Co-working Spaces in Brisbane

This month, I attended a meet-up at Fishburners. It is the second co-working space I have visited for a meet-up. My app marketing meet-up has been happening in the Salt Space. So I started thinking about the co-working spaces that are available in and around Brisbane. I mean, working from home is great when you are working independently or just starting-up. But a lot of people quickly discover that the isolation gets to them. Of course, co-working spaces have their pitfalls, but a carefully selected co-working space can be a great investment. Especially if it also comes with a community that promotes engagement with other users of the space.

So I decided to do a little research on the coworking spaces in Brisbane and came up with the table below, comparing the cost per month, along with highlighting if you can get a dedicated desk at the space and perhaps more importantly if there is an explicit community attached to the working space. I mean, if you put yourself out there, you'll make friends in any shared environment. But some coworking spaces, like River City Labs, explicitly promote engagement with the community.

Comparison of coworking spaces in Brisbane

Community engagement can be the most important part of joining one of these co-working spaces, but only if you are willing to put in the extra effort to be social. But I think that if you wanted if you just wanted a quiet space to work because you are sick of your home office. Th State Library's Business Studio space might just do, although the State Library is also trying to build a community around its space.

Of course, with the community, you also have to make sure it's the right community. The Coterie and Liquid Space, for example, seem to be more geared towards creative types. So tech start-ups might not get a lot of bang for their buck if they decide to rent space within those coworking spaces but would probably get more out of the community at River City Labs or Fishburners. The other way to look at it is that if you float around different co-working spaces with the various communities, it might stop you from going into your bubble and become blinkered. A lot of these spaces offer day passes and casual passes. So I would certainly advise maybe varying it up from time to time.

As for me, I am going to make an effort to work out of the State Libraries Business Studio for at least a day or two in the coming month. I love my home office, but it can only help me to work from a different location from time to time!

Apps as investment

Earlier this month I had another productive and enlightening meetup of the App Marketing group. The topics covered included tips on outsourcing and developing a community around a product as a means of marketing. The outsourcing talk was interesting because I never thought about funding app development as a source of passive income. Similar to having a share portfolio or perhaps a more apt analogy would be investing in a business without being involved in the day to operation of said business.

Obviously, I am developing apps through my company Virgo 19. But the difference here is between being a business that is actively in the app development space. Who is making app development or a specific app the core of their business, e.g. Uber and Lyft. As opposed to being someone with an idea who funds it and then steps back, letting the app go through its lifecycle with minimal intervention. But they retain ownership of the app or at least a significant stake in the app.

I think it would work well with tool type apps, games that do not require active support to keep players engaged. Certainly interactive story apps would be perfect for these kinds of passive investment in the app market space.

The other aspect of this is that in this situation, the person funding the app development doesn't necessarily have the technical know how. They are not a coder to put it simply. They have an idea that they believe there is a market for and so they fund it and put it out in the Google and Apple marketplaces. Depending on the level of investment, they might also undertake some marketing and let it go. Active support is impossible just because they don't have a technical team actively working on the app.

However, the goal for apps as investments does not seem to be to focus on one app and make it the next Uber. But to have a diverse range of small apps that offer a return on investment for people who are looking for complementary income, as opposed to the apps being a primary source of income. Although, I guess the dream would be that your portfolio of apps is so successful, that you can just go fishing all the time! Personally, I hate fish and fishing, but I understand that is the dream of many, many people.

SEO Marketing: The Pitfall of content generation

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) has become something of a buzzword that many people are aware of but very few people seem to understand. Places like Airtasker are filled with requests that are some variation of "I need SEO." But with no explanation or understanding if they mean they want their website tuned to have a high SEO score or if they want to undertake SEO marketing. SEO tune-up of a website involves a few hours of work to make sure Google has an easy time indexing the site. SEO marketing is an ongoing effort that can be very expensive.

However, the lack of understanding of SEO but the vague feeling that it is something necessary has to lead to the situation that many people are falling prey to unscrupulous "experts." The so-called "black hat" SEO tricks that artificially boost Google ranking but lead to long-term issues with Google penalties is rife! The other pitfall is spending a lot of cash generating content. But the content in question, not generating any benefits. Either because it didn't drive eyeballs to the website it was designed to promote or because the visitors to the page were not becoming customers. In short, SEO can be a black hole of time and money for the unwary.

SEO content marketing can spread a brand and keep it in people's minds. I mean, I find myself visiting Domain a few times a month just because stories from their news section keep appearing in my Facebook feed. I'll certainly Domain if and when I need help with real estate. Of course, I keep going back to Domain because their articles are interesting and good. Good content like that can be expensive to produce. Even with online job boards offering up writers and infographic designers for reasonable costs. Still, I do think SEO content based marketing is worth pursuing.

For my part, when I built this website, I made sure to ensure that this website was optimized to make it easy for Google robots to index it. Squarespace, of course, made life easy and I am grateful for that.  I paid less attention to SEO when I built the website for my company. This was because I wanted the website up as a placeholder while I worked to get apps released on the Google Play Store. Now that I have a few apps up, I am starting to layout marketing plan. This includes tuning my company website. But also, looking at setting up separate websites for each of my apps and using said the website for focused marketing. At this stage, I would probably generate all my content myself. That could be an interesting task. Especially for the Tea Tracker. I am looking forward to researching different types of teas so I can write about them!

My First Bangla App!

Virgo 19 has released its second major app! My First Bangla App is targeted at kids up to the age of 5. It teaches Bangla nouns for many pets, farm animals, body parts, wild animals, fruits and vegetables. We have plans to expand it to include counting games, fun quizzes and the phrases. But for now, it has over 70 nouns that can be taught to my niece, I mean, your kids!

Tea Tracker: A UX Story

I have made a significant change to Tea Tracker. It was so obvious that I am wondering why I didn't think of the feature from the start! The obvious answer to why it took me so long to put in this important UI change is that when I first thought of the Tea Tracker app, I envisioned it as a grid of tins. So, when I built it, a grid of tins is what I put in the "main activity". 

However, just using the app for awhile showed me that I had missed something vital for a good user experience. Yes, the app showed my tins, but it did not quickly show me which tins were full and which what tea! That was a real "D'oh!" moment and made me glad that I have not yet run a huge promotion campaign for the app.

The marketing push is coming, but I want to spend a few more weeks refining the app. Also, I would like to add a widget feature and not to mention, test it more by using it myself. I mean, I did make this app because there was a need for it in my life.

It is, however, interesting how easily it is to miss UX pitfalls. Of course, part of the reason missed such an obvious UI usability issues is because I am used to doing, as I like to say, "everything but the pretty graphics". I didn't do what I know my friends in UX design would have done, which is that they would sit down with pen and paper and start with the user interaction. They would develop apps top-down. As a middleware and backend engineer, my first instinct is to build from the bottom up. But this, as was the case with my Tea Tracker app, can lead to UX blindspots.

I will need to change Virgo 19's development workflow to avoid this in the future. Especially since the next app in the pipeline is made for toddlers! Now that's a tough demographics!