New Home for Entrepreneurial Seduction

In a move to reduce my dependence on Google, I've moved Entrepreneurial Seduction to my own Wordpress site. Visit it at http://blog.hoctor.com.

The Future of Software Pricing

I think everyone can agree that we won't survive long as indie developers if we can only charge one or two dollars for our apps. I don't even think $15 is enough unless you have an enormous audience. So what do we do? How do we compete with the "race to the bottom" inspired by the App Store? I don't have all the answers, but I do have my opinions and I'm willing to back them up with evidence through my business actions.

Doubling Down

Michael Jurewitz gave a great talk on the economics of software pricing at Çingleton and expanded that talk at NSConference 5. You need to watch the videos to see all the details, but the high point for me was when he said, "Take your current price and double it. If you lose less than 50 percent of your unit sales, you're making more money."

Less tech support and more revenue. That sounds good to me. When others were telling me that I should lower the price of MoneyWell when the Mac App Store appeared, I refused. I know what my software is worth and what I need to grow my company and a $50 price is as low as I'll go for an app that could save my customers hundreds of dollars a year and improve their financial futures.

Back in the '90s at one of my previous companies, I wrote vertical market estimating software for the construction industry. We sold our software for $2,995 when our competitors were selling their products at four to five times our price. Were we making five times as many unit sales as them? No possible way.

So we hired a sales consultant to improve our techniques and he immediately asked why we were selling a premium product at discount pricing. He said, "Double your price and I guarantee you will only make more money." Nervously, we announced to our customers that the new price would be $6,000 and to buy additional seats before June 1.

The result? A very healthy seven-figure sales month for May and then unit sales leveled off to exactly what they were at half the price. We doubled our revenue. How much freaking money had we been leaving on the table all those years? What could we have done with our products with that added money? Shame on us.

Not every market can handle a 2x price increase, but the experiment is worth it for so many developers.

Subscription Pricing

Another wise developer and friend, Manton Reece, talked about subscription pricing. He gave us examples of how well this works with the new Microsoft and Adobe pricing and also with his some of his own software, which he was too modest to pitch, so I'll do it for him. Check out SearchPath, Tweet Library, and Watermark—they are great products.

Chatting with Manton after his talk, we discussed what software this model works for best and the simple answer is any software with a cloud back end. It's not going to work for simple device-centric apps, but if you can fit this model, it's a great option. Think about being able to lower the price point of acquiring your product and then having more balanced revenue figures for each month throughout the year. I know I wouldn't mind few valleys amongst the hills.

In-App Purchase

Since my price point is pretty solid and my products don't fit the subscription model, I'm choosing too go a different direction: In-App Purchase (IAP).

One of my biggest frustrations with the App Store is lack of trials or demos. Offering a "lite" version of an app just adds clutter and confusion, so we have a trial version on our website for our Mac app to allow customers to try MoneyWell before shelling out 50 bucks. This is not an option for iOS so I needed another solution.

Chatting with Michael Jurewitz at WWDC 2012, we came to the conclusion that IAP could work well for No Thirst apps. Last month we shipped MoneyWell Express and proved that it is a viable option with a consistent 25 percent IAP purchase rate.

MoneyWell Express is a companion app that syncs with MoneyWell on the Mac and allows for quick entry of your transactions during checkout at a store or restaurant. The fact that most people installing it are most likely existing customers skews the IAP units numbers a bit, but I'm still very happy with this adoption rate. We'll get more interesting figures when we release our iPad version, which will be standalone.

It's important to choose wisely with IAP divisions in your app. For MoneyWell, we played with different features at lower prices adding up to the price we wanted, but it got too messy. Instead we decided that the free version would allow for access to all the features and just limit the customer to a singe bank account. Most people have checking and savings accounts with a credit card or two so we were confident that they would want to purchase our "Unlimited Accounts" IAP and not settle for the limitation.

If a customer did only have one account, they would never be nagged to purchase anything. Those that did have multiple accounts would get to use all the features, but only one account would show a balance in their Accounts list. The others would have the word "locked" there instead. Tapping one of those locked accounts presented the IAP screen where a purchase removes any hint of IAP in our app.

It's a very soft sell and lets us charge more for the app than we could without that initial free experience. I want to keep our iPad app pricing in line with our Mac apps because they are going to be nearly feature equivalent to each other. Why charge less for the same functionality?

We have not seen a serious uptick in support and our ratings have been averaging four stars, but if your app has a serious learning curve, the IAP model may cost you in sales or support. I'll report back on our iPad experience when we ship it later this year. I'm optimistic that it will be excellent.

Peace.

Befriending Apple

You're writing an app that you hope will lead to fame and fortune or at least will pay the bills. If you have any hope of succeeding, you need to make friends with your platform manufacturer. For the iOS and OS X universe, this is Apple.

Like it or not, you will always have more success if people at Apple are rooting for you. They have influence over your App Store promotions, which is your best shot at free, effective marketing. This thought was brought to the forefront of my mind as I was listening to talks by Michael Jurewitz and sharing my own story with other attendees at NSConference 5.

Back before we called software "apps" and sold them through Apple's central pipeline, we had to sell software via our own websites. It was hard to get people to notice your product so download sites were a valuable marketing resource. Apple Downloads was the biggest and the best of these.

In 2006, I built a product called Debt Quencher to help me eliminate my credit card debt using the snowball payments process. It was the software that launched No Thirst Software. I knew this $15 tool was not going to lead me to any fame or fortune and it barely paid my website hosting bills at first. It was my toe in the water so I could decide to jump into the deeper waters of bootstrapping my new company.

I filled lots of paperwork to acquire a $50,000 small business loan and dove into development of MoneyWell, a personal finance tool that would fix all the problems I was having with Quicken. While developing my flagship app, I needed help making sure I had the infrastructure to sell it—one that would withstand selling thousands of copies instead of the manually emailing licenses process I had for Debt Quencher. The best place to hang out was the MacSB group on Yahoo, so I was very active there.

At the same time, I wanted feedback on my app design and the sister group, MacGUI, was perfect place to get peer reviews. I started talking about my unique single-window design for MoneyWell and posted some screenshots of alpha versions. In addition to excellent advice from designers and developers, I was contacted by a guy from Apple. He said, "I am in charge of the Business and Finance section of Apple Downloads. Could I get more screenshots or see a beta version of MoneyWell?" I replied, "If you work for Apple, I'll be happy to give you the source code if you want."

In August of 2007, my government-backed loan had run out (actually, it ran out much earlier, but I did some creative financing and spending reductions) and I had to ship what I had completed as 1.0. Let's just say it wasn't the software I wanted to release, but it was the software I needed right now.

As promised, I had included my new best friend at Apple on beta versions. As best friends go, we didn't talk a lot, or at all really, but I was sure that in his own quiet way he felt as much love for me as I did him (call me). I didn't expect much from this relationship since I was a nobody in the Mac developer world. I was just covering my bases.

I released MoneyWell and submitted it to all the various download sites including Apple's. I was thrilled to see it listed and getting healthy downloads—double digits each day! Two days later, I was shocked to see it featured as the main app on the Business and Finance section of Apple Downloads. Even better, it was also the featured app on the front page. I may have had to change my underwear, I'm not sure.

My website didn't give me realtime statistics, but I was able to see them the following day. It said there were over 20,000 downloads. I recounted the digits in that number three times. I called my wife over to look at it to make sure I wasn't having a dyslexic fit.

Twenty. Thousand. Downloads.

Holy unexpected server activity, Batman!

And this continued for the week that I was featured giving me a total of over 160,000 downloads in the first month. Unfortunately, it wasn't the version I wanted everyone seeing. It was crap in my eyes. Features were missing. It lacked half what I had planned for it, but my funding ran dry and I had little choice.

My brain toggled between praising and damning Apple. But it honestly was a fantastic gift from the Fruit Company and proved that there was a huge market for Mac software no matter what the naysayers repeated throughout my development process. All this because I followed up with an opportunity to work more closely with Apple during my app development and release.

How much bigger is the potential win today? What size win can you have by cultivating your relationship? Say hello to your Apple Developer Relations team members. Talk to engineers at WWDC and show off your products. Be an active member of the Cocoa community and share what you are doing and have learned. You never know when someone with influence over App Store placement might be watching.

And I'm not saying you shouldn't be critical of Apple, there is plenty of room for improvement. Just do it without being an asshat.

Peace.

Community Inspiration

This past week was an incredible experience—I attended NSConference 5 in Leicester, UK (don't feel bad if you didn't read that city name as LESS-ter; two years ago while visiting London, I spent a week thinking I was walking through Lee-eye-cess-ter Square). If you're not familiar with this conference, it was started by Steve "Scotty" Scott a few years ago to build more community among Apple developers.

My buddy, Scotty, has an amazing team that cares deeply about the whole experience of attending a conference. They know how precious our time is and they don't waste any of it. The venue is well thought out, the food is delicious, and every detail is polished, including down to making sure there are three wines to match each course of dinner.

NSConference always has great speakers, but this year felt exceptionally high quality. Slides were professional, talks well rehearsed, content relevant, interesting, and entertaining—it could have been an Apple event. But that's not why the three days were so successful. The difference is Scotty's insistence that we spend time as a community and share experiences and ideas with each other.

More than half of the nearly 300 attendees were first-timers and I was able to talk with 20 to 30 of them due to the structure of this event. We switched tables at breaks, we talked at the parties and meals, and we were given a goal of meeting three new people. It worked. If you didn't come away knowing many more people than when you arrived, you have no one to blame but yourself.

This conference reminded me that we have some incredibly smart people in this community who are talented and diverse. I was delighted by the creativity streaming though the participants. Attendees shared software designs, hardware hobbies, business strategies, life experiences and much more. It was inspiring.

So inspiring that I wrote three blog entries on the flight home to Houston, which is more than I published in all of 2012.

As an added bonus, I got to spend time with Michael Fey, my friend and one of the reasons our company has cool products to sell like MoneyWell Express. Any time I get to spend with my Number One is priceless.

While WWDC fills your need for a technical conference and allows you to talk to Apple engineers and get introduced to the latest tools from Apple, NSConference feeds your emotional and spiritual needs. Writing software in isolation may produce technically solid apps, but connections with your community drive innovation and inspiration. We all need to recharge and reenergize so we can be at our most brilliant—this is a great place to do just that.

If you get a chance to go next year, I highly recommend you set aside a portion of your budget for NSConference. Just don't try to steal my ticket because I'll fight you for it. If you didn't make it this year, buy the videos (when they're posted). At least you'll get a small idea of how much you missed.

Peace.

Spicy with Beans

Given the choice of choosing something that is known versus unknown, people tend to avoid the mystery item and go with the known.

Case in point: We had our annual neighborhood Halloween party and a few of us provided food (hot dogs and chili) and snacks. My wife cooked a very tasty chili, but it was quite spicy so I wanted to let people who had sensitive palates know that. I made a very simple sign that read "Spicy Chili (beef and bean)." I also included the two primary ingredients in case we had Texas purists at the party who insist real chili has no beans in it.

I like beans in my chili. Screw the rules. I was raised in Buffalo, New York anyway, so I don't get hung up on that "Real Texan" crap. But I digress, let's get back to the anecdote.

There were three slow cookers on the table containing chili and ours was the only one with the paper sign sticking out from under it stating what it was. Now all of these had glass tops and all were right next to each other. There was no doubt that each contained chili and none was harder to dig into than the others, but an hour later, one was nearly empty—ours.

The chili to the left was partially eaten and the one to the right barely touched, but our chili in the middle was down to the Crock in the Pot. Instead of scaring people off with the "spicy" alert, my sign gave them a feeling of confidence that they were going to get chili with beef and beans in it and a bit of a kick.

Obviously the beans didn't scare people off, which means there are plenty of fake Texans in our neighborhood as well.

My experience tells me that this goes for most things in life—including the products or services sold by software companies. Given the choice of buying software that is a mystery or one that the website makes obvious what it contains, people choose the known most every time. That's why many of us tend to frequent the same restaurants or watch movies we've seen before. It's safer going with what we know.

So look at your website and advertising to make sure you're being clear about what it is people are purchasing. Warning people that your software is very spicy and has beans might just be what makes them click the "Buy Now" button.

Peace.

The Elephant in the Room

My apologies for the blog coma, but I'm coming out of it and will be posting on a much more frequent basis starting today.

My vegetative state started in late 2010 when I was swamped with MoneyWell 2.0 design and coding. I could have snapped out of it sooner if it weren't for the elephant in the room giving me the stink eye.

MoneyWell 2.0 was an ambitious project and one that I didn't control and execute well. Writing about mistakes and failures is part of this blog, but I wasn't comfortable doing a postmortem on it as it neared the end of development or even after it shipped. All I wanted to do was fix any mistakes I had made.

I guess I could have blogged about other things, but I wasn't inspired to write about general company activity while there was this huge beast in the office that needed to be discussed. Pretending it wasn't there simply didn't work for me.

We have passed a milestone though and MoneyWell 2.1 is awaiting approval by Apple so we can ship it. We also have redesigned our support, tutorials, and help pages on our website to include proper tutorial videos and instructional information about MoneyWell 2.1. Hopefully this will heal some wounds that we caused by shipping 2.0 without the proper training materials.

We also have some new projects started, which are moving very quickly thanks to our new, full-time designer, Dan Hauk. I can't wait to show you what we're building, but I also can't talk about any of it either because pre-announcing products and features was one of my many MoneyWell 2.0 mistakes.

Stay tuned for future blog posts. I'll push through my personal embarrassment and give you the scoop on all that has happened during that project. My hope is that any developers reading this will avoid the same mistakes and save themselves some pain.

Peace.

He Was Too Young To Die

It was 1967 and I was a five year old boy in a hospital room watching my family break down after hearing the news that my brother was dead. This reality was too hard for me to face at such a young age, so I chose to believe that my brother really wasn't dead. In my favorite cartoon at the time, Racer X was Speed Racer's brother, Rex, who was thought to be dead. I imagined Bobby also was just hidden from me.

By the age of twelve, I finally had a good cry about my loss when it struck me that 19 was too young of an age to die. My big brother had so much more to give and his passing left a huge void in my life. I was inspired to be a better son and try to fill the void for my parents.

In December of 1980, I was stunned by the news that John Lennon had been shot. I wanted to be a rock star, but my weak guitar skills and weaker singing voice forced me to choose a different path. I had just made the decision to go to college after a semester break. Graduating high school, the last thing I wanted was four years of college followed by a boring 9-to-5 job. My heroes were musicians and I wanted to inspire people like they had inspired me. The death of Lennon ripped a huge void in my life. He was who I wanted to be—unconventional, a person who changed the world. He was back in the studio recording music and had so much more to give us. John was too young to die. I was inspired to find a way to change the world in my own way even if it wasn't on a stage.

In March of 1984, my father died. I was 21, newly married, and ready to show my personal hero what I could do when he left me. This void was cavernous. He was 60 years old and too young to die. My dad's scope of influence was much smaller than Lennon's, but to me he was just as inspiring. He challenged me to be smarter, stronger, and to take risks in life. I lived to make him proud of me.

His funeral was followed by a proper Irish wake, which meant dozens of family and friends raising a glass to Fran Hoctor and telling stories of his life—I was too angry to join in much of it. Later that day, I got a call that my Macintosh had arrived and I should come pick it up. It felt wrong to be excited, but I couldn't help it. I had spent the last three months waiting for this and had become fascinated by the story of Steve Jobs and his pirate group at Apple who created this computer.

When Jobs stepped down from his CEO role, I knew he didn't have too much longer to live, but I thought we would get a year or two more from him. When I heard the news of his death yesterday, a new void ripped open for me. Steve had inspired me to create better software, to be a better leader, to inspire a team to create something that could change the world. He made me want to make a positive dent in the universe. And like the others, he had more to give us and was too young to die.

Steve was not a perfect man, but then neither were my other heroes. Inspiration doesn't come from perfection. Instead, it comes from the impact that someone makes in your life. Each of these men that died impacted my life deep enough to change my direction. They all inspired me and for that I owe each of them. My repayment will continue to be how I live my life.

Thanks to my brother and my dad, I have a deep love of family, the understanding that moments spent together are precious, and to not assume I will have time later to apologize. Thanks to John, I have a deep love of music and an understanding of how words and notes can move people to action. Thanks to Steve, I have a software company to run today. I will do what I can to honor his vision and create something great—maybe something that can change the world.

Peace.

Thank You Steve!

In the early 80's I learned to write computer software. I really enjoyed writing software. Then in January of 1984, I touched a mouse on a Macintosh and my world changed. I fell in love with the idea of creating amazing software—code that could change the world.

I ordered my Mac 128K as soon as I could qualify for an Apple credit card.

What Steve Jobs has now—and has always had—is the ability to see potential where so many of us cannot. He wasn't afraid to fly in the face of convention and build something that no one asked for. There was no market demand for an appliance computer. The original Mac was as disruptive as the iPad is today, only the scope of technology was much smaller.

I've probably read too much about Steve Jobs and spent too much time thinking about what he did right and wrong—especially in the early days of Apple—but his tenures as CEO of Apple, NeXT and Pixar have forever changed my world. I have learned from his flaws as well as his successes.

Would I have fallen in love with designing software if I spent years writing command line driven apps? What would the graphical revolution have looked if it was built by people who weren't visionaries? How many years later would Apple-driven leaps in technology have taken?

I honestly don't want to know.

Thank you Steve being brave enough to say no to "good enough" and the vision to show us what's possible. Thank you for making computers fun and exciting. Thank you for putting a huge dent in my universe. May you win the battle over your illness and live to see many generations of breath-taking products built on your vision.

Peace.

A Familiar Place

I have been here before. This place is familiar to me. Here is where the journey becomes steep, rocky and overgrown with vegetation. To my right is a well-worn path leading gently downhill. The smooth and packed soil looks easy on my legs, but I also know the destination. It's a place of sorrow and regret that saps energy from my soul.

After a moment of weakness, my gaze returns forward as I square my shoulders and seek a foothold. The first few steps cause the most strain, but this decision eases the pain and with every step my energy and confidence grows.

I have been here before and understand its temptations. It lies and deceives by offering a "better" choice but, at least this day, I will not fall for its trickery.

I have been here before and will be here again.

Peace.

Delayed

I love the Black Hockey Jesus blog post ‘He’s Not My Character to Write Anymore’ not just because it's a touching tribute to his 13-year old son, but because he writes about the struggle of writing. I have too many posts that rot and die in my MarsEdit Drafts folder because I don't like them enough to publish them or I let writer's block prevent me from spending time on a post until it stops being current. I delay them and they die.

The months of silence on this blog also fills me with guilt. I started Entrepreneurial Seduction to help others build their businesses. I wanted it to be more interactive—more raw. It was supposed to a stream of consciousness, as if someone were reading a diary. Unfortunately, I'm a bit of a perfectionist and a harsh self-critic so I hold back my writing looking for the right words or that amazing sentence that everyone will quote. It's a damn shame, too, because so much has happened in the last six months that would benefit fellow entrepreneurs. Delays in writing are a sure sign of rigor mortis settling in.

Typically, the dead zones in this blog align with periods of heavy software development. Let's blame this latest on MoneyWell 2.0, which has been chatted up by me for so long that it was compared to vaporware products TextMate 2 and Duke Nukem Forever. I even allowed the code name MoneyNukem to be bantered about until Duke Nukem Forever actually shipped—and sucked. Then I wanted nothing to do with it.

So what happened to delay MoneyWell 2.0 for so long? To be honest, the 2.0 release shipped two-and-a half years ago—it was just called MoneyWell 1.4 at the time. And then I shipped 3.0 fourteen months later, but called it 1.5. What we are working on now could legitimately be called MoneyWell 4.0. The problem is that I promised too much in 1.0 and felt guilty charging for an update. I delayed incrementing the major version number, which I consider to be a major business mistake.

No matter what we call it, the new version of MoneyWell is late. Why? Because we started it late. The finish wasn't delayed, the start was. Coding on 2.0 didn't begin until October 2010 due to delays caused by our syncing issues and MoneyWell for iPhone, and our current team wasn't coding 100 percent on 2.0 until December. The complete design-development-ship cycle should stay under one year—not too bad for what has amounted to a massive rewrite of my original code. I'm not trying to minimize or excuse the fact that MoneyWell 2.0 has taken too long to deliver. I allowed too many other activities get in the way of building 2.0, which resulted in the release being delayed.

So I need to thank John Gruber and his Daring Fireball post that led me to read the Black Hockey Jesus post, which allowed me to write another blog entry on my own site without a delay. Once MoneyWell 2.0 ships—and it will ship—I'll try to avoid any delays in writing a postmortem blog entry on the project cycle. I think there are lessons to be learned from my mistakes and that is why I started this blog.

Peace.

Making Money Is Not My Focus

I was incredibly inspired by reading Pixar's Brad Bird on Fostering Innovation (tip of the hat to Wil Shipley). There's so much packed into these nine simple rules, but the final one really struck a chord with me: Making Money Can't Be Your Focus.

I truly believe that rule and try to live by it every day. My little software company was created to make a significant difference in people's lives. For the past 30 years, I have made a decent living writing software, but this time around I wanted to make an impact as well. I do get frustrated when sales are low or when we haven't finished the new major release that will bring in higher revenues, but not because I'm dying to buy a yacht and retire: I want, no, I need to fund more cool software development. It's part of my DNA now.

What we create at No Thirst Software should be seen by our customers as amazing software and no matter how good it is today, I don't feel it's anywhere near amazing. There is so much we can do and so much potential to give people tools that can change their financial future that I physically ache for progress some days. This is why I've reinvested so much of our profits to grow this company even though the risk factor is high. I know that by myself I will never get everything accomplished that I have planned.

We have three major software releases scheduled for 2011 and years of ideas beyond those swimming around in my head. The day I start doing this for the money is the day I need to hand the company over to someone who still has passion for the product. Luckily, I can't imagine that day right now.

Peace.

Mac App Store - Month One

I've waited to blog about the Mac App Store because I didn't want to jump to conclusions based on just a few days of sales. We're now at the end of the first fiscal month for Apple's newest software store and I'm ready to reveal my findings. Let's start with a graph, because everyone likes a good graphic.

Above is a chart of unit sales for MoneyWell from AppFigures.com, a resource that I highly recommend for tracking your sales. The bar chart shows unit sales and the line charts show ranking. The labels aren't perfect, so I'll explain them. The red line is Top Paid Overall (units), the green line is Top Grossing Overall (profit), the violet and blue lines are Top Paid and Top Grossing in the Finance category, respectively.

For the tl;dr crowd, my overall opinion of the Mac App Store is positive. I think it's already a great resource for increased sales and it will only become better as more Mac users migrate to 10.6.6 and are trained to use it exclusively when OS X Lion ships.

MAS or No MAS

My biggest concern selling my apps on the Mac App Store had to do with cash flow. I recently expanded my development team and we are shoulder deep in MoneyWell 2.0 development, so overhead is up. With a new major release comes a need for newer, prettier pixels, so I've also had to set aside cash to pay a graphic artist. I couldn't afford to have my normal direct sales bank deposits, which occur four times a month, to turn into a 60-day wait for income. I won't receive a dime from Apple on the sales you see in the above chart until the end of February. That's just way too long to go without any revenue when employees and contractors haven't signed up for the same two-month delay.

Besides losing cash flow, I also wanted to be able to compare direct and app store sales. Running both throughout the month of January was very revealing. My direct sales are right on target with my projections for January based on MoneyWell sales in the previous two years. Unit sales from the Apple store are three to four times our direct sales. The two stores seem to be capturing customers independent of each other. Selling my apps through the Mac App Store has almost tripled my overall revenue. I'm not complaining at all.

What's more remarkable is that these sales are all without any significant promotion. I sent one mass mailing to my customer base announcing that we were in the Mac App Store and explained how upgrades and migrations would work, but I did no outside sales promotions. MoneyWell was picked as a Staff Favorite, which lasted for about a week, but the spikes in sales towards the middle and end of the month were strictly from more people finding us in the store.

The biggest boost appears to have come from reviews. MoneyWell received half a dozen 4- and 5-star reviews right before the first spike and doubled those reviews by the second spike. I have not adjusted the price at all; it still sells for $49.99 on and off the Mac App Store. There was a Debt Quencher sale, but that doesn't appear to have a direction relation to the MoneyWell spikes.

It's pretty easy to spot when I offered a limited $4.99 sale price of Debt Quencher on the chart above. What's harder to spot is the next transition from $14.99 back to $4.99. The last three bars show the new price point, which will probably become the new retail price. You can see that there is growth, but without a promotion that has a deadline for that discount, there was no spike. Here's a chart showing Debt Quencher profit.

I'm currently earning less money selling Debt Quencher at the discounted price but I'm confident that sales will continue to rise at this lower price point. Even with the additional sales from the Mac App Store, this will probably never be a product that will cover the company overhead. Later this year, we plan to give Debt Quencher a revised UI and additional features to see if we can push this lower-priced product higher on the Top Paid chart. The goal is to use this impulse purchase product to lead people to our more profitable MoneyWell software.

Topping the Charts

What's most exciting to me is MoneyWell's rank in the overall top grossing list. We've been staying in the top 40 apps and have hit 20 as our peak. This means we get just a bit more visibility when people are looking around the store—the top 30 or 40 show without even scrolling down the page. I think we have an advantage over apps like games because the Finance category fits all its apps on a single page without needing further breakdown or navigation.

The magic number for visibility on the Top Charts page seems to be twelve, which is the number of apps that show before you have to click See All > and navigate deeper. My guess is that those apps are seeing higher sales by a factor of ten—or the square of that if Pixelmator is representative of the high-end revenue. Let's just say that my goal with our 2.0 release is to break into the dirty dozen.

Going Forward

My strategy is to continue to sell direct as well as on the Mac App Store. I see no reason to give up an extra 25% of my profit just to steer customers to the Apple solution. My direct sales through my FastSpring store are highly automated and don't require my intervention to process them. I can also run promotions and bundles on my site that can't be done through the Mac App Store. If my customers prefer to get their software updates from Apple, I certainly won't discourage them from using the other store.

It's really the best of both worlds: My existing sales are staying at projected levels and Mac App Store sales are even higher with an upward trend. If at some point my direct sales drop to near zero levels because everyone prefers shopping in Apple's house, I'll think about turning off my back end. Until then, I'll offer the same upgrades for my products no matter where my customers shop.

Peace.

Building a Bigger Indie

No Thirst Software LLC has hired its third full-time employee: As of November 22, 2010, Danny Greg joins Michael Fey on my development team. Danny is best know for his work at Realmac Software creating Little Snapper. Here at No Thirst, Danny will be joining us in developing MoneyWell 2.0, which will keep us all very busy for the next few months. After that, our team will shift to development of our MoneyWell iPad release. Now you know one reason I've added two developers this year.

It doesn't matter what kind of company you are running, it's always hard to manage growth. The decision to bring on staff is never trivial and should always be done carefully. My previous company, a dot.com in the late 90's, grew quickly to over ten employees and my company before that expanded to a staff of over 30 people. The latter is still around and doing well and the former popped along with the bubble in 2000. I learned a lot from both of these experiences.

The most important lesson was to take my time picking new additions to a team. The actual phrase I was taught was slow to hire, quick to fire. It means that you should really get to know who you are bringing into a company before you extend a job offer and you should let someone go the instant you know they are not working out. That may sound harsh, but if you made a mistake hiring someone, you're hurting your company by keeping that person around. You're also cheating your new hire from finding a job that fits him or her more perfectly. Don't compound one mistake with another. Being in charge means making the tough choices.

If you have a small company with limited resources, a single interview is not enough to make an important decision like this. In fact, I don't think any company—no matter how big its bank account—should treat hiring casually. Before finalizing your decision, you have to find out how this person ticks and what motivates performance. In my case, I need developers who have a passion for the products I am creating. I refuse to micromanage my teammates, so they need to know how to work autonomously. My job is to inspire, not to babysit. I also want people who won't back down from a fight if they think I'm doing it wrong. I learned a long time ago that I am no where near perfect and I make plenty of stupid mistakes. It's best if I surround myself with people who inspire me to continue to learn and grow.

Before hiring both Michael and Danny, I spent time getting to know each of them. Michael was an early MoneyWell customer that also turned out to be a developer. We talked a bit about development during a small sideline project he was coding and then I was able to spend time with him at a developer conference, WWDC '09, and really get to know him. I discovered what motivates him and why he loves creating software. I also watched him as he designed and released a fairly complex iPhone app for his previous employer. In late 2009, Michael was in the middle of a job change and I was able to bring him on board in January of this year.

Danny and I were introduced when he wrote a review of MoneyWell about three years ago. He and I later chatted during a podcast were were both on hosted by Steve "Scotty" Scott, now the producer of iDTV, which later lead to us starting our own podcast called cocoaFusion:. I paid attention to the projects he managed and the products he released and we talked about development outside of our podcast. Danny was never shy about telling me when he thought some code of mine could use improving or if a product was in serious need of better pixel dressing. I actually tried to coax him away from Realmac Software around the time I hired Michael, but the work environment there is fantastic and he could not be swayed. This time, I threw in a healthy dose of guilt with my offer to get him on board.

The bottom line: I knew who I was getting. There was no doubt about intelligence, work ethic, communication skills, or motivation with these two.

I applied this same process when I hired Tamara Crowe as our contract support person. She was a MoneyWell customer who did an amazing job of sharing and helping on our help center discussions. Tamara had better answers than me some of the time and came across as friendly and knowledgable in her posts. I chatted with her several times before offering her a position and knew by that time that I was not making a mistake.

It was a bit harder when I hired Kevin Kalle to do contract design work for us because I didn't have much time to get to know him. He was referred to me by designers I respected and we began by working together on a trial basis. I explained up front that I wanted him to be strong and opinionated and made sure that he was comfortable with some friction in our working relationship.

For me, the give and take is critical. The best solutions come out of a blending of ideas mixed via a friendly struggle. I hire people smarter than me with different skill sets to offset my weaknesses. I never assume that I have all the answers or can see from every perspective and I listen to everyone's opinions. Conversely, my team knows that I have a very definite vision for what this company is creating and I won't compromise that vision. They also understand that the final decisions need to be mine.

I'm incredibly excited about the team I've assembled and can't wait to show everyone what we are creating. As great as 2010 was for my little indie group, 2011 is going to be even better.

Peace.

P.S.: Stay tuned for my follow-up posts where I'll discuss the financial and logistic concerns of adding employees.

Mac App Store Mania

It's only been a few days since Apple announced the Mac App Store and there are already predictions of rampant software piracy, Apple locking down future version of OS X to only App Store sales, and price drops to 99 cents. Let's calm down and take a step back people.

First of all, pirates will be pirates and if they want to crack your software, they will. Apple's copy protection will be broken just like every other system out there. This does not mean that your sales will drop. The honest truth is that the dishonest people using pirated software wouldn't be your customers anyway. I've lost track of how many illegal download sites display MoneyWell as one of their offerings, but I also don't lose sleep over this problem.

As to Apple shutting down all sales outside the Mac App Store, can we give them time to get it up and running before we start blaming them for something they haven't done yet? I'm willing to give Apple the benefit of the doubt on this one.

Now on to the topic that is a huge issue for me: discount pricing. I can't stand the dollar store pricing on the iOS App Store and it shows because MoneyWell is at the $9.99 price point even though many of its competitors are lower. I think it's worth even more than 10 bucks and the price is more likely go up instead of down as we add features down the road. Our Mac version currently sells for $49.99 and that price will go up when we ship our 2.0 release in early 2011. I'm also not planning to lower it when we start selling on the Mac App Store.

Why? Because our software is worth the price I charge. I also owe it to my customer base to make sure my company is well-funded and continues to provide excellent software and support in the future. The profit curve is not negatively affected by higher prices until you are significantly out of the range of your competition—and by competition, I mean software that matches your software in quality. I've seen too many companies go out of business because they try to compete on price.

I truly believe that the Mac App Store is going to increase sales for every quality Mac product on the market, but we don't know by how much. Assuming that you can cut your price in half because your volume will increase by a factor of five or ten is insane. High volume sales are never guaranteed and you may need the cash reserves you make from an initial sales spike for long term development projects or an onslaught of support.

Just because software is made up of electronic bits doesn't mean that it has any less value than computer hardware or or other electronics. There's an argument that computers have gone down in price and software should do the same, but companies like Apple aren't making less money on each computer sold. In fact, most of the time they work to increase their margins as manufacturing costs drop. Apple doesn't have $51 billion in the bank because they cut their profits in half.

There's an opposing argument which states we can charge a fair price for software because we provide lasting value. What do you pay for lunch or dinner? How about that trip to Starbucks? What's your ROI for that meal or latte and how long does that "value" stay with you? Think about that for a minute. Got a visual? Good.

If I invest in a software tool, I expect it to hang around for more than a day or two and to continue to get a return on my investment of 12-18 months before spending more money on it. Will I pay $20, $40 or $60 for software I use several times a week throughout this timeframe? Definitely. It has real value. I don't buy many games, so most of the software I invest in is either saving me time, improving my communications, or making me money. If I'm using it constantly, I want to use the highest quality software I can get. It should be well-crafted, rarely crash and never lose my data. I'm happy to pay for quality. Building excellent software is hard work and we deserve to get paid for our efforts.

Let's stick to our guns and price our software fairly so we can prosper and continue to give great service to our customers. Let's earn some profits and invest in training to improve our coding and business skills. Let's build some company bank accounts so we can afford to expand our indie companies beyond simple solo acts. Who knows—if we stop tripping over each other to get to the bargain basement—we actually may end up with several hundred more indie developers who can afford to quit their day jobs.

Peace.

If Not You, Then Who?

Running an indie software company is an emotional roller coaster. Some days the code is flowing like water out of a fire hose and you're breaking sales records while other days are filled with blank stares at a debugger and a strange fear that your website must be broken because no one's buying your software. It can be a struggle to keep pushing forward in the face of bugs and support requests. You work your butt off to produce a product update only to be met with jeers and complaints, "You wrecked my software! It's slow/crashing/ugly now" or, "You gave us features a, b and c but I asked for f and g almost two years ago. Why can't you finish your software?"

Okay, it's not like that very often, but if you're like me, a hundred compliments are negated by one complaint. If you're not like me, be happy you dodged a bullet.

MoneyWell is an especially tricky product when it comes to making people happy. Personal finance software is very… personal. Everyone has their own way of managing their finances and no single tool will satisfy every need. I built MoneyWell for one person: me. There were certain needs I had that weren't being met by my current tool, Quicken, and no other software I tested was idiot-proof enough to help me control my spending. So like a good programmer, I wrote my own. When designing the feature set, I did consider if others would like certain abilities, but in the end I based all my decisions on what worked best for me. That may sound selfish, but I've been in companies where software was designed by committees and frankly, it always sucked.

When releasing version 1.0 of a product, flaws and missing features are often forgiven, "It's a one-dot-oh release, I'm sure it will get better." But as your customer base grows and your product matures, the slings and arrows come at a faster pace and hit closer to vital organs. You might start to doubt your vision or struggle to hear your internal voice over the din of the crowd. You might start to doubt your ability to succeed based on what you have planned or fall prey to feeling overwhelmed.

I've ridden the roller coaster plenty of times over the past four years. There were times when I wondered if my design was correct or if I even knew what the hell I was doing. I'm no financial genius so who am I to tell others how to run their books?

What struck me recently and inspired me to keep on the path was a simple question: if not you, then who? Are there any software products out today that I would use instead of my own? No, there are not. And why not? Why do I still like my finance software better than anything else?

There are millions of software developers in the world and many are better or smarter coders than me, but none are me. None of them have had the same financial failures I have had or experienced the same exact frustrations. No single person has gone through all the same life trials as I have. I'm the only one who has lived my life and that makes me unique. My blend of skills and experiences gives me an edge for the software I'm passionate about.

I'll never write the next great word processor because I don't have a burning desire to build it. I've struggled with debt and blown budgets, not page formatting issues. My software comes from my history. It is better because I care about it and how it can improve my life. My greatest desire is that what I create can also help millions of others as well.

You too have a history that gives you a unique perspective on a need. Your life experiences have molded you to see things that others would overlook. What could you contribute to a software design? What do you desire in a product? What are you passionate about?

In other words, don't build what others have envisioned—create from within yourself. Your design process will be much more enjoyable and the final product will scream "you." This will mean that you'll have to endure complaints and say "no" more than you like to enhancement requests, but you will love your work because it feels organic. And even if it doesn't make you rich, it might make you happy.

Here are the rules in summary:

1. Seek knowledge from others, but make decisions from within — don't let the noise drown out your thoughts
2. Ignore the naysayers — haters are gonna hate and there's nothing you can do about it
3. Believe in yourself — trust that what you have to give to the world is unique and worthwhile
4. Put passion before a paycheck — doing work you love trumps more money any day of the week and twice on Sunday

Every so often, I get lost and let the one or two negatives swallow up all the good creation happening in my life. It's easy to feel discouraged because your software is in use by hundreds instead of thousands or thousands instead of millions. It's easy to feel overwhelmed because you don't have the time to see your vision in full bloom. It's easy to give up and let someone else deal with creating the solution, but don't do it. You'll be cheating the world out of an experience only you can provide.

Peace.

Indie Multitasking

As much as we'd like to think that we are capable of multitasking, we are truly more like an iPad than an iMac. We may have a dozen or more things we have in our queue to do at the moment, but we can only focus on one task at a time. To multitask and actually get two tasks done at once, you need to be two people.

For an indie software company, this means taking a large step and hiring someone—either contract or full time.

This is by no means a trivial decision, but eventually one that has to be addressed. At some point the long days and late nights start to affect the quality of your work or destroy your personal life. And whether you believe it or not, sleep is critical to your health.

Adding staff is hard for several reasons:

• It costs money


• It requires trust and flexibility


• It requires management


• It requires collaboration tools and processes

Let's take a look at each of these a little more.

Cash Flow

As an indie developer, you probably aren't rolling in extra cash that you can just flash and get more staff. You have to be careful about raising your monthly burn rate. The flip side is that you may be hurting cash flow by doing tech support or marketing when you should be writing code and shipping for-fee updates—I consider myself somewhat of an expert in this type of mistake.

Be smart and take baby steps. Instead of hiring a full-time person, you can pay hourly for contract labor. Last year I contracted with Matt Long to help me with MoneyWell for iPhone development, and recently I hired Ash Ponders, who bills me for the hours he logs keeping our support queue well maintained.

The nice part about contract labor is that you can throttle your spending more with them than you could a salaried employee.

Trust and Flexibility

After I contracted with Matt, I began to think that the amount of code that needed to get written at No Thirst Software was much more than I could do in a timely manner and too expensive as contract work. There was a huge potential for revenue from an iPhone release and a paid upgrade for a 2.0 version of MoneyWell but the overhead of running this company was cutting into my coding time and my schedules were slipping badly. If I had a full-time developer besides myself, I could ship these new releases sooner, which would be a huge win for both the company and our customers.

I've hired developers many times before in my previous companies and I knew the pitfalls. Hiring a skilled developer is important, but even more important is hiring someone you trust and can work with. I've hired prima donnas that code well but are impossible to work with and nice guys that really can't produce the code needed—neither hire is good.

I like to hire developers that I've already spent time with and have learned about how they code and think. That meant my list of potential employees was very short. To shorten my list even more: all of them had good jobs already and didn't have a strong desire to jump ship.

The stars aligned for me and one of them became available at the perfect time. I hired Michael Fey (a/k/a the infamous MrRooni who started a rumor about spotting Steve Jobs at WWDC 2009) as my first full-time employee in January 2010.

Check this out: I first knew Michael as an early MoneyWell customer who was generous and helped out by answering questions on our support forum. I later found out he was a Mac developer and then was lucky enough to spend some time with him at WWDC and really get to know him. This is one more reason why you need to socialize and network. You never know if you are going to meet a future employee or employer. Needless to say, I'm thrilled to have someone who knows our products, is a skilled developer and is joy to work with on a daily basis.

Now, this is where the flexibility comes into play. When you bring in someone else to do the work you once did in your isolated "me" universe, you'll find that they'll do the same tasks a bit differently that you did. If you can't deal with that fact, you can't have employees and you can't ever expand your company. You have to be flexible and accept that your way isn't the only way to get something done. I've learned something from everyone I've ever worked with—without exception.

Managing People and Resources

The minute you add any person or service to your operation, you become a manager. It's your job to steer the ship and control the future of your company. This doesn't mean that you have all the answers, it just means you have to make the final decision. With employees comes payroll. With contract work comes more payables and tax paperwork. There is overhead to even adding one person.

There's also mentoring and training. If you fail to properly mentor your new hire in the company processes or train your support technician in your software, you can't expect that person to perform well. This is your primary job as a leader. and ignoring it is like planting a garden but failing to feed and water the plants. All your initial effort will wither on the vine.

Tools and Processes

Before you expand beyond a one-body shop, you have to invest some time in collaborative tools and processes. For an indie software company, the three biggies are support, bug/feature tracking and source code management.

Email-only support systems are incredibly hard to maintain with more than one person. Did that email get answered? Was there a response? Who's checking for new emails? Has this customer had similar issues before?

We use Tender to manage our support because it gives us a way to coordinate and assign support. It also suggests Knowledge Base answers when customers post questions so some customer get immediate, automatic support. It also has custom queues that notify specific people in our company when help is needed. This way, our frontline person can get emails for all support issues and the rest of us only see what has been escalated. Additionally, the discussions can be public—the customer can choose to make it private—so other customers tend to jump in and help. I'll take all the help I can get and often, our customers know better answers than we do because they have personal experience with the question.

For bug/feature tracking, we chose Lighthouse, which happens to work well with Tender because ENTP makes and runs both. What I needed most in issue tracking was a quick way to create requests when customers report bugs or asked for features. Because Lighthouse and Tender integrate perfectly, creating a ticket in Lighthouse requires only a couple of clicks upon reading the Tender discussion post.

There are many different needs for both these tasks and you may need a more intense issue tracking system. I like to avoid complexity as much as possible and that was a driving force in my choices.

Picking a source control management system is like choosing an operating system or development framework. You're not going to convince a .NET guy that Cocoa is better any more than you can tell someone who loves Mercurial that Bazaar is better. It really doesn't matter what you choose, but pick a distributed system that has a cloud presence. I used Subversion, then switched to Bazaar and finally ended up with Git.

The primary reason for going with git was Github. I had to collaborate with other developers and they were already using Github so I was flexible and adapted. Once I learned the (sometimes weird) ways of git, I was productive and happy. Moreover, my team was able to work together easily. I needed four developers in three different parts of the country to work out of the same repository and Github made that happen.

Galactic Headquarters

The Galactic Headquarters of No Thirst Software LLC are in my home office located in The Woodlands, Texas. My full-time developer is near Syracuse, New York, contract work is done from yet another state, graphic design is coming from Europe and Ash is doing support from who know's where on the planet. I have to admit to a bit of envy towards my globe trotting support ninja.

My point is that the days of renting office space and hiring employees locally so that they can show up to work in a central location are long gone. It makes no sense financially and only offers a slight collaborative advantage over Skype and video conferencing. When you pick tools or decide on processes, make sure you think global.

We have office chatter over Twitter, share documents on Dropbox, manage projects on Lighthouse, review support issues on Tender, share source code on Github and hold meetings on Skype or iChat—our work day revolves around information stored on or shared over the internet. I've never run a company this efficiently with such a small amount of overhead. It's a great time to grow your operation and expand beyond yourself.

Peace.

The Computer for the Rest of Them

If you're a software developer, designer, or a high-tech computer user—Apple doesn't care about you.

Oh sure, Apple wants you to write, design and create software and products for the Mac, but you are not the target audience for the iPad. I've read so much negative backlash about Apple's latest device and all I can think is, "These guys just don't get it."

As software developers, we thrive on complexity. We have dozens of applications lit up in our Docks. As I'm writing this, I have 20 applications running, each with one or more windows open in four virtual workspaces using Spaces.

I'm a geek. I love this stuff. I even know all the keyboard shortcuts for switching apps and spaces and windows. I am a software developer with an engineer's brain. I am not the person Apple was thinking about when they built the iPad.

So who did they build it for?

The rest of them.

Have you ever watched someone who is not a geek use a computer? I have. My father-in-law lives with us and I'm his support tech, so I get an up close and personal view of the anti-geek at work. Here's a typical session for him:

• He clicks on Mail to look at his email;


• He reads a few emails and closes the window with the red dot in the upper left corner;


• Then he clicks on Safari and looks at some websites in one window;


• when he's done, he closes that window with a click in the upper left corner.

He doesn't quit any application. As many times as I've told him that he can simply hold down the Command key and press 'Q' to quit, he clicks the red dot. He doesn't try to multitask, he doesn't understand overlapping windows, and he gets very confused when he moves a window by accident and it doesn't show up well on his screen.

When I showed him the video of the iPad though, he said, "I'd love one of those. It looks so much easier for me to use. My sister could even use one of those."

For my father-in-law and millions of other people, clicking to run an application on the iPad, pressing the Home button to leave it so another application can be run is perfect. Millions of people spend all their time focused on one app. They read email, or browse the web, or live in Facebook, and the iPad gives them exactly what they need to do those tasks. The fast new Apple A4 chip inside makes changing from one task to another quick enough that there is no need for multitasking—especially with people whose eyes glaze over when you start explaining the concept behind running multiple applications.

The fact is: Real people don't try to multitask, so they don't see the iPad lacking this ability.

Personally, I love the idea of the iPad because I do all my RSS feed reading on my iPhone. When I take a break from writing software and working on my computer, I find a comfy place to sit and read on my iPhone. If I can grab my iPad instead, I'll save eyestrain and my iPhone battery while improving my casual time. For me, it's a no-brainer. I want one.

Is the iPad perfect? Nope. I think it needs front-facing video at least, but I do agree with John Brownlee that Apple probably left this out because it would make you look fat. This is the first generation of a new type of computing—the computer for the rest of them. Expect amazing growth in this space over the next couple of years.

Peace.

Indie+Relief: Mac Indie Developers Helping Haiti

I love the Mac developer community for many reasons and Indie+Relief is just one more example of how great it is.

Much thanks to Justin Williams and Garrett Murray for making this happen and to the 150 or so indie developers that are participating. You all rock!

No Thirst Software is participating as well, so tell everyone you know to hold off and buy software tomorrow, Jan. 20, 2010, if they were thinking about doing it anyway and help heal Haiti.

If you don't want software, but still want to help the Haitian people who are suffering from so much death and destruction, you can find a reputable charity by using Charity Navigator.

Peace

Grabbing a One Finger Discount

The Mac developer community is so great because of promotions like this: One Finger Discount.

Daniel Jalkut of Red Sweater Software fame decided that while MacHeist was running its promotion giving away free apps, he would start a simultaneous promotion allowing the rest of us to get in on the buzz. All we had to do was offer a 20 percent discount (Get it? Five finger discount = free so one finger = one fifth or 20 percent).

What does Daniel get out of the deal? Nothing. He's just being a generous member of the Mac Developer Community. So creative, so cool. Way to rock Mr. Jalkut!

Now go buy some software before this deal ends. You'll find MoneyWell and Debt Quencher there as well.

Peace.

Good Enough

My blog posts have been few and far between because I've been facedown in code for MoneyWell 1.5 and the related iPhone release. I have a feeling this won't change anytime soon, but I'm sneaking in a quick post to fill the gap.

This development cycle has been particularly difficult for me because I've had to venture into some uncharted territory. My iPhone development skills are less than expert and MoneyWell 1.5 is my first Leopard application, so the changes to that development are just enough to slow me down slightly.

The combination of acquiring new development knowledge and my tendency to want to do more in a release than is necessary caused several bouts of anxiety and doubt. Stupid questions like, "Can I get all this done in time?" or "Will I get all this working together perfectly?" slice and dice my productivity. My results don't always match up with my vision, which can lead me to mental self-mutilation.

I too often think, "This is not going to be good enough to sell enough so I can continue growing my company." If you haven't guessed yet, I'm borderline insane.

The fact is that there are plenty of indie Mac developers who would kill to be selling enough software to ditch their day job or drop consulting gigs. Additionally, I have probably 20 times more customers than I've had in any other venture I've started. My customer base is, for the most part, very complimentary of our products. This should be indie nirvana but then again... I'm insane, remember.

My "good enough" is most definitely well past a sane developer's good enough. There is no reason to expect a product like MoneyWell to be as full featured as products that have been on the market five to ten years longer or are being designed by teams of developers and designers when I'm still basically a one-man shop. I tend to take every compliment as being too kind and every complaint as being right on target.

Insane.

Software development is iterative. My philosophy matches Apple's: a subset of features should be very well executed and polished; new features won't appear until they can be implemented cleanly; and most people only care about 20 percent of a product's feature set. I could add dozens of new features quickly, but my user interface and flow would suffer and, for me, that isn't good enough.

This philosophy is quite sane.

The insanity comes when I forget that I'm developing software the right way for me: balancing my work and family life while still providing a quality product for my customers. What I have planned for future releases should make 80 percent of our customers ecstatically happy and 20 percent will still wish I had done more sooner no matter what I add to the software. The fact that I don't have every feature I have ever envisioned for MoneyWell finished today shouldn't make me crazy—there should a product timeline for the future.

So, the bottom line is: what I'm doing is good enough to keep my software company growing and the majority of my customer base happy. I don't need to lower my standards but I do need to reassess my expectations of what I can accomplish given that eating and sleep seem to be a necessary evil.

I have already taken steps to offload some support and even brought in help to code MoneyWell for iPhone so it can get finished soon. I should probably have been finishing a 2.0 product instead of a another minor release, but I can't go back in time and retract promises I made. I can only watch my comments and promises for future releases.

If, like me, you're running an indie software company, strive for excellence, polish every detail of your work, but always make sure to enjoy what you're doing. Shipping any software is always better than coding vaporware. Chances are if you truly care about your customers and the software you deliver to them, what you're producing—no matter how shy it is of your ultimate goals—is probably quite good enough.

Peace