Karelia Software

With the end of 2009 just around the corner, I thought it would be useful to write a "big picture" post here instead of a specific "how-to" article.

I was recently asking myself "where do customers come from?" and "how do I reach out to more of them?" I've long been a big fan of metaphors, so I started brainstorming metaphors as a way to visualize the many dimensions of how customers come to know about one's products.

After a few false starts, I remembered the "fishing for customers" metaphor used by Daniel Jalkut in Episode 19 of Core Intuition. I decided that this is a great metaphor, and it's worth thinking about some more.

The question is: Who are the fish and who are the fishermen? (Uh... fisherpeople?)

Metaphor 1: Your Customers are the Fish

This is the metaphor from Daniel's podcast. Think of your customers as swimming by in a stream, and you are trying to do whatever you can to get them to notice you and become a customer. A net to catch some might be a newsworthy event or…

Following up on my "15 Suggestions for Marketing your iPhone Application" post, Shane Crawford of Blue Lightning Labs told me that the latest version of his application Mathemagics was just approved for the App store, with in-app email list signups.

I grabbed some screenshots of the Settings window (visible by clicking the "i' button in the lower right corner of the main window) of the process, in case you want to implement something similar. Note that he is also providing a way to follow @bluelightnin on Twitter by prompting you for your twitter information and performing the follow directly.

Congratulations Shane, and thanks for sharing the news.

This interview with Oliver Breidenbach, CEO of Boinx Software, is the fourth in a series of interviews I've held with indie software developers about marketing Mac software. Previous interviews: Jacob Gorban, Jean MacDonald, and Kevin Hoctor.

Boinx Software was founded in 1996 by brothers Oliver and Achim Breidenbach. With Achim as the master mind developer and Oliver the marketing genius, they set out to change the world with OpenDoc components — an effort thwarted shortly before the first products shipped by the sudden death of OpenDoc. To recover their losses, the brothers decided to venture into web application development until users could use Apple's next generation OS in their daily lives. In 2002, Boinx Software shipped its first Mac OS X application and has won three Apple Design Awards since. With a talented team of currently 18 people, Boinx Software creates and sells software for creative users, including FotoMagic, iStopMotion, and BoinxTV.

Though I had met many of the…