95: !Boring Software — Andy Allen

On the podcast: Andy Allen shares how he went from designing the never-shipped Microsoft Courier tablet and co-founding the Apple Design Award-winning drawing app Paper to starting !Boring Software (Not Boring Software) — a deliberately tiny, 2-person studio built around one rule: never make boring software again. He talks about why staying small on purpose protects you from getting trapped in a business you hate, how a "patron plan" with no extra features outsold expectations, why sound design and haptics are the most underused tools in app development, and how 3 years of false starts led to Not Boring Camera — an app that strips out all of Apple's photo processing so you can take expressive photos instead of technically perfect ones.

Top Takeaways:

🎨 Design can be the entire value proposition — not just a nice-to-have

People pay premiums for notebooks, furniture, and cars based on aesthetics, yet the software industry still assumes you need feature differentiation to charge money.

🔒 The biggest risk isn't failure — it's getting trapped in a business you don't want to run Structure your company, your incentives, and your product roadmap around the work you actually want to do, not the work that seems most scalable.

🎭 Doing the uncool thing often has the most staying power

The projects that resonate most tend to be the ones nobody else wanted to do — starting an app business when everyone else was chasing SaaS turned out to be the right move.

💰 Patronage works when your mission resonates

If people see you fighting a battle they believe in, they'll pay significantly more than the value of the features they unlock — they're funding the effort, not buying a product.

🔊 Sound design is the most underused tool in app development

One sound file repeated is grating; a dozen slightly different versions of the same click — borrowed from game audio — makes software feel alive without adding real complexity.

📷 Default camera apps ensure you never take a bad photo — but you can never take a great one