So I’m launching a little club and since I’m a relentless ego-maniac, I’m calling it the RyanWaggoner.com iOS Apps Club (takes 5 seconds to join up).

Why would you join such a thing?

Before I get into the benefits, I have five promises to make:

1. I will never share your email address with anyone, ever, for any reason.
2. I will never spam you.
3. You can unsubscribe at any time with a single click.
4. I will not email you more than twice per month (and likely only once).
5. I will only email you the kinds of value-packed emails I would like to receive myself.

So what do you get for signing up?

1. Sneak previews of apps before they’re released
2. Promotional codes for new apps (read: FREE STUFF)
3. Priority support if you ever have any problems or issues
4. The chance to ensure that my apps have that one MUST HAVE feature from day 1
5. Insider knowledge of what it’s like to be an indie app developer

I think this will be a really interesting project and I’m hoping you’ll join me. I’ll make sure it’s worth your time.

Click here to sign up in 5 seconds

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I’ve been doing web development full-time for the last four or five years, and in 2010 I started learning how to create iPhone and iPad apps. I switched to doing iOS development fulltime in early 2011 and I worked on a number of client apps throughout the year.

However, I haven’t released any apps of my own…until now.

My very first app just hit the App Store. It’s called SignPad, it’s iPad-only, and it’s pretty much the simplest app I could think of creating. I wanted my first app to be simple, and to give me a taste for the process of submitting an app to the app store, marketing it, etc.

The concept

You know how you see those people at the airport holding a sign with someone’s name on it? I thought it’d be cool to create an app that takes whatever text you type in and displays it on the screen as large as possible.

But I had a few criteria:

1. I wanted the text to automatically scale to be as large as possible, breaking text into multiple lines and scaling optimally to ensure that the text is as large as possible while keeping all of it visible. So typing in “Hi” should result in a very large font size, while “Hey there, good looking” would result in 2-3 lines of text, so as to maximize the area of the screen used.
2. I wanted the font, background color, and text color to all be easily customized.
3. I wanted it to be beautiful.

I feel like I hit all those items, and I just got my very first review today (4 out of 5 stars). Can’t tell you how exciting that is

What’s next?

My goal for 2012 is to release one app per month. I have a list of about 150 app ideas, and I have selected the apps for February, March, and April, and have a couple of those at the rough prototype stage. If you’d like to be a beta tester for future apps, shoot me an email and let me know.

In the meantime, check out SignPad and if you like what you see, please leave a review and tell a friend. Thanks!

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Check out our first post below, and make sure you subscribe!

How Cheating Has Opened the Door for Real Learning

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I’m very excited about DailyPath and the opportunity we have before us, but there’s a powerful group of lobbyists and corporations out there that have backed two bills in Congress that represent an incredibly grave threat to the free and open nature of the Internet. You have probably already heard of these bills: SOPA and PIPA. If these bills pass, it will give large corporations the power to squash new startups like mine before they really get started, destroying job growth, economic activity, and amazing innovations for millions of Americans.

If you’ve already taken action and contacted your representatives to voice your opposition, thank you. If you haven’t, please take a moment to do so now. Google has a great guide on what you can do, as does Wikipedia. Wikipedia, Reddit, Wired, and hundreds of other very-high-traffic sites are blacked out today in opposition, and Google and other sites have posted requests for help in opposing these pieces of legislation.

Finally, it can often seem that bills like these are abstract and it’s hard to see who they’ll help or hurt, so here’s something to make it more concrete: my name is Ryan Waggoner, I’ve made my living via the Internet for the last seven years, and these bills will eventually wreak havoc on my livelihood and the future of my company. 

Please help me stop them. It’ll take you a few minutes, but it’s incredibly important. Help us stop SOPA and PIPA now.

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Here’s the lesson: momentum is everything.

I see this in a lot of areas in my life; blogging is just the latest one to bite me. It comes down to focusing on your successes. If you’re doing something and it’s working, double down. Don’t start looking around for something else that you can do as well. Build on your current success; it’s working for a reason!

And be extremely careful about taking a little time off. The last time I did that it took me three years to start my daily blogging again. No good, and that’s why I’m forcing myself to get back into it today, even though starting up after not doing something for awhile is rough. My writing just feels rusty in my head, so it may take a week or two to hit my stride.

It’s 10x as hard to create something new as it is to optimize something you already have that’s working.

Have you experienced this? I can’t be the only one

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Writing is an inherently creative task, and like any creative task, the creative process varies from person to person. I know bloggers who sit down and write their daily posts in a near-stream-of-consciousness flow, spend a minute or two checking for any glaring errors, and then hit publish. And while their posts aren’t consistently amazing, they do often push out some pretty good content.

Other bloggers I know carefully crafts their posts over a period of days or even weeks, refusing to publish them until they’re nearly perfect.

My method is quite a bit more haphazard and inconsistent: my posts come to me in fits and spurts, each a unique “personality”. Some just pour out of me a few minutes after the idea has hit, while I’ll wrestle with others for weeks. I’ve got dozens of drafts in various stages of completion, because while the initial idea was intriguing, I just haven’t managed to piece together enough bits to consider it worth sharing.

This makes it difficult to write a daily blog post, because some days I have plenty of ideas and things to write about and I find the words flowing easily, while other days I have absolutely nothing. Most frustrating are the days in the middle, when I have a faint glimmer of an idea that wants to be expressed, but I just can’t make the words work.

Add to this the pressure of needing to produce something every day. Pressure generally isn’t conducive to a creative atmosphere for me. But I have a public commitment to post every day, so I have to post something. This often results in posts that I’m not thrilled with that could have been 10x as good if I could have waited a few days to publish them.

The obvious solution would be to wait until the post is better before publishing. I’ve gone this route in the past, and without a specific, consistent habit of regular publishing, I go months without writing anything. No, I need to keep the daily habit, but figure out how to increase the overall quality.

So here’s what I’ve come up with. For the rest of March, I’m going to write a blog post every weekday, just like I have been. But I’m also going to write one on Saturday, and one on Sunday. And while I’m at it, I’m going to write two posts every day instead of one. But I’m just going to continue to publish a post Monday through Friday, as I have been. Since there are 20 days left in March, that will give me 40 posts in total that I’ll have written by month’s end, but only 15 published. Which means I’ll 25 surplus posts in the hopper, or five weeks of daily posts.

“But Ryan, if you’re going to just start writing twice as much, won’t your quality go down??” Good question, and it’ll be challenging for the next few weeks, but here’s the key: I’ll then have a five-week buffer where I’ll have the opportunity to examine a post and make any changes necessary to take it from OK to great. It’s like the QA portion of the conveyor belt in a factory: I want to make sure I fix the duds before they get shipped out to customers. This way I’ll have some breathing room to do that.

And bonus: not having the psychological pressure of getting today’s post out today will hopefully improve the writing as well.

I generally like to tell people about things like this after I’ve done them, but I’ve been planning on doing this for a couple months now and it hasn’t gone anywhere, so I’m hoping that by telling thousands of people about it, I’ll be able to actually buckle down and do it.

So if you have anything you’d like me to write about, now’s the time let me know.

PS – And in keeping with my theory that I won’t be any different tomorrow, I’m starting right now.

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Pick the Brain – It’s Alright: We All Need a Little Reassurance Sometimes

The Simple Dollar – The Rush: Feeling Good About Bad Financial Decisions

Zen Habits – Relationships are easy

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I wrote a post a couple months back about 21times, a new project I’ve been working on with Ben Rasmusen. We launched as a course for application developers to build and launch an app in 30 days. The response has been overwhelming, and we’re expanding in the near future. If you’re not a developer, don’t worry, because we’re including some non-technical courses and topics as well.

As part of this change, we wanted a new name, and we’ve decided on DailyPath. The domain isn’t active yet because we literally just got it, but I was too excited to wait to share. Let me know what you think of the name and the logo. And if there’s something you’d like to learn or accomplish, let us know!

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But I opened 2011 by screwing that up. January 2011 was the first month that I didn’t meet my goal of 20% growth in income. In fact, I made less than in December. A lot less. It was a bloodbath, actually.

I made just $219.38 in January 2011, down about 73% over December 2010, when I made $809.54.

So why did I lose so much income? Two primary reasons:

1. My post quality just wasn’t as high. I’ve been busy with some other projects and I’ve not had as much time to dedicate to researching and writing posts. This is something I’m making a big focus in February and March.
2. Traffic is way down. A good portion of my traffic growth over the last four months of 2010 was the fact that I was getting lots of posts to hit the homepage on Hacker News, which brought a lot of traffic. But in January, not a single post of mine hit the homepage, despite several garnering enough votes to do so. I dug deeper and apparently my domain is being penalized at HN for some reason. I don’t know why, but that’s the reason my traffic is down so much from that source.

So how am I feeling? I’m disappointed, obviously, but I’m neither surprised nor upset. Of the two reasons above, #1 is completely my fault and completely fixable, and #2 is something I’ve been expecting and preparing for. I realized a couple months ago that in order to grow this to something that could replace my income, I’d need to do two things:

1. I need to expand my audience. What the readers of sites like Hacker News want is not really what most people want. And while I’m sure many will accuse me of being shallow for commercial appeal’s sake, I really do blog about things because I enjoy helping people and exploring new ideas. And I’d like to try doing that for a wider audience, that’s all. As a result, I’ve been expecting to move away from traffic sources like HN; this was just earlier than I was hoping for.
2. I need to focus on subscribers. Being subject to the whims of social media sites is nerve-wracking and frustrating. It encourages cookie-cutter content with overhyped headlines, just to get attention. I’d much rather build relationships with a base of subscribers who are interested in the same things that I am and who are willing to take the time to get to know me and to learn to trust me. I would love it if most of my growth came from subscribers forwarding posts to their friends. That kind of relationship-based growth is harder in many ways, but much, much more valuable. And bonus: you’re not dependent on a 3rd party for your traffic.

So while I wanted to see January do better (and Feb isn’t looking amazing either), I’m still very excited for the rest of this year. I’m going to dedicate more time to content in the coming weeks, and I’m still working on several plans to grow the subscriber base. I’ll be sharing more about that in the coming weeks, but feel free to drop me a comment if that kind of thing interests you.

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