The universal trial, of course, is money and I’m hardly exempt. There’s a sixty day delay between me making money from an iPhone app and Apple actually paying me. That leaves immediate, painful gaps in my cashflow.

The obvious solution to this is consulting — I’m privileged to know how to do a lot of things that are useful to people. Unfortunately, I’m still learning how to market, grow and manage that particular end of my business, so I’m painted into the most dread of corners: retail.

I live by the axiom that no honest man is too good for honest work. So while retail is often the dullest, most imagination free work you can do before hitting manual labor, that’s not the part that I hate most about my seasonal job.

No, the worst of it is this: I have to call my customers “guests.”

This is some of the most odious corporate newspeak bullshit in recent years. It has always irked me. Guest means a specific thing: certainly it implies hospitality, which may explain the intent, but it fails to properly convey the truth of the relationship between the store and the customer. Being the guest of another places the guest in the inferior position and the host in the superior position. While manners may require that hospitality be extended, being termed a guest in the final equation simply means that the customer does not belong there. It suggests they belong somewhere else.

This is the wrong view.

The customer is not a guest of the store. A successful retail experience means that the customer is at home in the store.

Somewhere, somehow, having “customers” became a distasteful condition for large corporations. This is unfortunate and I wish they would cut the crap. The truth is that there is honor in having customers. There is honor in upholding the sanctity of the customer relationship. Being a customer of a business means something very specific that no other English word can capture. Being a customer means being the lifeblood of a business. Being a customer means being the motive force behind a powerful organism that provides products, services, livelihoods and, ultimately, the basic existence of others. Being a customer is being part of a tradition that keeps babies nourished, families housed and people clothed.

That means something. Something potent. Something that must be continually venerated if we’re going to keep moving forward as rational people. Does any of this sound remotely like having a “guest” to you?

I’m proud to have customers. I’m proud to respect their importance to my business and their contribution to the fact that I’m not sleeping outside tonight. That is essential to my work ethic and it will never, ever change.

The end of my seasonal retail job can’t come fast enough. I’m not sure my teeth will survive the grinding required for me to get the word “guest” past my lips on every shift.

Out of 20 images, 10 depict people either wearing a headset or holding a phone.

It’s a sad state of affairs: we’ve all come to think of customer service as this thing that kicks in when a company has screwed up.

That’s not the way it should be. True customer service comes from a passionate, proactive culture that embraces every opportunity to make the customer happy and loathes the idea of ever being a source of disappointment.

Regular readers will note that Netflix is a darling of mine. It’s with good reason: my personal relationship with Netflix is entirely positive. They provide me with a great product at a great price and have been consistently fervent in their interest to keep me happy as a customer. Beyond that, Netflix is a quintessential, recession-proof example of a company that spends its every second trying to make their customers as happy as possible. In a fascinating look at how a Netflix distribution center works, the Chicago Tribune revealed one of the most telling internal processes of all:

[VP of Communications Steve] Swasey, who drove in from Columbus, Ohio, where there is an even larger hub, pointed to a photocopy taped to the wall — a picture of Disc 4 of “Rescue Me” Season 4 alongside a sleeve that promised Disc 4 of “Rescue Me” Season 3. It’s a kind of Netflix perp walk. Some diligent associate caught the mistake before it shipped. “To me, I see it as a goose-bump moment,” Swasey said.

Sure, he’s the VP of communications. But the choice of words is so specifically visceral that you can’t doubt its authenticity. Not only does this organization care so much about their customers that they have real, living, breathing humans ensuring the discs match the sleeves, they even go so far as to nail potential customer disasters to the wall like trophies. They don’t know if you or I are enduring a TV cliffhanger that must be resolved with the very next disc of 24. They don’t know if you’re having a bunch of friends over to watch a specific episode of Rescue Me. All they know is that if you don’t get you exactly what you asked for, you’re going to be disappointed and they’ve failed. Right on up to the VP level, what might be seen as something quite small is enough to confer goosebumps.

That’s not an accident. That’s an organization spending a significant amount of time and effort on ensuring that its customers are its focus. Not after they’ve screwed up. Not after the customer is unhappy. They’re taking uncountable invisible steps to ensure the customer never has a reason to be disappointed in the first place.

The other modern paragon of customer service virtue is Zappos. True story:

My dress shoes were shot. Once upon a time I worked in an office and dress shoes were an integral part of a daily professional image. I needed new ones.

So I wandered around the mall with my girlfriend in search of something minimalist, comfortable and professional. I’m a picky bastard so after an hour, we’d discovered nothing quite my style. Finally, we found something perfect at Macy’s: simple, black leather, comfy as hell. After waiting about ten minutes for service, someone bothered to ask what I needed. When I requested my size in the shoes I’d found, I was told they were out of stock.

We left. I was about ready to resign myself to going barefoot the rest of my days when my girlfriend, a longtime fan, told me I needed to check Zappos. Sure enough, there were my shoes at a better price than Macy’s. At midnight, in around five minutes, I’d placed my order and with standard shipping expected to see my new shoes the next week. It was easier than shopping around, at least. I was happy enough with the whole experience.

Eleven hours later, my shoes had been delivered.

Let me say that again: eleven fucking hours.

This was eight months ago and I’m still a little speechless about this. My expectations were set so low by other online retailers, with their two days of processing and absurd charges for overnight delivery, nothing could have prepared me for the ridiculous, effortless haste Zappos showed in delivering what I’d ordered.

I’d never been unhappy with Zappos. I was already pleased with their prices, their solid website and their ever-present friendly tone. Behind the scenes, though, Zappos had spent countless effort, time, brainpower and what must be boatloads of money creating an infrastructure that can get a guy’s shoes delivered almost as quickly as he can choose them. Way the hell from Kentucky to anywhere in the country, no less. (This wasn’t a fluke, either – they reproduced their feat multiple times since)

This is behind-the-scenes, utterly invisible to the customer.

Your call center, if you need one, should be staffed with friendly, empowered people who answer quickly, work directly for your organization and give everything they can to address the needs of the customers they work with.

Then you should go further, giving everything in your soul to ensuring that most of your customers are so happy with what you give them, most don’t ever call you.

There are a laundry list of problems facing the growth of the App Store. I won’t bother to rehash them here. Let’s focus on the one that most thoroughly jeopardizes the future of developer businesses: Customer Service. Every other problem can be overcome or worked around but without the power of caring for your customers, your business has no reason to exist.

In an aside to a link last month, John Gruber muses:

I’m wondering how much of the problem is that the App Store is built on the foundation and framework of the iTunes Music Store, which was designed from the outset specifically as a venue for selling 99-cent downloads.

This is the most crucially important point: the iTunes Store was never designed to sell software. Among other things, Craig Hockenberry enumerates all the ways in which the App Store is hobbled by this historical truth. It’s a good, important post that you should read if you care about this kind of stuff. But it doesn’t address long-term outcomes related to customer service that will doom the developer community.

As an iPhone developer, I have no control over my storefront – Apple manages it for me, with basic data I provide. On the one hand, this is incredible news: access to a huge pool of customers, a complete distribution infrastructure and – best of all – I never have to worry about payment processing.

There’s just one issue: Apple doesn’t give a damn about my relationship with my customers.

Generous, attentive, impassioned customer service is an important piece of any successful business. My customers mean the world to me. Unfortunately, iTunes does not provide a clear, encouraging feedback channel.

User Reviews

When you’re selling music, user reviews are a simple tool. Much is subjective, but overall quality will be reflected in the reviews.

With software, the reviews have become more complicated. The most tantalizing way for a customer to speak out about software that is giving them problems is to write a review. And that’s what they do. Bug reports, feature requests and anything else that comes into their minds gets dumped into the reviews. And why not? The ability to write a review is prominently featured and uses a built-in, official form. It’s infinitely more seductive than leaving iTunes to write an email to the support contact. It’s also a venue provided by the same service that is taking the customer’s money, so it feels more intimately linked to their purchase than anything they can do on an external website or in their email client.

This is infuriating since the communication is strictly one-sided. There’s no way for the developer to follow up on these reviews to ask for more information. Without that information, acting on a bug report is often impossible. The worst part is that without dialogue, it’s impossible for the customer to learn more about their problem, discover workarounds and discover that there’s a living, breathing person who truly cares about the quality of the software they’ve just purchased.

Like it or not, the iTunes user review becomes the support form of last resort.

The Consequence

There are ways around this. Tap4Help is an interesting example, providing a built-in feedback and support request system. Developers, like Lucius Kwok, report some success explicitly declaring their email right in their application description with a call to action encouraging its use. I do this, too, but it doesn’t catch them all.

Why not? Nothing will ever come close to the power and authority of iTunes itself. I theorize that part of the reason so many customers prefer the review form to using a support email or link is that they know that iTunes will provide them satisfaction. No matter what, iTunes will show their review. They will be heard.

By keeping these customers so thoroughly at arm’s length, Apple retards the formation of relationships that will build developers’ business. I’ve turned angry emails into loyal customers through the power of honesty and genuine interest in customer issues. I’d desperately love to provide that dialogue for every customer, ever, but iTunes, under the current system, will continue to siphon off some portion of those opportunities into its black hole of customer reviews.

Having good conversations with your customers is as essential and non-negotiable as having an engine in your car. When Zappos tweets at me in thanks for my praise, I feel as though my relationship with the company has been further validated. When Netflix gives me complete and generous support when I have trouble with their service, I feel respect for them, since their conduct conveys respect for my business.

It’s all about how the customer feels. If you never get to talk with them, you’ll never get to impact that feeling.

Let’s Do It Better

This is not a hard problem to solve. If you happen to work on the iTunes Store infrastructure team, you may feel differently, but the company you work for is in the business of accomplishing the impossible on a fairly regular basis. My sympathy is limited.

Developer Review Replies

This is the easiest part. Let the developer reply to user reviews. This isn’t groundbreaking and I’m the eight thousandth developer to suggest it. So make it happen. The developer can join the conversation and solicit additional information so that bug reports that go into the reviews can actually be productive. Notify whomever left the review that they have a response via email. For bonus points, let the customer reply directly to that notification to reach the developer.

Feedback/Support Form

Let the user provide feedback or support requests through an official, iTunes-embedded form. Send the feedback to the developer via email, with an anonymized reply-to address, like craigslist uses, so Apple can cover their ass on privacy concerns. For bonus points, provide a rating for each application that states how responsive each developer is to requests sent via this form.

There is no step three. With those two provisions, an open dialogue has been created for anyone who bothers to seek one. Software, even for the iPhone, is not music. The one-sided echo-chamber conversation of the iTunes Music Store does not work in the App Store. With the two modest tools I’ve described, developers will have an infinitely easier time creating the relationships they need to build their business.

I’m not going to hold my breath. Hopefully Apple is working on this stuff, but in the meantime, I need to figure out better ways to put myself in easy reach of my customers.

Unfortunately, HARO, as it is called, is an awful product. It makes the fatal mistake that many fast-scaling services make: screwing the most important customer.

Three Customers

HARO has three customers: journalists, who need leads, sponsors, who pay for placement, and subscribers, who consume sponsored content and respond to journalist queries.

Subscribers are the most important customer as they are required for both sponsors and journalists to even bother with the product. Without subscribers, there’s no one for sponsors to influence. Without subscribers, the journalists get no responses.

A typical HARO email goes something like this:

1. Lengthy sponsored message
2. Cutesy personal update from the mailing list administrator, Peter Shankman
3. An absurdly long list of journalist queries

The practical result of this is that a subscriber will have to scroll an entire page before they even get to what they care about. Even better, HARO is sent out as often as three times a day.

Now, I disclaimed that as typical. What’s more interesting to my point are atypical HARO messages. These don’t happen often, but happened often enough to piss me off. HARO has particular rules about how subscribers should interact with journalists. It’s pretty obvious stuff, if you’re not five years old, but boils down to please don’t spam the reporters. Sometimes a HARO subscriber would go off the reservation, do something naughty, piss off a reporter and end up in Shankman’s bad graces.

It’s a closed system – a mailing list, after all. The solution seems pretty simple. When applicable, speak to the individual’s boss, if their wrongdoing was in the service of a larger organization. Then, kick the person off the list.

That’s it. Problem solved.

In Shankman’s defense, it seems he does do this. Then he takes it a step further, by venting his frustration into the next HARO email and scolding the entire subscriber base at large. Here’s a sample:

READ THIS: This morning, while being given a behind the scenes tour
at Busch Gardens, I had to spend a portion of the tour on my mobile
phone, calming a reporter from a major publication. Seems someone
at a major agency took it upon themselves to form an opinion on
what kind of story the reporter was writing, simply from the query
alone.  Long story short, this was a situation that should not have happened.

This isn’t brain surgery here, guys: If you can answer a query, do
it. If you know someone who can answer a query, send it to them. Do
not post them on the web, in blogs, or on message boards, and do
not email the reporter saying “You should do it this way.” Had I
not gotten an EXTREMELY sincere apology from a top-level person at
the agency, I’d be outing the person who caused the mess in the
first place, as well as outing the agency. Instead, he’s just banned
from HARO.

Five rules of HARO here: READ THEM.
http://shankman.com/the-five-rules-of-haro/

I can only speak for myself, but as a former subscriber, it’s worth listing all the things in this message I don’t give even a tiny fraction of a fuck about:

• Shankman’s very special behind the scenes tour
• The frustration of said tour’s interruption
• The existence of an over-sensitive, irate reporter who doesn’t know how to use the delete button on her keyboard
• A rehash of common sense HARO rules I already know
• Shankman’s super-duper ballbusting phone call to top-level Tommy
• The ban of another subscriber
• The power of passive aggressive ALL-CAPS text

The Precious Commodity

HARO exists thanks to a simple reality: time is a precious, ever-dwindling commodity. If reporters weren’t in a hurry, they’d spend weeks on just one story, finding the perfect source for their piece. They don’t have that luxury. HARO to the rescue. Similarly, subscribers don’t have time to build a publicity campaign, research publications or spend weeks pitching themselves. They often don’t even have time to learn how. Again, HARO to the rescue.

The issue is that HARO does not give any reverence to the time of its subscribers. Quite the opposite: not only do we have paragraphs of crap no one cares about at the top of each message, there’s this occasional business of Shankman feeling empowered to command the entire list to spend time reading a rant about the misbehaviors of a single participant.

This doesn’t even begin to take into account the amount of time it takes to scour the actual list of queries. Taken in aggregate, it’s shocking. Let’s not forget, it’s a thrice-daily proposition.

The reason it happens is that while subscribers are the most crucial part of Shankman’s business, they’re also the most plentiful – the most easy to replace. Sponsors are magic unicorns, treasured and protected. Journalists are golden geese, continually laying the eggs that make each HARO message. Subscribers? There are tens of thousands of those.

So HARO gets away with it. For now.

Complacency Breeds Contempt

I just checked my calendar. It’s 2009. A mailing list? Hell, let’s move the whole thing over to Usenet. Infinitely more retro chic and you don’t need to bottleneck the queries through a single guy.

The problem with HARO not caring about its subscribers’ time is that it completely erodes loyalty, trading every ounce of goodwill for an ounce of contempt with each message. When something better comes along, they’ll have no problem switching. Ask Blockbuster how that works.

Fine, so you’re saying if I’m going to be a douche and trash this guy’s hard work, I should have a better idea, right? Glad you asked.

Let’s Do It Better

Build a website.

That’s it. A problem actually solvable with a website. Could have been huge during the dot-com bubble, but I bet it’s enough to at least keep Shankman fed. Here’s what you do:

1. Persistent accounts that store basic bios and feedback ratings. Elevate the stars, demote those who don’t play by the rules, make it clear who’s making the best contributions
2. Categorized, post-moderated, RSS-enabled members-only query threads that let reporters post their queries whenever they want or need. Only postable by verified reporter accounts to keep the bozos at bay
3. Tagged queries: instead of having to parse a tedious headline that’s different for each query, provide the option for easy-to-scan tags
4. User-configured search agents to send email alerts any time a query seems of interest
5. Daily sponsorship opportunities, to keep Shankman in Busch Gardens tickets

That’s it. I bet you could accomplish most of it with Ning, without having to spend a dime. If you wanted to take it to the next level, you could impose a monetary bozo filter for new accounts.

Will it happen? Eventually, I’m sure it has to. Linking journalists with sources is an important job. Just because HARO’s implementation is completely hamfisted doesn’t mean someone else’s won’t eventually hit the mark. Will Shankman do it?

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

Upton Sinclair, via Daring Fireball

So who knows. In the meantime, I’m off to half-heartedly find some other way to get journalists to talk about me.

Restaurant 1′s manager:

“That chicken won’t take very long at all to cook – I’ll get it replaced for you right away. I’m so sorry about this, there’s really no excuse for it. While you’re waiting, are there any appetizers I can get for you? On the house, of course. Let me get you some menus – choose whatever you’d like.”

Restaurant 2′s manager:

“We’ll fix it,” with the dish yanked roughly from me and a replacement dropped wordlessly on the table minutes later, without hint of apology or even embarrassment. Annoyance, on the other hand, is exuded in abundance.

Which restaurant do you feel better about?

Restaurant 1 is a clear paragon of basic decency and above-average customer service. Restaurant 2, despite delicious but somewhat high-end fare, gives the same rude service you’d expect from the most indifferent fast food joint at the busiest rush hour.

But why bother giving above-average customer service? It takes time, it can be expensive, it may require significant investments in training if your team is large or spread out.

The business case is an obvious one: negative word of mouth travels with much more grease than does positive. One bad customer interaction can mean the loss of future business not only from the person you’ve disappointed, but also from many of the people they know. There’s also the trope about it costing more to replace a customer than to keep one. Worst of all, if other customers witness an especially bad interaction, they might abandon you themselves despite an otherwise trouble-free experience. No one wants to deal with a someone who looks like a crook.

That’s a short list and there are plenty of practical reasons not to screw your customers. They all miss the point.

You should give above-average customer service because it’s fucking wrong to give anything less.

I am not a man of any faith. There are few things I hold sacred. This is one of them: If you work a job at a business and interact with customers, whether you are the lowest paid hourly employee or the CEO, your highest duty is to the customer. Not to policy, not to your boss, not to your shareholders, not to anyone alive before your customer.

Why? You would starve without them. The roof over your head, the lunch in your stomach, the weekend trip you’re about to take – all of it exists thanks to the grace and honesty of the customer who will pay, time and again, for access to your goods or services. If their satisfaction, their absolute fucking bliss, is not at the core of what you’re doing, you are absolutely, one hundred percent doing it wrong. I don’t care if all you’re doing is punching the clock, if your boss doesn’t care about you, if you hate the stupid uniform. I’ve been there, it sucks. Doesn’t make a difference – you still owe the customer the very best you have to offer. It is your duty. In my retail days I sometimes broke the rules and defied my boss to make my customers happy while giving them the respect their patronage had earned them.

When you ignore that duty, when you maximize profit and personal convenience at the expense of loving your customers, you will eventually be slaughtered brutally and painfully and your customers will laugh when that day comes. Want proof? Look at Blockbuster. Everyone who existed in North America in the 90′s has at least one tale of woe at the hands of the video store’s brutal late fee policy. Blockbuster stocked only movies that were obvious mainstream bets, with a few token art house and foreign selections, without bothering to sort out what their customers actually wanted to watch.

Then, one day, technology changed, allowing the entry of a bizarre new competitor. Netflix, out of nowhere, showed up and gave customers genuine respect. Netflix provided a service with generous, flexible terms, abundant selection and entirely reasonable pricing. The offering was so compelling, people changed their habits to accommodate this weird mail order movie service. Netflix, in turn, listened to their customers and broadened their selections further while building ever more distribution facilities to ensure that no one had to wait more than a day or two for fresh movies. Through Watch Instantly, Netflix continues providing incredible value instead of becoming complacent and allowing the rise of someone else with a better feel for the needs of their customers. Most importantly, when a customer has a beef, Netflix makes it right with friendly, generous customer service and proactive communication that owns up to every screwup.

It’s up to you. Do the right thing for each customer every single time and sleep well at night with the knowledge that your business is safe and you’re a good person. As for the alternative: I have a handy chart for that you may find instructive.

Choose wisely.

Footnote:

If you’re wondering, restaurant 1 is the excellent Spice in Winter Park, FL. Restaurant 2 is Greens & Grille, in Orlando. Greens & Grille has one particular manager who seems so exceedingly annoyed at the very existence of my girlfriend and I that we routinely forgo their delicious, sublime organic meals because we’d rather not feel quite that unwelcome. We eat three times a day. That grumpiness has cost them, in the last six months, what could have easily totaled hundreds of bucks because they’d get our business a few times a week if we actually felt welcome there.

A couple of months back, a Washington DC-based intellectual property attorney from a prominent national firm came for a tour. Let’s call this guy Rich. I was tapped to run the tour, but when one of the owners decided to come along, I spent the bulk of the morning opening doors and walking quietly alongside the conversation. I was extra quiet when the subject turned to the recording industry. Rich explained that he wasn’t terribly popular for representing the recording industry but that it was important work. He then trotted out the same tired old tripe suggesting that a decline in recording industry revenues was caused by piracy — a decline Richard assured us could be reversed if only young people were educated on the importance of respecting intellectual property.

This is Bullshit

I listened to all of this and swallowed so hard I bruised my own throat. First of all, as has been mentioned, piracy is murderous, ruthless work done by indefensible criminals. What these guys mean is bootlegging.

I failed to ask Rich if it were possible, just even the slightest bit possible, that recording industry revenues were on the way down because the record companies make over-priced garbage. I failed to mention that education is indeed necessary… for the luddite morons who ran these businesses into the ground in the first place. I failed to point out to Rich that if each pirated track really represented a lost sale, any miraculous absence of bootlegging would have to also transform the economy dramatically as to permit people the opportunity to drop $20,000 on a half-filled iPod Classic.

I failed to say any of it. Whaddya want from me? I’m not my own man for another few weeks yet.

Even so, the encounter was instructive. I learned that there still exist real, living, breathing people who believe this bullshit. Not to be ageist, but I suspect being over 30 years old has a lot do with this, though surely there are exceptions in either direction of that mark.

The recording industry has spent millions of dollars on technical and legal measures to prevent bootlegging. The pinnacle of that achievement? A multi-million anti-piracy measure that was defeated with a Sharpie and the most impressively tarnished image of any industry that doesn’t make guns or pollution. I’m talking out of my ass, but I expect that the number of people who partake in bootlegging has only grown since this crusade began. Talk about money well spent. Can you imagine where their business model would be if, instead of wasting their money fighting an unstoppable force, they’d instead took a good hard look at the way the wind was blowing and invested that cash in reinventing their business model in such a way that made bootlegging irrelevant?

The result would be a recording industry that neither you nor I could recognize.

Instead, the RIAA makes a habit of suing the very people to whom they’d like to sell their product while attempting to destroy any service or platform that challenges the traditional ways for people to discover music.

Unstoppable Force

Anywhere there exists a non-scarce encapsulation of value, that value will be reproduced and distributed outside the bounds of the author’s license or intent. Put another way, if your shit is digital and desired, your shit will be pirated. The question with piracy isn’t whether or not it will happen. The question, rather, is whether or not your digital property is valuable enough to be worth the trouble of pirating. Trouble, here, has a very flexible definition, depending upon how much stands between wanting to distribute and being able to distribute. This varies from platform to platform, from absurdly simple with digital music to decently pain in the ass with console games.

Why? There are two simple reasons. People want things and, as we know from economics, the capacity to produce is infinitely outstripped by the capacity to desire. Secondly, and most crucially, distribution is gratifying. People feel good sharing — that’s simple human nature. In many cases, too, distribution of something digital, something protected, requires solving someone else’s puzzle. The high that comes from accomplishing something intended to be impossible is well-known nerd crack.

Piracy is Always Possible

This recipe creates a world where the dreaded boogeyman of scary piracy will always exist. Any business model where a 100% lack of piracy is integral to success is doomed to failure. What to do about this truth is a difficult question — one beyond the scope of what I can tell you here.

What’s important to understand is that time spent fighting the unstoppable is almost always time wasted.

By definition, anti-piracy measures require an investment of development time that will never benefit your paying users. Who are you working for, if not your paying users?

You have a choice. You can allocate 500 hours to one of these options:

1. Building an incredible feature set that your customers love
2. Developing a new anti-piracy scheme that will be defeated in X weeks and may genuinely annoy your paying customers

Which do you choose? The exhausted Microsoft vs. Apple comparison is apt here. If you’re Microsoft, you roll out Windows Genuine Advantage and truly piss off anyone who ever has to reinstall Windows. If you’re Apple, you sell a five-pack license and let your customers buy on their honor. I’m sure there’s a decent set of folks who install Leopard on more than their purchased share of machines, but the Leopard family pack is ranked #201 in Amazon’s software sales and was an even better seller when Leopard was new. And you know what? Apple makes more money through the family pack than if they were dicks by using anti-piracy measures and only selling single-user licenses.

I’ve Got One Boss

And it’s not me. The boss is the customer. By definition, my customer doesn’t give a damn about the boogeyman. They want the very best features in a piece of software that does everything it possibly can not to annoy them. As far as I’m concerned, every minute I spend on anti-piracy measures for my apps is a minute I should have spent making something incredibly useful. I’m in this to make people happy with incredibly useful stuff. If can’t focus my time on that, there’s no point.

The only time I should worry about writing code related to users who haven’t paid me money is when their existence will affect users who have. If pirates adversely impact resources essential to your paying users’ happiness, by all means, write a bit of throttling code that gives their requests a lower priority.

You’ve Got a Decision to Make

Whether or not you spend time writing code that benefits you instead of your paying customers is a personal choice. I can’t tell you what you should do — that conversation is one you need to have with your collaborators and moneymen. The temptation is a strong one. I remember how angry I was when I discovered Tallymander being distributed by iPhone bootleggers for the first time.

Still: last week, I submitted my latest app, GlobeJot, for App Store review. GlobeJot’s source contains precisely 0 lines of copy protection code.

The choice is made easier for me by Apple’s inclusion of good-enough copy protection for iPhone OS apps. Even without that, though, I wouldn’t bother putting up much of a fight. I want to make money by creating honest relationships with paying customers who appreciate that I spend every last ounce of my energies making something they will love to use.

If that ideal one day ceases to be realistic, I’ll find somewhere else to put my productive ability.