Ben Thompson’s piece today about Zoë Keating is an interesting read for any indie developer. The chart alone is worth a look whenever you’re making choices about how to price your apps or services.

Immediately after reading his piece, I sent this tweet, which he was kind enough to put into his footnotes.

.@monkbent Your update today made me think of indie app devs. Most make craft beer and try to sell it at Bud Light prices.

— jcieplinski (@jcieplinski) January 26, 2015

I find it odd that so many indies want to make “opinionated” software, which by definition limits the audience, and then price it as if trying to reach the widest audience possible. This strikes me as trying to have it both ways. Either you want to target a niche, or go for scale. If you target a niche with your design and features then try and price the app for the mainstream, you’re going to have a very hard time being sustainable.

The mainstream simply doesn’t care about your high-quality, artisanal approach to app making. They want what’s free and what’s popular. To get their attention, it takes millions of dollars an indie doesn’t have.

The craft beer analogy isn’t perfect, but it does offer a hint as to how some of us might successfully navigate through the overabundance and ultra-discount dominance on the App Store.

A craft brewery like Victory doesn’t try to take customers away from Coors. They specifically target the people who wouldn’t be caught dead drinking a Coors. They are looking for beer snobs, none of whom are drinking the giant brands.

The problem is that there are few people outside the mainstream. So you have to let go of this notion of making up for it in volume. You can’t easily convert people who don’t pay for software with your amazing hand-crafted experience. But by and large, the small group who does look for that level of craftsmanship will be far more loyal, vocal, and happy to pay[1]. You just have to find them[2], earn their trust, and then charge them more for your superior product.

Easier said than done, right? Still, it looks easier to me than competing with funded startups for the attention of the fickle masses.

You’ll never make the money the big startups make, but you won’t have to. You’re paying yourself or a small team, not an office building full of people. Success isn’t about beating everyone else. It’s about feeding your family. To paraphrase Charles Perry on our podcast today, mind your revenue, not your rank.

Is there a large enough market for “craft” apps? I don’t know. But I think trying to couple a superior experience with rock-bottom prices is maybe not the best way to find out.

1. In many cases, the higher the price, the better. They want to brag about how much their superior experience cost them. A low price can actually hurt you here.  ↩
2. Guess where they’re not hanging out? The App Store most popular charts, for one. You really need to think outside the App Store to find these customers.  ↩

Here’s the thing about excuses: they rarely lead to action. Thus, they are pretty much useless to me in my pursuit of success.

It’s perfectly natural to look at someone else’s circumstances and focus on everything that differs from our own. He doesn’t have any kids. She gets health care from her husband’s employer. He has a large following that I don’t have. She lives in a small town with cheaper living expenses. And so on. Noting these differences can actually help us build a realistic plan for our own success.

The problem comes when you take those differences and turn them into excuses for your own inaction. When those differences lead your mind to that’s why she’s successful and I’m not, or that made it easy for him, rather than I’m going to have to find a way to succeed without that or I’m going to have to overcome that issue first.

Of course someone else probably has it easier than you.[1] No matter how privileged you are, no matter what life choices you’ve made, there’s always someone in an even better starting position. We don’t live in a fair world.

But ask yourself: How does dwelling on this help you succeed?

We all do it from time to time. The human mind gravitates toward finding the easier path. Excuses protect us from having to take risks.

But not taking risks also means not reaping rewards.[2]

This is the reason successful businesses are rare. It’s not that they can’t be built, but that it’s easier and safer not to even try.

If what you want is to feel good about not succeeding, go ahead and let your excuses stop you. You’ll find plenty of other unsuccessful people with whom to commiserate. And you can throw your excuses at more successful people to make yourself feel even better as a bonus.[3]

Otherwise, if you want to actually succeed, you have to fight the urge to make excuses when you should be taking action.

By all means, take note of your disadvantages. But then build a plan for overcoming them.

1. Of course, easier doesn’t mean easy. Don’t assume that someone’s lack of one or two obstacles means there were no obstacles to their success at all. In fact, often other people have different obstacles, not necessarily fewer.  ↩
2. No, you shouldn’t take foolish risks. But you can’t take no risks and expect anything good to happen to your business.  ↩
3. Just kidding. You should stop doing that. Seriously. It makes you look silly.  ↩

Two interesting articles published today. The first is an announcement from Dark Sky that they have sold a piece of their company to Applied Invention. The second is a status update from Studio Neat on a recent change they made to their business model for Slow Fast Slow.

From the Dark Sky piece:

We’ve never done anything like this before, and any time you introduce new partners you’re taking a significant risk. In fact, I’d put the odds of Dark Sky crashing and burning in the next couple years (or worse: turning into something we no longer love) as high as 50%. But really, that’s a big improvement. If it were just Jay and myself, the odds of utter destruction would be much higher; closer to 100%. The two of us were trying to do the job of a much larger team (i.e. design and development of a sizable app and website and data service, keeping a hundred Linode servers up and running, customer service, corporate development, and all the nitty-gritty work involved in running a business), and that just isn’t sustainable. Continuing down that road would lead to unimaginable stress, burn-out, probable heart disease, and a slow and steady descent into functional alcoholism.

And from Studio Neat:

We stated in the aforementioned post that “if we can generate only one sale of a Glif (or any of our products, really) per day as a result of this ad, it will be worth it.” It is too early to know if the app will continue to drive traffic to studioneat.com once it is no longer featured in the App Store. But, as you can see from the graph below, revenue clearly saw an uptick when we switched to the free model and started directing traffic to studioneat.com.

Now, perhaps some will see both of these developments as bad news for indie developers. You can’t succeed without selling out. You have to pivot to hardware because of the dismal state of App Store pricing. You can’t make a living just selling apps anymore. And so on. The doom and gloom practically writes itself. But what I take away from both of these posts is actually much more favorable.

Companies have to grow to survive, and there’s nothing wrong with bringing on extra talent to do a better job accomplishing your goals. If you have shortcomings as a business person, or you’re just at the end of your rope as far as how many hours you can put into a product on your own, there’s no shame in seeking some outside expertise. It sounds like Dark Sky had gone about as far as it could under the leadership of its founders. If it were being sold outright to some giant company like Google, I’d say good for Adam and Jay, and then I’d start searching for a replacement app immediately. In this case, however, I’m much more cautiously optimistic. It sounds like Applied Invention might actually have some real talent that can bring improvements to Dark Sky. And the founders are still very much involved. I’ll be watching with interest, at the very least.[1]

In the case of Slow Fast Slow, I see some creative business thinking that seems to be bearing fruit. While theirs is not a model I can readily apply to my own products, it does give me inspiration to think outside the App Store for where I might get some money from customers. Remember, Studio Neat is a hardware company first and a software company second. It only makes sense for them to take an app which was not making much money on its own and try to use it to boost sales of their primary hardware product, the Glif. While the “App as Ad” approach is normally only utilized by larger companies, here we get to see it in action from a much smaller indie outfit.[2]

So congratulations to Adam and Jay on their new partnership, and thanks to Dan Provost for sharing some numbers from Studio Neat’s latest experiment. I’m fond of saying there’s no one right way of going about the indie software business, and these guys are living proof.

1. The absense of the usual corporate mumbo jumbo in the announcement helps. A lot.  ↩
2. Too early to tell if it will be successful long-term, but I applaud the experimentation and the willingness to share the results.  ↩

I remember back in the early 2000s, when OS X was an infant and the Apple Retail Stores were just starting to take off, I would lament with many of my longtime Mac faithful friends about the decline in reliability of Apple’s products. Many of my friends were convinced that Macs were failing at a much greater rate than they had been “in the good old days,” and that the software was buggier than it ever had been. Of course, Apple was starting to sell many more Macs than it ever had, and it had just replaced the core of all of its software in a relatively short period of time, so it stood to reason that the number of duds coming off the assembly line would increase, and that bugs in the software would become more commonplace as well.

How could Apple possibly continue to grow and succeed without a corresponding decline in quality? This is a universal struggle for all companies, and most end up falling apart eventually because of it.

I bring this up not because I disagree with Marco Arment’s post from last night about the recent decline in Apple’s software quality, which is undeniable. I just think it helps to remember that mass market success and decline in build quality pretty much go hand in hand. And that we’ve been here with Apple before. Many times.

Apple is now hundreds of times larger than it was back when I was complaining with my friends, and the software and hardware, despite not being perfect, aren’t hundreds of times more buggy and unreliable than they were then.

Somehow, Apple always manages to right the ship before the quality assurance issues get completely out of control. Maybe we’re in a particularly bad phase at the moment, and maybe that struggle to keep the quality up is harder than it was in the past, but if history is any indication, it’ll get better.

Almost two years ago, I suggested that Apple would be better off slowing down and taking a year off to fix bugs and enhance already existing features, rather than continue the fevered pace of innovation that it had maintained for so many years. Clearly, Tim Cook ignored my advice. And how could he not? After Jobs’ death, the world consistently questioned Cook’s ability to keep the company in its role as the richest, most powerful, and innovative tech company in the universe. He had a lot to prove. There were expectations that needed to be met, and so he met them.

Unfortunately, meeting those expectations has had consequences.

You can’t have it both ways. You can’t stay way ahead of the curve and not introduce some bugs along the way. This decline in software quality is a side-effect of the current strategy. It’s a compromise Apple has made in order to reassure the general public that the company isn’t “doomed” without Steve Jobs.[1]

The only question now is how does Apple balance the speed of innovation against the need to maintain quality moving forward? As the Apple Watch starts shipping later this year, and the critics of Cook finally quiet down about Apple’s inability to have a hit new product, will Apple shift gears a little? Will the organization realize that it’s out of whack and start to feel the need for a Snow Leopard moment? I think it probably will.

How Apple accomplishes this feat—slowing down the upgrade cycles just a bit, adding more people, introducing fewer new features per release, etc.—is an open question. Regardless, Apple can’t simply stop moving forward. They can’t just take the year off to fix bugs, as I had naively suggested. That’s what I and many old fans of the platform would love to see, but it’s not realistic for the continued success of the business. Apple has no choice but to push ahead.

I’m not apologizing for Apple. I think the leadership has a lot of work to do. But it’s not as simple as “fix everything” or “stop making new stuff until the old stuff works better.” You can’t ignore the fact that Apple has real competitors who aren’t standing still. And you can’t ignore the consequences of spending too much time fixing bugs and denying the always fickle masses the new and shiny bits.

The unfortunate reality is that “Here’s a new version that’s the same as the old version, except now everything works” is a tough sell.

In the meantime, Arment and others are right to point out these glaring software issues, and we’re right to debate them. Apple’s reputation is indeed taking damage, although that may have been unavoidable. Let’s just not get impractical about solutions or pretend that this is an easy thing to solve. And let’s not assume that Apple doesn’t have a sense of the problem.

1. Ironically, the decline in quality is now going to be used to spark a whole new round of “doom and gloom” stories about Apple. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.  ↩

“Most” is a dangerous word for a small business.

If you start out thinking only of things that work most of the time, for most people, you miss most of your opportunities. If you concentrate all of your efforts on only the things that most people do, or the ways in which most people behave, you will be invisible to your most valuable customers.

You don’t want most people when you’re starting out. You want the right people. The people who are going to become your sales force. Your lifetime loyal fans. And loyal fans generally don’t conform to the norms.

Some customers are worth more than others.

You want to think of every single new customer as a victory and a potential opportunity. You want to be determined to find the people who usually fall between the cracks of standard marketing techniques.

The “most” customers others are chasing are fickle and ultimately worth little to a young business just getting started. They might give you money in the short term, but then they move on to other things. They don’t sell your products to the next five customers. They just drop you as soon as another shiny object passes by.

Chasing “most” gets you a sales chart like this:

Instead of a chart like this:

As you grow, you’ll want to widen your horizons, of course, but at the beginning, I think you’re much better off not catering to the crowd.

Another thing about this “most” mentality: it gives you an easy excuse not to do things. Most people won’t bother watching that video. Most people won’t read my blog. Most people won’t come to my web site.

And so you do nothing. And then no one finds you.