Basques in Boise

Jason Crawforth, a multifaceted entrepreneur from Boise, does not have neither the money nor the time to spend on advertising campaigns to get the world to know about his products. However, he knows exactly who his target clients are and is very sure about how to get to them.

His latest venture, a decision-making application for Apple’s iPhone and Ipod touch called Imakedecisions, broke into the top most popular “lifestyle” applications of Itunes within a week. It includes ten little small tools such as darts, coin toss, eight ball, wishbone, which way is the wind blowing, will it stick, rock-paper-scissors and three others in order to help anyone reach a conclusion on any imaginable decision.

Of all of them, Jason likes the coin flip the best, with high resolution graphics, three-dimensional programming to cause the flipping and coins from seven different countries. “It is the most complex application and the most beautiful. It was the hardest of them to write but it was also the most beautiful”, Jason says in an exclusive interview for eitb.com in Boise.

In order to spread the word and make his application known, Jason has used social networks such as facebook, youtube, delicious, dig, stumbleupon, flashdot and a variety of bloggers, and websites. “As an entrepreneur, unless you have a lot of money, it is very difficult to get the world to know about your application, social networks are the only tool you have”, Jason recounts.

However, this was not the first time that the Boise entrepreneur, co-owner of Pie Hole, used the social networks to spread the word about his initiatives. Pie Hole, two small Pizza restaurants in two strategic spots of Boise, are usually crowded predominantly with high school and college kids.

“How are you going to get these college kids and high school kid’s attention?”, Jason wonders. “They do not really read newspapers, I am not sure what magazines they read and if I did, I probably could not afford it. I can not afford television and besides there are so many cable shows and network shows that it is not worthy. And radio, most of them are listening to their ipods or satellite radios with no commercials. So, the only way to get hold of them is through the facebook”, Jason recounts.

Pie hole’s profile in facebook has over 18,000 friends at the moment. “Facebook is an interesting phenomena. It is obviously the future”, Jason says.

Itunes

According to Jason, the fact that his application is sold in iTunes makes it easier to sell. “Writing the application is always the easy part. You may think that writing code is hard, and it is hard, but in comparison to getting the world to know about your application, that is the hard part,” he says.

Jason thinks that Apple has created one of the most brilliant business models out there. “There is only one place where you can legally buy applications and there is only one place to legally sell them. They created a market, they created a place where everyone goes”, he adds.

As a person with entrepreneurial spirit, Jason is not afraid of the economic crisis and is already working on a new application for the iPhone and Ipod Touch. “I can not really talk about that one but it will be much bigger”, he says.