My favourite part of his post reminded me of a quote my marketing professor once told me "The most important thing in a marketing campaign is a great product"
Had desk been a poor product, I doubt the Halo-effect would have happened.
Not only is his promotion on DF and followup blog post a model of How It's Done, but his entire blog is really well-done from a marketing and SEO standpoint. Lots of relevant internal links, good photography, great design, and posts that are devoid of keyword spam and are just the right length and reading level.
Anyway, great design, very savvy marketing and SEO, wrapped around a buggy app that ticks a lot of the currently trendy boxes and contains some shocking deficiencies. And if I sound irritated for being taken, it's because it cost me $30, which is what a mature, quality, premium app like Pixelmator costs.
It's honestly really tough being an indie developer... I have to do EVERYTHING related to not just building the DAMN THING but all of the business, marketing, Q/A, financials/accounting, blogging... the list is eternally-long.
v1.0 was lucky... in a lot of ways. v1.1 addressed a shit-ton of issues... v1.2, out in a week (hopefully) will add a major user-requested feature...
it... just... takes... time... when... doing... it... alone...
thanks Jon for the comments. I'm doing my best.
1) this is a writing app /with no support for paragraph breaks/. That is unbelievable to me. Nobody who writes for a living can use an app that shows all of your text to you as a really large single block with no horizontal breaks between paragraphs. How? Why? Not only am I stupified by this, but I also am dumbfounded at all of these 5-star reviews that don't mention it or any of the other show-stoppper flaws I pointed out within the first 20 mins of use. Are people reviewing an app that they've not actually used?
2) The price. $30 is a lot of money, and yeah you can try to convince Apple's customer support to give you a refund, but we both know nobody does that.
The combo of high price, glaring product problems, and a masterful marketing effort just doesn't sit well with me. I'm not saying you're a scam artist -- the site and even the app reflect a lot of passion and creativity. But I do question your priorities. More coding and user testing, and less SEO and blogging and convincing everyone in your network to give the app 5 stars, maybe.
1. I'm working on this and the feature was an attempt to combine both WYSIWYG and Markdown into one formatting experience. This ended up being a gamble and one that I lost and the newest updates will address this. It sucks, i failed, i got it wrong.
2. A lot? sure. i guess. there are tons of great alternatives, for sure!
"More coding"...? #facepalm ...
really?
If you continue adding features and continue making the product as a whole better and more valuable for a larger and larger audience.
So eventually he should be happy as well.
That requires obviously, that you mostly add features. i.e. you don't re-invent features or redesign features without adding value (just to make prettier), I have seen a lot of teams/people doing that kind of mistake.
i think one of the most important things any developer or business does is decide who their customer is... and who their customer isn't.
Remember that out of the $30 John gets just $20 from Apple, and if you take another third out for other expenses you're looking at less than $14. Needless to say you need to sell a lot of copies at that price to break even on your development time, on the order of 10,000/year, which is more than 27 copies/day! Then take into account that the App Store makes it difficult to get repeat revenue out of customers even if they use your app for several years...
But, that wasn't the point and wasn't the motive... so, i am okay with "eating" those costs so that i might be more "in control" of this product's destiny.
appreciate the support... this is what makes "indie development" worth it.
As an indie who has made the mistake of both pricing too low and spending too much time on development (vs marketing) in the past, it looks like you've done very well to avoid these pitfalls so far!
one of the biggest compliments and encouragements that i've received is that other indie developers have told me that i've done it "right" by pricing the app the way I've done it.
in fact, many of them have shared with me that they've done this wrong in the past and that they wanted to encourage me that i've gotten at least this part right!
the challenge is that those "atta boys!" are all private via DMs or individual emails... not public so they aren't available for all to see.
but to be sure, i've got a bunch and it feels great.
Possibly, but then that would be a bunch of people with a lot of money :)
> 2) The price. $30 is a lot of money, and yeah you can try to convince Apple's customer support to give you a refund, but we both know nobody does that.
Is $30 really that much if it delivers value? Desk is meant to make blogging simple. It's definitely hard to argue if you buy the app, hate it, and don't use it. At that level, a price point of $5 or $10 would still be much more expensive than what you got from it.
But for people who actually use the product, how long will it be before they extract the $30 of value (ok, this is a simplified view, there is non trivial effort for learning the product.) from the product to have made it a good investment? Whether it is time saved, or increased quality of output, I'd argue not much time at all.
Another thing to note is that the article points out that the number of returns for Desk is small but non trivial (~2.6% of revenue), so people do in fact do that. This is consistent with my own experiences (about 4%).
but, one of the biggest motivations for building this was knowing how hard it is to write, full stop. even after writing and blogging for 14 years... it's still as hard as ever.
any tool that can help me write and grab my strange amorphous thoughts and put them down into something understandable makes that ROI-value hit positive real quick.
so, for those people who are able to write more and publish more via the app... i think it's really worth it to them.
why? because writing is really fucking hard.
In less snarky terms, I think focusing on marketing is super important. The faults and missing features can be fixed when you have users and money to pay for the work to do so. I'm sick of using a nice obscure app that is abandoned because I'm one of the few people who use it, so I'm less harsh on marketing as opposed to "more coding" than you.
that nearly killed me when i first realized that. this book really changed my perspective: http://blog.desk.pm/gaining-traction/
it's hard to do both... i mean, impossible... but i've focused more on doing a good job of building community, creating content, and gaining traction through experimentation (e.g. marketing on Gruber's blog) than I ever have...
and... it's kinda worked.!
I have maximal sympathy for the challenges you face and I think that the concept of focused-editing with seamless publishing is fantastic, especially since no one else has done it, and I'm willing to wait for some updates to see where it goes, but I wonder if there should be some better visibility on the apps current caveats.
the challenge is that i wasn't aware of many of the issues until we had a plethora of users (which is great). i can only catch so many via testing and alpha-users!
thanks for your patience, that means a ton. it really does as an indie developer.
finally, i try to point a lot of people to our community forum, which has grown quite nicely over the last 3 months. there's a lot of help there and said caveats. i can always do a better job in this department though, so, thanks for the kind reminder!
Except there is a problem: serious writers need more than 'minimalism'.
All the authors and novelists and long-form fiction writers I know have reams upon reams of notes, plot information, and character data cluttering up their MS Word (argh) and Scrivener screens. I even know some to use spreadsheets to keep track of complicated family trees and plots in long fantasy novels.
This is why I use Scrivener. It's bulky and far from minimalist, but it has the tools I need.
Minimalist apps are for people who want to play 'pretend' at writing. Or write a blog post a day and call that 'substantial writing'. But if you really, really need to put together a story, you will need to do your research. And minimalist apps are of no use to you then.
"substantial writing"...? really? "serious" writers?
I could list 10,000 pieces of GLORIOUS work that was crafted on nothing more than "pen" and "paper" ... or perhaps just "paper" and "ink" and "typewriter"...
PEN + PAPER == Maximally-minimal "app"...
and in that way, with Desk, I was attempting to create an homage, of sorts, to the "old way" of creating great writing work.
keeping it simple, effective, useful.
minimalist apps are for the serious and the playful, for those that are writing epic novels (one user of Desk is a multi-New York Times winning author) and those that are, as you say, "pretending" to write (like my 8-year old daughter, perhaps: http://john.do/gift-writing/).
but, it all, at the end of the day, is still writing...
"There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed." ~~~ Ernest Hemingway
> this comment is single-handedly the most pompous one of all.
It is interesting to note that HN's commenting guideline is to "Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face to face conversation." yet, the folks here are downvoting puranjay's neutral 'pretend' comment (not targeted at anyone in particular) while upholding yours (you don't tell someone to their face that they made a pompous remark). What hypocrisy.
you're right. i should have taken a step back here. i am being hypocritical and i am (was) wrong. great catch and thanks for that safaridevelop.
Tolstoy didn't write War & Peace with Scrivener, after all.
But what Tolstoy did have was a thick notebook filled with copious notes.
As did every other writer.
Heck, there was a picture going round a few days ago of JK Rowling's huge spreadsheet with plot information, all written on paper.
Now, you can of course get yourself a notebook and take your notes and get your writing done in a minimalist app, but since we are talking about using the computer alone to get all your writing done, I won't bring pen and paper into the equation.
Desk replaces the typewriter. It doesn't replace the notebook and endless scribbles and marginalia.
For that, you still need a tool like Scrivener.
(Edited...) I'm not particularly enamored of "minimalist" writing apps, either -- I'd really like to see a prose-focused editor with modern design sensibility with the editing capability of Nota Bene for DOS two decades ago (which, it's worth noting, Scrivener lacks as well) -- but you're being unduly snippy about it, I think. I write and even occasionally sell stories that are, in fact, written in Markdown in relatively minimal editing environments. Not every story needs research folders, timelines and an index card view.
many of them are not very good... but some of them are amazing. it's all about what works best for the individual.
:)
The community has helped a ton in helping to qualify new features (that make sense) and reward me through my execution.