A couple of quick items.

First, I was just listening to Release Notes podcast episode 117 with Chris Liscio, and he made the interesting suggestion that you should consider giving away updates and new features for apps for free rather than forcing your current users to pay for in app purchases (IAP).

That's not new, but the rationale was interesting. If you haven't finished capturing a reasonable share of your market (and with millions of iOS devices, if you have a general-ish use app, you likely haven't), consider your feature gift as resources spent on word-of-mouth marketing. That is, if your features are worth the time you've spent, why not have your current users sing their praises and convert more folks who aren't in your user base now rather than mining your current users for more cash.

This is very anti "1000 followers", where you realize you can make a decent living on having 1000 folks willing to pay you $100 a year. Or Hoy's Unicorn Free's 30x500:

ME: "Welll, if you skip the VC, and figure out a way to get only 500 people across THE ENTIRE INTERNET to pay you $30 a month, that's $180,000 a year. Pre-tax, sure, but that's a pretty nice salary, no?"

So there's a certain income level you need to have (or a certain exceptionally low outgo level you need to be able to live off of) to run Liscio's "marketing" gamble, but it's interesting, and well-argued. Can you afford to play the long game?

Desk MD Fimp

In other news, and following my own advice (Scratch every itch, stay itchy for life), I just shelled out for Saddington's Desk MD instead of spending the time building an itch-scratching blogging app. So far, I'm actually not exceptionally happy. It's nice and "distractionless", if you don't count that I can still see my second monitor ;^), and the Markdown rendering/highlighting on the screen is fine, but I've got complaints, man!
  • Even the "XS" font size is GIANT.
  • I just had the cursor screw up when I added a line at the bottom of the screen, and now with each addition, the whole danged draft jumps. (It's hard to tell that jumping isn't from hand-holding the iPad taking the video, but it isn't.)
  • I also don't think I'm going to be able to upload YouTube very easily here...
  • No onboarding on initial open.
  • I'm not sure how to edit the title of my post.
  • There's a place for tags, but I think that's OS X tags, not Blogger tags.
  • I can't access existing blog posts on Blogger to edit, etc, I don't think. So Desk MD seems to be a one-way poster... ??
  • There doesn't seem to be a way to get to existing post tags either in the posting process.
  • Some of the toolbar buttons are actions, and some are drop-down menus. Possible actions don't excourage exploration. "Hrm, wonder what this button does..." (self-destruct!!)
  • I'm not sure how I add an image without uploading it somewhere myself, though part of the permissions Desk MD asked for from my Google account was for "View and manage your Google photos and videos", which already made me feel squeamish.

    Now it's got permissions, but I can't use images?
  • Did I mention no onboarding, not even a good video on the Desk PM site?
  • It also put <p> tags around every list item. That looked horrible, and, um, isn't how Markdown should be translated to html, I don't think.


    (I've fixed it manually, and also added images and YouTube manually)
  • Wow. It also translated URLs as if they were Markdown. Major fail. So my link, below, to MVP on Wikipedia went from 
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_viable_product

    to
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum<em>viable</em>product


    That's simply invalid html. Wow. Wait, is the underscore for em valid MD? I thought that was [only] an asterisk? Perhaps it's both...

Man, this screen-jumping stink0rz. And the featureset is exceptionally MVP-y.

Anyhow, let's see how it posts. Edit: Poorly. See above. And now that I've edited using Blogger's online tools, the p tags are all br's. I have no idea what's going on, but at least the post looks better now. No more time, will probably split the Desk MD stuff off later.

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