TechZing

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Justin and Jason speak with Rob Walling, founder of the Micropreneur Academy, author of Start Small, Stay Small and co-host of the podcast Startups for the Rest of Us, about how to dramatically increase your odds of success when bootstrapping a microISV. Some of the topics discussed include the love of making things and the drive to create, how to pick a product niche and why not to create a horizontal offering, why the freemium model doesn’t work for bootstrapping startups and whether Justin should discontinue free accounts for Pluggio, the difficulty of competing against venture backed startups, how to create a landing page and build an email list, possible marketing and pricing strategies for AppIgnite, Google’s SEO guidelines, why software as a service is a better business than software as a product, how to buy websites and build a portfolio of web investments, outliers and why it’s better not to try to emulate them, the time, effort and talent required to create a personal platform (ala 37 signals and Joel Spolsky) and why email lists are so valuable.

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Justin and Jason discuss possible referral models for Pluggio, Sebastien’s progress on the Swarm AI, using WebWorkers (the HTML5 spec for multi-threading) vs setTimeout or setInterval, Jason’s ideas for his machine learning library and business intelligence platform QuantFire, the benefits of collaborating on projects with friends, the status of AppIgnite, developing locally vs using a development server, ambient thinking, growing your willpower and managing your time, how not to lose your enthusiasm for a project, what can’t be stolen from you and why clones seem to almost always fail, the new iPad news app Flipbook, launching an app per week using AppIgnite, AppInventor as the VB for Android and a comparison between the Android and iPhone developer ecosystems.

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Justin and Jason discuss Justin’s new podcasting setup, the current status of Pluggio and Justin’s overhaul of the Pluggio session management system, the need to scratch your creative itches, going on an intellectual sabbatical, why claiming to give more than a 100% effort is stupid, using mock objects for Ajax calls, eliminating coding mistakes via code generation, the importance of maintaining momentum on side projects, wrestling with SQLLite in Titanium, Justin’s frustration with TextMate, how Jason talked Guyon into working on AppIgnite, the basic concept of MashAPI, whether you can get vertigo by staring too long at a monitor, how Guyon is getting a sit/stand desk at work, BackMate – a mobile app for automatically adjusting a sit/stand desk, Jason’s vector-based Javascript graphics library, Jason’s cross-platform messaging library, web workers in HTML5, the net worth of past presidents, Inverted Totalitarianism, JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters, AntiWar.com, Scott Horton’s interview of Max Keiser, how iPads are selling at 200K per week, Jason’s methodology (or lack thereof) for naming podcast episodes, the power of exponential growth and why you want your numbers to get big earlier, why the No Agenda podcast is like a religion, hosting hackathons as a means of finding top-notch developers, why Justin codes better when he’s drunk, some stories about the Koz, Prolog to the rescue, Google’s new Prediction API, Jason’s idea for web-based business intelligence startup, how the government’s black budget programs are the equivalent to dark matter in the universe, the sudden disappearance of _Why the Lucky Stiff and why visual logic builders have never caught on.

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Justin and Jason discuss the re-branding of Tweetminer as Pluggio, how Justin learns from the show’s guests, the effectiveness of communicating with your users via email, whether or not Justin should raise funding for Pluggio, Jason’s secret project – AppIgnite, the mother of all demos, how Hacker News almost blew a gasket over the iPhone SDK 4.0 TOS, Strategy Letter V – commoditizing your complements, Justin’s new game – Swarm, and Jason’s idea for a massively multi-player, browser-based AI strategy game.