Update++

Good news to anyone still interested, our potential buyer has had to back out, so I’m once again considering offers. leefalin@polarian.com

Update

I’d like to thank everyone who showed an interest in Polarian. At this time we have found a buyer and are no longer considering other offers. Thanks again to all those who inquired.

The Reason

When I started Polarian back in 2005, it was with the hope that one day Polarian would be the sole source of income for our family. As 2006 rolled around, Polarian was not yet fulfilling that dream and we made the decision to return to graduate school and pursue my other lifelong dream of being a professor and teaching at the university level.

Throughout 2006 my research still hadn’t really picked up speed and so I had quite a bit of free time. I continued to devote some of that time to further development of Screen Mimic. In 2007 this development came to fruition as Screen Mimic 2.0 was released. From there Polarian’s revenue grew exponentially and went from being a hobby income to something that could in fact fully sustain our family. We started making plans for Screen Mimic 3.0 as well as a new software application that I believed would do even better than Screen Mimic.

During that same period of growth, my research project was also finalized and became much more demanding. As 2008 started it was clear that we could no longer pursue both dreams, so it came time to choose between them. From the title of this entry it should be obvious which one we chose.

Making this choice was difficult for many reasons. We started Polarian from scratch, a blank screen and an idea. We actually began as graphic design company and started writing Screen Mimic after I couldn’t find a screen capture application for the mac that output to Flash format. Since I was in fact a lousy graphic designer, we shifted our efforts fully to Screen Mimic’s development.

After countless hours of hard work we released Screen Mimic 1.0, then 1.2, 1.5, 2.0, etc… Our sales were so high that it no longer made sense to use a third party payment processor so we even developed our own online store.

It has been an amazing process and I have learned so much by it. The Mac developer community is an amazing group of people and I am thankful for all of the support and knowledge that I have gained from them.

The Details

So what does that mean for you? Well it means that you, my faithful reader, now have the opportunity to purchase a complete turnkey software company that is currently earning substantial revenue.

The sale includes:

• All of the source code for Screen Mimic and all rights pertaining to it.
• An online store setup to take payments via credit card and PayPal, (though you’ll need to set up your own merchant account with your bank if you want to use it, and your bank would have to use the YourPay API). This isn’t necessary of course because Screen Mimic is setup to use license keys generated by Kagi as well.
• The source code to the fledgling Screen Mimic 3.0, along with my insider thoughts of where I think that the screencast market is heading.
• The source code to another software product that is 50% complete which I think will do even better than Screen Mimic.
• The professional designed icon for the above unnamed software product that was designed by the talented folks over at The Icon Factory

Once you own the code you can of course do whatever you want with it, it will be yours. I’m happy to provide on-going email support to answer any technical questions related to the code, but I won’t be available to do any actual development work.

I’m only interested in cash, not royalties, not stock, nor any other .com type incentives. If you are interested, send an email to leefalin@polarian.com and we can go over the details.

So what happens if I don’t end up selling? I’m not sure. One idea is that I could open source Screen Mimic and see where the community takes it, but I’d rather sell it to someone who is passionate about Mac development.

I’d like to thank…

Throughout this article as I refer to “we”, I mean my wife and I. My wife has been a wonderful strategic advisor, companion, and friend. Anytime I have suggested a bad idea my wife has talked me out if it, and anytime I have suggested a good idea she has encouraged it. There would be no Polarian without my wonderful wife.

Thankfully this isn’t the end for me in the developer community, my research project is such that I’ll still be doing active Cocoa development, just in the scientific/academic community rather than the small business one. Maybe one day when school is finished I’ll return to the exciting and rewarding world that is mac small business.

But for now I want to thank all of the other mac developers that have made this such a rewarding experience for me, I started to name all of you, but it is just too long of a list and I’m sure to leave someone out. I also need to thank all of our customers, all of you that have made Polarian a success.

Let me end by saying again that this has been a wonderful experience filled not just with time spent coding, but time spent interacting with lots of great people. Thank you again.