You Innovate - We Distribute

Just a quick note for those wondering if we’re still alive. Yes, we are! We’ve been very busy working on our infrastructure. It’s clear from talking to indie developers that they want to see accelerator in action. Frankly, there is nothing quite like it out there right now. Our plan is for Bob to launch GlobalTalk using our system, then allow the Mac ISV community to see what our system actually does by providing a read-only management interface.

We’re excited about showing Mac indie developers what a fully-integrated business management system can do, and we’re pushing to complete features. Seeing is believing.

Technorati Tags: MacISV

What would happen if your site hit Digg today? That’s right, the long-coveted event happens and thousands rush to check out your shiny app. Time to test-drive the Enzo! …Well, hold on. As your server melts, your visitors are fed 404’s, and your moment of discovery fizzles. Turns out your bargain webhost was simply unprepared for the surge in traffic. At MacISV Accelerator, we understand how much is riding on your 15 minutes of Digg Effect fame, and have designed our infrastructure with the Mac indie developer in mind.

As part of our suite of services, we ensure you have the bandwidth and server horsepower to handle the surge. First, your site is hosted on a box we control in a data center we don’t have to board a plane to reach. We built each server with your needs in mind down to the gigabit ethernet spigot. Second, we carefully restrict the number of sites we host on each box. After all, what would happen if each site were hit hard on the same day? Stranger things have happened. Third, we are constantly monitoring the performance of our network. If you get hit, we want to be the first to know. If we need to mirror your site and balance the bandwidth, we can do it.

Mitigating bandwidth spikes is just one of the many services we offer Mac indie developers. Want your site on ‘accelerator? We’re taking applications for beta testing (see right sidebar). Got questions? Just ask.

Greetings -

Well, we are settling down now a bit after our week blitz out in San Francisco at WWDC. One of the surprises of the week was a great little talk given at The Apple Store from some well-known indies about how to become and sustain the lifestyle.

And, here are some of the most memorable quotes from the event. Hopefully, they’re almost word-for-word. I was writing (how archaic!) as fast as I could, and the audio in some spots can be sketchy.

These quotes came during Wil Shipley’s talk entitled “Hype”, which, from an indie developer’s standpoint, offered advice on how to make your app sales soar.

“If you’re famous among developers, 90% of your [marketing hype] work is done.”

- Wil Shipley

“Hit just one rumor site [about your next great app], and let the buzz build.”

- Wil Shipley

“Be generous with free copies.”

- Wil Shipley

Daniel Jalkut had two great quotes that capture the spirit of what we’re trying to solve with MacISV Accelerator. In talking about merchant services, licensing schemes, and the like, he said …

“We’re all qualified [to do server side code, Aquatic Prime, etc.], if you want to take the time.”

- Daniel Jalkut

“Most people spend so much time on these nuances [again, licensing schemes, websites, etc.] that they never release their software.”

- Daniel Jalkut

It was a great event - as a Mac developer and as somebody launching a business aimed at helping the indie Mac developer, I couldn’t help but feel that I was on the ground floor of something very special.

Technorati Tags: Apple Store, MacISV, WWDC

Thanks for all the hard work, Chuck! Here are a couple pics from the event. In addition to us, the soirée was sponsored by Esellerate, Perforce, Omni, and Localize Technologies.

Bob and Marcus Zarra

Crowds ‘o people at the soirée

…sorry, we were too busy to take individual shots–next event!

Looks promising for an ‘08 event.

Technorati Tags: Apple, MacISV, macsb

Greetings From San Francisco -

Well, the (first annual?) sfMacIndie Soirée was a complete blast! We had a chance to meet the indie developer community and hear the stories behind some of the great apps that are out there.

Here are some pics of the prep process …

What do 200+ foam cars with your name on it look like? Well, this:

111 Minna is very close to our hotel, so Har and I threw all of our gear into into our two big suitcases and trucked it down the sidewalk. With our “matching getups”, we got some stairs. We’re used to stares:

And, moments before the floodgates were opened, we put the finishing touches on our sponsor table:

Everyone has been very generous with their time this week, meeting with us about becoming Beta Testers for MacISV Accelerator. More about the various parties with pics later, for now, it’s dinner time.

Technorati Tags: MacISV, WWDC, sfMacIndie Soirée

We’ve noticed our meebome widgets are showing us as “offline”. Please use email or phone #’s to contact us.

(UPDATE: we got feedback from meebo, we’ll need to make some adjustments to our contact page. Thanks for the response, guys!)

Technorati Tags: meebo

The Moscone Center

Genius? Har outside the Apple Store.

More Genius

China Town

Don’t look too closely…the rice featured some kind of grub

Stand back…Har’s eating dim sum

The elevator in our hotel displays a BSOD….too easy.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Mac, MacISV, wwdc

At MacISV Accelerator, we manage our own servers (FreeBSD in case you were wondering). Why would we do that? Well, it all comes down to service, and we’ve learned this one the hard way.

Despite having *nix sys-admin expertise, we haven’t always managed our own boxes. When Bob and I started our web-design business four years ago, we decided to outsource our hosting services. It made sense at the time, and this is an adequate solution if all you need is a little web space and a couple POP accounts. However, once you start doing the really cool stuff (customized content-management system, deep analytics, etc.), you quickly outgrow this level of service.

Avoiding Bad Service
The weaknesses of the “commoditized” hosting service become apparent when you want Apache compiled with a necessary, yet “non-standard” feature, and you are told “we can’t do that”. …Or when you find out (because your site is broken) that the hosting service has upgraded software on your server and has replaced your carefully-crafted config files with defaults. …Or when you find rootkit debris on your server and hear the support person say, “yeah, that happens alot.” ( ...what?!) …Or when you discover your important business information is served by the same database manager as “Joe’s Hackme Forum.” You get the idea.

For those reasons alone, when we created MacISV Accelerator, the choice was obvious. But beyond that, our goal at MacISV Accelerator is to help Mac indie developers write great software. We create the supporting infrastructure, you focus on the cool apps. This infrastructure, however, involves much more than throwing together a few servers.

Addressing Big Needs
Developers want to see:

• how their website is performing,
• who’s talking about their product (and what they’re saying),
• how many demos turn into full licenses,
• what their customers’ systems look like (os version, app version, etc.), and
• where their customers are coming from
• …and we haven’t even touched what developers want to do.

Developers want an integrated view of their business: a logical, easy-to-read series of views that inform their decisions.

Providing A New Solution
Can’t developers do this now? Sure, but when each part of the business is farmed-out to a different company, pulling the data together and correlating relevant pieces is a tedious and time-consuming job. The pain is unnecessary, and that time could be better spent on creating the next killer Mac app.

And that’s why we run our own servers. We’ve designed our systems from the ground up to allow us to pull-together the right information at the right time in the right way. But are we really getting it right? As we scale our systems and add services, we’d like to hear from you. If you had a data center at your fingertips, how would you use it to help your indie software business?

Technorati Tags: Apple, developer, FreeBSD, indie, Mac, MacISV, online tools, server

When I was planning Global Talk in early 2006, I started to poke around and understand which versions of OS X I should support. After talking with several developers and spending a lot of time on the web, it was still unclear how much effort I should put into supporting any users who had not upgraded to 10.4.

For Global Talk, I wanted to make use of Core Data, which meant restricting my distribution to Tiger only. But, how many sales would I lose in making this decision?

When creating MacISV Accelerator, we started to brainstorm how to help indie developers get their hands on this valuable market data. We were really intrigued by Sparkle Plus as a simple and unobtrusive way to get this information from customers, completely by their approval. Now, if we could support a community of developers, then we could pool this data together, allowing the individual developer to baseline his or her own statistics versus others in the same boat.

With MacISV Accelerator and Sparkle Plus, the indie Mac developer has access to a much richer dataset about their customers and their market. Impersonal data, such as total percentage of users on 10.3.x vs. 10.3.4 amongst 100 developers, could be extremely valuable when making decisions about which version of OS X to support.

Greetings –

Thanks to Chuck Soper’s hardwork, we are one of the official sponsors of the sfMacIndie Soiree happening the week of WWDC. We’re really excited about this opportunity to meet with you face-to-face and learn more about your application. Harlan will be in-town until Tuesday morning, and Bob will be around until Thursday afternoon. And, although it’s hard to do, we’ve decided not to attend WWDC itself so that we can be around to meet with you throughout the week.

Our goal in coming to San Fran is to meet you, understand your requirements for software distribution, and learn about what makes sense to help you with and what it doesn’t make sense to help you with. Many of you are already distributing your app, so what can we offer you? Where are you spending precious cycles where you’d rather not? Where are your “pain points” that we could potentially assist you?

We’ll definitely be at the Soiree, and we’re planning on hanging out at the Metreon throughout the week. We here they have food, coffee, and wireless … and they are right across the street from Moscone. Perfect! If you need a break from WWDC sessions, just come to this website, use our Meebo Me widgets under the “Contact” page, track us down, and the espresso’s on us. If you definitely want to see us, fill in the little form to the bottom right (no spam, we promise) so that we can hook up with you at a particular time and place.

If you have any questions or comments beforehand, by all means let us know. See you in a few weeks!

– Bob