Developing Perspective

00:00:00 ◼   ► Hello and welcome to Developing Perspective. Developing Perspective is a podcast discussing

00:00:04 ◼   ► news of note in iOS development, Apple and the like. I'm your host, David Smith. I'm

00:00:08 ◼   ► an independent iOS developer based in Herne, Virginia. This is show number 183. And today

00:00:14 ◼   ► is Friday, May 2nd. Developing Perspective is never longer than 15 minutes. So let's

00:00:18 ◼   ► get started. All right. So first, as a quick note, any thanks to all of you who bought

00:00:25 ◼   ► a t-shirt in the last couple of weeks as we've had that campaign. Those should be off to

00:00:28 ◼   ► printer and then on their way to your door in the next week or so. Definitely in time for

00:00:32 ◼   ► WWDC or the summer in general if you'd like to sport an underscore followed by a square bracket in

00:00:39 ◼   ► you know wherever you are this summer. All right so let me jump into the main topic today

00:00:43 ◼   ► and I'm going to take a quick break from the series I started a couple weeks ago about

00:00:49 ◼   ► unconventional wisdom and today I'm going to kind of ruminate and think about something that's just

00:00:54 ◼   ► just a bit more topical and something

00:00:55 ◼   ► I've been thinking about a lot more this week,

00:00:58 ◼   ► that whenever I have an opportunity for something

00:01:00 ◼   ► like this that's kind of fresh and live in my head,

00:01:03 ◼   ► it's something that seems-- those often

00:01:05 ◼   ► make the best episodes.

00:01:06 ◼   ► So I'm going to be kind of addressing and dealing

00:01:09 ◼   ► with some thoughts and feelings that came out of this last week

00:01:13 ◼   ► when Feed Wrangler hit its one-year anniversary.

00:01:17 ◼   ► And if you have been following this podcast for the last year,

00:01:22 ◼   ► you'll know sort of how significant that is for me,

00:01:27 ◼   ► in the sense that getting the service to where it is now

00:01:31 ◼   ► has taken a tremendous amount of time, energy, effort,

00:01:34 ◼   ► a lot of late nights early on, lots of struggles

00:01:37 ◼   ► and challenges, some triumphs along the way.

00:01:39 ◼   ► It's been a really complicated process.

00:01:42 ◼   ► And so getting to this point has been kind of interesting.

00:01:47 ◼   ► And there's a blog post I wrote about that,

00:01:49 ◼   ► the actual thing, which is a link in the show notes

00:01:51 ◼   ► if you want, talking about the actual service itself.

00:01:53 ◼   ► But I don't really necessarily want

00:01:55 ◼   ► to talk about Feed Wrangler so much as something

00:01:57 ◼   ► that it's hitting its anniversary

00:01:59 ◼   ► has made me think about a lot.

00:02:01 ◼   ► So obviously, there being an annually paid service,

00:02:03 ◼   ► Feed Wrangler is $19 a year.

00:02:05 ◼   ► This is the week in which, obviously, I now

00:02:08 ◼   ► need to manage and work through all the actual renewals

00:02:11 ◼   ► for the service.

00:02:11 ◼   ► So work out how many people are going to renew it,

00:02:13 ◼   ► how many people are going to choose not to renew.

00:02:16 ◼   ► And it's brought to a head something

00:02:20 ◼   ► that I've struggled with a lot, being in this kind of business.

00:02:23 ◼   ► I've been making my living from the app store

00:02:25 ◼   ► and app-related things for about five years now.

00:02:28 ◼   ► And the way in which I've had to make my living

00:02:30 ◼   ► has changed a lot over that period.

00:02:32 ◼   ► There's a lot of things that have changed that I

00:02:34 ◼   ► have had to adapt to and things.

00:02:37 ◼   ► But something that really hasn't changed,

00:02:39 ◼   ► that has kind of remained constant,

00:02:41 ◼   ► is this lurking sense of anxiety that I have,

00:02:44 ◼   ► that tomorrow will be the last day of my business,

00:02:48 ◼   ► that everything will just kind of collapse out of nowhere,

00:02:51 ◼   ► and I'll be blindsided and have to deal with that

00:02:53 ◼   ► and I'm in a pretty dramatic situation.

00:02:56 ◼   ► And if you're talking to a lot of other iOS developers,

00:03:00 ◼   ► I know I'm not alone in that.

00:03:03 ◼   ► I know that there's a lot of iOS developers who also kind of

00:03:06 ◼   ► struggle with that, that you have the sense

00:03:08 ◼   ► in the back of your mind that something's going to happen.

00:03:11 ◼   ► And fair enough, sometimes you think about things

00:03:13 ◼   ► that are kind of more concrete.

00:03:14 ◼   ► You think Apple will change policy.

00:03:16 ◼   ► You think Apple will change the search algorithm for the App Store.

00:03:19 ◼   ► You know, you think about a new competitor arriving, you know, those types of things.

00:03:23 ◼   ► But you also just kind of worry that customers are just going to disappear one day.

00:03:27 ◼   ► That they're going to stop finding your app.

00:03:29 ◼   ► That, you know, that whatever has been working so far will suddenly stop working.

00:03:34 ◼   ► And there's an anxiety that can be kind of crippling.

00:03:37 ◼   ► And it can be something that for a long time I really struggled with.

00:03:41 ◼   ► That you kind of have this anxiety where every morning I would get up, come downstairs,

00:03:46 ◼   ► is go to the office, and the first thing I would do every day

00:03:49 ◼   ► is I would open up AppBiz, pull down my sales reports

00:03:53 ◼   ► from the day before, and hopefully make sure

00:03:56 ◼   ► that things hadn't fallen off a cliff.

00:03:58 ◼   ► That was genuinely a fear that I was having to manage.

00:04:02 ◼   ► And for a while, I remember I tried a couple of services

00:04:05 ◼   ► that would send you emails in the morning

00:04:07 ◼   ► when the sales reports were available.

00:04:09 ◼   ► And I very quickly found that I had to turn those off, because it

00:04:12 ◼   ► created this sense of anxiety that I'm constantly

00:04:17 ◼   ► worried about what's going on, what's

00:04:19 ◼   ► happening with my sales.

00:04:21 ◼   ► And the funny thing is-- and as a brief aside,

00:04:24 ◼   ► that anxiety is a funny thing when you're independent.

00:04:27 ◼   ► Because before I was independent,

00:04:29 ◼   ► before I had just had a regular job,

00:04:31 ◼   ► I never really felt that way.

00:04:33 ◼   ► I never really felt that one day my boss is just

00:04:36 ◼   ► going to come down and ask me into his office

00:04:39 ◼   ► and then let me go.

00:04:41 ◼   ► It just wasn't really something that I thought about.

00:04:43 ◼   ► Maybe that's just being arrogant, but I think the reality is being independent, there's

00:04:47 ◼   ► such a direct connection between the work you do and the output that comes out of it,

00:04:52 ◼   ► that everything just gets magnified and these feelings just become much more real.

00:04:57 ◼   ► My guess is the reality is the odds of my business failing were actually pretty simple,

00:05:01 ◼   ► similar to the odds of me being laid off at any one point.

00:05:03 ◼   ► I mean, maybe not exactly the same, but they're certainly more similar than I probably gave

00:05:07 ◼   ► credit in either direction.

00:05:10 ◼   ► So in order for me to stay sane, in order for me to do this business for this long,

00:05:16 ◼   ► this is something that I've had to manage.

00:05:18 ◼   ► This is something that I've had to think through and try and kind of wrap my head around how

00:05:23 ◼   ► I can think about the anxiety that your business is going to fall apart.

00:05:26 ◼   ► Because obviously in some ways that's useful.

00:05:29 ◼   ► Hopefully in some ways that's motivating.

00:05:31 ◼   ► In some ways having a sense that things could all fall apart motivates you to continue to

00:05:35 ◼   ► work hard, to find opportunities, to exploit those opportunities.

00:05:39 ◼   ► There's a certain oomph that that gives you, having a little bit of fear, having a little

00:05:47 ◼   ► bit of edge, that if I got too complacent, if I felt like things would always be like

00:05:52 ◼   ► they are or my business would always grow without any effort, I'd be complacent.

00:05:56 ◼   ► I'd stop trying quite as hard, probably.

00:05:58 ◼   ► I'd be resting on my laurels.

00:06:00 ◼   ► Whatever analogy or cliché I wanted to apply to it, it wouldn't probably be good.

00:06:05 ◼   ► But on the flip side, if I don't manage it in a useful way,

00:06:10 ◼   ► and you can kind of let it overtake you a little bit

00:06:13 ◼   ► and be kind of a crippling fear, rather than being productive,

00:06:16 ◼   ► rather than just giving you an edge,

00:06:18 ◼   ► it's taking away the enjoyment of your work.

00:06:21 ◼   ► It's taking away a lot of the positives of this type of work

00:06:26 ◼   ► and the opportunities that you have

00:06:27 ◼   ► and the flexibility that you have.

00:06:29 ◼   ► So I've had to learn to manage this.

00:06:31 ◼   ► And the thing that I found, which

00:06:34 ◼   ► was when I do-- and sort of the way that I manage it now

00:06:37 ◼   ► is-- what I'm going to kind of very pompously refer

00:06:40 ◼   ► to as underscore's first law of business dynamics.

00:06:43 ◼   ► And that is that on any given time frame,

00:06:46 ◼   ► the rate your business will decay roughly

00:06:48 ◼   ► matches the rate it grew to get there.

00:06:53 ◼   ► And this is a very vague anecdotal principle,

00:06:58 ◼   ► but that I found to be incredibly comforting

00:07:01 ◼   ► backed up time and time again by my own experience, especially in the App Store.

00:07:05 ◼   ► Maybe it applies more generally, but especially in the App Store.

00:07:09 ◼   ► And to kind of put it another way, you know, what goes up quickly will come down quickly.

00:07:12 ◼   ► What goes up slowly will come down slowly.

00:07:16 ◼   ► And really what that means is that there's an inertia to the App Store.

00:07:21 ◼   ► There's kind of a general sense of inertia that things have to overcome, that things

00:07:27 ◼   ► don't take unprecedented downward moves unless they were preceded by an unprecedented upward

00:07:34 ◼   ► move. That's what I've seen time and time again. I'll launch an app and I'll have a big spike,

00:07:41 ◼   ► this rapid rate of growth, and then followed by the exact mirror of that almost exactly,

00:07:49 ◼   ► of a very rapid fall off on the other end. That kind of fits. The business decays at the same

00:07:55 ◼   ► rate that it grew. And then the interesting thing though, once you're out of those periods,

00:08:00 ◼   ► once you have any sense of stability, if I look at a time period and my business remained roughly flat

00:08:06 ◼   ► for the last month, there's a good chance it'll remain roughly flat for the next month.

00:08:11 ◼   ► And then, you know, the next month, and you can kind of have the sliding scale as you think about

00:08:16 ◼   ► this, that when I look at my, you know, I look at my business, this is kind of consistent. This

00:08:23 ◼   ► seems to be what happens. These things tend to average out. And while there can be a lot

00:08:29 ◼   ► of intraday volatility, while overall there can be a lot of ups and downs that might be

00:08:34 ◼   ► a little unsettling, but generally speaking, things tend to fall off slowly. I mean, the

00:08:39 ◼   ► funny thing, I can even look at it, I have some apps that are part of my portfolio that

00:08:43 ◼   ► recently, back in their day, did pretty well. And they're just kind of in the App Store

00:08:48 ◼   ► still work, they look all right, but I haven't put a lot of time, energy, or effort into

00:08:54 ◼   ► updating them. And their sales will decay over time, but it's a very measured and linear

00:09:02 ◼   ► drop-off. It's never been a cliff. I've never seen that experience, unless it was preceded,

00:09:10 ◼   ► like I said, by a period of rapid growth. And so that's comforting to me. That's something

00:09:16 ◼   ► that as I look forward now, for example, at Feed Wrangler, I can look at my sales, I can

00:09:23 ◼   ► look at my renewal rates, I can look at all these types of things, and I can start to

00:09:28 ◼   ► get a sense of where I'm coming from.

00:09:33 ◼   ► How many people have found the service and started using it in the last couple of weeks?

00:09:38 ◼   ► And then maybe that's most likely the kind of people and the rate that'll be finding

00:09:42 ◼   ► it in the next two couple of weeks.

00:09:44 ◼   ► kind of thing on renewals. You know, what percentage of people renewed the first day?

00:09:47 ◼   ► Okay, well, there's a good chance that's similar to the people who are going to renew the second

00:09:50 ◼   ► day and the third and the fourth. And it can put my mind at ease that I'm not going to

00:09:54 ◼   ► have one day wake up and everything just is in shambles, that everybody's asked for their

00:09:59 ◼   ► money back. You know, obviously, there's no accounting for the news, I suppose. You know,

00:10:03 ◼   ► if something crazy and dramatic happened, you know, you never know. But you can't worry

00:10:08 ◼   ► about those types of events. Things that you can't predict are by definition things that

00:10:13 ◼   ► aren't really worth worrying about in a lot of ways.

00:10:15 ◼   ► Because you can worry about the things

00:10:17 ◼   ► that you have control about, and the rest you just hope for.

00:10:22 ◼   ► So anyway, I know it's a bit of a rant,

00:10:24 ◼   ► but I hope that's useful.

00:10:26 ◼   ► Because I know I hear from a lot of other iOS developers

00:10:28 ◼   ► that this is something they struggle with, too.

00:10:30 ◼   ► That you're worried about how you're

00:10:32 ◼   ► going to make this sustainable.

00:10:33 ◼   ► And the reality is, the average may not

00:10:36 ◼   ► be what you want it to be.

00:10:38 ◼   ► Your apps may not make the amount of money

00:10:40 ◼   ► that you hope they would, or that

00:10:41 ◼   ► would be sustainable for your business.

00:10:44 ◼   ► But it's rarely going to be a dramatic falloff.

00:10:46 ◼   ► It's more likely to be a much more gradual, a much more steady falloff.

00:10:51 ◼   ► And so you can look at where you are now, and if that's enough for you, then great.

00:10:56 ◼   ► If it isn't, well, then you're going to have to work on a way of either adding another

00:10:59 ◼   ► app on top of that or by growing them up gradually over time or whatever it is.

00:11:04 ◼   ► But don't have quite so much anxiety about, you know, sort of dramatic falloffs because

00:11:09 ◼   ► Because that's what you worry about, and it doesn't really get you anywhere.

00:11:15 ◼   ► For a while I definitely had to catch myself with feed wrangler, where I thought, what

00:11:18 ◼   ► happens if nobody renews and the service just kind of ends?

00:11:21 ◼   ► And the renewal rates maybe are, it's complicated to work out exactly if it's what it needs

00:11:28 ◼   ► to be or what I want it to be, but it's good enough.

00:11:31 ◼   ► At least it seems fine now, and it's certainly not zero.

00:11:33 ◼   ► And so that kind of worry that I had wasn't helping me make the service any better.

00:11:38 ◼   ► If I want to worry about making this-- increasing revenues

00:11:42 ◼   ► on Feed Wrangler or any of my apps,

00:11:44 ◼   ► it's like the thing I need to be doing

00:11:45 ◼   ► is putting time, energy, and effort into making

00:11:47 ◼   ► those products better.

00:11:48 ◼   ► And that's probably going to be far more productive than

00:11:50 ◼   ► spending that time worrying.

00:11:52 ◼   ► All right.

00:11:52 ◼   ► That's it for today's show.

00:11:54 ◼   ► As always, if you have questions, comments, concerns,

00:11:56 ◼   ► complaints, I'm on Twitter @_davidsmith,

00:11:58 ◼   ► david@developingperspective.com.

00:12:00 ◼   ► And as we-- I guess we're heading into our rundown

00:12:03 ◼   ► towards WWDC.

00:12:04 ◼   ► I think we're about 30 days out.

00:12:06 ◼   ► I'll probably be doing a couple of-- the next couple of shows.

00:12:09 ◼   ► Might go back to the then conventional wisdom theory,

00:12:13 ◼   ► but then I'll probably be doing a couple of pre-WWDC shows.

00:12:16 ◼   ► So if you have any questions about WWDC itself,

00:12:18 ◼   ► in terms of if you're going and you've never been before

00:12:21 ◼   ► and you have things that you're worried about or concerned

00:12:22 ◼   ► about, let me know.

00:12:23 ◼   ► I'll be happy to kind of address those.

00:12:25 ◼   ► I won't be there this year, but I'll be in town.

00:12:27 ◼   ► But I've been many years, and so I'm happy to address that.

00:12:30 ◼   ► And then just generally about talking

00:12:32 ◼   ► about what to expect and kind of what I'm hoping for as we

00:12:35 ◼   ► head into the summer.

00:12:36 ◼   ► Exciting.

00:12:37 ◼   ► All right.

00:12:38 ◼   ► Have a good week.

00:12:38 ◼   ► Happy coding.

00:12:39 ◼   ► I'll talk to you later.

00:12:40 ◼   ► Bye.