Tallymander

It took just over five weeks, but Tallymander lives again.

I kept pretty close to my timeline. I took some extra time to ensure Tallymander's key viral feature worked well: easy export and import of workspaces. By creating a custom file format, it's possible to boil a workspace down and send it to your friends or coworkers.

This also enables the creation of a library of example Workspaces, similar to what Airtable does. I'll be working on that next.

Tallymander is a simple tool where the details matter. SwiftUI made it possible to get an MVP out quickly while still being nicely polished. Without it, development would have either taken longer, or the initial result would be shoddier.

It's an exciting time to build software for iOS. Here's a post with more technical detail on this:

https://frisco-uplink.com/2020/designing-building-and-shipping-an-iphone-app-in-five-weeks-with-swiftui/

I was laid off.

And for the last ten years, I'd thought about Tallymander constantly. No one complained about the other apps leaving the store. But Tallymander customers emailed in sadness for months.

And now I had nothing but time on my hands. Apple's new interface framework, SwiftUI, was something I'd been meaning to try out for months.

Meanwhile, in the intervening decade, new business models had been enabled by the App Store. When I got started with iPhone apps, you could only sell them once. But today, a SaaS model is possible through recurring subscriptions.

I settled on a freemium strategy for Tallymander, with the hopes of making it a more sustainable business. Get all the basic features free. If you find Tallymander useful, you pay a nominal monthly (or yearly) fee to make multiple Workspaces—the containers that organize your Counters and Calculators.

I gave myself a month to rebuild Tallymander from scratch, using modern technologies, for modern devices.

One of Tallymander's early customers, and a Twitter mutual, was CEO of a startup. After some email conversations, a grueling all-day, in-person interview, and a couple of weeks anxiously waiting to hear back, I was saved.

I relocated to California and started working on mobile professionally. I had to retire my indie apps—no time to work on them. But by giving myself a job developing apps, I created the experience I needed to convince someone else to pay me for the same work.

I was sad to give up the indie life, but happy to keep a roof over my head.

My indie developer adventure ran aground. The desperation of the financial crisis made it hard to find income to supplement my App Store takings.

I was out of cash. I needed to find a job, and fast, or I would be living in my car. No spare mental energy to work on any of my apps, either.

After working on some other indie projects, I got back to Tallymander.

All my user feedback boiled down to one thing:

People wanted to easily answer questions about what they counted. It was time to give Tallymander more power.

Two months of design and development went into building an equation editor. I had to figure out recursion from first principles. Prevent divide-by-zero errors and circular references.

My favorite use case for the new features: a drywall installer wrote to me and explained he was using Tallymander 2.0 for doing price quotes on the fly. He loved being able to give clients quick answers just by pulling out his phone.

The next morning, I loaded up the App Store to check on Tallymander.

Before I could do my customary search, though, I spotted Tallymander immediately: on the very front page.

App Store editorial had liked my 1.1 update enough to send it ALL the traffic from the front page. It was enormously validating and led to new customers.

I heard from a research scientist using it to count cells in culture. Because Tallymander could be used just by shaking your iPhone, they could easily count while peering through a microscope. This was a use case I had never imagined.

I heard from other folks, too. At $2.10 per license after Apple's cut, I got over $1,000 in revenue that month. Over 500 new customers! The money was helpful, but even better was hearing from customers with feature requests.

The funniest part was seeing the explosion of Tallymander clones in the months that followed 😂

A handful of people liked Tallymander!

I got a few emails from customers who appreciated its power to count multiple things at once. Using a table to present multiple counters really hit the spot for people.

A consistent request was the ability to change the colors of the counters. I added that in, fixed a few bugs, and submitted.

My second iPhone app was out in the wild.

I didn't expect it to be especially popular, but I knew I would find it useful and hoped a few others would too. This was an extreme MVP—just two weeks of development before submission. I wanted to build something that was useful, but not sink too much time into it. I learned a lot about scoping from this project.

Tallymander occurred to me because I'm bad at math. Back in 2009, I had a job I had to dress up for. That meant sending shirts to the cleaners. I'd always lose track of how many I had, which meant I wasn't sure if I was getting the right number back!

I assumed that the App Store would have something great to solve this problem. But it didn't. All of the counting tools for the App Store were awkward reproductions of physical counters. Nothing that truly took advantage of the iPhone's flexibility.

I thought I could do better.