This episode we talk with Gus Mueller, founder of Flying Meat Software and creator of Acorn, the image editor for humans, built for Macs. Gus covers why you should still sell direct, his thoughts on sales, how he handles competition, why he wishes he'd focused on documentation earlier, and much more.
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Show notes

Gus Mueller: Twitter, Blog
Flying Meat Software: Website, Twitter
Acorn: Website, Twitter
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Transcript
Alexis: Gus, thanks for coming on the podcast!

Gus: No problem!

Alexis: Now, before we get to Flying Meat and Acorn, tell us a bit about your background.

Gus: I’m a programmer. I went to college at the University of Missouri, Columbia. I basically ended up getting a general studies degree by combining three minors together to get a single major. I basically studied Art, Art History and Computer Science and I took them all together and sort of made my own degree. So that’s sort of where my art background comes from when I do image editors and stuff like that. Add in the Computer Science and that’s what’s going to happen. And I’m mostly just self-taught.

Alexis: Now why did you combine those three minors or your interests? Was it because, “Well it’s just what I’m interested in so it’s going to happen†or was it more of a calculated, “Well I think these could go well together,†like the Steve Jobs intersection of technology and liberal arts kind of thing?

Gus: No, it wasn’t really planned. I just always grew up with computers. I had an Apple IIc growing up; it was my first computer. I was just playing games on it and I would write little basic programs, and I also liked drawing.

So when I went to college, I just took a bunch of art classes just because it was fun; I really enjoyed it. Computer science, I just kind of enjoyed too.

I didn’t take very many hardcore Computer Science classes; I actually worked for the Campus Computing – as it was called there. It’s the central IT department for the university and some of my co-workers were actually professors.

I would create my own little Computer Science classes, which were basically projects I was working on at work anyway, and they would sign off on it and I would get credit for it. That's how I got the Computer Science stuff. I wasn’t very good at algorithms and stuff like that, and actually the only class I ever flunked was a Computer Science class – go figure.

That’s just two interests of mine that just sort of fell together. It wasn’t planned at all; it just happened that way.

The Art History happened because I was going to be an art major for a while, and you needed a lot of Art History credits. I hated Art History, but I had all those credits so I just turned it into a general studies degree that way.

Alexis: Now we’re getting ahead of ourselves here, or at least I am, because I’m curious – you mentioned not being very good at algorithms and that kind of stuff. I imagine when it comes to image editing and all these kinds of effects that you have to work with in Acorn, there’s a fair amount of algorithms involved. How do you deal with that nowadays? Do you hire it out or do you go, “Damn it, I’m going to take this book and I’m going to absorb it and whether I learn by osmosis or otherwise, I’m going to figure it out�

Gus: It’s mostly I like to do all the work myself. There’s been a couple of things that I’ve hired people for, but for the most part, it’s all just me. Once you get into it, the algorithms for graphics aren’t too hard.

It goes very deep, but it’s easy to get a good, broad overview of how to manage pixels, basically. It’s also probably a lot less that you need to know for algorithms and stuff like that than you wo