Daniel and Manton talk about the Core Int blog, new Red Sweater logo, and web site conversion rates.
Download (MP3, 37 minutes, 17 MB)
Links for this show:
- New Red Sweater logo by Mike Rohde – creative sketches, nifty buttons, and updated web site.
- SXSW sketchnotes – more sketches from Mike Rohde
- Marketing for indie developers – tips from Karelia Software’s Dan Wood: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3
- The 4-Hour Workweek – business book by Tim Ferris
Daniel Jalkut is the founder of Red Sweater Software. His most popular products are MarsEdit, Black Ink, FastScripts, and FlexTime.
Manton Reece is the founder of Riverfold Software. He builds e-book software for Ingram Digital and has 2 independent products: Clipstart and Wii Transfer.
Heh – I accidentally described Sandvox as a “blog publishing tool” … I meant to say WEB publishing… though it can be used for blogs, as well ;)
Hi guys,
I just wanted to say that I’m a big fan of Core Intuition, and I hope you keep up the good work. As a wannabe indie Mac developer, I find it really interesting (and entertaining!)
Daniel: the new logo rocks! ;-)
Mantion: so does Clipstart! (I haven’t bought it just yet, but I can see it’s going to be *very* useful). I never replied to your reply to my support e-mail, but thanks for such a swift, polite, helpful response.
Thanks again, and I look forward to the next episode!
James Frost
So Manton, you have 1- a full-time day job, 2- you built two significant Mac apps, 3- you record podcasts and 4- you have wife and kids. I have 1, 3 and 4 taken care of but I can’t find time to work on 2. What’s your secret? 4 hours sleep?
James: Thanks! Let me know if you ever have other questions about Clipstart. I’m hearing a lot of your comment (looks useful but not quite ready to buy it), so hopefully I can follow through with 1.1 and 1.2 to make the app even more compelling.
Philippe: That’s about right, not enough sleep. To be honest, sometimes (like this pre-WWDC week for example) I’m not sure how much longer I can keep this schedule going. :-) But I consider myself very lucky to work at home where can see my kids even when I have other work to do.
Congrats on the new logo, one-year anniversary, and the updated web site.
I enjoyed listening on the flight out here from Boston, definitely helped get me in the right frame of mind. Hope to bump into you at some point during the week.
I wanted to echo the comment about being a wannabe indie Mac developer and enjoy your podcast hugely.
I look forward to seeing a new episode downloading in iTunes. The Mac community really do have some caring developers that work on apps that are fully featured, great to look at and use, and reasonably priced!
Keep up the great work.
Daniel & Manton, thanks for the very kind words on the logo design, the process and my sketchnotes. It is much appreciated. I’m honored to have been chosen.
I had a great time working with you on the logo Daniel and to be fair, you should mention that the 1 year time-frame had a little something to do with you and your wife having a new baby. :-)
In response to around minute 28 or so, “It’s not scaring people off that were formerly comforted by the bad logo… ‘I like this company because it seems like it has an air of badness to it that comforts me’”:
I wonder sometimes if MySpace succeeded (back in the day) in part because it was so ugly, potential publishers weren’t intimidated by the design.
Sometimes I wonder the same thing about Windows 3.1.
Thanks for a great podcast.
Keep up the great work!
First of all thanks for putting together this podcast. I’m a recent listener that started doing iPhone development last year, but now that I took the Objective-C / Cocoa learning curve, I might also work on some Mac apps at some point.
In this episode you talked about your new logos (which look nice, by the way). I wanted to point out a resource that may be useful for your listeners: 99designs.com is a crowdsourced design website. I used it to get a logo for my consulting website (http://codemeup.com) and am very happy with the results. You do end up spending a fair amount of time providing feedback to all the designers that are submitting designs for your contest, but in return you get to see a lot of very varied concepts. I would definitely use them again, particularly for logos, icons, etc.
Here are some real numbers on download and sales conversion ratios from a recent survey I did of Indie developers (Mac and Windows):
http://successfulsoftware.net/2009/04/23/the-truth-about-conversion-ratios-for-software/
5 downloads out of 100 visits is actually quite low, if you believe the survey results.
Thanks, Andy! Shows that science is more accurate than … well … my thin-air speculations ;)
And the worst thing is I had even seen your results previous to recording the podcast.
Daniel