Inside one iOS app developer’s quest to get onstage at Apple’s WWDC

FastCompany:

It’s better than any advertisement, social campaign, or press write-up. Appearing onstage at an Apple press event is the dream of every iOS developer. It can almost instantly lift a tiny bootstrapped company from obscurity to name-brand status. It can also be the beginning of a long-lasting and lucrative relationship with Apple.

But as the folks at Scrollmotion, a New York-based iOS app developer, can tell you, getting there is a long, careful dance that can be full of heady highs, heartbreaking lows, and sudden death. The company marshaled a laborious campaign to present its app onstage at an Apple event last spring, and while the campaign was unsuccessful, the company says it would do it again in a heartbeat.

I know developers are of two minds – it is a Darwinian pressure cooker attempting to satisfy all of Apple’s demands and to be better than a dozen other developers, some of them your friends, who are all trying to do the same thing. But, on the other hand, it’s the kind of jumpstart a small company craves.