Mac Indie Marketing
An Interview with Justin Williams, Second Gear Software
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
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
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.
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