Sofa's blog about design, code everything else.

Sofa is now a little over two years old and we can't complain. We have built some cool products and worked for some great clients. But above all, we built a very talented team of designers and programmers with a big affection for interaction design. People always tell you those first two years are the hardest. And when it becomes clear you're here to stay, they become interested in how you pulled it off.

Convinced that you've learned a lot, you try to extract some lessons to share. Tangible stuff that people can use when they're heading down the same path. But that is really tough. There's only so much that's neither clichéd nor very specific to what we do. Still, there is some stuff that might be interesting for others too and I will share some of it on the blog over the coming months.

Let's start with some context for people who read this by chance and have no idea who we are. Our company consists of two kinds of craftsmen; designers and coders. Everyone shares one big passion: interaction design. We try to build apps apps that we can use ourselves (first cliché, warned you). For example, Checkout started because we were working in an Apple Store and thought we could make selling less annoying, and even fun. The biggest reason to build Versions was that we used Subversion just about for everything we did. In addition to developing our own products, we service clients in need of interface and visual design direction. We concentrate on two types of organizations: smaller companies with interesting technologies and potential for market impact and, at the opposite extreme, larger, more complex organizations that present unique challenges and learning opportunities.

Those of you who work for clients know how hard it can be to actually get them on board. Especially clients that you really like, have a reputation that increases your portfolio's value, and give you enough influence to actually make a difference. If you happen to have seen our work page, you might have noticed we have some pretty big clients for a small Dutch company whose primary focus is not even on client work. Actually, we don't do much acquisition at all. How that works is what I'd like to describe today: your product as marketing for your client work, and how we used that to build Sofa.

Back to the products. The most important thing for a successful product release is great marketing. As a starting indie company it's hard to market in a traditional way as you most likely have no budget or contacts. Plus, you want to spend all your time on getting the application right. Luckily the Mac community loves spotting new applications. If you create something interesting it will get picked up quite easily, and people start talking about it. We noticed this effect gets dramatically bigger when your app has a great user interface or artwork. This causes people who don't directly are the target audience to check it out. Mostly just to play around with it.

Apart from them talking about it to potential clients, they actively discuss and give feedback on for example interaction decisions. This is a great way to gain knowledge on how to improve your app. But I also suspect lots of these people have important positions and are involved in the decision making process regarding interaction and graphics. Or maybe big companies are looking to be inspired for their own products and watch the Mac indie development community very closely. So a well marketed Mac app has a great side effect; it actually markets your company and its services. Both to the public and to potential consulting clients.

Now it might not seem interesting to deal with clients when you're trying to build a business around a product. But even the most efficient startup needs some cash to fund their initial development. As most founders don't have cash themselves they have to look for investors. But in a time where it gets harder and harder to find those, especially in the Netherlands, it could make sense to fund developers by providing design services. And you end up fully owning your products.

It's also a great argument to actually get a designer on board from the very beginning. Something lots of startups lack and our own Jasper Hauser has been advocating for a while now, based on the arguments that 1) your product will likely be better 2) close collaboration leads to better design and 3) again, they can actually fund development by working for great clients.

Sofa has been built exactly this way. And even while we have a decent product portfolio by now and the funding argument becomes less of a necessity, we just decided to formalize and scale up our design department. It's a good way to diversify the business, but the main reason is that we really enjoy collaborating with others and we learn from it everyday.

Looking back it seems simple enough; make something people talk about and they will want you to help them out with their products. I'm certainly not trying to advocate what the best way is to build your company. But if you decide to go this way, it's an effect that can really help.