Great article on Apple, competition, winning, and cannibalizing your own products:

If your goal is this solo win, if you have achieved everything that you want to achieve with this hit, here’s to you – the first round is on me. If your goal is growth, if you want to turn this win into more success, taking the time to catch your breath is the wrong strategy. Like, really wrong.

Your success is delicious. Others look at your success and think, “Well, duh, it’s so obvious what they did there – anyone can do that” and, frustratingly so, they’re right. Your success has given others a blueprint for what success looks like, and while, yes, the devil’s in the details, you have performed a lot of initial legwork for your competition in the process of becoming successful.

I’ve been working with a big publisher on a series of apps and one of the things I am most excited about with them is that they are so willing to test the future. Their book business, when we started this process a year and a half ago, was quite healthy. But they saw the writing on the wall. Now 2 of their big 5 resellers are gone and our first product together, DEWALT Mobile Pro, is on its way to more downloads in one year than their best selling book ever.

We’ve basically worked on the same product for the last 15 years, although we have had to adjust pretty significantly to evolving market conditions. We are now working on a worthy successor to powerOne. I couldn’t be more excited.

(article via Daring Fireball and Marco.org)

Knowing when to quit is so important. I have put down a few projects and moved on. I even almost put down Infinity Softworks and moved on. Chris Dixon’s entire article is so good, but this section here has been my benchmark for a long time:

Another way to think about this is using what Jeff Bezos calls the “regret-minimization framework.” Imagine you do give up on your idea. Have you explored most of its plausible implementations? Are you confident that another entrepreneur won’t come along and make it work? You’ll regret it more if you nearly created a big company than if you spent an extra six months iterating.

One mistake that I made when I was going through this 5-6 years ago was to look for other people to give me enough input to make my decision. I figured if there was consensus then it must be the correct answer. But I found that people tell you what they think you want to hear in this case. And almost every one you ask won’t have as much information as you do when making this decision.

A friend visualized this for me. He said the act of starting a business is like confronting a huge wall that stretches as far as you can see in both directions. The act of being successful is the act of doing anything you can to climb it, dig under it, go around it, whatever to get to the other side. He noticed that I had stopped attacking the wall.

I made the call to move on all those years ago. My wind-down of Infinity Softworks lasted three months and I was pulled back in. I changed the wall. I saw a bigger challenge in front of me then the one before and it opened itself up to new ways of getting to the other side. It re-energized me.

I have a friend going through this right now. Her board said stick with it but she decided she didn’t want to attack this wall right now, that after five years of trying to make the business go, it was time to let go.

It’s an impossibly tough decision. And it is no different then mourning the loss of a close relative. If you have to make this decision, I wish you the best of luck. It is not an easy one.

From Insanely Simple by Ken Segall (Amazon, Kindle, Powells):

What makes Apple stand out in a complicated world: a deep, almost religious belief in the power of Simplicity. As those who have worked with Apple will attest, the simpler way isn’t always the easiest. Often it requires more time, more money, and more energy. It might require you to step on a few toes. But more times than not, it will lead to measurably better results.

I’ve been obsessed with simple the past few years. I get frustrated by computer complexity, business complexity, even personal life complexity. There just isn’t enough time in the day to deal with any of it. (And that has become even more apparent since I had kids six years ago.) I haven’t been able to put a word to it as well as Ken Segall, the author of this book does, but it has been there.

I look at other people’s products, I look at my own products, and get frustrated with everything that needs explanation or isn’t obvious, simple, intuitive.

I bought an Android phone this weekend and its complexity struck me immediately. Maybe some of it is my lack of familiarity with the platform, but its nit-picky way of doing things drove me nuts. Hiding things in a menu drawer, navigating through email, the lack of consistency from app to app. (The hardware is magnificent, simple and responsive.) I love my iPhone (and iPad) for just that reason. I loved my BlackBerry before that for the same reason. And I loved the PalmPilot back in the day for the very same reason.

So this has been my struggle since the dawn of time: how do I make working with numbers simple? powerOne was amazingly simple compared to what came before it. Teachers, students and professionals in all walks of life loved it for that reason. But just as BlackBerry made the PalmPilot look complex and iOS made the BlackBerry look complex, powerOne doesn’t feel so simple anymore.

The evolution continues.

I read an excellent book last week called Pitch Perfect, written by Steven Sande and Erica Sadun  (iTunes, Amazon). It is a practical advise guide to pitching your app to bloggers and is well worth the money and time.

A few weeks ago I sat with a friend who got into mobile in 2008. We were talking about something or other and he commented that he often thinks about mobile really starting in 2007 with the introduction of the iPhone. All those companies and products that came before were just white noise.

In some ways he is right. Developing, shipping and marketing a product is completely different. In the old days we shipped to dozens of resellers with no review process, our prices ranged from $30-$160, and we marketed with traditional channels: ads in magazines, print articles and op-eds, emails and physical flyers to customers, promotion through distributors and partners, and in our case bundling.

Now, an expensive app is $4.99, all sales go through a handful of storefronts, and all the old methods of marketing are defunct.

And that’s why Steven’s and Erica’s book is so important. It gives each of us a first-hand look at what it takes to get today’s primary marketing channel — bloggers — to pay attention. Since Steven and Erica work for the popular blog TUAW, they see hundreds of these pitches every week and know the difference between a good one and bad one. That makes all the difference in this book as the advice and input is hands-on and practical.

I was honored to be asked to read an advance copy and contribute a quote. This is what I said:

There are tons of great mobile programming resources but very few great resources for app marketing. Erica and Steve do a fantastic job in their book Pitch Perfect explaining in detail the best way to raise awareness for your indie apps. I have virtual yellow highlighter all over my copy!