Life of an Indie App Developer - Computerphile

**Moving On: The Story Behind Instapaper's Legacy**

As I reflect on my journey as an entrepreneur and app developer, I realize that it's time to acknowledge the end of an era. My beloved project, Instapaper, was a significant part of my life for several years, but ultimately, I had to make the difficult decision to let it go. I'm not going to sugarcoat it – it was a tough pill to swallow. Instapaper did well, and I'm grateful for the time and attention it received from users. However, as much as I love the app, I no longer have the capacity to give it the dedication it deserves.

The reality is that I can only devote so much time and energy to any project. As my circumstances change or new opportunities arise, it's essential for me to reassess what I'm working on and whether it aligns with my priorities. Instapaper was no exception. The market has evolved significantly since its inception, and the landscape has become increasingly crowded. While there were moments when I felt like I had found something special, other ideas never quite took off.

**A Combination of Luck and Hard Work**

So, what's the secret to Instapaper's success? In hindsight, it's a mix of luck, timing, and sheer hard work. When I launched Instapaper in 2008, the world was still finding its footing with mobile apps. The iPhone had just been released, and the App Store was still in its infancy. Being one of the first developers to tap into this market gave me an incredible advantage. As a result, Instapaper found its way onto the App Store, and the app quickly gained traction.

It's essential to acknowledge that luck played a significant role in my journey. I missed out on the initial Web.com wave, which would have made it easier for me to establish myself as a developer earlier on. However, this setback ultimately allowed me to find my footing in iOS apps, which became my bread and butter. The timing of Instapaper's release was fortuitous, but it wasn't the only factor contributing to its success.

**Building an Audience Takes Time**

One of the most significant aspects of building a successful app like Instapaper is creating and nurturing an audience. For me, blogging has been an essential part of this process. I started writing in 2002, not well at all, but it eventually became a vital component of my online presence. When I began to blog more seriously around 2006-2007, I was able to attract a dedicated following. This audience has since grown and evolved alongside me.

As an app developer, having a blog is crucial for several reasons. It allows you to share your expertise, showcase your personality, and connect with potential users. In Instapaper's case, the app became closely tied to my blog, which helped to drive traffic and interest in the app itself. The blog also served as a platform for me to share my thoughts on technology, design, and entrepreneurship.

**The Power of Synergy**

One of the most surprising aspects of building an audience is how interconnected these platforms become. For instance, when I started podcasting five years ago, it's had a significant impact on my app development work. The podcast has helped me reach a broader audience, which in turn has attracted more users to my apps. Similarly, when I release new content on my blog, it often prompts people to download my apps or check out my podcast.

This synergy is not unique to my situation; many successful creators and entrepreneurs have experienced similar effects. The value of building multiple platforms and engaging with your audience across different mediums cannot be overstated. It's a delicate balance between promoting one thing and another, but when done correctly, it can lead to incredible results.

**The Evolution Continues**

As I move forward, I'm excited about the new opportunities that lie ahead. Instapaper may not be around anymore, but its legacy lives on through my other projects. The experience and knowledge gained from developing and maintaining Instapaper have been invaluable in shaping my approach to app development and content creation.

The journey has been long and winding, with many twists and turns along the way. I've learned that success is rarely a solo achievement; it's often the result of collaboration, perseverance, and a willingness to adapt. While I'll miss Instapaper dearly, I'm eager to explore new horizons and create even more exciting experiences for my audience.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enthis is where i live this is my home office and uh i work from home on a couple different things i write a blog not that often anymore i write an iphone app called overcast and i have a podcast called the accidental tech podcast and i do all that from here i think almost everybody would mention three things that i haven't been working on for quite some time which would be that i i was the kind of maybe co-founder if not first employee of tumblr and then i made instapaper and after that i made the magazine none of which i am involved with anymore my main job was to make it work and to make it fast for its first four years or so i contributed little minor feature things here and there i might have been responsible for its gift support or jif depending on who you ask but for the most part david david carp the founder he was the idea guy and he was the front-end designer and he would he's also a programmer so he would do like a lot of the front end programming and i was doing like the back end stuff making the servers work making things fast optimizing things database stuff you know like the kind of hardcore programming stuff that was my job i was like the stage crew of tumblr you know like making things work but no one really notices my job i look back on it kind of the way i look back on college it's like it's something it's a thing i did i had a good time doing it but now it's i mean i left there five years ago now and it was such like a whirlwind of craziness of just this thing that was growing incredibly and we had to be keeping up with it and i had to be you know trying to make the site scale and everything and it was so much stress so much work i enjoyed it i do look back on it fondly but is also i feel like i've like moved past the stage in my life where i can do things like that ever again and yeah i definitely only want to look back on it i did occasionally want to be like the guy who was in the spotlight being recognized as like the celebrity of the site but not most of the time most of the time i was very happy being just the person who made things work very well because that was very challenging the company was growing like crazy and we had kept the staff really really small at too small for too long and it was about to explode into what like my job was about to become a whole department of lots of people and i neither wanted to manage such a department nor would i be qualified to because i have no management experience so i would neither be qualified to manage so many people nor would i want to work under someone else managing him so so that's when i decided you know what and david and i both were like yeah this is a good time let's let's leave while while we're still happy with each other and our jobs so we left on great terms and uh yeah i still talked to david today and we're everything's great and do you do you follow tumblr much like like do you use tumblr i don't really use it much i will i still have my account and i still have the app on my phone and i will jump in from time to time to just browse and see you know see some things if i want if i'm looking for something to read or browse or you know just waste some time with but i don't really publish there anymore um because my like most of my geek community uses twitter as the primary place where they gather so it's just it's kind of just like not where my friends are anymore well one of the reasons why why i decided to leave when i did was that i had already built instapaper and it was already doing pretty well and it could support me full-time at that point and i knew that if i if i took it over as my full-time job then i could make it even better and i and i could you know i could make it you know i could make it a thing the thing i did i could work for myself and work from home which i had never been able to do before i had never even considered the possibility and now i had this great opportunity to take this thing i was doing at night in my free time which was dwindling to do this thing at night to take that full time was incredibly exciting and satisfying so i went right into doing that full-time what level of enjoyment do you get from that kind of constant refinement and iteration and improvement and fixing things as as everything changes versus creating something brand new is one more enjoyable than the other they're dif they're different satisfactions you know like i think you need a healthy balance of both to be happy as a programmer a lot of programmers only love the creating new things part um and that that can be challenging when you're tasked with some boring tasks because even when you're creating something new there's like 10 of it that's actually that new exciting part and then the other 90 of it is all the boring stuff you have to do to make that into something that you can use or sell or release so i feel like you have to kind of develop an appreciation for both and really they both are satisfying in different ways like i love being able to go in and delete old code that is no longer necessary because some some change happened you know apple added some new thing so then i don't need to do my own version of it anymore so i can go and delete a bunch of code i love that it feels like you're cleaning like spring cleaning you know it feels it feels like you're getting lighter there's less stuff you have to maintain and worry about so really both can be satisfying where is that tipping point when do you let go when do you let insta paper go when do you let the magazine go when do you let any project go sometimes it's forced upon me you know like like the magazine didn't really work out it wasn't it was not doing well under my stewardship so i sold it to somebody who wanted to work on it instapaper was somewhat similar it was doing well still but i was no longer able to give it the amount of time and attention it needed and so i you know i just had to move on to new things and to to sell or shut down my old things when in short i no longer want to work on them or i no longer can work on them that can that can occur if it fails that can occur if the market changes that can occur if my if my personal situation changes if i have more or less time to devote to certain things or if i just have a really awesome idea of something else i want to do instead that doesn't happen very often most of my ideas are terrible and i can recognize that early on that you know what this idea that i thought was really cool that i should not do that because even the things that i released that have been terrible you haven't seen the other 100 ideas i had that were way worse than those you've got a job that i think would appeal to a lot of people why have you been able to get away with this such a cool thing i think it's a combination i mean certainly there has been some luck along the way i'm not going to deny that um but it's also a combination of just being in the right place at the right time like i was a little too young i graduated from college in 2004 so i missed like the first web.com wave and if you were in that at all you had a pretty good chance of being good at something or winning or being success successful at something you know you had a pretty good chance whereas if you know so if if i was in ios apps at the very beginning which i was you know in 2007 that was the first iphone and then the app store opened in 2008 i was making apps on day one in the app store insta paper 1.0 was in the store right then at the beginning and i've been making apps now as long as somebody could make iphone apps and so timing you know just being being in the market when it's taking off is a huge advantage and then beyond that it's just i just keep doing it i mean i've been trying to build an audience uh for over a decade i've been i've been blogging for over a decade now you know i've been making apps for what seven years or whatever it is um so it's really it's a combination of those things you know some of it's luck some of it is being in the right place at the right time and some of it is just a long span of hard work i started blogging in like 2002 or something i mean not well at all uh but uh but you know i've been writing for a long time like that i started blogging more seriously in about 2006 2007 uh and just been doing it since then and that has evolved with the apps like when the apps came out no one looked at my blog my blog had no audience i wasn't even on twitter twitter didn't actually exist yet i don't think um or it just barely and uh and so everything has kind of grown together it helps to have all those things because then like people who who find my blog are then more likely to get my apps people who know my apps first are more likely to read my blog now i have a podcast and the podcast is getting popular in part because i started it after i built these audiences and in part because again the same effect i have people who download the app might be interested in my podcast because they like the app people who like the podcast will go by the app so it's it's this nice i hate to say synergy i'm sorry but it really is kind of the synergy of of these reciprocating forces that really do help that you know if you build them up together and again this all takes time i mean i've been podcasting for five years i've been blogging for 10 at least something like that i've been making apps as i said for like you know seven or whatever so it just takes a long time to build up these things for most people but that is kind of part of the fun of it you know it's it's the whole step along every step along the way every time i would get like wow i just made a post that got five thousand views like every step along the way then oh next time i do a big post it gets ten thousand like every one of those has been exciting and awesome and something i never thought possible beforehand and that's on a screen called nitpicky details every time i do things like this i think it's a risk and i think maybe it'll turn off some people when you press the button and every time it's around the character so now he's back to his original facing directionthis is where i live this is my home office and uh i work from home on a couple different things i write a blog not that often anymore i write an iphone app called overcast and i have a podcast called the accidental tech podcast and i do all that from here i think almost everybody would mention three things that i haven't been working on for quite some time which would be that i i was the kind of maybe co-founder if not first employee of tumblr and then i made instapaper and after that i made the magazine none of which i am involved with anymore my main job was to make it work and to make it fast for its first four years or so i contributed little minor feature things here and there i might have been responsible for its gift support or jif depending on who you ask but for the most part david david carp the founder he was the idea guy and he was the front-end designer and he would he's also a programmer so he would do like a lot of the front end programming and i was doing like the back end stuff making the servers work making things fast optimizing things database stuff you know like the kind of hardcore programming stuff that was my job i was like the stage crew of tumblr you know like making things work but no one really notices my job i look back on it kind of the way i look back on college it's like it's something it's a thing i did i had a good time doing it but now it's i mean i left there five years ago now and it was such like a whirlwind of craziness of just this thing that was growing incredibly and we had to be keeping up with it and i had to be you know trying to make the site scale and everything and it was so much stress so much work i enjoyed it i do look back on it fondly but is also i feel like i've like moved past the stage in my life where i can do things like that ever again and yeah i definitely only want to look back on it i did occasionally want to be like the guy who was in the spotlight being recognized as like the celebrity of the site but not most of the time most of the time i was very happy being just the person who made things work very well because that was very challenging the company was growing like crazy and we had kept the staff really really small at too small for too long and it was about to explode into what like my job was about to become a whole department of lots of people and i neither wanted to manage such a department nor would i be qualified to because i have no management experience so i would neither be qualified to manage so many people nor would i want to work under someone else managing him so so that's when i decided you know what and david and i both were like yeah this is a good time let's let's leave while while we're still happy with each other and our jobs so we left on great terms and uh yeah i still talked to david today and we're everything's great and do you do you follow tumblr much like like do you use tumblr i don't really use it much i will i still have my account and i still have the app on my phone and i will jump in from time to time to just browse and see you know see some things if i want if i'm looking for something to read or browse or you know just waste some time with but i don't really publish there anymore um because my like most of my geek community uses twitter as the primary place where they gather so it's just it's kind of just like not where my friends are anymore well one of the reasons why why i decided to leave when i did was that i had already built instapaper and it was already doing pretty well and it could support me full-time at that point and i knew that if i if i took it over as my full-time job then i could make it even better and i and i could you know i could make it you know i could make it a thing the thing i did i could work for myself and work from home which i had never been able to do before i had never even considered the possibility and now i had this great opportunity to take this thing i was doing at night in my free time which was dwindling to do this thing at night to take that full time was incredibly exciting and satisfying so i went right into doing that full-time what level of enjoyment do you get from that kind of constant refinement and iteration and improvement and fixing things as as everything changes versus creating something brand new is one more enjoyable than the other they're dif they're different satisfactions you know like i think you need a healthy balance of both to be happy as a programmer a lot of programmers only love the creating new things part um and that that can be challenging when you're tasked with some boring tasks because even when you're creating something new there's like 10 of it that's actually that new exciting part and then the other 90 of it is all the boring stuff you have to do to make that into something that you can use or sell or release so i feel like you have to kind of develop an appreciation for both and really they both are satisfying in different ways like i love being able to go in and delete old code that is no longer necessary because some some change happened you know apple added some new thing so then i don't need to do my own version of it anymore so i can go and delete a bunch of code i love that it feels like you're cleaning like spring cleaning you know it feels it feels like you're getting lighter there's less stuff you have to maintain and worry about so really both can be satisfying where is that tipping point when do you let go when do you let insta paper go when do you let the magazine go when do you let any project go sometimes it's forced upon me you know like like the magazine didn't really work out it wasn't it was not doing well under my stewardship so i sold it to somebody who wanted to work on it instapaper was somewhat similar it was doing well still but i was no longer able to give it the amount of time and attention it needed and so i you know i just had to move on to new things and to to sell or shut down my old things when in short i no longer want to work on them or i no longer can work on them that can that can occur if it fails that can occur if the market changes that can occur if my if my personal situation changes if i have more or less time to devote to certain things or if i just have a really awesome idea of something else i want to do instead that doesn't happen very often most of my ideas are terrible and i can recognize that early on that you know what this idea that i thought was really cool that i should not do that because even the things that i released that have been terrible you haven't seen the other 100 ideas i had that were way worse than those you've got a job that i think would appeal to a lot of people why have you been able to get away with this such a cool thing i think it's a combination i mean certainly there has been some luck along the way i'm not going to deny that um but it's also a combination of just being in the right place at the right time like i was a little too young i graduated from college in 2004 so i missed like the first web.com wave and if you were in that at all you had a pretty good chance of being good at something or winning or being success successful at something you know you had a pretty good chance whereas if you know so if if i was in ios apps at the very beginning which i was you know in 2007 that was the first iphone and then the app store opened in 2008 i was making apps on day one in the app store insta paper 1.0 was in the store right then at the beginning and i've been making apps now as long as somebody could make iphone apps and so timing you know just being being in the market when it's taking off is a huge advantage and then beyond that it's just i just keep doing it i mean i've been trying to build an audience uh for over a decade i've been i've been blogging for over a decade now you know i've been making apps for what seven years or whatever it is um so it's really it's a combination of those things you know some of it's luck some of it is being in the right place at the right time and some of it is just a long span of hard work i started blogging in like 2002 or something i mean not well at all uh but uh but you know i've been writing for a long time like that i started blogging more seriously in about 2006 2007 uh and just been doing it since then and that has evolved with the apps like when the apps came out no one looked at my blog my blog had no audience i wasn't even on twitter twitter didn't actually exist yet i don't think um or it just barely and uh and so everything has kind of grown together it helps to have all those things because then like people who who find my blog are then more likely to get my apps people who know my apps first are more likely to read my blog now i have a podcast and the podcast is getting popular in part because i started it after i built these audiences and in part because again the same effect i have people who download the app might be interested in my podcast because they like the app people who like the podcast will go by the app so it's it's this nice i hate to say synergy i'm sorry but it really is kind of the synergy of of these reciprocating forces that really do help that you know if you build them up together and again this all takes time i mean i've been podcasting for five years i've been blogging for 10 at least something like that i've been making apps as i said for like you know seven or whatever so it just takes a long time to build up these things for most people but that is kind of part of the fun of it you know it's it's the whole step along every step along the way every time i would get like wow i just made a post that got five thousand views like every step along the way then oh next time i do a big post it gets ten thousand like every one of those has been exciting and awesome and something i never thought possible beforehand and that's on a screen called nitpicky details every time i do things like this i think it's a risk and i think maybe it'll turn off some people when you press the button and every time it's around the character so now he's back to his original facing directionthis is where i live this is my home office and uh i work from home on a couple different things i write a blog not that often anymore i write an iphone app called overcast and i have a podcast called the accidental tech podcast and i do all that from here i think almost everybody would mention three things that i haven't been working on for quite some time which would be that i i was the kind of maybe co-founder if not first employee of tumblr and then i made instapaper and after that i made the magazine none of which i am involved with anymore my main job was to make it work and to make it fast for its first four years or so i contributed little minor feature things here and there i might have been responsible for its gift support or jif depending on who you ask but for the most part david david carp the founder he was the idea guy and he was the front-end designer and he would he's also a programmer so he would do like a lot of the front end programming and i was doing like the back end stuff making the servers work making things fast optimizing things database stuff you know like the kind of hardcore programming stuff that was my job i was like the stage crew of tumblr you know like making things work but no one really notices my job i look back on it kind of the way i look back on college it's like it's something it's a thing i did i had a good time doing it but now it's i mean i left there five years ago now and it was such like a whirlwind of craziness of just this thing that was growing incredibly and we had to be keeping up with it and i had to be you know trying to make the site scale and everything and it was so much stress so much work i enjoyed it i do look back on it fondly but is also i feel like i've like moved past the stage in my life where i can do things like that ever again and yeah i definitely only want to look back on it i did occasionally want to be like the guy who was in the spotlight being recognized as like the celebrity of the site but not most of the time most of the time i was very happy being just the person who made things work very well because that was very challenging the company was growing like crazy and we had kept the staff really really small at too small for too long and it was about to explode into what like my job was about to become a whole department of lots of people and i neither wanted to manage such a department nor would i be qualified to because i have no management experience so i would neither be qualified to manage so many people nor would i want to work under someone else managing him so so that's when i decided you know what and david and i both were like yeah this is a good time let's let's leave while while we're still happy with each other and our jobs so we left on great terms and uh yeah i still talked to david today and we're everything's great and do you do you follow tumblr much like like do you use tumblr i don't really use it much i will i still have my account and i still have the app on my phone and i will jump in from time to time to just browse and see you know see some things if i want if i'm looking for something to read or browse or you know just waste some time with but i don't really publish there anymore um because my like most of my geek community uses twitter as the primary place where they gather so it's just it's kind of just like not where my friends are anymore well one of the reasons why why i decided to leave when i did was that i had already built instapaper and it was already doing pretty well and it could support me full-time at that point and i knew that if i if i took it over as my full-time job then i could make it even better and i and i could you know i could make it you know i could make it a thing the thing i did i could work for myself and work from home which i had never been able to do before i had never even considered the possibility and now i had this great opportunity to take this thing i was doing at night in my free time which was dwindling to do this thing at night to take that full time was incredibly exciting and satisfying so i went right into doing that full-time what level of enjoyment do you get from that kind of constant refinement and iteration and improvement and fixing things as as everything changes versus creating something brand new is one more enjoyable than the other they're dif they're different satisfactions you know like i think you need a healthy balance of both to be happy as a programmer a lot of programmers only love the creating new things part um and that that can be challenging when you're tasked with some boring tasks because even when you're creating something new there's like 10 of it that's actually that new exciting part and then the other 90 of it is all the boring stuff you have to do to make that into something that you can use or sell or release so i feel like you have to kind of develop an appreciation for both and really they both are satisfying in different ways like i love being able to go in and delete old code that is no longer necessary because some some change happened you know apple added some new thing so then i don't need to do my own version of it anymore so i can go and delete a bunch of code i love that it feels like you're cleaning like spring cleaning you know it feels it feels like you're getting lighter there's less stuff you have to maintain and worry about so really both can be satisfying where is that tipping point when do you let go when do you let insta paper go when do you let the magazine go when do you let any project go sometimes it's forced upon me you know like like the magazine didn't really work out it wasn't it was not doing well under my stewardship so i sold it to somebody who wanted to work on it instapaper was somewhat similar it was doing well still but i was no longer able to give it the amount of time and attention it needed and so i you know i just had to move on to new things and to to sell or shut down my old things when in short i no longer want to work on them or i no longer can work on them that can that can occur if it fails that can occur if the market changes that can occur if my if my personal situation changes if i have more or less time to devote to certain things or if i just have a really awesome idea of something else i want to do instead that doesn't happen very often most of my ideas are terrible and i can recognize that early on that you know what this idea that i thought was really cool that i should not do that because even the things that i released that have been terrible you haven't seen the other 100 ideas i had that were way worse than those you've got a job that i think would appeal to a lot of people why have you been able to get away with this such a cool thing i think it's a combination i mean certainly there has been some luck along the way i'm not going to deny that um but it's also a combination of just being in the right place at the right time like i was a little too young i graduated from college in 2004 so i missed like the first web.com wave and if you were in that at all you had a pretty good chance of being good at something or winning or being success successful at something you know you had a pretty good chance whereas if you know so if if i was in ios apps at the very beginning which i was you know in 2007 that was the first iphone and then the app store opened in 2008 i was making apps on day one in the app store insta paper 1.0 was in the store right then at the beginning and i've been making apps now as long as somebody could make iphone apps and so timing you know just being being in the market when it's taking off is a huge advantage and then beyond that it's just i just keep doing it i mean i've been trying to build an audience uh for over a decade i've been i've been blogging for over a decade now you know i've been making apps for what seven years or whatever it is um so it's really it's a combination of those things you know some of it's luck some of it is being in the right place at the right time and some of it is just a long span of hard work i started blogging in like 2002 or something i mean not well at all uh but uh but you know i've been writing for a long time like that i started blogging more seriously in about 2006 2007 uh and just been doing it since then and that has evolved with the apps like when the apps came out no one looked at my blog my blog had no audience i wasn't even on twitter twitter didn't actually exist yet i don't think um or it just barely and uh and so everything has kind of grown together it helps to have all those things because then like people who who find my blog are then more likely to get my apps people who know my apps first are more likely to read my blog now i have a podcast and the podcast is getting popular in part because i started it after i built these audiences and in part because again the same effect i have people who download the app might be interested in my podcast because they like the app people who like the podcast will go by the app so it's it's this nice i hate to say synergy i'm sorry but it really is kind of the synergy of of these reciprocating forces that really do help that you know if you build them up together and again this all takes time i mean i've been podcasting for five years i've been blogging for 10 at least something like that i've been making apps as i said for like you know seven or whatever so it just takes a long time to build up these things for most people but that is kind of part of the fun of it you know it's it's the whole step along every step along the way every time i would get like wow i just made a post that got five thousand views like every step along the way then oh next time i do a big post it gets ten thousand like every one of those has been exciting and awesome and something i never thought possible beforehand and that's on a screen called nitpicky details every time i do things like this i think it's a risk and i think maybe it'll turn off some people when you press the button and every time it's around the character so now he's back to his original facing direction\n"