Charlie Monroe: ‘A Few Words About Indie App Business’

Charlie Monroe, developer of excellent apps such as Downie and Permute:

But also don’t do this alone. I work 365 days a year. Last year, I worked 366 days (2024 was leap year). I’m not saying that I work 8 hours each day, but even during weekends, holidays, vacation, I need to tend to support emails in the morning for an hour or so and then once more in the afternoon or evening. I cannot just take off and leave for a few days without seeing the consequences and going insane when I get back. I currently receive about 100 reports from my apps each day. Some are about license code issues, some are crash reports, some are Permute conversion issues, some are Downie download issues, but it all adds up to the average of the 100 reports a day.

If I were to leave for a vacation for 10 days… You do the math what would I be getting back to. Plus your users don’t want to wait for 10 days. Even 5 days. There are users who are unwilling to wait an hour and just don’t realize that you cannot be at the computer 24-hours a day and that you’re perhaps in a different time zone and sleeping. The unfortunate thing about this is that going through the support emails in my case is something that takes about 2-3 hours a day — which is not enough to hire someone and train them. Not to mention that most of the reports actually need some technical knowledge. So unless I would hire another developer, in the end, the really administrative stuff that someone could do instead of me is a 30-minute-a-day job.

I wouldn’t recommend never taking a complete break for anyone, but there are some businesses where someone needs to spend an hour-plus on certain tasks each day. If you’re a one-person operation, that person is you, even while on vacation. No one gets into indie development because they look forward to doing support, either. It’s the designing, programming, crafting, and refining of the apps that drives them. But it’s like being a musician or comedian in some ways. For those endeavors, the grind is traveling from one city to another for gigs. Or like running a restaurant, as dramatized on The Bear — prep work, cleaning, procurement, reservations, food allergies, more cleaning. It never stops. For indie developers, the grind is support. (Small restaurants typically close for a day or two each week; technical support email addresses don’t.) There’s just always a lot of menial work involved with being a professional artist. But that’s also why so many indie developers — like, seemingly, Monroe — find the endeavor worthwhile. Because artistic work is deeply fulfilling.

A while back — around 20 years ago, at the height of the “Delicious” renaissance in indie development for Mac OS X — there was a developer who burst onto the scene with a deservedly very popular app. It was gorgeous and fast. It had a lot fewer features than other apps in its somewhat-crowded category, but that was also part of the app’s appeal. It was like a sporty little roadster in a category full of practical sedans and trucks. He eventually came out with a second app, and it too was popular. His apps were sort of like Panic’s, aesthetically, I’d say. They not only looked cool, they were well-designed from a usability perspective too. This developer, so I’ve been told, spent almost no time at all on tech support from customers. How was this possible, a friend of mine asked him. Easy, this developer said. When the inbox for support emails looked full, he’d do a Select All, then Delete. Inbox zero.

This story has always made me laugh. It’s hilarious, in a way. But ultimately it was a sign that he just wasn’t cut out for the indie app business. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that his apps went dormant around 2010, and I haven’t heard of him or from him in like 15 years. He was super talented so I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s doing great work in some other business, perhaps inside a much bigger company, where developers and designers are isolated from customers, rather than enmeshed with them like indies inherently are.

★ Wednesday, 26 February 2025