How can I implement analytics on a hardware product that runs offline most of time?

Your skills would be most useful if you were starting your own startup and needed to make an early prototype to show to investors or potential cofounder developers. Your experience in debugging, testing, and agile, could help you get a job as a product manager, and the fact that you have a background in some sort of 'coding' will help too. It's very unlikely that it would help you get an actual dev job though, since you wouldn't be able to translate your programs into actual code that could be taken over/continued by other devs. Even if the programs you mentioned do allow you to export as code, it's unlikely that it would be exported in a way that's very usable by other devs.

Here are some options: ___Free Options___ 1) Make apps without needing to spend a lot of time learning to code. Look into "MIT App Inventor" (http://appinventor.mit.edu/explore/). It's a very _easy_ way to make pretty complex apps using drag and drop coding. You can find youtube tutorials that will show you how to make your first app within 5 minutes. I've used MIT App Inventor to make prototype apps for many of my ideas, saving me tens of thousands of dollars if I paid a dev to do it instead. Learn to do "real" coding yourself. The main investment will be your time. There are plenty of free resources for learning coding on the web. I'd suggest learning "React Native", it's a relatively new way to code apps, which allows you to make one app that will run on both Android and iOS. 2) Find a software engineer cofounder. Go to Meetups, conferences, local hackerspaces / makerspaces. Hang out on relevant online forums (e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/ make sure to read their rules for posting before posting though). It won't be easy to find a tech cofounder, your idea will need to be amazing, and you yourself will need to be very passionate and capable in order to convince someone to partner up with you for sweat equity. ___Paid options___ 1) Use developers with less established reputations / portfolios (lower cost, higher risk) Be very wary of freelancers on sites like Upwork, Fiverr, etc. Here are some basic hiring rules: In your hiring script, make sure to ask for all applicants to give their account name for github/bitbucket and Trello. Don't hire agencies, only hire individuals. To get hired, ask them to do a simple task via Trello and submit the code via github/bitbucket. This task should only take them maybe 1 hour. Check the quality of what the applicants and if they deliver it in a timely manner. Keep the 1 or 2 people that do a good job. If you don't do this vetting these "low cost" developers may end up costing a lot in the longer run. 2) Use developers with more established reputations / portfolios (higher cost, lower risk) With this option your app will probably cost > $20k to develop, but it can be worth it if you have a single idea that you know you want to move forward with. I can introduce you to a very high quality developer in NY if you're at this stage. Let me know if you'd like any additional help more tailored to your specific app ideas, best, Lee

You should try to engage people using social networks, it is easier to spread than email. The conversion rate on emails are low but is still a valid tool for that. Send and email with a simple and objective message that will make people want to try. The best way to have feedback from users is to watch them use the app. You should put them on the hands of everybody that you can and without any instrucions and just watch, don´t even say that the app is yours. Try to do it a lot. If you want feedback from others, you can include the feedback form inside the app and suggest users to answer occasionally. I would also strongly recommend to use a tool as Flurry Analytics. Is the best way to get data from how is the use of the application. Pay attention to those data and be open to change your app a lot, you may need more features or cut some off to make it easier to use. If you need more help please contact me.

The best way to build an MVP for any SaaS product is to create a landing page that looks like a real product. Here's an example of one I built. http://www.happiily.com In this case, it advertises the primary features of the product and invites people to sign-up. When they do, they are asked for information which qualifies the person and then sends me an email. I built this quickly and very inexpensively and started getting inbound leads from it shortly thereafter. I got on the phone with each person who signed-up and explained the features I wanted to build and was able to do a lot of customer learning based on that. Happy to talk to you in a call if you'd like to talk more about customer development with SaaS products.

Being a freelance developer for the last 10 years or so, I have seen and used almost every project management software you can think of, open-source and closed, and I have found that the "best bug tracking tool" completely depends on your process. I employ and direct teams in an Agile process that involves loose story-based requirements with point-based estimates, two-week cycles of iterative development, planning and retrospective sessions, and look-ahead and show-and-tell meetings with the stakeholders. It's important to me, then, that my tools have a method of capturing all those pieces with as much detail as I need but no more. On projects, I've successfully used Pivotal Tracker, Unfuddle, Redmine, Codebase HQ, Basecamp, Trello, and many others. I usually recommend people to Trello for light, agile management; it's essentially a digitized version of sticky notes and swim lanes. If your team actually needs a full-featured ticketing system, see Redmine (Rails), Trac (Python), or Mantis (PHP), depending on your language preference. Hosting a version of these yourself is fairly trivial, and numerous options exist for cheap or free hosted versions. For something in the middle, Github Issues is a good fit and the open-source clone GitLab.org replicates most of those features nicely. However, if you're looking for a hosted version, you're probably looking to offload that tricky "backup" thingy, and in that case, how important is your data? How proprietary? What's your business model? If you're working on an open-source project, Github will give your team a free account with private repos, issues, wikis, and the like. If you're okay with your project being "readable by all", public projects on Pivotal are still free. I'm mostly a consultant these days, leading small groups of junior or intermediate developers into a more productive, more mature, fully operational teams of senior software developers. One of the first things I teach folks is how to use a project management system... and why! It'll save your bacon if it's simple, effective, and reliable. With a few minutes of discussion about your project, I can probably help you select the right tool and service for your team. Let me know if I can help with that. Best of luck!