Nathan Barry is a designer-turned entrepreneur and developer who learned to program while creating an Ipad app called OneVoice. The app is designed to give a voice to those who cannot speak.

In this interview you’ll enjoy hearing about how the process he went through to bring his app idea to life including: learning about the market need from an expert, prototyping the idea, talking to the market to get feedback, and iterating based on feedback from the market.

Below you will find a transcript of the interview as well as a list of interview insights organized by topic to enable you to grab the insights that are most relevant to you and your present business stage.

Nathan Barry:

So my background’s in software design, and everything I did is around design and usability – just making the easiest to use software possible. I did a lot of web design and basic web sites and then maybe 3 or 4 years ago I tensioned into web apps exclusively. I led the software design team at a company here is Boise, Idaho, USA that made web apps for the medical field, specifically around distributing video. I worked there up until last October, and built OneVoice while working full time for them.

Dan Hodgins:

So what was your workweek like? What was the breakdown in terms of hours?

Nathan Barry:

I just averaged 40 -50 hours per week, and I did other deisgn on the side 5 -10 hours per week. Including everything my work week while building OneVoice as 55 – 70 hour weeks. It’s not like I was doing 160 hour weeks, it was intense but doable. I had time for my girlfriend, and to enjoy hobbies. I have a wife and son, and my son was born in September.

Dan Hodgins:

So you built it part time while you were working, and it sounds like you have a background in the area. I read on the Hacker News post and in your blog article that you knew at one point that you wanted to build some iOS apps.

When was the moment that you knew you wanted to build an iOS app? Talk to me about the genesis of the whole thing.

Nathan Barry:

I knew I wanted to build an iOS app, and have it in the store the day the Ipad was released, so that was an interesting challenge. None of us on the team had any Iphone experience. We all used Iphones, but none of us had developed or designed apps for it. That was our challenge – to get in and start learning that and build something to be in the app store the day the Ipad was released. On the App, I (Nathan) just did design. It was Photoshop mockups, I tried to do some usability testing without the device, to get a feel for how the interface would work and all that.

Also, when I was at unity, we did another application and at that time I got into code a bit, I started to wire up some of my designs and get my feet wet in the code. In August 2010 I was headed down to iOS Dev Camp which is at the PayPal headquarters in San Jose, and it’s just a weekend hackathon basically. You show up, put a team together, and see what you can build in 48 hours.

Dan Hodgins:

Cool, sounds like fun!

Nathan Barry:

Yeah, it was a lot of fun.

So I was headed down there, didn’t have a project to work on, and my sister in law who has worked with special needs kids at the time, and described the problem OneVoice was created to fix. She said you should build this on Ipads because there’s a lot of clunky hardware out there already that’s very expensive stuff. Bascially, I got down to San Jose looking to join a team because I was pretty inexperienced and didn’t find any projects that I really wanted to work on, so I decided to launch into building OneVoice. I had a coworker down there with me he’s a developer and I’m a designer, and so we set out to see what we could get done, and we built a prototype. I guess we got started Friday night and had a prototype ready by Sunday morning. It was hard going. and it took another 4 months, from then until January for it to actually be live on the store and finished.

Dan Hodgins:

Let’s talk about that weekend.  So Friday night you decide you want to build something, and by Sunday morning you have a prototype. Describe your process if you wouldn’t mind from deciding to do it to the initial prototypes. Were you wireframing, or did you sketch it on paper first, or how did you map out all the interactions and just do the prototyping?

Nathan Barry:

I started on paper, that’s how I start every project. I just sketched out a bunch of different ways to solve this interface problem. I finally settled on one I liked the best, and conveniently it was the one that was the easiest to code as well. That was just a ‘happy’ coincidence.

I just made a bunch of paper prototypes and tried to think of how you would organize the vocabulary and how to solve that problem. At the same time, my friend Robert and I were researching how to do speech synthesis on the Ipad. His first thought was that we would use Apple’s API’s for it because they have speech synthesis built in, but they’re all private API’s, and they won’t let you access them. So we set out to find another library and found one that’s put out by Carnegie Mellon, it’s called Festival Light, and we got that built in to the app.

In our prototype it didn’t have a database for storage, and you couldn’t customize things, but it functioned. After the wireframes we just started coding on the interface. I did more of implementing the interface, and he did more of getting the speech engine working and that sort of thing. We hit a lot of walls, but it was a really good place to be since there were so many talented Iphone developers around who were just going around offering help. It would be like 12:30 at night, and you’re sitting in the PayPal lounge, and someone just walks up to you and goes “are you guys stuck on anything, is there something I can help you with”? It was a fun experience.

Dan Hodgins:

I’m sure lots of Hacker News readers would love to go and do something like that. Just to be in that ecosystem and to be around all that energy and collaboration that would be pretty cool. OK. So it sounds like you partnered up with someone who has some complimentary skills who helped with the speech engine side of it. Let’s move toward your first customers, and those first few pitches you made to people beyond friends and family. What was the very first pitch, who was it, and how did it go?

Nathan Barry:

I really just built it, and put it out on the app store. it sold 4 copies on the first day which was substantial for a $200 application. The thing to realize is the App store at the time had a recently added list, and so just for getting on the app store you got on that list. So you go on in education, and then you quickly drop off. That ended up being just what you get for free basically.

Dan Hodgins:
Just that initial spike?

Nathan Barry:

What I did is I started contacting speech language pathologists who were the ones who would prescribe something like OneVoice as a solution for someone. It was actually a really easy pitch. First I asked if they were even using the Ipad for their speech therapy practice. I was doing well at contacting only the ones I thought were using the Ipad.  What I told them is, here’s a promo code to install the app for free, will you give me feedback and write a review. It was a really easy sell because they were effectively the distributors.  I ended up contacting about 100 speech language pathologists either by email or by phone, and it kind of grew from there. They gave a lot of feedback. I made some fairly substantial changes in the first 4 months. I ripped out one library and replaced it with another. Went from a free open source one to one provided by Accapella Group, and for that one I pay $28 per copy sold.

Dan Hodgins:

To outsource that problem to them it must be worth it if you’re doing it.

Nathan Barry:

Yeah, it’s absolutely worth it.

Dan Hodgins:

So when you say you got lots of good feedback what does that mean exactly? Did you meet them for coffee, were you talking on the phone, did you pop down to their office for a demo, or how to you get that feedback, and what did it look like/

Nathan Barry:

It was all either over email or over the phone. There was one group at a local university that I went to, a couple of grad students and a professor gave me some feedback. They told me a couple of things. They reinforced what I was already thinking that simplicity and usability was the most important thing.  And so they reinforced my direction there. They also encouraged me to set the high price. I built it as a hobby, and so I was thinking I’ll sell it for 50 bucks or something like that. The competitor apps were several hundred, and the competitor devices were many thousand.  I was told I have a really solid product. It has less features, but for the usability and all that it’s leaps and bounds ahead of the other products. They said to not sell if for $25, $50 – sell it for $200, and I think that’s worked pretty well. I always wondered if I were to drop the price how many more customers I would pick up. I don’t think I would get double the customers or anything like that. If I did get double the customers I would have double the support. Based on that feedback I focused on making it easier to use, and making it more customizable.

Dan:
I was thinking a couple of months ago that in some ways there’s a value paradox in apps and software where companies like 37 Signals are preaching the whole minimalist, ‘less is more’ deal. I think less really is more, especially in the area that you’re in because feature creep doesn’t necessarily mean more value. It might mean more powerful functionality, but if power isn’t what the customer is after than that just adds barriers to ease of use. Despite the fact that minimalist, easy-to-use apps are quicker and easier to develop I think they also are also paradoxically more valuable.

Nathan Barry:

Yeah, often they are. You just have to set a minimum quality level that you’re going to implement. Especially when you’re starting out, you can’t implement every feature at the high bar that you need to set for quality. You have to limit the functionality. You can always come back and add some of those features if you can do it in a way that doesn’t harm the user experience. So that was the one thing I focused on – as few features as possible, and the best experience right off the bat. Then, that became the bar that I would compare other features to. If I could maintain that same experience, then that feature is a go. Otherwise, I won’t build it into the software.

Dan Hodgins:

Now, where you’re at is it sounds like you’ve made some money, gotten some great feedback and a bit of traction in your market. What’s next? What is keeping you up at night right now?

Nathan Barry:

Actually, the biggest thing I’m working on right now is trying to become a better programmer. My background is in design, and I decided I wanted to market OneVoice and improve it, and get it out there, but I don’t think that you should just be a designer or a developer. I don’t see a reason why you can’t be both. Over the past year I’ve been trying to become a much better programmer, so I’m working on a couple little apps that I’m writing entirely on my own, and they’re coming along pretty well.

Dan Hodgins:

Any hints about what these apps are?

Nathan Barry:

One of them is released on the App store, and it’s called Fluent. It’s a memory system for the Iphone. So it’s flashcards, but there’s a system built in for repetition. Any flashcard you put in there you’re guaranteed to know. That was just an app that I wrote for myself. It wasn’t too hard of an app to write, and it was a really good programming project.

The other app is in the App store review process right now. It’s called Commit, and hopefully it will be approved in the next couple of days. There will be a lot of blog posts, and announcements, and all that.

Dan Hodgins:

In terms of your marketing strategies, tactics, approaches – maybe you could tell us a little bit about them. I know you have your blog, and you’ve posted some articles about the OneVoice App on Hacker News, and we’re interviewing right now, but what are your overall approaches?

Nathan Barry:

For OneVoice, my approach is to target speech language pathologists. They become many distribution points all over the country. They’re going to see 3 people per day, hundreds of days per year, and for a few of those people it will be the right fit. So I’m just really selling through them.

I’ve had a review in quite a few special needs blogs – around 15 or 20, and those backlinks to my web site help with search engine optimization (SEO). I’d like to get more real articles written about it.

The cool thing about posting the app for feedback on Hacker News is it got a whole bunch of publicity. It was 55,000 unique visitors, but the downside is that there isn’t anything I can point people to and say – this publication wrote about it. There isn’t an article that I can point to.

Dan Hodgins:

So you get all those eyeballs, but you feel as though you haven’t really effectively harnessed them.

Nathan Barry:

Going backwards I can’t say I was written about in Mashable, or the Wall Street Journal. There isn’t that ‘plaque’ that I can point to for credibility, but it was still a really cool experience to post the app on Hacker News and generate that much traffic, and I got emails from a lot of people.

Dan Hodgins:

How many emails did you get?

Nathan Barry:

I got about 50 emails from the Hacker News posting. 3 of them were requests for interviews or to take jobs at different startups, 10 of them were offers to port OneVoice to Android, and probably 5 or 10 more were from people who wanted to become a designer or I want to become a developer, and how do I go about that. And, a few more were just kudos.

Dan Hodgins:

Are there any areas in terms of apps, maybe some ideas that you don’t have time to get to, or some promising areas that you see? Maybe you could just give readers some ideas about that.

Nathan Barry:
So like what direction?

Dan Hodgins:

Well, potentially Iphone apps, Ipad apps, specific industries that have some unsolved problems. I read on Hacker News oftentimes that there’s a lot of creative firepower and talent out there that just doesn’t have the right problem to work on. That’s part of what I like to do, to uncover those unsolved problems that are out there that are worth creating solutions for.

Nathan Barry:

I would say there’s still a lot of unsolved problems in the special needs/autism area around learning and storyboard applications.

The direction that I really like with mobile apps in particular is because they change the interaction paradigm from sitting at a computer, typing at a keyboard, and you can only interact with it in a certain way. But if you take OneVoice for example, it’s on an Ipad or Iphone, and you’re out in the world, and the device is actually communicating for you. And that’s something that computers on the desktop aren’t normally used for. The other application that I’m working on, Fluid, is all about learning and memorization, and then commit is all about changing behaviour….

Dan Hodgins:

That’s the one in the review process right now?

Nathan Barry:

Yeah. I wrote a blog post this morning about doing something every day, making little bits of progress every single day, and commit is based all around that ideas. So whenever you can use the Iphone, Ipad or a mobile device to change those interactions and become used in those everyday situations I think that’s really cool.

Dan Hodgins:

I remember from reading your blog post that you had mentioned that the existing machines were $7,000, super clunky, hard to use, and I don’t know how big these machines are, but it sounds to me that they’re just total beasts. So, if you can capitalize on the ability of an Ipad or Iphone to basically be in your pocket with you, on the go,  on the fly, that is a benefit that technology can provide that wouldn’t be available any other way at all. Your sister in law, I believe you said is a speech pathologist?

Nathan Barry:
She’s in the special needs area. She’s not actually a speech pathologist.

Dan Hodgins:
Thanks for clarifying. The point is that she has the insider information, knowledge and ideas to be able to point you in that direction. For all the talented developers out there who might not have a contact with insider knowledge of an industry or area like that, do you have any suggestions for them about how they could maybe team up with somebody that’s in an area like this?

Nathan Barry:

It’s hard to team up with people just randomly. It’s gotta be someone you know. Or, the other option is you build the software for yourself. That’s the hard thing about building OneVoice – I didn’t build it for me, and so I’m not going to use it, and so I really have to go out of my way to test it, and to learn to make it better. You can build software for yourself, that’s the ideal scenario.

Dan Hodgins:

One thing I notice on Hacker News quite a bit is “I built it to scratch my own itch”, and it ends up being some obscure technology that only some subset of developers might want, and even then they might not pay for it, and so it’s kind of a tricky thing.

I find your story to be quite inspiring. Just the fact that you come from a design background, and you believed in this idea enough to bring it to life, and really dedicate yourself to that. It’s a great story, and I’m looking forward to monitoring your progress, as you move along with the other apps – Commit, Fluent. and to see how that all goes for you.

Nathan:

Thanks – it will be interesting to see how it goes. I’m hoping Commit will have a decent launch with new year’s resolutions and all that coming up.

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Insight List From Nathan Barry Interview – Desinger of OneVoice

Sales Statistics
* Had 4 sales on the first day in the App Store

* Has now generated over $19,000 in revenue from OneVoice – at $199/copy minus $28 royalty for speech processing engine and 30 % app store cut = $111.30 in revenue per copy sold in the App store. If these assumptions are true, OneVoice has sold 170 copies in the App store.

Process
* Prototyping process: started sketching on paper, and mapped out possible screen layouts and interaction flows.

Customer Acquisition
* Gave free promo codes and free copies to early adopter speech pathologists in exchange for feedback and online written review
* Targeted customers who could also act as distributors (selling the app to their patients)
* Got on the recently added list in the app store, and got a small yet brief traffic spike
* OneVoice has been reviewed in quite a few special needs blogs – around 15 or 20

Pitching
* Contacted Speech language pathologists (either by email or by phone) who he thought were already using the Ipad about trying out the app for free (avoid educating non Ipad pathologists)
* It was an easy sell. Find the easy sell.

Templates
* The pitch: “Here’s a promo code to install the app for free, will you give me feedback and write a review”?

Outsourcing
* Used high quality language library that costs a bargain price of $28 per copy sold. A bargain for outsourcing that whole technology problem.

Design & Usability
* According to grad students and professors who he showed the app prototypes to, simplicity and usability is the most important thing in devices for any disability.

Marketing > Pricing
* Was encouraged by grad students and professors to price highly ($199)
* Competitor apps were several hundred, and the competitor devices were many thousand.  Nathan’s solution could be priced highly at $199 and still be orders of magnitude cheaper.
* I always wondered if I were to drop the price how many more customers I would pick up. I don’t think I would get double the customers or anything like that.
* If I did get double the customers I would need to provide double the support  resources

Marketing > Testimonials
* Going backwards I can’t say I was written about in Mashable, or the Wall Street Journal. There isn’t that ‘plaque’ that I can point to for credibility

Interaction Design
* Mobile devices and applications change the interaction paradigm, and make possible entirely new interactions using the devices, and business models for apps that enable these interactions.