Yay, it's Friday! :)

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Awesome article on independent software developers: (some minor snipping)

Novelists aren’t expected to help people read their books; musicians don’t help fans play their CDs; but programmers are expected to help you with their software.

When a solo developer reaches the point where an app becomes so popular he needs help, there are only several options. One is to hire help, to build a company around the products. But there’s nothing easy about this. For one thing, even if you hire just one person, you’ve greatly increased the amount of revenue you need to generate. And it needs to be steadier revenue — if you’re only supporting yourself, you don’t have to write paychecks every two weeks. Running a company with even a single employee involves a ton of overhead; the whole point of The Life is the idea that you can just sit around all day hacking on code and watch the money roll in through Kagi or eSellerate. That’s not what it’s like if you own a software company with employees.

Another option is just not to worry about keeping up with the flow of support issues. Tempting, for sure, but certainly not a good way to build up a reserve of goodwill from your users. There’s a lot of overlap in the Venn diagram of the intersection between successful indie Mac developers and indie Mac developers with a reputation for being responsive to customers. From what I know of Brent Simmons, this was never an option for him — his personality is such that he’s incapable of being unresponsive to his users.