Is there a way to have users Tweet from a stand alone Iphone app? (not Twitter app) Is there a Twitter API that makes this possible?

Hi there! Best of luck as you complete your college degree. From experience I will try to give you some insight into the world of startups and mobile apps. First some things to consider: 1. You live in a world of social klout 2.Apps must (specially iOS) must be very well developed, otherwise the users themselves will filter you out. 3. Apps must be relevant if you want to succeed. You've have probably seen this, a lot of paid apps go for free for a while when their sales begin to stall or never actually make any pay back to the developers. Free is an easy way to get users and thus paid advertisements or in app purchases (if they are good enough to keep) Assuming you will have all 3... Let's move on to your question: Most investors won't entertain an idea alone, specially if you haven't any prior successful experience in running a startup or app development company. Some do however, consider depending on your social klout, learn about growth hacking and consider growing your social relevance before the completion of the app. As mention by Ryan Holiday, a blogger not too long ago got investment for a book from a simple screenshot of his followers' requests for the same topic... he decided to write a book and through his community market it. This was a no brainer for the publisher investor. With that said, an often unspoken rule of networking is that you don't ask for favors in your first intro. You don't do that in your personal life, you shouldn't do that in your professional. Make friends in the right place, build relationships with a backbone in honesty, mentorship and through time as they see you work and guide you they themselves begin to entertain the idea... In the future, when you ask, your chances are much better that way. Get yourself a team, find a developer to mentor you and help you improve as you learn. Most new entrepreneurs think that their product at launch is their "final-good enough for a while- product" and is not! Complete opposite, you must realize that your initial launch is nothing more than the 1st iteration of the many to come if you want your community of users to stick with you and share their experiences with others as you help them and improve their lives by listening to their suggestions and issues with your app. If you have a developer this will become easier in the long run as well as tell an investor that you are capable of being a leader, even if is of 1. Best of luck, give me a call if you wish to talk a bit more :)

Having gone through this multiple times either in new startups or for side projects, here is how I would approach turning your idea into an app. 1. Defining the Minimum Viable Product Your first goal with any new idea should be about proving the idea and finding a market that wants the app you want to build. Achieving that quickly is probably one of the most important thing. To achieve that, you will need to write the specifications that will constitute your MVP. The MVP is basically the simplest expression of your idea to prove it. This step should not cost you much as you can do this on your own. 2. Design the app Before starting any development work, I would suggest you work with a good UX/UI designer to create wireframes and mockups of the app based on the specifications you came up with in step 1. You can find good designers in meetups & hackathons or on website like Dribbble or 99designs. If you want to reduce your costs, you can give shares in the project to the designer. Otherwise, it really depend on the size of the MVP but I would say it will probably cost between $5K-$10K. 3. Develop the app Once you have the specifications and the design of the app, you now need to find a good developer that will build it. Again, you can find good developers in meetups & hackathons or on sites like Github. If you want to reduce your costs, you can give shares in the project to the developer. Otherwise, it really depend on the size of the MVP but I would say it will probably cost between $10K-$25K. For this part however, I would recommend the developer becomes part of the project as his engagement will most likely be higher. 4. Test the app This step is not only about making sure the app is bug free, it's also making sure the app does what was intended in the specifications. To test the app, you can use platforms like BrowserStack or SauceLabs which gives you access to multiple devices/browsers. You can do this step on your own so the cost will be for the subscription to the test platform which would be around $100/month. Hope this helps and good luck with your project.

This is a little hard to answer because it is so vague. It depends on the area, the market and the strength of innovation. I know that The App Guy has a terrific podcast at http://www.theappguy.co/ and is also trying to organize a community for App developers to sell their ideas. Let me know if I can be of further assistance to discuss patentability in terms of its value to getting a sale or license. What ever you do, don't spend money filing a full patent, just a provisional. Good luck.

It can certainly be tough to build up a substantial follower base, starting from nothing or very little, especially if you haven't launched your product yet. But here are a few tactics to help you get in front of more people pre-launch: 1) Start sharing tons of useful content. Before you bother sending people to your Twitter feed or Facebook page, you want to make sure they'll find something valuable once they get there. If you have the time, create original content that ties into your industry, your product, or your company in some way (without directly promoting yourself, though). If you don't have the bandwidth to create your own content, find other articles from bloggers you admire or experts in your industry, and share their content. Just make sure you're putting out information that's highly relevant and valuable to the audience you're trying to attract so you can engage them once they find you. 2) Create conversation. The people who aren't following you yet aren't seeing your tweets, so how do you show them value and get them to discover you? Start a conversation! At Change Collective, we're rolling out our first course on Becoming an Early Riser. So I'll do a Twitter search for "need to wake up earlier" and find a bunch of people who are tweeting about the exact problem we're setting out to solve. By favoriting their tweets or replying with -- "That's great! We think we can help - check out our newest course & let us know what you think!" -- I'm getting our product on their radar and simultaneously providing value to them. 3) Ask for help. Start with your fellow team members, and ask them to share the company's Facebook posts or retweet some of your tweets. You can even create lazy tweets for them to share. What about your board members? Advisors? VCs? They all have a stake in helping your company grow awareness and adoption, so find an easy and appropriate way for them to help by leveraging their networks. And if you have friends and family who are excited about your business and supportive of what you're doing, they probably won't mind a friendly request to help spread the news every once in a while. Hope this helps! I just joined an early-stage startup and I'm currently building up our marketing from scratch. Happy to jump on a call and offer some tips from the trenches if you'd like. Best of luck!

Designer. Specifically a UX "designer" as you say, who doesn't just draw screens, and won't draw any for weeks or months. They will not just use their knowledge but will go out and talk to users, observe how they solve the same problem today, and help create the scope of work, and design the basic functionality. If you hire a developer first, they will build stuff that may or may not be of any value. If the company survives the first few rounds of building the wrong thing, you are still spending a hell of a lot in rebuilding, re-marketing, etc. etc.