples sake - A “tumblr” for podcasting which simply automates the work by sending uploaded podcasts off to 3rd party services etc before publishing it.
Yeah, podcasting is inherently a big job. I do have an idea for something that we need at UserScape pretty desperately which isn’t a giant product but it would be B2B 
Will talk about it on the next show.
To me it makes sense for you guys to take a leaf out of the Rob Walling playbook and build something that your listeners would use. That would help you can get off to a running start when you launch and likely be very interesting to listeners…
[quote=“duncanm, post:9, topic:2047”]
To me it makes sense for you guys to take a leaf out of the Rob Walling playbook and build something that your listeners would use.[/quote]I’d prefer it if they didn’t do that. It would make talking about the app an infomercial. Ian and Andrey would have to juggle thinking about how to present the app to us as the target market/customers versus presenting it to us as bootstrappers who should hear about the all problems with the app.
Yeah, while I expect some listeners will try what we build (if we build anything!) and it will hopefully be useful for some I don’t see us focusing on listeners as the target market.
At least in the sense of making an app for podcast listeners or making an app that’s specifically for bootstrappers in some way. It could turn out that way, but I don’t see us approaching it from the angle of this must work for the listeners directly as an app, though hopefully it works as entertainment.
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