Upcoming Developers

CollegeKidApp

Three College Kids make the decision to jump on the App Store bandwagon and give Iphone Development a try. Cameron Banga, Micheal Phelps, and Jeff Lange are three Junior year students from Valparaiso University that decided to spend their summer creating a business. What makes them Unique is that they are documenting the entire process on their blog at CollegeKidApp.com. From the initial idea stage to just recently submitting an finished app to to the app store for review.


Who you are, and what are you exactly doing?
I'm Cameron Banga, Marketing and Business Director for CollegeKidApp.com. We're a team of three students who using this summer to create an iPhone development studio.

What is your background with App Developement?
Personally, I pretty much have no experience when it comes to application development, both on the iPhone and with other computer platforms. I've worked as a marketing intern a couple of times and have a fair amount of practice in that field, but none in app development before about a month ago.

What is or will be your debut app?
We're currently working on an eReader application for an essay and we have a secret app in the review process. :-) Our app in the review process will hopefully see the light of day in a week or so and that will be our debut app.

Do you have any other apps in process?
We're in the concept stage on a couple of app ideas, but nothing has been set in stone yet. We're always throwing out ideas and mocking up concept art, etc.

How did you come up with your idea, describe the Eureka moment?
For our app currently in the review process, I had the idea whole lying in bed late one night. I was getting ready to sleep and I was tossing around ideas in my head when one kinda stuck out and seemed really useful and a possible candidate for decent sales numbers. I immediately woke up, wrote the idea down, and called one of my partners who thought I was drunk because it was 2am. That was about a month ago haha.

At what point did you know you were successful..?
While we definitely haven't seen any large amounts of success yet, I knew we were moving in the right direction when we first were able to get an application up for test in the simulator. It just seemed so cool that we were able to get something up and running, even on simulator software.

What funding did you have?.
We're entirely self funded right now. Everything we spend comes out of our own pockets. It's helped to keep us extremely cheap while also forcing us to be extremely wise with every penny we spend. It's been great in helping us create something out of nothing.

What marketing did you do?
I work primarily on marketing and use Facebook, Twitter, and our blog extensively. We use the blog to update on our progress and different parts of our development team with the Facebook and Twitter being our primary interaction with people who are interested in our projects.

Do You develop on any other platforms, will you in the future?
We don't right now and I'm not sure if I see us moving over to anything else in the near future. We have been somewhat interested in Android development though and would love to work with that system.

What was your thinking and your decision to run ads vs sell in the App store?
We're playing it on and app by app basis. We'd personally rather run an unobtrusive application with no ads that comes at a small cost, but realize that some consumers are not willing to pay any cost. For our first self-produced application, we plan on releasing at a $0.99 price point and see how sales play out from there.

How long did it take you from start to finish, to make your first App?
That's a tough question to answer because of all of the different steps. I would say that the total time frame was about a month, but that included a lot of time learning about the software in general as well as design and research for the application. Our total development time wasn't too bad, but we kept on task relatively easily and put in a lot of hours over a short period of time.

What are your plans next for collgekidapp.com?
The goal is to continue making iPhone applications until August and then see where we go from there when school starts back up in the fall. We'd like to continue on from there into the winter and next spring, but that entirely depends on our free time and schedules once that arrives.