You’re not using it the right way
Hi frens,
Most indie products focus on niche markets, or at least with an indie “attitude” towards its product.
I wanna share two stories.
Antennagate
Back in 2010, the smartphone hasn’t been popular yet. Some people still perceived it as a niche market. There was a design defect that led to “antennagate” for Apple: If you were holding the iPhone 4 in the left hand, chances are the mobile signal would drop significantly.
Initially, the late CEO Steve Jobs responded, “Just avoid holding it in this way.” That was quite “indie” (or arrogance, if you will) way of response, but definitely a disaster for a growing company.
The full story was covered in chapter 39 of Steve Jobs biography. In the end, Apple made a turnaround. The iPhone 4 became a blockbuster, and Apple has been growing into an enormous company.
Overcast
Marco Arment has been an iconic indie app developer, launched products including Instapaper, The Magazine, and the latest Overcast, which has been running for over a decade.
Overcast pioneered with innovative features like “Smart Speed” and “Voice Boost”, which has become standard Podcast player features.
However, there are two things that bother me for some time.
Searching podcast shows named in Chinese is often broken. This looks like a bug that an indie developer wouldn’t prioritize it yet, since I never see any ads in CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean).
I struggled to manage the numerous Podcast shows I subscribed to on Overcast. Oftentimes, I only listen to a select few episodes that interest me. Therefore, I had to modify the settings because Overcast automatically downloads all new episodes by default.
When I was doing a clean up for podcast shows, I realized that Overcast was excellent for subscribing to shows I want to listen to every single episode of. So that’s how Overcast has been designed for!
I wonder if that’s just me having niche preferences or if Overcast specifically caters to those behaviors. How do you typically listen to podcasts?
Your friend,
Denken