Mac Indie Marketing | Karelia Software

WWDC Prediction: Mac App Store

Thu, 03 Jun 2010 10:28:17 -0700

Since the iPhone app store debuted, there has been speculation that Apple may introduce a similar app store for Mac OS X applications.

I really started thinking about this when I saw a 2008 tweet from Steven Frank:

Scenario: Apple makes code-signing mandatory for desktop Mac applications. You can now only buy them through iTunes. Think it can't happen?

The discussions over email, over Twitter, or over beers have ranged from the skeptical "It'll never happen" to the paranoid "OMG OMG."

But now, I'm beginning to think that it's really going to happen, perhaps with an announcement at next week's WWDC to start the ball rolling. And it might be a good thing.

So what if Steve Jobs supposedly denied that there would be an app store for the Mac? You know that Apple is never straight about its future plans. Many times before, Apple (or Steve) has denied the existence of strategies or products, only to introduce it a few months later.

Here is why I think the Mac app store idea is ripe to happen. First, there's the removal of the link to the Apple downloads page from Apple's website. You can still get there from the  menu, and they are maintaining the page again after a bit of a mysterious hiatus, but the page and its family are clearly not being "pushed" by Apple.

Musing about an Indie Developer Referral Marketing Coop

Thu, 27 May 2010 15:00:52 -0700

Occasionally we send out referrals for other software from fellow Indie Mac developers in our monthly mailings. As a way of helping our users/friends to find out about cool software, and also as a favor for our developer friends, we will include a blurb about the other developer's product(s) in our mailing. Often we'll arrange with the developer for a coupon code we can mention, so that our readers get a special deal by buying the application using our referral.

Sometimes this is a one-way thing, where we just mention the application because we like it so much, for the good karma of doing so. Other times, we have made agreements with the other developer that they will put in a reciprocal mention of our product in their mailing, so that we scratch each other's back.

Of course it's quite possible to set up a commission kind of deal for this kind of thing, though we have only done this once or twice. As long as it's still a genuine recommendation, I don't have any ethical problems about doing that; we all have to make a living and doing so is a way to bring in another stream of income.

How to turn people into walking billboards for your company

Wed, 26 May 2010 16:18:02 -0700

John Fox's MemoryMiner has a cool gallery feature, so I took John up on his idea for a blog post. Only somebody like Justin Williams (Cocoa developer, and also, I'm told, a popular singer who is quite a sensation with the young ladies) would be able to pull something like this off!

(Apparently a lot of developers will be bringing promotional buttons to WWDC. I thought about doing that for Karelia but I'm worried that idea has already "jumped the shark." What kinds of swag would be better?)

"10 Marketing Resources…" is also Useful for Mac Apps

Sun, 09 May 2010 07:30:17 -0700

I ran across this article, 10 Marketing Resources Every App Should Provide. Though it's geared toward Web-based applications, it has some good advice that should apply to Mac applications as well. (In fact, you'll see a familiar icon in Tip #2 that is a Mac application!)

Note to self: Make sure we are doing all 10 of these on the Karelia website! :-)

The AppStorm website may be worth browsing around; they have a Mac section that looks very nice!

Dropbox Presentation

Mon, 26 Apr 2010 07:56:05 -0700

I came across this wonderful presentation by Dropbox CEO Drew Houston, linked via the ever-useful twitter feed @smashingmag. (So useful, in fact, that I don't actually folow the feed — I subscribe to it in NetNewsWire, using a script I wrote that turns the embedded URLs into links for the feed itself so it's easy to open the linked pages. But I digress.)

Dropbox Startup Lessons Learned

This presentation has quite a few gems. Some particular favorites of mine:

Search is a way to harvest demand, not create it.
Typical Dropbox user: Hears about Dropbox from a friend, blog, etc. and tries it → "I didn't realize I needed this" → "It actually works" → Unexpectedly happy → tells friends.
Three types of markets: existing, resegmented, new. Marketing tactics for one market fail horribly in others.
New strategy which worked well was to encourage word of mouth and viral spreading.

It's astonishing how Dropbox was able to enter an already crowded field and come to dominate. Their word-of-mouth techniques worked rather well, of course. (It's interesting to note that Dropbox used to have a paid referral program but they no longer do. I guess they felt they no longer needed it.)

You can draw your own conclusions from how Dropbox did it to your own business.

"Running a MicroISV" video talk

Wed, 21 Apr 2010 12:41:55 -0700

I came across this video by Jonathan Freeman of WidgetPress from a CocoaHeads Atlanta meeting a couple of weeks ago. Thanks to Scotty and Foxy of the MDN Show for pointing out this video.

You can skip until about the four minute mark if you don't want to hear a lot of company history, and really the main point of the talk doesn't start until 12:00.

Of course he covers a lot more than just marketing in this talk. The content that is related to marketing includes understanding Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and website analytics, giving out special information and licenses to bloggers, issuing press releases, and making yourself known in the Mac community. He also introduces a good technique to paying attention to how much money your company is making on an hourly basis (which, to me, is helpful when judging when you should consider paying somebody to handle some tasks for you, as I mentioned in my previous post.)

Overall, some good advice! I, however, will not be trying to emulate his getting up at four in the morning!

Getting Help So You Can Focus on Your Strengths

Mon, 12 Apr 2010 21:35:09 -0700

Some recent discussion on the MacSB list about what kind of system people recommend for handling technical support got me thinking that what is important for dealing with support is not what tool, but who is doing it.

One of the best things that has happened for us engineers at Karelia is when we found somebody who could handle front-line technical support for us. If you can hire somebody, part-time, to handle your support inquiries (and, as it often turns out, sales inquiries as well), and insulate you from all but the most complicated cases, it means that you can focus on the engineering that you are good at.

Taking this step is a critical early step for an indie developer to go from struggling to successful, especially when he/she discovers that once their software is released, they hardly seem to have time to do development any more! Last year at WWDC, we were chatting with Kevin Hoctor about doing this, and look at where he is now! You're welcome, Kevin.

What does this have to do with marketing? OK, maybe this is just a little bit off-topic, but really the idea here is that if there is something that you are not that strong at, and you would rather focus your time on something that you are better at, then you should find some help. And of course that means marketing as well as tech support.

An interview with John Fox, creator of MemoryMiner

Fri, 09 Apr 2010 15:14:38 -0700

This interview with John Fox of GroupSmarts, LLC is the eleventh in a series of interviews I've held with indie software developers about marketing Mac software. Previous interviews: Paul Kafasis, Gedeon Maheux, Justin Williams, Gus Mueller, Daniel Jalkut, Rich Siegel, Oliver Breidenbach, Jacob Gorban, Jean MacDonald, and Kevin Hoctor.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Really young. If you look at the original photo you will learn the interesting story about it.

John Fox (@djembe on Twitter) is the creator of MemoryMiner, a cool application used to "discover the threads connecting peoples' lives across time and place." His professional background is Digital Asset Management (or DAM). At his prior company WebWare, he created a rather sophisticated web-based application used by the likes of Martha Stewart, Sony Pictures, Harvard Business School, et al. to organize, distribute and track the usage of their valuable digital media. Over a 12 month period starting in 2003, the confluence of several life-changing events (his father died, he got married, and had a child) made him want to put his skills towards more humanistic endeavors, and thus was born MemoryMiner. His goal with MemoryMiner has been to create a great tool for the recording and sharing of individual life memories which in turn could be aggregated on a massive scale. The end goal (which he admits is a huge undertaking) is to create a network of first-person accounts of modern society and culture that can be browsed by people, place and time.

An Interview with Paul Kafasis, Rogue Amoeba

Wed, 07 Apr 2010 13:38:36 -0700

This interview with Paul Kafasis of Rogue Amoeba is the tenth in a series of interviews I've held with indie software developers about marketing Mac software. Previous interviews: Gedeon Maheux, Justin Williams, Gus Mueller, Daniel Jalkut, Rich Siegel, Oliver Breidenbach, Jacob Gorban, Jean MacDonald, and Kevin Hoctor.

Photo by Blake Burris

Rogue Amoeba makes cool applications like the home audio streamer Airfoil, Audio Hijack Pro, the Radioshift audio recording tool, and the audio editor Fission. Paul Kafasis, whose title is CEO/Lackey of Rogue Amoeba, was kind enough to talk about marketing from his perspective.

While not in front of a computer, which he admits happens too infrequently, Paul enjoys/suffers through distance running, reads voraciously, and attempts writing humor. He can be found on Twitter as @PBones.

DW: First off, can you explain what you do at Rogue Amoeba?

PK: I handle the myriad tasks that let our top-notch programmers keep programming. That's a litany of things, from marketing and PR to interviews to all sorts of boring paperwork. Probably what I enjoy most is product design and development, working with our coders and designer to determine what we'll include in a new app, or an update. This sort of process takes knowledge gained from talking to customers, reviewers, reporters, and more, and distills it down, to shape what the future will be. I find that fascinating, and rewarding.

Getting another $n * 0.93

Tue, 06 Apr 2010 21:25:53 -0700

One of the main goals when selling software is getting people to be aware of your product so they will buy it. Ideally, everybody will buy it at full price (let's call this $n) but not everybody is going to be finding your application through word of mouth, search queries, links from websites that mention it, and so forth.

There are something like 25 million Mac users out there, probably more, who could conceivably buy your application. But the fact is, a good 99.9% of them have never heard of your application and won't buy it.

So even though it would be cool to get just a few more users at $n per license, it might be worth reaching some small percentage of that 25 million people who weren't going to be paying you anything otherwise. This is why it's often useful to do discounts and sales (getting you an additional 50-90% of what you make on normal-priced sales), daily promos (an additional 20%-30%), or perhaps bundles (peanuts per license, but hopefully a few extra thousand dollars) to reach some of those otherwise unreachable people and make them paid users of your application.

iPhone App Store SEO

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 08:00:19 -0800

A while back, I wrote a post "15 Suggestions for Marketing your iPhone Application" in which I suggested you work on having a website for your iPhone application so that you can get found in Google.

While a lot of this is still relevant, I did notice the article "App Store SEO: The Impact of iTunes Web Preview" which shows that Apple's new, rich web previews take care of a lot of the criticisms I had of their launching pages.

I still think it is a good idea for an iPhone (or iPad, for that matter) developer to have their own website, where they have much better control over their content and can do more to convince the website visitor how cool your application is. But at least Apple's change will help as well; the advice in the article I've linked to is good stuff!

Track Your New Customers with Cookies

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 22:57:23 -0800

It's possible using any number of website analytics tools such as Google Analytics, Mint, or just the tools that may be provided by your Internet host, to get a sense of how people who visit your website found out about it. It's a great way to see what your major referrers are.

I've been a bit more interested in how people who actually end up becoming customers originally came to our website. This one is a bit tricker, because it means tracking visitors all the way from their first visit through their purchase, but it is more revealing.

How can you do something like this for yourself? Well, it depends a lot on how your store works, but I'll outline the basics.

First off, you need to set a cookie when they arrive at any page of our website and the cookie has not yet been set. Just save the value of the HTTP referer [sic] header. If the value is empty (such as when somebody types in the URL, or clicks on a link to your website from an email message), I find that it's better to set a placholder like "direct" so I know for certain that we didn't have a known referrer. If the cookie is already set, don't replace it; they may come back to your website more than once, but it's (probably) the first referrer that you are interested in knowing about.

Smashing Mag's Marketing Your Mobile Application

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 16:36:31 -0800

One of my favorite websites these days is Smashing Magazine. Generally geared toward web development and designers, it has enough tidbits that keep me subscribed to their RSS feed and their prolific Twitter stream.

Today they featured "How To Market Your Mobile Application." I wanted readers to know about this, not only because many Mac developers are also iPhone developers, but also because its advice is good for Mac developers as well! In fact, there is little in the article that is specific to mobile or iPhone apps. So go check it out!

An Interview with Gedeon Maheux, the Iconfactory

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 21:51:45 -0800

This interview with Gedeon Maheux of the Iconfactory is the ninth in a series of interviews I've held with indie software developers about marketing Mac software. Previous interviews: Justin Williams, Gus Mueller, Daniel Jalkut, Rich Siegel, Oliver Breidenbach, Jacob Gorban, Jean MacDonald, and Kevin Hoctor.

I'm sure everybody reading this blog knows about the Iconfactory, a design/software company based in North Carolina (with branches in California and Sweden). While fellow developers probably know (and look up to) Craig Hockenberry, inventor of the CHOCKLOCK, I thought it would be best to talk to Iconfactory's main marketing person, Gedeon Maheux, about how this über-cool icon design, icon, and Mac/iPhone software business gets the word out about their products. Ged blogs and tweets, of course.

DW: Can you start by telling our readers about the kinds of marketing activities you do at the Iconfactory?

GM: We've experimented with different types of marketing over the years, but the tried and true ones that work best for us include:

An Interview with Justin Williams, Second Gear Software

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 18:29:06 -0800

This interview with Justin Williams of Second Gear Software, is the eighth in a series of interviews I've held with indie software developers about marketing Mac software. Previous interviews: Gus Mueller, Daniel Jalkut, Rich Siegel, Oliver Breidenbach, Jacob Gorban, Jean MacDonald, and Kevin Hoctor.

Justin Williams runs the one-man software shop called Second Gear Software. His products are Today and Check Off. He obsessively blogs at CarpeAqua and it also very active on Twitter.

DW: Can you tell us some of the marketing activities you do?

JW: I'll first confess that I'm not entirely comfortable with my marketing activities at this time. Part of this is due to me not really having much experience with it, but another part is that like many, I have a negative connotation to the word marketing. I am so bombarded with marketing and advertising (good and bad) every day that I always second guess what I do in terms of marketing.

(1) Newsletter: This is my favorite marketing venue. I send out a monthly newsletter that highlights what I've been working on in the past month as well as offers some tips for using both Today and Check Off. I recently added support to both apps to prompt the user to subscribe to the newsletter on their first launch, which has offered a nice uptick in the amount of subscriptions.

An interview with Gus Mueller, Flying Meat Software

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 16:49:32 -0800

This interview with Gus Mueller of Flying Meat Software, is the seventh in a series of interviews I've held with indie software developers about marketing Mac software. Previous interviews: Daniel Jalkut, Rich Siegel, Oliver Breidenbach, Jacob Gorban, Jean MacDonald, and Kevin Hoctor.

Gus Mueller is the founder of Flying Meat Inc, located just north of Seattle in Everett, Washington. Flying Meat has created a couple of award-winning applications for the Mac; Acorn, a bitmap image editor (which I love to use for graphic manipulation that I don't need a real artist to do for me) and VoodooPad, a personal wiki. Gus being a self-admitted man of few words, this is one of the shorter interviews of this series!

DW: Can you tell us some of the marketing activities you do?

GM: I don't do any traditional marketing, at least on purpose. I guess I've got an account on twitter, and I have a blog that's reasonably well known, and Acorn was in MacHeist last spring. But that's really about it. I tend to rely on word of mouth sales, and getting noticed by the mac pubs.

An Interview with Daniel Jalkut, Red Sweater Software

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 21:28:54 -0800

This interview with Daniel Jalkut of Red Sweater Software, is the sixth in a series of interviews I've held with indie software developers about marketing Mac software. Previous interviews: Rich Siegel, Oliver Breidenbach, Jacob Gorban, Jean MacDonald, and Kevin Hoctor.

Daniel Jalkut is the founder and de facto CEO of Red Sweater Software, where he develops MarsEdit, a blog editing app, and several other products. On his company blog he writes about marketing, software development, and the general thrills and perils of being an indie Mac developer. When he's not painstakingly developing — and marketing! — his company's products, he enjoys playing guitar, running, and endlessly striving to perfect the home-baked pizza.

(I've actually known Daniel — at least online — since before he became an indie developer, when he worked at Apple, probably around 2002. Even back then, there was a red sweater!)

DW: Can you tell us some of the marketing activities you do?

DJ: I consider marketing to be a very soft art and try to market my products and business on as many fronts as possible, but in a fairly casual way. For some reason the phrase that pops into my head right now is a play on the title of that book you recommended about A/B testing. “Always Be Marketing” sounds like a pretty good catch-phrase for the kind of attitude I try to keep in mind as I'm developing the relationship between me, my company, and the rest of the world.

You Should Have an Email Marketing List

Fri, 22 Jan 2010 12:11:15 -0800

A couple of months ago I wrote a post suggesting that indie developers set up a customer mailing list. I figured that it is such an important topic that it was worth revisiting.

This post is a sort of grab bag of suggestions and tips.

There are so many good reasons to have an email marketing list:

If somebody comes to your website, or downloads your application but doesn't buy it right away, they can join your mailing list, and get to know you and your company a bit more. And then, perhaps, become a customer.
You will have a base of current and potential customers to notify of your upcoming products and releases.
You can cooperatively promote your fellow indie developers' software programs. By introducing cool software to people on your list, they will appreciate you, as will your fellow developers.
You can provide tips and tricks for the users of your software. Even if your subscriber doesn't own the software you mention, they will see that you are proactive and helpful to your customers, and be more likely to become a customer in the future.
Your subscribers may want to forward your emails to other people, thus netting you more subscribers.
You have a base of people to solicit ideas from, have take polls, sign up for beta testing, etc.
You can show off some of your users' productivity. For instance, we like to spotlight a couple of customers' Sandvox-built websites each month.
You can keep your company and your products in the back of people's minds.

Some General Suggestions

Don't just make your newsletter for your customers. There are a lot of people out there who may not need your software, but are curious about what you are up to, or maybe are looking forward to the next great application you write. These are your potential customers, and you are much more likely to sell to them than to somebody who you are hoping will wander onto your website.

Make your signup form easy to find on your website. Really easy. You want to capture people who are just window-shopping, not really in the buying mood. Catch them while you can!

(I have gone to some indie websites, knowing that they had an email list, but sometimes it took me 5 minutes to find the form, or I gave up completely!)

A Comparison of 16 Bulk Email Marketing Services

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 23:23:38 -0800

(If you are just arriving at this post, I recommend you check out my post from November suggesting that you set up a customer mailing list, and my post immediately following this one, You Should Have an Email Marketing List.)

This is a comparison of a 16 online email marketing services. With a little help, I dug up as many email bulk senders as I could, so that I could compare their prices. It's hard to compare these prices because their ranges never quite match, so I decided that putting them into a table form would be the best way to get an overview of the prices.

Nearly all of these services charge you a monthly fee, with a few offering discounts for annual or semi-annual plans. But there are two very different pricing models, which has caused me to break this down into two tables.

Note: These prices are current as of mid-January 2010. They will probably change! Be sure to verify prices by visiting the websites.

The first pricing model is per-subscriber. No matter how many emails per month you send out, you will be charged a fee based on the number of subscribers in your list. This means that if you only send a newsletter out from time to time, you may not be getting a good deal. If you send messages out frequently, then these can actually be quite nice.

Rich Siegel, Bare Bones Software

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 21:08:34 -0800

This interview with Rich Siegel, President/CEO of Bare Bones Software, is the fifth in a series of interviews I've held with indie software developers about marketing Mac software. Previous interviews: Oliver Breidenbach, Jacob Gorban, Jean MacDonald, and Kevin Hoctor. (Is there an indie developer/company you'd like to see featured here? Leave me a comment and I'll do my best to feature them!)

Rich Siegel is the founder and, after all these years, still the President/CEO of Bare Bones Software, known for its long-standing BBEdit and more recent Yojimbo. He lives in Rhode Island with his family, including four parrots (two of whom he claims are "too smart for everyone's good"). Like most indies, Rich works out of a home office, which presents interesting opportunities and challenges. He enjoys music and can claims to be able to use dangerous power tools without injuring himself or others. His personal website is absolutely not www.richsiegel.com.

I cornered Rich over email and managed to get some of his thoughts about marketing.

"Why MicroISVs Fail To Sell"

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 20:33:37 -0800

Here's an interesting article I found via the MDN Big Blog. It's called Why MicroISVs fail to sell. It's part of an eBook from 47 Hats (not to be confused with 37 Signals!). I especially like Mistake 6: Customer as Circus Animal, in which the article encourages you not to make your customer jump through terrible hoops like the big companies do.

Of course, the take-away from this list of mistakes is that you should not be doing these things on your website and in your business. I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader.

Get Your App Listed on Macworld Expo's Indie Developer Spotlight

Tue, 12 Jan 2010 17:49:27 -0800

Just a quick announcement in case you missed it on Twitter or other blogs: Macworld Expo '10 will have an online "Indie Developer Spotlight" in which any application that is discounted for 20% off can be listed on their "indie list" page during the expo, between February 11 and February 13.

Just go to this page and get yourself signed up. One note: you will need a URL to visit, not just a coupon code. (For Sandvox, we were able to supply a URL to our store with the coupon code pre-entered.)

It looks like it's not too late to get a stand at their Independent Developer Pavilion — what some call "Tiny Town."

Fishing for the Big Picture

Wed, 30 Dec 2009 21:17:15 -0800

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 review or word-of-mouth recommendation that the fish come across. The more (or bigger) nets you cast, the more fish are likely to notice you and get caught.

Eleven Tips on Writing Press Releases Effectively for Marketing Your Software

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 16:47:50 -0800

Here's a quick post with some suggestions for press releases. I hope they are of use. Please leave any comments afterwards about your experiences or ideas.

1. Make your press release interesting enough that people will want to publish it.

When you publish a press release, some websites will just automatically pick it up and publish it as-is, even if it's not that interesting. However, you should try for more than that — the more respectable publications will only pick up the interesting stories, so give them something to write about! This goes for Twitter also; if you have an interesting story, people will tweet about it!

2. Topics for a press release

Obviously when you release a new app, you'll want to send out a press release. But there are so many more opportunities to do something newsworthy and announce it. Updates to existing software titles. Announcements of new people on your team. A special sale (especially if it's interesting somehow). A milestone you are celebrating. A charity drive. A bundle you are participating in. Announcements of upcoming events. The launch of a new website. An award you have just won. The availability of a new downloadable item that complements your product. A new or updated SDK for your application. A really big new client who has started using your software. A give-away (software or otherwise) you are doing.

iPhone in-App Email List Signup

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 09:47:15 -0800

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.

Making a Facebook Fan Page

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 11:47:34 -0800

I had read recently that it's a good idea to connect with people on Facebook. We've been using Twitter a lot (come follow @karelia!) but wanted to get more of a presence on Facebook as well.

I set up a facebook page for Karelia Software (If you are reading this please stop by and become a fan and write something on our wall!) and started looking around for ideas on what to put there. I've found a few Mac software companies, and some other organizations, with some interesting content, plus a bunch of ideas for making an effective Facebook page.

Why do all this?

Having a Facebook page for your company is a good way to connect with people who are interested in you. Yes, you should have a mailing list, and use Twitter, and hopefully an online forum or discussion email list. Facebook is just another channel. There are ton of people who are on Facebook constantly, so why not connect with them too?

When you make some update to your facebook page, your "fans" get notified of the update. So it's a good way to be noticed by your fans.

Oliver Breidenbach, Boinx Software

Tue, 08 Dec 2009 08:09:07 -0800

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 Boinx folks at Mac-related conferences in California, I got a chance to visit Boinx's headquarters last summer when I was vacationing in nearby Munich, Germany. This interview, however, took place more recently — and over email.

The Importance of Blogging

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 10:07:40 -0800

Some recent discussion on the MacSB discussion list prompted me to write a few words about the importance of blogging as a marketing tool.

I've mentioned blogging in previous posts here, and it came up as a marketing idea in a recent Mac SB thread. A couple of negatives suggested about blogging is your customers may not know what a blog is, or that your niche is so narrow that there isn't much you can post about regularly.

I believe that these negatives are far outweighed by the positive aspects of blogging. Especially when you consider that the potential audience for a company/product blog are not your current or potential customers (who would be wandering around on your website), but searchers — and, via extension — the search engines.

Let's look at this this way. People are out there, searching for what you have to offer. Perhaps most of them are using really obvious terms, and in your keyword research, you've made sure that your product's home page works in those terms into the <title> tag, the meta description, the <h1> and <h2> headings, and the rest of the body text. That's great, and this will help people find you who are using the obvious keywords for a search.

15 Suggestions for Marketing your iPhone Application

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 15:20:08 -0800

Some of the comments in my previous post about "The Source" got me thinking about ways to market an iPhone application. Even though Karelia Software doesn't currently have an iPhone application on the market, I realized that many of the suggestions that I've been making about the marketing a Mac application also apply very well to iPhone applications. Since many readers of this blog are both Mac developers and iPhone developers, I thought I would come up with some suggestions for marketing an iPhone application, geared toward the small developer.

This is a long post with a lot of ideas; it's not something you can do all at once. So bookmark it and come back to it a few times. I think that if you start applying these suggestions, perhaps one per day, you should start getting more people finding your app.

Disclaimer: Apple is very picky about what iPhone applications do and how they do it. Please exercise caution in your marketing activities so that you do not find yourself in violation of your iPhone Development agreement.

"Marketing for µISVs" from Andy Brice

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 16:41:13 -0800

Andy Brice, developer of the app "Perfect Table Plan" for Windows and Mac, has made a talk he did available online. It's called "Marketing for µISVs — Embracing the Dark Side?" Clearly he comes from the PC world more than the Mac world to use such a term, but his presentation has some good points that the indie developer who is new at the idea marketing — especially the reason why it's a useful activity — should see.

His presentation on marketing was a lot less rushed than my five-minute Blitz talk at C4, so he gets to cover a lot more ground. First he dispels seven "myths of marketing," then goes into a number of marketing concepts. His presentation goes a bit too heavy into the concept of branding, which really doesn't apply (as he admits) for the small developer. He shows a lot of examples of "positioning" from the non-software world, but it's food for thought in any case. His insights on pricing are extremely interesting; that's an issue that we all have had to go through.

I think that there is a lot more about marketing the people need to understand, especially dealing with getting your website found and getting your visitors to turn into buyers, but this is a great overview. Listen to the lecture and page through the slides for some useful enlightenment.

Give Your App to Apple Employees

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 11:29:00 -0800

One great way to get some exposure to your application is to get it in front of as many Apple employees as you can. Ideally, give your program away! Apple employees would include, say, engineers or administrative assistants or in Cupertino, who might enjoy using your program but were probably not going to be buying it anyhow. (But if you application is cool, they will talk about it inside and outside of Apple!) Other apple employees who might pick up your program are the sales engineers, whose job it is to help clients set up their Macs. If they are familiar with your software and it will solve a problem for their clients, you might get a recommendation — maybe even a big one. And of course there are hundreds and hundreds of Apple employees who work at the retail stores. These people are talking to Mac-using people all day, and if they happen to know and like your software that can help the customer do what they want, of course they will recommend it! We've gotten plenty of notes from people, for example, who wound up buying Sandvox because somebody at the Apple store suggested they check it out when they discovered that iWeb wasn't powerful enough for them.

How (Not) to Ask For a Review

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 08:13:09 -0800

I got an email this morning from a developer of a Mac application. I quote it here, though I have replaced the names and URLs to protect the guilty.

Dear Sir,
We have gone through your website([URL OF MY PERSONAL BLOG]) and found good postings on your website, just wanted to appreciate you on a well presented, and informative web site related to different products posted on your page. We want our Macintosh product (XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX) to be reviewed and posted on your webpage.
Information about the product can be found at: http://www.XXXXXXXXXX.com/
Our product review would provide good quality content to your blog and it will also help us.
If you are interested to review our product we can provide you full version of our software and license key as well.
We hope an early and positive response to your site. If you have any queries then please feel free to mail us
Thanks for your time and consideration

Bundles, Promos, and Discounts, Oh My!

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 11:01:12 -0800

(Apologies for the title of this post. My kids are working on a production of The Wizard of Oz so we're hearing a lot of songs about the Yellow Brick Road in our house these days! Since today is Friday, traditionally cat-blogging day, I thought I would feature a picture of a bundle of little cowardly lions.)

Photo by abcrumley

Bundles

In yesterday's post, Jacob Gorban raved about software bundles. Anybody reading this post is probably well aware of bundles and the controversy surrounding them. Let me see if I can sum up both sides of the issue:

First, the bad impressions of bundles:

Bundles cheapen the value of your software — and Mac software in general. People expect to get it for 10 cents on the dollar so they won't buy it at full price.
It's making the bundle-makers filthy rich, even though the developers do all the work.
The developers are exploited, making peanuts per license.
Having to support thousands of new customers with so little income makes bad financial sense.

On the other hand,

Bundles do a great job in exposing your software to an audience that may not have found out about your app.
The bundle companies often give a lot of money away to charity.
The developers that participate are going into the deals willingly and with their eyes open.
Many people only use a few of the applications, yet the developer still gets paid for each bundle sold.
It gives the developers a chance to offer their upgrades and other products to their new customer base.

I've been on both sides of the fence, so although I may have missed some of the positives and negatives, I think that covers the basics. Really, I think the answer to the question "Is a bundle right for me?" depends on a lot of factors.

Where I think a bundle has huge advantages is the last point in my list of positives. If you have more than one product, and you can get people exposed to your company by selling bundles for product A, then you can now help these new customers know via your email list about product B and product C. This is key. It's way easier to sell your products to people who have already bought a product from you. They know you and trust you. So if you have more than one product, it could be a real win for you to participate in a bundle, as long as you are able to apply some leverage to the bundle sale.

Jacob Gorban, Apparent Software

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 10:45:57 -0800

Jacob Gorban founded Apparent Software in 2006 with the release of ImageFramer. Starting with programming as hobby since the age of about 12, on multitude of platforms, he made it a part-time business in 2006, alongside his career in electronics engineering. In early 2009 Jacob partnered with Kosta Rozen to take Apparent Software to the next level. Lately Jacob has left his day job to concentrate fully on Apparent Software. I was able to ask Jacob some questions about how they do marketing; Kosta stepped in as well to answer a couple of questions near the end. Please forgive Jacob for using the term "MicroISV" — I think the term "indie" is much more approachable, but that's just me….

DW: Can you tell us about your marketing activities?

JG: I must admit that I started this business without much real-life knowledge in marketing, as a developer. But I do love reading business books and blogs and listening to podcasts on these subjects to educate myself.

The first couple of years I've done the usual basic set of marketing activities that most mac developers do, such as listing on the software listing sites, SEO, a couple of MacZOT appearances and a little of other stuff such as trying to do some joint ventures with frame manufacturers. Over the time I started to realize that marketing should be done properly, smarter and that more resources should be devoted to it. Otherwise, the business will not grow.

Targeting Mac Users in Online Ads

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 13:52:37 -0800

My last post here interviewing Jean MacDonald, and a conversation with Seth Dilingham, who is cooking up a project that is related to Macs and marketing, got me thinking about a frustration I have had for a while, in that none of the major advertising networks allow you to only show your advertisements to people using Macs.

If you are going to be showing an ad for your product, and it costs money to put that ad in front of people, clearly you want to target people as specifically as you can. So if you have a local business, you want only the people in your geographic region to be exposed to the ad. If your product only appeals to people who speak a certain language, you want to restrict your ad to only viewers who have that as their browser's preferred language. If your product is only sold in certain countries, you would be wasting your money (and people's attention) if your ad was visible outside of those countries.

And if your product only worked on Macs, you would want to only show your ads to Mac users, right?

Jean MacDonald, SmileOnMyMac

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 10:31:39 -0800

I met Jean MacDonald and the crew from SmileOnMyMac at a developer gathering at Chaat Cafe in San Francisco a few years ago during Macworld Expo. She is a partner at the company and primarily handles marketing and PR. Prior to joining the SmileOnMyMac, she operated Well-Tempered Web, an independent web design and online marketing firm. She also taught web design and online marketing at Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, Oregon and as a member of Geekcorps in Ghana, West Africa. Smile is one of the few indie companies that I know of to have somebody on staff dedicated to marketing, so I thought it would be useful to pick her brain for how they do it.

DW: What kind of marketing activities do you handle?

JM: Our website is the locus of our marketing efforts. We are continually refining and enriching it so that it's easy for site visitors to learn how our products can help them. We work hard on driving traffic to our site, via search engine optimization, advertising, and PR, but we also know that it's not enough to get lots of traffic. We constantly ask ourselves "Is it easy to find what you need on our site?" We have things like Feature lists and FAQs, but we also have video screencasts: different people need different things to give them a compelling reason to click the Buy button.

Kevin Hoctor, No Thirst Software

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 15:24:05 -0800

I thought it would be educational for Indie Mac Developers, myself included, to interview fellow developers, over email, about how they do marketing. I am starting with Kevin Hoctor, whom I met in person at WWDC about two or three years ago. He is the President and Founder of No Thirst Software LLC, a software company started in October 2006 to help individuals improve their personal finances. Mr. Hoctor has a background in Computer Science and has been creating software for over 28 years. He is also a serial entrepreneur having started four other companies (!) prior to No Thirst Software. He writes about marketing and company design on his own blog, Entrepreneurial Seduction.

DW: Can you tell us some of the marketing activities you do?

KH: In previous companies I've owned, marketing meant a big budget, four-color trade magazine ads, bingo cards and cold calling for leads. Now, with the Internet as everyone's primary source of information, my marketing is much different. First and foremost, maintaining a clean website with a clear message is my priority. Almost any other marketing activity is going to lead people back to our site and it better not disappoint.

"One Finger Discount" Launches

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 16:29:57 -0800

Yesterday, Daniel Jalkut of Red Sweater Software put together a cool marketing idea: the One Finger Discount. (Hmm, which finger did he have in mind?) The idea is that during the MacHeist free bundle deal, a lot of other Mac companies would offer nice 20% discounts on their software. (We're happy to join the fray, so I've just submitted Sandvox to the list.)

The speed of Twitter is amazing. It looks like the pre-announcement happened 18 hours ago on Twitter, the launch was 11 hours ago, and (because I spend a lot of time working rather than keeping up with Twitter, I'm ashamed to admit) I first heard about it … a few minutes ago.

This is a great idea, and not a lot of heavy lifting was need to get this off the ground. There are already over forty companies and roughly fifty applications available with this discount! Kudos to Daniel for this idea. I'm curious to see if this spreads very far beyond the inner circle of people who keep up with Mac news on Twitter and the Mac-specific blogs and websites. (Indies, I'm curious to hear here or on twitter how well this promotion does for your sales...)

Viewfinder from Connected Flow — The Twitter Launch

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 16:14:18 -0800

One of the thoughts I had in starting this blog was to discuss what other indie companies are doing in the realm of marketing. Some companies are very much "into" the concept of marketing; others tend to treat marketing as an annoyance that they can't be bothered with (even though they are at least doing some minimal marketing by having a website).

Today, Connected Flow launched Viewfinder. With all the material fresh, I thought I would point out some of the cool marketing things that I noticed Fraser & co. do. Also, Fraser is a great guy, so I'm happy to shine a bit of attention on his app.

Salting: This is the pre-launch phase where you build up excitement (thirst) for a product. Fraser has been doing this for a while. On Twitter, Fraser (as himself and, occasionally from the @connectedflow account) was mentioning "[FLOWDACTED]" for quite a while, at least since August if not before. That built up curiousity in the developer and power-user community. Just before Halloween, he leaked (again, via Twitter) the name of the app and hinted that it would be launching soon. Early this week, he created a twitter account @viewfinderapp and started tweeting hints about what the application does. By launch day today, a lot of people in the developer/power-user community had heard about Viewfinder through Twitter.

Customer Mailing Lists

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 10:43:13 -0800

In the last couple of days I received newsletter-type emails from Second Gear Software, makers of Today and Check Off, and Like Thought, makers of Opacity (which I have to just rave about every chance I get!) and Lexicon. We also just sent out our newsletter (which we do about every month or so), so this inspired me to write a post about customer mailing lists.

Back in the Watson days, we didn't collect email addresses from people when they purchased the software, nor did we have an email list for general interest, in case people wanted to just stay up to date with what we were doing. At the time it didn't even occur to me to set this up, but later I realized that it was odd that I had no way of contacting our customers or prospective customers.

So when we started to go public about Sandvox, before its launch, we set up a mailing list so people could find out when the product was available. Once the application launched, many of them bought the software — at a special price just for members of the list, of course.

The Three-Legged Stool

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 10:31:38 -0800

As you know, I've been trying to convince indie developers that marketing is an important component of running a business. There are just too many Mac apps out there, and most of the twenty-something-million Mac users out there have no idea that your application even exists!

Yesterday, Seth Dillingham mentioned the idea of a three-legged stool. The pieces you need are Engineering, User Interface, and Marketing. I was intrigued by that idea so I dug around and found that the metaphor was discussed in Chapter 2 of the 1998 book The Invisible Computer by Donald A. Norman.

Human-centered development requires three equal partners, three legs to the triad of product development: technology, marketing, and user experience. All three legs provide necessary and complementary strengths. Weaken one leg and the product falls. The three legs stand upon the foundation of the business case and support the product itself. Weaken the foundation of sound business practices and the company may not succeed. And finally, the product must be appropriate for its position in the technology life cycle. An emphasis on technology is inappropriate for products in the consumer cycle of a technology.

"Marketing events" that go

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 17:19:44 -0800

I really like being a part of the Indie Mac Developer Community, and I try to participate whenever there is some group event, whether it be donating licenses to charity events (like the PMC Software Charity Fundraiser), participating in group sales (like MacSanta from a couple of of years ago), changing my twitter avatar to the latest trend, and so forth.

I started my own idea way back at WWDC, earlier this year. Although everybody I spoke to thought it was a cool idea, it took a long time to get my idea implemented (since it required writing some code) and then even longer to get it going across the community. Unfortunately, due to a combination of timing and some bugs of Apple's, my idea — which happened on Halloween — mostly went <thud> like a tree falling in the forest when nobody's around.

The idea was to get as many indie developers to insert a bit of code, and some artwork, into their application, and have it released before Halloween. Then, simultaneously, Snow Leopard users would notice that a lot of their apps — at least those that were from participating indie companies — had special Halloween icons.

Eleven really useful, free marketing eBooks

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 10:42:15 -0700

Following a tip on the MacSB list, I picked up copy of the ebook "MicroISV Sites that Sell" since it was on sale. It's pretty good, especially if you really just haven't given much thought to the message on your website and whom you are trying to reach. I really liked the section where it asks you to really try to identify who your potential customer is. I've picked up a lot of eBooks (usually for free) over the years, and while this isn't necessarily the best, I can recommend it.

However, I thought I would go through my collection of eBooks come up with some other recommendations for fellow Mac indie developers (and anybody else who is interested, since they can apply to all kinds of Internet-based businesses.)

All of these are free, though some need you to get on their mailing list.

(IMPORTANT: If you run across a free eBook download, you will often be asked to provide your email address. I suggest you set up a special email address just for your marketing downloads. While I've never gotten actually spammed, some of the marketers who are offering goodies tend to be a weeeeeee bit heavy on the hype — you'll come to recognize the Impact font, the loooong sales letters, the yellow highlighting, and so forth. So it's nice to be able to keep your real address separate!)

I'm turning this into a blog

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 09:12:10 -0700

I'm reading Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust (which I just added to the sidebar) and it's a great book. It has inspired me to add some more content to this little corner of the Karelia website and provide some more insight about marketing, from the perspective of the Indie Mac community.

To be a bit more clear about the intent of this blog, I've changed its URL; however the old url of http://www.karelia.com/marketing/ will still work as a shortcut.

I'm hoping to add more content here as I run across interesting ideas or see nice examples of other indie Mac companies and their marketing efforts. It's a huge market out there, and very hard for a Mac developer to get their stuff noticed. I am hoping that some of the insights that I pass along, further fueled by the discussion in the comments on these posts, will help us all out.

I should note up-front that I may be linking to commercial products, packages, training, and so forth from time to time, and that some of these links may be affiliate links. (The amazon.com book list in the sidebar is an example of this.) While this is potentially an additional stream (or trickle) of income for Karelia — you can call this "Integration Marketing" that I mentioned in my C4 talk — I will only link to something that has my true recommendation, that I would heartily suggest even if they didn't have an affiliate program. There is a lot of junk out there and it would be a disservice to recommend anything that I don't find to be truly useful.

Blitz Presentation (PDF)

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 11:03:52 -0700

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 17:08:50 -0700

StomperNet is offering their "Stomping the Search Engines" SEO course available for free, at least for a while, as part of their launch. If this is no longer available for free, you can get it for $1 here. Highly recommended — we've learned a lot about SEO from this course. (Note: The presentation style of this company is very "slick" which we're not big fans of. Still, it's really useful information.)

Integration Marketing

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 17:04:20 -0700

Integration points include:

“Thanks for ordering” page
Signup Confirmation Page
Downloading page
Signup confirmation email
Newsletter emails
Your Application itself?

You can get the eBook by the guy who coined the term, here.

Your Circle of Friends

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 17:03:52 -0700

Build an Email List. You could roll your own (We have a PHP script that loops through our database of customers and friends, and we use our SliceHost account with its fixed IP address to avoid a lot of spam-blocking issues you get if you send from a shared account's IP address.

There are a bunch of bulk email sending services. Their costs can start to add up when your list gets big, though! Using an external service means that they handle all the subscription management and they usually can do split testing and analysis. These are some ideas, not recommendations…

Hurdle 3: Converting to a customer

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 16:59:23 -0700

Provide actions for interest levels: Ready to buy, evaluating, or window-shopping. (The book Always Be Testing, listed in the Sidebar, has some good explanations of this.)

Improve your conversion rate: The slide showed this example. You can use Google Website Optimizer (free) or the Taguchi Split Test (included as part of StomperNet membership)

Hurdle 2: Clicking through to your site

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 16:59:13 -0700

URL itself, meta description (156 characters max), and title tag (65 characters max) make up your "free google ad." Here is a nice article on the two important tags and another article on Meta tags in general.

Hurdle 1: Finding your listing on Google

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 16:59:02 -0700

It's a very good idea to register your website with Google Webmaster Tools. With it you can find out about crawling errors, get notified if your site gets cracked, see how people are finding your site, get a big list of your inbound links, etc. It's probably a good idea to register with Yahoo! Site Explorer as well.

Make sure you have Googleable content on your page. Try this "html2txt" tool from w3c.

Use the Google Keyword Tool to brainstorm keywords that you should include on your website (and/or links to your site).

If you want to write some good off-site content linking back to your own website, try general sites like EzineArticles, HubPages, Squidoo. Of course you may want to do some guest-posting on other Mac-specific websites and blogs.

Press Releases: We've had good luck with PRMac. There are a lot of other general-media press release services as well.