Penned Thoughts

Today marks the closing of Caramel Cloud and Notificant.

As anyone who has tried to contact me through my Caramel Cloud email address and the company’s Twitter account knows, I have been unresponsive for the past month. That’s because I have been spending most of my time attending to a new business in the offline world and some of it writing for Macworld and have not found the time to answer those communications with the evasive responses that I have been getting so much practice at.

This was probably not the best start to this post, but I don’t know what else would be either. How do you tell the world that you failed? I don’t know. I didn’t even want to be the one to write this post, but then again, who else would? I thought my friends, and above all, Caramel Cloud’s customers, deserved an explanation, so here it is.

I had high hopes for Notificant. It filled a genuine gap in my own workflow and I had expected that it would do so in others’ as well. And it did too. Almost all the reviews the application received, from both customers and reviewers, was positive and encouraging. Even the negative criticism was polite and well-intentioned and I was taking down those suggestions and requests for implementation into the app in future.

Guess that won’t be happening now, huh?

But I do really have this note in Notational Velocity that currently has 29 bullet points. From the really small fixes, like adding pagination to the archive in the web app, to some great new features like recurring notifications and CloudApp integration and support for TextExpander and Automator, text messaging, Twitter and Facebook, natural language scheduling…it was all planned.

I made mistakes. I spent too much, I made some bad hires, I was too lenient and polite with people who didn’t keep up their end of the bargain, I missed some deadlines, I tried to delegate some work that I later realised I myself was best suited to handle. I got too excited about things like getting contacted by Apple for a possible feature on the front page of the App Store. I spent too much time over-thinking things. I didn’t have enough business acumen to see this project through, to make it profitable.

Oh well. You live and you learn. There were a few days after the initial buzz over the release of Notificant for iPhone had died down and sales were precipitously dropping to unsustainable levels where I was horribly down. I don’t know if that’s what they call depressed but that’s what it felt like. People in my family, my parents, they knew something was up.

Eventually, I just let go. I decided not to pursue this any longer. I know it seems like a very hasty decision, and maybe it was, but there really was no way out. This was a self-funded project and it was clear that I’d have to spend more to work on further developing the app. At a time when I hadn’t been able to recoup even 25% of my original investment, that did not seem like a very good idea.

I am dragging this out. The point is: Caramel Cloud and Notificant are no more. I have pulled the apps off the App Stores, but will keep the service around for a few more months, probably till September, to let its most recent purchasers get some value for their money. Maybe it won’t be enough; please pardon me for that. I wish there was another way more than you do.

…

The good news is that I did sell 2,200 units overall (iOS and Mac OS X combined) in the month of May. While that was nowhere near good enough, it was still our bestselling month by far and for that I am very thankful to all the people who spread the word about our app, to the kind folks in the media who wrote about it and to the customers who went out and bought it. Thank you.

I usually go through and proofread every post I write on this blog but I am leaving this one as it is because I may not be able to publish it if I start reading what I have written here. Please pardon the typos and other errors that must inevitably have found their way into this post. Thanks for reading.

-Aayush