One of the challenges of running a small software business is how to turn customers into advocates for your company and products. It’s a challenge because unless there’s a support exchange, it’s entirely possible for your customer to go the entire lifetime of the app without ever having any direct interaction with you. Some customers may want that completely disconnected,…
mostly nonsense
Even after seven years of selling my software, there are still days when I feel like I’m a fraud and have no idea what I’m doing. Those feelings are never more real than on days when I don’t make a sale. I’m lucky that they’re now few and far between compared to when I was just starting out, but when…
My good friend Mike and I have been discussing a theory about indie developers. I call it The Trap of Your First Success. Our idea is that while it’s incredibly hard to build a successful indie product, it’s even harder to repeat that success because of a trap indie developers often fall into. Let me explain. As I wrote about…
One strategy I’ve tried throughout my software career is to fail often and fail fast. Any time one of my ideas reaches the point where I seriously consider building it, I immediately think about how much I could sell it for. (And for what it’s worth, my second instinct, if it’s not a viable product, is to open source it,…
Gus with his strategy for success: My basic strategy is to make a useful quality product, and sell it at a fair and sustainable price. If your app is quality, it will find customers. And then those customers will tell their friends, and the news sites will notice it. And since you’re charging a fair price a virtuous circle will…
Earlier today, my friend Jared Sinclair published an incredibly brave and candid blog post summarizing the financial earnings of his iOS app, Unread. To the extent that my wife is comfortable with, I’d like to share my own financial situation as another data point – but from the perspective of someone who has experienced slow and steady growth developing Mac…
This was a puzzler. I’ve had an iPhone 5S since last fall, but haven’t ever done much more than just play with the slow motion video capture feature. Yesterday though, I had a need to take a slow-mo video and post it to Facebook. I recorded the video easily enough, set the slow motion start and stop points, and then…
What follows is the first half of the introduction to the book I’m working on about organizing your photo library with Dropbox. I thought some of you might like to see what I’ve been working on as I get closer to launching in July. I adamantly believe that our photos and home videos are the most important digital assets we…
For six years I carried a bright green, nylon, kid’s wallet I bought from Target. I enjoyed the simplicity and “funness” of it. But last year I finally decided to grow up and buy a real, adult wallet. I hate fat, George Costanza wallets and, as a rule, only carry the absolute bare minimum of cards. So when I started…