Faruk on Indies
First, let’s look at the skills involved in creating and publishing a great app like Unread. You need a good understanding of interaction design, UI design, (most likely also) icon design, and having great taste and the ability to know when to say “No” to things are a boon to its positive reception by critics and users alike. Then, you need to do the programming of the application, which generally requires at least a decent understanding of database architectures, MVC principles, the main programming language and its frameworks, and generally good programming discipline. Next, you need content strategy skills: all the labels and text in your UI send messages to the user, and if they’re poorly written or unintuitive, this will cost you in significant, but difficult to measure, ways. The same applies to the marketing of your app: the website promoting it, the language used in your AppStore listing, the quotes you provide in interviews, and so on. Good selling skills overlap with this, but if you’re simply publishing it on the AppStore and not making direct sales to, say, enterprises or businesses, you probably don’t need the equivalent of a sales agent. Then, from your business end, you need all the various business management skills as well as the project management chops to keep yourself on track, issue yourself realistic deadlines, and so forth.