With voting round 2 coming to an end, we’re now down to half of the original 24 finalists. Making the first cut from 2,716 total entries was hard enough, then getting into the final 12 was another huge feat.
Even if I or any other individual judge am not into your particular idea, that doesn’t mean anything at this point. And even if you finished just above the cutoff point in round 2, it’s insignificant. You’ve made it this far which means that you have a good amount of support for your idea, both from judges and especially the voting public, and the key now is building support for it in the final three rounds.
“Stat Monkey” Joe Kavanagh recently posted a list of “iCommandments” in the forums. Take good note of them all, especially X where he proclaims, “Thou shall remember that this is a binary state competition, either thou is in or thou is out, there is no tie. It doth not mater where you are in the rankings each round as long as you survive.”
Keep in mind that a vote from a MDA forum vet with 500 posts under his or her belt is absolutely no different than a vote from someone who quickly popped-in to pick up a free copy of Mori. At this stage of the game, the primary goal for you is to get votes. And getting your idea across to the masses as effectively as possible is what’s necessary to do that.
There are 11 other ideas you’re competing with. How do you get through to voters when attention spans are ridiculously short these days? The three things that are key are the name of your app, your app description, and your main mockup…
App Name
The app name is pretty much the first thing voters see. And in many cases it’ll be the last. Don’t let this be the case by having an obscure name.
I’m not going to point fingers here but having a “clever” name doesn’t serve your entry well right now. Since there are many entries all competing for the same eyes, I really feel that it’s critical to have an app name that immediately conveys what your idea is. There are a lot of entries here that are suffering because voters have no idea what your app is at a simple glance, so then they move on to the ones that they do get. And they vote on them.
Save the fancy name for if/when your app is actually created.
Description
Again, because of short attention spans, concise, crystal clear app descriptions are critical. There are tons of resources on the ‘net that can help you to polish your description. A quick Google of “copywriting” is all it takes to get you started.
Mockup
There’s no doubt about it, if you don’t have solid mockup at this point, you’re chances of survival are getting slimmer by the second.
“But I don’t have the skills to make a good mockup!”
Well, here’s where your resourcefulness comes in. Where there’s a will, there’s a way… In Anders Melin’s recent blog post, he offers to give the Macbook he’d get from being one of the winning apps in exchange for help getting quality mockups for Stick-It. Brilliant!
And what totally kicks ass is that Dillon Krug, who recently got eliminated with his Bookroom entry, stepped-up here and they’re now working together on it. Dillon has some great design skills and I’m positive that this move will give Anders’ entry a much needed boost in the next voting round.
That’s it for now…good luck to all of you in round 3!
John Casasanta
iClipJohn Casasanta is the founder and chief of Inventive, maker of the popular utility, iClip. John feels that solid design is one of the most important things in creating successful apps. In his 15+ year career as a Mac developer he?s managed to rack up two Apple Design Awards and he?s hoping to land more by heading up the development teams for My Dream App.
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