Hours, the Apple Watch, and turning an app into a business — The Hours Blog — Medium:

How do you break into business and the enterprise? We like Slack’s bottom-up approach. Start by making the best solution for individuals, who in turn advocate adoption for their team, who in turn evangelize to other teams…and up the chain it goes.

If this isn't already part of your indie business plan, even as just a potential end game, it should be. That's exactly the tack I was hoping to take. It's a long game -- become a household name, at least with the bleeding edge households, and then, slowly, have your fans champion your app at their businesses.

 That requires some planning, not the least of which is ensuring that your app has features that appeal to business users. And, admittedly, it's a stolen plan. Apple's the most obvious, but even Aeron chairs are probably executive-first finds.

But there's probably not enough money in the consumer market to power a large business based on most any software-first company short of games. Even _David Smith recently lamented that his company peaked a few years ago, and that he has to at least consider that the indie iOS ride might not last forever. If you want to make money, you have to go where the money is, and that, obviously, even ontologically, enough, is to target those entities whose primary goal is to create wealth: businesses.

Not sure how it'll work for Hours, nor am I sure going free and incurring the extra support load is best, but I will say that targeting business is the smart way to go.

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