2014 Business Yearly Review

Inspired by this article on doing a year-end review of your indie business, I took a few minutes and calculated some stats and compiled my major accomplishments from 2014. The result was eye-opening and made me feel more than a little bit proud. I’ve made a conscious effort to be more transparent about my business dealings this year because I truly believe getting more people to share these kinds of numbers will benefit the community as a whole. So, here’s my 2014 review of Click On Tyler… Earned $61,500 in sales ($168/day) Grew revenue by 6% Gained 1,714 new customers …

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My Inboxes

I’m not one of those people who feels busy all the time. I typically never feel overwhelmed no matter how much is on my plate. But I know and have worked with lots of people who always seem to be in a hurry and are frazzled trying to remember all the tasks in front of them. I’ve never been able to understand the mindset of the perpetually busy person. I don’t at all mean that to sound condescending. It’s just not in my nature to feel overwhelmed very often. I really do believe that a big reason for why I …

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That Connection

I don’t code every day. Even when my only job was running my little company, I never had enough work in the pipeline to keep me busy in Xcode five days a week. The actual programming part of my job comes in fits and spurts as I work on new features and bug fixes. The only area of running my company that is consistent (other than the administrative overhead) is customer service. Simply due to the fact that I sell my software worldwide, I have customers in every time zone and in countries with vastly different holiday schedules than my …

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More App Rejections

From Cromulent Labs, whose app launching widget was initially approved by Apple and then removed from the App Store: But this time I decided to make a more concerted effort, start a company, and see if I could make some app (or apps) that could simply keep me employed and pay the bills….As with any iOS app, there was a chance (perhaps this this case, more than most) that the app would be rejected by Apple, but I figured it was worth the risk once I determined that it was technically feasible and I found nothing in the App Extension …

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Writing Without Editing

Last year, December 30th to be precise, I had the idea to write and self-publish a book about Dropbox and digital photography. It would sum up and explain in detail everything I’ve learned about capturing, organizing, sharing, and protecting my photo library – centered around Dropbox. I went home that night and immediately dumped everything out of my mind into an OmniOutliner document. Eighteen hours later, my son was born. So, the book stalled for a while. But a few months later, once the insanity of having a baby settled into something resembling a routine, I turned that outline of …

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Being an Indie is Hard

Zach Waugh of Giant Comet and Flint fame writes: But even after I released Flint for iOS in late 2013, I was only making about half of what I would need to go full-time comfortably. Building apps by yourself is a grind, and I was starting to wear thin, so I decided to leave Giant Comet as a side-project. A wonderful product, aimed at a passionate, niche market and it’s still a struggle and grind to make it full-time. On a different note, Jared Sinclair with advice for the creators of the superb Crossy Road, who he’s afraid might go …

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