Indie Developers are Stronger Together / Sharing Our Numbers

After publishing my Mac app financials last month, I received mostly positive comments. But a few people did share with me, over Twitter and email, their displeasure for what I wrote. They seemed to think that I was only writing to jump on Jared’s bandwagon, to grab some cheap, easy traffic, or to show off. […]

Mailing Lists Are Your Friend

In this post I thought I’d share my history maintaining mailing lists for my products, how I make the most of them, and what sort of success they have and haven’t brought me. Near the bottom, I’m also going to share some real data about my open rates, etc. To begin with, it took me […]

Marketing is just another stage in the development process

Despite spending three years working in the Yahoo! Marketing department, I’m a terrible marketer when it comes to my own company. I’ll often be in the process of explaining to my wife some new marketing tactic I’m considering trying, when she’ll stop me and say “You sound like you’re apologizing for doing this. You don’t […]

Encouraging Serendipity

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 […]

Zero Sales Days with a Little Impostor Syndrome Mixed In

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 […]

Your First Success is a Trap

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 […]

My App Strategy – Keep Trying New Things

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, […]

More Business Advice from Gus Mueller

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 […]

Daniel Jalkut says, in a tweet, what I tried to say with 2,000 words