While I was at the Sarasota International Design Summit, of course I posted to Twitter about it. Local one-man news crew David Leonard caught my message and visited the conference in order to interview me. Here is the article (corrections in italics), originally posted to the 10Connects site:
Sarasota, Florida - Dom Sagolla knows the value of a dollar. The founder and developer of DollarApp is creating applications for the iPhone that are just a buck.
“It’s like they say, ‘I’d buy that for a dollar,’” the 34-year-old designer said. Dom is just one of many speakers who gathered for the 2008 Sarasota International Design Summit hosted by Ringling College at the Ritz Carlton Hotel. Designers from Google, Microsoft, Herman Miller, and others presented work and discussed the direction of social networking in the real world, online and from mobile devices.
It was one of those events that were under most people’s radar. I found out about it on Twitter. I put in a search on robots within a 50 mile radius of Tampa and caught Dom’s post.
“Checking into the Ritz-Carlton in Sarasota, Florida — turns out this Design Summit is high class.”
It turns out Dom was one of the originators of Twitter; #8 in fact.
“Jack Dorsey envisioned twitter as a messaging service to keep people in touch where ever they were in short bursts and stay connected and share ideas,” said Sagolla who is #8 of more than a million subscribers to Twitter.
“There are almost genres of users who tweet what they are eating next or what they thought of what they ate or what their cat is doing. I am more of a journalist.”
It was fun talking with David, who is doing a great service to the Tampa Bay area, and it’s always fun to turn other journalists on to Twitter.
It seems the DollarApp idea has inspired some fans! My friends Sam Levin and Daniel Brusilovsky must have missed me while I was in Florida giving my “Why A Dollar” talk. They made this wonderful tribute poster for us!
I think this has something to do with the fact that we helped get Adobe as a premiere sponsor for the upcoming Teens In Tech Conference. I can see already that it’s going to be a blast working with these guys!
Sam Levin Consulting is a sponsor of iPhoneDevCamp, and Daniel is an alum of that conference as well as the recent FlashCamp. This poster was created using the fabulous Comic Life Magiq for Mac.
We’ve discovered the DollarApp logo. It is an abstraction of both the sand dollar shape, and the infinity symbol. Also, it reminds me of the Apple “command” symbol, with five turns instead of four.
In this continuum symbol, I can see five fingers, or a person, or sometimes a knot. I just like looking at it, reminds me of Ocean Beach. So we colored it like faded money then printed stickers and cards.
This is the symbol of quality, of infinite joy, and continuous improvement. This is DollarApp.
Where I’ll be:
- Sarasota International Design Summit, October 26-29, Florida
- Adobe MAX, November 16-19, San Francisco
- Macworld, January 5-9, San Francisco
- Teens In Tech 2009, January 31, San Francisco
Be on the lookout wherever you see the DollarApp sticker.
Tags: Adobe, California, Design, DollarApp, Florida, iPhone, San Francisco
Why set your price at a dollar? It has something to do with being accessible to the greatest number of people, managing user expectations, and providing a focus on simplicity.
Liana discussed this topic with me in a recent episode of the Apple Phone Show over at Podango studios in San Francisco.
Check out my comments on the origins and concept behind ‘DollarApp’, starting around 17:30 into this feature.
Tags: Adam Jackson, Apple, Apple Phone Show, DollarApp, Dom Sagolla, Liana Lehua, Podango, podcast
Let’s face it, ideas are a dime-a-dozen. Everyone’s got a great iPhone application idea, right? The question really is, how do you get it to market quickly?
DollarApp was founded on the principles of simplicity and doing one thing really well. So what is that One Thing that your app is going to do first? How will you whittle the idea down to something you could sell for $1? When you’ve found your DollarApp, you’ve found your first shipping version.
Now, say you have a great $1.0, and someone says, “Oh, great idea - you should add [this killer feature].” This is a good sign! When someone else starts adding features to your concept, it means that they really get it, and you’ve lit their imagination. Add their idea to your backlog of features and think about whether you can still ship your app for just a dollar.
Why just a dollar? Because there is a certain expectation that the user has, once they pay just a little bit of money for something. Not too much, mind you, or expectations could be inflated. Ship just enough software that your customers recognize value. It’s OK to leave people wanting a little more; this is classic advice from the entertainment industry. A simple price creates a vested interest in communication with you, and that customer relationship is priceless.
Feature creep happens when you say, “Oh, [this killer feature] is a bigger idea and it will allow me to charge more for my app.” That may be true, but remember that feature creep will kill your schedule. Scope creep will kill your schedule. Anything creepy will kill your schedule. So start small, ship soon, and iterate on incremental value.
In summary, you can always charge more later. Get to $1.0 as soon as possible. Work with us.
DollarApp is a tiny iPhone development shop in San Francisco, focused on delivering fun, useful little apps for under a dollar.
Learn more about DollarApp.
Sign up to for email updates, or just follow ‘dollarapp’ on Twitter.
Tags: DollarApp, DomSagolla, Twitter
