Last week I did a whole bunch of iOS programming for CantoRead. The added the ability to group flash cards by the image they came from. It was quite a simple feature, but it took me ages to develop. I submitted it to Apple for certification last Friday and it was approved the same day. Nice. What’s the plan for this week?
Content Marketing
CantoRead has been available on the App Store for just over 18 days and has been downloaded 10 times. That’s not great! In the past I’ve used Facebook or Google ads to get users after launching my apps. This time however, I think the app is a bit too basic to pay for users. Instead I want to try out content marketing. Writing these blog posts is a form of content marketing, however I also want to try producing videos. The idea is to create videos that introduce a cantonese phrase, and explain the etymology behind that phrase. This sounds like a lot of work, and I don’t particularly want to do it. I’m going to hire out all the work. Here’s how I plan to do it:
- Hire writers to find interesting Cantonese phrases, research their origins and write a script for a one minute video about them.
- Hire a narrator to read the scripts
- Hire a videographer to create the videos
- Hire someone to post these videos to TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook
That’s actually quite a lot of hiring! I’ve hired four people to write the scripts. Let’s see how those scripts turn out. I am hoping to do none of the actual work, let’s see if that is possible. If all goes according to plan this will be me.
Here are some of the words that we are going to produce scripts around:
1. 盞鬼
2. 半斤八兩
3. 偷雞唔到蝕渣米
4. 一舊飯
5. 食檸檬
6. 濕水炮仗
7. 金魚佬
8. 生舊叉燒好過生你
9. 燉冬菇
10. 炒魷魚
11. 笑死
12. 講呢啲
13. 仆直
14. 世一
15. 知我咩
16. 躺平
17. 佛系
18. 黑人問號
19. 圍爐取暖
20. 壞咗嘅人
UI Redesign
Earlier I talked about not wanting to buy ads to attract users because I reckon the app looks bad. I’ve hired a UI designer on Upwork to redesign the application so that it looks a lot better. When I place job ads on Upwork, I typically include screening questions to make sure the people applying actually read the job post. The screening questions I put up are really easy to answer. Here’s the job post along with the screening questions.
To know the answers to the first three questions you need to read the first two sentences of the post. The fourth question is a bit tricky, you need to open the Google Drive folder and count the six images in that folder. It doesn’t matter how simple the questions I set, people still get them wrong. Here’s an example of someone who getting the questions wrong.
He actually got all four questions wrong. I think he might have mixed up my job post with someone else’s. His attention to detail isn’t good, so I don’t want to work with him.
Hiking
After that exhausting morning of posting job ads on Upwork, I decided to go for a hike. I walked from Quarry Bay towards To Tei Wan.
