Authors: Allen Wong
Nowadays, I don’t have many haters in my life, because I left them with nothing to really hate on. I was once hated for being arrogant and egotistical, but now I try to be humble and modest. I was once hated for showing off my wealth, but now I try to hide my wealth as much as possible. Instead of fighting the haters and giving them more fuel, sometimes it’s better to just take away the fuel and leave them with nothing to hate you for.
Lifehack #12: Know your enemies and know your market.
Since I was such a big target for bullies, I had to adapt to survive the school system. Knowing how to interact with different people from different backgrounds is the key to good marketing. Your social skills will translate to better sales. And they are especially important if you want to create good business connections.
I know many programmers, IT technicians, and web developers who are great at what they do. They can arguably code better than I can. But they lack the social skills necessary to create good business connections. There can be a number of reasons for this. They are sometimes condescending, and they cannot relate with the common man. They see regular people as inferior for not understanding technology, and therefore do not bother interacting with them. Sometimes it’s because they spend so much time at their computers coding that they do not spend enough time socializing with their classmates after school. Sometimes it’s because the parts of their brains that deals with logic and reasoning (important skills required for coding) have been so developed, that it causes the part of their brain that is responsible for socializing to be underdeveloped. And finally, sometimes it’s because programmers don’t have fashion sense, and/or they’re seen as not cool. Thus, their classmates shun them, and they don’t get to socialize even if they try.
When I started high school, I was a part of this group of computer geeks who didn’t socialize that much. I went to a specialized high school that required you to pass an exam to get in. Only a few people from my junior high school got in. Thus, I didn’t know that many people at the school, and everyone kept mostly to their own cliques.
The only people I socialized with regularly were the other socially awkward kids at school. I was a pretty shy kid when I was younger – possibly because I was small in stature and thus lacked confidence. And my shyness made it hard for me to make the effort to speak to others. The other kids at school also saw me as a nerd (yes, even in a school full of smart kids), and thus I wasn’t considered one of the “cool” ones.
That all changed when my best female friend in high school started going out with my best male friend in high school. I was deeply attracted to her, because she was one of the few prettier girls who bothered to speak with me, even though I was a vertically-challenged Asian nerd. And both of them knew that I was attracted to her. Needless to say, that relationship broke my 16-year-old heart, and that’s when I knew that things had to change.
By the time this all happened, I had a pretty good grade point average in my high school. Thus, I knew that I could afford to give up some of my time spent studying in exchange for time spent socializing with other people. Shifting my focus away from school and more towards socializing did lower my grades, but it was worth it. It helped me develop better communication skills later on, and allowed me to understand people more.
One of the first things I had to change was the way I presented myself. I had always been dressed by my mother, who had horrible fashion sense. She picked clothes based on how cheap they were rather than how good they looked. I ended up wearing a lot of bootleg Mickey Mouse shirts and other embarrassing pieces of clothing. But she grew up in the ghetto, so I couldn’t blame her. The worst of all the nerd accessories I had was the pair of granny glasses that I sported throughout high school. Even though I was only near-sighted, I wore big glasses that could fit bifocal lenses. I ditched those for contact lenses in my fashion transformation. I later got laser eye surgery to fix my vision permanently.
I also started buying my own clothing using the money I earned from my summer jobs. I chose clothes based on what the cool kids were wearing, but I also changed it up enough to create my own style. My hair used to be a mess as well. In an effort to save money, my mother only took me to the barber once every two months or so. I ended up sporting a small afro, because my hair was naturally spiky and I wasn’t cutting it often enough. To change this, I started going to a better barbershop and styling my hair with gel. This was my way of adapting to the very superficial and critical world of high school students.
This entire transformation happened over the summer between junior year and senior year. And the transformation was quite astonishing. People at my school no longer recognized me. Even my own cousins did not recognize me at family gatherings. The transformation was so drastic that the senior girls on my school bus, who rode with me for three years prior, had asked me who I was. I ended up dating several girls that year, even though I never had a girlfriend in the previous years.
This experience was my first lesson in marketing. In this case, it was marketing my own image. My character never changed. I was still the same person as before. The only difference was my presentation. I exuded confidence.
This was a lesson to teach me to get to know my market. I had to give them what they wanted in order for me to get what I wanted. And having just good content or a good product was not enough, because first impressions were important. When you buy a bag of dog food, do you look at the packaging or do you taste the food to see if it’s good? Most of the time, you’d buy a product based on its packaging.
On the other hand, most people get turned off by a product because of how poorly made their packaging is. If the packaging is bad, you start questioning the quality of the product inside. Thus, presentation is what a lot of the app developers need to learn.
App development tip #1: Presentation is key.
I often see many great apps in the app market that don’t do well in sales. The problem is that they lack presentation. Potential customers are already turned off by the icon, so they don’t even bother tapping on the app details to investigate the app further.
I once developed an app called “Cop Radio” to prove that presentation was important. The icon was a very vague black icon with the white/blue letters ‘C’ and ‘R’ on it. The icon looked very good, but it didn’t really tell the user what was in the app. The download rate for the app was in the hundreds per day, but nowhere as impressive as I had hoped.
Unsatisfied with the sales, I changed the icon to a bright blue color with the words “Police Scanner+” on it. I also changed the name of the app to “Police Scanner+”. The app itself did not change at all. It was still the same app underneath. Yet, the download rate was now in the thousands per day instead of the hundreds. It shot up to being one of the top 10 most downloaded news apps in the App Store in 2012, when Cop Radio barely broke the top 100.
Let my experience be a lesson that the icons and screenshots are some of the most important marketing tools you have for selling your app. And I am sure that this applies across all businesses. Although many of you probably knew that presentation was important, you probably did not know how important it was. I certainly didn’t.
I was taught from movies that personality and the content of a character was the most important in getting girls to like you. This was probably true if we were looking at a long term relationship. But, in order for someone to even notice you, you have to look approachable and decent first; then she’ll give you a chance to show off your awesome personality. And in the realm of the App Store, icons and screenshots are in the forefront of presenting your apps.
There are many cases where people buy apps based on just the icon and screenshots alone. They don’t even bother reading the reviews or description. There was a brief period of time in the App Store when there were apps being sold as “cell phone trackers”. The premise was that you would enter a person’s phone number, and the app would tell you where the phone was. In the icon, it showed an image of a radar screen like the one you would see in a submarine. In the screenshots, it showed a place to enter a phone number, and then showed a map rendering of where that phone was located. Both the icons and screenshots were very professionally made.
While that would have been a really nifty app, the actual app did not work as you would have assumed. In the description, it said something along the lines of, “This is for entertainment purposes. The app will prank your friends into thinking that it works, but it only shows your own location when you enter any number.” Nobody bothered reading the description. If they did, then they would have figured out that it did not work in the manner that they assumed. And in the reviews, there were thousands of negative reviews saying that they felt ripped off and that they should have read the description or reviews first before buying the app.
Those apps ended up in the Top 100 paid apps list for the App Store and made thousands of dollars. This may have been an extreme case, but this goes to show that presentation can be more important than the content of the product itself. And this was not an anomaly. There were other apps that had misleading screenshots and icon. For example, there was once a string of apps that made you think that you could lock and unlock your iPhone using your fingerprint. Obviously, this was impossible, because the iPhone did not have the necessary fingerprint scanning hardware on the screen. But a lot of people still bought the app anyway. The presentation was there, and they fell for it.
And if you think that this was a great way to make money, then think again. Most of these deceiving apps don’t last longer than a month in the Top 100 list of top paid apps. To stay in the Top 100, your app had to be both presentable and have great content. My “5-0 Radio” police scanner app stayed in the Top 100 paid and Top 100 free apps for over two years, because it had both the presentation and content to back it up. If the content was bad, the success of my 5-0 Radio app would not have lasted longer than a month. Instead of making the millions of dollars that it made, it would have only made a few thousands of dollars.
7 COMPUTER SCIENCE
I chose computer science (C.S.) as one of my majors, because I had already been making websites and coding C++ and Java programs in high school. I created my first website in junior high school and learned how to build my own computer even before that. As a child, I was always curious about how things worked, so I would take things apart and put them back together. That was how I learned to build my own computer, and why I also majored in computer engineering. I was one of the first people on the internet back when I was still in elementary school. And I was also one of the first people in my school to have his own website.
Because our family used to be so poor, my brother and I used to go around the neighborhood during trash day and pick up computers that people had thrown away. We would salvage parts from the computer and either use them as spare parts or add it to our existing computers. I did not even get to buy my own computer until I was in high school. To this day, I still build my own computers and try to stay on the cutting edge of technology by learning and adopting new technologies on my own.
My family’s first computer was a Commodore® 64. Even before I knew what “load” meant, I was typing commands into the Commodore 64 and running video games that my brother borrowed from his friends. To learn how to use the Commodore 64, I watched what my brother did, and it intrigued me.
Eventually my brother bought a computer with a Windows® operating system and got himself a dial-up modem. Before there was even the World Wide Web, my brother and I would attach the phone line to the computer to join what were called Bulletin Board Systems (BBS).
A Bulletin Board System is a computer system running software that allows users to connect and log in to the system using text commands. Think of it as a message board that you have to call directly from your computer to send and get messages. My brother used BBSes to download new software (such as demos for video games), chat with friends, and get updates on his friends. It was a precursor to the World Wide Web, and social networking websites.
Eventually, my brother got AOL® on his computer, because his best friend loaned him his AOL account. We were too poor to afford having an internet subscription, so we didn’t even pay for Internet access until I was a senior in high school. After my brother’s friend stopped loaning us his AOL account, I used a free internet service called NetZero®, which allowed you to go online in exchange for viewing advertisements. When I got my first email account during elementary school, I was excited to even receive one new email. I used to sign up for newsletters just so I’d get daily emails. I remember that the first thing I did after I came back from school was check to see if I got any new emails. Nowadays, I try to minimize the number of emails I get, and actually enjoy it more when I don’t get emails.
Since the computer was in my brother’s room, I usually had to sneak in there to use it. My brother didn’t like me being in his room. So every time I wanted to use the computer, I had to turn into a covert-ops agent and sneak my way into his room without anyone noticing. When I heard him coming, I quickly hid in his closet or behind the door.
This kind of taboo behavior around the computer only piqued my interest more. When I finally got my own computer in junior high school, it was like discovering Pandora’s Box. It was the old computer that my brother was using before he won a laptop from a raffle. But, it didn’t matter to me that it was old and slow. I wanted to learn everything I could about the machine, and the internet was my guide to everything.
I created my very first website in the 7
th
grade. All of the other websites looked pretty bad back then with their animated flaming gifs, Times New Roman black font and blue under-lined links. People didn’t know how to code websites back then, so they all used website templates or “What You See Is What You Get” (WYSIWYG) HTML editors. A WYSIWYG HTML editor basically hides all of the website coding and lets you create websites by simply dragging and dropping the elements you want onto the WYSIWYG editor. I wanted full control over the codes of my websites, so I learned how to code a whole website by hand without using a WYSIWYG editor. To this day, I still don’t use WYSIWYG editors much. Just using a basic text-editor was good enough for me.
High School
Throughout my school years, I had trouble taking English tests. Since my memory wasn’t that great, I had trouble memorizing vocabulary words. English was also my second language, and people only spoke Chinese in my house. Also my parents didn’t buy me any English books, and the nearest library was too far from my house. Thus, all of these disadvantages meant that I wasn’t very good at taking any English exams.
When I took the NYC high school entrance exam, which tested middle school students on Math and English, I had only been accepted to the second best high school in New York City, Bronx High School of Science. I was only one correct answer away from being accepted into Stuyvesant High School, the #1 high school in NYC. Because of my financial disadvantage and high exam score, the New York City Board of Education offered to allow me attend Stuyvesant High School if I attended a summer school. I opted out, because I did not want to be one of the dumbest students in that school.
By choosing to go to Bronx Science, I was among the top students going there. My 96% GPA was among the top student GPA’s of the school and it could have been higher if I didn’t get distracted during my senior year there. Although I did not get to be valedictorian or salutatorian, they did give me a school award that had a large college scholarship attached to it. Only one student per year won that award. For my financial background, having the extra cash to pay for college was a better award than being valedictorian.
By having less competition and challenge in high school, I had more free time to learn other things. After I had mastered HTML during my freshmen year, I moved onto learning Flash. Back then, all of the cool websites had Flash in it. It’s a bit archaic now to have Flash on your website, but it was the fad of the late 1990’s and early 2000’s. The ability to add more interactivity to your website that normal HTML and JavaScript couldn’t do was what fascinated me the most. This fascination ultimately led me to develop apps, where good interactivity was one of the main selling points.
During my junior year, my high school started offering C++ classes. It was a very basic class that taught me the fundamentals of programming. It was in that class that I found out that I had a talent for programming. I learned C++ at a much faster pace than everyone else did. While my memory skills were not excellent, my logic, critical thinking, creativity and mathematical skills made up for it. All of those were essential to learning how to program code.
I aced every exam given in that class, and I also did all of the extra credit work. I didn’t have to, but I wanted the challenge anyway. I eventually got bored with how slow the class was going, so I skipped several chapters ahead. Once I finished with the entire textbook, I decided to have some fun in the class, because there were still some months left in the semester.
Lifehack #13: Don’t boast. You can trust no one.
The computers with the Windows 95 operating system that my C++ class had were easily hacked. I played pranks on the other students by modifying their Windows splash screen to show random pictures of celebrities. I had written a batch file that would automate the entire process. All I had to do was put in the floppy disk with my hack, and run the autoexec.bat file. The whole hack took less than a few seconds. So when the class started or finished, I’d put the hack in before the students took their seats. Since the teacher had no idea how to change the splash screen back, I was able to infect several computers with my prank before they were all changed back.
The one mistake I had was that I had the stupid idea of attaching my alias to the images. I wanted credit for my work, just like how graffiti artists wrote their name on their work. Eventually, someone recognized my alias and snitched on me to the C.S. teacher.
The teacher confronted me after class was over and said, “Someone told me that you were the one behind this. I don’t care if you did or didn’t do it. Just change it back, and I will not tell the dean about this.”
Later that week, I snuck into the empty computer room during a bathroom break in another class. I changed it all back while making sure that nobody was looking. The teacher kept his promise and never told the dean about it. But I later learned that my prank did not go unpunished.
When you apply to college, you have the option to select one school for an early-decision application. This meant that you promised to attend the school if they accepted you. The idea was that if you were on the borderline of being accepted, the school would accept you if they saw that you were an early-decision applicant. Colleges don’t like their acceptance letters to be rejected, so they prefer early-decision applications.
I applied to an Ivy League school as my early-decision college choice. But, my application was marked incomplete because one of my two recommendation letters was not received by the school. When I asked around, I found out that it was my C.S. teacher’s recommendation letter that was never sent out. I only chose him to write my recommendation, because I was applying to the school as a computer science major. I had other teachers as back-up if he didn’t want to do it. But he promised that he would do it, so I trusted him.
That ultimately screwed me over, because he either forgot to do it, or he was punishing me for the prank I pulled. To this day, I still don’t know why he didn’t mail that recommendation letter in time. Either way, his letter must not have been that great, because when I reapplied as a normal applicant a month later, I was wait-listed. And for every school that didn’t require a recommendation letter, I was accepted.
Perhaps it was for the best that I didn’t end up in that Ivy League school. I saved tens of thousands of dollars in tuition by attending a public school instead of an Ivy League school. Also, by having a less challenging workload at my non-Ivy League school, I was able to do a lot of self-education on the side.
Lifehack #14: Take advantage of free education.
After my C++ class, I wanted to use my newfound skills in the real world. So I found a summer internship that was being offered to just one candidate at a tech company in Manhattan. The company focused on creating Java-based web solutions and IT consulting for different small business and corporate clients. Their biggest client was for a pharmaceutical corporation that created a famous allergy medicine. It seemed like a company that would help me get a foot in the door, so I applied for the internship.
During the interview, various employees and even the CEO of company interviewed me. The CEO said that I showed promise because of my high SAT scores and because of my perfect grade in my computer science class. But the problem he had with me was that I only knew how to code in C++ when the job requirement was for Java, a similar, but different programming language. So he told me to reapply when I knew how to code in Java.
I took him up on the offer and quickly went to the library after the interview was over. At the library, I borrowed a book that taught the basics of Java. I started reading it as though I had an exam on the matter the next day. After reading the book for many hours straight, I decided that I knew enough about Java to reapply for the job. So I called up the CEO of the company the next day and told him that I learned Java and would like a second chance at the internship. He was curious, so he granted me that second chance.
During the second interview, they asked me a few basic questions about Java, and I knew the answers. However, as the interview went on, the questions got more advanced, and I didn’t know the answers. I tried to answer them in the best way that I could, but they weren’t the right answers.
After the interview was over, the CEO said, “You didn’t answer all of the interview questions correctly. Next time, just say that you don’t know the answer instead of giving a bad answer. It’s okay to not know the answers sometimes. What intrigued me the most about you was that I told you to come back when you knew Java, and you actually went out and tried to learn Java. You didn’t wait a year or a month or even a week to start learning. You went out and tried it immediately. You may not be the best Java coder we interviewed, but you definitely have the attitude that I would like to see in my employees. I’m going to accept you for the internship. But I want you to review those Java books some more.”
And that was when I got my first job at a tech company.
The learning curve at the company was very steep. I had to learn new technologies, such as Apache, SOAP, REST, Java, Linux, JavaScript, UNIX, and VI, at the internship. Since the other employees were busy with their own work, they only told me what to learn without actually teaching me anything. I had to learn everything on my own.
It was all overwhelming at first, but the challenge of it all was what kept me pushing to learn more. I was basically learning college level material while I was interning there. One of the employees told me that spending a month there was equal to spending a semester in college.
All of the technologies I learned at the internship would later prove useful when I had a web development course in college, and when I was interviewed for tech jobs. Although the steep learning curve would have deterred most people from wanting to move forward and learn more, it ultimately benefited me. I stood out during my college applications and during my job interviews.