Under the Radar

00:00:00 ◼   ► Welcome to Under the Radar, a show about independent iOS app development. I'm Marco Armet.

00:00:05 ◼   ► And I'm David Smith. Under the Radar is never longer than 30 minutes, so let's get started.

00:00:10 ◼   ► So today we wanted to start what is largely going to be a kind of a two-part series about,

00:00:16 ◼   ► I guess, more of the financial business side of being an independent app maker. And specifically

00:00:25 ◼   ► we're going to be talking through viewing your apps in two different lenses. One we're

00:00:34 ◼   ► going to talk about today is kind of viewing your apps as though you're creating annuities

00:00:39 ◼   ► that pay you back over time. And then next week we're going to be talking a little bit

00:00:44 ◼   ► about viewing your apps as sort of assets that you're building up for the purposes of

00:00:49 ◼   ► selling down the road. I think this is one of those topics that is very much outside

00:00:57 ◼   ► of the typical developer-y kind of topics and the kind of things that we would normally

00:01:03 ◼   ► discuss in the sense that we're not talking about Xcode, we're not talking about design.

00:01:07 ◼   ► There's going to be a WDC session about how to sell your business.

00:01:11 ◼   ► Yeah. This is a topic that is very much, this is like a business topic. We could be making

00:01:17 ◼   ► anything. The fact that it's an application is in some ways kind of immaterial. But I

00:01:21 ◼   ► know for myself, when I started off doing this, I gave no thought to these types of

00:01:29 ◼   ► topics at all. I was focused entirely on the development side of things. I was focused

00:01:33 ◼   ► on the design side of things and the marketing to some degree. But thinking of these kind

00:01:38 ◼   ► of broader business things wasn't really something that was on my radar at all. And now, whatever,

00:01:44 ◼   ► eight and a half years later, it is something that I think about more and I realize the

00:01:48 ◼   ► importance of thinking through, mostly just because depending on what you want your business

00:01:55 ◼   ► to look like, how you want it to pay you both now and in the future, what your ultimate

00:02:02 ◼   ► goals are, will impact the types of apps that make sense for you to build.

00:02:08 ◼   ► Different apps have very different revenue curves. If you make a paid up front app, you

00:02:14 ◼   ► are far more likely to have a big burst of revenue at once and then it will fall off

00:02:19 ◼   ► fairly dramatically. If you have free with ad or free with in-app purchase application,

00:02:26 ◼   ► you're more likely to have this slow, hopefully growth of revenue that is fairly stable over

00:02:33 ◼   ► time or at least shifts in these kind of more seasonal waves. Depending on what you like

00:02:43 ◼   ► there will make a big difference.

00:02:44 ◼   ► For the purpose of today, what I'm going to talk about to start off with, and this got

00:02:48 ◼   ► started for me by, I've been doing a lot of work updating my app audiobooks, which I think

00:02:53 ◼   ► I've mentioned a few times over the last few episodes. As part of this update is the realization

00:03:01 ◼   ► that I haven't done any work on this app, Realist, really, for about 18 months, which

00:03:07 ◼   ► is not a good idea, isn't great. It is because other opportunities have presented themselves.

00:03:12 ◼   ► I've been doing much more work on the health and fitness side of things recently in this

00:03:15 ◼   ► app that for a while was like my bread and butter with the thing that was paying my mortgage

00:03:20 ◼   ► each month. It kind of had fallen a bit to the side. But as a result, I got this opportunity

00:03:26 ◼   ► to have some really interesting data about, of course I did, I made a spreadsheet. I took

00:03:32 ◼   ► a look at just one, two or three, it's fine. I don't have a problem, I can stop anytime.

00:03:41 ◼   ► I took a look at the revenue of this app over the last 18 months because one of the things

00:03:46 ◼   ► that I've always been curious about is what happens to an app when you stop working on

00:03:51 ◼   ► it, when you stop maintaining it, when you stop marketing it, when you stop doing anything

00:03:54 ◼   ► with it. What does that actually look like? Because in the back of my mind, I've always

00:03:59 ◼   ► had this thought of sales won't immediately drop to zero. That's just not the reality

00:04:06 ◼   ► because I go for weeks or months between updates typically. You usually don't let them go out

00:04:12 ◼   ► to 18 months, but you kind of get the sense that over time, sales will likely fall. If

00:04:18 ◼   ► they don't, stop working on it. If doing nothing makes your revenue go up, do nothing, that's

00:04:23 ◼   ► awesome, but that's not realistic. What I did for audiobooks is I took a look over the

00:04:28 ◼   ► last 18 months and I looked at what the revenue curve looked like for this app with no maintenance,

00:04:35 ◼   ► no anything, it's just been sitting on the app store. The app makes its money from advertising

00:04:39 ◼   ► and to a very small degree, some in-app purchases for some kind of premium books. What was interesting

00:04:46 ◼   ► to me is that the curve that the revenue took matched pretty closely to kind of an exponential

00:04:52 ◼   ► decay curve, like I said, around with some best fit lines and things. Essentially, what

00:04:57 ◼   ► it meant is the sales went down by half a percent, I think it was, per day, sort of

00:05:07 ◼   ► compounding. Say for argument's sake, the app had been selling for $100 a day and then

00:05:16 ◼   ► I stopped working on it. The next day, it would lose 50 cents in revenue and the next

00:05:19 ◼   ► day 49.8 cents and then 49.5 cents and so on. It loses less each day because there's

00:05:28 ◼   ► less from it. That curve of about a half a percent a day seemed to match fairly closely

00:05:35 ◼   ► to it, which meant that obviously as it falls down, you start losing less and less per day

00:05:42 ◼   ► and it almost starts to stabilize and level out. Obviously, it's still losing as it

00:05:48 ◼   ► goes but it gets slower. That was really interesting to me because that number and that multiplier

00:05:55 ◼   ► is I'm sure very variable based on a lot of things, but it's instructive to think

00:05:58 ◼   ► about how an app's revenue will almost certainly have that kind of a decay curve. The slope

00:06:08 ◼   ► of it and the steepness of it will change, but that's a really helpful tool for me

00:06:12 ◼   ► as I think about apps because now I have some data to back up this notion that I've always

00:06:19 ◼   ► had that in many ways, the way business that I like to build is I want to have a steady,

00:06:26 ◼   ► even income from my applications that in an ideal world requires a relatively small amount

00:06:33 ◼   ► of constant maintenance and input. I'm coming from a background where I used to do consulting

00:06:37 ◼   ► where all of my income was prepaid in the sense that I have a contract with someone

00:06:44 ◼   ► that says I'm going to work for them for 80 hours and they're going to pay me $100

00:06:51 ◼   ► an hour, so they're going to pay me $8,000 and that's the contract and that's the

00:06:55 ◼   ► most I'll ever make from that project and it's all prepaid. And shifting to a world

00:07:00 ◼   ► where everything's postpaid, where I do all this work for nothing essentially, I release

00:07:07 ◼   ► the app and then hopefully it pays me back over time. And in many ways, that's the

00:07:11 ◼   ► same kind of thing that in the financial world which you'd call something like an annuity,

00:07:16 ◼   ► which is where you take a large sum of money and you give it to a bank or an investment

00:07:21 ◼   ► institution and they pay you an amount of money back each month that you're shifting

00:07:29 ◼   ► the risk for them generating that money onto them and you're getting a steady stream

00:07:33 ◼   ► of income. And that model for what an application is, I find is really kind of nice because

00:07:39 ◼   ► you get the sense of my goal is to build up a broad diversified pool of these little income

00:07:45 ◼   ► streams that each individual one is kind of slowly decaying over time and my job is to

00:07:52 ◼   ► I can increase or reduce the degree to which they're decaying or in some case hopefully

00:07:59 ◼   ► grow them by putting in work, but if I don't, if I want to go on vacation or if I get distracted

00:08:05 ◼   ► or things happen, my income will very slowly decay over time, but in general we'll keep

00:08:11 ◼   ► going and we'll have a pretty long runway. And I think this was actually before Under

00:08:18 ◼   ► the Radar, but back when I remember talking about it on my old show, Developing Perspective,

00:08:22 ◼   ► where there was a period of time a couple years ago where I had to take for a variety

00:08:27 ◼   ► of personal reasons, I had to take about six or so weeks off of work basically, and it

00:08:34 ◼   ► was lovely that during the course of that my income didn't fall off dramatically.

00:08:39 ◼   ► It wasn't like all of a sudden if I'd been a consultant that would have been a really

00:08:42 ◼   ► big problem to suddenly just not have any income. And so instead my income fell and

00:08:47 ◼   ► it kind of slowly decayed, but I still had this kind of annuity that was paying me back.

00:08:54 ◼   ► And so I love that, and so what I do now is I think I structure my business around that.

00:08:58 ◼   ► That's why I have so many apps, that's why I have so many of these little streams

00:09:01 ◼   ► coming in in the hopes that kind of building that layer cake that will average out to something

00:09:07 ◼   ► that is somewhat dependable and somewhat reliable.

00:09:09 ◼   ► I love the idea that you're living off of background noise, like the asymptotic tails

00:09:17 ◼   ► of all these curves and you just pile enough of them up and here I have a background radiation

00:09:23 ◼   ► income.

00:09:24 ◼   ► That's kind of wonderful.

00:09:28 ◼   ► And that's the thing that is kind of nice about it though, is that it is so often in

00:09:34 ◼   ► software development we kind of get the thing that you hear most often about is the big

00:09:40 ◼   ► impressive first month of the sales of an app or a new update or anything. It's not

00:09:51 ◼   ► easy, but it is more easy to focus on that big exciting part of it, where you do a big

00:09:58 ◼   ► update and everyone loves it and the sales go up and everything's exciting.

00:10:03 ◼   ► But what's more interesting from a lifestyle perspective is what happens six months down

00:10:10 ◼   ► the road with that and is there a way to make your living on that noise, on that slow easy

00:10:18 ◼   ► part down below where you're not having to put in the effort that you did up front.

00:10:27 ◼   ► You need either enough apps for them to decay at a slow enough rate that it still sums up

00:10:36 ◼   ► to a reasonable living, but if you can, or at the very least if you can get close to

00:10:42 ◼   ► that and be hoping that you have some big bursts that build up your reserves and then

00:10:48 ◼   ► you have this noise in the middle that you can live on. It is an approach that seems

00:10:53 ◼   ► to have worked a couple times for me and is something that I think the math checks out.

00:11:00 ◼   ► And that's why I was kind of really excited to have the opportunity to sit down and really

00:11:03 ◼   ► dive into it with audiobooks because now I can kind of prove to myself that the experience

00:11:09 ◼   ► I've been having of this seems to be working for the last couple of years, the math checks

00:11:14 ◼   ► out and it kind of follows a pattern that is somewhat predictable or at least reasonable

00:11:21 ◼   ► to base a livelihood on.

00:11:22 ◼   ► Yeah, it's funny. In other areas of web-based work, things like blogs, the idea of building

00:11:31 ◼   ► up stuff up front that then has a very long tail of revenue over time is not a new idea.

00:11:38 ◼   ► In the blogging world, you have straight up blog ads and things like affiliate links where

00:11:44 ◼   ► you can write a blog post and then it might get a certain number of views from the main

00:11:50 ◼   ► subscribers and active audience that day or that week, but then over the next 10 years

00:11:56 ◼   ► it could be getting search traffic and then you can be slowly building up more and more

00:12:01 ◼   ► ad money over time from this big back catalog that you have. And for me, on my side, I never

00:12:08 ◼   ► made a ton from the ads, but I actually started in the last few years making a pretty good

00:12:13 ◼   ► amount of Amazon affiliate revenue because I have, over years, I have written a pretty

00:12:19 ◼   ► good number of product reviews, things like headphone stuff, coffee stuff, the baby stuff

00:12:24 ◼   ► guides and those have slowly built up search relevance over time.

00:12:31 ◼   ► And at first when I started out with Amazon links forever ago, like Amazon affiliate links,

00:12:37 ◼   ► I would make effectively nothing. It was like maybe like 20 bucks a month for a while and

00:12:42 ◼   ► I stopped looking for a long time because it was so low I kind of stopped paying attention

00:12:47 ◼   ► and then eventually it became real money. Like it became, after a few years of doing

00:12:52 ◼   ► it and slowly building up from like 10, 20 bucks a month, it eventually became a few

00:12:57 ◼   ► hundred dollars a month and then now it's like over a thousand dollars a month and that's

00:13:02 ◼   ► all from stuff I wrote years and years ago for the most part, not a lot of new stuff

00:13:07 ◼   ► yet. Just over time, it's kind of like where each post is one of these little like decaying

00:13:12 ◼   ► asymptotes like over time I have enough of these and it does build up to something substantial.

00:13:18 ◼   ► And it's interesting to think of apps this way because I don't think most of us think

00:13:23 ◼   ► of apps that way. I think most of us, the idea of doing blog posts and links that way

00:13:28 ◼   ► I think we are accustomed to by now, but the idea of doing apps that way almost seems like

00:13:34 ◼   ► wrong or like you're getting away with something because I think people expect that apps need

00:13:39 ◼   ► to be the more high profile launch kind of things and the, you know, have to be constantly

00:13:44 ◼   ► maintained over time and have to constantly be getting updates and new versions and keeping

00:13:49 ◼   ► everything fresh and new while it's totally okay to let a blog post sit there for 10 years

00:13:52 ◼   ► unmodified. I wonder like is this kind of a temporary thing? Is this always going to

00:13:59 ◼   ► be the case? I mean what the causes might be of why apps can behave this way or why

00:14:04 ◼   ► they might not behave this way. Like we have this coming fall it's looking increasingly

00:14:09 ◼   ► likely that Apple's cutting off support for old 32-bit apps and that's going to cut off

00:14:15 ◼   ► a lot of people's long tails and let's take a look at them. But I wonder like it seems

00:14:20 ◼   ► like it seems like this is probably okay for the long haul overall as a model. Like it

00:14:25 ◼   ► seems like this is probably going to keep working because it turns out that keeping

00:14:30 ◼   ► apps up to date for the most part really isn't that important for whether or not they will

00:14:36 ◼   ► have, you know, a long tail of success.

00:14:39 ◼   ► Yeah and I feel, I think it speaks to, I think there is something there like it's why the

00:14:47 ◼   ► reason why I thought it would be a good topic is because I feel like it also is important

00:14:50 ◼   ► to think through the type of applications where an approach like this would actually

00:14:55 ◼   ► work because the reason this approach works for me is because the types of apps that I

00:15:03 ◼   ► am making by and large don't have large ongoing costs and expenses and infrastructures that

00:15:12 ◼   ► I have to have in the background to support them. You know like the, I think all the sum

00:15:19 ◼   ► total of the infrastructure I have for audiobooks is I think it's about a hundred dollars a

00:15:27 ◼   ► year at Linode. Like I have a little server that serves thumbnails and a few other things

00:15:33 ◼   ► but it's essentially nothing in the scope of the app. And so that allows the fact that

00:15:40 ◼   ► the app isn't, as its revenue decreases slowly over time, its income, the expenses that I

00:15:50 ◼   ► am having to put out for it, they become a higher proportion perhaps of its income but

00:15:54 ◼   ► they are still so small to start with that it doesn't really matter. Whereas if you had

00:15:58 ◼   ► an app like, so for example for me, Feed Wrangler and I imagine for you with Overcast to some

00:16:03 ◼   ► degree, like if you have an app that has a bigger server infrastructure that is going

00:16:07 ◼   ► to be a thousand or two thousand dollars a month in server costs, it starts to become

00:16:13 ◼   ► trickier to do this type of thing where that slow, that sort of slow decay will very quickly

00:16:21 ◼   ► cross over and then be losing money rather than gaining money which is essentially what

00:16:25 ◼   ► happened for me with Check the Weather. Where I had a weather app which I hadn't done updates

00:16:31 ◼   ► for in a while too but I had to eventually kill it off because I was losing money on

00:16:35 ◼   ► it because there was this ongoing cost for weather data providers that wasn't being

00:16:41 ◼   ► offset by it. And so I think with software, the key for this to work is the more that

00:16:47 ◼   ► you can make the applications that you're building kind of built in such a way that

00:16:52 ◼   ► they are more like blog posts or they are more like YouTube videos. There's lots of

00:16:56 ◼   ► things that you, like you said, this isn't a new concept at all. This is the business

00:17:01 ◼   ► model of most kind of media companies where a media company makes a show, like they make

00:17:09 ◼   ► Seinfeld and they put it in syndication in, or they put it out on broadcast TV and they

00:17:15 ◼   ► put it in syndication and they sell DVDs and it's exactly the same thing that they're

00:17:19 ◼   ► just kind of reselling over time. And the degree to which an app can be that I think

00:17:24 ◼   ► is it's something that is fairly self-contained, that is built in this way that doesn't require

00:17:29 ◼   ► a lot of constant updates and maintenance. And fair enough, eventually you'll have

00:17:35 ◼   ► to either update it or it will stop working. I think software has a higher barrier for

00:17:42 ◼   ► that versus just a plain text file that you're putting on the web, essentially. But it doesn't

00:17:52 ◼   ► have this intrinsic need that it has to be updated every few months. And in some ways

00:17:56 ◼   ► that's counterproductive, that we've talked about many times, the trap of over-featuring

00:18:01 ◼   ► an application and having the sense that there's this urgency that it always has to be new

00:18:05 ◼   ► and better when in fact maybe it isn't. And you can just kind of let it go. And as long

00:18:10 ◼   ► as you have a customer base that likes the app that you shipped whenever you shipped

00:18:15 ◼   ► it, people still use audiobooks that I shipped 18 months ago and they use it on a regular

00:18:21 ◼   ► basis and it still works. And the updates that I'm doing now are in some ways unnecessary.

00:18:28 ◼   ► To it, I think it's a good thing in terms of trying to bump up that rate a little bit

00:18:36 ◼   ► and sort of start decaying from a higher point again. But if I didn't do anything, my guess

00:18:41 ◼   ► is they would just keep going slowly until at some point it breaks. And who knows, maybe

00:18:47 ◼   ► iOS 11 would introduce something that would force it to be updated, which, fair enough,

00:18:51 ◼   ► that's the reason why it was updated 18 months ago was because that was what, iOS 9 broke

00:18:58 ◼   ► something in it and so I had to update it and I did and I fixed it and then I haven't

00:19:02 ◼   ► done anything since. And those kinds of maintenance updates are so much easier and so much lighter

00:19:07 ◼   ► weight than the big broad things that you'd have to do if you have a perspective of you're

00:19:12 ◼   ► trying to grow, grow, grow and that's your goal.

00:19:15 ◼   ► - Yeah, and it really does kind of impact how you develop everything. If you're thinking

00:19:21 ◼   ► about, how can I design this app and build this app in such a way that it will require

00:19:27 ◼   ► the least maintenance over time and be the least likely to unexpectedly break in future

00:19:33 ◼   ► OS updates or with future changes to the landscape, that affects things. Like for instance, running

00:19:39 ◼   ► off of a Linode server, which actually they were sponsored this week, which I'll get to

00:19:42 ◼   ► in a minute, running off of a Linode server, that is to me more future proof than running

00:19:49 ◼   ► off of a service like Parse or some kind of like managed high end or higher abstraction

00:19:54 ◼   ► layer service because that landscape of those services changes all the time and if you write

00:19:59 ◼   ► an app today on like a higher level abstracted service, in three years you might have moved

00:20:06 ◼   ► on and you're just leaving this app in maintenance mode and hoping it just collects money over

00:20:10 ◼   ► time but then that service might shut down or do some kind of forced change that will

00:20:15 ◼   ► break your app and then you're stuck having to decide either well do I just shut this

00:20:19 ◼   ► app down completely, is it just done now because it's not worth the investment to move it to

00:20:23 ◼   ► something else or do I now lose a big chunk of this investment to move it over. Like do

00:20:31 ◼   ► I invest a bunch of time in it and lose money on it for a little while to do this move and

00:20:34 ◼   ► like that's, if you build from the start to try to build on like boring stable stuff,

00:20:41 ◼   ► both on the server side like just doing Linux servers and also even in the app like if you

00:20:45 ◼   ► just use mostly like vanilla UI kit and you don't do a lot of like fancy hacks and things

00:20:51 ◼   ► that might break in future OS updates, that also will help you just make sure that you

00:20:56 ◼   ► can keep that going for a long time. Anyway we are sponsored this week as mentioned by

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00:22:58 ◼   ► for years into the future without much effort from us.

00:23:01 ◼   ► Yup, years and years and years. So the last thing that I think I would, it seemed like

00:23:07 ◼   ► I would be good to bookend this discussion with would also just be to say that this approach

00:23:13 ◼   ► of thinking about an application as an annuity that you kind of build and then can kind of

00:23:17 ◼   ► leave on its own for the most part or do lightly maintained potentially is probably not for

00:23:23 ◼   ► everybody. And I was thinking about it a little bit. There's two groups that I feel like this

00:23:27 ◼   ► approach really wouldn't work for. And that is people who are perfectionists and people

00:23:34 ◼   ► who kind of have the like a growth mindset in the sense of you kind of have that vision

00:23:41 ◼   ► of the venture started kind of company that's trying to be worth a billion dollars and has

00:23:49 ◼   ► that kind of runaway hockey stick magic fanciness. I don't know. Like those two groups of people

00:23:55 ◼   ► I feel like would not do well with this kind of approach because by its nature it is optimizing

00:24:01 ◼   ► for minimizing input and rather than trying to maximize output which works well for me.

00:24:10 ◼   ► I love that I can sort of, once you get a business to this, you put in years, it takes

00:24:18 ◼   ► years to get there, but if you put in years of work with this kind of mentality you can

00:24:22 ◼   ► get to a point where your core business requires relatively little input and gives you a steady,

00:24:30 ◼   ► reliable, slightly decaying over time but can be bolstered periodically by putting inputs

00:24:37 ◼   ► into the system rather than something that is growing month after month, year after year.

00:24:43 ◼   ► It's like, "Oh, we just need to be doubling every six months," or whatever. This is not

00:24:47 ◼   ► an approach or a mindset for an application that will lead to that kind of a result. And

00:24:54 ◼   ► I think in our next episode, like I said at the beginning of this one, if you're looking

00:24:57 ◼   ► to sell an application or have a big exit or something, you might structure your application

00:25:02 ◼   ► and your approach differently than this. But it can work for some people or it wouldn't

00:25:07 ◼   ► work for others. And I think also if you're a perfectionist, if you're someone who just

00:25:09 ◼   ► wants to keep tinkering and polishing over and over and over again and keep working on

00:25:15 ◼   ► something until it's almost like the asymptote that you're approaching is perfection rather

00:25:22 ◼   ► than looking at it the other way around of hitting good enough and then just letting

00:25:27 ◼   ► it slide into the future, that's probably not for you either.

00:25:32 ◼   ► - Yeah, I mean, in many ways it's kind of like the culmination of everything we've been

00:25:39 ◼   ► trying to teach the audience for this entire podcast, this entire run of this show so far,

00:25:45 ◼   ► is like when you're an indie, if you want to optimize your limited resources, you have

00:25:52 ◼   ► no other staff or you have very little other staff, you don't have a huge amount of cash

00:25:57 ◼   ► with VC money to build up stuff at a large scale very quickly up front. And so in order

00:26:04 ◼   ► to optimize your limited resources and especially mostly your limited time, it does help to

00:26:10 ◼   ► have these qualities to really not be a perfectionist and to be willing to ship something that is

00:26:17 ◼   ► good enough and then to decide afterwards, you know what, now that's kind of done or

00:26:24 ◼   ► at least seems to be done for a while and now I can move on and do something else or

00:26:29 ◼   ► I can move on to feature expansion to expand into new markets instead of doing things like

00:26:36 ◼   ► perfectly sending down every single individual feature to be totally perfect. In a lot of

00:26:42 ◼   ► ways the whole point of the show is to tell people if you want to run a business the way

00:26:48 ◼   ► we do and especially the way you do, then this is how you do it. It is possible to make

00:26:55 ◼   ► a living in the app store but if you do it in these other ways that might be more high

00:27:01 ◼   ► profile it's harder and it's less likely to succeed. Whereas if you do it this way

00:27:06 ◼   ► where you're really just building up a whole bunch of asymptotes of gradual income from

00:27:13 ◼   ► a larger quantity of apps that are not necessarily all perfect but you can get them all to be

00:27:19 ◼   ► good enough and to be long term businesses, that is actually a way more likely approach

00:27:24 ◼   ► to succeed in the app store than hoping that you are going to be the new tank game that

00:27:31 ◼   ► makes a million dollars in a day.

00:27:34 ◼   ► Yeah, and I think the biggest adjective that comes to mind in this approach is tolerance

00:27:41 ◼   ► and it's being okay with letting things go and being like this is fine, I think this

00:27:49 ◼   ► is good enough and being honest with yourself about that and having that as your goal. I

00:27:55 ◼   ► know that's not the approach that everyone feels comfortable with or will take and I

00:28:00 ◼   ► think especially the Apple developer community, at least early on and probably to some degree,

00:28:07 ◼   ► has that bit of the mentality that they took from Apple and the way that they build things,

00:28:16 ◼   ► which is not this at all. This is in no way the approach that Apple builds most of their

00:28:21 ◼   ► products that they take the other extreme of the highly engineered, highly polished

00:28:28 ◼   ► approach to something that's a premium product and that works and that model, the premium

00:28:34 ◼   ► product market works clearly. It works for Apple, it works for Tiffany's, you can think

00:28:38 ◼   ► of any number of car manufacturers that take that approach and that works but I think it

00:28:45 ◼   ► struggles when you're a small company, when you're one person, to be viable. If your goal

00:28:53 ◼   ► is to win the lottery or to have that premium approach, so many things have to go right

00:29:00 ◼   ► for you that are outside of your control but if your goal is more modest and your goal

00:29:05 ◼   ► is to say, it's much less scary to say my goal is to make an app that makes $50 a day.

00:29:17 ◼   ► That is much less scary than trying to make an app that makes tens of thousands of dollars

00:29:23 ◼   ► a day and could potentially be purchased for millions of dollars. Those are big scary things.

00:29:29 ◼   ► Making it much smaller, much more modest, I think is a much more approachable and reasonable

00:29:33 ◼   ► thing for small developers to take and I can speak from experience that over time, it works.

00:29:40 ◼   ► Thanks for listening everybody. Tune in next week when we talk about selling your apps

00:29:44 ◼   ► instead of keeping them forever. Thanks and we'll talk to you next week. Bye.

00:29:48 ◼   ► [BLANK_AUDIO]