Speaking at 360iDev On Developer-Owned iPhone Businesses

I’ll be speaking at the 360iDev conference.

Here’s my rough-draft level-of-finish submission for the topic:

Title

Warm, Clothed and Fed: Developer Run iPhone Businesses.

Description

As developers, we bring a certain set of skills, biases and preferences to business. These act as a double edged sword; we make great business people when we play to our strengths; we fail when we try to be something we’re not.

There are sweet-spots in the iPhone market that will sustain, on a continual basis small, developer run, 1-3 person iPhone companies.

This is a talk about identifying those market opportunities. This talk is about capitalizing on them in a way that plays to our strengths and mitigates our weaknesses. This talk is about the choices we make when we start our own developer run iPhone businesses. Topics include:

Choosing the type of business: are your customers iPhone consumers, companies that need iPhone apps, or other iPhone developers?

Data-informed app-price and product-category strategy.

Marketing from code.

Contract wages and the $10,000 problem.

Conference Details

The conference is in Denver and runs from September 27-30. It’s only $360 for the first 100 registrations — quite a value for a 4 day conference — $499 thereafter.

The conference features four tracks:

1. Game Development
2. Non-Fame Application Development
3. The Business of iPhone Development
4. Hands-on Training

Lots of well-known speakers. A partial list of folks whose names popped out to me:

1. Peter Bakhyryev
2. Henry Balanon
3. David Barnard
4. PJ Cabrera
5. Phil Libin
6. Noel Llopis
7. Joe Pezzillo
8. Brent Simmons
9. Marcus Zarra

Conference Website | Registration

Hope to see you there!