Babbleze and the 80/20 Rule
Originally posted on Tumblr, 5 July 2012.
You won’t find a software developer in the World today who hasn’t heard of the 80/20 rule, but I’m guessing many don’t realize you can apply it to nearly anything. I first learnt this lesson from the The 4-Hour Work Week (link no longer available). If you can look past some of the hype, there are a lot of useful tips in the book.
One thing I am really bad at is applying 80/20 to my projects. For example, I’ve now spent many months trying to get my app to sync reliably via iCloud. That’s months of expensive, intense, and somewhat stressful engineering time. Luckily I don’t have to pay the bill, because it would be expensive if I did.
The idea of 80/20 as told in The 4-Hour Work Week is that you should pick the low hanging fruit when it comes to growing your business, the stuff that will give the most bang for your buck. For example, I could have spent the same time as I have spent on iCloud syncing developing a whole new iPhone app, and that may well have brought in more income than an incremental improvement to my existing app.
My wife, Jennifer, has just released her first app (or series of apps to be precise). Babbleze (link no longer available) is an audio flashcard app for learning languages. Unlike my flagship app Mental Case, which is the powertool of flashcard apps, Babbleze is much simpler, but because it is focussed on one task, in my opinion it succeeds as a product.
Jennifer doesn’t have the years of programming experience that I have, and yet she found a category of apps that was within her range of skills, and then made a polished app in that category. To me, it’s a great example of 80/20. You don’t have to be the World’s best programmer to make a good app. You just have to think carefully about design, and make a polished product to solve a problem. In short, make the most of what you have.