{"id":9272,"date":"2014-07-31T19:45:18","date_gmt":"2014-07-31T23:45:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=9272"},"modified":"2020-10-05T16:06:51","modified_gmt":"2020-10-05T20:06:51","slug":"building-a-business-not-an-app","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2014\/07\/31\/building-a-business-not-an-app\/","title":{"rendered":"Building a Business, Not an App"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/stratechery.com\/2014\/pleco-building-business-just-app\/\">Ben Thompson<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote cite=\"http:\/\/stratechery.com\/2014\/pleco-building-business-just-app\/\"><p>[Mike] Love thinks the fact he started from day one with the new business model in mind gave him a competitive advantage to the dictionaries already in the store, but I think he sells himself short; after all, it&rsquo;s been five years and only now are most independent developers starting to realize that free with in-app purchase is the only viable monetization model. To put it another way, Love differentiated himself again by being a student not just of APIs and frameworks, but of business models as well.<\/p>\n<p>[&#8230;]<\/p>\n<p>This point blew me away. Love invested real money into differentiating his <em>free<\/em> app (Love still had the great handwriting engine, but iOS&rsquo;s built-in handwriting &#8211; while hugely inferior &#8211; had lessened that advantage). Love was confident that after he won in free, he could make up the difference with his plethora of paid add-ons, which at this point included not only additional dictionaries &#8211; several of them exclusives &#8211; but also modules like stroke order diagrams, different fonts, a document reader, and a year later, optical character recognition (OCR).<\/p>\n<p>[&#8230;]<\/p>\n<p>Much of that time has not been spent on development or design. Rather, it&rsquo;s been spent understanding and listening to customers (which led to the aforementioned bundle change), making business deals with slow-moving publishers, careful consideration around pricing and app store presentation, investments in both free and paid differentiators, and a whole bunch of time spent on an Android app that doesn&rsquo;t make that much direct money but that marks him as a leader in his space.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ben Thompson: [Mike] Love thinks the fact he started from day one with the new business model in mind gave him a competitive advantage to the dictionaries already in the store, but I think he sells himself short; after all, it&rsquo;s been five years and only now are most independent developers starting to realize that [&hellip;]<\/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":"2020-10-05T20:06:53Z","apple_news_api_id":"3dc793e9-96bd-4e0b-9702-7219d01ee365","apple_news_api_modified_at":"2020-10-05T20:06:54Z","apple_news_api_revision":"AAAAAAAAAAD\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/w==","apple_news_api_share_url":"https:\/\/apple.news\/APceT6Za9TguXAnIZ0B7jZQ","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":[248,249,101,956,641,1996,522,31,26,299,955],"class_list":["post-9272","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-android","tag-androidapp","tag-business","tag-chinese-language","tag-dictionary","tag-handwriting","tag-inapppurchase","tag-ios","tag-iosapp","tag-palm","tag-pleco"],"apple_news_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9272","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=9272"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9272\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9273,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9272\/revisions\/9273"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9272"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9272"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9272"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}