Two Days, and Not One New Industry
Monday's post was the whole making of one app, start to finish. Since then: fourteen operating systems, thirty-four apps. Exactly what it was on Monday. Nothing new got added to the fleet, and I'm not going to dress that up.
This was the second kind. Here's the honest accounting of it.
We started making our own commercials
Twenty-one years in media and operations means I have bought, placed, and measured a great deal of advertising for other people. Newspapers, national media groups, senior living. I know what a media buy costs and I know what a production house charges to make the thing you're buying space for.
So we make ours here. Every operating system in the store is getting a commercial and a long walkthrough — not a hype reel, an actual tour of the software doing the job. The first long walkthrough shipped for the theater system. Seven more verticals are queued behind it. The photo-and-video system got the full treatment: a straight comparison against what else is on the market, and a sixty-second cut.
And the beats are mine
Stock library music sounds like stock library music. You have heard the same four beds under a thousand ads and your ear knows it, even if you couldn't name why the ad felt cheap.
So I make the beats myself. Three volumes of them now, all original, and they run under our commercials and our walkthroughs.
They aren’t locked up, either. I made them, and anybody who wants to try one is welcome to it — put it under your own video, your own spot, whatever you’re making. Music sitting in a folder where nobody hears it is a waste of having made it.
Two tools got put where people can find them
AE Wire records your meeting and turns it into notes where every action item is one tap from the moment it was actually said. It runs on your device — nothing gets uploaded anywhere. And it is not a business-only tool: it is for anybody with a meeting, a class, an interview, a long phone call they want to remember properly. It is free right now.
It had been sitting in the catalog for weeks — real, finished, openable — but no shelf in the store actually named it, so it kept landing in the catch-all where nobody looks. That is not a small bug. A product nobody can find is a product that doesn’t exist. It has its own shelf now, and you can open it.
AE Blastpack — make the video once, have it land everywhere you post — now has its card in the store too. Straight about this one: the card is up, the app is still finishing. It says so on the card. I'd rather you see it coming than find a locked door.
One rename, because I was being clever
There was a product here called Revolver OS. All it does is remember what albums you own. Calling that an operating system was me enjoying my own naming convention at the customer's expense — somebody shopping for a way to catalog their records is not shopping for an OS. It's AE Revolver now. Consumer app, named like one. Same app, same address, nothing lost but a word I liked too much.
One number corrected
The store and this blog disagreed about how many apps exist. Not by a lot, but they disagreed, and a company that publishes two different counts of its own catalog has a credibility problem whichever number is right.
So it got recounted off the live store rather than off anybody's memory: thirty-four apps in the catalog, thirty of which you can open right this second. The other four are still being finished. Both numbers are on the front page now. The bigger one is the honest headline and the smaller one is the honest promise, and there was no version of this where I published only the flattering half.
What’s new, and what’s next
A curriculum system for teachers and homeschool families is in production. And AE Fraud Division is brand new — a fraud tool for banks — going into the store now. That one is a different animal from everything else on these shelves, and it has earned its own post rather than a line at the bottom of somebody else’s. That post is coming.
That's the two days. No new industries, one product findable that wasn't, one name fixed, one number told straight, and a company that now scores its own ads. Next week may look different. This is the log, not the highlight reel.