When a Bug Saved the Company

In the realm of computers, bugs are generally a bad thing. Every year, our team ships dozens of free updates to eliminate bugs that are an inescapable byproduct of the countless variables in software development. Rarely, though, a bug can be beneficial. Back in 2002, a software bug saved Rogue Amoeba.

It started when we shipped the very first version of Audio Hijack. We wanted to give potential customers the ability to fully test the app prior to purchase, but we weren’t sure how best to limit that free trial. Our initial download provided 15 full days of completely unlimited usage.

From pinstripes to a goofy tagline, there’s a lot going on in this dialog.1

The app’s functionality only became constrained after that 15 day trial period had elapsed. Our documentation at the time explained what would happen:

After 15 days, Audio Hijack will nag you to register at launch and will quit after 15 minutes. Additionally, the recording feature will be disabled.

We hope that before your 15 days are up, you’ll want to register Audio Hijack, so you won’t have to worry about this.

Unfortunately for our business, what we hoped for seldom came to pass. Sales were middling. Though we knew we had a useful tool, it seemed unlikely Rogue Amoeba could ever be more than a side project.

Still, we continued developing the software and shipping new versions, eventually releasing Audio Hijack 1.6. It was a relatively minor update, without any eye-catching new features. Given that, we were shocked when we saw sales jump to a new (and viable!) level. Then, they stayed there.

As days of sustainable sales turned into weeks, we were thrilled but confused. Initially, we couldn’t figure out what had happened. Eventually, though, we tracked down the change. It was a bug! In version 1.6, we accidentally broke the intended 15 days of unrestricted usage. Instead, from day one, the app was limited to 15 minutes of recording. After that, all trial users were confronted with this dialog:

Alerts in our apps now have much better titles.

Compared to giving away two-plus weeks for free, this stricter limitation led to dramatically higher sales. We had unwittingly created a vastly superior trial. It’s stuck around, too. Though we’ve refined things further, our current trial limitations directly descend from this rogue idea we stumbled into.

With this change, our low sales rose to a level where it was worth continuing to work on and improve Audio Hijack. Within a year, Rogue Amoeba became a full-time job for the three founders, and our company now employs a dozen people. If not for this fortunate mistake, it’s very likely we’d eventually have given up long ago. It’s no exaggeration to say that this bug saved both Audio Hijack and our company.

Footnotes:

That tagline existed because the fair-use right to time shifting was not yet well-established. Given that, we focused our early marketing on the audio adjustments the app made possible. While Audio Hijack can still help with that, nowadays, we recommend SoundSource as the best solution for applying effects to any audio on your Mac. ↩︎