It’s official: We’re open for business
Yes, we do client work
I’m really proud of the work my team and I have done over the past six years. We’ve designed and developed apps like Pocket Zoo, Wake, Quick Fit, and Next Keyboard. We’ve also built games like InstaMatch and Emoji Party.
Our apps have hit #2 overall charts, and #1 in the Education and Utilities categories. We’ve been repeatedly featured on the App Store, we’ve made App of the Week, and Quick Fit even made it into an Apple commercial. We’ve even won a few awards along the way and have been featured in The Verge, the New York Times, and WIRED Magazine.
We deliver better products than a lot of apps on the App Store, and we only work on products we care about. Some people think that’s because we’re picky (and we are), but it’s actually because we’ve found passion to be the missing ingredient in countless products.
We’ve found passion to be the missing ingredient in countless products.
Passion and curiosity enable us to work on the intangibles — to put the effort into very thoughtful, deliberate, instinctual iteration and into sweating the details. That’s how we’ve been able to create products that have been downloaded over 6 million times. As our track record shows, we’ve got years of perspective and we’re consistent. So we know a thing or two about building consumer products and the App Store.
Product managers, designers, marketers, and entrepreneurs frequently come up to me and ask if my team and I do services. And it kills me every time. Because services is a very important and valuable part of our business, and we clearly haven’t talked about it enough. So here it goes:
Yes, we do client work.
We’re a hybrid products and services studio. My team and I got started with mobile when we built an app called Pocket Zoo. As we continued building apps, we were driven by the same mission:
We want to make people’s lives better in small and meaningful ways.
From mobile keyboards to alarms, watch apps, mobile games and fitness apps, we were solving our own problems and scratching our own itches. We found and solved inefficiencies. We built better products that solved old problems. While we were building these apps, this mission organically led us to work with other like-minded companies to build products with.
For example, we worked with the innovation team at Plantronics to build software for a fitness tracker prototype they had. We worked with a unicorn on an experimental mobile app. We worked with Career Cruising and Ooka Island to explore the future of game-based learning. We worked with The Learning Partnership, a nonprofit, to improve the way high school students discovered and learned about careers.
Service work contributes to our team’s processes, expertise, and perspectives.
Our service work has led us to new industries and new problems. We get to work with thought leaders of various industries and learn more about their journeys and their jobs. It introduces new challenges or constraints that refine our abilities. It also forces us to improve our own methodology. It helps us keep our skills sharp.
We’re excited to share our design thinking, product, and marketing expertise with like-minded brands, startups, and nonprofits. Here are a few quick examples of the kind of projects we do and how we solve problems and create digital products:
Creating Real Talk to solve real problems
We were approached by The Learning Partnership to help them address the alarming rate at which students were graduating high school confused, picking post-secondary programs at random, and ending up either unemployed, underemployed, or just plain unhappy.
They had done a survey suggesting that students turned mostly to their parents and peers to help make important decisions regarding their post-secondary choices, severely limiting their scope of possibility in terms of what they could do.
Knowing there was a shortage of people students could turn to for candid advice about careers of interest, we started brainstorming ways to expand their network without them putting in too much effort. This meant building a community of high school students and education experts to help bounce ideas around with and validate our idea. We white boarded, sketched, and wireframed more than seven different versions of the app before arriving at something we knew had legs.
That was the conception of Real Talk, an app that would equip students with real (no b.s.) advice from real people, with a diversity of real jobs. We leveraged our network and that of TLP’s to crowd-source the necessary content to populate the app which was to be made available on iOS, Android, and the web. To our surprise we received more than 500 responses from people with careers as diverse as Drake’s barber, to acrobats, to sustainability specialists.
Ultimately, we struck a nerve with how candid the app was with the reality of careers today and got a nod from Apple when we were featured as a Best New App overall and in the Education category.
We also got picked up by the fine folks at Lifehacker, BetaKit and App Advice which helped us keep the momentum going and achieve 6x the results TLP originally benchmarked for success. We’re really pleased with our work for TLP, and are currently exploring other projects together. (Stay tuned!)
From Upstarts to Unicorns
We work with companies of all sizes — ranging from ambitious startups to unicorns, public companies, and nonprofits.
The reason they come to us is because our passion speaks for itself in the products we’ve built and launched into the world. We go the extra mile to sweat the tiny details and treat every project like our own.
Real Talk isn’t our only education or career-based client product. We’re proud to say we’ve worked with Career Cruising to design and develop the ccSpark Career Town game. It’s an interactive way for children to learn about careers and the different opportunities available to them. Career Cruising’s products are used in over 20,000 schools and have over 5 million users worldwide.
We’re extremely passionate about learning (clearly), but we are also interested in exploring health and well-being. We worked with the Plantronics’ innovation team on an experimental wearable technology and helped them explore and narrow down potential use cases for this new hardware. Our iOS concept explored how we could help office-workers, stay healthy and active during the workday.
Our work goes beyond mobile. Teletoon (Corus Entertainment) was interested in testing out a new way of gauging viewers interest in a brand new show and characters. We worked with them and GURU Studios to develop a process that would enable them to test potential shows on their website. The end result was the Nemesis website, a new way for Teletoon to validate a show but also for users to interact with the characters.
Need a product?
If any of this piques your interest, we’d love to learn about your challenges and share our perspectives on design, mobile, and our methodology.
Don’t be a stranger, say hi! Email us at collab@tinyhearts.com
Robleh Jama is the founder of Tiny Hearts, an award-winning product studio. They make their own products like Next Keyboard, Wake Alarm and Quick Fit — as well as products for clients like Plantronics and Philips.
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