
The Sparrow Problem - kirillzubovsky
http://appcubby.com/blog/the-sparrow-problem/
======
3pt14159
I've been saying this for years. It is easier, _way easier_ , to sell someone
a 12 dollar a month subscription to a traditional SaaS app that stores their
sales leads. Get your monthly churn rate down to 2% over time and you have a
client with a life time value of $600.[1]

Now, you could spend the same time making an app that you sell for $0.99 but
you would need to sell about a thousand of them just to break even (since
Apple takes such a huge cut, plus it costs more money to service a thousand
people than it does to serve one). Furthermore your cash flow is much more
predictable under a SaaS model (hence, easier to raise on, exit with, hire on,
or just plain sleep at night with) so it isn't even a 1:1000 ratio. More like
1:2000.

The psychology behind this is pretty simple. Most business owners know that
saving time increases their billable hours. If you can do that, then great.
They would be thrilled to hear that they will be paying you that 12 bucks for
the next 4 years, because it would mean that they survived at least that long!
Most of them think there is a good chance that they will be toast in their
first 3 or 4 months, and what's $40 bucks compared to their other expenses?

Whereas a general app purchaser isn't costing in their saved time (for
business or productivity apps), since they don't view their mobile device as a
work tool, and consumers don't usually care that your game is good because
their are plenty of alternatives to choose from when it comes to wasting time
on the internet.

Where I would build an app:

For an existing product that exists in a browser, mostly as a sales gen tool.
Possibly for functionality that people would like to be mobile but doesn't
work in a traditional SaaS app (check-ins for a ticketing app, for example,
could be done on an iPad).

Most other cases I just wouldn't bother.

[1] I'd say 1.5 to 2% is basically the floor because that is roughly what
small businesses close at.

~~~
theoj
>> Whereas a general app purchaser isn't costing in their saved time (for
business or productivity apps), since they don't view their mobile device as a
work tool, and consumers don't usually care that your game is good because
their are plenty of alternatives to choose from when it comes to wasting time
on the internet.

I like the way you identify the costing "point of reference" for various
segments (web/mobile and business/consumer). To add to that, it seems the
costing point of reference for mobile is the monthly phone bill. In comparison
with that $1 is negligible (in the ballpark of carrier overage charges), but
$10 or $20 extra is a "major expense".

------
ChuckMcM
"The age of selling software to users at a fixed, one-time price is coming to
an end. It’s just not sustainable at the absurdly low prices users have come
to expect."

While it is fun to watch folks figure out that business school is more than
just a big party until graduation, watching them draw the wrong conclusions
from their experiences hurts.

There is an old joke about a scientist who teaches a frog to jump when you
yell "Jump!" he then proceeds to cut off the frog's legs and notes that it no
longer jumps when he yells "Jump!". From this he concludes that removing a
frog's legs makes it go deaf.

The same is true about concluding that the age of selling fixed price software
is over. It is not economically viable at these prices. So people will go out
of business, and the people who remain will raise their prices to the point
needed to support themselves. Now it may be that its not economically viable
to live off the revenue from a 'simple' application, but its also true its
generally not possible to live off the revenue of a single paperback book
either.

That said, its easier to see how a 'subscription' is a better model for
somethings, but people aren't too excited about those either.

~~~
notJim
It seems like there's a key point you're missing, which is that there is
currently a constant stream of people entering the market to write $2 apps.
They write an app, it fails, and they move on, but instead of a situation
where the surviving app makers can now raise their prices due to scarcity,
instead the people who left are replaced my someone else who tries to do the
same thing. The end result is that no one can raise their prices, because the
instant they do, some college kid comes along and does the same thing for $1.
And of course the acquisitions of instagram and Sparrow make this even worse,
because now there are 10 times more college kids thinking they're going to
make $1b by making an app and getting acquired.

Of course, the key to being able to charge a premium comes down to marketing,
and positioning yourself well in the market, but that's obviously not a fairly
difficult thing to do, especially in these competitive markets.

~~~
joe_the_user
Yes,

Forming a rock band is not a viable business plan. Hasn't been for years,
since long before the music industry's current woes. The music industry
survived for years and years parasitically feeding on the free labor that
would-be stars put into skills for their hoped-for careers. The movie industry
and the sports industry similarly harvest the freely available talent of
would-be stars. And some musicians, some actors and some athletes indeed make
lots of money but total final rewards look like very little if you divide them
by the effort expanded by those aspiring to success. And consideration of the
problems involved here can easily avoided if everyone who fails in any of
these fields is dismissed from consideration as a "loser".

This stuff may not sustainable but it can be sustained for longer than one
might imagine.

I heard once that the only ones who got rich in the gold rush was the ones
selling pans. Too bad Apples seems to have a monopoly on the mobile-app
equivalent.

~~~
jowiar
> I heard once that the only ones who got rich in the gold rush was the ones
> selling pans. Too bad Apples seems to have a monopoly on the mobile-app
> equivalent.

Not just Apple... The original pan seller's legacy isn't doing too badly,
either: [http://mashable.com/2012/07/01/stanford-top-major-
computer-s...](http://mashable.com/2012/07/01/stanford-top-major-computer-
science/)

------
jsz0
_Sparrow did everything right. They built an incredible email app_

I would say they did everything right _except_ choosing to build an e-mail
client. The days of paying for e-mail clients is long gone. The days of even
using a local mail client are over for most people. It's just a tough sell to
make money selling a paid client to a free service. I use Sparrow and will
continue to use it but I can understand why they were going to have
difficulties making any real money off it. Way too small of a market.

~~~
david_shaw
_> The days of paying for e-mail clients is long gone._

I'm not sure I totally agree with that. My first example is the ridiculously
wide-scale enterprise adoption of Microsoft Outlook and Exchange -- sure,
there's a bunch of features that are piled onto those "email clients," but at
the heart of it, people are still paying for this stuff.

The second example is Sparrow itself. If people _weren't_ paying for e-mail
clients, then would Sparrow have such a huge, dedicated userbase? Or is this
just the vocal minority we're hearing from?

~~~
potatolicious
I agree - people are no longer willing to pay for the little bit of the client
that connects to a server, downloads the email, and renders it, because all of
that is widely available for free.

What they _are_ willing to pay for is a value proposition that goes beyond the
mere mechanics of email. Outlook succeeds because it integrates email with
calendaring (so does GMail, with less success), does a _fantastic_ job with
sortation, filtering, and highlighting, and also is a champ when dealing with
unmanageably large address books.

The market for an amazing email management service is absolutely existent. The
market for a rubber-stamp me-too mail client is not.

~~~
rileyt
I agree that if someone could improve email management they would indeed make
more money. However, I still feel that sparrow was able to become so popular
because it's iPhone interface was so much nicer to use than both Google's and
Apple's free alternatives.

~~~
lloeki
> _sparrow was able to become so popular because it's iPhone interface was so
> much nicer to use than both Google's and Apple's free alternatives._

Sparrow became popular way before the iPhone version. Anyway, how is making an
app more convenient supposed not to be an improvement worth at least a couple
of bucks?

BTW, _"All mail clients suck. This one just sucks less."_

------
carsongross
I've said it in two previous threads and gotten down-voted for it, but it's
the truth: apps _must_ have a recurring revenue model.

The upgrade-train model is over for a lot of software out there. Those of us
who want good desktop software should be begging our favorites (I'm looking at
you, JetBrains) to charge on a subscription basis.

~~~
SquareWheel
Perhaps I'm just cheap (I prefer frugal), but I refuse to purchase anything
with a recurring subscription. Don't even own a cellphone. That said, I had no
problem buying Sublime Text 2 for $60 because it was a great product, and I
was guaranteed updates until the next major version. If it was subscription,
even at $5 a month, I'd have never made that purchase.

~~~
carsongross
And, because of that, Sublime's developer will never make a living at it, and
it will either be a labor of love or abandoned.

I'm with you, man, I'm cheap too. But that's the reality of todays software.

~~~
SoftwareMaven
As long as Sublime can charge for upgrades in the future, it's not too large a
problem. The problem is all the App Store software that can't _and_ the user
expectations of free upgrades that are being set by Apple (not familiar with
other app stores to know if they are following the same path).

~~~
robryan
Having purchased sublime text 2 I would definitely encourage the author of it
to do this. The main competition text mate is a great example itself of this
model being unsustainable in terms of having someone continue to develop the
product full time in the long term.

~~~
veidr
Opposite problem. TextMate made Alan Odgaard so much money that he didn't need
to work on it anymore[1].

Who wants to maintain an old code base when they could spend ten weeks
trekking in New Zealand[2] and then hunker down for the Great Rewrite That
Fixes All The Problems?

(Not that I blame Odgaard; in fact, as an ST2 user this is my greatest fear
about that product--selling thousands and thousands of copies at $60 is an
extremely viable level of revenue for a one-man shop.)

[1]: <http://blog.macromates.com/2006/year-in-review/> [2]:
<http://blog.macromates.com/2006/20-will-require-leopard/>

~~~
robryan
I disagree, I think it it more that the future effort vs reward didn't stack
up as well. Because so many developers had already purchased and it was well
known, a free version 2 wouldn't represent the same kind of financial gain the
initial spike did, despite all the extra effort.

A paid version 2 though produces a similar windfall again, rather than
diminishing returns.

~~~
jowiar
> A paid version 2 though produces a similar windfall again, rather than
> diminishing returns.

Marginal utility. The first million is worth a lot more than the second.

------
LoganCale
Apple seriously needs to implement support for paid upgrades on major version
releases without having to add an entirely new, separate product. If that were
easily done, this point is moot. No one seriously discussing this really
expects free updates for life. I'm happy to pay for a major new release every
year or so.

~~~
taligent
That's what in app purchases are for. If you want to add new functionality
then allow people to purchase it separately.

That way existing users still have a core product that will see upgrades.

~~~
zachwill
I've yet to really think about it like this, but your comment seems spot on.
Has any app really gone the route of already being established before
introducing in-app purchases? The only utility app I can remember paying for
an in-app was Paper — but even then, a large chunk of functionality wasn't
available without it (the different brushes) and it wasn't an established app
beforehand.

~~~
brc
I listened to a talk by a game developer last week, and their thrust was
exactly in this direction.

The app is free and revenue is made from in-app purchases.

The basic app is structured so that upgrades are infrequent, because of the
time lag.

However, the app connects to back-end servers which contain much of the smarts
of the app. Thus they can upgrade them whenever they like, without having to
upgrade the app. Then can also introduce premium features to be sold with the
existing in-app purchases.

How you achieve this in a non-game setting is a challenge, but I believe it is
the key.

------
astral303
The value obtained from the application should mirror the value received by
the developer.

For games, one-time app payment makes more sense: usually, you complete the
game or there is finite set of game rules that is implemented.

For most apps one uses day to day, one-time-pay model works against the user
by mis-incentivizing the developer, just like TFA said.

It's somewhat ironic that AppCubby itself is an illustration of the same
problem: their GasCubby app, which I use several times a month, has been
effectively abandoned. Now, I would gladly pay at least $4 a year for that
app, if it were actively developed, as it continuously delivers value AND
getting improvements is important to me. However, since I've paid for the app
once and that's the end of story, the app's own development reflects the same.

Pay to get updates is really the way to go.

Now, I am afraid to go shopping on the App Store for the same kind of app, as
I'm wary of another disappointment. If I were to develop a competing app that
filled the same need, but was critically more usable on several subtle, but
important fronts, I would have a very uphill battle against the established
stalwarts, which have been reviewed and rated since the early days of the App
Store.

Thus, we are stuck in a situation where, given a popular app category,
existing/old school apps tend to dominate based on reputation, but stagnate
due to the lack of incentive to update or innovate, and the new apps a tough
time breaking through.

------
stevenwei
There are some issues with the numbers in this post:

 _Thus, when Dominique revealed to Ellis Hamburger in August 2011 that Sparrow
had made at least $350k in it’s first 6 months in the Mac App Store, they had
already been working at least a year on the app._

The article actually states they made over half a million in the first 6
months

    
    
        DL: In terms of numbers we've made more than half a million dollars in the past six months since Sparrow was introduced in February.
    

_I don’t currently have an app in the Mac App Store, so it’s hard for me to
estimate sales, but I’d bet the Mac version isn’t generating much more
revenue, even at the higher $9.99 price point._

I do. You really can't take iOS App Store sales trends and extrapolate them to
the Mac App Store, the markets are quite different.

1\. Sparrow is first and foremost a Mac app, and its target demographic is (or
was) Mac users. The iOS version is supplementary. Without the ability to do
push on iOS they wouldn't have been able to deliver as great of a user
experience on iOS anyway. I would bet that the vast majority of their sales
actually come from the Mac version.

2\. Mac apps don't drop out of visibility nearly as quickly as they do on the
iOS App Store. Part of this is because it takes a LOT more effort to produce a
quality Mac app compared to an iOS app.

3\. The Mac version of Sparrow has been pretty consistently in the Top 50
Grossing on the Mac App Store since launch[1]. I would be surprised if they
weren't averaging at least $1000-1500/day on sales of the Mac app alone, with
_much higher_ spikes when they hit the Top 10 Grossing.

That said, I will agree that whatever they were making was probably not
sustainable for a team of 5, especially compared to the $25M that Google was
offering.

[1]
[http://www.appannie.com/app/mac/sparrow/ranking/history/#vie...](http://www.appannie.com/app/mac/sparrow/ranking/history/#view=grossing-
ranks&start_date=2011-01-01&end_date=2012-07-20)

~~~
snowch
350k is the net after Apple's 30% cut.

~~~
stevenwei
Hm, I suppose that's a possible explanation. Although since the sales reports
provided by Apple already include the 30% cut, I'm more used to developers
reporting their net revenues. And the original quote says "we've made more
than half a million dollars", which to me implies that's _after_ Apple's cut,
and how much they're actually taking home.

------
js2
And yet Mailplane continues to pay the salary of a sole developer. Maybe
Sparrow's aspirations were too big for an email client? The interesting thing
about Mailplane is that it targets an arguably different user base (gmail
power users?) at a higher price point ($24.95). Personally I'm a Mailplane
user because I prefer gmail's web-interface and I have three accounts to
juggle. I never saw the appeal of Sparrow over OS X's Mail.app. And I'm still
waiting for something like Mailplane for the iPad.

~~~
jbigelow76

        Maybe Sparrow's aspirations were too big for an email client?
    

Why is it people keep painting a $25 million dollar exit and jobs at Google
for a year and half's work as some kind of failure? It looks like like a home
run to me.

~~~
robryan
Because it is, in terms of the goal of building an awesome app and a
sustainable business solving peoples problems with email. It is a personal win
for the founders but not the one I imagine they were hoping for when they set
out.

------
zbowling
I can tell you, as a developer on Growl, being in the top 100 paid app list at
$2.99 is not going to be like being in the top 100 paid apps on iOS by a
extremely huge margin. Growl retails at $1.99. We are always around the top 20
paid apps and have been for a long time and even that rate, it's not really
sustainable for multiple developers.

------
petercooper
Ahh, I hadn't realized Sparrow had taken funding. That explains a lot. Forget
revenue, forget breaking even, forget being a well paid lifestyle business..
once you have that funding, you've gotta head for big profits or a big
acquisition.

------
jlft
The price of the desktop app seemed too cheap to me. Why only $10 for such
great piece of software? So, it seems they made around $1,000k in two years.
That's about $100k per employee per year. Google bought them for $25,000k
which gives $5,000k per employee. That's 50 years of work at the rate they
were.

------
stcredzero
My takeaways from this article:

If you can't make it with a team of 3 or fewer, you're not going to have a
sustainable business.

The community needs an "App Escrow" organization which developers can sign
copyrights to their software over to. In the event of a "acquhire," the app
developers won't be able to kill their app. In essence, the app developers who
sign up for this "escrow" have made a precommitment to not killing their app.
(Perhaps the app the software can be licensed to a new development team for a
fee commensurate with the app's earnings history. Perhaps it could also be
open sourced.)

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precommitment>

------
MediaSquirrel
In March, I emailed the CEO of Sparrow begging him to offer premium SaaS
features on a subscription basis that integrated the functionality of "was my
email opened?" services like Toutapp.com and automated follow up services like
followup.cc into the email client.

[http://mattmireles.com/post/27676258826/what-sparrow-
could-h...](http://mattmireles.com/post/27676258826/what-sparrow-could-have-
been)

The market wants it. I still believe.

~~~
PufferBuffer
I think you're right. It's really bazaar why Google hasnt implemented those
features into Gmail, but if they were seamlessly integrated into Sparrow, I'd
pay.

~~~
youngtaff
If gmail starts notifying people I've read their email I'll be switching email
services...

At the last full-time gig I had we had a plugin installed on the mail server
to strip out external read-receipts

------
akrymski
It's not about SaaS vs one-time payments or anything like that. It's about how
much value you provide.

Mail.app is free, Outlook is free. How much better is Sparrow? Is the
improvement worth $60 a year? Cause if it's not worth even $5 a month to your
users (2 cups of coffee) - then it's probably not worth doing.

No matter how much people say they love your product, if they aren't willing
to pay $5 per month, $60 per year or $200 one-off - they are kidding
themselves. Think everyone loves Facebook? How many of those folks love
Facebook enough to pay $5 per month to use it?

People aren't stupid. They will pay for stuff that translates into the bottom
line - just like businesses. They may pay for Photoshop - if that's their work
tool. They'll pay for a Mac - cause it helps them be more productive and earn
more money.

My personal benchmark is dating sites. When most guys in the world are
prepared to pay north of $20 per month to access a dating site, and if you are
charging less you have to ask yourself - if people don't value my product more
than a dating site, should I be working on something else? It's kinda sad but
true.

------
gojomo
How long until some team, with an acqui-hire offer in hand from one of the big
boys, opens a Kickstarter campaign to collect a 'community crowdsourced
counteroffer'?

~~~
jusben1369
A bird in the hand is worth a crowd in the bush?

~~~
coryl
I believe "flock" is the correct terminology

~~~
jusben1369
Well it's a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. At least where I grew
up.

------
Steko
Couple important caveats with the provided graphs:

The graphs are rankings not revenue (understandably he doesn't want to share).
But this introduces the problem that a week in the top 10 and a week at #500
does not equal to two weeks at #250. Not even close.

Further 250th place today =/= 250th place in 2009 or 250th place in 2016 or
2030.

Ron Nicholson [1] roughly fits the following formula for app store sales:

unitSales = totalPaidApps * ((1 + rank) ^ -1.0) - 1.5

This suggests that a week at #5-10 is worth about 23-42 weeks at #250.

[1] [http://www.musingpaw.com/2011/04/estimating-iphone-app-
store...](http://www.musingpaw.com/2011/04/estimating-iphone-app-store-sales-
from.html)

------
tonetheman
Yup a 3 dollar app will not make enough money to sustain a company. It seems
foolish to think it would. Now if you sell 10 of those apps you are getting
closer.

The app store and the mentality behind it is a race to the bottom. So unless
you are insanely lucky (angry birds), app store devs will be living with their
moms just like drug dealers. :)

------
nl
I generally agree that the email client market is a hard, hard market to be
in.

One thing I think could have worked to bring in substantially more revenue is
price differentiation.

A number of people have claimed that a significant number of Sparrow users
were on paid Gmail plans. If Sparrow had split their pricing in a similar way
(eg, $3 if you are on the free plan, $20 if you pay to use Gmail) then they
might have brought in significantly more revenue. Additionally, the people
paying for Gmail are already known to be to be people who spend money on email
services.

Joel Spolsky's essay is the best resource on this:
[http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckie...](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckies.html)

Of course, some kind of recurring revenue is the real "solution" here.

------
bigfrakkinghero
Eventual payout from Google aside, I wonder if the team ever regretted the
fact that taking funding "changed the yardstick" for success. I'd guess that
going back to work for a big company (even with a big payout) wasn't really
the original goal.

But then again, maybe it was.

~~~
jusben1369
Remember. The "changed yardstick" is 100% conjecture. It's undeniable that
taking outside investment increases the number of people who expect a return
from your venture. However, we can't presume to know what the investors were
really thinking. They may have known that a talented web and mobile email team
will always be a talent buy irrespective of revenues and just sat back and
waited to double or tripe their money in 12 - 24 months. Point is - we really
don't know if that changed the game that much for them.

------
jconley
Another thing this OP leaves out is Sparrow was also probably running
advertising, and thus burning more capital, to try to get their app store
organic coefficient up. The peaks and valleys in the ranking numbers lead me
down that train of thought.

------
fallous
I think you can still do a one-time purchase app with support for the next X
versions and still get the revenue model of a SaaS. Stop thinking about the
app as the final product and start thinking about it as a platform.

Sell email client for X, then build additional plugins for client that solve a
problem for a subset of users and offer that as an upsell. You avoid bloating
the original app for those that want a sleek solution but offer enough plugin
functionality to let users tailor to their purposes.

And each of those plugins can have a paid upgrade cycle as well, a long with
the ability to bundle plugins with app for "Enterprise" or "Power User" price
points.

------
ricardobeat
Was the title of this submission changed? I'm pretty sure I read this
yesterday as "the gold rush is over" or something. If we are going this way
why not simply grab page titles automatically and disallow edits? (because
that sucks)

------
damian2000
I see it as something like the historical gold rush - developers flocked to
the app store because they sensed there was a lot of money to be made. This
vastly increased the supply of apps, which in turn decreased the demand per
app, and so decreased revenue per developer. I think there will inevitably be
a fall in the rate of apps being added to the app store, and sucesses will
continue to be focused on a handful of publishers.

PS: This is probably wrong in some fundamental way (I'm not an economist)!

------
dave1619
I wonder if Sparrow had a subscription model... let's say you had to pay
$2/month to use it across any platform. How many people would have signed up?

Sparrow seemed more complex than a typical 0.99c app, and it seems like they
had their fans. I wonder if they followed the subscription model if their
finances would have looked better and gave them the ground to stay
independent.

------
tsunamifury
My team makes around $2 to $2.5 million a year on app sales.

I'll tell you one thing -- both of these guys and almost everyone I've met in
the Valley deeply misunderstand how to make sustained profits in an app store.
I'd say, from what I can tell, Gameloft (not my company) is one of the few
companies that gets it.

~~~
nanijoe
What apps do you guys make? Are they games? I think the general consensus is
that it is hard to make any decent money on the app store unless you are
selling a game

~~~
tsunamifury
The problem is, most people I've met don't understand that profitable apps, by
and large, are not software platforms.

They are:

1) Disposable 2) Timely 3) Shallow 4) Impulsive

These can be games, but they can also be many other types of content.
Everytime I see a guy betting on one app, on one platform, trying to make it
perfect, I try to explain to him it has a snowballs chance in hell of working,
he doesn't listen. No one wants to face that profitable apps are mass produced
at medium to low quality on every platform.

~~~
nanijoe
So do you make games ?

~~~
tsunamifury
We make some trivia games and simple word games. However our 3 top sellers in
the Apple App Store make about 120k per year each and are simple reference
content. The key is that it is branded with a well recognizable name.

------
Xcelerate
It's a bit hard to buy the "never going to be a millionaire" thing when my
friend joined a relatively new start-up and became one overnight. Yeah, I
realize a lot of people don't become one, but I still have a good deal of
optimism.

------
josephlord
I find these articles looking at the economics of the app store interesting.

I'm still learning mobile (iOS) development having got back to software
development last year although I've been doing Rails contract work for much of
the time. I released my first real experiment
<http://itunes.com/apps/fastlists> (yes it's another lists app but it is
currently free, with no ads and has a couple of useful features making it
especially useful for reusable lists for shopping, packing etc. The design is
functional rather than beautiful).

I'm currently adding some in-app purchase options to test the reactions of the
users.

My current idea is to offer the following options:

1) No-ads (tier 1 price)

2) Privacy - No anonymous usage collection.(tier 1 price)

3) Raise item limit (by 100 to 200 items) (tier 1 price)

4) Unlimited items (tier 3 price)

5) Everything including future in-app features (tier 5)

For me option 5 is important because like several other commenters I hate
feeling I will need to keep paying bit by bit for something. It will include
everything that doesn't need server side support and expense. I actually hope
most customers choose this, the other items are there largely to justify the
pricing of this item.

Ads and anonymous usage monitoring will come in releases after the purchases
have become available and for ads I will probably make the first month of use
add free to try and get the user stuck in. I may also add some alternate skins
as in-app purchases too later although that is lower priority than using the
iOS 6 social framework as a way to try to get users promoting the app for me
by sharing lists.

There is currently no item limit so I will allow users with more than 50
current items to have their initial limit be 50 higher than the current level.

At the moment this is just a small scale test because I haven't done any
promotion for the app yet so the current numbers of users is small although
the reviews are currently very good (despite a usability issue leading someone
not to work out how to reorder items - but I'll add some help in the release
after next).

To become self sustaining as an independent developer I'm expecting to need to
keep a small suite of apps ticking over. Some will be more ambitious than this
although others may be even simpler with different unique features or niche
target markets.

Any thoughts on the pricing model? Or the app?

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chmike
What if the Sparrow problem was a too high burn rate ? Apparently they were
planing to integrate ads in Sparrow, probably for a free version. This could
have worked since the app was very popular.

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kposehn
Interesting.

I may have to revise some of my opinions about Sparrow's sale. New data means
new conclusions.

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mikehoward
nailed it. period

