Saving is a skill a third of America lacks, with one out of three Americans living without a penny in a retirement account. This isn’t surprising in a culture where money is spent on credit and university education is paid for with borrowed dollars. Given the pressures to live a luxurious lifestyle beyond your means, it can be a challenge to get ahead financially.  Fortunately not all systems in modern western culture result in the reddening of your credit. Specifically, money saving apps.   Mint  Mint is a well known app that even our parents’ parents use. The established credibility and no brainer UI make this app a simple solution for getting all things finance on track. The app takes a look at your overall financial blueprint, including your debts, income, investments and savings. It can be a little terrifying putting all of this confidential information in one place, but perhaps more frightening is that first time you see your overall net worth. However once you get past those hurdles, Mint is an excellent solution for seeing your overall spending and saving. From there, you can set goals such as overall savings for the year or saving in specific areas of your life. One such department could include your affinity for chinese takeout...how it’s possible to spend so much per year on chinese takeout can be pretty impressive when you see your aggregate spending. But with Mint you can get those spending habits at least a little bit more in control, without entirely abandoning chow mein.   Gas Buddy  Gas prices have lately been a bit kinder to us than other times in the recent decade, but petroleum is still a place we’d rather save as many pennies as possible. Gas Buddy is the convenient app to help you locate the best gas prices in your area, and guide you to the gas stations you trust. This is especially great for the travelling salesperson unfamiliar with new towns as you travel throughout your region or state. Then, while saving money is a fun game in and of itself, Gas Buddy includes gamification features such as points for saved gas and clever car icons when you report new gas prices. Take or leave the gamification of it, the best part of this app is keeping a few more cents in your pocket that can better be spent on Italian footwear. We mean savings, savings account is where those extra pennies will go…   BillTracker  There are certainly plenty of bills that you can set to pay all by themselves with auto-payment features. Yet it’s important to keep an eye on when those payments are coming out and maintaining focus on how much you really are spending on your phone bill each month. BillTracker is the simple app that allows you to do just that. This is also helpful for those payments that can’t be set to auto-pay, making absolutely sure you don’t waste a single stupid dollar on an unnecessary late payment.   RetailMeNot  Coupon clipping is still a pain and we’re not going to sit here and say it’s a fun and cool way to spend a Friday night. But that’s why us app developers are looking out for you, and come up with apps like RetailMeNot. This is a fantastic little app for the person who loathes the concept of bargain hunting but still enjoys keeping more of his/her hard earned dollars in their fat wallet. The way we use this app is whenever we’re about to hit “Checkout” on any of your online shopping carts, we always check RetailMeNot to see if there’s a new valid coupon for your particular purchase. We can’t explain how many times we’d laugh at the idea of our bizarre purchases like a 6 pack of Mike Tyson shaped whoopie cushions having a coupon available...only to realize RetailMeNot absolutely has one and it’s 50% off. Do yourself a favor and just download it and start saving.   Digit Digit is sort of like that 4-eyed accountant that takes a look at your spending habits and tells you how much you’re capable of saving over a given period of time. That’s because it is, as the smart app that can help you strictly with reducing your spending habits to help you beef up your savings account. Once you link Digit with your bank account, it studies your income and spending habits and crunches these numbers into an algorithm to help you start the savings process without really thinking about it. Then every two to three days, the tool transfers small amounts of cash, typically between $1 - $150 dollars, from your checking account and funnels it to an FDIC-insured savings account. You are notified of these transfers via text message, kind of like the happy “clink clink” sound you heard as a child when you dropped quarters into your piggy bank.   Are there other money saving apps you use and love to stay on track? Let us know your favorites in the comments below.  

You’ve heard the adage, “the best offense is a good defense.” A quick Google search yields unclear results as to who the author is, but the meaning of the saying is as clear as a sunny day in Los Angeles. Wait… Essentially, if you can anticipate the challenges you may run into in any endeavour, the chances are much better of conquering victoriously. With football season well underway, we have offense and defense on the brain and naturally want to help you with your defense. So what issues can you anticipate when you hit the ground running in building your app? Let’s go: Failing to Plan is Planning to Fail Yeah yeah, we aren’t fans of using hackneyed idioms either. But this one felt appropriate to get the point across in a way that (hopefully) doesn’t revive nightmares of childhood teachers. Those finger wagging tyrants who scolded you to get preparation work done for papers you never wanted to write. Well now that we firmly revived those memories, those ladies and gentlemen were right. You must have a plan detailing where you’re going before you get to work in almost any part of life. Same goes with building your mobile app. What is the purpose of your app? What kind of a problem will it solve and how is it going to do so? Have a plan in place and the obstacle monsters will digress. Nice to Niche Ya Some cold hard reality: Someone may have thought of your mobile app idea already. Now that this devastating information has sunk in and you’ve peeled yourself off the floor, it’s time to get to work. What is going to make your mobile app different from the rest? Facebook has been done and done well (you can argue with that but you’d be wrong), and the world doesn’t need another Facebook. Too many entrepreneurs want to build another version of [insert app you know and love here], but that’s not what is going to make you a success. Figure out your niche and stick to it. The Name of the Game - Competition It’s no secret that there are a ton of apps out there. And the competition continues to swell with 2,000 mobile apps published each and every day. Understanding what your competition looks like and what makes them special will help you find a way to differentiate your app. After building an app that separates you from the rest, you must ensure a skillful marketing strategy to get your app off the App Store/Google Play and into users’ mobile devices. We talked about this at length in The Best Mobile App Marketing Techniques, but as a quick overview remember to: Understand ASO Utilize Word-of-Mouth Marketing Leverage the Blogosphere Get and Read Ratings and Reviews We have some more tricks in the aforementioned article, but there’s a start. We Pledge Allegiance, To Your App Say it with us: “We want loyal users. We will take care of them and meet their needs.” It doesn’t matter if your raving fans are your best friends in real life or Aunt Sue from across the street and isn’t really your aunt but she makes the best brownies so she’s Aunt Sue. They are the humans who will gab about your app to everyone they know, and you want to encourage their loyalty. This is helpful for a couple of reasons, one being for marketing purposes. The second is their frequent use of your app equips them to find your flaws. As strange as that sounds, this is great for you. Having users out there who will take the time to let you know how you can improve enables you to grow your app so it can transform into a product users will pledge their allegiance to - and ultimately make you more money. Get To Work If everything were easy, everyone would do it. While the competition is hot and finding loyal users in a unique niche can be tricky, you can do it. And we can help you get started - let us know how we can help here.

Few television shows are able to demonstrate tech life while simultaneously holding our attention. Yet Mike Judge has in what might be his funniest satire yet, poking fun at the lives of a startup in Silicon Valley and even, somewhat, accurately depicting how truly nerdy the life can be.  Even better is you don’t have to be an engineer to follow the show and learn from the mistakes Richard, Ehrlich and the team at Pied Piper make throughout their adventures. Through the classic Judge humor and dry bumbling wit, Silicon Valley not only entertains but provides nuggets of wisdom along the way. Specifically, here are a few things we noticed that those of us building apps - or interested in building apps - can take away from the show and apply to our app delivering endeavors. Good Comes Before Great  "Hooli isn't just about software. Hooli...Hooli is about people. Hooli is about innovative technology that makes a difference, transforming the world as we know it, making the world a better place through minimal message-oriented transport layers. I firmly believe we can only achieve greatness if first we achieve goodness." - Gavin Belson While this particular quote is a playful jab at people who think they can change the entire world with one piece of technology, there’s some truth to it in the thought that good ideas come from great ideas. Begin by solving one problem and one problem only. Once you master that first problem, get good at it. From there, your application can become the application for that problem. Don’t become the, “Facebook of x,” or the “Pandora of y,” develop your app to solve a specific problem extremely well - then become the best solution for that problem.  Know Your Vision “Today’s user wants access to all of their files from all of their devices instantly. That’s why ‘cloud-based’ is the holy grail. Now, Dropbox is winning. But when it comes to audio and video files, they might as well be called ‘Dripbox.’ Using our platform, Pied Piper users would be able to compress all of their files to the point where they truly can access them instantly. We control the pipe, they just use it. That’s the vision in Richard Hendricks’ head.” - Ehrlich Bachmann Ehrlich may be a wiry-haired goofball, but the second he understood the concept behind Pied Piper he was all over it. He defined what it was and focused, clearly articulating the vision of Pied Piper in such a way that potential VC’s couldn’t say no. Your idea may be clear in your head, but if you can’t explain it as an elevator pitch, you yourself don’t understand it well enough yet. Be able to explain your product in one sentence - from there you can focus and hone in on other elements that will make your concept a success. Go Big “If we can make your audio and video files smaller, we can make cancer smaller. And hunger. And AIDS.” - Gavin Belson As hackneyed of a statement as it is, we’re going to say it anyway - shoot for the stars. Imagine that your concept can solve everything you ever want it to. Developing a top downloaded app isn’t a goal reached by people who barely care or have short-sighted vision. Believe that your app can solve everything in the world, and perhaps it can solve one thing well.  Let the Successful Help You  Richard made a tough decision. He turned down a $10 million buyout for his startup and instead took less funding from a VC who offered to help grow his idea. Seldom do any of us have an idea that draws that kind of buyout attention, but many of us have people who want to help our small ideas become something great. Many startups and entrepreneurs make the mistake of trying to do everything themselves - don’t be one of them. Align yourself with partners who can offer the stability needed to grow and go to market. There will always be others in the industry who have more experience in some part of the business than you do. Borrow brilliance and let those who want to support you, help you. Slow to Hire, Quick to Fire Richard has, so far, survived his decision of hiring friends and housemates for Pied Piper. It wouldn’t be a surprise if in coming seasons those friendships begin to unravel, as it is important to take time and attention to each person you bring on board with your company. In addition, Richard hired a young, so young he was in junior high, developer to work on a part of the project without consulting the rest of the group. What happened was the developer destroyed a significant part of the code, causing the team a significant amount of cleanup work that never would have happened if Richard took more time evaluating the new hire. Whether you run a startup, enterprise, or well established business, building an app is a heavy task. Silicon Valley is filled with hilarious mistakes and gems of wisdom you can learn from to help your mobile or web application development process. From there, we can help bring your application solution to life. Ping us here.