Twin Sun is honored to be recognized as a 2023 Fall Clutch Global Award winner. This award is a testament to the excellent client work we have delivered this year as recognized through the voice of our customers in their reviews on Clutch. We’re proud to be recognized as a service leader on a global scale for the Mobile App Publishing and Ruby on Rails categories. Clutch Global Awards showcases the very best in the B2B services industry worldwide.
"Thank you to Clutch for recognizing our dedication to excellent service. Most importantly, thank you to our clients who have trusted us to deliver for them for the past six years. We are proud of what we have built together and look forward to many more years of success."
Chris Wraley, President
“We are thrilled to showcase the incredible success of leading companies worldwide on our platform,” said Sonny Ganguly, Clutch CEO. “Their dedication to delivering outstanding services has not only contributed to their own success but has also empowered countless clients to thrive. We aim to highlight this year’s industry frontrunners and facilitate connections for Clutch users seeking top-notch services tailored to their specific needs.”
This award marks the third consecutive year of Clutch recognition for Twin Sun, and our first Global Award. Previously, Twin Sun has been recognized as a top developer in Nashville in 2021 and made the 2022 list of most highly recommended companies in Tennessee. Including recognition from Clutch’s sister site, The Manifest, Twin Sun has been recognized five times over the last three years as an outstanding software development and design services provider.
Based in Nashville and founded in 2017, Twin Sun set out to bring humanity to software development consulting. We understand the challenges you face when selecting a development partner. We’ve worked with teams of all sizes, from one-person startups to global corporations, and we are ready to help navigate all aspects of product design, development, and long-term support to help make your effort as successful as possible.
Clutch empowers better business decisions as the leading global marketplace of B2B service providers. More than 1 million business leaders start at Clutch each month to read in-depth client interviews and discover trusted agency partners to meet their business needs. Clutch has been honored for the past 6 consecutive years as an Inc. 5000 fastest-growing company and by the Washington Business Journal as one of the 50 fastest growing private companies in the DC metro area for 2023.
]]>That’s why we started Twin Sun. Starting a business is hard enough without having to worry about the technology behind it. We work with clients we’re excited about, because we want meaningful work for ourselves.
Twin Sun is primarily a software development services business. Traditionally, billing clients for the time we work on their apps has made up the vast majority of our revenue. But lately, more and more frequently, we find ourselves saying “we wish we were a bigger part of our clients’ businesses.”
So that’s what we’re doing. We have invested in a few clients over the years, but this past year we committed to upping the ante. As of this writing, we have four clients in active development who have accepted investment from Twin Sun.
These investment deals are all unique, and we aren’t always the right investor for every client. But we’ve decided to say yes whenever the opportunity is a good fit. Below are the major reasons we’ve been investing more.
Nothing says confidence like putting your money where your mouth is. When we offer investment, we are doing exactly that. Our clients know we believe in them and their business when we offer an equity deal.
Our investment deals typically involve some combination of discounts or development credit, decreasing the cost of our software development services. This extended budget translates into more features you can squeeze into the first few releases of your app.
Startups are often constrained by their budgets, and custom software development is not cheap. Our investment has helped several startups extend their runway. Money that may have otherwise been earmarked for building a minimal viable product (MVP) can instead go toward advertising and marketing.
Many startups overlook the sometimes difficult tasks of marketing and selling their product. We encourage our client partners to use their extended runway on new customer acquisition. After all, what good is the product if no one uses it?
We want to help our clients maintain their level of excitement for the business. In a way, investment is an important motivator for a lot of startups. You get to see that we’re big enough believers in you and your business that we’re willing to buy in.
Buying in adds something new to our relationship. We act as a point of accountability for you. Our regular check-ins throughout a project become touch points for updates on your business as well.
Accountability is important, especially in single-founder startups. Discussing your progress with an invested party helps sole founders maintain focus and achieve their goals.
When we invest in your app, we’ve made a big commitment to ourselves. In whatever form investment takes, we are giving you money to build something we all believe in. To recoup that investment, we want to do everything in our power to help you succeed.
That means we’ll make introductions to our network. When it makes sense, we’ll connect you to personal and professional contacts. These contacts offer invaluable advice, connections to potential customers, and potential introductions to additional investors.
Having run our own business since 2017, we have a list of incredible contacts that can help you with your own business. If you need a vendor for some other aspect of your business, we can likely direct you to someone or offer advice on selecting the right vendor.
We’ve also assisted with various tasks to help our client partners succeed. We’ve designed promotional materials, built marketing sites, helped with search engine optimization (SEO), and more.
Naturally, when we invest, we are hoping for a return on investment. Consider our typical services business: we exchange time for money. That means our business, like most professional services companies, has linear growth potential.
We recognized this when starting Twin Sun. It led to plenty of discussion about the type of business we wanted to be. Did we want to seek out ever-increasing revenue from services, requiring continuous growth of our team? No, not really. We’ve been down that path before in earlier jobs in our careers and knew the headaches that come with a massive professional services team.
These discussions eventually led us to ask what can we do to build a resilient and profitable business without growing a massive team. The answer is creating revenue streams that do not require the one-for-one exchange of time for money. Put in those terms, investing in clients for equity makes a lot of sense.
We succeed when you succeed. So let’s make sure that we set you up to succeed.
Are you starting that exciting new journey of entrepreneurship? Whether it’s your first business or your tenth, we’d love to talk to you about working together. Contact us to start the discussion, and we’ll find what makes sense for each of us.
]]>Dave Lane, our Chief Strategy Officer, observes in the article, “Nowadays, I feel like it’s kind of a given that [Tennessee] is a great source of talent… It is a great center for innovation.”
One of our key philosophies at Twin Sun is the importance of clear communication and creating user-friendly products. These values were born from recognizing a need in the technology space. As Chris Wraley, our president and co-founder, mentioned in the article, many aspiring entrepreneurs need guidance to navigate this sphere, and that’s where we come in.
Furthermore, we embrace the unique blend of creativity that Nashville offers. There’s an unexpected intersection between the city’s rich music scene and the tech world, a combination that we’ve found deeply enriching in building software.
We appreciate The Tennessean recognizing our work and helping share our story. We’re proud of our role in Tennessee’s growing tech scene, and we look forward to continuing to provide thoughtful, client-focused software solutions. If you’d like to read the full piece, you can find it on The Tennessean’s website.
Finally, we wanted to end with a fun fact revealed in the article. Our company’s name, a Star Wars reference, symbolizes the start of a new and exciting adventure - both for us and our future clients. To quote Caleb Hamilton, our CFO and co-founder, it represented “a new hope for us and our future clients.” The journey so far has been incredible, and we are eager to see what the future holds for Twin Sun and the thriving tech landscape of Tennessee.
Are you interested in building an app for your business? If so, we’d love to hear from you. Reach out to us to learn more about our process and how we can help you achieve your goals.
]]>While AI models are getting a lot of attention, API development will continue to be a necessary part of software for the foreseeable future. APIs can enhance the capabilities of AI models, and AI can make APIs more accessible to users. Together, APIs and AI models can enable new business models and solve problems that previously required completely custom automation solutions.
The Age of AI has begun, but that doesn’t mean the time for APIs has passed. In fact, APIs are more important than ever. APIs help us share information and capabilities. AI models can understand APIs and use them to solve problems. Together, APIs and AI models can enable new business models and solve problems that previously required completely custom automation solutions.
Most modern mobile and web applications are built on top of APIs. APIs are an essential building block of modern software development, and are the foundation of the modern internet. With APIs, developers can build applications that leverage the power of other applications and services. This lets apps share data and functionality.
For example, a mobile app might use an API to get the current weather. Your smartphone doesn’t know it’s partly cloudy: that information is coming from a weather service that has made its information available through an API.
In short, APIs are a way to share data and functionality between applications.
AI models are able to understand APIs and use them to solve problems. This is a big deal. It means that AI models can be used to solve problems that would otherwise require a human to write code. Applications that were once disconnected can now be connected through AI models. All that is required is documentation for the APIs, and a sufficiently advanced AI model with Internet access can do the rest.
This is basically how ChatGPT Plugins work: you provide API documentation to the AI model, and it infers how to interact with the API based on users’ requests. While most of the recently hyped AI applications have to do with using capabilities derived from an AI model’s training data, API integration brings new capabilities beyond what the model was trained to do.
So what do those new capabilities look like? Any service made available through an API can now be utilized by an AI model. That, in turn, means any person who interacts with an AI model can now interact with that service.
Some APIs are difficult to use. For example, the OpenStreetMaps Overpass API is a powerful tool for querying OpenStreetMaps data, but quickly becomes hard to follow. Utilizing ChatGPT, however, users have built complete queries by simply asking for the result they want.
With conversational chat bots, some data sources and services may no longer need a custom user interface to be useful to users. Instead, users can simply ask for the information they want, and the AI model can retrieve it for them. All the business owner needs to do is provide API access to the AI model. Certainly there will be opportunities to monetize direct access to APIs through AI chat bots.
AI models can quickly combine data and services from formerly disconnected systems. For example, an AI model could combine data from an issue tracking system and a time tracking system to generate detailed invoices. The AI would need access to both systems’ APIs, some basic context on the relationship of data in the systems. Then a user could simply ask for an invoice, and the AI model would generate it.
While recent AI developments are bringing new capabilities to the table, APIs will remain an essential part of the software ecosystem for years to come. APIs can enhance AI models’ capabilities, and AI models can make APIs more accessible to users. Together, APIs and AI models can enable new business models and solve problems that previously required completely custom automation solutions.
Are you interested in finding how your business can leverage AI with your existing data and services? Contact us to start a conversation about how we can help you build API-powered AI solutions.
]]>Any API (backend web service or endpoints supporting your mobile or web app) can quickly become a ChatGPT Plugin. ChatGPT Plugin development largely consists of documenting your REST API interactions, with ChatGPT itself doing the heavy lifting of natural language processing and text generation.
This means your preferred web app development company is a great candidate for building your ChatGPT Plugin. However, if you wish to make a more informed decision, this article outlines considerations for preparing to build a ChatGPT plugin and how to choose the best ChatGPT Plugin development company for your app or service.
ChatGPT is an AI-powered chatbot that can be used to interact with web services. In an earlier blog post, I discussed using ChatGPT to generate app ideas and showcased some of its capabilities through conversational examples. You can use ChatGPT to assist you with brainstorming, troubleshoot technical problems in various fields, and generate documents. ChatGPT Plugins extend those capabilities by allowing you to integrate your own web services into ChatGPT.
OpenAI is just beginning to open up access to their ChatGPT Plugin development program. (Twin Sun has access to the program, by the way!) In fact, many ChatGPT users do not yet have access to even use released ChatGPT Plugins. In the near future, though, access will become more broadly available. This means that any developer that knows a bit about web apps or API development can build a ChatGPT Plugin.
There are a few things you need to build a ChatGPT Plugin. First, you need an API you wish to integrate with ChatGPT. This can be an existing API or a new one you are building.
Second, you need a place to host a manifest file that describes your API. ChatGPT will use this manifest file to power your plugin.
Finally, you need access to the ChatGPT Plugin development program. As of this writing, the program is in alpha and only available to a select few.
As ChatGPT Plugins are new, there are not many companies that have experience building them. However, there are a few things you can look for to help you choose the best ChatGPT Plugin development company for your needs.
The first thing you should look for in a ChatGPT Plugin development company is a proven track record. While they may not have built a ChatGPT Plugin before, they should have experience building web apps and APIs. This means they should have a portfolio of apps and APIs they have built for other clients.
What is the goal of making your product’s API available through ChatGPT? What are the use cases you are hoping to enable? What are the features you want to support? These are all questions you should ask yourself before you start looking for a ChatGPT Plugin development company. And, importantly, they should be questions that your development partner asks of you.
The best ChatGPT Plugin development partner is one who understands what you are hoping to accomplish with your plugin. They should be able to help you design your plugin so that it meets those goals.
A ChatGPT Plugin should not simply expose all API endpoints you have: the definitions count against token limits (think “maximum message length”) in ChatGPT, which can have an adverse effect on the user experience. The right developer will understand this and help you focus on exposing the most impactful API endpoints for meeting your goals.
ChatGPT Plugins are simply a way to expose your web app’s APIs through ChatGPT. Therefore, your ChatGPT Plugin developer needs to understand how to build and manage APIs. If your API requires user sign-in, as most do, you will also need a developer who is familiar with OAuth 2.0 authentication. OAuth 2.0 is the only currently supported authentication method for ChatGPT Plugins.
Token limits with ChatGPT may also require you to build custom API endpoints that are optimized for ChatGPT. The more information you document about your API, the more room your Plugin takes up within ChatGPT’s per-message token limits. Token usage is important to understand, as token usage impacts the user experience. If your ChatGPT Plugin takes up too much room in a user’s message, the user will have less room to provide context to ChatGPT.
Consider each message to ChatGPT to be like a piece of paper. You can only write so much on one page. Your Plugin’s manifest file takes up room on that page. The more room your manifest file takes up, the less room the user has to write their own message.
A developer who has experience interacting with GPT-3, GPT-4, or ChatGPT will understand these limitations and work to condense your manifest file as much as possible. Fewer API endpoints exposed to ChatGPT, combined endpoints designed specifically for ChatGPT, and more concise documentation will all help improve users’ experiences with your ChatGPT Plugin.
The right ChatGPT Plugin development company will have some understanding of what things make a development effort succeed. They should have a documented process that outlines how they work with clients and what you should expect from them. While most agencies strive to be flexible and adaptable, the best development agencies are often opinionated and can discuss trade-offs to different development methodologies with you based on their experiences.
As mentioned earlier, understanding your goal for your ChatGPT plugin is an important first step. The goal frames all future decisions for your plugin, including who should help you build it. Describe your goals and requirements to each candidate company, and confirm their understanding of your goals. You only want to move forward with a company that listens to your needs and understands your goals.
Use online directories, Google, and your personal network to find potential companies. Again, as ChatGPT Plugin development is a new field, you may not find many companies that have experience building them. However, you can find web app development companies or companies that specialize in API development and integration.
Once you have a shortlist of potential companies, schedule interviews with them. During the interview, ask them about their experience building similar types of integrations. Ask them about their process for working with clients. Write down your thoughts from each interview, as you will want to refer back to your notes when making a final decision.
A company with a proven track record will have references you can contact. The company should be happy to connect you with a few clients who are willing to talk about their experience working with the company. Reach out to those references and ask them about their experience working with the company. While they may not have experiences specific to ChatGPT Plugins, they should be able to describe what it was like to collaborate on a technical project with the team.
As part of your assessment of the company, you should assess their communication and collaboration skills. Does the company do what they say they will do? Are they clear about assigning action items and providing a timeline of what to expect? The way they communicate during the interview process is a good indicator of how they will communicate with you during the project.
Finally, ask each team for a proposal for your ChatGPT Plugin development effort. Their proposals should outline your goals and requirements, the anticipated timeline, team makeup, and cost for the engagement. Compare the proposals and make your decision based on your notes from the interviews and your assessment of the company’s communication and collaboration skills.
Once you have all the information in front of you, you can make a decision. Which team feels like the best fit for you? Who seems most excited and invested in your project? Which proposal do you believe provides the most value for the cost?
ChatGPT Plugins are a new way to integrate your web app’s capabilities into ChatGPT. If you are interested in building a ChatGPT Plugin, you should choose a ChatGPT Plugin development company that has experience building APIs and web apps. Consider adding Twin Sun to your shortlist of potential ChatGPT Plugin development companies. We’d love to have a conversation with you about your project and how we can help you build a ChatGPT Plugin that meets your goals.
]]>Madden was really into skateboarding as a kid. On his sixth birthday, his parents gave him Tony Hawk Pro Skater for Nintendo 64. Madden enjoyed one song more than any other from the game’s soundtrack: Superman by Goldfinger. “I remember playing the song in the game, and it was really cool. I thought, as I got into music, my dream would be to play this song on stage,” Madden recalls.
In 2020, his dream came true. The Basement East in Nashville hosted A Live Music Tribute to Tony Hawk Pro Skater, a concert featuring local musicians covering songs from the game’s soundtrack. Madden’s friend was playing trombone in a band that was performing at the concert, who invited him to play trumpet on their cover of Superman. His decision was immediate: “Yes, absolutely.”
Madden had played trumpet for over a decade before joining a band in 2018: Soviet Shiksa. The group has a unique sound that combines elements of jazz with dark lyrics and plenty of room for brooding improvisation, which Madden jokingly calls “evil jazz.” Often, the guidance for Madden and other horn players is “do what feels right.”
Despite his long history with the trumpet, Soviet Shiksa was Madden’s first real experience playing solo parts in front of a crowd. His prior experience was a mix of marching bands, quartets, and ensembles. He credits the group’s performances to boosting his confidence. Madden has plenty to be confident about, with his incredible work on tracks such as Sinner and Wendigo.
Madden has a very active musical life and plays in several groups. Point Taken is an alternative rock group that describes themselves as “horn-spiked rock.” The group is composed of friends who have played together a lot over the years. Madden is very excited to hit the studio with Point Taken to work on some new music in the coming weeks.
There’s also Vibright, a reggae group that is pretty laid back (“as you might expect from a reggae group”). The group plays festivals around the state.
Members of these groups occasionally moonlight as a jazz band for a change of pace. They’ll call each other up for a show and go through a bunch of jazz books together to come up with a two-hour set. Madden has also done his fair share of studio work for other artists, but recently has mostly focused on music with his own groups.
Another passion of Madden’s is history education. He earned a Bachelor of Science in History from Tennessee Technological University and has worked in several history education roles.
During his time as a team lead and museum guide for The Hermitage, Madden loved having really deep history discussions not just with his coworkers, but from people who came to visit from all around the world. “I’ve always been fascinated with people who are looking in to American history from the outside,” Madden says. “It’s interesting hearing their thoughts on American history from their frame of reference.”
Madden also worked as a summer camp counselor at Benton Hall Academy during high school and college, which he describes as a challenging and very rewarding experience. He helped lead camps for middle and high school age students with special needs, giving them the same type of camp experience a neurotypical student would have.
His time with the summer camp program served as a bounce point into the Discovery Center at Murfree Spring, where he worked for five years in several leadership roles. The camp counselor role led him to join the Special Needs Council at the Discovery Center, as they helped coordinate special needs camps with the local school system. Madden enjoys teaching people new things, whether it’s history or getting kids excited about cool science experiments at the Discovery Center. He attributes all of these education experiences with helping him understand different ideas and perspectives, which he says continues to help him in his work at Twin Sun.
Madden has always appreciated technology and enjoyed working with technology, but did not seriously consider a job in software until a few years ago. While working at the Discovery Center, Madden had to wear a lot of hats. In preparation for the Tennessee STEAM Festival, he had to learn how to update a website to add event information. Later, he began doing some basic video editing for the Discovery Center.
Those experiences with technology motivated Madden to learn how to code. “I learned a bit of C# on my own, which was slow going. Then I heard about Nashville Software School’s (NSS) month-long Jumpstart course to learn some basic web development skills.” Madden has always loved creating things, so he almost immediately fell in love with software development.
“I compare software development to music,” he says. “There’s always more than one way to approach a problem, and there’s room for creativity in it. In music theory, you have all of these rules, but you can bend the rules a bit and make something really incredible out of it.” Software development is the same way.
Madden applied for the full NSS web development program after completing the Jumpstart course, and the rest is history.
In his spare time (if you can believe he has any), Madden keeps his gecko, Rhae, company. When he first got Rhae, he thought the gecko was female. Geckos don’t exhibit clear male/female traits until they’re a bit older, so initially Madden had named the gecko Rhaenys after a Game of Thrones character. About eight months later, while examining a sore on Rhae’s underbelly, Madden realized his mistake. “I guess you’re Rhae now.”
Rhae is pretty laid back—mostly sitting on his rock all day—but seems to be a fan of Madden’s music. Whenever Madden plays his ukulele, Rhae comes out to listen.
During his time so far with Twin Sun, Madden has worked on several things, but mostly Flutter development. In addition to building awesome mobile apps for our clients, Madden also had a hand in building Twin Sun’s first Atlassian app: Harvest Timer and Work Logs for Jira.
Out of everything he’s worked on so far, Madden says he most enjoys building his current project, a soon-to-be-released mobile app that he is building in Flutter. The project has a very unique design, which has given Madden the opportunity to draw plenty of custom shapes and refine his animation skills, creating a very enjoyable user experience.
I've really enjoyed working here. It's an interesting group of people that I feel like I mesh with very well.
Madden Purcell, Software Developer
Contact us to learn more about working with Madden and the rest of the Twin Sun team.
]]>Sarah’s passion for solving problems with technology led her to excel in the software development bootcamp program at Nashville Software School, where she designed applications addressing real-world problems. Her capstone project, LegalEase, is a productivity tool that helps law students organize their case briefs.
Sarah is an author, having completed her first epic fantasy novel in 2020. She also enjoys writing fan fiction. You can find her latest installment of Killmore Girls, an apocalyptic Gilmore Girls fan fiction series, on her website. When she isn’t writing, Sarah enjoys baking, knitting, reading, and video games.
“We are thrilled to welcome Sarah to our team,” said Twin Sun CTO, Jami Couch. “Her extensive experience in project management, research, and problem-solving makes her a valuable addition to our company. We look forward to the innovative solutions that Sarah will bring to our clients.”
]]>Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of improving your website to increase its visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs). SEO is a long-term marketing strategy for reaching your target audience, driving traffic to your website, and increasing brand awareness.
One alluring myth about SEO is that it’s free. While it may not cost money to optimize your website yourself or to get indexed by search engines, ranking well for search terms (keywords) your business cares about is time-consuming. This is especially true for well-established industries where you have plenty of competitors.
So, while you may not have to pay money for placement like you would with an ad campaign, you will have to invest time and effort into your SEO strategy. The time investment can cost just as much if not more than an ad campaign. However, the payoff with SEO is that you will reap the benefits of your efforts for years to come.
There are numerous aspects to SEO, which can make it difficult to know where to start. You don’t need to be an expert, but it’s valuable knowing what factors can impact how your site ranks in search results.
At the end of the day, SEO is about search engines trying to provide the best possible results for their users. Therefore, the singular best thing for your SEO campaign is to create excellent content.
Think of search queries (keywords) as questions. Search results are answers to those questions. The top-ranking content for any search query should be the best possible answer to the question. Everything else is secondary to answering your target audience’s questions with great content.
This is not to say that you should ignore the other factors that impact your SEO. But if your content is not worth reading, nothing else you do will be as impactful as building better content.
Your site’s target audience is the group of people you want to visit your website. Who do you wish to attract to your site and why? What do you want them to do? The answers to these questions will help you define your target audience.
Your geographic focus will impact your SEO strategy. Local SEO—optimizing your site for location-based keywords—is used by businesses that serve a specific geographic area. A local SEO strategy will focus on keywords that include a city, state, or zip code to ensure that your site ranks well for local search queries. For example, a Nashville-based pizza restaurant would want to rank well for “pizza in Nashville.”
National SEO targets a nation-wide audience, and international SEO targets a global audience. For businesses, applicable regulations, distribution capabilities, and customer demographics will dictate the geographic focus of their business and, in turn, their SEO strategy.
Demographics are the characteristics of a population that can be used to identify groups of people. If you are an established business or organization, you can use your existing customer data to identify your target audience. If you are a new business, you can use data from your competitors to inform your decisions on building a target audience.
You may look at characteristics such as age, location, education, industry of employment, and income to describe your target audience’s demographics. Demographics are important because they help you understand your target audience’s needs and interests. This will help you create content that is relevant to your target audience.
Similarly, understanding the language used by your target audience will help you write better content. Customer interviews, testimonials, and surveys can help you understand the language your target audience uses to describe your products and services. Regardless of how you feel about their vocabulary, you should use the language your target audience uses to describe your products and services. Perhaps you prefer thinking of your product as a “widget,” but your customers may refer to it as a “thingamajig.” Your content should refer to your product as a “thingamajig” since that’s what your customers are looking for.
The right vocabulary helps customers discover your content, but it’s not enough to convince them to buy your product or service. You must also understand your target audience’s pain points. Pain-Point SEO is a strategy that prioritizes content around the problems your target audience is trying to solve. This content may not target the highest-volume keywords your target audience is searching for. Instead, pain-point SEO targets keywords that indicate high buying intent. That is, keywords that indicate that your target audience is ready to buy your product or service.
Combining pain point marketing with your customer’s vocabulary helps you write content that deeply resonates with your target audience. That translates into better-ranking content in SERPs, more traffic to your site, and more conversions (conversions are actions your visitors take to turn them into subscribers or paying customers).
Again, writing content that answers your target audience’s questions is the most important part of your SEO strategy. But you can’t write content without knowing what questions your target audience is asking.
Analyzing your competition is a quick way to find high-volume keywords that your target audience is searching for. You can use a tool like Ahrefs to find the keywords targeted by your competitors.
There are many keyword research tools available. My personal favorites are SpyFu and SEMRush. These tools allow you to search for keywords and see how many times they are searched for each month, and how competitive they are.
You can use Google Webmaster Tools to find keywords that your site is already ranking for. If your site content already shows up for certain keywords, you can use that as a starting point for your SEO strategy. Often you’ll find keywords that you don’t rank incredibly well for but could easily rank well for by optimizing your existing content.
SEO is typically considered a long-term strategy. The traditional reason for this characterization is the claim that it takes time to rank well for keywords. While getting your site indexed and getting other sites to link to you (“building backlinks”) does take some time, most of your time investment will be in creating content. The more content you create, the more opportunities you have to rank well for keywords your target audience is searching for.
Starting out, it’s difficult to rank for meaningful keywords simply because you don’t have content targeting those keywords. That’s why most of your SEO efforts should be focused on creating high-quality content.
First and foremost, more is not better. Focus on quality content before trying to create a massive amount of content. Quantity doesn’t rank: quality does. Quantity matters more for consumer-focused sites than B2B sites, but even for consumer-focused sites, having a handful of high-ranking pages is more valuable than having hundreds of pages that rank poorly.
Different types of content can serve different purposes. You may find, for example, that some blog posts are only useful for a few months, whereas others receive a decent amount of attention for several years.
Time-sensitive content is basically news: it’s either describing a temporary event or a new development of some sort. This type of content is useful for a short period of time, and can benefit your SEO strategy if your target audience is very interested in the topic you’re covering. For example, a blog post about the latest iOS update may help our software agency capture attention from someone who is looking for a developer to update their existing app. However, a blog post about iOS 7, which was released in 2014, is unlikely to be of much use to anyone browsing the web in 2023.
There is other content, though, that may be referenced for years to come. This is often called “evergreen” content because it remains relevant for a long period of time and does not really expire. A good example is a blog post covering topics like ways an agency can help you get funding for your app idea. Such an article contains advice that will be relevant to its audience for a long time: the ways you can get funding are unlikely to significantly change.
Though, evergreen content can benefit from being updated from time to time. Continuing the funding example, such an article may reference specific funding vehicles. SAFEs (simple agreement for future equity) were introduced in 2013. An article written in 2012 wouldn’t reference it, but could be easily updated to incorporate new information while retaining other information that continues to be relevant. Reviewing your content at least annually for opportunities to update it can help you keep your content relevant and near the top of SERPs for valuable keywords.
Deciding on the type of content you wish to produce is an important step in your SEO strategy. Some SEO marketers will focus exclusively on text content, but there are other types of media that can get your site to rank well in SERPs. Images, videos, and infographics are all indexed by search engines and can rank for valuable keywords. However, those content formats require different skills to create. You may need a graphic designer or video editor to create the content you wish to produce, and should consider the time and money investment in creating that content.
Generative AI such as OpenAI’s GPT-3 can be used to create text content. However, blindly generating content and publishing it will not help your SEO strategy. Google has made it clear that AI generated content is acceptable, but—like any other content they evaluate—must be valuable to the user. So far, AI generated content is no substitute for innovative human writing. Tools like ChatGPT can be used to assist you in writing, though, or even help you produce a first draft. Just remember that people are reading your content because you have something valuable to say that they aren’t finding elsewhere. If you use AI generated content, the focus should be on enhancing your writing workflow, not replacing your thinking process or generating a final product.
Technical SEO or on-page SEO is the process of making technical adjustments to your site to improve your search engine rankings. For example, sites should publish a sitemap to help search engines crawl your site. A sitemap is a file that lists all of the pages on your site, helping search engines find every single page you believe is worth indexing and sharing in SERPs. In addition to a sitemap, your site can provide a robots.txt file and structured data to point search engines in the right direction.
There are plenty of other aspects to technical SEO: internal linking strategies, performance optimization, building for accessibility, and content structure/optimization. While links to your content from other sites are incredibly helpful to your site’s rankings in SERPs, starting solely with technical SEO can help you get your site indexed and start ranking well for keywords. As an example, our site has relied mostly on technical SEO tactics to rank well, often reaching the top 3 spots in SERPs for niche keywords.
For high-volume (popular) keywords, though, links to your site are a very important factor in ranking well. The more links you have to your site, the more likely you are to rank well for a given keyword. The descriptive text in those links is also important: if you have a link to your site with the anchor text “software agency,” that link will help your site rank better for the keyword “software agency.” Though, an overall increase in links to your site will help your site rank better for a variety of keywords as your site appears more trusted or authoritative to search engines.
Once you’ve published a sitemap for your site, you can request that Google and Bing index your site. Use Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Tools to submit your sitemap and request indexing. It may take the search engines anywhere from a few days to a few weeks to fully index your site, but you can check the status of your site’s status using their webmaster tools. Once your site is indexed, your pages will start appearing in SERPs.
Backlinks are links to your site from other sites. They are one of the most important signals search engines use to determine the authority of your site. The more backlinks you have from reputable sites, the more likely your site will be considered reputable by search engines. This in turn helps your keyword rankings.
There are “black hat” SEO tactics that can help you get backlinks, but they are often short-lived and can get your site penalized by search engines. Directories and link farms are two examples of black hat SEO tactics. It’s better to focus on meaningful backlinks from reputable sites than to try to game the system.
Guest blog posts can help you build backlinks to your site. By offering to write an article exclusive to another site, you can get a link to your site in the author bio. If you already have a collection of great content, there may be opportunities to link to several relevant pages on your site from a single article. Though, you must be mindful of the site hosting your guest post: they may have restrictions on the number of backlinks they permit on your post.
Social media, email, and other channels can help you share your content with your audience. When you share your content, there’s a chance your readers will share it with their audience. Their backlinks to your site will increase your rankings in SERPs. Even YouTube videos and podcast interviews can help you build backlinks to your site, through video descriptions and show notes where you can link back to relevant content.
Just as we measure success after the launch of an app, we can measure the success of our SEO campaign. To begin, you must define what success looks like. There are a few potential goals you may have for your SEO campaign. You may wish to replace expensive ad campaigns, increase your website traffic, or increase your conversion rate.
Analytics tools like Google Analytics can help you measure metrics that support all of those goals. You can track the number of visitors, sources of traffic, and conversation rates. Google Webmaster Tools can also help you track your site’s performance in search results, which will help you determine your effectiveness at targeting specific keywords and help you identify new keywords worth targeting.
SEO is a long-term strategy that can help you build a sustainable business. The advantages of SEO are that it is relatively low-cost and can help you build a brand that is trusted by search engines and users alike. Getting started is simple: just start writing!
]]>During her time as a veterinarian, Nora’s love of animals and lifelong learning drove her development of analytical thinking and problem solving skills. Nora will have ample opportunity to apply these skills in her work at Twin Sun, developing software solutions for their client partners.
A recent graduate of Nashville Software School, Nora learned several programming languages and frameworks, including JavaScript, React, Python, and Django. She quickly discovered that the analytical and problem solving skills she developed as a veterinarian were essential to her success as a software developer. Twin Sun anticipates that Nora’s unique background will bring fresh perspectives and creative solutions to the company.
The Twin Sun team is thrilled to welcome Nora and is looking forward to the contributions she will make to the company’s continued success.
]]>Previously we’ve discussed when fixed price contracts make sense for building your app. However, our general recommendation for most new apps is to start with an hourly contract. Hourly contracts, also known as time and materials (T&M) contracts, are a great way to build brand new apps because they provide flexibility, cost predictability, transparency, and aligned incentives.
An hourly contract is a contract that pays the development team for the time they spend working on your project. The contract will specify the hourly rate you will pay as well as the payment terms. Some hourly contracts may include a “cap” or expected maximum cost for the project, or an estimate of the total cost of the project based on what the development team knows about your app.
A fixed price contract will “lock in” the scope or requirements for your project. If you know exactly what you want to build, fixed price contracts can be a good option. However, the level of certainty you need to reap the benefits of a fixed price contract is rather high. It is unlikely that you will have this level of certainty when building an entirely new app.
So let’s look at some of the benefits of hourly contracts for building new apps, and why an hourly contract is our preferred way to start greenfield projects.
First and foremost, hourly contracts offer incredible flexibility. This is especially important when building a new app, as the requirements and scope of the project can change over time. Even with a clear idea of your goal for your app, there’s plenty that can change as you see your app come to life.
For instance, the user experience is a frequent target of change in a new app. Even if you have a fully fleshed out design to start with, you may find that the design doesn’t feel like you expect once you have the actual app in your hands. Early feedback from users may reveal that the user experience is not as intuitive as is needed by your target demographic. You may even find that features you felt were important are considered by most users to be unimportant, or vice-versa.
In a fixed price contract, these changes would be considered scope creep and would require a change request—updated requirements that increase the project’s overall price. In an hourly or T&M contract, these changes are simply part of the development process. No contractual change is needed, and the team can prioritize whatever changes you like.
Additionally, new or untested technologies introduce uncertainty into the requirements (and cost!) of an app. If your app is working with experimental or cutting-edge technology, your development team may not know exactly how long it will take to build a feature. There is no fair way to capture such work in a fixed price contract. In a fixed price scenario, the developers would either overestimate the work to avoid losing money, or underestimate the work to win the contract. If they overestimate, you lose money. If they underestimate, the development team will either (a) lose money, (b) propose a change request when they exceed their estimate, or (c) cut corners to finish the project on time.
In an hourly contract, the development team can work with you to determine the best way to approach the new technology. They can estimate the work, and if they are off, they can adjust their estimate as they go. If you decide the feature is not worth the time, you can simply stop the work without amending your contract or incurring any additional costs.
Cost predictability is a significant concern for companies who are building their first app. That’s a big reason that fixed price contracts are so popular. However, in our experience, fixed price contracts merely give the illusion of predictability. Fixed price contracts tell you what you will pay for completion of a list of requirements. What it doesn’t tell you is if the completed app is something anyone will want to use, or if you will need to invest more money to make your app successful.
That illusion of certainty is why we now recommend fixed price contracts only for efforts where we have a small, well-defined scope, and we understand the technical risks of building each feature. When we do not have incredible certainty, we prefer having a conversation with our clients to explain why we recommend an hourly contract. We would rather be upfront about project risks and the realities of building a new app than to promise something we can’t deliver.
Hourly contracts give you a more accurate picture of the cost of your project. Typically accompanied by a ballpark estimate, an hourly contract will tell you how much you will pay for the work that is actually performed. Instead of promising an exact scope of work, an hourly contract is designed to motivate all parties involved to achieve the best possible outcome for the project.
A good agency (ahem) will communicate the cost of the project as it progresses and regularly update you with a projection of the final cost to deliver an app that meets your goals.
Hourly contracts require the development team to track the time they spend on your project. This gives you transparency into the work that is being done. You can see the hours being logged, and you can see the work that is being done. If the two don’t match up in your opinion, you can ask questions about the status of the project and hold the development team accountable.
Our typical process involves weekly status updates, where we provide a detailed report of the work that has been done and the work that is planned for the next week. This includes information about completed features, time spent on the project so far, and our projection of when we will hit key milestones in the project (such as your first App Store release).
Hourly contracts also require the development team to give you an idea of how long new work will take. If you have an idea for something new that you’d like to add to your app, the development team can give you an estimate of how long it will take to build. You can then make an informed decision on whether that new feature is worth the investment. The team will offer options for how to implement the feature so you can choose the best option for your budget.
This is opposed to a fixed price contract, where the development team typically sets a price and then does whatever they must do to avoid losing money on the project. For example, if your fixed price contract includes a feature for sharing a calendar with a friend, the team may take liberties with the implementation to save time. Perhaps you envisioned a way for friends to gain administrative access to the calendar, but the development team decides to simply give them view-only permissions to save time because the project requirements did not explicitly describe what “sharing” means. In an hourly contract, the team would simply ask about your expectations and build what you like, communicating the cost difference between a bare-bones implementation and a polished implementation.
Again, fixed price contracts give the illusion of certainty, not the guarantee of certainty. In the previous example, the gray areas in a fixed price contract can lead to disappointment, unexpected costs, and frustration with the final product. An hourly contract does not share these problems, because the expectation upfront is very clear: we will learn as we go and collaborate with you to build the best product possible within your desired budget.
We describe the hourly arrangement within a T&M contract as an alignment of incentives between our agency and our client. Hourly contracts incentivize our team to continuously deliver high-quality work that meets our client’s expectations. There is nothing to lock a client in to continuing to work with us: there is no contractual obligation to continue working with us. Therefore, we must do well to keep our client happy and maintain our relationship.
Compare this to the worst-case outcome with a fixed price contract. The development team would be motivated to complete the contractual requirements as quickly as possible: doing so would allow them to move on to the next project and earn more money. They might cut corners to minimize the time spent on your project, increasing their profit margin while delivering an inferior app. Depending on the contract terms, you may be obligated to continue working with the development team until they complete the agreed scope of work even if you are unhappy with the final product. In that scenario, there’s even the possibility that the team postpones completing your work in favor of more profitable contracts, missing your desired timeline for completion. These problems are described further in our article about current problems with the app development industry.
Hourly contracts do not experience these problems, because the development team is motivated to deliver a high-quality product that meets your expectations. If you are unhappy with the work, you can simply stop working with the team. This arrangement is empowering to clients and motivates everyone to work together to build the best product possible.
In short, an hourly contract is a great arrangement for building new apps. It offers flexibility, predictability, transparency, and alignment of incentives between you and your development team. Consider using an hourly contract for your next project. If you are weighing your options, we’d be happy to speak with you.
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