Quality Above All

Last year, I started wearing an Oura ring. It data-fies everything going on with your body — how well you’re sleeping, whether you’ve recovered from your last workout, if you’re about to get sick, the triggers for stress.?

To see my physical existence quantified so concretely… it’s surreal. This data empowers you to make healthier decisions, or to be conscious of the tradeoffs you’re making. Take an extra rest day, for example, so you don’t burn out.?

I’m captivated by this proposition, the optimization of self.?

But it also begs the question: optimize for what??

Optimizing my bodily metrics doesn’t answer the most important questions. What am I here for? Am I living a life that is worth living? Am I being true to myself?

I’m wary of searching for these answers in a world predicated on the idea that more is better.?

We want more clients so we can work more and make more money. We want more hours in the day. More features, more users. More form fills so we can send out more emails. More likes on LinkedIn or wherever. More newsletter subscribers.?

We want to read more books than we did last year. We wish we had more friends. We want to be more beautiful.?

More can be such a mirage.?

Because the pursuit of more centers the mission in the metrics, rather than the goal that metrics intend to describe. “More” too easily replaces “Better.”?

Our work must be rooted in the world of Better

An app starts as an idea, then, if it’s lucky, it evolves into a business. You’re probably aware of all that entails. All those metrics to account for.?

This goes well as long as the idea — the Thing Worth Doing (TWD) — stays in the driver’s seat. That means the TWD gets proper attention, care, and priority. There can be no shortcuts when it comes to the TWD.??

Too often, the TWD becomes subservient to the metrics. To the deadlines and the funding rounds and the cost. As soon as the metrics and the pursuit of more dethrones the TWD as the soul of the business, the app begins to fade.

The world we live in relies on a slew of unsung heroes who live and die by doing things right and making things better, even if no one else will ever see their work. It could be building a house. Fixing a car. Designing a product.?

These maniacal, hell-bent heroes understand that the gap between “bad” and “passable” is razor-thin. But the gulf between “passable” and “great” is ocean-wide. Without them, corners get cut until the entire enterprise hangs in tatters.?

For them, anything less than the best is repellant. Abhorrent. They simply can’t stand it.?

If you’re a founder, you’ll make it by being such a person. The way isn’t always easy, or sexy, or fast. It will cost more than you think. But it will give you more than you can imagine, and what you build will stand the test of time. It will have been worth doing.

Vet Development Partners for Quality Assurance

Your app’s fate will be determined by its most invisible components. High-quality code allows your app to scale and evolve smoothly, without breaking.?

Quality happens by checkpoints throughout the product’s creation. In development, the team performing those checks is known as the Quality Assurance (QA) team. They work alongside developers to keep their work on track to the outcome necessitated by the user’s vision.?

As you shop for partners, ask about QA.

Agencies should have a dedicated QA team.

Many agencies don’t. They rely on incomplete automated testing or allow devs to perform their own QA.?

QA should be involved throughout the entire build.?

This is non-negotiable. If QA only comes in at the end, it will be more difficult, time-consuming, and expensive to root out defects.?

QA and development should be on good terms.

Devs should love QA, because QA saves them time and trouble. Dev-QA friction may indicate that QA is treated as a box-checking measure.?

Read more about why you need QA, how it works, why low-quality code kills, and why your product should never suffer defects approaching launch.

• Check out my first piece in Forbes where I talk about the problem of traceability in AI and why the New York Times’ lawsuit against OpenAI will solve nothing.?
• I had a blast talking with Ken Coyne on the OpsTalent podcast, where I talked about the future internet we should want our children to inherit and why I don’t think Web3 is dead.?
• On the WLCM blog, I make the case for radical simplicity in app design. My hot take is that if your app does eight things, you should be making eight apps!
• A lawsuit could help app entrepreneurs get around the App Store’s 30% cut for in-app purchases and subscriptions. I summed this up on LinkedIn.

Melanie Wolff and Darien Williams, founders of the Brella app, are truly innovating a crucial part of our lives: childcare. The Brella app boasts features like by-the-hour, drop-in bookings that allow childcare to fit their users’ real lives. Darien, an architect, designs Brella’s gorgeous, state-of-the-art spaces.?

We at WLCM are proud to have built this app, but we’re even more proud to champion two moms who saw a problem, built a solution, and garnered great success.

Are you a female founder in need of development work? Whether you’re building or launching, scaling or fixing, WLCM’s in your corner. Tell me more about your project here.

OpenAI’s GPT Store has opened and we’re off to the races. We are ready to build AI-powered apps and custom GPTs, whether for implementation in new products or existing ones.?

With all the fervor around AI, it’s easy to forget that the user comes first. We have the expertise and strategic knowledge to apply AI in targeted ways that make apps insanely usable and — just as importantly — reliable. See why we’re the premier technical partner to help bring your AI app to market.?

If you’ve got a project in mind, tell us about it here.

About WLCM App Studio

WLCM (pronounced “Welcome”) is a tight-knit, long-standing team of 25 veteran specialists – designers, project managers, QA specialists, and engineers – who have launched over 150 apps together for clients across industries, many award-winning and nationally recognized.