My own mother, after testing the app on launch day, simply said: “Like the app a lot. Hope you can improve it.”

Of course I have ideas for improving the app, but it’s likely to never become a #1 app or meet all of the needs of those who will try it out in the coming months.

And not all of the incoming reviews are negative. Jeff Byrnes of AppAdvice.com had a few kind words to say about Snaplight: “Whether you’re highlighting a quote from a book you’re reading now or loading up an old photo from your photo library, the app is easy to use for creating a picture of your highlighted passages.”

Thanks Jeff!

But…

I’m ok with falling short in the eyes of those who don’t find Snaplight useful.

Instead of looking at this as a story of failure and missing an opportunity to potentially be a massively popular app, I want to instead focus on the reasons I built the app and how they’ve empowered me to not only reach hundreds of thousands of people time and time again, but helped me to be successful financially, in my career, and in my personal life.

Here’s what I think is more important than getting a 100% 5-star review rating on an app:

1. Scratch your own itch

Snaplight solves an exact need — or scratch — I had: being able to quickly capture a photo of a book I’m reading and create a sharable quote from it.

All of my work has followed this same pattern of scratching my own itch, and here’s why:

If the project fails, at least you have something that fulfills your need.

Even if Snaplight was never featured in the App Store, and even as it is certainly doomed to fall in the rankings due to low ratings, the app was a success in that it fulfilled my need.

There’s a bonus benefit to scratching your own itch in the work you do as well: you can adapt it to fit your needs as they change or grow, because you own it. If I ever have a problem with Snaplight or want to add new features, I’m completely empowered to make those changes happen, because it’s my product.

2. Start with MVP

Minimum viable product. Whatever it is you’re working on: it needs to do what you set out to make it do, and nothing more (at least initially).

You can always add more to a product, what’s tremendously more difficult is getting the damn thing built and out the door in the first place. If you have an idea, focus on whatever the minimum product can look like and build that. You can always adapt/grow/improve the product once it’s built, but until you have something you can actually see or play with in front of you: don’t worry about your growth strategy for it.

For Snaplight, I knew I wanted to be able to adjust the height of the highlighted area (something not present in version 1.0), I even began working on a text-height detecting algorithm that looks at a series of pixels in a photo and compares their contrasts in aggregate in order to return an ideal height for the highlight. But features like auto highlight sizing based on text size detection is candy compared to what I set out to build in the first place.

3. Don’t be afraid to ask for money

Your work deserves a dollar, at the very least. If you want to succeed you’ll need to get comfortable asking for money.

If you’re willing to put in some work to do something (anything) you should be rewarded for your efforts, particularly if someone else is going to benefit from them.

As long as you believe the product offers someone value, they’ll pay a reasonable price for it. And because you’re scratching your own itch, there’s a bit of early proof that makes it clear:

Of course “someone” will get value from whatever it is you create: people like you.

In the end, I’m excited that Snaplight is getting a bit of additional exposure to those who will find it useful but otherwise wouldn’t have discovered the app in the first place.

For everyone else who tries it and finds it to be a useless piece of garbage: thanks for trying it and providing feedback, I hope you find what you’re looking for elsewhere.

But for those in the last category, if you aren’t finding the product that scratches your itch, might I make a suggestion? …

Learn how to build whatever it is you need, then go build it.

It’s been a pretty effective strategy for me so far.



