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Comment by volaski | Hacker News Reader

How are these "failed"? Just looks like a nice set of demo purpose apps to me

Well if I had to guess, it's because he didn't turn it into a profitable business.

Targeting developers is probably not a good market because most are notoriously cheap. I've seen rants where people complain about $70 being too much for Sublime Text, for example.

Howard Pinsky did a good job explaining his similar problem in this video: http://youtu.be/IBUh8bxbdmU

I haven't come across his channel before but from what I saw he has good quality tutorials plus he has 300k subscribers. It is really sad that the combination of quality and 300k subscribers doesn't bring him a decent return.

In the age of Ad Block, I say a return of $50 every 6 months or per video tutorial is good if not remarkable.

OK, so perhaps it's not an unexpected return. But that kind of return does not provide the creator with enough income to make a living, even in a country with a lower cost of living.

After all, a quality tutorial is not something even a highly-skilled individual can throw together in a few minutes.

Yeah sure $50 is ridiculous but as something on the side and in light of the turbulent market dynamics post ad blockers proliferation, it's really remarkable.

I know it's hard to imagine but many (most) developers are not from USA (and similar). They work on/for local markets, earning local salaries. $70 is suddenly a lot. Nothing to do with being "cheap".

That statement is made a lot. It's easy to believe because of how the world population is distributed. However, it's just a made-up statement. Where do most developers live? Do you have any real data to backup that statement?

Take the USD appreciation in front of most currencies and you'll have a made up yet pretty reasonable estimation.

70 sounds fine but what about 210 for a text editor? That's how it feels in Brazil for example.

Yes, I get how the exchange rate works, and I understand that there are a fair number of developers in Brazil. It doesn't answer my question though, which is where do most developers live?

Like I said there's nothing wrong with choosing free software. It's a great option. The more Linux, vim/Emacs/Eclipse, Gimp/Inkscape users, the better.

Is the statement in question this one?

They work on/for local markets, earning local salaries. $70 is suddenly a lot. Nothing to do with being "cheap".

I do not have any real data to back up that statement. But I'm pretty sure about it.

edit: To explain a bit, just take web developers. No one would outsource creating a web page to US (or wherever it would cost 10 times the money). Various Information Systems as well. Even bigger US companies have usually development centers in some "poorer" countries.

> "I do not have any real data to back up that statement. But I'm pretty sure about it."

If you have no evidence to back up a statement you pulled out of thin air, then do not comment! There are PLENTY of web design firms and iOS shops in the US.

I feel it's quite intuitive that there are more developers outside of US than there are in US. If it's not, then I'm sorry, I do not have the data for you and the comment already happened.

> There are PLENTY of web design firms and iOS shops in the US.

How is this even remotely relevant?

Why don't you back up your statement with data? Your argument (that most developers live in the USA) is the one that requires convincing. Maybe you slept through your social studies class but USA is just one part of the world and there are many other countries. And they all use computers and smartphones. And it's obvious American developers are not the ones who coded apps that run on them.

>> They work on/for local markets, earning local salaries. $70 is suddenly a lot.

If that were the case, then every single Adobe product would be totally out of reach. Considering they do around a billion dollars worth of business in Europe, I'm not sure this is the case.

For me its quite the opposite. After saving a lot of money just to get Photoshop (around 1K) and Dreamweaver (around 1K), $70 is practically free.

That sounds a lot like priming. https://explorable.com/priming

Europe west/north of Germany is very rich compared to newer EU states and eastern Europe in general.

Pretty much everything is too much if the alternative is free. Taking your Sublime Text example, you can get Atom.io which has functionality that is comparable to ST - meaning you'd only pay the $70 for performance. And even then, you can get the free / demo version of ST which is just as usable as the full version, but with an occasional and IMO not very annoying popup every once in a while.

It's fine to use the open source option. The more people who use it and help contribute to it the better.

However, saying that you can live with the occasional nagging of the paid option violates the license. It's an honor system.

https://www.sublimetext.com/buy

Later, we should rip on all those unethical MBA's. Those "losers" need to be taught ethics. Ridiculous!

I think a lot of the problem is that you don't know how much you want to commit to a product. I have tried a number of JS frameworks, and wouldn't pay for any of the, I would pay for Django (or get my company to) as it has saved me loads of effort over the last 4 years. Though it did take probably 6 months before i was aware quite how much effort it was saving me.

I would pay for Django (or get my company to) as it has saved me loads of effort over the last 4 years

Not being snarky, but https://www.djangoproject.com/foundation/donate/ is an option.

That is true, but it is much much easier to get most companies to pay for a product than to make a donation.

Many widely used developer tools have been free(as in freedom) for decades. This is natural, as developers are actually competent enough to take advantage of that fact by virtue of knowing how to code. So many tools become popular because of their extensibility and hackability.

I'd like to second this question.

I've thought about producing demo/stub apps on a similar basis but my lack of marketing expertise/foresight/interest has been a real blocker. I'm curious to hear how you got into this project, when it started to become a business interest, when you decided it was 'failed' (I note these target iOS 7, but hope all is not lost with iOS 8)

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