Maybe the Apple approach to having such a strongly tied in store also helped your sales. I can’t remember a single product I have ever built that had any sales in the first week. Usually the first week is spent trying to find all the places to post it to even get started with trials. Or back in the old days you would spend days dialing into BBS systems and posting your app. Wow, glad we don’t do that anymore.

Best of luck on your product

@Olly SB: You’re right. It shouldn’t be the dev blog on the front page. I started the blog just to get some pages out there and to establish the site. Now that I have a product, I needed to change it so that people know what they’re looking for. Now maybe people will click buy instead of running

About 6 months ago, I started my quest on building a Micro-ISV. I did the same waffling on whether to write an app for the store. I was doing all of the market analysis, and trying to figure out whether it was a product that I could eventually grow to provide a full-time salary, and the numbers weren’t coming out good. I was just about to scrap the idea when the person I was discussing my plans with (Josh Kaufman of http://personalmba.com, a site I highly recommend) broke my stagnation by saying that even if the launch doesn’t create enough revenue to live off of (or worse, a complete failure), it is a great experiment that has very little downside ($99 to get into the app store, a little more for incidentals, website, etc.), and a lot of benefits, the biggest of which being you actually get to experience and learn what it is like to be a Micro-ISV.

I’m glad he talked some sense into me. The experience has been great, and it’s given me the platform to do all of the experiments in marketing, website design and SEO, social media, sales, copywriting, etc. to gain experience for when I launch the real thing (not that the iPhone app isn’t real, but the chances of it becoming a paycheck). I always sum it up by saying that I’ve become addicted to entrepreneurship, because being an employee just isn’t the same high it used to be.

I would say if you are investigating being a Micro-ISV, look into this as one way to test the waters.

Then along came our children, and they sucked all the time out of my life lo these many years! My days of banging out code until 3am on weeknights were over. It didn’t help that I was getting a little too old to subsist on caffeine and a few hours of sleep, either

Then a couple years ago I came across Leon Bambrick’s blog entry “New Year’s Resolution: Build Your Own Micro ISV!” (http://www.secretgeek.net/ny_2007.asp) and it was a revelation for me. The kids were getting older, and I could steal a little time here and there to start tinkering again.

Not having a lot of time, I had to come up with projects that were doable for me; small to medium sized apps that I could have a chance to finish. One of the best bits of advice I’d read somewhere was to scratch your own itch; to come up with something that you’d want to use to solve a problem.

I came up with one idea and worked on it a bit at a time for several months before abandoning it. Some time passed, and I came up with another idea with the same outcome. More time passed and a new idea came to me last summer. This was my best idea yet, and I worked on it really regularly until this spring, when I began to realize that a part of this project was in itself a pretty good idea for a standalone class library product. Down a new road I went.

And that’s where I am now, trying to complete a product that was a complete accident. I had always thought in terms of standalone apps, never class libraries, as my projects, and I find a lot to like in this different approach.

As always, I hope I can complete it. But I don’t view all the prior projects as failures. With every one, I learned new and better ways to improve my code. I’ve learned how to use FxCop and Nunit and Sandcastle Help File Builder in the process. And I bring all this expertise back to my day job as well.

So thanks again. It was great read about someone with similar experiences. And right you are: “just do it”!