I Did a Daring Fireball Ad

Firstly, if you're not an app developer, excuse some inside baseball. You can safely skip this one.

In December I bought a spendy Daring Fireball sponsorship (~ $10k) for my paper-inspired iOS/macOS daily planner app. It was a perfect confluence of events: Finalist had just reached version 3.5 milestone with some neat goodies packed within, and the End of the Year is a great time to pitch a time management tool.

Since the ad ran, I've gotten the same question from other indie devs: "Was it worth it?"

Short answer: Yes. But it's complicated.

The Audience

Not every target audience is your audience. I have an iOS app coming out very soon I'm extremely excited about. A truly new take in an old established space that makes new things possible through our efforts that spanned over 5 years. But it's a MIDI controller, and I won't be buying DF sponsorship for it.

But Finalist? It's a perfect fit. That audience* cares about idiomatic UI, typography and interaction design, and they're open to trying yet another planner app. And I wanted their feedback more than I wanted to sell to them.

*) I understand the audience because I'm in it. Finalist's first private beta was released 3 years ago on Wavelength app to mostly DF readers. Some of them I still chat with to this day 👋

Timing

Timing matters more than the budget.

Finalist came out years ago. I could have sponsored DF last year, but I felt that it wasn't ready. Not "not finished", it was in the App Store, but not ready. You only get one chance at a good impression and all that. This requires patience and long term thinking, something us indie devs are often short on.

The truth is, the app was just barely ready last month. I would have loved to push it back 3 months, but the new year was the right time to talk Planners. And did I mention I wanted feedback?

The Ad

Daring Fireball runs sponsorships where you submit your text pitch and he publishes it. I'll spare you my ad copy, but it was a 100-word condensed version of my landing page for the ad.

What I didn't expect is that John actually tried and liked the app. So instead of my carefully crafted pitch, readers got 500 words of John Gruber's take on Finalist:

One aspect of Finalist that makes it different from most to-do/task apps is that instead of setting due dates for tasks, you add tasks to specific days. This really resonates with me. [...] I'm kind of blown away by how robust and thoughtful Finalist is. It's not a web app with iOS and Mac clients. It's a suite of native apps designed with care for Apple's platforms. Auteur software, with a distinctive brand and vision, while remaining idiomatically native.

His version was so much better, and infinitely more credible. But all I saw was more feedback!

ROI

So did the ad pay for itself? In this case it did, and very quickly. But even if it didn't this still was a success, as the long term value it created was tremendous:

• My already-busy Discord got an influx of new people, with new feedback [yawn] and different perspectives. In the month since the ad ran, I already published several updates with improvements from smart ideas discussed in the chat.
• I had influencers and journalists reach out who in the past might not have returned my emails, as John's words carry weight in this space.
• Finalist now has more brand heft. I see more people talking about it, and understanding the ideas behind it. This helps me with both future marketing and product development planning.

The struggle for us indie devs is thinking long-term, and doing something for years without obvious external validation. After all, at some point you want to see other people using what you made, lest you be called... indulgent.

Finalist is available on the App Store for iPhone, iPad, and Mac.