You know it's a bubble when...

One of the most accurate business cliches I know of is this one: "success is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration."

Most good entrepreneurs come up with new business ideas constantly, but also know from experience that those ideas have no value if they aren't backed up with commitment, sustained effort and constant adaptation to market feedback.

If this is true in traditional business ventures, it's an order of magnitude more applicable in the domain of iPhone applications. As a recent GigaOm post pointed out, *very* few apps have a meaningful number of customers, and many of those are free. So even if you have a great idea, build a fantastic product and get it approved for distribution in the App Store, you're still pretty unlikely to generate meaningful revenue.

These facts are in pretty wide circulation, so I've been surprised to see an increasing number of search queries to this blog (query visibility courtesy of Lijit) like these:

• "selling an idea for an iphone app" (Bremerton, WA)
• "how to sell an iphone app idea" (Little Rock, AR)
• "how can I sell my iphone app idea" (Location Unknown)

Folks, I hate to break it to you, but even if you're a skilled dev, interaction expert and graphic designer who can code it up all by yourself, your iphone app idea is still might not pay this month's rent. And if you don't have any of the skills above and think you can sell an idea for an iPhone app, you've been reading *way* too many breathless headlines in USA Today and Newsweek.

Making money on the iPhone is like any other serious entrepreneurial effort: the guys who make it look easy are extremely talented *and* have been busting their ass in their area of expertise since well before the iPhone was a gleam in Steve Jobs' eye. The mobile web is a hugely exciting and potentially rewarding market for software entrepreneurs, but I'm getting a strong feeling that iPhone bubble economics are now fully in effect.

The Google Giveth...

...and The Google taketh away.

All of our companies at Founders Co-op rely on organic search traffic to drive revenue and margin (some more so than others), and we're very careful to stay well on the "white hat" side of SEO best practices to ensure that our hard-fought gains on that front are lasting.

But inevitably we get caught up in Google's filtering mechanisms from time to time (often because a white label distribution strategy has triggered a duplicate content flag on their end) and have to go through the "site reconsideration" process to clear things up. The process feels fair and we've never failed to be reinstated, but the experience is always a stark reminder of the power Google holds over our business success.

This happened again this morning with one of our companies - a site that had been receiving thousands of Google organics a day was suddenly capped at 500 visits, and then received a metered trickle of traffic each hour after the cap was hit. We quickly reviewed all our recent actions to make sure we hadn't screwed anything up, fired off a reconsideration petition, and are now waiting for the wheels of justice to turn. I fully expect that we'll be back to normal in a few days, but I'm freshly in awe of Google's dominance in web content distribution.

W00t! AppStoreHQ named best services startup at MobileBeat 2009

A few weeks ago VentureBeat emailed to tell me that AppStoreHQ had been selected as one of seven finalists for the Best Services Startup competition at their upcoming MobileBeat show. More than 100 companies had applied for the competition, so I was stoked to get picked but had no real expectation of winning. We just started AppStoreHQ this spring, and we were stacked up against much more established (and better funded) entrants. But I figured it would be good exposure for us, so I bought a plane ticket and threw together a deck (embedded below).

The format for the competition was a two-minute pitch, followed by questions from a five-member expert panel. At the end of the seven pitches, the panelists would confer and vote on a winner. The panel included Bob Borchers (Opus Capital), Anand Iyer (Microsoft), Stephan Noll (T-Mobile Ventures), Nagraj Kashyap (Qualcomm Ventures), and Greg Tarr (Cross Pacific Capital). I hadn't fully grokked how short two minutes of talk time was until the flight down, when I first had a chance to practice. I felt like I had hardly opened my mouth when I got the time signal and had to wrap up.

My personal pick for the winning pitch was Urban Airship, a platform provider for push and in-app transaction services enabled by the v3.0 iPhone SDK. They had timed their release perfectly with the launch of 3.0, releasing in association with a few leading iPhone app publishers. So I was amazed when Matt Marshall announced AppStoreHQ as the judges' pick.

Unfortunately, there was no cash prize for winning, but the show was a great experience and the win was a nice surprise. Partly as a result of the win, AppStoreHQ has a small but influential group of new admirers, and I have renewed faith in the power of just showing up.

AppStoreHQ makes the New York Times

I love the New York Times - it's one of the only publications I still read in paper form (every day, no less), so it's always a good day when one of my projects gets a mention in the Gray Lady.

Today was that day for AppStoreHQ. Roy Furchgott gave us a nice shout-out in his Gadgetwise piece on App Store shortcomings titled "Apple's 1.5 Billion Wake Up Call":

"Of course, there is another option. Give consumers better tools to sort through the stores themselves. One stab at that is found at the Web site App Store HQ. In addition to being more organized and informative than the iTunes App Store... it also has a sortable search. So instead of just choosing from 1693 apps categorized under music, you can then choose only those rated four stars and up (158 apps) then narrow it to those that cost 99 cents (38 apps). Still not perfect, but a step in the right direction."

Thanks for the shout-out, Roy - you made my day.