# From a Personal Side Project to $100K ARR —  Antoine van der Lee, RocketSim & SwiftLee

Channel: Launched by RevenueCat
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrbXvsUQ44w
Duration: 1 hr 13 min
Language: English
Words: 15272
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/LrbXvsUQ44w

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[0:00] Well, I remember I I was 13 years old and I was playing a game. Wolverstein, Enemy Territory, it was called. I'm not sure if you know it. Wolfen. Yeah, Wolstein. Yeah, like a first person shooter. And uh we had a clan and ever since my life, when I do something, I want to do it as good as possible. I played darts and I wanted to become like a world champion

[0:18] in darts and I I played football and I wanted to become the best defender and I screwed up. That's why I'm sitting here in this podcast. This is your This is your failure mode. Yeah, this is my failure mode. Yeah. I even got songs on Spotify. So, if you ever find me at a conference, okay, I need that. I wanted to become a DJ and I tried to my to-do list. Welcome to Launched. I'm Charlie Chapman and today I'm excited to bring you the developer

[0:39] behind the popular website and the outstanding developer tool Rocketsim, Antoine Vanderly. Antoine, welcome to the show. Thank you, Charlie. It's u an honor to be here. It's uh it's kind of funny. When I was when I was doing prep, prep for people I've known for a long time is always weird because it's like I feel like I know everything, but you're kind of like, you know, going through the website, refreshing yourself on things. And I realized two very kind of funny points here. I I've never thought of you this way, but in a way, we're sort of competitors or have been competitors on two fronts at this point. Have you have you thought about this before? Yeah, I I think I

[1:30] think I know what you mean. Yeah. I again I don't actually think of it this way but for a little while you you had a uh interview podcast where you were interviewing people. Yours was significantly more ambitious than mine because uh yours was like recorded in a studio in person uh which I've done like twice or maybe more than tw twice but as has been cataloged on the show is usually a failure and then I have to do it virtually. And how long did how long did that last? Well, I'm honestly jealous on how you do it because it was so hard to get people in Amsterdam into

[2:04] the podcast studio. But I was like, if it fails, it can only fail because it's just not a success. It can't fail because the level of quality was too low. So, that's why I brought people in and it brought the conversation in a in the way I wanted it to do. The episodes were great, but yeah, it was it's very good. Uh, what is the name of it? Is it is it the Swiftly podcast or did it have a different name? I'm trying to remember. the going in the podcast basically going into the to the course I was doing at that time and I want to boost that that course with the with the whole

[2:35] episodes and such but the return on investment was just it took so much time and I love doing the interviews but the the after work and I think you will recognize you know the editing and the posting of the videos and I mean I can do it but it was just not the fun and yeah I don't know who knows maybe maybe someday season 2 comes back but I love that you're doing this uh Charlie yeah if you want to see uh this is weird I sort of jumped the gun here, but I just thought this was a funny uh funny comparison. But yeah, if you want to see what this show could be if I, you know,

[3:04] put way more effort into it and was better at uh basically everything, uh you should go check out Going Indie cuz yeah, it's uh it's pretty good. We'll we'll put a link to, I guess, as a dedicated YouTube channel, or is it your normal YouTube channel? Yeah. But the other one, which we'll get more into the details on this later, but I've noticed in your more recent developments on Rocket Sim that like we're sort of creating, we're coming at it from different angles, but we're sort of creating a similar similar app here. Again, yours being the the much better one, uh, in my opinion, but we'll get into that. We'll get into that. So, really quick though, minus what

[3:37] I just was talking about, uh, I'm trying to start the show now with a little bit a quick explainer of what it is that your app does. just an a quick elevator pitch so that whenever I forget to do the real intro later, people already have it in their head. So, really quickly, uh what is Rocket Sim? This is the single most question that I got asked like plenty of times and I always struggle to give the proper answer to it because the thing is it does 30 different things, right? So, I have teams that that bless the location simulation feature that other teams don't even touch or know about,

[4:11] right? So you could basically see it as a Swiss uh knife and that that brings 30 plus features to the Xcode simulator that might exist elsewhere but are just hard to reach. Plus features that don't exist at all in Xcode um that really make the life of a developer much easier. Testing features like push notifications, accessibility, creating recordings and screenshots and so on so on so on. can mention all the 30 features, but I guess it just is really focused on helping increase the productivity of uh developers that work with Xcode. And I'll I'll just say without even explaining what a single feature actually is, if you are a person listening to this and you use the Xcode simulator

[4:52] for literally any reason at all, I guarantee you that it's worth downloading and using uh Rocket Sim because like one utility that probably a half of your users, over half of your users, there's a single utility that makes it worth it for them. But there's a whole bunch of those like you mentioned and so we can get into it a little more in the in a minute. But yeah, this is one where it's like you should literally just stop listening to this and go download it and then come back and listen to this. Yeah, don't forget to come back. Yeah. Yeah, don't forget to come back. But yeah,

[5:17] for real, this is one of those tools I've had for forever. Way before I knew who you were, I think. So, yeah, definitely recommend it. All right, so to the to the regular show, before we get into how Rocket Sim and your your whole website and writing career and all that thing uh took off, uh let's give everyone an introduction to who you are. So the three questions I always ask to to kick off the show is uh where are you from? Do you have a formal education related to what you do? And then how did you end up let's let's start with how did you end up getting into swiftly? Your

[5:47] your sort of writing. Yeah, sounds good. So I'm Antoine Fenderly. I'm from a very small village called Spanuk. So if you're listening from Spanuk, shout out. Um it's a small village where? If you went to Swift Island, it's a conference on an island in the Netherlands. You drive past it from Amsterdam. So it's like a 30 minute drive up north uh from Amsterdam. Yeah. My my formal uh education is a communication multimedia design. It used to be Oh, really? Okay. Yeah. It used to be called interactive media and it basically taught you about how to create products like digital products. So it taught me like yellow is the first color a human processes or you know you

[6:27] need to get to your end destination within three clicks and all those kind of things. But but this podcast I'm going to pull on that thread cuz I can't not What do you mean yellow is the first color you process? I've never heard this. Yeah. So there's all kind of psychological things, right? So if you go to the supermarket, the entry is actually slow on purpose because it slows you down when you enter the the supermarket and you will go slower through the whole supermarket and you will see more things. And then you'll notice that the things on sale are either yellow to get your attention or they are red because it creates an impulsive action. Those are all

[7:03] kind of like tricks that you can use. And blue from launched blue feels comfortable and it works great with older people. That was definitely what I was going for. Yeah. Comfortable and old. Uh but I guess I guess the interesting part of it is that I thought myself how to code myself. I didn't really get lessons on it, but at the same time, I got that real big bag full of extra experience on how to create great products. And I'm I'm somewhere in the middle. I'm also not a designer, right? Like I really look up to Hit and B with with Helm because it looks so beautiful and

[7:37] all those animations. Um, but at the same time, I have enough to at least make my products look solid enough and make it work in a way that you get things done without realizing in a way. Okay, that's interesting because we'll get to it in a second, but at at some point you started writing quite a bit about software development and your your writing kind of sits I wouldn't put it uh all the way at the sort of Donnie Walls like really deep technical but it's definitely on the technical side. It's not like all high level. So something about your writing gave me the impression that you had like a computer science background. I think I'm I'm really good

[8:16] at teaching myself how to code. So I I went quite deep on it and eventually you know I'm I'm building apps since 2009 so I got quite a bag of experience and but but still like when I write my articles I on purpose try to not make it as deep as as needed right like I leave out certain details because I want both junior as well as seniors learn what I think is at least the most important for that topic of the article and that might result in articles that are not that in-depth technical but they are much more approachable for the wider Um, that's the way how I look at articles in a way. And so, you already mentioned you've been

[8:52] building apps since 2009. Did you start doing that on your own or did you get into like a company and that's how you kind of got into it? Well, I I remember I I was 13 years old and I was playing a game uh Wolverstein Enemy Territory it was called. I'm not sure if you know it. Wolf. Yeah, Wolstein. Yeah. Yeah, like a first person shooter. And uh yeah, we had a clen and and ever since my life, when I do something, I want to do it as good as possible. I played darts and I wanted to become like a world champion in darts and I I played football and I wanted to become the best defender

[9:22] and I screwed up. That's why I'm sitting here in this podcast. Thank God. Um this is your this is your failure mode. Yeah, this is my failure mode. Yeah. I even got songs on Spotify. So if you ever find me at Oh, okay. I need I wanted to become a DJ and I tried to my to-do list. Uh dig these up. Yeah. But either way, I was 13 years old and I built a website for our clan because we wanted to become the best clan possible. And that's my first Yeah. start with programming and that evolved in building my first CMS in PHP because that's what you do. And then I bought a phone which was

[9:56] an Android because I couldn't afford an iPhone. And then I had an internship where I did Android development and Windows phone development because they needed people for that part. You also did Windows phone development. This is in the like Windows Phone 8, you know, live tile era. Or is this the Oh, that I didn't realize we had this shared background. It was both of us basically. That's so good. Honestly, the the way you animations and stuff Oh, man. Yeah. the the the API was definitely not as mature as Android and iOS, but what was there was actually really nice minus Zam ZAML horrible like trying to to do anything custom. But if you lived

[10:37] within the constraints of their UI system, uh it was you could make some really nice feeling apps, I thought. Yeah. But let's not lose your listeners because I think we will get off track if we No, there's dozens of us. Uh, all the Windows fans are uh, Windows Phone fans are rejoicing right now in their cars. Yeah, I'm not sure if it's even still alive, but either way, I I had a colleague, a neighbor, colleague, so to say. He was literally 2 meters next to me and uh, he was doing iOS development and I I always looked up to the iPhone. I remember somebody walking with

[11:08] the first iPhone that had a GPS and he could walk us through the city. I was like, "Oh man, I want that." you know and I think I just tried to push myself into that direction and eventually I was like okay I want to work here but I want to do iOS as well because I want to learn that and yeah that's where where the whole journey kind of kicked off. Okay. So you you eventually worked your way into an iOS job and you have like typical iOS career going on. Where did the the writing start then? Yeah, I think um I was at a at an agency, a fantastic agency here in uh in my

[11:41] neighbor neighborhood so to say, a city nearby and I wanted to speak at conferences because I was like, well, travel two cities and you know, for free and meet people from the community. So, I um I did talk proposals and uh did another one and did another one. You know, you know, these are proposals, not actual talks. I didn't get invited. Uh that was pretty much the the the problem. And I I never gave up, right? I wanted to become the best speaker possible, right? That that was kind of my personality. So I always look at like, okay, what can I improve? And if you looked at the conferences and it's still a bit like that today, which makes sense, you

[12:19] always see the same familiar faces because those, you know, sell tickets and you kind of know like, okay, they know what they're speaking about, so I want to go to that conference. So I was like okay I need to become that person that is you know you want him to be at your conference because tickets will be sold and that's when I started to join I I joined with transfer at that time and I remember okay now I work at a company that everybody knows so if I now do a talk proposal I'll get accepted I didn't get accepted right so quite fast after that I decided to just write about anything and

[12:52] I I figured like okay consistency is key if I just write an article every week and just do my best possible version, visitors will follow, growth will follow and my first conference talk will follow as well. And that basically happened really quickly. I got like a proof of the numbers growing and my blog went really rapidly towards like 100,000 visitors per month or something like that. And then that was search engine optimization times, right, where you could still really have an impact in that sense. Were you were you doing a bunch of intentional SEO then? I mostly wrote about the things that I knew people would search for either way. Not so much really. I didn't have

[13:30] like a tool to look up for keywords other than search console for example. It was kind of your gut slash the Google search console. Yeah. As well as that, you know, I didn't want to spend like a day writing an article. So I wrote about things that I learned that we transfer and that resulted in many authentic articles that people could relate to. Yeah. that that got me quite rapidly into the whole system of conferences and my first conference talk was um at do iOS where they knew I did a talk at the local meetup. I had a talk ready and somebody couldn't make it and I think

[14:01] I suddenly remember that that person that couldn't make it told me that he was the person but I now don't remember who that person was. Well, doesn't matter either way 24 hours before that conference started I was called whether I could do that. Wow, look at that. That's like a call up in a you know major sports situation you know like this is your chance your big break. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. which was quite, you know, I was nervous like crazy and you know, I can still see my hand shaking like like my first DJ gig had the same kind of issue cuz D iOS had a that was a pretty even back then that

[14:32] was a pretty decent uh sized audience, right? Yeah. Yeah. I I was sitting at the the speaker dinner I remember and I think there were people like Daniel Steinberg and the drop prompt stack overflow with a lot of points I don't know his last name people you look up to you know and that felt great and at that point I had a reference I spoke at a conference and that already adds up if you want to speak to another conference and that's uh where the ball started rolling I think and uh that's where where I'm at now fast forward right like now I'm able to speak at more conferences so

[15:03] okay so your initial idea behind writing was you had this sort of goal of speaking at conferences, but that was a while ago. You're still writing and as far as I can tell, you're still writing at least one article every week. Every week. Yeah. It's a habit. Significant, you know, commitment. So, why are you still doing it now that you've already achieved that original stated goal? Like, what's the purpose of it now? Yeah. Yeah. So what I never realized at that point is that eventually I um I got at a point that I could ask money for sponsorships and that started with small numbers but eventually that grew and you know we will talk about it but eventually I created Rocket Sim and I

[15:41] realized okay I basically have my audience right here. I just have to send an email to them. So I started the newsletter and slowly but surely and and you know eventually it allowed me to really build up a side business that really became became serious and I managed you know I'm almost like do you call it like artist I really I'm so structured like like almost like crazy structured and I think my my close friends can confirm but it also made me um made me that's why I can deliver an article every week because I'm so structured and I had a full-time job at retransfer and I could still

[16:13] do it every week and Yeah, in in 2024, that's two years ago, after we transfer became more corporate and wasn't so nice in my progression reviews, I will save you the details. I uh decided to work one day a week on my my my website, my newsletter, everything. And the impact of one day a week was so crazy like the numbers went up so rapidly because you can work on more larger features, right? So that rapidly and I think an important piece of that is I'm going to guess is being structured because there's I know a lot of people that like you know they quit their full-time job

[16:47] or they negotiate you know less not a full 5day work week so they can dedicate a day to their job and they'll find like oh I don't actually get that much more done than I was before. But it sounds like that wasn't the case for you and I imagine part of that is is the structure you were building around it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean so many people were asking me like how do you manage all those things that you do but it was really like compound effect of all the things that I had in place automations you know turning repetitive task into something that I could do in minutes creating my own tools

[17:17] which nowadays you know AI is a blessing for me because all the things that I already did I can now you know do 10 times faster but yeah that that's also why I created my going indie uh course right that's so if you want to know how I did it everything is in there I literally wrote down all the tricks that I used and discipline in planning. You know, whenever I had 10 minutes a day, I knew exactly what I was working on. So, those 10 minutes were spent so well that in a week I I could still make a lot of progress even though I had family, I played golf, and I I had a full-time

[17:47] job and so on and so on. And it's called going in going indie because you did eventually go go full-time indie. And we'll I promise we'll get into Rocket Sim, but at the time that you went indie, and correct me if I'm wrong because this is just from my memory of us talking. Your primary income was swiftly the website newsletter, right? More than rocket sim. I was in a situation where I matched my we transfer salary, which was above standards in the Netherlands for for you know, all the stuff iOS engineers. So the risk was pretty much zero in terms of income. And I at that moment

[18:20] that I went full India, we were just we just had our second son a week ago. I was kind of like, okay, that delivery needs to go well and if that's all good, then I'll just go for clear. Paternity leave, you know, I had some extra time to to work on the kickstart of my my indie journey. But yeah,

[18:39] the the newsletter, the sponsorships, but Rocket Sim was doing pretty well. I think it was close to 100k recurring revenue a year as well at that point. Okay. Okay. So, it was I mean it was properly taking off by that point. I couldn't remember. I mean it was on that curve. I just didn't remember where it was at that time. It was pretty far. And on top of that, I knew the impact of the single day a week, but I also knew that I had so many ideas that I didn't

[19:00] step into yet because of the time constraint that that was another thing that I really did, right? Like I couldn't work on new apps. I couldn't work on new projects because I do everything on the side. I need to keep my focus. But now, and that was also a risk that I realized afterwards, like I suddenly had five days a week and I let loose of all the things that I learned as a side hustle. So, I didn't prioritize anymore. I didn't Oh, so when you when you suddenly had more time, you did run into that problem I was describing. Yeah. Crazy. Oh, interesting. Okay. Yeah. So,

[19:29] I I went starting on my own course because now I had the time to do courses, right? So, I I figured, okay, let's let's go with going indie because that's knowledge I have in my head. I can basically create the course without thinking. And then I realized like what I'm now explaining I'm no longer doing. I should get back on track. It's stupid, right? Oh, that's really funny. Okay. Yeah. You don't you don't think about it. You you're like, well, you have so much time. So, I kind of ended up in a situation where I felt like, okay, I have so much time. I can do

[19:58] everything that I started doing everything, which made me less focused on the things that I should actually do. So the impact of what I did was still big and impactful because I I did more things, but I could do so much more if I really focused. So I I really had to kind of like level up myself again. Interesting. And really focus in that case was limiting the scope of what you're doing and instead spending more time on on a smaller amount of things. It's a bit of both. And honestly, I had the same situation like November December last year because of AI. You kind of have the same

[20:31] thing. you can now do much more at the same time, right? And it's it's kind of like the same thing as what happened back then because you you gain more not necessarily more time with AI, but you gain more possibilities, right? There are basically no limitations on your creativity anymore. So, I'm constantly kind of like getting back to my own course and my own fundamentals to really put myself back on track. There's a television show that I love watching which is Dragons Dragon's Den. I think every country has a different name for it, but you basically

[21:01] have four investors sitting watching it's a shark tank in in America. That's what I mean. And I remember one of the Dutch sharks, I think I have to say then um you can say dragons. Dragons. Okay. Sounds more fun. Okay, let's do it. So, one of the Dutch dragons. I I always think about it, but he said like, okay, to somebody that did a pitch, you do too much things. you have a pitch right here for a company, but at the same time, you have a full-time job. I'm not going to invest in you. But the the real real point is that focus, right? And if I focus on Rocket Sim,

[21:35] Rocket Sim goes super well. If I start a new app, I can clearly see Rocket Sim doing less. And it's because I don't talk much about it at that point. I don't post social post about it, right? Like it's not a living thing at that point. So, it all makes sense, especially in your case or anybody who's indie more or less on their own. Uh it's it doesn't go on without you because you're pretty much entirely the driving force behind the thing. Uh and then one more thing about the writing and then we'll we'll go backwards, roll back in time and get to Rocket Sim. Uh I'm really curious

[22:06] about, you know, we talked about AI already, but like I've definitely been hearing across the board the the squeeze on coding educational content in particular. And now your writing does kind of stretch the gamut between like there is a bunch of technical coding stuff but then there's a lot of like sort of business and indie development stuff but are you feeling that same that same squeeze where there's less people coming in uh especially on the search side of things? Yeah 100%. So this is also a relationship to November December right when when I started to realize like okay I need to reinvent myself. I um I was part of a growth accelerator program from the platform

[22:45] that I host the course at and that brought me like on one coaching session every month and the person at a certain point asked me like where do you want to be next year and I told told her like well I'm not thinking about next year I'm thinking more about two three years from now because the actions I do today kind of like create that path towards me in three years and I told her like my business now is evolved around my blog and my newsletter and the blog is dying clearly, right? Like so you're seeing that same that same trend then 100%. I think it's not a surprise,

[23:19] right? Like instead of going to a Swiftly article, having to read through the details and you can now just ask AI to do the thing for you and probably trained on the details you wrote. Yeah. Well, honestly, I started creating my uh my own agent skills with my own content because I was like, well, if AI grabs it either way, I might as well take advantage, do the job myself. Yeah, take advantage and and help the community with a with an agent skill that I believe is the best for for their purpose, right? But at the same time, I also realized like the companies that sponsored

[23:52] me still have the need to reach the audience and my newsletter might become even more valuable to them because nobody visits websites anymore, right? So the focus was kind of like moved a little bit more towards the newsletter and the articles are still being read. But you might also notice if you're a frequent reader of my articles that I focus much more on practical AI much less on coding details because the coding details you know you'll you'll learn but how to pick the right agent skill out of many right or how to use an MCP to to load revenue data and optimize your onboarding to watch the payw wall right like th those are I think much more practical things that

[24:33] you'll receive and as soon as I made that shift I I think my my followers on Twitter for example grew like from 63,000 to 69,000 in 2 months or something. And you think a lot of that is kind of the the sort of AI hype like you're sort of jumping on this big movement that's happening and you can kind of grow with it kind of. Yeah. Also because I'm I'm fully in it, right? Like there's founders of companies that worry because there are small people like me that suddenly can do what they do with 200 people, right? I'm on the on the good side, I would say. like I'm an indie

[25:05] developer and I just hired 20 agents that do work for me every day. And while I'm on that journey, I just I'm keeping a diary of all the things that I learn u because I'm also working on like a new course on AI fundamentals. I really want to make that kind of like my new journey in a way because I feel like the blog is dying. Sponsorships will stay because I have a newsletter, but the newsletter needs to keep growing and I don't think it will keep growing if I start writing about how to use guard in Swift, for example. Right. So, yeah. Well, and there's kind of like, you know,

[25:36] if you're thinking of it that you're competing with the LLMs, you're not going to like it's just almost impossible to imagine competing with LM on like technical content like that. But where you can compete is it doesn't matter if every LLM has the exact same information that you wrote about your personal experience. What they don't have and literally can't have is the fact that the personal experience happened to you. They can't write it from personal perspective. And so that's like that is almost the the one kind of differentiating thing that no matter how good these things get uh you always have at least that human element sort of by definition. Yeah. But it is ironic

[26:15] in a way because the AI agents we have today are trained on the data from bloggers like me but at the same time they kill the bloggers that train their data. So I was just talking okay this is this is another little tangent. I was just talking to somebody about this same phenomenon and I'm like I think if I were to project out where this goes, I think the the only path I can imagine is the only the incentives are going to have to lie in the like language and platform creators to fund this. So either that means they have to pump a lot more money into their own documentation which they

[26:53] assume is not going to actually be read by anybody but is like basically for LMS to consume or they fund they are the ones who fund external writers and bloggers and stuff but that almost feels like the only path that this could eventually lead to in terms of in terms of the like technical content kind of thing. Yeah true. No. Well, I've been involved in some I think it's Cloudflare. Um, they are working paper crawl. There's a HTTP status code that has never been used, but now it will be used again that returns I'm not sure which one it is, but then it basically says to the agent,

[27:26] well, you're happy to read Antoine's article, but you need to pay for this crawl, and it's about 00001 cent or something. But with a lot of crawls, the authors basically get paid back. But yeah, that's I didn't really think through that like that specific thing feels like maybe but an evolution of that maybe it's like Spotify kind of model which isn't exactly the most appealing maybe to get turned into that being the business model on the artist side if you will but I mean honestly like the things that I write are mostly also in the Apple documentation right so I'm fine if they use it and um it's it's also you know I wrote the articles for my own learning process as

[28:03] well personal knowledge base that I could revisit myself and if I can continue with my newsletter and and teach the practical stuff that I learn every day via my articles, then I'm I'm really in a happy ground for the future ahead, I would say. Yeah. And I like I think that's the the right way to think about it. I mean, there's probably people that maybe it's good that there's people that are fighting the good fight or trying to build these big systems, but if you're a creator, like really you should just be thinking about, okay, how can I differentiate? How can I provide value that people I can still build a business on and continue forward? And it sounds like

[28:35] that's kind of what you've got going with in the newsletter world. Seems like it's this kind of crazy exploding market right now, right? In terms of journalists moving to personal newsletters like that idea of paying for that kind of content or or in your case it being sponsored. This is uh it seems like it's a a growing field sort of funny enough as the blog side of things is shriveling. Yeah. I mean the tools improve, right? like it's so much easier to now launch a newsletter and you don't have to pay like crazy amount for a thousand subscribers anymore because the competition is just higher. So I think it becomes all much more approachable and I think

[29:13] they also realize like if you retain your audience right like if you have a way to repetitively talk with your audience via an email you are much more likely to surface them the course that you have or the products that you sell. And I think that's something that many artists see as well in a way. Yeah, I guess it is. It's sort of like the influencer economy in a way where, you know, most of them aren't really making that much money on the actual creator payments from the the platforms. It's more the figuring out other ways to sort of monetize that audience. Um, yeah, while integrity and all that. What's that? They don't own the audience. I think that's the biggest

[29:49] problem, right? like if you're on Instagram or on Twitter or anything like you can have so many followers but the platform decides whether those followers will see your link to the course and they don't like linking to external places right so the best way is to really focus on getting those emails and and staying connected with your audience via that platform yeah yeah but the other way that you can kind of build a foundation for your financial security is doing something that's

[30:15] not writing uh at all and you know would never be disrupted by AI and that's coding your own app. Yeah. So, RocketSim uh has been around for quite a while, but let's like roll back to where did it start? Yeah. Well, I I kind of told it a little bit before, but I love creating my own apps, right? Like Rocket Sim happens to be an app that I shared in in the app store, but I also have an app for my newsletter, for my website, right? Like I have all this kind of internal tools. But it was 2019 I worked on we transfer and we transfer was a file transferring app. You basically upload files

[30:51] you get a link you share a link with another person and that person can use the same app to receive it. So we had all kinds of transfers that we needed to test in the simulator. And the one thing that I did was a venderly.com/html page with deep links to easily open those deep links on the simulator. But you know I every time I had to open safari, open that URL and after the simulator is reset I need to remember that domain name and it was just you know repetitive and I wanted to improve my productivity. So I started working on rocket sim status bar app. The only thing it

[31:27] could do is storing deep links and open that in uh in the active uh simulator. So it was a it was a status bar app like it lived in the menu bar and what it was just a drop down with links and if you clicked on it it would I guess there's there's CLI commands where you can like trigger actions inside of the the simulator. Exactly. Yeah. Okay. So that was how it literally started. Yeah. Exactly. So for those that don't know, Xcode uh ships with sim control, siml, and you could basically say rocket sim is a very advanced wrapper nowadays around that simulator tool. But yeah, it already

[32:02] existed back in the days and there was one command that allowed to execute deep links in the in the simulator and I basically allowed you to create groups for a certain bundle identifier so you could launch those deep links in a specific app for your needs. And you built that for yourself. Did you did you start distributing it right away? Was it distributed internally in Wii transfer or did you like think, hey, maybe people would be interested in this and you started you released it kind of publicly? Yeah, it started to grow slowly but surely, right? Like I I basically had a I that's the thing with app IDs. You need to get the ball rolling and at a certain point I had that app

[32:38] in place. So whenever I had a new ID that I could automate, I could basically just add it to that same project. And before I knew that app evolved into many more useful features that I could use myself during my day-to-day job at we transfer. So you just kept shoving new simulator utilities in there because it was sitting there. Yeah, exactly. And and it's still like that today. Like you don't want to see the road map that I have. I have a public repository with 198 open issues, but I also have a private repository with 100 IDs that I have myself that I keep for myself because I don't want

[33:12] anyone else to build it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's it's how it goes. But um for the first two years, it didn't make any money. It wasn't really meant for that. I was So you did you did release it publicly though. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think store initially or did you do it like externally at first? Yeah. No. No. I never I I once tried but sparkle was so difficult to do and nowadays it's it's so much easier. But you know out of the app store distribution was difficult. Plus, I I also wanted to benefit from the contacts that I had at Apple. And I felt like if I go into the app store,

[33:44] I could probably get featured or or you know, it's also a developer tool. And I still say this today to many clients that ask ask about security certificates and all those kind of things, right? Like Rocket Sim is in the app store. It's sandboxed. It runs on your local machine and we don't share any data to backend services, right? It creates a certain feel of security which is super important if you start asking for permissions about the developer directory and derived data and those kind of things. Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah. So, yeah, it was in the app store day one basically and the first version weren't weren't that that serious,

[34:20] right? But eventually I added screenshots and and recordings and the simulator didn't offer that to be clear. Give support. You couldn't upload videos to GitHub pull request yet. So having a way to really quickly create a recording into a gy was quite unique back in the day. So that was I can I can personally attest to the number of uh copies that me using it and then pushing it on people because I was putting it into GitHub PRs. Uh yeah, that that that was definitely a feature that people jumped on to especially when you added in the ability for it to show touches. So, like as you're recording in the simulator, you know, as you're clicking around,

[35:00] when you export it out in Rocket Sim, it can put a little circle that represents, you know, where the person's finger was touching. And that, man, does that is that amazing for communicating, you know, what is actually happening. Just rapid, massive difference. And putting that in your PRs, especially if it's one that you're trying to convince people is worth doing. Like that little extra polish. It sits inside of a frame. It's got these touches that can go a long way. You only realize once you used it once, right? Then you suddenly you can follow along what the person is doing, right? Without even hearing any voice or or whatsoever. Yeah. Especially so it's not only

[35:36] showing touches, right? It's constantly showing where your mouse is at. So it's kind of like touch attention mode I like to call it. But um you can really similar to like if you're recording a tutorial uh on, you know, a Mac or whatever and you use the mouse to kind of circle around something. It's a little different than that, but it's Yeah, it's that idea. It's like before they tap on a button, you see it move up to that button and it kind of draws their eye to like I'm about to take an action in this area. Pay attention here. Exactly. Yeah. You can just easily follow

[36:04] along. And there were things in the simulator like if you recorded like landscape, it would still come out of this portrait. Like the the recording feature was really bad and Yeah. in the in the built-in simulator. And they improved later which also improved rocker sim directly because I was relying on the same underlying structure. But this kind of shows like how I was thinking, right? Like I wanted to have those recordings myself, so I created it. I wanted to have those screenshots myself, so I created it. I wanted to have location simulation. I wanted to have quick access to the common directories like the caches directory or the file storage directory. And dive

[36:37] data just that that also is one that sells people. Uh it's just a quick way to get to your drive data folder. Uh weirdly an annoying thing to get to uh to clear out. Yeah. And and what's a blessing and a curse is that the things that I built are not written on Stack Overflow and and AI doesn't know the answer. I I really have to find my own answers and I still have to do it. It goes a little faster now with AI, but many of the things like releasing in the app store was not easy. You you can't just access the simulator control terminal command, right? So I had to figure out a way to do that

[37:12] in the app store while being sandboxed. All those limitations. It's secure. That's a great selling point, but in terms of being sandboxed as a developer tool, it'd be a lot easier if you could just do literally whatever you wanted. Yeah, I still see myself like, you know, one of those moments that I've give up. And then fully January, I tried to build Sparkle and I was like, "Okay, screw the app store. I'll just go ahead." And I I just couldn't I needed to be in the app store. So, I I kept pushing it. And, you know, now I know the tricks and I kind of like find found my way

[37:43] through. And I'm not getting any exceptions by the way. I really have to deal with the same sandbox limitations everyone has to. But yeah, uh the fun part of it is that I remember the network speed control. So that was something I really wanted to build. I hated the network link conditioner because it would also slow down your Mac, right? So, you're working on and just for just so everyone who's not a developer understands like in in your simulator and on your device, you can uh in your developer settings, you can go to a setting and turn on what's called network link conditioner, which literally just artificially slows down your internet connection. But if you

[38:18] do that on your Mac while you're building it, it also slows down if you're googling something or whatever. And every developer at some point in their career has had a time when their internet was running really slow and they were annoyed and they realized it was cuz they just left that turned on. Exactly. Very annoying. Those those pains. Yeah. And this was also a time where there was no AI, right? So every single answer you would basically find on Staflflow. So you're working on slow networking support and you go to Stack Overflow, but it's also slow. Well, you know, it's painful. But I I remember I I I created that issue like okay I want to create a

[38:53] solution that works just for the simulator and that issue has been open for two years. I just couldn't find the answer. And every now and then I just revisit that that list of issues, right? You you grow as an engineer, there are new APIs, you get to talk with people at Dubdc, you post on the Apple forums, and you hope for an answer. It's much better nowadays, by the way, but back in the days, it was tricky to get the answers that you needed. And at a certain point, I found a way to do it. And the moment that it worked was so amazing because I was literally

[39:23] thinking about it for two years. And now I'm able to just slow down exactly like the network link conditioner just your app in the simulator without affecting your Mac which in AI days is even better right you can just use AI still on rapid fast internet. Yeah and that's one example and I have many of those and like I said it's a blessing and a curse because it's not easy to

[39:45] copy Rocket Sim. Um I I see more and more people creating like an app for screenshots and videos. Hey, now they're different. They're different. No, it's it's it's totally fine. I love that actually, right? Like, um, you know, the thing is with competitors or or friends that also built a similar app, I don't want to call you a competitor because I don't look at it that way. Yeah. to be clear and I I don't even know if I've mentioned it much on this podcast, but I have a I have a Mac app that's it's like a toy app really uh called Frameus and it the point of that app is screenshots for me at least screenshots that you take on your real

[40:26] device. You can just drag into it and it wraps it in a frame and you can export it. But I keep adding more features and I just started adding a feature to where screen recordings that I take. You can add you can artificially add uh swipe and tap indicators largely because I find myself wanting what I can do in Rocket Sim on my real device screen recordings and I can't. It's not as good as what you can do in Rocket Sim. But they're they're really they're really different things. But it was very funny seeing in one of your recent newsletters, uh, and we can maybe talk about this if you want to, but like you're building like a full-blown

[41:01] video editor for the screen recordings. And like looking at it, I'm like, man, this is like a nicely designed version of the sort of hacky thing that I'm building, which is really funny. But again, they are different like uh they are different things. Yeah. And I mean the way I look at you know like there are also many other blog creators and there are many other developer tools and there are plenty of tools for ASO and the thing is like the restaurants that are combined together in a single place do much better than the restaurants all distributed across the city. And there is a reason because people want to go to a central hub and then have

[41:37] a choice in a way. And the way I look at it with apps is that people might get into your app and they realize like oh wait a second I can actually create a video with device vessel and you educate them about the fact that that's possible and then they find rocket sim and they see like rocket sim does it as well and they install rocket sim could also be the other way around. they are a user of rocket sim and they actually want to have the same feature but then for uh for a real device and you've been such user and you decide to build that yourself but there might be another Charlie that

[42:09] decides like okay let's see what's out there and they notice your app right so I think embracing competitors is something that that might not be the first thing you think about but actually if you if you work together and I also do that with my newsletter by the way I have a content kit or a comfort kit creators iMessage group where many newsletters of the community are in and we promote each other because they might find an audience and they subscribe to their newsletter and they promote my newsletter. But I also bring in people and we help each other grow and I'm very much like to look at it that way and help the community work together if that makes sense. Oh yeah,

[42:45] definitely. And my favorite like there's a number of these in the the iOS sort of indie community of like competing developers who are very friendly with each other. Um, and I have that actually a little bit in the the sort of white noise space. There's a couple developers that if they run into some sort of bug that's really esoteric, clearly they're using my app to be like, "Is this us or is this a framework thing?" And if they find a solution, I've had people just DM me solutions to problems I didn't even know were problems because they fixed it on their end and they're like, "Hey,

[43:15] just so you know, this is an issue." And it's like, man, that's a really encouraging environment and it makes you want to, you know, encourage them and help them in any way that you can, too. So, uh, yeah. And what I also learned over the years is because I I had to learn this, right? Like in the beginning, there were some other developer tools and I was like, well, I don't want you to build something like that as well. But honestly, people will find out either way. So, you might as well just be the the good person there and help each other out and the favor will be returned,

[43:41] right? Sometimes you have friends that you you you give input to for years and you feel like okay I'm just that solo friend that just gives and gives and gives but one day they will come back and give back to you and then it's all worth it in a way and that's the same with this right so yeah it's difficult mindset sometimes for people but I think together you will grow much faster I think both of us are in this in this category too where it's like we're trading on our goodwill to a degree as well right like part of rocket sim success is the product marketing itself and you you know

[44:14] trying all the different things that you've tried in terms of marketing but a big part of it is you have an audience who trusts you likes you knows you as a person and they want like I again I'm pretty sure I found rocket I don't remember the order of operations of whether I found Rocketsim or you first but I didn't know you personally at that point right but since I've gotten into this community there's so many apps that I've started using because I'm friends with the person or I like them online or whatever and then it becomes part of your workflow and the reason I like them

[44:41] in the first place is cuz they're they're good and they they make good stuff. And so it is to that point, but like you can get a lot of mileage out of just not being the jerk in the room. Yeah. And for people listening that think I'm uh they are afraid to talk with me, please don't be afraid.

[44:53] I'm the No. Antoine in person is is quite a imposing jerk really. Uh you know, he smiles. All of his smiles are only for the camera. As soon as the camera's off, it's just angry. I I I visit conferences and I once went to a conference and the speakers were like afraid to take hostage of my time and were really like well yeah I just wanted to say hello and and I'm like I'm I'm here to drink a beer with you all like that's why I'm here right like that's why I'm here right so yeah I don't know it's sometimes the the serious side of being online and just posting serious articles

[45:27] and content. Um, and that's also why I started to post more pictures of my chickens and dog, by the way, to make me, you know, I'm a person. I'm not a robot. You know, I make mistakes. Yeah, I'm I'm real. Uh, that's funny. So, okay. So, we talked about like why you built it. You put it on the store right away and you've been just sort of pouring ideas into it over time based a lot on what you want. But at the time, at least where you left off, it wasn't like a business. So, when did that transition happen? like did you was it something you did or did something happen that

[45:58] sort of kicked things off and then you started taking it more seriously? Yeah. Yeah, there were a few phases right. So in the Netherlands you can be an ammon sack which is basically a sole entrepreneurship uh without having certain tax responsibilities and such and for a while that was good enough when I was working at we transfer but at a certain point you make more money you need to pay more taxes so you convert it into a real company and that was for everything I earned right so swiftly and and rocket sim and everything alto together and everything grows slowly but when I went working like one day a week on mostly rocket sim that's where I went from 1,000 MR

[46:35] monthly recurring revenue to I think in one year to 4,000. So that's four times. What was that that caused that? Was it the development you were doing like features or were you doing marketing along with that? I think mostly the features because I can sell so many more things. I can post 100 more tweets but if the value in the product is not there it will not bring in anything. Right. So the the main reason was that I could work on features like the network speed control or the network monitoring and those those larger features that you simply have to build with a bit more long

[47:06] longer focus, right? Like three four hours of focus instead of just 10 minutes a day because that was literally what I did before, right? Like 10 minutes 30 minutes. Um 10 minutes always turn into 30 minutes by the way. It's all about getting Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. 10 minutes is 30 minutes. Yeah. Clearly. Yeah. I I run through the same thing with dark noise stuff. It's like there's these big features that I'm like, I'm going to need like this dedicated, you know, 4hour coffee work night to do that. And it's like, well, how often does that happen when you have kids and a family and a job where you're traveling a lot? And so you you pick off lots of these little features

[47:40] constantly. So, you're always doing stuff, but it's like the big ones that you know will move the needle take dedicated time. That's exactly what it is. And there's a feature in Rocket Simar feature. There's a road map view where you can vote on stuff. And I always knew a bit like what people wanted. And the big one on the list was the network monitoring. So it's basically like uh Charles proxy or proxy man for the simulator that always runs in the background. So whenever you have that unexpected failure of a response, it's running in the background. You open up, you'll copy the request to your backend developer and it's fixed right away. That was number one on

[48:14] that roadmap list. And I remember it was June or July or something and I I got it working and I released that and I think I generally had like 40 running trials or something and then I peaked towards 120 at that point which really just proves like if you build what your users want you know the the real fields will follow if I do think that your kind of like I said at the beginning your app is a little unique in that most apps features you add can have a make a big difference in terms of how good the app is or how users will stick with it. But the actual pitch for the app,

[48:49] it can't be that wide, right? Like if you if you build like Straa, you know, running tracking, it's like it can have a trillion features. And that matters for users staying with it or not leaving for a competitor, whatever, but you can't put all those features in your sort of advertising. And it's not really going to draw very few features are going to draw people. But your app because of your audience, you can make this one esoteric feature and that's a new marketable thing that could bring in somebody who does not care about a single other feature of your app, but they will 100% pay for that one feature because it changes their workflow. You know, they're a

[49:26] uh performance engineer on a principal like engineering team that isn't building features. their only job is to ek out the best performance they can for users when they're have low internet connectivity or whatever. Like that's a job that lots of people have. If you have a feature that makes their life easier, they're going to pay a subscription just for that. They don't care about screenshot recordings and all that stuff. Exactly. And and this still happens as of today. So I I got a running test flight beta now with way too many things. Blame AI, but it's good. It's getting there. But one of the features What was your thing about focus uh being a big thing you need to be

[50:01] doing? There is focus, but I I just have focus on 10 different agents. So, Oh, yeah. I see. Yeah, I'm focusing. I'm completely 100% focused on 10 different things. It's all rocket sim. That's fair. That's fair. To be frank, that that is something I learned because if you do many things with agents and you want to do a lot of things, then at least make sure it's the same context, the same project. That makes things so much easier. No, but I I had that breakthrough thing once again which allowed me to do 120 frames per second recordings with the simulator plus voice over overlay and so it's like showing all the voiceover elements on top of the simulator and you

[50:37] can navigate as if you're using voice over but you don't have to use your actual physical device. And the the point I want to make is that I got emails from people that used rockersim one two years ago and then kind of not really used it anymore. They that just happens when you need a network monitor but you're not really working with networking anymore. You and there's plenty of reasons for it but they emailed me like yeah when I saw this feature I'm getting back to it you know I want to have access to the test flight. So it's literally what you just mentioned like that one feature can

[51:07] bring people back or bring new people in. It's really yeah it can make a difference in hours per week that people spend building apps. Yeah, it's a it's a weird unique thing about I don't know what you call that if that's enterprise tooling or if it's developer tooling specific, but it does feel like it's unique compared to typical consumer apps. It I do imagine it makes some stuff a little harder like your marketing can't be as honed in on one specific thing, right? What is interesting so at a certain point um and I'll I'll share more details on it but two friends joined me to to make

[51:42] it more a mature company and one of them is head of sales and he just tells me like it's so easy to sell Rocket Sim and the reason is and there are more examples of apps like that Rocket Sim is focused on reducing time spent and it creates more time to work on actual features right there are so many solved problems in the world but if you manage to solve the one limitation factor which time and give more time to people, they will pay you simply. I mean, yeah, that's honestly that's one of the biggest things with Revenue Cat is uh it's like there's a lot of things we can sell, but

[52:17] one of the easiest ones is like exactly that same pitch. Like, hey, nobody wants to make another subscription management system that everybody else has the same version of or 12 iterations of the same payw wall with slight differences. like let's let the engineers get back to engineering cool like stuff for users and then we'll build all this tooling or let growth people focus on this other stuff. Totally. And I have conversations like this about revenue get with some friends that still don't use it by the way. You know, like you you want to buy back. No, there is no

[52:47] friends that don't use it. Yeah, sorry. Yeah, I can share the names afterwards. There are many. No, but I mean it's it's all about buying back time, right? And yeah, that's that's with everything. Like if you do something repetitive every day, you can solve that and make that like an automation ideally so you don't have to think about it anymore. You buy yourself back five minutes a day, which is like five multiplied by 365 per year. A lot of time that you can spend on, you know, growing your business, making that app successful, right? It can make the difference in a way. So let's let's dive into that though. So, like we talked about, you basically by spending

[53:25] more time on features, you were able to kind of grow the app. Um, we won't get too deep into it, but you've you can go go read your newsletter uh if you want to learn more about all the different like experiments and and things that you've tried over the years to sort of but I imagine all most of those were pretty incremental. But I guess you got to a point where you could hire on help and was so the first help you hired was on the on the sales side. Yeah. So at a certain point I wanted to offer you know like a way to for teams to buy multiple licenses at once because the app store

[53:56] is in that sense limited. This was a major point I wanted to bring up because you talked so much about being on the app store and sandboxed and I see on your website I've never consumed it this way but you that you sell to teams and I don't I can't square those two because for the most part the app store is onetoone. So yeah how do you do that? I see it a bit like a Netflix subscription where you you might have bought the subscription on the web, right? And yeah, you log in on an iOS app and your subscription still works. It's a little bit like that for Rocket Sim 2. But the

[54:28] the biggest point is that we couldn't really offer Rocket Sim easily to like a big team. And at that point, I was like, okay, I want to do it. So I was sitting with a friend from the small village as well. He was a front ender and I was like, "Hey, maybe I I can use a front ender because I need like a a back end." I had the idea of of the teams dashboard that we have today where the build durations of of your whole team get together in a nice chart and you can see like, "Hey, Charlie, who's uh at revenue for years still has an M1 MacBook, but somebody that just joined has an

[55:02] M4." And you can see the build duration being much faster. Give insights and tell the whole team get a M4 in two months, you you earn it back. I needed a website for that right so I was sitting with that front ender ask him to join he was like yeah I want to do something one day a week but I don't really have a purpose so yeah let me join and then similarly I had the saleserson also a great friend for years uh we wanted to have a side hustle because we always challenge a bit each other like how many how much money do you make and you know sometimes you do that with friends right and

[55:33] uh I was like you need a side hustle right like you need to do more things and yeah that turned up to be you know join me uh Also, it's also a great way to make sure I always make more money than him. By the way, don't don't tell him. I hope he's not listening. No, but no. Either way, um I could I could use enterprise sales knowledge, right? Or team sales knowledge. And plus,

[55:55] I wanted to guard my own time. I want to focus on features. I don't want to focus on selling. And same for the front end. I could probably build a dashboard myself, but there was no AI, right? Like maybe today. Um no, no, I would I wouldn't Nick Mick is doing a great job, Nick. Uh I'm sure you're you're listening. So yeah. Well, and I will say the your like landing page is exquisite. Uh it's very very nice for like showing how I don't know if that's that's his work as well, but like it is a Yeah, it's extremely I was looking because of AI tools. I was like ah I

[56:28] should spend some time and redo mine and I was looking at yours the other day like Yeah. Oh, I could maybe use this. And I started scrolling through and I'm like maybe I could do something a little uh less ambitious. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's very nice. It's not that ambitious. The thing I thought about is like my audience are iOS developers, so I need to give it the same feeling of watching the iPhone. That's what it feels like. Yeah. Right. Like the smooth animations and things popping in and endless scrolling. And honestly, we want to improve it. So, there will be a new version for it, but I don't think we will throw away that that feeling of the homepage. But,

[57:01] um, yeah. Either way, they they they wanted to join me. And then at that point I was also like yeah uh how do you do it in terms of um dividing the money right like Rocket Sim was there for six seven years already I don't just want to give them the money that I built up over the years that felt unfair from my side it felt unfair from their side so we um decided to start a new venture basically a venture of the three of us that get a fixed price to buy a rocket sim license from my company and is allowed to resell it for any price so I'm basically getting like a fixed But of that

[57:34] uh sold license and everything above is divided by a tree in a way. And the way you you are doing like bulk sales then is through web web payments with like license seats basically. And so if they log in in Rocket Sim, it'll unlock that based on their current enterprise license. Yeah, pre pretty much indeed. And um it allows us to do direct invoicing. It allowed us to uh you know like sell commercial pricing which is higher which you know at that point and it's funny enough my monthly recurring revenue in the app store slow down but the teams you know it's I think at this point

[58:16] almost equal or even past what uh what we earn in the app store because we we basically sell so much more and it's difficult to get into companies but once you're in we have some really big clients once you're in then then they basically just press a button and they add 20 more seats, right? It goes so fast and that's the real money for SAS products. And it's al also fun, right? Like Ralph and Nick are two friends of mine for years and now we get to build something together and we can also celebrate things together. We've talked about that on this show before with lots of people, but like

[58:46] it is one of the weirdest things about fully indie as in solo development is like you can have a big launch or you can have a big you know you can get fireballed like end up on on you know John Gruber can write about you and it's like this extreme moment of elation and then you're kind of like sitting in your office you know petting your dog like all right well that was that and just having a group of friends you can at the very least be in a group chat and and celebrate together. But especially if you're I don't know if you all are in the same space, but like if you can go out, if

[59:19] you can actually celebrate with a person, it makes everything feel a lot more uh like real. Yeah. No, true. Yeah. Mik is nearby, but Ralph lives in Atlanta in the United States. Um which is also helpful for small commute. Well, the funny thing is he he joined me to Deep Dish last year. Um, and also to do DC and we we managed to get some deals signed there because we met with with companies in person and that feeling, you know, going out for dinner and drinking a beer and going crazy because you sold, you know, like that's Yeah. unmatched and that's definitely an great addition to being indie mostly of the time. Yeah. Oh, that's awesome. And before like we we wrap up,

[59:57] I'm also curious, what are your thoughts right now in terms of the future of Rocket Sim in this sort of crazy AI world that's sort of eating all of our lunches, but RocketSim sort of lives inside of this thing that's I wouldn't say it's being sunk, but it's being rocked around and nobody really knows where it's it's going to land. I mean, I I can clearly see that there are so many more solutions nowadays, right? Like we have the Xcode build MCP for example and I believe it uses AXE behind it to let agents use the simulator and tools like those really challenged me to think

[1:00:34] through the future of Rocket Sim as well, right? And I've had moments over the past months where I started to integrate Rocket Sim with agents. I had a MCP working and but I was like well this is not the purpose of Rocket Sim. I'm I'm sure Codeex or or Cursor will do this themselves, right? Like I will fight them and this is probably not my purpose. What I do think is that and and this is always hard to really predict, right? But I believe how much AI will write, there's always a moment as a developer that you will test the app and validate the outcome. That's

[1:01:07] where I'm at at this point and I truly believe in and if you think about Rocket Sim today, that's exactly where we are at because I don't help you write code. I don't help you write better features. I help you test the features quicker so you can focus on writing the features. And that that took me a bit to go back and forth. And I'm not saying that Rocket Sim will not integrate with agents because I think there's value in the data that we provide. In fact, we recently allowed you

[1:01:35] to create prompts outside of RocketSim or inside Rocket Sim for the network request for example. Give agents eyes on what your app is doing in a way that only Rocket Sim can do because we have that data in a way. But mostly I think our mode or how you want to call it is that we um we we really help developers spend less time validating all the things they need to validate even though AI writes things. And sure you can argue like well it's a matter of time before AI will also do that for you by automatically gaining feedback visually or whatsoever. But I'm not sure about you and

[1:02:09] maybe I'm oldfashioned because I'm on developer for years. I still want to be in control myself and feel how it works and test things out. So that that is my bet at this point. And if I then combine it with also connecting with agents, then we have the two most powerful fundaments I think for for a feature ahead. And yeah, like for any app these days, you need to remain flexible and

[1:02:33] move with with the needle and see what's required, what people need and and use AI to your advantage. you know, don't let it eat you, but make sure you eat with it in a way, if that makes sense. Yeah. Well, especially in in your case because like, you know, if you're making a consumer app, you do need to think about the AI world, obviously in terms of development, but in terms of your users because chatbt could be a competitor, right? Because it can do everything theoretically, but like it hasn't eaten the regular world the same way that it's completely dominated developers lives, but your customers are are those people. And so uh and this is where probably you spending the last

[1:03:12] how many what is it like seven years of your life writing and engaging directly with the developer community is probably super helpful. But it's like as new needs are constantly coming up for people and using these tools, you're well primed to like see those, anticipate them and build a tool that makes it easier. And so it's like it feels like a wave you could ride just as much as be as be sunk by it. So there is an interesting example. I think two newsletter issues ago, I asked my audience and I didn't get many replies. Maybe because it's a feature that people just don't realize they

[1:03:43] need yet. But if you sometimes you test your app and then you realize like, oh, damn it, this is a bug. I I should not forget to change this button color from blue to red and we need to remind myself about it. So you go to GitHub, you create the issue or something like that or could also be your QA engineer testing your app in the simulator or a designer validating your design. I figured like this is where Rocket Sim can perfectly be fitting, right? like you select an element on the simulator and you write a comment in the simulator and then you prompt it straight ahead into codeex

[1:04:12] or any AI that you use and there will just be a PR open for review with a screenshot attached for the developers to review it and they're just a merge away from fixing that color change and I was like well this is something you want right but I didn't really get much response so I'm well that feels like the type of feature where people aren't going to know they want that you have like show them the way in in a sense and create that demand. And that's exactly my point, right? Like we're in such weird situation now with AI and many companies didn't really even adopt AI,

[1:04:45] right? Like we're also sometimes in a bubble where we feel like everybody is using it already, but many don't even know that agent skills exist for example, right? That's also something not to forget. And eventually companies will have processes to adopt AI and and security wise and so on and so on. And then then I think developers tools uh like Rocket Simu uh need to be in a place that that fits that perspective at that point. Yeah, exactly. H well it's cool. It's it was really fun talking about this. This is I feel like you know I've been reading your work and using Rocket Sim for I mean essentially for the entirety of me being an iOS developer. Uh so a lot of this

[1:05:21] I knew but then little little gaps I didn't know. So I don't know. This is this is pretty cool and it's well it honestly the way you're talking about it sounds like it's more fun to you. I know it can be uh a little scary at times, but it it's been fun watching you navigating the everanging world and and figuring out where both your writing work and your, you know, your app uh work fit into this this new world. But one thing that you've always done really well is articulate your feelings and and your strategy very well in a way that's sort of fun to follow and and helps you think about,

[1:05:54] you know, your own work in the same way. Well, thanks. I appreciate it and I I love that I can talk about the thing that I love building the most. I don't often get that opportunity to go in so much detail about it. So, I appreciate that a lot. Before we wrap up, I'll ask you the question uh I ask everybody in the show, which is uh what's a person or people out there that have inspired you and your work that you'd recommend others check out? Yeah, there there's one mandatory thing I have to say when you're part of the DUPDC in the house, you have to say my site or or you know, at

[1:06:21] least shout out to those people. No, but honestly uh I sometimes forget how uniquely talented they are and how blessed I am that I get to see what they're building from like a nearby iMessage group and sometimes in person. I thought about this question, right? I listened to Lance. I knew that it was coming. And there's one group, those are Yodi, Ha, and Neils. Those are indie developers from Amsterdam, from the Netherlands as well. Uh Neils is in Sweden nowadays, but they mean more to me than they might realize, but they are bold and honest. They're like friends that tell you the truth. And I'm reinventing myself constantly. I'm also reinventing my socials and the work that

[1:06:58] I do. And sometimes I make mistakes, which I often regret. And sometimes I don't realize I make mistakes. And they are the honest friends that just tell me upfront or they say like, "Hey, you're now writing a little bit too much clickbait on Twitter," for example, right? I wanted I wanted to reach 5 million impressions because they can get paid by by Twitter. And I was like, okay, let's see if I can get that. And and it made me realize like, yeah, you're right. That's not who I am, who I want to be. And I just highly appreciate them. Plus the fact that they're amazing developers. What they built is insane. and and they just inspire me to constantly keep

[1:07:32] pushing and deliver amazing products. So yeah, when I thought about this question, I just can't live without them being on my side even though it's just why I miss it mostly. Yeah, I have a really recent example of of HA doing the same thing, you know, pointing out a dumb thing that I was doing and really calling me out on it. People who who watched the previous episode or maybe two episodes, I don't remember the order that these will come out, may have noticed my uh my facial hair was, you know, getting to Antoine levels. Maybe not quite, but it was on its way. So, you're

[1:08:02] now saying I I should have shaved before. Damn it. No, no, no, no, no. Uhhuh. No, we released a I released a video. Actually, it was for Revenue Cat. I released a video that you could see a little bit of facial hair going and uh and it just goes, "Are you doing this for real or is that AI?" And I was like, "No." I was like, "It was it was just a short-term thing." I shaved it and then he just goes, "Thank God." And uh that confirmed to me that uh I should never let this grow out anymore anymore. that but this is typical right I once had a colleague who was really smelling

[1:08:32] but will you you know say nothing and be nice but you know that's also not really helping him or will you confront him with the matter allowing to improve but it's also not really nice and as a deeply insecure person uh there's nobody in this world no colleagues in this world I appreciate more than the ones who are super direct uh which is why I like working with Dutch people not to you know lean into a stereotype but having somebody who when you do something dumb immediately tells you or even when you don't do something dumb but they think it's dumb. Having them tell you right

[1:09:03] away makes at least me feel a million times more secure around them because I know like if I'm like oh do they think this is dumb then I'm like oh no if they thought it was it was dumb they would have already told me. Uh that is like a weirdly safe environment at least for a person like me. Oh man I wish everybody was like that. Like people make mistakes right? Like we're we're human and it's definitely not always on purpose. So just be honest to each other, try to help each other do better. And I'm sure if those are good friends of you, they will accept that and be actually happy

[1:09:32] that you do so. So yeah, absolutely. And those are three friends that do that for me. So super happy with them. Awesome. All right. Well, uh, let's go ahead and land this plane. So, uh, where can people find you and your work? Yeah. So, we mostly talked about Rocket Sim. That's rocketsim.app. I'm sure there will be links in the show notes, but you know, a venderly.com is my Swiftly blog where you can also subscribe to my newsletter if you will and on socials. It's all kind of handles. I won't bother you listening to that. Um, we'll make sure to put those links in the the show notes and

[1:10:06] definitely yeah, make sure to um speak to me at conferences. I'll be at a few. I'm really social and I love to meet you all. And if not, then uh I hope to follow you somewhere else and meet you somewhere else online. All right, perfect. Uh, thank you Antoine for coming on. And then I don't know if you can see him, but my dog is showing up to tell me this is a very This is a very Antoine thing to do. Actually, wasn't your profile picture basically this for a long time? Yeah. Your dog's a lot taller than me, but you're a lot taller than me, too. So, maybe that's uh that's fair. Maybe

[1:10:36] this is a good way to get more people to subscribe to your YouTube channel. I I'll get my dog, you know. All right. You need to go down so I can wrap this up. Okay, buddy. All right. Right at the end. Uh oh. Oh, we're getting the Oh, yeah. Here we go. Here we are. Here he is. All right. There we go. Here. Come on. Come on. First ever launched uh dog segments. Uh do you have any words, Moose, to say? What is your dog's name again? It's Benny. Benny. All right. You want to say You want to interview Benny? Benny. Who's that? Our editors are

[1:11:14] going to love dealing with this. Actually, they probably will. Who doesn't love seeing a dog, right? Yeah, we'll do a loun episode with the dogs, Jordan. We should let them bark. We can just release an hour and a half episode of It's just them sitting there. Yeah, I was so close. I was so close to to truly landing this, wasn't I? Uh literally the very last thing to do. Uh no, this is great. It It shows that we're human,

[1:11:42] you know. Exactly. We're not Exactly. Okay. So again, thank you uh for coming on. This was fun. Uh and thank you all for listening. Uh launched is part of the Revycat podcast family. If you'd like to learn more about the growth side of mobile app businesses, you should check out SubCub uh hosted by my friend and colleague uh David Barard. Um and of course check out revikat.com to learn about the easiest way to grow and monetize your mobile app business. Uh, for launch, you can go to launchfm.com and uh, like Antoine, I won't read off all of our handles, but for the most part, it's launched fm basically everywhere. And, uh, if you want to see the dogs

[1:12:19] that may or may not have made it into the edit, uh, you should check out our YouTube channel. And, uh, and you might see them or or you won't if they didn't make it. It's a good upsell. Yeah. Yeah. Perfect. Exactly. Uh, awesome. All right. Well, I will see you all in two weeks. Bye. Bye. Bye.

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