Developing Perspective

00:00:00 ◼   ► Hello and welcome to Developing Perspective.

00:00:02 ◼   ► Developing Perspective is a podcast discussing news of note in iOS development, Apple and

00:00:07 ◼   ► the like.

00:00:08 ◼   ► I'm your host, David Smith.

00:00:09 ◼   ► I'm an independent iOS developer based in Herndon, Virginia.

00:00:12 ◼   ► This is show number 203.

00:00:14 ◼   ► Today is Friday, November 14th.

00:00:16 ◼   ► Developing Perspective is no longer than 15 minutes, so let's get started.

00:00:21 ◼   ► So yeah, so we're entering into kind of an interesting time in the, I guess, in the Apple

00:00:27 ◼   ► news, Apple developer, this little ecosystem timeline, because we're kind of heading into

00:00:33 ◼   ► a little bit of a lull in terms of news. I think Apple is, other than probably the release

00:00:38 ◼   ► of WatchKit sometime, I guess now has to be sort of next week, because it's Thanksgiving

00:00:44 ◼   ► the week after. Other than that, I don't expect to be, there'll be much news coming out, news

00:00:49 ◼   ► of new things, things going on. I think things tend to very quickly start shutting down this

00:00:53 ◼   ► time of year. And so, you know, as someone who's doing a show discussing news of note,

00:00:58 ◼   ► that is a bit interesting. And so I'll probably over the next few weeks be starting to unpack

00:01:03 ◼   ► a few of the topics and things that I have been thinking about, and have kind of have

00:01:08 ◼   ► on my list of things for show topics, but haven't really gotten around to doing. And

00:01:12 ◼   ► so they may be a bit more general and a bit less timely, which probably will work. And

00:01:17 ◼   ► today's show, I'm wondering if it's a topic or I guess a train of thought maybe is a better

00:01:23 ◼   ► way to say it is less than a topic even, that I've been thinking about for a while and that

00:01:27 ◼   ► I thought would make an interesting show. And it's to try and unpack in some ways the

00:01:31 ◼   ► differences and the advantages and some of the attributes of the difference between being

00:01:37 ◼   ► a sole developer on something and making something all by yourself versus making it in a team,

00:01:45 ◼   ► whether that be in a partnership, you know, one with you and one other person, maybe in

00:01:49 ◼   ► and sort of a small team, three or four people, five people, and how different those are.

00:01:57 ◼   ► And especially trying to unpack a little bit something that I observe that is a very strong

00:02:04 ◼   ► difference by being by yourself and being with other people.

00:02:09 ◼   ► And so at its first, something that was a lot of my experience recently is essentially

00:02:15 ◼   ► working by myself.

00:02:16 ◼   ► I have people who I employ to help me

00:02:19 ◼   ► with various parts of my business,

00:02:20 ◼   ► but the actual development, product design,

00:02:22 ◼   ► physical design, most of those types of things,

00:02:24 ◼   ► I'm just doing myself.

00:02:26 ◼   ► And that has pros and cons, as I'll unpack.

00:02:29 ◼   ► But it is something that I struggle with a lot,

00:02:33 ◼   ► and I've struggled with in varying degrees over the years,

00:02:36 ◼   ► about whether that's the right thing for me.

00:02:38 ◼   ► Because working by yourself, you're not necessarily

00:02:41 ◼   ► collaborating with somebody.

00:02:42 ◼   ► You don't have the opportunity to have the rich experience

00:02:47 ◼   ► that working with someone else can often lend,

00:02:49 ◼   ► where the sum of the parts is greater than the whole.

00:02:53 ◼   ► When I have an idea, someone else can come and refine it,

00:02:55 ◼   ► and we can riff and bounce off each other

00:02:58 ◼   ► and ultimately make something that's

00:03:00 ◼   ► really cool as a result.

00:03:02 ◼   ► When you're by yourself, you don't really

00:03:03 ◼   ► have that opportunity, certainly not in quite the same way.

00:03:07 ◼   ► And so it was something that I give a lot of thought to,

00:03:10 ◼   ► of like, should I get a partner?

00:03:11 ◼   ► Should I work with somebody else?

00:03:13 ◼   ► Should I hire a developer?

00:03:14 ◼   ► Should I go work for a bigger company?

00:03:17 ◼   ► There's all kinds of things that I'll think about.

00:03:19 ◼   ► But it's interesting from a development side,

00:03:22 ◼   ► because the more I think about it,

00:03:24 ◼   ► and the more I've unpacked it-- and I've

00:03:25 ◼   ► had some experiences doing collaborations with people.

00:03:28 ◼   ► But the more I think about it, the more

00:03:30 ◼   ► I start to see that there's an interesting discontinuity

00:03:36 ◼   ► in being one person and being anything

00:03:39 ◼   ► other than one person for the development of a product.

00:03:43 ◼   ► And I'm going to unpack a couple of different ways

00:03:45 ◼   ► that that's the case.

00:03:46 ◼   ► But it's something that I'm now fairly confident about.

00:03:49 ◼   ► That you either kind of want to be-- it's like being one

00:03:54 ◼   ► is so different than anything in any other situation.

00:03:57 ◼   ► And the first-- and this is the one that

00:03:59 ◼   ► is most interesting in some ways--

00:04:00 ◼   ► is if you work by yourself, you completely

00:04:05 ◼   ► own all the upside and the downside of what you're doing.

00:04:09 ◼   ► And maybe that's less obvious.

00:04:12 ◼   ► Yeah, if you make something and you sell it,

00:04:15 ◼   ► and you get 100% of the revenue, of course, that's great.

00:04:18 ◼   ► But what is interesting is if you start to think about it,

00:04:21 ◼   ► and not to be like, get all math,

00:04:24 ◼   ► but you add someone and say, for simplicity,

00:04:27 ◼   ► you're all doing even splits.

00:04:29 ◼   ► So you become a partnership.

00:04:30 ◼   ► Hey, me and Joe are going to make an app,

00:04:33 ◼   ► and we're going to go 50/50 split on it.

00:04:37 ◼   ► So now, for me to make the same amount of revenue

00:04:40 ◼   ► that I'm hoping for from this app-- say

00:04:43 ◼   ► I wanted to make $100 from it.

00:04:46 ◼   ► Now the app has to, rather than making $100, it has to make $200.

00:04:50 ◼   ► And that's the double, because I added one person.

00:04:54 ◼   ► And so then you get into, well, what happens if we do three?

00:04:57 ◼   ► What if we get three people working on this?

00:05:00 ◼   ► Say, hey, we get a designer and two developers working on it.

00:05:02 ◼   ► Great.

00:05:03 ◼   ► Now I need to make three times the amount of revenue

00:05:06 ◼   ► in order to end up at the same place.

00:05:08 ◼   ► And I'm sure it's a fairly simple equation, right?

00:05:13 ◼   ► You're going from one, and then you need two,

00:05:17 ◼   ► and you need three times, and then four times, and then five

00:05:19 ◼   ► times.

00:05:20 ◼   ► And it gets out of control pretty quickly,

00:05:22 ◼   ► because you start to think that the amount of revenue

00:05:26 ◼   ► that you can get from an app is in some ways capped

00:05:28 ◼   ► at some point.

00:05:29 ◼   ► It's not that it just sort of scales

00:05:31 ◼   ► with the amount of energy or effort that goes into something.

00:05:34 ◼   ► And so it's just something that I kind of ended up with,

00:05:37 ◼   ► is that in order for me to do what I do and make

00:05:39 ◼   ► a living from it, I kind of have to do it by myself.

00:05:42 ◼   ► Because I have no way that I'm going

00:05:43 ◼   ► to be able to make twice or three times the revenue,

00:05:46 ◼   ► more likely than not, from my applications.

00:05:49 ◼   ► And on the flip side, you end up with a really kind

00:05:52 ◼   ► of interesting other perspective of saying,

00:05:54 ◼   ► like, going from one person to a two person job,

00:05:57 ◼   ► you end up with a-- like, you're halving the-- I

00:06:02 ◼   ► have to give up half of the revenue

00:06:04 ◼   ► that I would have had otherwise.

00:06:06 ◼   ► And so a half is a pretty big number.

00:06:09 ◼   ► But going from a half to a--

00:06:10 ◼   ► like from two people to three people,

00:06:12 ◼   ► going from a half to a third, you only

00:06:14 ◼   ► have to give up essentially, what is it, a sixth

00:06:16 ◼   ► of the revenue?

00:06:17 ◼   ► And then you go from three to four,

00:06:18 ◼   ► you're giving up a 12th of the total revenue,

00:06:21 ◼   ► because that's just the way math infractions work.

00:06:25 ◼   ► And when you start to think about it in those terms,

00:06:27 ◼   ► it starts to be a really weird deal

00:06:30 ◼   ► when you start to think about, should I

00:06:31 ◼   ► work with somebody else on this because you have to make double three times, four times.

00:06:36 ◼   ► And the economics get really, really hard anytime your team grows beyond one.

00:06:42 ◼   ► Because the smallest divider that you could ever do is one, and so it kind of works.

00:06:49 ◼   ► But that's kind of sad in some ways.

00:06:53 ◼   ► That's an economic reality that I've kind of settled with and become comfortable with,

00:06:57 ◼   ► is that it is much easier to do this as a living

00:07:00 ◼   ► if I do it by myself, because I don't

00:07:02 ◼   ► have to make quite as much.

00:07:05 ◼   ► But it's also kind of depressing,

00:07:06 ◼   ► because I don't get to work with people.

00:07:08 ◼   ► I build things just by myself.

00:07:11 ◼   ► I have friends, and I have people who are beta testers,

00:07:14 ◼   ► or people I can bounce ideas off of and things.

00:07:16 ◼   ► But it's not the same.

00:07:18 ◼   ► And in some ways, it's kind of crazy when I think about it's,

00:07:21 ◼   ► for years now-- it's been years since I ever really shared

00:07:24 ◼   ► a code base with anybody.

00:07:26 ◼   ► That's kind of scary.

00:07:28 ◼   ► I imagine my code is terrible and horribly ugly.

00:07:32 ◼   ► I mean, empirically, one thing that I do know for sure

00:07:34 ◼   ► is that my source control is terrible,

00:07:36 ◼   ► because most of my commit messages

00:07:38 ◼   ► are just smashing on the keyboard.

00:07:40 ◼   ► It's like I'm a monkey typing and checking in code.

00:07:43 ◼   ► I just select all the files that I did, bang on the keyboard

00:07:47 ◼   ► a little bit, and hit commit, because no one's ever

00:07:49 ◼   ► going to read it.

00:07:50 ◼   ► I don't go back and read my old commit messages necessarily.

00:07:54 ◼   ► I have a few that are obviously more interesting and noteworthy

00:07:57 ◼   ► where I'll check in, like this was the submission I

00:08:01 ◼   ► made to the App Store.

00:08:02 ◼   ► But generally speaking, I'm just working by myself,

00:08:05 ◼   ► and I only have to worry about myself.

00:08:07 ◼   ► And so while I can divide by one on revenue,

00:08:12 ◼   ► I can also only multiply by one on development.

00:08:16 ◼   ► And that's kind of the sad part.

00:08:18 ◼   ► That's not just the tragedy, but that's

00:08:20 ◼   ► the thing that is most interesting,

00:08:22 ◼   ► that you have this weird bargain that you're making.

00:08:26 ◼   ► Like when I think about, hey, if I worked with somebody

00:08:29 ◼   ► on something, could we have double the output?

00:08:35 ◼   ► Could we, in that sense of, could we

00:08:37 ◼   ► have twice as good of a product or a product that would generate

00:08:40 ◼   ► twice as much revenue?

00:08:41 ◼   ► Maybe.

00:08:42 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:08:43 ◼   ► A lot of it seems, empirically, a lot

00:08:46 ◼   ► of the best, the most successful products and companies

00:08:52 ◼   ► in history, or even just in the history of the App Store,

00:08:54 ◼   ► are often teams, are often partnerships, especially.

00:08:59 ◼   ► I think of Supertop, the guys behind Castro and now Unread,

00:09:04 ◼   ► or the Tapots guys.

00:09:07 ◼   ► There's often you have these small teams

00:09:10 ◼   ► of two, three people who can do really, really amazing things.

00:09:14 ◼   ► You often especially have these great dynamics

00:09:16 ◼   ► where you have a designer and a developer working

00:09:18 ◼   ► kind of hand in hand to really get an incredibly polished result. And if you work by yourself,

00:09:24 ◼   ► you don't have that. You kind of have to make do. And so I don't know if that made sense,

00:09:30 ◼   ► but it's a thought process that I've been thinking about a lot, about the strange tension

00:09:36 ◼   ► between on the one hand having this really powerful lack of divide or like dividing by

00:09:43 ◼   ► one on revenue is incredibly powerful, not necessarily in an obvious way, but it is.

00:09:50 ◼   ► Any money I make I can hold onto, and that's really powerful because dividing by two is

00:09:56 ◼   ► really different than dividing by one, especially at the kind of level that we're talking about

00:10:01 ◼   ► where I think most people who kind of make their living in the app store, it's not like

00:10:06 ◼   ► you're dividing $10 million by two. Oh, no. Now you have $5 million. Okay, that wouldn't

00:10:13 ◼   ► really matter.

00:10:14 ◼   ► But the level of money that you're talking about for most people making just normal apps

00:10:17 ◼   ► in the app store, it's not measured in those terms.

00:10:20 ◼   ► Where dividing by two changes it in a pretty dramatic way from something that is like a

00:10:25 ◼   ► good solid living to something that's much more problematic.

00:10:28 ◼   ► And dividing by three, it's even crazier.

00:10:31 ◼   ► And so that's on the one side.

00:10:34 ◼   ► And then on the flip side, you have this awkward thing where it's like, well, you're just one

00:10:37 ◼   ► person.

00:10:38 ◼   ► I know what I'm making isn't as good as it could be as a result.

00:10:42 ◼   ► But I suppose I could also argue that the advantage of being by yourself is that you

00:10:46 ◼   ► can make all the decisions.

00:10:48 ◼   ► You don't get stuck.

00:10:50 ◼   ► You don't have to build things in place to keep, you know, like you don't have to have

00:10:55 ◼   ► a committee or a meeting to talk about something and decide something.

00:10:58 ◼   ► You just kind of go full steam ahead.

00:11:01 ◼   ► And that's probably also worth pointing out.

00:11:02 ◼   ► That's one of the things that has allowed me to develop so many products over the years

00:11:06 ◼   ► is that when it's just me by myself, if I have an idea, I open up Xcode, I hit new project,

00:11:11 ◼   ► and I go.

00:11:12 ◼   ► I don't have to get permission.

00:11:13 ◼   ► I don't have to have a conversation with somebody

00:11:15 ◼   ► about whether it's a good idea, what they think about it,

00:11:18 ◼   ► what direction they would take it in.

00:11:20 ◼   ► And that creates a lot of efficiency.

00:11:22 ◼   ► And that's a powerful thing.

00:11:24 ◼   ► But it's a weird tension.

00:11:27 ◼   ► And this is one of those episodes

00:11:28 ◼   ► where I'm not sure there's necessarily a conclusion.

00:11:30 ◼   ► It's just some interesting thoughts

00:11:33 ◼   ► that I've had over the last couple of weeks and months

00:11:35 ◼   ► about this strange tension about if you work by yourself,

00:11:39 ◼   ► you're getting this really powerful thing

00:11:41 ◼   ► on the business side, that your revenue can be so much lower

00:11:44 ◼   ► than it would be in another context.

00:11:47 ◼   ► But on the development and design side,

00:11:48 ◼   ► you're also limiting yourself.

00:11:50 ◼   ► You have this strange balance to strike.

00:11:55 ◼   ► And in my case, and what I've found,

00:11:56 ◼   ► is that it works pretty well.

00:11:58 ◼   ► That being by yourself, if you want to make your own apps,

00:12:02 ◼   ► work for yourself, be self-employed,

00:12:04 ◼   ► it works pretty well to have this as your balance.

00:12:08 ◼   ► Because the amount of revenue you have to make

00:12:10 ◼   ► isn't quite as crazy, isn't this insane number

00:12:13 ◼   ► that you need if you're trying to divide it by two or three.

00:12:16 ◼   ► It's just divided by one.

00:12:17 ◼   ► So whatever it is that you feel like you need to make

00:12:19 ◼   ► a living on, that's your goal.

00:12:22 ◼   ► And in general, that's a much more attainable thing.

00:12:25 ◼   ► Then you always worry about what could be,

00:12:29 ◼   ► what it would be like to work on a bigger team, what it would

00:12:32 ◼   ► be like to have collaborators.

00:12:33 ◼   ► And that's something I've explored, certainly.

00:12:35 ◼   ► But I don't worry about it quite as much as I used to,

00:12:37 ◼   ► where other than just kind of the emotional,

00:12:40 ◼   ► oh, it's a little lonely part, which is somewhat easily fixed

00:12:44 ◼   ► by just having friends and keeping in close contact

00:12:48 ◼   ► with people on a regular basis, working by yourself

00:12:50 ◼   ► could be kind of cool.

00:12:52 ◼   ► So like I said, it's not really a conclusion.

00:12:54 ◼   ► Unfortunately, hopefully that's not too dissatisfying

00:12:56 ◼   ► as a listener to this.

00:12:57 ◼   ► But it's something I've been thinking about.

00:12:59 ◼   ► And that's it probably for today's show.

00:13:02 ◼   ► So if you have any questions, comments, concerns,

00:13:04 ◼   ► or complaints, you can find me @_DavidSmith on Twitter

00:13:07 ◼   ► or email me, david@developingperspective.com.

00:13:10 ◼   ► See, I'm trying to think.

00:13:11 ◼   ► This next week's kind of exciting, because now that--

00:13:15 ◼   ► next week, we'll probably get WatchKit.

00:13:16 ◼   ► And I think there'll be some pretty cool things in it.

00:13:19 ◼   ► So I'm pretty excited to get started.

00:13:20 ◼   ► I did a post on my blog last week about expectations for it

00:13:25 ◼   ► that I think kind of outlines a lot of the things

00:13:27 ◼   ► that I think we're going to get next week.

00:13:29 ◼   ► And I think it's going to be pretty fun.

00:13:31 ◼   ► So I look forward to doing a few episodes about that

00:13:33 ◼   ► and talking to you about it then.

00:13:35 ◼   ► All right, have a good weekend.

00:13:36 ◼   ► Bye.