Time Traveler Tours Annual Report
The truth is, 2012 was a roller-coaster ride here at Time Traveler Tours. So just being up and running on January 1, 2013, felt like a great success. The past 12 months were a time of learning, introspection, and redirection. So, in this Annual Report, I offer you a sampling of our misadventures in the hopes that you may benefit from our mistakes...
January was the high point or our year, to be honest, with the bilingual release of Beware Mme la Guillotine (BMLG) finally hitting the App Store. Preceding it by six months, the English release had already garnered several excellent reviews as well as two Top 10 2011 distinctions. But the bilingual version was the true fulfillment of a dream; a dream that was five years in the making and a period of non-stop creativity: writing, curating images, developing spec docs and wire frames, learning to record and mix audio, working with art directors and translators and programming geeks.
It was an exhilarating time. Now the project was finally realized, published, and ready for purchase in the App Store.
But in February reality hit. I had no plan to sell it. In all the creative excitement, I had failed to construct a marketing strategy.
I cannot stress enough the difficulty of getting your app noticed when there are billions of others in the App Store. It’s a Sisyphean task for even the best product to rise above the noise, especially without a marketing plan and budget.
Lesson #1: It’s imperative to promote and market a product before and during launch.
After that, it’s old news.
We were lucky that the Anglophone version of Beware Mme la Guillotine picked up interest from Kirkus, NPR affiliates, School Library Journal, and Teachers with Apps in 2011 We were also lucky that it won the hearts and minds of many travel and writing bloggers who interviewed me or offered me guest posting opportunities to help keep the buzz going into 2012. But although now fully bilingual, Beware Mme la Guillotine was no longer news.
The 2nd month of 2012 also brought the 2nd blow: The developer of BMLG informed me that app #2 would cost just as much to build, defying previous expectations and exploding our remaining budget.
When we started working together, the plan was to make many apps. BMLG would be the main investment, the most expensive to build, for it would be the framework into which all subsequent content packages would be dropped. These would be wired together for a quarter of the cost of BMLG, I was informed, bringing the price of development down over time. The more apps, the more economical the investment.
Based on this plan, I bootstrapped BMLG, reaching deep into my own pocket as well as raising money through a 2011 Kickstarter campaign. I budgeted for development of app #2 at a quarter of the price, and that’s all the money I had left for development when bilingual BMLG launched.
Had there been a paradigm shift in development practice over the course of our year working together? Had my developer deliberately led me on? Had he so grossly under-estimated the cost to develop BMLG that he was now trying to make up for it in future projects? Or was he perhaps trying to cut me off, having found a new and more interesting project to move on to?
Whatever the truth, there was now no way #2 would be in the App Store in summer 2012. We had already lost momentum.
Lesson #2: There are lots of developers out there, but good ones are difficult to find and even more difficult to hold onto. They also don’t like to work with another’s code. So in addition to securing the rights to your project source code, be sure to hire a technical advisor or assistant to ensure that all code is readable and well organized throughout the development process. I did not do this and now I was going to have to start over.
I limped into March, suffering near total paralysis and with my beloved cat dying of cancer. I was demoralized. Feeling betrayed and like a total idiot for not realizing that my developer had built me a custom car, and was now the only mechanic in the whole wide world who could fix it. I was stuck with him and he could charge me whatever he wanted. In the event BMLG suffered a break down that I could not afford to fix, I would have no choice but to pull it off the App Store.
I was also then coming to understand that although apps are expensive to build, they do not fetch a high price tag. In today’s digital culture, the smaller the screen size, the cheaper the price. So creating and selling complex story-based historical mobile apps for tourism, it turns out, would never be a viable business model, not without additional revenue streams.
Lesson #3: In actual fact, the odds of you making a living (never mind striking gold) creating apps range from limited to none. Additional revenue streams are a must in order to build a viable business that includes publishing apps.
By the end of the 1st quarter, I considered giving up. But I’d already come so far. That’s when I resolved to build a factory rather than a series of custom cars. That way I could publish my apps without need of a developer, and publish others’ apps as well. I could create white-label apps for other cultural institutions, and rent out space in the factory (i.e., license the tool) for other app makers’ use.
To do this I would need a technical partner, someone to share the vision, as well as shoulder the risk and reap the eventual reward; someone with whom I could work side-by-side, using an agile publishing process, creating in sprints with regular testing to ensure that our products truly fill a need, and are not just what we think the public wants, as I had done with Beware Mme la Guillotine.
I attended a Paris Start-Up Weekend. I was terrified, but convinced that I could always duck out if it wasn’t working for me. Happily, it did work out. Very well, in fact. I pitched my concept, made the cut to form a team, and spent an action-packed weekend building a new storyapp from scratch with an ace developer and a talented young graphic artist. Our team won 2nd place.
Our prize? Free mentoring at the Paris-based business accelerator, DojoBoost, IF the developer and I managed to stay together. We gave it a good try, but our goals were too divergent and neither of us wanted to compromise our vision. It was an amiable parting. No harm, no foul. At the very least, I earned some serious self-cred and discovered that the Time Traveler Tours concept really does have legs. And I left with some theoretical access to money.
In May a friend of my daughter’s took Beware Mme la Guillotine out for a spin with his mum. He then requested a meeting. He knew I was looking to update the wire-frame and he had sketched out a new model for me. He also knew I was searching for additional revenue streams and advocated republishing the content as an interactive book with iBooks Author, expressly for the educational market. Sebastian is only 15 and already much smarter than me. I hired him on the spot and he’s been an invaluable member of my team ever since.
Meanwhile a braces-wearing coding genius fell out of the heavens and into my lap. He’d heard about the concept and was excited about it. He understood what I wanted to do and said he knew just how to do it, offering to help build the publishing platform of my dreams in Drupal, promising that when he was through I would never have need of a developer again. He would even help me get it off the ground for free. It would be fun for him, he said. A new challenge. He would have the first sprint case ready for testing by the end of June.
Lesson #4: Free doesn't work. People need to be valued and are compelled by a promise of remuneration. This guy, unfortunately, did not have a test case ready in June. He had nothing. But he did make me see that my vision was a real possibility, and he showed me the way forward. For that I am grateful.
In June I began my first-ever business class, and pursued talks with numerous dev firms about partnering with Time Traveler Tours to build a CMS in Drupal. I did a lot of yoga to try to keep my heart rate down.
Then, as July came to a close, Beware Mme la Guillotine was named a Top 10 Finalist for the World Youth and Student Educational Travel Confederation’s 2012 App Yap Contest. This was further validation that the concept works and that I was on the right track. However, I was faced with a problem. It was up to me to crowd source public votes for the App Yap contest.
In August I had plans to be on vacation with my family. And I was in desperate need of a break. But I knew all too well from my Kickstarter days that crowd-sourcing support is a ton of work, all the more so when you have limited Internet access and time. So I used Buffer to set up automatic tweets, also linked to my Facebook page, to do the work for me. I scheduled calls-to-action to go out at 5pm all over the Anglophone world one day each week throughout the month.
On one level, this was a huge success as I managed to pull off a 2nd place in the App Yap public vote count. But, it turns out, some of my regular followers got pissed at the recurrent tweets and cut me off. They thought I was being too “me, me, me”. I thought I’d earned that right, since I tweet other peoples’ stuff 90% of the time for the rest of the year. But not everyone agreed.
Lesson #5: The down side of putting yourself out there is it’s impossible to please everyone. Rejection exists, whether you’re published,
or not.
Fortunately, not everyone was disgruntled, because August is also when my agent and I started talking about joining forces to create a niche digital publishing boutique of eBooks, iBooks, and eventually apps, representing the authors and illustrators of Hen&ink Literary Studio.
By September I was convinced that if I were ever to do any more apps, I would have to do it right; I would have to seek out the best development firm possible and raise the capital to build my factory. I commenced negotiations with a Paris-based dev firm that owns a publishing platform much like the one I wish to build. With a few tweaks, I asked, could they make their tool work for my apps, too? They looked into it, but decided they could not.
That’s when I started to listen to my contact at Bluespark Labs. He’d been following my progress since May 2011 when he beta-tested Beware Mme la Guillotine with his wife, who later reviewed it here. He understood exactly what I wanted to do, and urged me to engage him and his team to enter into a discovery process to create a foolproof plan. ‘It doesn’t cost you anything to talk’, he said. And I was getting tired of taking foolish missteps.
The end of September took me to San Diego to WYSTC conference for the announcement App Yap winner. The winner was not BMLG, but I was proud to be there among the Top 10 finalists. I used the time to do some serious networking with industry thought leaders. I met a lot of folks in the world of student and educational travel, all of whom loved BMLG and wanted more. I had found my target niche as well as potential future clients and investors. More solid validation.
In October, still talking to BlueSpark, I gave my editor the finished manuscript for the next StoryApp tour, Day of the Dead. I was writing again. And, Man!, did that feel good.
November: Sebastian and I are so engrossed with getting the iBook edition of BMLG out the door that I thought of little else. But the BlueSpark dudes are starting to win me over.
Lesson #6: The way of the future for content creators is transmedia, i.e., the technique of storytelling across multiple platforms using current digital formats. I had to get my story onto as many platforms as possible to reach as many audiences as possible.
December: They’ve won. The BlueSpark team and I kick-off the discovery phase of our hopeful future collaboration. But only after Seb and I manage to submit the BMLG iBook to Apple.
And so a cycle closes and we arrive at January, 2013. This new year begins with the first interactive book by Time Traveler Tales awaiting approval in the iBook Store, along with a whole new outlook, a new set of learning curves to surmount, and a new challenge: This year, I’m going changing identities once again, adding 'publisher' to my bag of tricks.
Am I ready? You bet I am.
My next step? To create a community of writers and illustrators who want to join me for what I hope will be an incredible ride. And while we’re all working together creating content, I’ll go try and drum up some dough.
Care to participate? Go ahead. Contact Me.
Here's to a happy, healthy, and prosperous new year full of vision and success for us all!
Sarah
Monday, September 16, 2013 at 8:17AM Tweet 
