atomicbird

Five years ago today Atomic Bird made its public debut.

At the time I had never run a business and didn't know what to expect. I distinctly recall hoping that maybe I'd manage to bring in a few bucks here and there, but having little basis for making realistic projections. It soon became enough to live off of, and it's still going.

So how did I get here? I'll tell you. Get a cup of coffee and settle in.

I've been a Mac user since 1989. But for a long time I didn't write Mac software. Partly it was just that after working all day with computers I found it too much to deal with them in the evening except for purely recreational purposes (e.g. playing Marathon). And partly it was the old Mac toolbox. I looked at it a few times and always recoiled from what seemed impossibly arcane code. At some point I always ended up thinking, man, you have got to be kidding me.

At the same time, my professional life involved a good deal of Unix and Linux work. When Mac OS X finally came out back in 2001, I was seriously intrigued. Not only could I make use of the Unix skills I'd built up, but there was the lure of Cocoa. I'd heard about the NeXT software development environment and wanted to know more now that Apple had it. However reason #1 for not writing Mac software still applied and so I didn't do much more than read the occasional technical article.

But this was 2001. You know, when the dot-com boom was crashing and burning? I wasn't in a stereotypical dot-com boom company at the time, I worked at a place that actually turned profits. But for other reasons my employer decided they didn't need the division I worked in any more, and dissolved it. I didn't lose my job because of the crash, but the crash did make finding a new job a lot more difficult than it had been a year or two earlier.

Suddenly I found that I had plenty of time to learn how to write software on my Mac.

Not immediately, though. One of the other things that can be hard to do after working all day with computers is completing a master's degree. Initially then I set to work on my thesis. At the same time though, I took advantage of my student status to sign up for Apple's developer program. For $99 I qualified for a hardware discount worth much more, and used some of my severance pay to buy a G4 PowerBook.

I still wasn't sure what I was going to do, though. I'm not a businessman, not really, not even after running a business for five years. But nobody was hiring people like me at the time, at least not where I live, so I began to consider whether I could employ myself. My business plan, such as it was, was quite simple: I could see there were people supporting themselves by writing and selling their own software, and I thought I could write software at least as good as they did. I thought about how many copies of an application it'd be necessary to sell to live off of it, and guessed that the numbers were reachable. And of course my other options were somewhat limited.

It was still a pretty shaky plan. I recall a friend of a friend at the time saying that they'd heard I was starting a software business. My response was basically "that's what they tell me." I had no idea how one actually did that.

By May of 2002 things were really starting to look up. That month I defended my thesis and earned my MSCS. I also attended WWDC 2002, on a student scholarship, and learned a hell of a lot about how to write Mac software.

I spent the summer of 2002 dividing my time between learning to write Mac software and figuring out how to set up a business. I started work on Macaroni. I didn't do anything that an MBA might recognize as market research. Macaroni was something I wanted that didn't exist, and I guessed that if I wanted it that other people would too.

There was a lot to figure out. LLC, sole prop, or S-corp? How do I get a web site running somewhere reliable? Do I need a sales tax license? Just what the hell is up with Objective C syntax anyway? How do I, y'know, sell software to people and get money from them in return? And how do I convince them they want to buy it?

October 15 was my target date for a public launch. I chose it because it was one year to the day after I got laid off. My first attempt at promoting Macaroni was an announcement on the old and then-venerable info-mac mailing list. I think it appeared in the last info-mac digest there ever was, and it had been around forever. I know that it wasn't long after that when I realized messages to info-mac didn't seem to go anywhere anymore.

The next day three people bought copies. I was unbelievably amazed. The day after that I sold five. I soon learned that it's actually possible to make a decent living selling software over the internet for a few bucks a copy.

I also learned that being your own boss rocks.

Tune in tomorrow, when the story continues.