Pants optional.
Surviving in the muddy waters of the App Store as an indie isn’t easy. Alice Zhao, Curtis Herbert and Daniel “Jelly” Farrelly explore what it means to them, what they do to make it work, and how to claim your independence.
Published 5 November 2019 • 31 minutes, 42 seconds
If you’re considering doing an app with subscriptions, there’s some things you may want to consider before you make that move, as it’s not necessarily the best answer for every situation. Curtis and Jelly have been using subscriptions for a while, so Alice quizzes them on how things have been going, in the hopes that it’ll give her an answer on whether she should move to using them herself.
Published 22 October 2019 • 45 minutes, 43 seconds
After launching a new thing—or an update to a thing—Jelly likes to stop, look back at the process, and evaluate how things went. For him, it involves considering the answers to some key questions, and he decides that it’s worth forcing Alice and Curtis through this process. Together, they discuss recent launches, how they went, and what they feel could have gone better… or worse.
Published 8 October 2019 • 33 minutes, 7 seconds
Running a successful business is hard, and with the myriad of decisions that you make, it’s also difficult to do so in an ethical way. Alice, Curtis, and Jelly look back at the decisions they’ve made in trying to run ethical businesses, how they’ve worked out long term, and whether they’ve been the right choices in the long term.
Alice is the co-creator of Gus on the Go, a series of language learning apps for young kids. She focuses on developing educational content, business development and devising a marketing strategy on an indie budget.
In a former life (i.e. pre-kids), Alice and her husband used to run a fun food photography blog: eataduckimust.com. These days, they dream of raising their boys to be globe-trotting polyglots… but will also just settle for them becoming adventurous eaters.
Curtis Herbert is an independent iOS app creator, writer, speaker, and Apple enthusiast. These days he spends most of his time working on Slopes, a tracking app for skiers and snowboarders.
Curtis spends his free time snowboarding, gaming, and enjoying life in the suburbs of Philadelphia.
The creator of GIFwrapped, Jelly spends his days as an independent developer, moonlighting as a freelancer where it suits his whims.
When he’s not working on code, Jelly spends his time illustrating, building Lego, thinking about a future controlled by robots, or occasionally unpacking the dishwasher.