Atoll: An Indie Experience
As many of your already know by now thanks to our shameless advertising, we released Atoll last week. Both my colleagues have covered some thoughts on Atoll already. Coy Woolard covered why we built Atoll for the Reef Tank Community. Marcus Smith talked about our decision to use iCloud as our sole backend. Now I’d like to share some thoughts about our practical decisions as developers from start to finish.
Deciding to make Atoll
Back in February 2015, we were trying to decide on the app to spend our time on. We had tons of ideas but we knew we were all very tight on free time. So we put every idea we had into a spreadsheet and started ranking. We ranked by desire. Any app we worked on would take away most of our free time and likely cut into our sleep regularly. We ranked by ability. We all have dreams, but it’s much easier to attain one when you’re realistic about what you can do at the time. We ranked by affordability. Contrary to popular belief, apps cost a lot to build. And often times cost even more to setup, maintain, and market. We needed something we could build and afford to keep running. And most importantly for Frozen Fire Studios, we ranked by potential profit. We were never looking for a windfall of cash, but we needed to know that what we built had a real business model that didn’t involve selling our souls and more specifically our customers.
Atoll started when Coy Woolard suggested we build an app to solve a very specific problem for a small niche of people. A problem Marcus Smith and I didn’t know existed. Coy explained to us that in the saltwater fish tank hobby, coral was big. There are tanks and all variety of fish, but coral can be more expensive, rarer, harder to maintain, and yet a ton of fun. One of the biggest parts of coral that is misrepresented is identification. There are so many coral of various sizes, shape, color, texture, etc. To make matters more complicated, many coral change both as they grow and throughout the day. Many coral are capable of morphing in shape and texture during stages of the day, season, or coral lifespan. Coral can cost anywhere from $20 to $2,000. Without knowing what you’re buying, it can be a gamble. Worse, without knowing what you’re caring for, it can be very easy to harm or kill your coral with inaccurate chemicals and food. Identifying coral is a real problem with real benefits.
As we narrowed down our list of ideas, Atoll continued to look like a small, attainable project that would solve a real problem. Atoll also seemed to have a clear growth pattern solving other common problems in the industry. Plus, while we didn’t have a perfect business model in mind it seemed clear that the industry valued quality, technology, and community. Three great things to build a business on in a world where quality is becoming rare, technology is often in the way, and communities are either too small or too large to sustain.
By the end of the night, Atoll was the unanimous choice to build. Turns out that was the easy part.
Developing Atoll
We’ve all worked on side projects that slowly lose focus and never get released. We knew better than to let this happen. So we put together strategies early to make sure we could make it to the finish line.
We were all familiar with and enjoyed Agile Scrum development. So we set up 2-week sprints from the start. It was hard to estimate time for a side project, but at the very least it kept us focused on individual tasks and gave us small deadlines to meet along the way. Small deadlines are huge. When you make it, they’re huge motivators. But when you miss them, they’re small enough you can move on to the next deadline with more gusto.
We also set up work nights every Thursday. On sprint weeks, these typically ended up being review, planning and high-level design. But we met the Thursdays between sprint planning as well just to quietly work on our tickets. If we didn’t have any other time during the week, we carved out time Thursday. We never held each other to working more than Thursday, but we all tried to. On good weeks, Thursday night was the kick-off for a weekend of development. On bad weeks, Thursday night was the only time we had to work at all. These work nights kept the project alive through the good and bad.
We also set up larger goals. We set dates for beta testing. We set tentative release dates. We missed all of them. But we never missed them for lack of hard work. We missed them because we found something we hadn’t thought of, or decided a particular feature was more important than we initially gave it credit for. This fantastic balance with flexibility and goal setting worked remarkably well. The goals kept us focused during sprint planning on what needed to get done to reach the goal. But our desire to only release a fantastic finished product kept us focused on the long-term and gave us the reserve to lift our heads and push back the dates.
We crafted some beautiful designs and engineered some very powerful code. But in the end, it was our early decisions to set up development on a schedule, to run our project like a business, and to focus on a single project that helped us release a great app.
Releasing Atoll
This is the part where all our fellow Indies want to hear our secrets and great success. But that’s not how this industry works for most of us. There aren’t secrets, there is only hard work and perseverance. There can be great success but it’s either through lightning rod luck or tortoise-like tenacity. I’ll tell you what we did leading up to release. I’ll tell you what I think worked and I’ll highlight what I’ll do differently next time. Fingers crossed my fellow Indies get something out of it.
Real Beta Testing
One of the most valuable things we did was invite real users from the community to test our app. This wasn’t just friends or iOS developers. These were real reef tank owners who would be our actual audience.
Their feedback was invaluable. But not for the reasons you’d think. They didn’t tell us to completely change our app or suggest some incredible feature. We planned and designed for months. Almost nothing our testers said was a surprise. Almost none of the bugs and crashes they exposed would have gone unknown for long. The most important thing our beta testers did for us was validate. They loved the app, they requested features already on our todo list, they found the bugs we were already working to fix. We might could have beta tested earlier and gotten more project changing feedback. But for us, their validation before release pumped us up more than ever. And gathering all those beta testers gave us a chance to do a soft run on marketing Atoll to the general public.
Building the Hype
We did what any good business does. We set up social media accounts everywhere. We posted to them constantly. We didn’t just advertise the app, we posted relevant information for the users we wanted to garner respect with. And it worked to some degree. We built up followings on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
But we could have done way better. Instagram was our most successful social presence. We believe that’s because we supported its content the most. One of our favorite things to post was beautiful coral photos. Surprise, surprise, Instagram users react to beautiful photos. We posted them to Twitter and Facebook too, but obviously, while photos were appreciated on those platforms, there was more tailored content we could have been posting.
In addition to content relevant to our audience and target platform, we definitely should have started sooner and posted more. Its a hard line to walk. We didn’t want to start buzz too early and have users losing interest before launch. This was either a myth or we still didn’t get very close to that line. We also didn’t want to post so much we spammed our users. But spam is more specific to quality more than quantity.
Planned Press
We knew we wanted to push hard for press on Atoll. It was unique, very well made, and something the community needed. I personally hoped some Apple blogs might pick it up because it was so well made, but that pipe dream didn’t happen.
Planning press started early for us. Before we started the beta we went to MACNA, one of the largest conferences for the reef tank hobby. We knew who we wanted to meet and made sure the app was stable enough to show off. The goal was to tell everyone we could the beta was about to drop and to sign up for our mailing list. We also wanted to start relationships with pillars of the industry. Every industry has a few people to admire. It’s not always the biggest or loudest people. Often times it’s the ones who care about the community the most. We met some of the best and they loved the app.
When we started the beta we invited several Coral topic bloggers. We didn’t give any hard sell asking for coverage. We wanted to know their opinions as people who had probably seen more Coral related apps. We got good opinions but no coverage at all before or after release from these contacts. Perhaps we didn’t ask enough or perhaps those are just longer term relationships. Either way, start early and perhaps ask a little more directly than we did during beta.
Leading up to release, we started actually asking for press. We set up a list of all the respected industry blogs, youtube reviewers, and related business owners. We leveraged our contacts from MACNA and started planning release. We tried to get in contact with all the people on our list. Some through our friends, but most through cold emails. Our emails always included a link to our presskit packed with screenshots, videos, and pre-answered interview questions. We also included a promo code in each email to give them one less reason not to download Atoll and try it. We didn’t blow up the world with coverage but we did make a new friend and get a launch day post out of our press blitz. I’d call this a small success. Next time I’ll reach out to the press sooner, send follow ups after a week of silence, and I’ll do the creepy thing of finding real writers on Twitter and talking to them instead of emailing tip@whereever.com
The Release
Our release went well. So far several hundred people have downloaded the app. Most of them have used it more than once in just a few days. Our daily downloads are stabilizing with real users. We’ve had no detrimental crashes. So far the community that has seen the app loves it. And thankfully without provocation, they’re leaving glowing reviews in the App Store.
We would have loved to take the world by storm and have tens of thousands of downloads on day one. We would have loved an Apple feature for a thoughtful, well-executed app. We would have been pumped if every blog in the industry covered it. But we are proud of the launch we had and I have to say its the best I’ve done.
Atoll isn’t done. We’ve got a ton to add over time. This has been a fantastic experience and it’s only going to get better from here.
You can follow me on Twitter here for more indie developer chat. Feel free to ping with questions about Atoll and general iOS stuff. If there are other topics you’d like to see leave a comment or shoot me a tweet. If you’d like to see more Indie Dev post-mortems, recommend this post. :]
