Show Notes
I’m not a huge fan of the term polymath. It sounds kinda pretentious but sometimes the best word for something is that way. Today I was struck by the wild variety of tasks and skills that it takes to run a business principally on your own. So I wanted to walk through some of disparate aspects of the ‘job’. Hopefully giving someone who is considering going out on their own some good food for thought.
My intention isn’t to scare anyone off, but just to help you understand the inherent complexity of this line of work, and an appreciation for the things other people handle for you in a J-O-B, job.
General Development
Software engineering
Bug tracking
Product Design
Release planning
Customer support
Version Control
iTunes Connect submission lifecycle
iOS Development
Objective C, Xcode, Interface Builder
Device and iOS version management
Photoshop, PaintCode
Testing / QA
Server Development
Ruby on Rails
Postgres
Memcached, nginx, redis
Queueing, sidekiq
Linux system administration, Backups, Security updates
Operations
iTunes Connect, contracts, payments,
Accounting, Taxes and banking.
Budgeting
Compliance, Local, State, Federal, Business Licenses
Benefits / Welness
General hosting, email, domains, etc
Marketing
Websites
‘Brand’, personal and otherwise
Photoshop
Marketing concepts and ideas
Microeconomics
More from Developing Perspective
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I walk through the history of Apple developer platforms over my history as an app developer and grade them, then think a bit about what has made them worthwhile.
I’m bringing Developing Perspective back. This first episode wrestles through why being an indie app developer right now feels so “pivotal”, in both senses of the word. There’s the constant, week-by-week change in our tools and workflows, and there’s the bigger structural shift in what it even means to “make” apps.
I tend to think of my app business in terms of revenue per day. Breaking it down to that level helps me keep a close eye on it and know how well or poorly I’m doing. Today I walk through the reasoning for this as well as do a thought experiment of what the numbers might look like for a new business.