MediaBox

So with a million apps in the App Store, it’s clear that a lot of people out there already know how to build an iPhone app. However, if you enjoy an inside look at product creation or you have an app idea and aren’t sure where to start, then this series of posts may be interesting to you.

In this post, and several more, we’ll cover many aspects of creating and launching an app for iOS. We’ll leave coding details to the reader, but we’ll cover the interesting macro bits like team building, idea creation, product definition, and marketing. On the MediaBox team, we’re learning as we go and want to share all of it with you. We’ll talk openly about issues that we ran into, how much time and money we spent on the project, and share recommendations on tools and product development approaches. The number one goal here is to share information from behind the scenes.

Below, is an early design concept that we created using a great wireframing tool called Balsamiq. See the rest of the very basic design concept here. When we launch, you’ll see how far we deviated from these early concepts. Despite straying from the original sketches, they served as an important guideline and a few of the design concepts did stand the test of time.

Here are some project metrics I thought might be interesting. More to come!

• Team members at project start: 5
• Team members currently: 2
• Alpha testing group: 6
• Commits on Github: 170
• Month with most commits: June 2013 (44)
• Project start date: March 2013
• Elapsed time planning: 2 months
• Elapsed time development: 7 months
• Elapsed time to first alpha: 5 months
• Lines of code: 3920
• When we usually code: 8-11PM
• % team with iOS experience: 50%
• Business model: Affiliate Revenue
• Budget to date: $70
• Launch date: soon

Be a part of our iOS app experiment and catch all of our free content as we march toward the launch date of MediaBox!

Next Tuesday: “Building a Side Project Team”