The weird subtext of this article is that it's an example of a certain kind of person, the type for whom the entire point of making things is to make money, and it's only by accident that it's about doing something useful. Here's a person who reads entrepreneurship books and takes notes on good ways to find business opportunities, makes an app to help people basically cheat because that's where the money is, naturally explains how it's not cheating when asked, and dismisses the obvious reaction as 'negativity'... I mean, it's cool to make something, I guess, but it's possible that your life's work is to help slowly ruin the world despite doing your "job" / following all the obvious rules of society at every step... and I kinda think this is what that mindset looks like "on the inside"?
This is so unfair to the article author. People do things to make money because you need money to live in society! People want to be financially and creatively independent and starting a business, or learning how, is a completely fine thing to do. You can do volunteer work, contribute to open source, or whatever else for free, but why do you have to deride someone for trying to sell software?
Yes… and upon reading the post, I think that’s a very unfair characterization of the author’s app. This is a highly targeted niche convenience app. The activity is controversial, so is skill-based matchmaking in multiplayer games or CG in anime. That doesn’t mean the author is some heartless knob out to destroy society one watch app at a time!
You’re making a very interesting point about capitalism and democracy that people should keep in mind.
But…
1) I disagree that logic is the thing that goes out of the window, instead it’s “morality.” We sacrifice our sense of acting in the greater good and instead optimize for ourselves
2) There have been too many events in business and democratic history for me to believe that this disposal of our morality though repugnant is not just a human trait developed via evolution for some sort of greater purpose that benefits our species in a larger way than all of the disasters its caused (ie. Great Recession, Opiod Epidemic, Nazi Germany, Challenger Disaster, etc)
Seems to me like someone who properly thought about what he could do, did build it and then actually sold it to customers. You know, like, the basis of proper honest entrepreneurship.
Or are you concerned about the use of preflop charts? Because they are clearly allowed in the rules of most tournaments and not actually cheating.
The author actually acknowledges that opinions on legitimate use of pre-flop charts in the poker community are highly divided. It's a controversial topic.
> Overall, the app was controversial. Many of the Reddit comments were negative, and many accused me of making an app for “cheating.” Though there was some interesting back-and-forth because many people pointed out that high-profile famous poker players openly admit to using preflop charts.
Arguably, the author wanted to build a simple app that generates sizable revenue, having your idea reviled isn't a great outlook.
However, in his case, that's not a problem since his goal was to test an idea quickly, not to build a successful business:
> Overall, I expected some controversy and some negativity. This app mainly was an experiment to make money and learn more about making watchOS apps. If it fails, it’s not too big a deal.
The elephant in the room many have is that the author didn't start from an authentic motivation to solve an interesting problem people have, and turn it into a small business, but instead was motivated by "Hey, I want to experiment with building a business" and then started looking for a problem which was a good fit for his ulterior goal.
It's a kind of thinking about building businesses that will certainly yield successful results. It's also the kind of thinking that doesn't in the slightest consider the manifold impacts of their product or service on their markets and the wider environment in which those markets reside.
As one redditor duly noted:
> And that's how you get watches banned from the poker table.
Very few real people actually care. Certainly, if you post anything at all onto a sub Reddit, the gatekeepers of that subreddit will likely come out of the woodworks to cut down anything that doesn’t conform to their strict and limit view. Especially if you have something to sell, or have something unique to bring. It is precisely that kind of anti-growth mindset that has taken hold and destroyed the fun and potential of the web, and it is the last place we should be seeking validation for any kind of view. The true elephant in the room is that those gatekeepers are generally sad individuals who have disproportionately large effects on public discourse.
Just seems like a very harsh moral judgement on the author, who is operating well within the moral and legal bounds of business.
> the type for whom the entire point of making things is to make money, not do something useful.
the fact that somebody is paying for said app implies that it is useful. Noone parts with money for an exchange that they don't find useful.
The idea that just because _you_ don't see it as being useful doesn't make it not useful.
If you suppose that the exchange ruins the world somehow, because there's some externality that causes harm to you, then it's a case of making such an exchange illegal through some democratic process, and have enforcement. Absent of that, i think it is totally legitimate, and that the person doing the entrepreneurial endeavor is just trying to improve their own situation. One does not have to have the purpose of "improving the world" - that naturally would happen as people exchange to make their own situations better.
>Noone parts with money for an exchange that they don't find useful.
Come on, there's many. You can, for example, manipulate people to pay for something. You can get them addicted, so that they become repeat customers, despite rationality. You can lie to a lot of people, so that you will have one time customers, but you can do that to a large crowd. You can quasi-force people to buy something, if it's a prerequisite for something else.
Just because people buy something, it doesn't mean it's useful. Far from it.
> You can, for example, manipulate people to pay for something.
How?
> You can get them addicted, so that they become repeat customers, despite rationality.
No one purchases anything to become addicted. You may download a game, find it fun and purchase in-game items. It's useful because it's entertaining.
> You can lie to a lot of people, so that you will have one time customers, but you can do that to a large crowd.
But you have to convince people with your lie that it will be useful and beneficial for them to purchase it. Then once purchased they'll find it was a waste.
> You can quasi-force people to buy something, if it's a prerequisite for something else.
So it's useful to gain access to something else?
No normal person willingly spends money that they know is a waste ahead of time. There's some imagined usefulness from it, either as short or long term entertainment, increased productivity, comfort, or for another specific purpose.
This question is the foundation of the marketing industry. There are so many ways to manipulate people into parting with their money, but one of the basic approaches is to introduce and build tension in the customer that your product claims to release. This tension always exists on a deeper level than the practical value of the product.
For example, if Apple want to sell a laptop, they don’t focus on selling the tech specs. Instead they promise the customer that if they buy a macbook, they’ll become a creative genius, a musician or a VFX artist - high status careers. So what they’re really selling is the promise of enhanced social standing, not technology. That’s as manipulative as it gets
How can you manipulate someone into spending money on something where they don't perceive any value from its usefulness?
Through blackmail or coercion?
There's no reasonable explanation where someone can be manipulated into spending money that they think is entirely wasteful from the outset.
The sibling comment on marketing, whilst somewhat manipulative, is still a useful purchase -- I want to be a musician so I buy a Macbook Pro to further my dream and use GarageBand. In that case I've been manipulated into buying something expensive for my end goal (however unlikely I'll be to achieve it) but I still perceive some use from it.
Even if you consider spending money on purely charitable causes there's a usefulness in the warm fuzzy feelings the donator will get and the anticipated beneficial use of those funds to the needy.
You can't think of anything? People manipulate people to spend money every day, literally all the time. Sales, ads, product descriptions, promotions... some of these things turn out to be useful, and worth the money, some aren't, or are worth less than expected at least, and you usually don't find out until after the fact. It is like the single most common human activity, convincing people to buy things.
Myriads of ways. For an example, consider a virtue signalling issue, greenwashing. Greenwashing is employing green marketing, without actually committing to green causes. By doing this, many choose the product, company or service to be more conscious of nature. But in the end, the promises are not kept, and the customer is already out of their money. So, manipulation for pay happened.
>No one purchases anything to become addicted.
Of course they don't, that's not what I meant, obviously. They get addicted in the meantime of consuming. I think a timely example is mobile games, as detailed in for example this article: https://www.nbcnews.com/better/lifestyle/why-mobile-games-ar...
>Then once purchased they'll find it was a waste.
Yes, but they are already out of money, and the recourse is not worth it, unavailable, or otherwise hindered. The result is that many don't return the product or react in any way - and that's how this business model works.
>So it's useful to gain access to something else?
If it needs to be made useful, it's not useful. It's like console exclusive games. It's not a natural thing, the software could probably be made to run in other environments easily, but they are artificially restricted, and they spin that as an advantage to the console. It's nonsense.
>No normal person willingly spends money that they know is a waste ahead of time.
Let's not muddy the argument with "normal person". First of all, these tactics are exactly targeted at the so-called normal people. Second, there's is nothing abnormal in belonging to any group of people that get taken advantage of, like young men getting roped into redpill, incel, PUA things. The dismissal of labeling these experiences as abnormal is part of what creates even more of this thing.
> Noone parts with money for an exchange that they don't find useful.
I think this is true at face value, but when we consider addiction and self-destructive behaviors it is clear that while the definition of useful my still apply, the result is a negative impact on society.
The easiest most inflammatory example is drugs, but a more nuanced example might be slot machines. I won't wax lyrical about the examples, but I think they show that a transaction of money doesn't imply a positive impact on society.
Another example is rent seeking and fees, sometimes the transaction of money is non-negotiable, and one side is exploiting the other, or a middleman has inserted themselves (sometimes through policy lobbying) and extracts rent that no one benefits from but them.
i would assert that drugs or slot machines both provide value - they are entertainment, and the people using them are deriving value out of it. Why is that those people's enjoyment doesn't factor into society as being positive? Are they somehow not part of society?
If you imply that because they must've committed a crime to obtain the money to pay for their entertainment, then it's not the entertainment, but the crime that's negative to society.
If you imply that slot machines are harmful to the players, and that they're better off not using it, then my argument is who's to say that it's harmful? Why is that there must be a negative moral attribution to using it?
Edit: i would agree that "rent seeking" is bad, but it's hard to actually specify exactly what rent-seeking is, so i will leave it to someone else to discuss.
I think there's a tautology hiding here. It's unstated, so I'll give you the benefit of the doubt.
The tautology is that what people exchange for has value, but it has value because people pay for it. Specifically that it has the value people are paying or more.
This is a sort of free market idea: why would someone swap for something that isn't good for them? People must be swapping for stuff they want. To a degree this is totally reasonable. Why does a guy buy a razor if he doesn't think shaving is worth it?
The problem with this kind of thinking is it can never check itself. There's no independent way to give an item a value, so how do you know the exchanged values are correct? There's an assumption implicit that the market gives everything the right value, but it's not checkable without some other way to come up with a value.
And there are reasons to think this value might be wrong. For instance externalities, but also plain old "consumer misjudged the value".
I met a guy who exploited every trick in the book when building his business. He always picked addictive stuff. Online casinos, vapes. He would also put in fine print that people were buying a minimum subscription, so they would they surprised when they got billed a second time. On top of that he found a way to trick Facebook into showing his advertisements that were against the ToS. I doubt anyone got what they thought from this fellow, but he's rich now.
This isn't to say everyone who sets out to just make money makes a mess, far from it. I'm sure there are people whose get rich quick scheme is genuinely useful to other people. But it does mean we need to keep eye on behaviour to make sure there aren't abuses.
> but it's not checkable without some other way to come up with a value
which is the whole point - the value doesn't exist independently of what someone else values it for their own purpose. There's no objective measure of value, like the objective measure of some quantity like weight or energy.
So the free-market assumption is that everyone is always selfish but rational, and thus would only transact if the resulting transaction is beneficial.
in all the cited examples of otherwise, the transaction is fraudulent - someone tricking someone else (which is, technically already illegal, if somewhat un-enforcible all the time).
Anyone who has spent time around addiction and those afflicted by it can tell you it causes more pain than enjoyment. There is a big difference between someome getting high for fun and someone who feels they no longer have a choice but to be high. For what it's worth I am pro deregulation of drugs. I just think it's a good example that money changing hands doesn't imply a net positive had occurred. People pay for guns they use to murder people for another on the nose example.
I don't think anybody objects to the enjoyment of drugs or slot machines. They object to the addictive distortion of the enjoyer's mental state. The free market notion of value surely relies on the rationality of participants. Saying "it is rational for an addict to satisfy their addiction" is... well I suppose it is an argument.
Well the fact that somebody pays for somebody else to show me ads is useful to all of them, but it certainly isn't useful to me...
I'm not saying it's illegitimate in any legal sense. But morally it is not so clear.
> doing the entrepreneurial endeavor is just trying to improve their own situation
This person said they work as an engineer on growth teams in Silicon Valley, which is hilariously appropriate by the way, so they presumably have plenty of money. They're doing morally dubious things just to prove they can!
> somebody pays for somebody else to show me ads is useful to all of them, but it certainly isn't useful to me...
presumably the ads being shown has subsidized the usage of the app that you're using for free. So i dont think it's not useful to you - it might be an annoyance, but you've made the trade to use the app for free (or for a lower cost than it otherwise wouldve been).
> They're doing morally dubious
and different people ascribe different moralities. I dont think there can be one universal, objective, moral standard to which you can use to compare actions.
This is why i use the legal standard - at least it's an objective standard that the majority of people agree.
>presumably the ads being shown has subsidized the usage of the app that you're using for free
That's not how it works. Ads increase sales, every ad impression of yours is not an ad impression for your competitor, every ad impression makes you more familiar with the advertised - and there are other factors, I'm sure. But ads don't subsidize shit. I'm sure it seems like that in some products, but if that would be universal, cable TV, online news, and a lot of other stuff would be free. But what ends up being is that people buy things AND watch the ads. A lot of times the incentives are aligned in a way that this makes the most business sense, not lowering the price of the product.
People have different moralities, for sure, but that doesn't mean you have to pick the legal standard to break the tie. That's like.. not having any opinions of your own? The legal standard is pretty much unrelated to morality, anyway. The complaint here is anyway at an entirely different level: the level of virtue, of what a person _ought_ to do, rather than _should be allowed_ to do, which is significantly broader.
The point of griping about this author's morality is: people have different moralities, and this one in particular sucks, so if you're reading this, hopefully you noticed that.
The ad subsidized something, against my will. How can that be framed as some kind of "transaction"? Sure, if I can choose to direct or avert my attention to ads, like, using an app with ads. But in other less consensual cases it's difficult to make the case that ads are always a positive sum game.
You choose to use the app, not against your will, the app having ads is the consequence of you not paying for it, you make a transaction to be able to use the app you will see ads.
Ads are annoying but people wont buy subscriptions or microtransact for infomation, they wont pay for software either, if there was an alternative it would be running by now.
The ads themselves may or may not be useful but the service that's showing you them is probably useful to you, else why are you using it? The company who paid for the ad gets "use" out of showing you the ad, the service gets money from that, and you get a useful service in exchange.
I don't really like ads either but would you really be okay with paying out of pocket to remove every ad you see?
There are many situations where the amount someone is willing to pay does not equal the value of something.
Like you point out. Anything with negative externalities is in this category.
If value is derived from peoples experiences. Why would the experience of the customer count for more than the experience of another person affected by the purchase?
Another problem is that we (people) are not always good at deciding what is good for even ourselves in the long run. We are not homo economicus with perfect awareness of all effects going forward into the infinite future. That doesn't (always) mean people should be forbidden from making "mistake" purchases that they will eventually regret. But it means the value of the thing wasn't what they thought when they bought it. In short: they're not the same.
The only reason most people have a job is to make money. If this guy has a shitty mindset, then what of all the developers working in FAANG? What about most people that work for any large organization? Aren’t they all just cogs working for somebody else with the same type of mindset? At the very least the author is forthcoming and honest about his intentions. Perhaps there is nothing more “on the inside” than what has been presented. I’d rather take that instead of the usual spin about wanting to change the world.
I have a bookmark to a personal Google Doc called “SaaS Business Ideas”, for whenever I think of a project that I think I can monetize.
The Google Doc is actually view-only and says “Stop ideating about projects to make money! You probably don’t need the money. Just work on projects that you find fun.”
> You probably don’t need the money. Just work on projects that you find fun.
Oh but I do. I'm doing fine but sometimes relatives need help with medical bills and I would very much like to help them all. And it's quite the sum of money needed there.
How does that make sense? People need help NOW. I can't change a country healthcare system by myself. But I can earn more money by working harder and smarter to help my relatives in need.
Now, everyone, think about how much worse the world would be if this was a lauded or primary way to think about "how to make software."
While I appreciate the self-motivation idea generally - this article does nothing for me except make me grateful for free and open source types of folks.
As an iOS developer of 10+ years, it depresses me seeing people happily push out junk like this with a $20 price tag. I'm a bit surprised Apple let it on the store at all, to be honest.
It follows a pattern which Apple actively tries to discourage in its iOS apps, but hasn't quite gotten there for its watchOS ones. The pattern being:
1. Find some useful information online
2. Quickly package it into a basic tableview style app
3. Release for free
4. Use IAP to hide the 'useful' part of your app behind an outrageous price-tag
Seriously, $20 is an absolutely ludicrous price for what should really be a piece of paper. I'm hoping this is Bill's last foray into iOS dev, or at least he does some serious soul searching.
"It currently costs $19.99 for a lifetime purchase, but I’m moving to a subscription, so buy now!"
Well, many open source developers are quite content with making their software freely accessible without expectation of monetary gain. In fact some are strongly opposed to it (see uBlock Origin maintainer). And that’s ok too!
It looks like a pretty basic demo/full setup where a good chunk works for free and you have to satisfy the customer with the functionality to get money.
Looks like a great app! Congrats on getting two paying customers. One tip for the author:
In setting prices, remember the price elasticity of demand, which is how much people respond in terms of the quantity they buy depending on the price.
The demand curve might be such that as demonstrated two people want the app for $20 (the price charged). But perhaps ten people would buy it it for $9, maybe fifty people want it for $5, and perhaps at $0.99 no fewer than ten thousand people would buy it.
(In poker terms: you're giving them a price; how many big blinds would they call? Only the 1% of hands can call a 20 big blind raise, everyone else folds and moves on.)
If demand is highly elastic, setting the price at $2.99, $1.99, or $0.99 might be a great idea.
The author could try experimenting with discounts to see how much demand there is at various prices. It is not an exact science and there is no way to tell ahead of time. Starting at $20 and going down from there seems reasonable.
It might depend on how many customers the author wants to support.
I've drawn for you this diagram about how economists talk about quantity and price, illustrating it in a simple way (you can think of it as rows in a ledger going from high to low prices and listing how many are wanted at each price, high to low):
> Starting at $20 and going down from there seems reasonable.
slowly reducing the price doesn't work because the consumer would see that the price is being reduced, and wait for the reduction to stop, even if the current price would've been worth it for the consumer to purchase (aka, they would've gotten excess value at a higher price, but still wait for the reduction to finish). After all, buying the app isn't urgent.
So therefore, a different way to discern the price sensitivity is needed. Often you will have to have a discount deal that is time limited, and may be targeted geographically.
>For example, I’ve been rejected multiple times because they didn’t find IAP content on the iOS, rather than the reviewer taking the time to understand it’s a watchOS app with an iOS control interface.
>edit:hooray! Apple gave me a phone call and told me they would try to work with me more effectively on app reviews, and left a phone contact number to call. Thanks Apple!
Apple seems to be in full damage control mode nowadays. It's somehow after all those years of pestering developers and making their lives more difficult while asking for their pound of flesh - they realize that even the high and mighty can face consequences for their bad behavior in form of regulatory scrutiny.
Being nice to the people who drive their revenue is a better business strategy I hope, but in reality only to those who can go viral on social media I guess
I dug deeper and read the author's article about navigoals. I reckon the biggest lesson he could take from building this over the financial aspect, is to release early and regularly.
From what I gathered from the navigoals post it has a huge feature set from the beginning and that means it risks taking forever to finish.
But he's shown you can get to market very quickly in less than a month and then iterate on it.
As a former poker player I can say it's quite stupid to use that kind of app at the table, because it's a massive tell. Any time somebody looks at that app the other people at the table know you have mid range hand. Cause your not gonna be looking at it if you have unsuited 2, 5, and you not gonna be looking at it when you have Pocket jacks. Reminds me of how one of the regulars I played with was one of the smartest people I knew, he always calculated the exact odds in his head while sitting at the table, but he was still a subpar player, because he had the most obvious tell, if he was staring kind of up and to the right it was because he was calculating his odds of hitting a range, meaning I could induce when I should bet to get him to leave the pool.
The fact that you think this is an obvious tell just shows that it could be used strategically against you. Some players will use any means available to level each other. Don’t be so sure :-)
> Secondly, there were a lot of complaints about the $20 price point.
Is there a free trial functionality? I hate subscriptions for mobile (and even moreso for watches!), so I wouldn't recommend that, even though it might be the revenue-maximizing solution.
But it seems like it would be very useful for a one-time IAP to give people a free trial that's either time-limited or up to X uses.
I really liked this post, it's what so many entire COMPANIES fail to do in the early days. IMO, ideally every startup should sit down basically the day after founding and ask exactly this: how can we make money (i.e. prove the business point) within a MONTH?
Also have to chime in to the fact you mentioned getting banned due to self promotion on reddit, samething happened to me and really rubs me the wrong way. I also used reddit to get my first sales with my product and then was also banned from some of my favorite subreddits. Such a weird conundrum since the reddit hive mind leans so heavily into "we hate huge companies and corporate slave life!" and whenever someone goes out on a limb as an indy dev or solopreneur to make something themselves they likewise are berated. I just don't get it.
Anyways, great post, couldn't help but mix in my sourness at reddit.
I am in the same boat as the author. I decided that I'll take an year off my job to actually pursue some of these dumb ideas I get. After that, either I'll be financial independent enough to pursue more of them or realize that this isn't worth it.
Hence, I'm working on a Stable Diffusion + Wordle game (https://diffudle.com/). I realize now that getting traction isn't easy as it looks. I'll work on this for 1-2 more weeks then jump onto my next stupid thing.
A decade ago, you could create a reasonable app in a month and make money. Now, the low-hanging fruit is gone.
This app would get you kicked out of any poker-game I have ever been to, is over-priced ($20 for a glorified piece of paper), was marketed in a way that got the creator banned from Reddit, and made almost no money.
That type of outcome might not be the best that is left in the field of "ideas that an app developer can do in one month" today, but it probably will be soon.
Congratulations to the app builder - only small bit of feedback is on the app landing page, under how much does it cost you call it a 'subscription' rather than a one of purchase. That could put some people off who think they will be charged again (weekly, monthly, yearly?)
Shout-out to the smallest interesting number [1] and Kolmogorov complexity [2].
How difficult is it to scale the approach, slightly adjusted for ROI [3], like a variation of kickstarter.com?
People with an unfulfilled requirement could announce their willingness to pay for a service. The incentive could be that those early adopters receive shares in the resulting company.
Some people may just take the ideas. Early adopters can punish them by only doing business with companies that handed out shares to early adopters.
Its a good idea, I learned a lot from your post, and in the end its a win-win situation as you got some exposure. I would say keep it up and try to promote a bit more the app to see what comes out of it. I find the idea to charge 20USD also refreshing.
Seems like the incentives are off. Making some crappy app like this to make money proves that. I guess if we're still around in a few centuries maybe we can build the systems of the future. For now, though, we're relegated to the dustbin of irrelevance.
Wow, 2008. I remember that! I think it was the first big run-in between app. developers and Apple's moderation. What's wrong with a vanity app like that? Everything apparently.
