Welcome to War Stories, where I partner with famous builders in the iOS space to share real-life stories from the frontlines. It’s part narrative, part interview, all swashbuckling fun.
Today I’m working with Dave Verwer, the author of iOS Dev Weekly and co-founder of the Swift Package Index, plus many other projects you might have heard of.
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Without further ado, here’s When To Kill A Project:
“You have to really carefully cut the bits that aren’t working, and feed the bits that are working.”
— Dave Verwer
You might know him from iOS Dev Weekly, but Dave’s early career reminds me of another famous LinkedIn profile.
When I asked for tips about how to become a CTO within 10 years, Dave explained it wasn’t quite how it looked. Instead, it was a combination of growing up with the company as it scaled, working way too hard early on, and being the person to take the business online.
Since 2006, Dave has mostly run his own software businesses. When running your own company, you can just do things, so day-to-day work (as well as work-life balance), varies massively based on current projects and commitments.
Dave very modestly refers to himself as “not that good at coding” (which was deeply validating to my impostor syndrome), and explained his strengths lie in being a generalist, who enjoys getting stuck into all the aspects of running a small business: design, coding, research, writing, even doing the accounts.
One more very critical skill is knowing when to kill a project.
We discussed several of these projects, both successes and failures, and hammered out what we can learn from each of them.
iOS Dev Survey
Focus on what’s working, kill whatever isn’t.
— Dave Verwer
Dave wanted to do this for ages. Fortunately, since you can just do things, he did.
In 2020, he orchestrated the largest ever public Apple platform developer survey.
Dave’s decade spent cultivating a newsletter audience made him one of the only people in the world who could pull this off, and he managed it in a big way: 2,290 developers spent ~30 minutes each filling out a comprehensive survey with the promise that all the data people contributed will be made public in aggregate form.
Dave grinded for months to prepare the questionnaire, set up the website, land some sponsors, market the survey, process the data, and write commentary. It was virtually certain to be a hit.
And.
Crickets.
Despite the enthusiasm from respondents, excitement from sponsors, fascinating analysis, and huge time investment, hardly anyone actually read the survey results.
As soon as it was clear it wasn’t going to be successful, Dave proactively refunded the sponsors (many of whom he still partners with). Reputation is everything when your business is trust.
While the 2019 survey was a flop, a few community members asked whether they could keep it going, and tried again next year. Dave agreed to hand it over, support where needed, and help with publicity, but that added up to a lot of work. When the second survey (still completed by 1,229 devs!) still failed to garner interest, Dave killed it, as it still ate up a lot of his time.
The key lesson here is that you can never predict when something will or won’t work. But you win in the long-term by knowing when to quit, and doing right by everyone.
Tackle Fishing
Market research is essential.
— Dave Verwer
Dave’s company was on a roll after a big success with the Balloons app, and was looking for their next hit.
One of his co-founders was friends with a minor local celebrity in the fishing world. While at the pub, they had the idea to put his fishing knowledge into an app: Tackle Fishing. The team went all-in on production value, even getting a full-time illustrator on staff to make beautiful artwork with parallax-effect animation.
The business model was simple: you pay to download the app 🥹 (ah, better times).
But in their excitement to ship, the team forgot an important step: Market research.
If they spoke to users and focus-grouped some fisherfolk, they’d have noticed a big problem with the concept:
You go fishing to relax, become one with nature, and clear your mind. The last thing an angler wants to do is look at their phone.
The pretty clear lesson here is to talk to your users. Oh, and don’t make apps for your mates based on a conversation at a pub. But we can go deeper than that: when doing market research, never ask someone if they’d pay for something*.
Paying hypothetical money is free, so people will happily fluff up your imaginary future revenues. People pay to have their needs met. Ask about everything around the money, and identify the needs.
*I made this exact mistake with my first startup, where our market research indicated that people would totally pay $10-100 a month to offset their carbon footprint. They did not.