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 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.

I won't win this argument (and I won't try), but, I appreciate the time you took to write me a response!

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?

Re.: 2. Don't worry about the price point atm. He might be right that it is not worth currently for him, but it looks like that a lot of other people value it.

If you continue adding features and continue making the product as a whole better and more valuable for a larger and larger audience.

So eventually he should be happy as well.

That requires obviously, that you mostly add features. i.e. you don't re-invent features or redesign features without adding value (just to make prettier), I have seen a lot of teams/people doing that kind of mistake.

a great reminder. i'm keen on keeping it simple... and focused. i don't need to be the next microsoft word... i'd rather not actually.

i think one of the most important things any developer or business does is decide who their customer is... and who their customer isn't.

> 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?

Possibly, but then that would be a bunch of people with a lot of money :)

> 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.

Is $30 really that much if it delivers value? Desk is meant to make blogging simple. It's definitely hard to argue if you buy the app, hate it, and don't use it. At that level, a price point of $5 or $10 would still be much more expensive than what you got from it.

But for people who actually use the product, how long will it be before they extract the $30 of value (ok, this is a simplified view, there is non trivial effort for learning the product.) from the product to have made it a good investment? Whether it is time saved, or increased quality of output, I'd argue not much time at all.

Another thing to note is that the article points out that the number of returns for Desk is small but non trivial (~2.6% of revenue), so people do in fact do that. This is consistent with my own experiences (about 4%).

Yup. people are returning the product and there are a lot of people that hate the product... that's fine. i'm not trying to create a perfect product for 100% of the population... just certain people who will find it useful.

but, one of the biggest motivations for building this was knowing how hard it is to write, full stop. even after writing and blogging for 14 years... it's still as hard as ever.

any tool that can help me write and grab my strange amorphous thoughts and put them down into something understandable makes that ROI-value hit positive real quick.

so, for those people who are able to write more and publish more via the app... i think it's really worth it to them.

why? because writing is really fucking hard.

$30 is most certainly not "a lot of money", and it is this attitude that makes indie development so hard these days. This app is meant for serious bloggers (i.e. those that spend many hours writing each week), so if it works for them $30 is a steal.

Remember that out of the $30 John gets just $20 from Apple, and if you take another third out for other expenses you're looking at less than $14. Needless to say you need to sell a lot of copies at that price to break even on your development time, on the order of 10,000/year, which is more than 27 copies/day! Then take into account that the App Store makes it difficult to get repeat revenue out of customers even if they use your app for several years...

this paper-napkin math isn't entirely off-course... and my time as a developer would make much more fiscal sense if i went and did contract work... hell, i did this for a long time and made a ton of money in comparison to my "take" as an indie developer via the MAS.

But, that wasn't the point and wasn't the motive... so, i am okay with "eating" those costs so that i might be more "in control" of this product's destiny.

appreciate the support... this is what makes "indie development" worth it.

No problem John, I'm not (yet, at least) a user of your app I'm just a fellow indie that wanted to illustrate the reality of doing business at just $30/copy. Prices are low enough to make most indie development uneconomical in pure dollar terms. Though I wholeheartedly agree that money is not the only motivation, customers need to realise that developers need to make a decent living in order for there to be a vibrant ecosystem of apps.

As an indie who has made the mistake of both pricing too low and spending too much time on development (vs marketing) in the past, it looks like you've done very well to avoid these pitfalls so far!

here here!

one of the biggest compliments and encouragements that i've received is that other indie developers have told me that i've done it "right" by pricing the app the way I've done it.

in fact, many of them have shared with me that they've done this wrong in the past and that they wanted to encourage me that i've gotten at least this part right!

the challenge is that those "atta boys!" are all private via DMs or individual emails... not public so they aren't available for all to see.

but to be sure, i've got a bunch and it feels great.

If a programmer builds an amazingly perfect app, but has no users to see it, did she really build it? -Confucius

In less snarky terms, I think focusing on marketing is super important. The faults and missing features can be fixed when you have users and money to pay for the work to do so. I'm sick of using a nice obscure app that is abandoned because I'm one of the few people who use it, so I'm less harsh on marketing as opposed to "more coding" than you.

one of the most important things that i've learned in the process of building this particular indie app is the fact that GAINING TRACTION should be as important as building the product.

that nearly killed me when i first realized that. this book really changed my perspective: http://blog.desk.pm/gaining-traction/

it's hard to do both... i mean, impossible... but i've focused more on doing a good job of building community, creating content, and gaining traction through experimentation (e.g. marketing on Gruber's blog) than I ever have...

and... it's kinda worked.!

Actually it is pretty easy to get Apple's customer service to refund an app. Just say it didn't behave as expected and you would like a refund.

Hey John, I ran into some similar issues as the parent w/ line breaks (and w/ the local/remote publishing stuff in general). I posted a couple of comments on the Desk.pm feedback forum and am compiling some notes as I poke around.

I have maximal sympathy for the challenges you face and I think that the concept of focused-editing with seamless publishing is fantastic, especially since no one else has done it, and I'm willing to wait for some updates to see where it goes, but I wonder if there should be some better visibility on the apps current caveats.

this is great and you're right, software is never done, only abandoned ( http://john.do/software/ )...

the challenge is that i wasn't aware of many of the issues until we had a plethora of users (which is great). i can only catch so many via testing and alpha-users!

thanks for your patience, that means a ton. it really does as an indie developer.

finally, i try to point a lot of people to our community forum, which has grown quite nicely over the last 3 months. there's a lot of help there and said caveats. i can always do a better job in this department though, so, thanks for the kind reminder!