00:00:00 ◼ ► Hello and welcome to Developing Perspective. This is usually where I'd have an introduction,
00:00:04 ◼ ► but I don't think I have time today. All right. So, this last week we've seen a rather remarkable
00:00:08 ◼ ► explosion in writing and discussion about the business and practice, I guess, of making
00:00:13 ◼ ► a living in the App Store. Personally, I love these little bubbles of discussion. I love
00:00:20 ◼ ► is what I love. I'm kind of -- I try and be a student of the App Store. And so, whenever
00:00:25 ◼ ► these little discussion bubbles appear, it's a great opportunity for tons of anecdotes,
00:00:29 ◼ ► tons of discussion, tons of things that help me understand this story and make my living
00:00:38 ◼ ► had a lot of people reach out to me and ask, say, "Oh, they can't wait to hear what I have
00:00:42 ◼ ► to say about it," because the reality is I'm kind of right in the thick of this. I'm an
00:00:49 ◼ ► types of things. I've been making my living for about five years from the App Store. So
00:01:02 ◼ ► to disappoint you. You know, business is complicated. It's dynamic, it's ever-changing. You can
00:01:07 ◼ ► do the same thing twice and have wildly different outcomes. You can try and replicate what someone
00:01:12 ◼ ► else did and it could work for you or it could work way better or worse. You just never know.
00:01:17 ◼ ► And the reality too is we're all coming at these questions about is there a sustainable
00:01:26 ◼ ► all coming at it from a very different place, different goals, different personal situations,
00:01:30 ◼ ► backgrounds. And so there aren't any grand unified answers. There's just opinions. There's
00:01:34 ◼ ► just lots of little data points that we will all individually connect together in a way
00:01:38 ◼ ► that makes sense for us. So here's my best effort. And the best way I could kind of think
00:01:47 ◼ ► mini-rants. So let's go. All right. The first one. This is the super sort of super mega
00:01:52 ◼ ► high-level overview of where the App Store is and what it's like to make a living there.
00:01:57 ◼ ► First, it's never really been easy to make a living in the App Store, for whatever "make
00:02:02 ◼ ► a living" might mean to you, which I'll talk about later. The App Store, when it was young,
00:02:06 ◼ ► it may have been somewhat more straightforward to make something, put it out there, see if
00:02:10 ◼ ► it was a hit. It was never easy. The reality is, for even my own apps and myself personally,
00:02:38 ◼ ► that you used to be able to do. And I think those are much less effective than they used
00:02:47 ◼ ► has some things that always would have applied anyway, but maybe were somewhat hidden before
00:02:51 ◼ ► before. You need more than a good idea to have a successful product. The market doesn't
00:02:55 ◼ ► really care about the process it took to create what you created. It just cares about the
00:03:11 ◼ ► are just realities of a store and as the app store has gotten more mature, I think they
00:03:20 ◼ ► that couldn't be improved, see the 8-part series and massive blog posts and other podcasts
00:03:26 ◼ ► I've done on the topic about how to make the App Store better. But the reality is, it's
00:03:30 ◼ ► never been easy to make a living in the App Store. It may have been somewhat more straightforward,
00:03:34 ◼ ► perhaps, but it's never been easy. And while it's difficult now, it's always been difficult,
00:03:44 ◼ ► about as I think about these kind of discussions about if you can make a living in the App
00:04:14 ◼ ► Like, there's so many of these creative arts that people apply themselves to and have strong
00:04:18 ◼ ► passions for, but in almost every case, they're either pursued as a hobby on the side, or
00:04:27 ◼ ► It's a very rare thing that software and the current state of tools that we have at our
00:04:32 ◼ ► disposal allows an opportunity for us to make our living from our work, and to have that
00:04:48 ◼ ► my music," you know, whatever, I'm terrible at music, but if I was to imagine an alternate
00:04:51 ◼ ► reality where I was good at music, and I said, "Hey, I want to make my living from my music,"
00:05:09 ◼ ► great, supportive, that's kind of remarkable. And so we should probably make sure that we're
00:05:14 ◼ ► careful about understanding about just how unique of a position we're even in to start with before
00:05:18 ◼ ► we get too wrapped up in the nuances of the likelihoods and the percentages of possibilities
00:05:24 ◼ ► and the actual outcomes. All right, next one. We all have different goals, and this is something
00:05:29 ◼ ► that I think about a lot, and I've had a lot of situations that make me think about it even more.
00:05:40 ◼ ► App Store, about making a living from software, is the definition of making a living is very,
00:05:56 ◼ ► competing for the same attention from customers, but from very different places. And that creates
00:06:07 ◼ ► is just to ship something and have it in the store. And that the goal of making some money
00:06:15 ◼ ► from it somewhere down the road is something that's more like this fleeting notion that
00:06:31 ◼ ► is going to be stacked up against people for whom they've put their entire family's livelihood
00:06:43 ◼ ► things like the differences in cost of living and how global a marketplace we work in. This
00:06:51 ◼ ► is something that I have a very personal story about. I remember in my earlier days of the
00:06:54 ◼ ► App Store, I was reading an article that was written by one of my most direct competitors
00:06:58 ◼ ► at the time for one of my apps. And because of our comparative rankings, I knew what they
00:07:03 ◼ ► were making, roughly. It was about the same as what I was making. We were neck and neck,
00:07:07 ◼ ► always two or three in a category, really jumping back and forth. And he was interesting.
00:07:12 ◼ ► It wasn't really the purpose of what he was talking about, but he was talking about how
00:07:15 ◼ ► he was supporting a fairly large team of people on the income he was receiving. And at the
00:07:57 ◼ ► to keep that in the back of your mind. That your ability to stay competitive may be impacted
00:08:04 ◼ ► or reduced by where you live. And what your definition of what success will be, will be
00:08:10 ◼ ► very different based on where you are. Making a few thousand dollars from an app in the
00:08:15 ◼ ► US may just be kind of like, "Eh, you know, that's alright." Making that same amount of
00:08:20 ◼ ► of money somewhere in the third world or in a more developing country could be amazing,
00:08:25 ◼ ► could be a tremendous opportunity and a wild success. And it's probably important to keep
00:08:30 ◼ ► that in mind as we start to think about and talk about these types of things. You know,
00:08:43 ◼ ► you've been listening to the show for a long time, I've stated many, many times before,
00:08:48 ◼ ► is that the most important thing before you start building something is to make sure you've
00:08:52 ◼ ► understood and defined for yourself what success would be for you. And the better you are at
00:08:58 ◼ ► articulating and understanding that, I think the happier and the more satisfied you will be with
00:09:03 ◼ ► the result. All right, next kind of mini rant. The word "indie" I think has taken on a somewhat
00:09:10 ◼ ► mythical connotation within our community, somewhat consciously, somewhat unconsciously.
00:09:16 ◼ ► I mean, I think it is almost, and this is just speaking from my own experience, it kind
00:09:26 ◼ ► away on their work, sweating all the details, making the hard choices, and then after much
00:09:36 ◼ ► into the marketplace and the world lauds it and praises them and then provides them passive
00:09:48 ◼ ► Is that what it sounds like to you? If I say, you know, indie developer? I don't know. Maybe
00:09:55 ◼ ► what it starts to have, the connotations that it started to have developed in our community.
00:10:00 ◼ ► And I must say, I love the story. It certainly does sound nice, doesn't it? And I mean, I
00:10:05 ◼ ► love that it kind of elevates and creates this aspirational thing for us to strive towards.
00:10:10 ◼ ► pretty cool. But as somebody for whom this is often ascribed to, it's not something necessarily
00:10:26 ◼ ► And if I take for the purposes of this discussion the definition of being an indie is being,
00:10:30 ◼ ► you know, a small one, maybe one to three people team of developers who make their core
00:10:34 ◼ ► income directly from the software they create. Right, that's a pretty reasonable definition
00:10:37 ◼ ► maybe. It's much less dramatic. There's a lot of duct tape, cut corners, worried nights,
00:11:04 ◼ ► Being an indie is a really hard, tough way to make a living, and isn't honestly something
00:11:16 ◼ ► dangerous territory when we start to place undue elevation on that type of development,
00:11:22 ◼ ► and begin to, either directly or just by implication, start to look down our noses at people who
00:11:32 ◼ ► I have tremendous respect for people who support their families working hard in large corporations.
00:11:38 ◼ ► And whether that's a company as large as Apple, or it's the Omni Group, or it's just XYZ Corp.
00:12:06 ◼ ► The nobility of what we do comes intrinsically from the effort, from the care and attention
00:12:23 ◼ ► And I think it's important that we remember that and remind ourselves of that as a community,
00:12:56 ◼ ► internalize the time, energy, and effort that they took them to get there. And it's one of those
00:13:03 ◼ ► things that I think I see most often in people is where they forget and really don't want to think
00:13:08 ◼ ► about how much time and energy it will take to get to a point where you can make a sustainable living
00:13:14 ◼ ► from your work. You can look at a few examples of people who do that, for people who have made that
00:13:21 ◼ ► that work for them, and in almost every case I've seen it, it is measured in years before
00:13:26 ◼ ► they get to that point. It is not something that will happen overnight. It is not something
00:13:34 ◼ ► that building quality products, being an adaptive student of the stores and marketplaces in
00:13:47 ◼ ► path you'd like to do. But patience is, above all else, the most important aspect of that
00:13:53 ◼ ► journey. Understanding that it will take failure after failure, whether public or private,
00:14:10 ◼ ► maybe you'll be doing a podcast talking about what it's like to have finally gotten to cobble
00:14:19 ◼ ► end of the day is to build, ship, and then repeat. That's our shampoo label. That's what
00:14:26 ◼ ► we do. We build, we ship, and then we repeat, trying to learn something every time in that
00:14:32 ◼ ► All right, those are my mini-rants. Hopefully that was helpful. I'm not sure if it was,