Independence

Part of running a business is dealing with your customer’s expectations, and this is no more evident than in the App Store. Alice, Curtis and Jelly chat about how their users expect everything, including particular language support, new services for syncing, and the dreaded Android version… but are all these expectations worth delivering on?

At some stage, it’s entirely possible that you might end up needing to hire a developer to help you finish your project. Alice is considering going down that path with Gus on the Go, so she looks to Curtis and Jelly for advice on how to prepare, what to look for, and what makes for a good contracting experience.

There’s a lot that goes on when launching a new app: marketing, feedback… and watching the sales chart desperately hoping that things go according to plan. Heidi Helen Pilypas and Ish Shabazz join the show to talk about the recent launch of Capsicum, along with all the excitement and horror that ensued.

There are a lot of benefits to doing what you love as an indie, but there are also many things that you don’t consider when you try to turn your hobby into a career. Alice, Curtis and Jelly look at the things that blindsided them when turning their interests into products, and honestly ask themselves… do they still love what they do?

While they ring in the new year, Alice, Curtis and Jelly look back at 2018, with all its highlights, failures, lessons… and how it differed from everything they’d expected back when it began.

If you’re selling apps, odds are you’re going to go down the freemium route: offering the app for free, but charging for something within the app itself. Of course, this business model comes with a whole bunch of ins and outs that you have to navigate if you want to succeed, so Alice, Curtis and Jelly look at how they’ve managed their apps, what’s worked for them, and what’s failed miserably.

Startups and independents have a lot in common, but they differ in a lot of ways too, and the approach one takes to creating a product doesn’t necessarily serve the other particularly well. Alice, Curtis and Jelly compare their approaches to the typical startup, and figure out what they could potentially apply to their own businesses, and what to avoid at all costs.

We all need connections with other people, and so much about creating a product involves being in touch with the community of people who love it. Alice, Curtis and Jelly look at how fostering a community around their products could be beneficial… and a lot of work.

Change is inevitable, but unless you bring the people using your product along for the ride, you’re going to find that at least some of them are going to get left behind. Alice, Curtis and Jelly take a look at changes they’ve made to their apps, how they’ve approached them in the past, and ways to mitigate problems.

It can be time-consuming and difficult to get good feedback from people, but it can make a world of difference for the finished product. Alice is starting to think about how to approach beta testing with Gus on the Go, so Curtis and Jelly try to share their experiences to help make her job just a little easier.

Software, unlike other products, tends to change and evolve over time: features are added and changed—sometimes removed—and the way an app looks when it first launches can be very different after a few years. Alice, Curtis and Jelly reflect on the changes they’ve made to their apps over time, and how they’ve tried to take their users along for the journey.

As creators, it’s sometimes hard to tell where you end and your product begins. This gets compounded by the fact that customers often confuse you with your work, which can have some significant consequences. Alice, Curtis and Jelly dig deep to determine why it is that they associate their products with their own worth, what the consequences are, and what they do about it.

Introducing your product to new people is difficult, as any app developer can likely tell you, and while there are plenty of typical approaches that everyone tries, they don’t always succeed. Alice, Curtis and Jelly spend time looking at the techniques they’ve used for acquiring users, how they’ve approached it, and what’s worked for them so far.

Failure is an inevitable part of and indie’s journey, but sometimes the looming weight of it is enough to negatively affect the decisions you make. Jelly’s been feeling it a bit of late, so he, Alice and Curtis take a look at what failure looks like for them, and how they deal with it.

There’s a lot of theories out there about how feasible the Android market is for independent apps, and most of it isn’t exactly positive. To help cut through the noise, Russell Ivanovic joins Alice and Curtis to talk about his journey with Pocket Casts, what it’s like walking the line between platforms, and whether it’s even possible to find success with an Android app.

Where do ideas come from? Is every idea worth building into a full-fledged product? Is it better to have many projects, or fewer? Alice, Curtis and Jelly take a long hard look at where their projects were born, the projects they’ve thrown out, and everything in between.

Sometimes it can be really easy to work through a day and then keep it going until late at night, either because we love what we’re doing, or because we’re feeling pressure to succeed. Alice, Curtis and Jelly look at their own tendencies to put in the extra hours, and how it affects their overall balance in the long term.

Every one approaches their day just a little differently. From how you plan your upcoming months (and years) of work, all the way down to managing your day-to-day approach, the way you plan your work is going to affect how you actually do your work. Alice, Curtis and Jelly look at each of their approaches, explain why it works for them, and look at what they’ve learned about how they schedule things over the years.

Even as an indie, you’ll find that you need to make a bunch of decisions around what you do with the money you make: do you reinvest it right back into the business, or do you take the money and run? Alice, Jelly and Curtis look at the individual—and very, very different—approaches they each take, and find that the answer isn’t as easy as just one or the other.

Every app is different, and the approach to marketing that app is different too. From word of mouth, to building communities, our hosts discuss their own experiences with marketing their apps and how it’s changed over time.