# How a Videographer Turned a Workaround into a Full-Time App Business — Joe Allen, Teleprompter Pro

Channel: Launched by RevenueCat
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4icSRmG-CIE
Duration: 1 hr 20 min
Language: English
Words: 14661
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/4icSRmG-CIE

---

[0:00] To be honest, I struggled justifying it to myself. I'm thinking like, well, what what are we going to publish every month? What are we going to keep putting out to justify our subscription, but that's just not how that works, particularly not for these kind of utility products. It took me a while to kind of come around to the idea. We went in with a very low $20 a year subscription price cuz I just thought that's what sounded fair. Welcome to Launched. I'm Charlie Chapman and today I'm

[0:26] excited to bring you the creator of Teleprompter Pro and the just released app Captions, Joe Allen.

[0:46] Joe, welcome to the show. Hi. So, before we get into Teleprompter Pro and your whole backstory, uh, I always try to start with a really quick elevator pitch of what the app is so that people kind of know where we're going. This one's kind of funny because the app's called Teleprompter Pro. Uh, so maybe a little self-explanatory. Yeah, I struggled to do that sort of pitch without using the word teleprompter. Um, so maybe I'll explain that first. It's the thing that you see the news presenters reading on the camera, right? That's a teleprompter. And Teleprompter Pro is an app that allows sort of creators and studios um to have their own teleprompter and and you know produce

[1:23] better content and more engaging things whether it's a um video or a speech or you know wedding speeches things like that. Um yeah it's a little pocket version of a full-size studio teleprompter. And when you say that you mean because it's on your phone or your iPad as opposed to it's not a physical device. Correct. Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. All right. So, uh, let's kick this off the same way I always kick off the show, which is, uh, I have three questions

[1:49] for you, which is where are you from? Uh, do you have a formal education related to what you do? And then, what was your career backstory before you started building teleprompter? Okay. I'm from a very boring town near London. So, I I normally say London if I meet a stranger, but I'm actually from a boring town just outside. Um, but we invented the fiber optic and the blue asthma inhaler. That's my I'm sure I've told you that a million time. Oh, yeah. That's usually

[2:17] usually I always say if you need to know where I am, look that up. Come here. I'll be there. I didn't go to university. I don't have a degree or anything. Um but um I I do have some education in like media studies and film studies, which doesn't really mean much cuz it's not it's not a degree. It's like a 2year thing after high school. It's it's not much. Um

[2:39] but I suppose it's sort of in the industry, right? um that that's what I wanted to get into. It's very interesting how many people I've talked to on the show that their background is in film or animation or something specifically like that. I think there's something about the sort of indie side of mobile app development or maybe the iOS, you know, Apple's kind of the intersection of of science and or computer science and liberal arts or whatever that that does that. But yeah, it it actually seems really relevant in a in an interesting way. Yeah, I suppose especially I suppose like yeah, film and like you say animation, it's one of those things where

[3:20] you can do it with like a hund00 million, right? And that's what you see growing up and you think, oh, I I want to do that and you actually can just do that with a pocket camera or or you know, I suppose now you can do animation on iPad and things like that. So, it's one of those interesting things where you can aspire to these like great iconic works of art and be able to do them at home in your bedroom as well. I wonder if that's a a sort of similar thing for like um particularly app development but software in general where yeah, we have these well it's also

[3:52] a blend of you know art and science right like so much of film is actually really technical not what tripod am I going to use? Yeah. Right. Exactly. Yeah. Obsession with gear. Uh yeah, there's a surprising amount of overlap. And I guess also like we're talking about here, uh the there's a thriving indie scene in film as well, which is about how can you get the same level of

[4:19] artistry um at a way smaller budget with a small team and do something that's still impactful. Uh yeah, that's interesting. Okay. So yeah, so you have a background in in media then. Um and then is that what your career took off in then? Was that what you were doing initially? Well, it's interesting actually because yeah, immediately after um we call it college here, but it's not university. Immediately after college, um I sort of started doing freelancy style. Actually, it was while I was still there even um camera work, right? I had a $500 DSLR and I thought I was the world's best camera person. So, I was Oh, yeah. This is the

[4:59] thing. the uh the um 5D Mark II where all of a sudden you could shoot video with like real lenses that under you know $5,000 and it's like whoa. Yeah. So I I put myself out there as like video creator person, right? Um and that's sort of where Teleprompter Pro was born. Um but I did actually have like a real jobby job for I think seven or so years. Um and it was along the same lines. was a little bit more um web web design and and um sort of graphic designy. Um it was for like an events company. We did their websites and and their sort of onstage

[5:39] graphics and things and you just got into the web because you were working with them and you're like I can figure out computers or you it's something I had done at school as well. I was kind of into that idea. So that was that was a fun job to get as a first job. Right. And I I I enjoyed that. Um but yeah, so I did have these sort of two things going on where one well was more like um video production type thing, but it was kind of a hobby that I just enjoyed doing and I liked buying the gear. Um and then yeah, I had a real job in actual design and a little bit of web development

[6:14] and things like that. Um and that's the one I had to quit to go full-time with Teleprompter Pro. So, okay. So, in this mode, uh, where did Teleprompter Pro come from then? Were you already doing mobile apps or did it start with this? It's a funny story really that there's there's kind of two parts to it. I remember while I was at at um like secondary school, high school, I had really supportive teachers, particularly the the head teacher. um we've just sort of had this relationship where we sort of chatted about just stuff. Um and he kind of knew the things that I was into and we was on a we was on a trip. Um and mobile apps were kind of new. I think

[6:57] this was 2009. Um so very that's like still kind of new, but it's not this week's news, right? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So people knew um and we were just chatting and and one of his questions was like um are you are you not interested in these new mobile apps? Um and my answer was like well yeah but they're kind of difficult to to develop for right especially in 2009 right and I didn't even have a Mac. So my my 30 minutes of research and like, oh, how can I make an iPhone app, you know, the one of the beer drinking apps or what were the other fart noises? Yeah, it was just like a

[7:36] dead end like, oh, you need a Mac and you need to know this weird language that's kind of not really you can't Google so much and it kind of came to a dead end there. But when he prompted me on that trip, it kind of put the idea back in my mind, if that makes sense. Um, and for some reason I've always remembered that as the moment where I was sort of prompted to give it a real go, you know, maybe I can do this thing. That wasn't like the the week that I made Teleprompter Pro, but I I I did have a Mac at that point and I downloaded Xcode and just started playing. So I think

[8:10] that was my um entry into making a mobile app, specifically iPhone um at the time. Um, and then Teleprompter Pro came from that freelance work that I was doing where we we kind of needed a teleprompter, but not necessarily a teleprompter, but we just needed someone to read their lines. Right. Was this like a commercial kind of thing? It was uh kind of Yeah, it was this weird guy in my town who thought he could make a television pilot for some idea that he had. It was awful. It was just awful. There's so much more to that story. So, you

[8:47] knew obviously you knew teleprompterss existed. I think so, but it didn't really even come to mind. What happened was I was too cool to like write it on a piece of paper and hold it, right? That's that's no. So, my my new first generation iPad, which at the time didn't really have many uses in real life, you know, it had the a clock and a calendar, I thought, ah, I can type this into Apple Pages and scroll it with my fingers, right? That's so much better than paper, surely. Um, and it kind of wasn't. You know, scrolling on Apple Pages on a firstg iPad was kind of

[9:24] not really that great, but it worked. Um, and that's where Telecom Pro came from, basically. Um, I I had a bunch of apps on the store. They were all kind of junk, just projects that I had fun making. Um, and that one just had noticeably more downloads. Well, you say that one, but at this stage that you're describing, you know, you have you're using pages presumably with the font really big and you're scrolling. I did make it into a an app on the store. What was the impetus for uh pages isn't working for me, you know? Was there like some thing you're like, I wish it did this and finally you're like, you know what,

[10:02] I'm just going to make a cheap Yeah, I remember like just struggling to have a black background even. Uh that's I was wondering if that's what it was cuz I don't know if stuff like that do that. Maybe now you came with dark mode. I don't know if you remember the iPad launch marketing um but it was kind of similar to the early iPhone marketing where it was just a bunch of cool apps, you know, quickly showing on their on their TV ads. And one of them was that um the clapperboard, the the kind of movie thing. I thought, aha, this is cool. I'm going to have a a clapperboard

[10:36] on my iPad and uh this teleprompter thing. Um and I made a clapperboard app as well. Again, without really understanding I I knew what the primary purpose, you know, the noise and the and the video. Um but I didn't know what those numbers meant. I just put a clock there just made an app. Um so yeah, I had this like suite of just random project apps. One was a clapperboard and then yeah, I' I'd made a teleprompter which at the time you couldn't even really

[11:03] adjust the like speed or anything. It just sort of moved some text up. Um but it got download. Yeah. Okay. So it started getting downloads. So it sounds like you have you had a bunch of little apps. Did this one immediately jump out as Oh, maybe there's like an audience here. Yeah, I think so. I I distinctly remember thinking like why like it's weird. This one's getting more down. Am I just in a good position on the store or or something? Am I not sort of understanding some different keyword and people are accidentally downloading it? But but no, it was it seemed to be the first that I'd hit on that actually had a genuine use in life,

[11:42] right? Um other than my random games that I'd made or or that clapperboard that didn't really do much other than made a noise. And probably worth pointing out here that you got the name presumably right off the bat, teleprompter. Is that right? No. No. Oh. What was the original name? Well, back in those days, I think you could have like 100 characters in the app title. It It got very short maybe 10 years ago. Um, but in those days, you could have a much longer. So it was called like teleprompter video professional auto Q is a brand name in the UK for video create. It was a stupid long title that So were you you

[12:26] were you keyword stuffing like intentionally for marketing reasons at that point? Yeah, but only in the same way that I I sort of knew that was good thing to do. I had Yeah. Yeah. Understanding you're like a kid basically at this point. Yeah, but you're used to seeing at that point already Amazon, you know, products that have just all the other apps had similar things and I think it kind of worked. Um, and even in those days, um, if you're it, you would appear alphabetically in a what's new page. So, it was it was beneficial to start your app name with an A. Did you start? I could have even potentially called it a teleprompter app

[13:05] or something like that. I can't I I bet I can find it. I'll I'll I'll message you like the full name. But but no no we didn't didn't have a particularly unique or strong keyword name other than it just jump ahead fast but when did you kind of collapse it down to just teleprompter? It wasn't very long ago. It was within the last five or six years when when that started to matter. App Store is always sort of changing and evolving, but it was around about the time when it became a thing like oh a single unique search term name that people are going to type in right waited more is a good thing to have and and it was it was available in in

[13:46] one of the English languages we managed to if you go back to the point where it's in the store and you recognize it's starting to kind of tick up it was good enough but it wasn't like you were doing a bunch of extracurricular marketing at that time it was just organically getting a decent amount of downloads and presumably continuing users. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Um we've never ever had a day of zero revenue ever. Um and that's not to mean it made a whole bunch of money. It was like a $299 app for many many years. Um but that that alone was like, wow, this this thing seems to be,

[14:20] you know, people were paying for it and you know, they're not complaining. you know, it seems to be a a worthwhile sort of product that people like. Um, so yeah, it it was clear early on that that it's a it was a concept that people were were looking for at least. Yeah. So, did you kind of at that point take it more seriously as like this is a product and start trying to do either marketing or adding features to make it more worthwhile or playing with the business model or anything at that point? Just just pull us out of this and be a little meta here for a second. You know,

[14:58] talking to the audience right now, Joe is one of the most understated people I've ever met. like you've probably already picked this up, but he talks as if he's just this random guy who like there's nothing interesting about him and then randomly he'll talk about like dealing with bug reports from the International Space Station or something and you'll be like what in the world and so I already am prep I'm prepared for who knows what wild things I'm going to so don't let his uh you know modesty uh fool you here Uh yeah, but I can hear it in

[15:34] your voice even there. You're like I don't want to make this sound as cool as it actually is. Uh no, it's I don't know. I just I want to be careful that I'm not like making stories up cuz I I don't know. It just I know when you think back to like 15 years ago, oh yeah, I just I did that

[15:51] and it went well and that's what I did cuz I knew what to do. And that's not how it goes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um, but yeah, from from what I can remember, I I I like the idea of like having a cool product, you know, and being able to like release updates and announce things. I don't know. That that was cool. So, I like that aspect of it, but I don't know if I'd quite sort of um committed to like, okay, this is a thing that I'm going to do for 15 years and this is our big thing. But rather that um it had some users. So it was kind of cool that I could do these

[16:26] changes and updates and you know whatever people were requesting it was fun to then release that. Were you using it yourself occasionally? Yeah, I I didn't do much of that type of work but um I did get opportunities to do that. So that was certainly useful um just to like have a day actually in the field doing these things. So the primary driver of you know your work then was based on feedback you were getting from users like requests and stuff like that. Yeah, pretty much. Um and and at the time I I was kind of stupid 19year-old. I didn't really know what I was doing in terms of like software engineering. Um,

[17:03] for a very very long time, um, all of the data in the app was stored in NS user defaults, but in a wild way. Like the the keys just had it would be like user script one, user script 2, user script 3, and I would just like loop through those. Oh wow. It was just it worked perfectly, but it was just when it came to like introducing a new um variable or something uh it was just a it was just a whole lot of uh un undoing bad work and things. So I kind of struggled with turning into like a real piece of software that I could um iterate on and and and you know make meaningful

[17:47] um updates to. But but that was my thing. So it was like, yeah, now how can we introduce a video recording option, you know, so you could record a selfie video at the same time. That took me a very long time to figure out. Um, but yeah, it certainly hadn't become like this is our thing, our products and our and our sort of company now. Well, when you're saying our at this stage, it was still just you, right? Yeah. I don't know why I'm saying are. I think it's just cuz I'm thinking about us now. Yeah. As a company. But but certainly at the time, no, I was just a sort of 19, 20 year old with this app on the app store. At some point then,

[18:25] you know, it it reached the point where you did make that jump. What's the path there? Like how how did you get to the point where it was making enough money that you could kind of make that that jump? that that kind of happened like on its own um in terms of like it got to a revenue point where it could sustain me at least. Um it was very very slow. Um, and I think it probably just happened as the app store grew. And you know, and I I wonder even if you if you took that into consideration, um, the app itself might not have even grown or it might have

[19:04] shrunk and grown at different rates as I was just sort of dipping in and out of, um, working on it and doing other things in my life. Um, so that kind of happened on its own over a few years. Um but then I was very very slow to commit to okay this is what I'm going to do now with my life. Um and I think it was just that sort of fear of what if it changes or goes wrong or I don't know I don't know what I'm doing. Yeah I this is like a thing I think so there are different types of people. I think me and you are in in the same boat where

[19:41] we assume that literally everything is happening to us and that we're not responsible for for any of the success. And when you're in that mode, I think that's actually healthy in the app store in particular because there are a lot of factors that can drive users towards you that like I know people who, you know, they they work on their app all the time. and they're always adding features and they're attributing their growth to to the features that they're adding. And and that very well might be true, but it's also possible that, you know, I I've talked to many people on the show, in fact, that were doing that for a long time. They had a business that was growing

[20:17] and then very suddenly the bottom drops out and they have no idea why. And it turns out there was some keyword that they were ranking well for and a small change in the algorithm or a tweak that they made just caused the whole thing to like invert and then they had to do a bunch of research. It doesn't mean that your business is going to fall apart, but it does mean that like you have to be aware of where that's coming from if you want to solve it. Uh and so yeah, I I very much understand that. also as somebody who has a side project where sometimes it gets lots of

[20:50] attention from me, sometimes it doesn't and it's it's not growing like your trajectory, but it's it sustains itself and some of that is just, you know, I keep it solid and working and I'm taking advantage of the fact that the app store is doing a lot of that work for you. So, yeah, I I definitely understand. I think that's a really healthy way to like look at the app store is uh it's this sort of river with water running through it and you can kind of tap into it but the river can move. It's a much bigger thing than you. Uh you kind of Yeah. need to understand

[21:22] that things can change out from under you at any time. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. So, so it took me um probably another five years after it would have been enough to sustain me to actually end that full-time job. Um, and I was sort of aware of it, but I I certainly was, you know, I was in no rush to um yeah, put all my eggs in that basket. Were you doing things during this time or maybe immediately afterwards specifically to make that more sustainable? Like at some point, I know you switched your business model. Uh you when we, you know, where we left off, you weren't really doing much marketing. Did you start playing with those kinds

[22:04] of things? Like what were the things you were doing to kind of make it a little bit more of a capital B business? A lot of of what I I did to sort of make that happen um was things like price increases and sort of just being a bit more upfront about okay, this is a paid product. You know, there's you can use it for free, but you know, that's just so you can try it out and see if it fits in with you. We're a paid product and we're not $2.99 anymore. We're I don't know. I think when I when I quit my job it was like $17.99 which to me was a lot

[22:38] of money for an app you know but your industry like you're selling almost B2B uh in terms of how a lot of people are probably purchasing it like if you're on a production like the cost of a physical teleprompter granted they're going to have to use this with other physical items but like uh yeah $17 is like basically free in terms of a movie budget, even a really low budget, you know, production. Yeah. A lot of that was sort of me learning that and being confident enough to to, you know, put our pricing a little bit more along the lines of what we were actually offering. Um,

[23:20] and I'm just trying to think when we went subscription, but that was that was quite a while after I went full-time. Um, so yeah, I think a lot of it was just that actually understanding our position in the in the market and then sort of that doing that puts me in a position where I have a little bit more responsibility to create a product that's sort of robust and does the things that people need it to do. Um, so they kind of went hand in hand where you know I I position us as a sort of serious thing as oh

[23:54] I've actually got to make it. You got to follow that up. Yeah. Yeah. So, I think that helped. Um, yeah. And I think it was about 2018 that I went full-time and then 2020 is when we went subscription. So, what was the subscription transition like? What drove you to do that? I mean, I can guess. And then and then how did you do that transition and how did it go? We' done things in the past where I' I' we would release like a new app and that was the next version and you have to sort of buy this new upgrades essentially. Yeah. But it's kind of not possible in the app store, right? We tried. Just

[24:29] a new audience entirely, right? Did you ever successfully move people over? Like what were you doing inapp things? Were you collecting emails and sending like hey there's a new version? Yeah, we we had um email list of our customers and yeah, we would we would have inapp prompts and and just all those things, but it it was just a a mess really. Um I think you it can be done, right? There's a couple of examples where that's that's kind of their model. But we weren't really at the scale that that would work and I just didn't sort of like it anyway. I avoided it for a long time,

[25:03] but subscription was the the right move. And we've still we still have um sort of uh leftovers from presubscription. We still have two apps where we used to have a light and a paid, you know. Um that's kind of a difficult thing for us to work around. But but yeah, subscription was the right way for us to go. That was why you switched over. Uh the pain of doing upgrade pricing is is crazy. How did that go? Did you have users upset? Did was it just pretty smooth? Yeah, it kind of doesn't matter what you do, people will get upset, right? Because what we did was anyone

[25:36] who's purchased you just access forever like you what you paid for you full access forever. So all of our customers there's no difference to them. Um but we found most of the people that got upset were those customers thinking that they would be charged now and you know it was just a communication issue really. Some of my favorite uh you know bad reviews I have on the store are people being upset that it's a subscription app and the literal first thing is or or it's yeah like subscription you know hack or garbage or scam or whatever and then it says uh the very beginning will say great app uh even though I'm grandfathered in and

[26:14] they don't charge me this is evil and I'm against it one star and I'm kind of like you know you know I I almost see those as positive one star s like if somebody's going to sort by one stars and the one stars they see are like uh they treated me very well. I just don't like

[26:32] that this costs money. The app is good. I'm kind of like I'm okay if customers see that, you know. Um but yeah, it is it is there's like a holy war kind of uh aspect to subscriptions. Yeah. So we we had that. Um and I think to be honest, I struggled um justifying it to myself. Um, I'm thinking like, well, what what are we going to publish every month? You know, what what are we going to keep putting out to justify our subscription? But, you know, that's just not how that works, particularly not for these kind of utility um products. It took me a while to

[27:06] kind of come around to the idea. Um, and again, we we went in with a very low, like $20 a year subscription price cuz I just thought that's what sounded fair. I really was just picking numbers from the sky. Yeah. But yeah, otherwise it was it was quite smooth. We just used that um transaction receipt date to grandfather everyone in um and then anybody else just saw the um subscription payable and we still today offer a lifetime price. Um it's it's basically three and a bit years um price and it and that seems to please most people. Um so it was fairly smooth. you know, we it feels like it was kind of rough cuz you you always receive the the

[27:50] the heat directly, right? All the complaints come to you and it sounds like you've just sort of done the worst thing in the world. But but no, it it was it was certainly a good move and it seemed to go pretty pretty smoothly. And then after that, was it pretty immediate like, okay, this is a little more sustainable. uh now we can kind of expand the business. We can get to the part where you saying we and us in our uh is actually more accurate. Um I think I I was comfortable that it it was a sustainable thing to be doing um for a while by that point. Um I'm kind of two years into being full-time and maybe seven years

[28:36] into it being my main source of income. Um, so I was quite happy with that at that point. Um, but I suppose, yeah, you're right. It was about then that that that gave me then the opportunity to expand a little bit and and you know, things like customer support were actually impacting my life because I just had so many messages to reply and things. And then, you know, I I I had a lot of um I cared a lot about making sure either people got the answer they needed or were corrected about how wrong they were. Um so that kind of kept me up for too long in the days. Well, and it is like you were saying, if you're charging a premium price,

[29:23] part of the expectation there is Yeah. that there is support, right? So, a lot of questions we get are just super simple, like two-word answers, or it's just, oh, you just need to press this or you've you've got your orientation lock on, that's why it's not going landscape. Um, and I I sort of feared that that would turn into one-star reviews or or just someone abandoning the products. And I don't know why I had so much care for like individual cases, but it was just it was important to me. and and that sort of consumed my my um working day um for a long time. So yeah,

[29:58] our first hire was um customer support take care of all of that and and I could go back to trying to build software however I could figure it out. Was that like a freeing feeling once you got that going? Yeah, I think so. It it very quickly um became not my problem at all. Yeah, I would maybe get one or two really weird edge case questions or just decisions like,

[30:26] "Oh, should we just give this person the pro upgrade cuz of XY Z?" And yeah. Um, but yeah, that quite quickly it just sort of took all of that away from me. Serious. Yeah, email is is a job, but it often isn't the job, you know? Uh, but it can be like, "Oh, I got a lot done today because you answered like 12 emails that each took an hour somehow." Uh, yeah, I get that. But since then you've you've expanded the team. Like what size are you at right now? Uh there's four of us now including me. So me plus three. And what how has that changed kind of

[30:59] the trajectory of the company going from you know just you to you plus you know a team of people? It's interesting because um from from just the inside my experience it feels like oh it's the same right? we've got the mostly the same product and we're kind of putting out the same amount of updates and things for customers and we're we're essentially doing the same thing. But now it just for some reason takes four of us which I I took me a while to sort of come to terms with. But what I've realized um and certainly if I start like looking at actual numbers is I

[31:38] if I look at certain graphs I can see the points in which I hired people um and it's because like oh okay now I can focus on um how should we position our upgrade product you know when do we show the pay wall what do we think is fair to put behind the pay wall and in front and we could

[31:59] run experiments on it and I was free to do that cuz it kind of takes time, right? It's Yeah. Yeah. It allowed me to make those product decisions without having to do engineering stuff just to like fix a bug that came in iOS 16 or something. Um so certainly the last um two years which is when we got a swift engineer to take care of actual software um we've been able to sort of grow in those ways that I always had at the bottom of my priority list like you know I do I build this cool new feature or do I just see where the pay wall should appear and I I I

[32:43] kind of don't like those things anyway. I I I I have to be very careful and sort of mindful of how we're doing those things. So that was always at the bottom of my list. And having an excellent team take care of those things like engineering and features and and you know what are we going to build next lets me spend a lot of time really being considerate about okay how do we grow the things that we might be kind of ignoring you know and what are some of those things that have have moved the needle or didn't in a way that you know you thought like a nice onboarding for

[33:22] probably 13 years. Our onboarding was just a a sign in, you know, login and create an account. And you're it's like you're speaking directly to me. This has been the the top of my should do priority list for probably and and you know, it's kind of it is important, right? because it it it as you say moves the needle for like growth and and things like revenue and retention and things but but really yeah I want to be building the things that people are asking for. They're not asking for a better onboarding, especially with a subscription, but even even without, it's like I'm always thinking about the current users. Mhm. Um,

[34:07] and I I don't take the time to think about, which quite frankly is the majority of my users are new users, right? Like most people try it for a little while and then and then bounce uh whether free or trial or whatever. And so it's not just like especially living in you know revenue land. It's easy to only be thinking like yeah that can improve my conversion rate and all this stuff which is I'm not obviously not saying that that's bad but even from a pure like wholesome product level. I get so many customer support emails that are like, "How can I create a, you know, a custom mix of ambient noises inside of my app?" Yeah. And it's

[34:46] like, that's a feature in the app. Yeah. And if I literally just had a lit a quick slide that was just like, you can do this thing, even if it doesn't really show them how to do it. Just the fact that it says that it's something you can do, can go a long way to improve the amount of people who find that feature, right? Um, so it really is like good product work, but it's not uh it's not satisfying in the same way that I think a lot of sort of product oriented people uh want work to be satisfying. I guess it's just one of those things like

[35:17] I struggled with sort of feeling bad about optimizing for those things cuz it feels like what am I actually doing here? This is for me now, not for for users. Um, but ultimately they they do they find features like you say and you know there it's an opportunity to sort of put them on some rails and just sort of say here's where's this is here's where this is and you can do these things if you want and onboarding. So that was that one that like moved the needle for you business-wise? Absolutely. Yeah, I can I can point to you on a graph where that happened. It was it was big for us. Um here okay I'll earn my paycheck here for a second. So,

[35:55] literally just this morning, uh I I saw a feature that we are rolling out currently to our charts, which means everybody listening probably it's already out to everybody, but we have a little thing where you can annotate your graphs now. So, you can like you could mark, you didn't know cuz I I literally found out this morning, but you can mark, you know, I hire, you know, this is when we hired Greg, uh or this is when Apple featured us or whatever. And yeah, it's I literally had to then prepare for this uh interview, but I already have, you know, all these ideas in my head of like, oh, I need to go in and mark when this podcast feature happened or

[36:32] whatever. And it's funny listening to you say you keep saying like uh I can point on the graph and I'm like that's like an interesting exercise to to do. Obviously whether you use RavenCat or not, you know, it's nice that you can mark it on the graph, but just to go back and actually like have I guess this is another one of those like when you hire people, you have a little time to do self-reflection, but it's a good self-reflection exercise to go back and like think of the things you thought were important and like look for the signals. Are were they actually and then if you see a weird signal, see if you can pinpoint the real cause of it. Yeah. Um

[37:09] yeah, that's pretty cool. So yeah, so onboarding was one. Um I know another one that the talk that you're about to give at Deep Dish, uh which I haven't seen yet, so I don't know the answers to what you're going to say, but you're giving a talk that has to do a lot with your sort of email marketing that you did with with uh teleprompter. So can you talk about like what that was and how that's been beneficial for you? Yeah. Um it's top of mind, so I've got lots of nice sound bites for you. Um, but I'm quite convinced that that is the single most important thing I ever did for

[37:46] my career in this country. Wow. More than the ASO. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, wow. Okay. It's hard for me to know obviously if if I'd gone a different way then maybe. Um, but from very early on, um, I I just sort of asked people for an email address in in my random apps that I was making as part of onboarding. Well, I didn't I didn't have onboarding. That's why thing that popped up. But yeah, I I think that was just because I like the idea of being able to like announce cool things to lots of people. Um, and it's just like obviously it was kind of

[38:23] pointless early on with my just total random barely functional apps that I'd made. Um, but what that meant was even very early versions of Teleprompter Pro, we have this nice customer list that we can we can speak to. So what that means is when we did do like we tried upgrade pricing and doing different versions, actually possible at least then Yeah, it was possible. we could send an email and we'd everyone would know and people would be able to we'd steer people in the right direction. Um, and I think it's one of those things that allowed me um like how you were saying earlier to have a bit more confidence that my entire life

[39:05] isn't just balancing on like the app store search algorithm. Even though it kind of is, if there's kind of some temporary roadblock or something does change, we do have that opportunity to kind of communicate or just like, hey, we've had to change our name for some crazy reason and like, you know, we're not starting from square one. Um, and there just Yeah, there's there's lots of examples of that, but that that's been really important for us. Do you use that for growth then? like are are you re-engaging you know churned customers and seeing them coming back more along the lines of you know retention I guess it's a strange one because we don't actually

[39:50] even though we it's a kind of big part of how we've been able to grow we don't go too deep on like like you say re-engaging churn subscribers or or or anything like that but we do things like when they cancel we'll ask them why you know and and just gives us a lot of nice feedback. Um,

[40:11] or we'll ask you ask them why through an email. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, okay. Okay, that makes sense. A couple of days after signing up, we'll just ask them, have you got any questions? Or, you know, thumbs up, thumbs down, and then we we will personally come back and just sort of chat to customers who have questions. And that's that's led to a lot of either great um product ideas or or just sort of fun partnerships or connections we've been able to make. So that that's been good. Yeah. We can contribute to growth like wouldn't this all be downstream from those things? Yeah. I wouldn't necessarily say are super um growth contributors, but they've been

[40:53] very good at sort of guiding us in our general direction, which ultimately I suppose means growth. Um but but specifically for growth, we've been able to um when we have like something like a uh I'm just trying to think of a good example. When when we went subscription, um you know, we could put a bit of a discount and tell everyone, "Hey, we're Yeah. If you've been on the fence, try our subscription cuz it's cheap this week, you know, and that that gives us a big big boost and we still see that bump every year because that's when

[41:31] we sent a bunch of people. Do you do discounts often? Like outside of that? About once a year. Not necessarily like Black Friday or anything. Um we've we've tried Black Friday and it it it works. Um, I ju I just don't want to be um, you know, I don't want an email from Joe Allen to just be like 50% off, get 10% off, ends tomorrow, don't don't lose out, you know. So, we we're mindful not to do that. And you mentioned it's an email from Joe Allen. So, and I've noticed this looking through your app reviews recently. A surprising amount of them say the creator Joe. Yeah. which is

[42:08] interesting. I I never thought of you as much like you know you think of like Marco Arment or some of these David Smith like some of these like kind of well-known in the iOS because they have podcasts or you know whatever. Uh and you link those two together but at least talking to you I always got the idea that like Teleprompter Pro is this sort of industry app. Uh but it sounds like you have made a a personal connection in some way. Was that intentional? I've not really thought about it but I think you're probably right. Um, and we do we kind of position ourselves how you describe as a

[42:42] as an entity rather than a person who has an app, right? Um, I I often think um along the lines of like um Procreate, you know, we are this product, right? Um but yeah, a lot of the communications come from me. Um, so I think some of like what you've read the the app store reviews, people are kind of happy to have heard from me or they feel like we've had this sort of connection and we've been able to form a sort of, you know, like a relationship over this thing that they've asked for and I come back and say, "Oh, yeah, we can do that." Or, you know,

[43:20] have you thought about doing it this way around? Um, and yeah, a lot of those have come from we've sent like a welcome, thanks for downloading Teleprompter Pro, and people just reply. And it's been it's been great. Almost everything that we try, we've been able to at least have people see it, you know, not necessarily be successful or make a bunch of revenue. Um, but things that we've tried, we've been able to send lots of people that way and we get either get feedback or it's gone well. And you know, I just don't think I can't think of how we could have got to where we are now without having that in place, a a list of customers that we can

[44:02] send a nice message to. Another thing I'm interested in is I think whenever we first met a few years ago, you were kind of starting this I want to go out into the into the field so to speak. Y now obviously when we met we were at developer conferences but I know you go to uh like film industry conferences like NAB and stuff as well. Uh I'm curious like your thinking that drove you to kind of think of this as a strategic thing you should start doing and then

[44:35] how how do you feel it's worked out? It's been a you know few years of you kind of doing that. Yeah, it's interesting because that kind of lines up with um what we mentioned earlier is when we hired a swift engineer so I didn't have to be always engineering and just working. You being gone for you know a week or a few days or whatever doesn't mean that the business stops. Exactly. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I to be honest I can't really remember my my thought process as to like oh maybe this will be a good idea. Um other than just sort of thinking like oh WWDC looks cool maybe I should sort of join in with that. It's been a really

[45:15] good chance to um actually appreciate like what we've done with Teleprompter Pro. you know, it sort of made me realize, oh, this this thing has kind of grown and and it's it's done well. My mindset just sort of has sort of realized a little bit more. It's like, oh, okay, we do have this sort of position in our industry and on the app store that works really well for us. Um, but also things like I I wouldn't, you know, we've now been able to have a relationship with Apple and the App Store team because of going along to these conferences and things. That one specifically would be WWDC, I presume. Right. I have not yet been able to get a ticket. Oh,

[45:56] but but yes, you're you're right. It's it is it's being in proximity being in town. Yeah. And like I didn't even really know that that was a thing until recently that I I kind of understood that Apple must work with some developers to do these things, right? Um, but I didn't necessarily understand that like it's not unusual for an app on the store to have like a contact with Apple and you sort of back and forth with some feedback and things. Um, so yeah, that that's been really cool. But it to be honest, it's just been nice to actually have friends in the industry. You know, I've been doing this for like 15 years and I've not known anyone

[46:38] else in the same industry, you know, even really in like software engineering because I don't work with anyone else. Yeah. So, it's been nice to have people in exactly the same industry and in some cases events like running into people with the same products like you know it's been really cool. Yeah. Do you feel like that's in like worked its way into the business? Obviously, you know, having some connections within the platform provider, you know, Apple is is useful in that one context, but have have you found that like conversations with fellow industry, you know, people um both on the developer, app developer side and on the the sort of film side,

[47:22] have those trips contributed to the product and the business in like sort of concrete ways, do you think? Yeah, I think so. I I can think of like one or two kind of decisions that I I was on the fence about. Um and even like leaning one way and and having had conversations with people, I've fully changed my mind and just sort of um I I want to say like they just made me realize what an idiot I was being. I had this this wild idea to like buy some super expensive domain name because I thought that was like a big step in the right direction. You know that our next big thing will be we'll have this cool.com

[48:05] and then we'll grow in that direction and then um it was um Curtis Slopes. What's his surname? Curtis Herbert. That's it. Yeah. I I keep want to say Curtis Parrots, but it's not parents like the bird. Uh, and he just said like, "What? What are you talking about?" Like, "No, I can't remember. I can't remember specifically what he said, but it was he just said like,

[48:29] "What are you talking about?" No. Yeah. Yeah. And it's like, "Oh, yeah. Maybe not." Yeah. Sometimes you need mentor who who's who's been in the trenches or who understands or even thinks exactly the same way you do, but hasn't been sitting and stewing on this idea. Yeah. who can have that clarity of mind to be like, you know, slap like, hey, think about this for more than 8 seconds uh in this other way and then it and then it becomes crystal clear. Yeah, that's interesting. There there's certainly been more things I just can't necessarily remember them. But but yeah, just stuff like that where I've been able to

[49:01] bounce something off of someone for 10 seconds and just like, oh yeah, of course. Have the the like film industry events that you've gone to, those are very very different than uh developer ones, right? They're a lot less personal. They're way bigger. Have you found those useful to go to at all? They're they're certainly like fun to go to. Like this big expo hall with like crazy gear and people and things. That's on my bucket list. This was, you know, before I got into this, like Dubdub and Google IO were kind of these two conferences I really wanted to go to. But the other side of me that's always been obsessed with gear, NAB has always been

[49:39] at the top and Adobe Max. Those are like the actual the two big uh industry events that I've wanted to go to. So I I'm always jealous when you say you've been and I see the pictures. It it is good fun. Although I I've made less um sort of connections there just because of their sheer size. You don't run into the same people ever. You know it

[50:00] talk like thousands and thousands of people. It's the only place I've ever been recognized. They recognized my t-shirt cuz I had a pro t-shirt on. So, they didn't really recognize me, but they approached me and, you know, they just like, "Oh, we we use telepro all the time." That was cool. I felt like a celebrity for about a year after that. And you've been running those or you're like going as a hey, we'll let you use our stuff, you know, for free or or watch you use it basically to kind of get feedback. It's more so um just a genuine actual like they've just hired me like anybody else. Um There has been one or two where we just come along and just like, "Oh,

[50:40] we we'll do that and let us bring our things and we'll take some cool photos and things, but but no, it's been fun to like actually just be like doing that job for the day." Um, and people don't necessarily know, you know, they wouldn't they don't know or care that Teleont Pros our product.

[50:58] Um, but it's been really cool to Yeah. have that hands-on experience and just sort of see. There's a lot of things that people won't ever say. You know, I had the idea to um use like Xbox controllers to to do the um control the scrolling of the text. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Cuz you have something anyone's ever going to ask for, right? People tend to ask for what they already know about. It's like, "Oh, how do I do this thing that I've seen before?" And she, "Oh, I've seen that you can use these Xbox controllers for those like um camera

[51:35] robot arms. Have you seen those?" Right. Yes. Oh, we just use that for teleprompter. Excellent. And it's just maybe that's not a very good example, but it's just really cool to actually be have the time to go and use our product in real ways that's not just like on my desk imagining how it might be. There's this cool thing uh whenever I had Clemen Straer on the show like a year ago or so. uh he talked about going to these big gaming conferences and they would always have these like indie sections where it was like booths that indies could sign up for and people could come and

[52:10] like play their game, you know? Uh and with a game it's obviously easier because it's like everybody at a gaming conference is able to play a game. But like watching people just actually use the thing Yeah. kind of raw uh in getting their feedback and it's something that like most of us don't really get like our entire view is us or uh and us using it in weird you know non-normal ways, right? Or like feedback we get from email or from maybe family and friends if we're if we're lucky. Um

[52:44] and and Adrian Eves who runs a community kit which is like an alt Oh yeah conference alongside WWDC. Uh, I think it's it's yeah, I think it's free to go to. He's doing it again this year. Um, and I think he's doing the same thing again. He took that idea and applied it to app developers. And so he does this indie fair thing at Dubdub. Um, where people can just set up there's like a big rectangle of tables and you can people can just walk through and like

[53:13] play with people's apps and it was crazy to see. Obviously like it makes more sense or less sense. uh depending on on the app itself in terms of somebody playing with it live right there. Um but it's it's wild how much just having an opportunity to let people come in cold and like play with it and and at an event like that, oh they can't find this button. I need to make it bright red. Seeing them be confused about things that you would just never guess that they're confused about. Uh it's crazy how much of a difference it makes. And sometimes even using the product yourself outside

[53:47] of the context of developing it can give you that same thing where you're like, "Oh, this made total sense on my desk. Uh but now I'm now it's it's in the you know it's in the uh teleprompter you know physical device which of course I'm sure you have sitting on your desk as well but you don't have a giant camera hooked up to it and you know uh focus puller and you know all this gear and stuff and just seeing it in that context radically can change you know. Yeah. Actually, one of the things that we've we've done is um we now have a studio like 4 miles from my house with

[54:27] like three big broadcast cameras set up as if we are doing something and we're not. Um specifically for that purpose so we can pretend we're doing some sort of big important broadcast. Have you ever used it for you? I feel like you should do something with that. Um like marketing or goofy ideas. I think on our user guide. Yeah, if you you could Google it, but if you go to our user guide,

[54:53] we've got like two tutorial videos that about one minute long and those are shot in our studio. We're like way higher budget than they need to be. But it was we used our teleprompter and we figured out, okay, how do we set this up? And you know, what are we going to do for

[55:10] I don't know, everything. Now, now that's been really cool. Where my mind's at now is like, hm, when's the next time I'm going to be in London? Like, oh, absolutely crazy. Can I come up with if you're going to be here? We'll come and shoot something in that studio. Okay. Okay. Oh, we need to make that. I need to I need to sit there and chew on. It's on the train line from London. You'll be perfect. Perfect. Good to know. Good to know. This is the most valuable interview uh launched episode I've done in a long time. Uh so, okay. So, we've talked a lot about Teleprompter Pro and you mentioned how,

[55:41] you know, you don't have to be sitting and doing the normal engineering day-to-day yourself. Uh, and you can think about the product and the product can keep moving along even if you're distracted by other things. And something you've done very recently, as in this week, uh, is you've actually launched an entire new app and if I'm understanding correctly,

[56:01] it's pretty much your indie app. This is a, you know, Joe Allen production. Is that right? Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Nobody else had any involvement to be honest. I think it was just a little bit of um kind of missing out on that fun certainly for like when we've gone to these conferences and you know see these people excited about launching new things and and I sort of missed that that fun of building something new or or yeah sort of putting something out there that's kind of experimental or I don't know. So, it was a a a bit of a sort of hobby project, but that kind of luckily fits a little bit in with our existing users anyway. So,

[56:44] I can get away with putting it on our app store account and and and doing all that. Um, but yeah, it's it's been fun. It wouldn't be possible without, you know, Claude Code. Um we we we' done a similar thing in teleprompter but it that was again before um LLM. Yeah. Can you explain what the app is? Oh, of course. Yeah. Sorry. Um so captions, it puts wordbyword captions on your videos. Um similar to like Instagram and Tik Tok, but the point being you don't have to use Instagram or Tik Tok to do it. Um, and I'm hoping I can put some sort of fun styles and and animations and different unique options in there that

[57:31] that might not necessarily be possible in on on other apps and and certainly not worth doing on like something like Final Cut Pro. Um, yeah, it's just kind of from personal perspective, this is something I have to do very frequently with the videos I'm doing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I I I've understood that this is a thing that people like or not necessarily like, but they they they do a lot and they it would be cool to have a because it's important like so much, you know, when you when video content is one of the primary drivers of of your marketing stuff. Um

[58:09] it's a lot of people their phones are muted, they're on the subway or whatever. Um, and people I certainly will sit and I'll read the captions of a video as opposed to listening to it because I'm still interested. Um, but making them more engaging than kind of the default ones uh that you maybe get for free depending on the platform you're posting to can make a really big difference. Um, and yeah, and honestly what I was doing I' I now use your app. Uh, I have I've been on the test flight for a little while, but I frequently would sit and try and do it on my phone

[58:44] because there's there's obviously a lot of apps that can do this. Um, and oftent times I just would get back to my hotel room or wherever and open up Premiere Pro and just do it manually all there because I was a little picky about it. And the thing that stands out to me with captions specifically is that they they just look like nice out of the box. M um and you support widescreen which a lot of these tools like Instagram has an edits you know editing app but it's it's always everything wants to be vertical and a lot of my videos depending on where I'm posting them are not

[59:21] um and so just having you know the fact that it's very quick and simple and the correction on you know it never wants to say revenue cap right it always wants to say revenue cap or or their separate words or it's not capitalized guys ready? It's really easy to just go in uh you know, people should definitely check it out. It's got a cool instead of a timeline scrubber.

[59:45] Uh you have the words in these like pills and you can tap on them to, you know, edit them. But that's what you scrub and that actually scrubs the video. I've never seen that before. Was that like your idea of how to do this? Where did that come from? I remember thinking to ourselves like, "Oh, that's a cool way of just being able to sort of swish through a video because you really in that context, you only care about the words, right?" Exactly. Um, yeah. So, I I certainly had seen it before. I can't I can't take credit for that, but yeah, it's fun and it and I think it avoids the issue that I'd seen in other products where

[1:00:22] they're kind of a you can do everything product. you know, we don't want to trim the video or add images or do anything. It's just here's the captions and has one job. It does it very quickly. Um, which honestly for there's a long way to go. You know, there's lots of things that I would like to add and there's things that I know are missing. Um, but it's been really fun to just give myself that challenge of let's put something fun and new out and and try and do

[1:00:50] the fun new liquid glass things and something fun with uh foundation models and and stuff like that. So, yeah, it it has been good fun. There's two kind of big things I think worth worth discussing here. Uh, the first just because there might be any of our American listeners may have, you know, searched in the app store already for captions and not seen it. So, it's not called captions in America. Uh, what is it called in America? And do I'm curious about that. It's recap. Recap. And why is it why is it different names in uh the US region versus elsewhere to the level that you know you can kind of get into? We like the name captions and and I think

[1:01:30] that's a good name. I I wish it could be called captions. um in the US um we we had a little bit of an issue with an existing trademark which um I think is a non-issue but I don't really have the uh what's the word I don't want to say motivation I don't know but so there was you want to spend all of your time in US court systems arguing that you think it's okay yeah exactly I I've been there personally with with dark noise stuff as Yeah, an existing trademark which um it is a non-issue, but it was expensive both cash and sort of resources and time to to sort of

[1:02:20] put the wheels in motion to just make sure everything was okay with it. Are you worried at all about it being different names? Did you consider just changing it everywhere? Yeah, I I did I did consider that. I still don't know how I feel about having a different name. Um, but the the sort of nice thing is that because I'm considering this as a little bit of a sort of hobby side project, I can take those sort of risks. Not necessarily that it's a risk, but like you can always change it. Okay, let's just try let's try doing different names. See

[1:02:50] what happens there. Um, so yeah, it's called Recap in the US. It's called captions everywhere else. And then the other interesting drama with this app is you were very close to releasing it. What when when was the first time? I think in like January whenever we were talking, but it kind of got kind of got hung up in the uh the the app store process. What what happened there? That was still a little bit bizarre, but I think we got to the bottom of it. So, I wasn't actually necessarily going to release it then. Um but what I wanted to do was release for pre-order,

[1:03:27] right? Ah yes. Um and it and it released uh earlier this week um for like general download. Um but yeah, it it was getting some really strange rejections um from App Store review. Um I have to assume that App Store review is kind of different now. Certainly now, yes. But I think in January in particular was when the the Vibe Code apps mass flood kind of started. So like now it's a big deal and app store times are slow, but it's like yeah, it's an issue that they've been wrestling with for a couple months. I think in January was when they first started getting hit, maybe even unexpectedly with just the amount of apps, you know, not that

[1:04:13] vibe coded apps are by nature bad, but many of them are bad. And so there's this kind of whoa, what are we dealing with here? Yeah. So to just like to to sort of build the story, the the app uh in my opinion is not a vibecoded app. like yeah I know what I'm doing to a certain extent for how to build apps and and work with swift. Um so it's a Xcode project and I created all the files and considered data models and everything like that. Um but I did use claude code to sort of do a lot of the heavy lifting of just typing out a bunch of stuff that I can't be bothered to type out. And

[1:04:52] um it certainly helped with things like um the video rendering pipeline and and things that they that are beyond my ability. Um so in that context it kind of is a vibe coded app, right? Um so there's there's that part of it. And on the surface um at least as far as I'm concerned, it doesn't appear to be a vibe coded app, right? It doesn't have the purple gradients and and yeah. Well, to be clear, it being vibe coded is not a violation either. No. Um, but yes, using the app, it feels like honestly it feels like a Jo Allen app. Like it's got that Yeah, you know, I spent doing nice Yeah. nice UI design and Swift UI in a

[1:05:36] lot of cases and then UI kit where it needs to be. Um, and an awful lot of that was just me doing my thing to the extent that I know how to do it. Um and yeah and you're right vibe coded apps are absolutely not an issue. Um it just helps with my story for this rejection. It was otherwise quite normal. Um and it had one or two rejections for the the standard thing that a new app will be rejected for. So um I I think it was along the lines of like um specifically how the privacy policy was linked and things like that. Yeah. bundled them into

[1:06:15] um privacy and terms and they wanted them as separate links. fine, fine. You know, it's totally to be expected, especially for a new app. They they seem to get a bit more scrutiny. And then we got this rejection for um under the broad category of spam. Um which in itself was a bit of a problem because it was a very broad rejection,

[1:06:38] right? It's like what? Okay. If you read those guidelines, there's a lot that it covers. Yeah. It encompasses like copycat apps and um apps that we don't need any more of. Um um and then importantly it was um template apps loweffort. You know this is not really you've not really put any effort into this. You've just put some code that you found up on the store. I was about to say a lot of times these are like

[1:07:07] GitHub repos that people Exactly. Yeah. You know people make a tutorial and they just download it. give it a different name. Exactly. Yeah. That's the thing that it was rejected for. Um and that's not the case. Right. I I Yeah. As someone who's gone through a lot of caption apps, I can assure you your app does not look like other caption apps. Exactly. Um, so I had a lot of back and forth just sort of saying that and it's like, "No, no, look, I've done I've done these foundation model things and we spent a lot of time on the UI here and we're following guidelines here and it's

[1:07:37] it's not a template app, you know, and it was just the same rejection coming back. Um, spam, copycat, don't need any more template apps." Um, yeah, so we we had a lot of trouble with that. Weirdly, it sort of prompted me to make the app a little bit better. I was trying to sort of Okay, maybe they've got a problem with this screen. I'll make it Yeah, I'll make it a bit more unique, even though I think it should be this way. Whatever. Um, and essentially it came

[1:08:10] down to a couple of things, but we found out because we arranged the um the telephone call. You know, you can request a telephone call from App Store Review. Have you ever done that? I haven't. And I think most people don't even really realize that that's a thing you can do. Yeah. It's like a tiny line at the bottom of your rejection. And I think you have to have I I don't know, but I don't think it's always there. Under certain circumstances, a line will be added to the bottom of your sort of rejection email says like, "If you want to

[1:08:41] talk more about it, you can request a call here." And it's just a little like hyperlink to a thing. Um, so I did that and it was it was great. I got a call from a real person. Um, and it was surprisingly like human even for even for like what you'd expect for from Apple. Um, so what happened was he he called and just said, "Yeah, I'm calling about this captions app." Um, and he said, "We've spotted it's a code issue. we've spotted code somewhere in in your package that's just automatically flagging up as um he he described it as sort of downloaded code or or

[1:09:25] he didn't really use the word template but I think that's what he was trying to describe um which again was kind of strange for me I didn't really know why that would happen but it was good to at least know that it was a code issue and not just this blanket oh it's a copycat or we don't want anymore or it might be downloaded. So, it was it was good to know that. Um I get the impression that this person genuinely didn't know exactly what's triggering it other than he just could see a code trigger happened. Right. I did clarify like is it going to be something like revenue cat

[1:09:59] or or um some animation um library that we using, you know, for the for the um you can do a little confetti effect, right? Yeah. And he specifically said, "No, it won't be revenue cat. We know about them. It's it's fine. It's not that. Um and he just said just have a look. See if you can find anything that looks like that. Um and I really couldn't. But what I did do was um I removed a couple of the um agents.m MD and other markdown files that I had I just dropped them into the package even though they should just kind of be in the directory. Right. Right. So this is Yeah. This

[1:10:36] is like for using with claude. So it has nothing to do really with your source code. Yeah. Just something where I'd clarified the data model and like you know make sure you do this and we we're doing it this way and don't forget whatever you know standard sort of instructions MD files. Um so I just uncheck those from the package so that they're not in the delivered bundle. Um and that got the approval. That's interesting. So something flagged because of one of these, you know. Yeah. And I'm still on the fence as to whether the changes I made um

[1:11:14] were effective or just having communicated with me and me requesting that call was a good flag. Yeah. Yeah. So it was an interesting ride, but for a long time it was getting to the point where I think like I might have to just abandon the idea. Yeah. That's crazy. It's a good lesson though that like there is a mechanism for Yeah. Yeah. I was just worried that like cuz one of the one of the reasons that comes under this spam rejection is like a saturated market. We don't need any more captions apps. And it was just an interesting thought which is like is the app store now closed to captions apps and like will it eventually close for every type of app

[1:11:56] and obviously I was going way down the wrong road but it was interesting thought to think like wow maybe we can't no one can do this anymore. Like it is interesting cuz I do feel like I do feel like that like that was obvious that rule is obviously in relation to like we don't need any more fart apps, right? Yes. We don't need any more like

[1:12:15] this makes four sounds and does the exact same thing as everything everything else. But you can imagine especially if the ability to make an app becomes so easy. Yeah, that that was being after I'd sort of ruled everything else out, I thought maybe that's it then. Um, but luckily phone call and it was fine. Yeah. So that was my uh that occupied my life for about two weeks. It was a it was a happy day on the internet whenever you finally uh when you finally got into the store and your pre-order was up. Obviously it's out in the store now. Um it's been what 3 days, two days since? Yeah. Not long. Yeah. So, you know,

[1:12:53] we can't get into details on how it went other than do you do you think the pre-order concept worked? Was it worth doing? It's an interesting question. And the reason it's interesting is because I I offered the entire full pro upgrade, everything unlocked to everyone who pre-ordered. Um, so if you pre-ordered, you will never see a pay wall. You would just get this great market forever. Cuz I knew that cuz you told me at one point, but yeah, I mean your

[1:13:20] email list. Yeah. So I I sent an email to to um our customers who I thought would be interested. So, we sort of segment by whether or not they record videos in the app. And I thought that's a that's a reasonable um group of our customers. And yeah, we I I use that as a bit of please pre-order it cuz you'll get this thing for free. Um I think it's nice to give a bit of an incentive and reward people for supporting my new thing. I think the first version is going to be the worst version of this product, right? So, you can have it for free. Um, so it's actually

[1:13:54] it's kind of difficult to know whether that was a good move to do the whole pre-order thing because everyone who pre-ordered got it for free anyway. So true. Theoretically the benefits come in, you know, when reviews come in and yeah, it ranking better because there's more users, that kind of thing. So yeah, we we got about I think about 10,000 pre-orders, which is great, right? So we got 10,000 download day. Um, and from from what I understand on launch day, so when once it went from pre-order to sort of general availability, um, we did have a um, noticeable um, boost in our search position. Um, I don't know if that is down to downloads or like the ratings

[1:14:39] and reviews, the whole Blackmagic Voodoo thing to to figure out what's actually going on there. Um, so I I think it was a good a a good move. Um, I don't know if it's going to be right for everything. Um, but it was certainly fun to have that sort of big wave of initial customers. Um, and it it was fun to watch us sort of briefly jump above like Final Cut Pro on iPad in the top

[1:15:05] three jar. Grab your screen. Really doesn't mean anything, but it's great to like show off. I'm certainly happy if that's a good measure as to whether or not it was a good move. Um, and I'm hoping that's a good sort of jumping off point to start growing from and just it's nice to just have that that um project that I can sort of have a bit of fun with. And now that it's on the store, it's great to actually have people using it. Um, yeah. Yeah, I'm excited to see how that goes in the next year or so. That's awesome. Yeah, maybe uh maybe I'll have to have you on in

[1:15:38] a couple years as like a followup, you know, for the this mess. Yeah, I've got some pins as well. In fact, they'll be they'll be rare in America because they say captions and it's called recap. I've got some exclusive pins. If you find me in the wild, developers listening, I have pins for you and and I don't know, you can give me a nice review on the store. I'll give you a pin. Perfect. All right. Well, uh, I'm going to go ahead and start start landing this plane, which means uh, excellent. I need to ask you the question I ask everybody in the show, which is, uh, what's a

[1:16:10] person or people out there that have inspired you and your work that you'd recommend others check out? I'm going to talk about a well-known Austrian artist called Clemens. Ah, yes. So good. He might be my favorite person. I I I want his products and his sort of life and all of his friends So I don't know. Is that a good enough answer? I think that's I mean honestly Clemens is such a great This is Clemen stresser. There was this sort of era of the the indie developer scene that feels like it's kind of lost, you know, like with the great splitting up of all the social networks,

[1:16:53] everybody kind of has moved into their little hvels. And I'm in a, you know, I was fortunate enough to kind of make a lot of these friends early on when everything was still kind of more centralized. So, I'm in a lot of these groups, but it doesn't feel like there's as many people just publicly sharing their wins in a way where you feel like you're going along for the ride. Like most people outside of kind of it being sort of scammy feeling, most people I feel like once they have a decent success, they're almost embarrassed of it and they kind of shut off a little bit. And

[1:17:26] I feel like Clemens, I don't know, like he's one of those people that every new milestone he hits, I feel like I got to take part in, even though I have literally nothing to do with it. He's very good at at that. And then Yeah. If you've met him in person, he's just one of the like nicest, most fun to talk to people. Yeah. Uh, yeah, I think that's a I think that's a good pick. Um, and if you want to learn more about Clemens, there's an episode of Launched from

[1:17:54] I don't know, last year or something like that. Uh, that you can go to. But no, for real, he's he's um, have you played Art of Flora with volume on max? With volume on max. Well, just like with the volume on, certainly just going for it. Yeah. The sound design in all of his stuff is so good. Yeah. Um Yeah, he he has a very calming, chill like uh aesthetic that I find also some of the best merch in the indie

[1:18:30] in the indie. I know. I want a merch store. Have you seen his hoodies that just look cool? Um very good. Awesome. Well, I think uh I think that's a great answer. So, uh I guess we'll go ahead and uh and wrap this up. So, where can people find uh you and your apps? Uh so, you can go to teleprompterpro.com, find out about Teleprompter Pro. Uh you can go to captions.app to find out about captions or if you're in the US it will be called recap but captions.app. Perfect. Awesome. All right. Well, uh that's what we got. So, thank you all for listening. um launched is part of the revenue cap podcast family. Now,

[1:19:12] if you want to learn more about the growth side of mobile app business, uh you should check out our sister podcast. I don't know if that's the right phrase, uh sub club, which is hosted by my good uh pal David Barnard. And uh to learn about the easiest way to grow and monetize your mobile

[1:19:28] app business, check out revenuecat.com. And uh you can find more launched over at launchfm.com. Um yeah, that's what I got for you. I'll see you all in two weeks. Bye.

---

About this transcript
Read from YouTube's own caption track and laid out by ViewRank AI (https://viewrankai.com).
ViewRank AI finds the videos already beating a creator's own average on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube Shorts, transcribes them from the audio itself in more than 60 languages, and turns what worked into new ideas and scripts.
Free transcript tools, no account needed: https://viewrankai.com/tools
How to read any video this way: https://viewrankai.com/llms.txt