Hello and welcome to the annual M Cubed birthday retrospective. Grab your party hat and some birthday cake as you come in and find a seat. Last year I talked about the long road that got me to here. This year I'll be talking more about the past 3 years since M Cubed was founded.

Redesigns

First things first, M Cubed got a new website design for its birthday. I had a designing binge just over a week ago and so spent the weekend creating this new look. It's a lot cleaner and more flexible than the previous design. Unfortunately you need to view it in Safari in order to get the full experience, though the stylesheet degrades for other browsers so the site still looks quite nice.

Targets

So, now for the meat of the post. M Cubed has been alive as a shareware company for 3 years now and each year has been much better than the last. I'm not going to talk too much about the first year as not much happened. Had a product for 3 months, sold it off, spent 9 months without a product. The last two years have been much more interesting and are presented below in a fancy graph:

The graph shows the net revenue for all my apps each month (after Paypal has taken their cut). I've also noted all the major releases of apps. You may be wondering what the horizontal line is... well read on faithful reader.

Not long after I started M Cubed I read a post by Gus Mueller on how to become an indie dev in 1068 days. In it he suggests setting yourself goals, as they let you know you're on the right track. As I also like goals I've set myself a sales target for M Cubed. I calculated how much money I would need to make each month to live off my software and set that as my ultimate sales target. But as that target is a long way away and I like reaching goals I set myself smaller sales targets of a 3rd and 2/3rds of my ultimate target.

The horizontal line represents my first target, a 3rd of what I need to make each month to live off my software. But this is going to change starting in December as I'm moving to my second target. I set myself a rule that if I could surpass my sales target for 3 months in a row, I would raise the sales target to the next level and this month represents the 3rd consecutive month of great sales. The graph brings up some other interesting stuff:

1. Minim doesn't really sell well at all (nor does it get much love unfortunately).
2. My bank balance really likes software releases
3. Having two products that sell well makes reaching your goals much easier
4. I'm a long way off living off my software yet

University Challenge

One of the biggest problems I have is time. Having to balance university work with running a software company is a challenge. You become especially at risk of getting burnt out, which I have done on several occasions, ending up being unable to do any work at all for days. Unfortunately one has to suffer if you're to progress the other, but if you time things right then you can still do well in both.

The best tips I can give to anyone in university or school who's wanting to be an indie dev is to work hard over holidays. This is time uninterrupted by assignments and so it should be used to its full potential. There's a reason I've had so many releases around late Summer/early Autumn, because I've had the time to work on them over the summer.

Try to keep releases down in size too. I've been guilty of trying to do too much in a release, which has meant it has taken a long time to come out. If it's a .1 update then limit it to 1 or 2 medium sized features. This allows you to release updates much more frequently, which is essential for building up momentum.

Lastly, don't let your university work suffer. If you have a lot of work then just put your development on hold. It can wait a few weeks while you bring your workload down. If you're not going to put the effort into your degree then there's not real point spending your money on tuition fees when you could be attempting this full time.

That said, don't try to drop out and attempt this full time. You may need to manage your time more and won't be able to get as much done, but university is a huge safety net. It provides a "sandbox" of the real world, which means that your failures aren't as serious, and you will have failures.

Future Targets

So where do I want to be when I'm writing this post a year from now? Well I've started work on Lighthouse Keeper 1.1, which I'm hoping will be out sometime around the end of the year or early next year. I'll also be working on Minim 2.0 at some point in the new year. However, I will also be working on a 4th M Cubed application, one which promises to help me reach my targets even faster than ever before.

This is important as I will be finishing University in June, so my safety net will be taken away and I will be pushed head first into the real world *queue scary music*. This has given me the target of wanting to be a full time indie in around 7 months time. It will be a big push, but with a 4th application and the momentum I've started to gain I think it will be possible.

It's been hard work getting to this stage, but I'm starting to see lots of reward for my work. Here's to year 4 of M Cubed Software being one where I reach that final goal. Now where's that birthday cake...

Comments (3)

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Lighthouse Keeper was incredibly hard to design. It looks simple and obvious now, but it took many iterations to get it to what it is now. Unfortunately one piece of the interface has continually bugged me: the source list.

A source list is becoming a key component of any application that stores and organises data on Mac OS X. You can find one in many applications, such as iTunes, Mail, Code Collector Pro and Lighthouse Keeper. Often these are fairly simple but occasionally they get very complicated and Lighthouse Keeper was one of those.

Looking at the screenshot on the right, you may not think too much of it. It looks relatively simple, with projects containing milestones and ticket bin groups. Unfortunately, when you get more than a few projects it starts to become a mess and it's hard to distinguish where one project ends and another begins. So this set me on a quest to build a better source list.

My initial thought was to make the project headers more obvious, by giving them a different background. This would break the source list up visually into chunks. While it did split the source list up it ended up making it more cluttered visually. So, stuck for ideas I did what I normally do: ask others.

After trying a few people on AIM I got a reply that interested me as a neat idea. It hadn't be done before on the Mac for this purpose but it would solve the problem of a cluttered source list. The idea? Make it like the iPhone. So I've spent the past week hacking together a source list that has sliding "pages" to let you navigate the source list. After much playing around I finally got it working and added it to Lighthouse Keeper.

Of course, being something that hasn't been tried before means it needs some usability testing, which is why I'm releasing an alpha of version 1.1 with the new source list which can be downloaded from here. This offers nothing new over 1.0.5 besides the source list and while it should be stable, I have just changed a rather large chunk of the application so there may be bugs.

So I want to hear back from you about what you think of the new source list. Do you like it or do you hate it? Is there anything you found confusing about it? Do you think it should work differently? (Please, no comments about the back button's shape. I know it would work better if it was an arrow shape, I just haven't got the artwork for it yet). Leave any thoughts in the comments or email support@mcubedsw.com. Below are some screenshots showing the new source list:

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After the slightly buggy launch of Code Collector Pro 1.3 I've released a bug fix that should correct all the issues people have been having. The biggest issue has been problems with migrating user's libraries from version 1.2 to 1.3. Unfortunately there were several cases that caused failures which I hadn't anticipated (and some I thought should never have existed). These are all fixed. Along with this the warnings that came up saying your could not save changes have been fixed so saving now works reliably.

Be sure to update to 1.3.1 as soon as possible if you're using 1.3 as it will provide you with a much more stable and bug free experience. As a side note, I'd like to thank all the users who helped me with tracking down and fixing these bugs for being so understanding and helpful.

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