Surprised to see the random comment I made surface on this. Dug back out the anon account if anyone has questions or needs encouragement to strike out on their own.
1. If you're not using electron, what do you use? Are you happy with your choice (can you do what you want to do with reasonably effort)?
2. How did you get started? Did your app start as a side project, or did you go all out from the beginning? Was is spun-off as part of a consulting gig?
3. How did you find your niche? Did you scratch your own itch? Did you look for opportunities? Did you come across an opportunity by chance or through some previous experience/employment?
4. How did you decide that this was an opportunity worth pursuing? That is, how did you decide that your niche might be big enough to support you, and/or that you could compete?
Nothing out of the ordinary. I've always looked at it as free advertising. Make sure they need to crack every version and make sure you can shut down a rogue serial number from your activation server.
Not too many average consumers willing to pay $50+ for software. But if you can find something with a reasonable sized market [developer tools] where people are willing to pay, then go for the larger base of users. But the days of average people buying novelty mac apps for meaningful money is over. The low hanging fruit is being given away by the OS or Google or some freemium offering.
Running solo doing around $750k/year on a desktop app. The market is so huge and so many niches to filll. Make something you can sell for $50-300 with upgrades once in a while and set up a simple shop. It has never been easier to develop desktop software. If I was going to start this route today I'd 100% make an electron app and try to address and already large market that has stagnated or has shitty entrenched players making a ton of margin.
That is some nice revenue. I would assume you have pretty high margins on that as well. How long has your app been released?
I'm going down this route and making dev tools that help replace the sucky entrenched big players. I haven't officially launched a proper version (early access is going on now) but I'm hoping that I'll be able to be as successful as you are.
People pay money for productivity software/tools. Look at how many tiny ISVs are making fairly large amounts of money selling Git clients. I think 1Password has like 60 employees now. There are companies much larger than 1 person doing screen capture software and large companies selling remote desktop solutions.
What are your thoughts on various business models?
The traditional "sell once, offer paid upgrades" seems to be better suited for apps with a stable feature set, where you can take a year or two to produce the next major version. However, a more iterative approach to development doesn't work with this model very well.
The recently popular switch to subscriptions (Adobe, Office, 1Password, Jetbrains, YNAB, etc), while obviously every developer's wet dream, may not sit very well with customers, at least if there's no obvious service being offered (like e.g. Dropbox).
I think it depends on your software and your price point. You're never going to sell a $20 app as SAAS without a service component. 1Password probably didn't have a long term path forward selling a stand-alone $65 password manager. Certainly something worth thinking about from the beginning. If you can have a desktop app that integrates with a service and have SAAS pricing you will be truly living the dream.
That's one of the annoying (and liberating) things about desktops, they don't have an app-store, so you have to run your own store (without reviews) and people have to trust that you're not going to sell them a virus.
Exactly. Windows is a much much larger market in terms of number of devices and Mac is larger in terms of pros that pay for software.
And there is huge value in supporting both. If somebody wants to buy an organization-wide license, they almost certainly have lots of both and if you're being evaluated against a competitor that only supports one platform it is quite the leg up.
What are other options that are truly native? Also, speed isn't always a factor and Electron can get you up and running quick, especially if you already know Nodejs and HTML
The only electron app I can more or less bare is VS Code, yet I don't use it regularly. For others, if I see some desktop app made with electron, I just skip it. The only reason it exist is that web devs do not want to learn right tools for the right job.
You didn't answer what other cross-platform are out there.
> For others, if I see some desktop app made with electron, I just skip it
The Slack desktop app isn't bad, though I'm not sure if you've tried it.
> The only reason it exist is that web devs do not want to learn right tools for the right job.
I disagree. It allows people to get up and running with a cross platform app relatively quick. You could then port most of that to a mobile app since a lot of the platforms (if not all of the major ones) allow one to create an app using HTML and javascript. I'm a desktop developer (the only web stuff I've done is working on a Wordpress page) but I still see value in Electron and plan to use it for a project. You get cross platform plus all of the libraries that nodejs has, which is a ton.
99.9% of users have no idea they are inside a web frame. And so what if a good app uses 100-200M of ram these days? That's like one tab in Chrome. Electron has very low idle CPU usage, which I think impacts more users than does the memory. Each of those cross-platform widget toolkits look like shit.
The bigger issue is obviously lazy developers not polishing their electron app, but you can do basically anything with it.
The question is - why? (besides not learning right tools)
From app I want intuitive UI/UX, that means I want that raw gray "win95 look" controls, be it button or tree... I don't want some monstrous CSS/HTML crap.
