For the past several days, I’ve been wondering exactly which direction to take this blog in. I’ve been brainstorming what seems to be a million different topics that I’d like to write about here in the future. Many probably won’t make the cut, some will get merged into others, or some may even be split into multiple segments. I’ve grouped them into a few categories:

• design
• our apps
• general iPhone topics
• marketing

One thing I’m passionate about is design and I’m really looking forward to discussing our designs for all of our stuff… the apps, the website, our logos, ads, etc. We have virtually all of the iterations of our designs archived and you’ll be able to see how things evolved. I plan to discuss how and why the designs evolved. I’d also like to write about the way that we work, with every member of the team being in different parts of the world. That can be a challenge sometimes but we have a pretty effective system in place now.

And because interest for Groceries is so high, I definitely plan to go over its progress and evolution here in great detail. Groceries is undoubtably our most significant app and we’re putting a ton of effort into it. We still have a lot to do on it but I promise you… it’ll definitely be worth the wait. We haven’t even covered all its major features on its product page yet and there are a couple of features that’ll hopefully make it the killer app for iPhone. In a nutshell, our goal is to make the process of dealing with grocery lists dead-simple… enjoyable even. And from my point of view, none of the competition’s nailed it yet, not even close.

Some of the things I’d like to write about aren’t easily categorized. They’re not even remotely iPhone related. But I’m going to write about them anyway. I don’t want this to become a “corporate” blog so I’m going to try to keep it all loose and just have fun with it.

Big demand for marketing info

It seems like there’s a big demand for iPhone and/or Mac marketing info, based on the comments in my recent (Semi)Final numbers for July post. I’ve been lurking on the Mac Small Business mailing list for a while and I’ve always been surprised that marketing discussions often seem to be discouraged on it. What’s bizarre to me is that it seems to be acceptable to have a long discussion on it every few weeks about which method of payment processing is the best.

So if you feel like you have a taste for more marketing info, you’ll likely find it here as time goes on. I eat… sleep… breathe marketing. I spend much of my time preoccupied with how to get more exposure for the things I help create. Information on marketing seems to be pretty scarce, at least in terms of iPhone and Mac software marketing, and I feel like I can help that situation at least a bit.

The quest for the gold

The first post I plan to do along the marketing lines is regarding Where To’s recent climb back up the charts. We were as low as #77 and we’re currently at #28. To put it mildly, it wasn’t easy to get this far. And we still have a lot further to go. I’ve become absorbed, no… OBSESSED with the rankings and my goal is to get Where To in the top 10 (we made it as high as #12 last month)… and if possible, the highly coveted #1 spot.

Will it get there? Who knows but I’m working my ass off trying to and giving it my best shot. All I can say right now is that it’s been pretty stressful… seeing your app drop dramatically and having a very difficult time getting it back up is damn frustrating. Like I said, we still have a long way to go, but we’ve made some very good progress at least.

For the curious: our sales have shot up from around 250/day to around 750/day since the climb.

We have a lot of things in the works to try to push it higher and there’s something fairly big that we’re starting on Monday. I’ll try to have more details on that here over the weekend.

As for the post on what we’ve been doing to climb the charts, I plan to do it once Where To hits its peak and starts to fall again.

Opinions are like…

It’s worth pointing out that whatever I express here doesn’t necessarily reflect the rest of the tap tap tap team. There’s even a pretty good chance that whatever words fly off my keyboard are pretty much the opposite of the way they feel on any particular topic. So try to remember that and also try to remember that much of what I say will likely be opinion. Take everything I say with a grain of salt and always use your best judgement. Better yet, just ignore anything and everything that I say and you’ll be much better off, ok?

Your influence

Yeah, I know what I want to write about but I’m also very open to suggestions. Post comments are a good indicator of what you all want. We’ve gotten a lot of comments on the sales figures posts so obviously you want more of that and we’ll deliver. So if there’s something in particular you want me to cover or just a general direction you’d like me to lean in, be sure to let me know in the comments.