Cabel Sasser, co-founder of Panic Software, wrote an excellent 2014 year in review on their company blog recapping their successes and some of the issues Panic dealt with throughout the year.
To be honest, I was pretty nervous to be pulling Coda from the Mac App Store. But when we finally did it, I felt an incredible, almost indescribable sense of relief — mostly because as we began to wrap up bug fix releases, we were able to immediately post them to our customers within minutes of qualifying them. My god. That’s how it should be. There’s just no other way to put it — that’s how you treat your customers well, by reacting quickly and having total control over your destiny. To not be beholden to someone else to do our job feels just fantastic. (Also to not pay someone 30% in exchange for frequent stress is a fine deal.)
Despite selling more than half of our total units, iOS represents just 17% of our total revenue.
I’ve been using several of Panic’s apps on the Mac for a few years now and Transmit and the new version of Prompt on iOS this year were both excellent apps. If Coda 2.5 on the Mac and Panic Sync were results of pulling Coda from the app store then I 100% agree it was the right decision. We now get Coda updates faster than ever and Panic Sync works awesome, so there is absolutely no downside for me as a customer.
I was disappointed to see the breakout of units sold vs. revenue between Panic’s Mac and iOS apps. Panic’s iOS apps are some of the most powerful and beautifully designed productivity apps I’ve ever used on iOS and in many cases I am able to complete web development tasks that previously would have required being in front of a Mac to complete. I really want to believe that this is simply an issue of figuring out the right pricing model to make building high quality, well-designed iOS productivity tools worthwhile and that iOS users like me are more than willing to pay a premium for desktop quality tools on their mobile devices.
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