Marco Arment (creator of Instapaper) lends his perspective on the app economy, over on the planet money podcast, hosted by Alex Bloomberg;
I wanted to try the simple way, of charge money for a product, and spend less than you make and see what you can do with that. People always ask what my business model is, and it’s really, It’s very disappointingly simple for them. It’s, I sell something to people for money. The tech press looks at that as some kind of oddity, like, when are you going to make it a business and get VC funding.
Strange how the tech press seems to get so wound up over specs, stats, funding rounds. It’s almost like they’re so incredibly removed from the rest of the world, it’s a struggle to conceive of what people need, want or love. Why does an idea like Instapaper need VC funding to be validated in their eyes?
I’d say Marco’s spot on when it comes to knowing your goal, the focus of your organisation.
Here’s how I think about it. If you want to be the biggest player and dominate a whole industry, then maybe you have to do the VC route and get big quickly, before someone else does. All of my competitors, that I know of, are VC funded – or are Apple. So that’s one way to do it, if your goal is to dominate the market. My goal has never been to dominate the market, my goal has always been to just make a living for myself and I don’t really care if someone else is bigger than me.
He’s a one man band. It strikes me as a really mature, articulate position to take on this subject. It takes time to grow a steady user base, who use and love your product. It takes time and focus, it takes the ability to know what is not worth your time and effort. Why should Instapaper scale in the same fashion as, say, Facebook or google?
Yet, there is one thing that really allows this kind of entrepreneurial activity to thrive today;
This is a really really big pool of people we’re talking about, in the customer base, people who have iPads and iPhones and who want to read. When the market is that big, of everybody who uses the internet, any little differentiator can get you enough of a customer base to support you and a few other people.
you never want to hear, from a service that you’re using, is that they’re exploring business models. That’s never a good thing for you as the user.
Give people a way to pay for things easily. It’s that simple.
For me, Marco is one of the most trustworthy voices on the app economy today.
