Android

This is a guest post by my friend Roger Schmidlin. He created a dance move assistant app for your mobile called WhatStep. So, let's jump into it.

How It Began

My name is Roger Schmidlin and I have been Lindy Hoppin’ for over 20 years.

I even ran my own dancing school in Perth, Australia. On my path, I have been to lots of workshops and dancing classes.

But I had one big problem: I could not retain all these new learned moves in my head. I tried to write them down, but after a while I had no clue anymore what these notes meant.

I took videos, but they ended up in a big mess on my computer. I know that many dancers share the same problem.

So, I finally wanted to solve this. My mobile app WhatStep was born.

The Making Of

I started the development in March 2015. I was pretty naive then to think it would only take me a few weeks to get it done. There is so much that goes into an app.

My background is software engineering but I have never done any mobile apps. It was all new and exciting for me. My goal was to develop it for Android and iOS, so I used the development platform Xamarin.

The most effort went into the development platform itself (which was in a beta state and had many bugs on its own), dealing with the new technology and publishing it to the stores.

After 6 months I had my first versions in the app stores. It was still buggy and in its very basic form. Because of user’s feedback, I was able to improve my app quite a bit and tailor it to the dance market.

At the moment I have about 600 installs on Android and just over 400 on iOS. Out of these are about 7% that actually purchase the app. 30% of my sales goes to the stores. And you have to use quite a bit of paid advertising in order for your app to be seen.

My demo video (see below) was totally seen about 30.000 times (Facebook and Youtube together).

Some people think you become rich with writing apps. The above numbers are for one year's work. You do the maths. The apps are available on Android and iOS.

Here Is How WhatStep Works

• Take your mobile phone to your classes and video at the end with WhatStep
• Add personal notes to the video and give it a tag (Lindy Hop, Workshop, Frankie Manning)
• Some schools do this already for you and will send you the complete recap collection via their newsletter
• Watch your videos in slow motion or even frame by frame
• You can also import video clips from Youtube. You can slow them down too
• Once you have a cool video playlist, share your cloud videos with your friends
• Check out my demo video to get a quick overview on how it works

Demo Video

The Future Of WhatStep

I put my heart and soul in this app to make it the best dance assistant app on this planet.

Many of you have already given me lots of feedback and ideas for more features.

I want the community to be part of this. Make it your app. I like WhatStep to move towards social interaction.

Features like endorsing friends, nominating moves and even having a move dictionary are on my list.

More to watch and read

• Website: WhatStep.com (not available anymore)
• Facebook page

Thank you for your support and spreading WhatStep!
Roger

Update: Roger no longer maintains the apps.