Month
January 2016
In October 2015, Pieter Omvlee of Bohemian Coding gave a great talk at the inaugural Release Notes entitled The Great Pretender: Pretend to be More Than an Indie. In his presentation, Pieter talked in part about his experience selling a professional app to professional users. One of the things he suggested is that indies should consider pretending to be a bigger company than they really are in order to instill confidence in the mind of the customer that they are a Serious Business™. He pointed out that professional, enterprise, and corporate customers don’t care that you’re indie. They don’t care that you’re “living the dream.” What they do care about is that you’ll be around to support the product they purchased for years to come. Your inspiring “against all odds” story may buy you credibility with your indie peers, but oftentimes it does exactly the opposite with your professional customers.
Pieter’s talk really hit home with me. After all, my company and his company have a lot in common. Sure Bohemian Coding has been way more successful than Metakite Software has been (thus far), but we both sell products to professional customers. Bohemian Coding sells Sketch to professional designers; I sell Benjamin to professionals of all stripes who who want to be more productive. In many ways, Bohemian Coding is a model for my long-term goals with Metakite Software. So when Pieter pointed out the way that his (and by extension, my) customers viewed indie developers, I sat up and took notice. I didn’t immediately act on his advice though.
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