That's it, right there. Two years, twenty grand, every emotion, it comes down to this; being in a pub and someone going 'oh you've got an app?'
"Yeah man, download it."
"What is it?"
"It's called Story, go on the App Store and search it."
"What's it do?"
"It's like this mini-blogging app... get it and see!"
"Is it free?"
Is it free.
"Yeah, it's free. Give it a go. Try it..."
They don't.
---
"I can't even give my book away for free." Jamie the writer tells me.
Jamie's the best writer I've read. Written the funniest book I've read. Funnier than Catch-22.
"People just don't do anything unless a hundred other people do it first."
"Yeah." he replies, "Or if a celebrity tells them to."
"People, man. I've been trying to get my mate Gary, great photographer, to use Story for a year now. Never has. Just won't do it. Not even as a favour."
"Yeah? I've got people directly lying to my face about buying the book. They must think I've sold a load and I can't possibly tell! These are people I've told not to pay and download it from my dropbox for free. But they've been, 'hey, I bought it instead!' And they're lying!"
"People! I used to make T-Shirts. I'd write about it on a forum. If ten people on this forum bought one, and wrote that they bought one, EVERYONE would buy one. I'd sell out in a day. BUT, if I sold ten, and no one wrote about it, I would never sell more than that. It would stop dead."
People are a crowd. One indecisive shrugging mass staring at each other in the current.
---
A few days later I check Story. There's a new story by Gary. An album of pictures from his honeymoon. Holy shit. Took over a year but he did it!
"Pretty good isn't it?" He says when I next see him.
"What, Story?" I'm happily swiping through his pictures.
"Yeah, moving the pictures around into the order you want. Enjoyed it."
People. I guess I should stop worrying about people. In the beginning, it's about a person, one at a time.
