Making Overcast, Instapaper & Tumblr: A Top Dev Interview With Marco Arment

Inspiration

In the past you’ve talked about design being about “how it works”, not just “how it looks” (like Steve Jobs used to say). What apps, other than your own, do you use that also take on this philosophy?

Marco hosts ATP with John Siracusa and Casey Liss.

I love little delightful details and features. I’m always looking at apps for these, but I’ve found that looking into the world of other well-designed and luxury products is far more inspirational, since they’ve been doing it for much longer and are usually much better at it.

Cars are a great source, full of automated features, luxurious accents, lighting techniques, and control affordances. You don’t even need to go high-end to see them — a Honda Accord has more little niceties than most apps.

I’ve also recently gotten into mechanical watches, another solid source of delightful details. For instance, I recently learned that some manually-wound watches, upon running out of power, will stop the second hand at zero every time to make it easier to set them when they’re next used.

That’s exactly the kind of delightful little detail that I love: some potentially tricky engineering to achieve something that most people won’t even notice, but that makes the product nicer for everyone, and will really impress and delight the few that do notice it.

Who do you look up to? Who do you consider a success, either in our industry or otherwise?

I try to absorb as much wisdom as possible from people who do similar work, but in different ways or in different markets than me, like Brent Simmons, David Smith, Jason Snell, John Gruber, and CGP Grey.

I also look outside my immediate industry for potentially useful knowledge and wisdom — always finding tons — from people like David Karp, Seth Godin, Howard Stern, Trey Anastasio, and the late George Carlin.

What would you say to folks who want to make a living like you do?

Break the common assumption that you can painstakingly hand-craft one amazing app and make a full-time living exclusively from that app for years. That’s extremely rare, it’s not what I do, and I don’t think I can even name anyone who does that anymore.

Recognize that indie development is flooded with competition. This isn’t to discourage anyone from entering it, but should be considered when deciding what to do (and not do): keep your costs as low as possible, and get ideas to market quickly before assuming they’ll be successful. If they are, *then* invest more time. If not, move on and try something else. It’s hard to give up on an idea that you think is great, but when the market speaks, listen to it.

And as much as possible, diversify your income. Make multiple apps. Consulting is always a good option that can help fund other development. If you can write or podcast, do that, too. Not only can those bring in extra income, but they can build an audience to help promote your apps or consulting, no matter how big or small the audience is. It doesn’t take a huge audience to make a difference in an App Store full of undifferentiated alternatives.

Finally, don’t listen too much to me or any other single person. All I know is what worked for me, which won’t exactly work for anyone else because you can’t turn back time. Absorb as much as you can from a diverse pool of people. There’s tons of great wisdom out there if you look and listen.

Where to go from here?

And that concludes our Top App Dev Interview with Marco Arment. A huge thanks to Marco for sharing his journey with the iOS community :]

We hope you enjoyed this interview and that you take Marco’s advice to heart when it comes to becoming an indie app developer. In the end, working towards a successful app in the App Store takes more than good programming and good design.

There are also other things to consider such as building an audience, marketing and finding the right product-market fit. The good news is that these are all skills that you can learn, just like Marco did.

If you are an app developer with a hit app or game in the top 100 in the App store, we’d love to hear from you. Please drop us a line anytime.

If you have a request for any particular developer you’d like to hear from, please join the discussion in the forum below!