An excellent John Gruber piece on the life cycle of the independent Mac developer, using for an example Brent and Sheila Simmons, whose company Ranchero was recently sold to NewsGator.
There are 3 reader comments
• Oct 17 2005 • 10:52AM
They didn't sell Ranchero, they only sold NetNewsWire, AFAIK (from posts I read on the NNW mailing list).
• Oct 17 2005 • 11:04AM
"NewsGator purchased all of Ranchero Software’s software, including MarsEdit and the freeware apps."
I think it's a bit silly to use Brent as an example of a typical Mac developer. The story of NetNewsWire is just about the least ordinary of any product I can think of.
This thread is closed to new comments. Thanks to everyone who responded.
Ramanan • Oct 17 2005 • 9:06AM
This seems like a reasonable analysis. You can sort of see this with the way Shaun Inman has been handling the sale of his stats application Mint. If you read the FAQ on the site, it's full of the things Mint does not do, and the set-ups Mint does not support. Internet Explorer does not work with Mint much at all. I think by limiting himself in this way, I would imagine he has manageable sales numbers, and keeps the number of people he needs to support down. (Though, with something like Mint, I think a good chunk of the user-base is probably tech-savvy.)