Where's the Ad-hoc?

It was my partner who knew early on that we were being conned. I'd convinced her that making an iPhone app first and then working our way back to a good old fashioned ABC book was the way to go. She'd already discovered the magic of the iPhone, as she was one of the first people to jump into the"icraze." This group doesn't discriminate by age, gender, or socioeconomic stature. Anyone can become a member, as long as you own an iphone. And chances are, if you own an iphone you are going to want an iPhone4, and if you own an iPhone 4, you are going to want an iPad... And that is why if you give a Moose a Muffin....

Back to being conned, we'd discussed how our alphabet was going to be transformed into a state of the art technological breakthrough for teaching children their letters and corresponding letter sounds. We'd set up a corporation, applied for a trademark for our logo, copyrights for art work, and sent a large deposit to get things started. Whoops! We were told our app would hit the app store mid November. Believe it or not in the fall of 2009 there were not many alphabet apps out there, we felt that we had little competition with our teacher developed, research based, wonderfully illustrated, educationally sound, iPhone app concept.

This is when Malcolm Gladwell's teachings come to mind. In Blink, The Power of Thinking Without Thinking.
My partner, although never meeting the slick, young entrepreneur in person knew something wasn't right and she knew it right from the get-go......

Lesson 1. Trust your gut!

It took me months before I could even admit that it was possible that we were being scammed, and then one day our domain name was inhabited by an intruder! And we were still not even close to an ad-hoc! "Ad-hoc is the method given to developers to test their app or to get client approvals and such," according to Lawrence H. Leach of Technical Ramblings.

That was the END of that business relationship... and the beginning of the transition from trusting school teachers to savvy business women. We chalked it up to an invaluable lesson learned early on!

Up next: From Educating and Entertaining Simultaneously to Apps that Delight and Develop www.i-itch.com.