I finished the website for WebnoteHappy, my newly released bookmark manager for Mac OS X with integrated note taking and tagging, early Wednesday morning at around 2AM. Then I told some of my friends who were online via IRC and IM. At this point I had gotten about 17 hours of sleep in the past 3 days. Unfortunately, because of the adrenaline of finally releasing, I had a hard time sleeping…

I woke up at 8:37 AM – I remember this exact time because I was meaning to get up at 8AM to get an earlier start on the day. I had set an alarm but I don’t remember even pressing snooze. I do remember getting up around 6AM wondering if I should get up yet. Now I had overslept my alarm. But I think my body was telling me – hey get some sleep, you only started snoring at 4:00AM.

At this point came the active marketing portion of being a Mac indie developer. I had finished development on WebnoteHappy about two weeks earlier, with the exception of the inevitable last minute bug fixes. I think it is always better to delay the release and fix the bugs before it gets out to users.

Let me publicly thank all my beta testers here: We did it! Thanks for all the wonderful comments, testing, and advice! You can find a list of all the beta testers for WebnoteHappy in the “About WebnoteHappy” dialog box.

Now as the development was wrapping up, I started doing all the things that make an app complete like documentation and a web site. In some ways, I think this is marketing, since it is telling people about your product. I’ve come to respect marketing a great deal. It always seemed like there should be more programmers and less marketers in companies I had worked at. But I was wrong. Marketing at its very essence is telling people who can benefit from your product that it is available and can help them out, make them happy even. Its crucial to a software company – the yin to programming’s yang.

And so the marketing began – starting with VersionTracker and MacUpdate. These two sites are popular among Mac enthusiasts who like to try out new apps. Plus their UIs are quite programmer-friendly. You fill in some fields and your software is announced to the early Mac-app-adopter world. Next I submitted to Apple’s Mac OS X downloads. Also programmer-friendly, but Apple has more editorial review I think as WebnoteHappy is still not up on the OS X downloads site.

Finally I submitted to a few Mac news sites. The first being TUAW, since they were nice enough to cover WebnoteHappy Lite a while back on their own initiative. I’ve actually learned a lot since the original Lite release, which only went up on MacUpdate and was covered in some blogs. For the 1.1 release of WebnoteHappy Lite, I finally submitted to VersionTracker and revisited my listing on Macupdate, got more blog coverage, but still no submissions to news sites. This time around, for WebnoteHappy 1.0, I prepared a press release and sent it out.

I was mentally exhausted after I sent out the press release to a few sites. I’ve been trying to cram marketing into my head and I think my programmer self was fighting back. But then… Ding! I got new email in Mail.app. And it was from Kagi, my payment processor, telling me that I had just sold my first public copy of WebnoteHappy 1.0! I cannot tell you how cool that is. I got up and did a little dance / victory lap around the house, hugging my wife and kids as I passed them. Later, we all had lunch together at one of my favorite restaurants, Hard Times Cafe, where we ate some chili.

It turns out that news sites, bloggers, download sites, and search engines are all important in their own ways to letting people know that your app exists and could possibly help them. I emphasize helping people, because that’s what I want Happy Apps to be doing. I want WebnoteHappy and other future happy apps to be helping people do things that they really need to get done, like keeping track of web pages so they can get back to them later, and hopefully so well that they are delighted and happy. As a side-effect, I get to support my family and keep making apps.

Over the next few days, I got a lot of email. It was about 50/50 support and congratulations/feature requests. Fortunately I have not run into many bugs, probably due to the long private beta cycle and the efforts of the beta testers and myself. The support emails mostly pointed out shortcomings in my documentation, so I’ll be working on this. I should probably also have a screencast or two and improve the FAQ. That would probably answer most questions I get.

The congratulations emails are incredibly satisfying and many were accompanied by statements like:

First of all, “bravo” this is a must have application, and for a 1.0 version, it’s quite mature.

That is like music to a Mac indie’s ears. You toil away in obscurity (ok truthfully I’m still mostly obscure, but a little less so now) for months and months, hoping that it meets people’s needs, that someone will “get it”.

OK time to wrap it up, since this post is already easily my longest post ever. First let me say that I welcome any and all feature requests. 1.0 was just the beginning and I’m starting to plan out 1.1 and beyond. Second, please spread the word about WebnoteHappy: bookmark it on del.icio.us, write a blog entry about it, mark it in ma.gnolia, tell people in your Mac user group, digg it or whatever you can think of. I’m still new to this marketing thing. And lastly, (though maybe this should have been first), please download WebnoteHappy, try it out, and see if you find it useful.