{"id":12483,"date":"2015-10-09T11:24:32","date_gmt":"2015-10-09T15:24:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=12483"},"modified":"2015-10-15T16:10:19","modified_gmt":"2015-10-15T20:10:19","slug":"overcast-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2015\/10\/09\/overcast-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Overcast 2"},"content":{"rendered":"

Marco Arment<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

And with the new storage manager,<\/strong> you can see how much space your downloads are consuming for each show, and optionally delete the downloads and stream the episodes on demand.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

Overcast 1.0 locked the best features behind an in-app purchase, which about 20% of customers bought.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

With Overcast 2.0, I’ve changed that by unlocking everything, for everyone, for free. I’d rather have you using Overcast for free than not using it at all, and I want everyone to be using the good<\/em> version of Overcast.<\/p>\n

If you can pay,<\/strong> I’m trying to make up the revenue difference by offering a simple $1 monthly patronage. It’s completely optional, it doesn’t get you any additional features, and it doesn’t even auto-renew — it’s just a direct way to support Overcast’s ongoing development and hosting without having to make the app terrible for 80% of its users.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Marco Arment<\/a> (comments<\/a>):<\/p>\n

I wasn’t very competitive against Pocket with Instapaper, and Pocket “won” (at least in the sense of having far more users, although if I had to choose either company to be running today, I’d definitely pick Instapaper).<\/p>\n

I’m trying not to repeat my mistakes, and one of the biggest mistakes I made was putting short-term gain from paid-app sales above long-term growth. I watched my biggest competitor clone all of my features, raise VC money, and hire a staff. I knew he’d go completely free months before he did.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

Podcasts are hot<\/em> right now. Big Money is coming.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

They’re coming with shitty apps and fantastic business deals to dominate the market, lock down this open medium into proprietary “technology”, and build empires of middlemen to control distribution and take a cut of everyone’s revenue.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Update (2015-10-15): Dave Winer<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Now people seem to think there has to be a linear relationship between code created and money paid. I come from the distant past where this was considered gospel. I made the mistake of charging for Frontier, a powerful system-level scripting environment, in its early days (1992). Ultimately it would have to compete with a product from Apple which of course was free, and even though our product solved many problems Apple left as “third-party opportunities” the users and developers gravitated to Apple. We went out of business quickly.<\/p><\/blockquote>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Marco Arment: And with the new storage manager, you can see how much space your downloads are consuming for each show, and optionally delete the downloads and stream the episodes on demand. […] Overcast 1.0 locked the best features behind an in-app purchase, which about 20% of customers bought. […] With Overcast 2.0, I’ve changed […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"apple_news_api_created_at":"","apple_news_api_id":"","apple_news_api_modified_at":"","apple_news_api_revision":"","apple_news_api_share_url":"","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_is_hidden":false,"apple_news_is_paid":false,"apple_news_is_preview":false,"apple_news_is_sponsored":false,"apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":"\"\"","apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1272,101,393,31,1137,26,647,1293,112],"class_list":["post-12483","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-3d-touch","tag-business","tag-instapaper","tag-ios","tag-ios-9","tag-iosapp","tag-overcast","tag-pocket","tag-podcasts"],"apple_news_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12483","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12483"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12483\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12581,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12483\/revisions\/12581"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12483"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12483"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12483"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}