Dan Wood: The Eponymous Weblog (Archives)

Dan Wood Dan Wood is co-owner of Karelia Software, creating programs for the Macintosh computer. He is the father of two kids, lives in the Bay Area of California USA, and prefers bicycles to cars. This site is his older weblog, which mostly covers geeky topics like Macs and Mac Programming. Go visit the current blog here.

Useful Tidbits and Egotistical Musings from Dan Wood

Categories: Business · Mac OS X · Cocoa Programming · General · All Categories

Wed, 13 Feb 2008

If I could go back in time...

permanent link · Topic/Cocoa
/Cocoa

Yesterday, I was interviewed by a couple of folks who are doing a project about the "indie" Mac software community. Many other people I know have also talked to them. I look forward to the report that they are working on.

It was interesting to reflect about the business, and the community that we have. This community is great — we "see" each other on Twitter (where I've been active for a while), iChat, email, and even in person at conferences like WWDC and Macworld Expo. It's something that certainly didn't exist when I "went indie" and started writing Watson and its unpublished predecessor, Museo, back in 2001.

There are dozens of well-known, successful independent Mac developers now. More seem to be taking the plunge each and every day. It's easier to do now because of the community, I think. Of course it also means more competition, and it's harder to get a quality application noticed amid the quickie applications. VersionTracker and MacUpdate are so full now that they are not particularly useful anymore.

There's one thought I expressed yesterday, which I'll reiterate here. Consider it advice for budding Indie software developers. If I could go back in time and give myself some advice, I'd say to plan for having more than one application, and incorporate that into your development and company infrastructure. Even if you are a one-product company for quite a while (as we have been, though I hope that will change soon), it will be much less painful to grow into a multi-application company. I'd even go so far as to work a "dummy" second application into your workflow, just so that you can easily work with a second real application should you ever have one. The "behind the scenes" aspects of the company, such as the structure of your source code repository, your building scripts and utilities, your payment processing methodology, your customer/mailing list databases, your techniques for looking up lost license keys, your online help documents, and so forth, will scale better if you plan for it early on.