

My app ShoveBox is on NYTimes.com for some reason - dangrover
http://www.nytimes.com/external/gigaom/2009/11/16/16gigaom-shovebox-for-the-mac-and-iphone-helps-keep-your-s-23340.html

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tlrobinson
It looks like NYT syndicates GigaOm, like how the Washington Post syndicates
TechCrunch.

When we're on TechCrunch I make sure to send my friends and family the
Washington Post URLs, since it looks a little more impressive to people not
familiar with TechCrunch ;)

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wglb
For some reason. Sounds like it is there because it is really excellent.
Congrats.

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grinich
I'd be really interested in hearing how MacHeist has affected your sales, this
press included.

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dangrover
Actually only a pretty minor boost to Mac sales.

Nice windfall of iPhone app sales to the people who got the Mac app though.
Ended up selling about $5500 of the iPhone app over the past week (usually
only sell <= $400/month of the iPhone app itself). This will probably be the
first month where iPhone revenue is more than Mac revenue.

Support has been kinda rough lately, hopefully it will die down. Sometimes I
look at these MacHeist sort of things as kind of a Faustian bargain. But I
think it'll have been well worth it. I'm looking forward to sending a limited,
tasteful email campaign to those 300K people when my next product/version 2
launches.

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patio11
_Support has been kinda rough lately_

Let me take a stab in the dark: you've found that folks who pay less for your
application have higher expectations for it, are unwilling to read the
documentation, are ruder, and cause many more support requests per customer
than your customers who paid full price do? How'd I do?

This phenomenon is _very_ common with shareware developers. Higher prices tend
to scare away many of the pathological customers.

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dangrover
Yeah, kinda. There are quite a few wackos like that (I've seen it _all_ in the
past week), but overall it's not _too_ bad considering I have 300K new
"customers."

I had no qualms today about raising the price of the iPhone app back up, now
that it's fallen off the top 10 charts. It's kind of a support intensive piece
of the app (e.g. it requires wifi to sync, and a lot of people have shitty
wifi).

I did release an update right before MacHeist that fixed some edge cases in
the syncing (see my presentation here:
<http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=899656>). That seemed to help somewhat.

I've found the difficulty of the support load can be better quantified by the
number of _unique_ requests rather than the number of requests.

I hired someone to help a few months ago to do support. I felt felt very
lazy/extravagent/unresourceful doing so, but it's been a huge help, especially
with MacHeist. She can't troubleshoot _every_ issue, but that's perfectly
fine, because she does a great job weeding out the riff raff. And she has a
way thicker skin than I do dealing with customers.

I also launched a fancy new support section for my site at the same time as
the MacHeist thing.

Also, there's a special box for MacHeist visitors at the top of every page
that kinda tries to get them to buzz off:

<http://files.dangrover.com/macheistbox.png>

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patio11
I'd describe that as "prominent, effective self-help options", and your
implementation is _brilliant_. Seriously -- if you write that up in a blog
post I will cite it for a decade.

I try to strike the balance between "I am always, always happy to talk to my
customers" and "There are thousands of you and only one of me so I can't talk
to you all every day". Mostly I fix the app and website to answer the common
issues without requiring my input and, for the recurrent ones ( _cough_
Registration Key management) emphasize that they get their answer a day
quicker if they use the lookup form than if they send me an email asking me
to, essentially, please use the lookup form for them.

(Apropos of nothing: I would gladly abandon Registration Keys if people
actually paid money for software that wasn't access controlled. Happily, the
change from downloadable software to a web app has eliminated this issue for
about 70% of my customers.)

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novicecoder
Congratulations - when you've got an app that's useful, effective and solves a
real pain, people are gonna write about it...

I wonder if this type of publicity will start to nudge ShoveBox into the
'tipping point' of success...

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dangrover
Thanks!

It actually desperately needs a ton of work. I want to get v1.8 (free upgrade)
and v2.0 (paid upgrade) out as soon as possible. The baseline level of sales
has been dwindling gradually. The MacHeist spike is an anomaly.

But I'm really busy now with my next app which may or may not pay the rent the
way ShoveBox does.

It's weird actually feeling overwhelmed with my own business for once. Maybe I
should do the next one with a cofounder.

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csbrooks
>But I'm really busy now with my next app which may or may not pay the rent
the way ShoveBox does.

Have you considered if this is the best use of your time right now? Was it
spolsky who said you generally make a lot more money by adding new features to
your old product, than by creating a whole new product?

Not as glamorous or fun, I know, but...

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DTrejo
Congratulations!

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nick007
what do you mean "for some reason" -- it's my favorite app!

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DenisM
For the curios: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacHeist#MacHeist_nanoBundle>

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kvs
Nice! It sure does sound like a nice app. Congrats. BTW: Does the iPhone app
syncs using mobileme (or at least automagically) or do we have to manually
open both apps and sync (Things-like syncing)?

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wizard_2
It's a things type of syncing, apple doesn't open up sync services for iphone
apps.

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kajecounterhack
Congrats Dan! Oh and I'd just like to add that WriteRoom is ridiculously
awesome. Got it from MacHeist and have been using it ever since.

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oliverkofoed
WriteRoom is cool for sure. If you ever need to "upgrade" a bit, then i've
personally found Ulysses to be the next logical step. It has a fullscreen mode
akin to writeroom, but also supports semantic marking for later output
generation + system for keeping track of related documents in a "project"

No affiliation, just like it.

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ronnier
The said link: <http://www.wonderwarp.com/shovebox/>

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thehigherlife
This looks really cool and would be extremely helpful in my work-flow. Thanks,
i had no idea this existed!

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tangore
what is your team size and how much time it took you to develop this app i am
really desperate to build a simple app in iphone .. please help me out to make
an estimate so i can plan over my expenses

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dangrover
Just me. The original version of the app was made in about 130 hours, the
iPhone version + desktop syncing feature in about 160.

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metra
Why the heck is it on there?!

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dangrover
I dunno. It says it's from GigaOm, but I can't find any article about my app
on there. The same article is posted on Salon too.

WebWorkerDaily posts the article and it's in the GigaOm "network", but I saw
the same article on some random obscure blog this morning and thought nothing
of it.

I wonder if this means I can put a NYTimes logo on my page and have it link to
the article, or if that would be sleazy?

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patio11
_I wonder if this means I can put a NYTimes logo on my page and have it link
to the article, or if that would be sleazy?_

I think your concern that it is sleazy is based off of the reflexive engineer
disdain of marketing. You may wish to carefully examine whether you have a
rational basis for that disdain.

"As seen in the New York Times" is 100% factual and a valuable trust signal
(which will make a measurable difference in conversion rates -- A/B test if
you don't believe me), because it lets you mooch off the Gray Lady's 100+ year
reputation for crusading liberal journalism.

Their sole purpose in life is dictating what the reasonably well informed
person should know about, and now they are saying that the reasonably well
informed person should know about _you_.

Granted, in this particular instance you've gotten past the gatekeepers not
due to the vaunted internal checks at the NYT but because they're syndicating
cheap content from an outside blog network to get all the bang from their
brand without having to pay for the journalism. That suggests to me that they
won't have a brand to speak of in a few years because they can't live on
previously accumulated goodwill forever but, hey, it isn't your job to
conserve their brand equity.

~~~
dangrover
Thanks. I'm usually pretty good at getting past the "reflexive engineer
disdain of marketing", but I still have a lot of hangups over stuff like that.

I'm gonna do a marketing push in a month or so around version 1.8. It's gonna
have a redesigned page for the app, with a screencast video, and giant-ass
unmissable download/buy buttons. And a huge, throbbing NYTimes logo. :-D

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kevinholesh
Great job!

