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If you have a Mac App or iOS app, Daring Fireball would be a great place to advertise. I'd like to here from some of the web apps that are promoted, do they have a same uptick in subscribers?
Congratulations to the author and a succesful campaign. My favourite part of his post reminded me of a quote my marketing professor once told me "The most important thing in a marketing campaign is a great product" Had desk been a poor product, I doubt the Halo-effect would have happened.
The community has helped a ton in helping to qualify new features (that make sense) and reward me through my execution.
A previous amusing note from Gruber[1] on his sponsorship system and a sales email from Taboola, purveyor of the obnoxious click-bait grids that you're starting to see all over: > Speaking of revenue and pageviews, true story: I got an email yesterday from a sales rep at Taboola, pitching me on running their ads on DF. It included this line: “I see your site is not monetized at present, and I think there is room to d…
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I dunno dude, I bought it, tried to use it, and quickly discovered that it's a pretty poor product. I won't go into it here, because it's off-topic and I left a two-star review in the App Store anyway. But my impression of the app is that its success is mainly due to marketing savvy and the current infatuation with "minimalist" writing apps that use Markdown. So I would say yes, DF advertising clearly worked here, an…
You can always get a refund for the app... and I'm really sorry it didn't work for you. It's honestly really tough being an indie developer... I have to do EVERYTHING related to not just building the DAMN THING but all of the business, marketing, Q/A, financials/accounting, blogging... the list is eternally-long. v1.0 was lucky... in a lot of ways. v1.1 addressed a shit-ton of issues... v1.2, out in a week (hopefully…
1) this is a writing app /with no support for paragraph breaks/. That is unbelievable to me. Nobody who writes for a living can use an app that shows all of your text to you as a really large single block with no horizontal breaks between paragraphs. How? Why? Not only am I stupified by this, but I also am dumbfounded at all of these 5-star reviews that don't mention it or any of the other show-stoppper flaws I pointed out within the first 20 mins of use. Are people reviewing an app that they've not actually used?
2) The price. $30 is a lot of money, and yeah you can try to convince Apple's customer support to give you a refund, but we both know nobody does that.
The combo of high price, glaring product problems, and a masterful marketing effort just doesn't sit well with me. I'm not saying you're a scam artist -- the site and even the app reflect a lot of passion and creativity. But I do question your priorities. More coding and user testing, and less SEO and blogging and convincing everyone in your network to give the app 5 stars, maybe.
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I like the feel of the landing page, but I have a hard time figuring out what desk is. I don't know how it compares to other markup editors or distraction-free writing environments (I currently use and love Ulysses, and have tried several other similar apps), I don't know the details of its blogging platform integrations, or how it manages media. Without that info, I'd be happy to try a demo, but not risk $30 to figu…
This is great feedback and something I can do better. I had actually done a retrospective on the change of the landing page but you're right... it still needs improvement. At some point I'll probably hire a "real" designer to help me... since i'm not a designer by any stretch of the imagination.
If there's no demo available, I need (as a potential purchaser) quite a bit of information to know if it's worth risking my $$'s. I'd say some combination of screenshots/gifs or screencasts going through the program would be great. Or maybe more of a focus on the workflow, or maybe just expanding your features section to be illustrated with screenshots form the app showing how features are used.
Honestly, some of the best descriptions of the program are in App store reviews where it's compared to other distraction-free/markup writing environments.
Also, congratulations and good luck!
But on the web the long tail is the long tail. Search engines can pull an article out of the mists of time and that advertising is still intact. So you're exposure is very different.
Combining that with the curating effects of a trusted source, and you get a solid advertising value for the right brands.
I expect it will be "successes" like DF which inspire additional people to create this sort of content and that seems to be a good thing for everyone (advertisers and readers).
I suspect this is a lot more informative about the future of journalism. The 'old school' magazine/newspaper group was all about getting 'readership' and then 'blasting their eyeballs'. And there was a tremendous amount of loss to their madness. 6 months after a magazine was published it was entirely unlikely that someone would pick up that issue, see an advertising message, and act on it. But on the web the long tai…
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You can always get a refund for the app... and I'm really sorry it didn't work for you. It's honestly really tough being an indie developer... I have to do EVERYTHING related to not just building the DAMN THING but all of the business, marketing, Q/A, financials/accounting, blogging... the list is eternally-long. v1.0 was lucky... in a lot of ways. v1.1 addressed a shit-ton of issues... v1.2, out in a week (hopefully…
Believe me, I understand how hard it is. I've been working alone on a project for the past 2.5 years now (not quite ready for prime-time, but soon), so I know exactly what you mean. However, two things are just inexcusable to me: 1) this is a writing app /with no support for paragraph breaks/. That is unbelievable to me. Nobody who writes for a living can use an app that shows all of your text to you as a really larg…
1. I'm working on this and the feature was an attempt to combine both WYSIWYG and Markdown into one formatting experience. This ended up being a gamble and one that I lost and the newest updates will address this. It sucks, i failed, i got it wrong.
2. A lot? sure. i guess. there are tons of great alternatives, for sure!
"More coding"...? #facepalm ...
really?
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I'd rather not. It introduces a pretty big conflict of interest (for example, Gruber would probably think twice before writing something negative about a former sponsor when he's on the record endorsing them) and blurs the line between advertising and editorial content. As mentioned in the article: > the cost today ranges between $8,000 – $10,000 dollars per placement and you get to write your own post, essentially M…
PBS and NPR have to deal with this issue every year and their solution is pretty simple. They report it as they would want to, mention that X Co sponsored them in the past/present, and don't take their advertising dollars for that piece.