Sub Club Podcast by Revenue Cat: From Indie Side Project to $1M in ARR

0:00[Music] [Applause] hey you're listening to the sub club podcast a show dedicated to the best practices for building and growing subscription app businesses we'll share insider secrets from the top subscription apps on the app stores let's get into the show hello i'm your host david barnard and with me today revenue cat ceo jacob hiding our guest today is curtis herbert an independent ios app developer designer and wearer of many hats curtis is the founder of slopes the app for skiing and snowboarding and he took it from an indie side project to a thriving business on the podcast we talked with curtis about his nine-year journey to reach a

0:44million dollars in arr why he shares revenue numbers publicly and how taking inspiration from web businesses instead of other apps kept him ahead of the curve hey curtis i'm so excited to have you on the podcast today long time fan first time uh podcasting with you um so i wanted to jump right in and just ask like why did you build a snowboarding app uh because i snowboard is probably the easiest answer to that question uh but while i was snowboarding i was with some friends and we were using another app at the time that was uh pretty well engineered but the ux left a little bit to be desired to be polite

1:23about it um and so we were trying to figure out i think where we went the fastest uh while we were skiing that day um and always remember people ski responsibly don't go out of control fast go at a controlled speed um but anyway we wanted to see where we went the fastest and uh it took cross-referencing like three or four screens or something crazy um so i was just we were at denny's and i'm like yeah i could do better than this uh which i feel like is the famous last words for a software engineer and the rest is nine years of pain and suffering

1:55[Laughter] so you so you started with the very typical like build a better mousetrap yes yes that's awesome advice i actually give uh people to not do but uh maybe a combination of being early sometimes the mouse traps are really bad david and like somebody you know and it just takes the the person that is annoyed enough to fix it right so i mean it's it's classic like you can't solve a problem you don't have personally i kind of feel like and so yeah that's a great place to start yeah i certainly wasn't the first on the market at that time there were like one or two or three other apps so

2:34yeah it was a space that had competition already um so you know take that as you will it's a good indication that there's a market there um but then it's you know competition and i had to come from behind to compete with that yeah so how long did it take you to get to 1.0 was this just it was a you were working full-time at the time right so this was just started as a side project yeah i had left lockheed martin in 2011 um and i started my own consulting company for ios and web um so at the time that i started slopes i think the

3:07first year i spent um only one month full-time on it and then the rest was nights and weekends and then the other 11 months was consulting and then year over year basically as it grew i was able to use the revenue that it brought in to justify doing less consulting and just kind of balance act that uh until there was no consulting left in 2016 when i went full time on it that's awesome so it shipped in 2013 yup i think i yeah i submitted for the ios 7 launch because that was a fun one to redesign for when you're trying to launch it um and actually i found a last minute

3:43bug and i had to reject and resubmit so i missed the launch day by like three days or something but whenever ios 7 came out that's when slopes came out basically it's it's interesting to think like ios 7 felt like so late already you know if you think like you've been doing ios since 08 or whatever it's like we've been through seven iterations oh yeah whatever but if you think about like where the devices were in that era like 2012 2013 like there were apps but like batteries were really kind of crummy you couldn't run location all the time location apis are probably a lot less

4:14efficient like you know there was there's and i think this is this is generally true when you're trying to if move into a crowded market if the technology if the something has changed about the underlying technology and in this case maybe it wasn't so obvious it was a bunch of different things like that's often a good time to disrupt right so we were seven iterations of ios in but like maybe we were ready for like a new snowboarding app right uh but it may not have been obvious uh yeah it was the one of the catalysts for two beyond trying to figure out speed himself was i

4:44wanted to visualize the runs in 3ds and phones had kind of caught up to the point where i could write very primitive teach myself opengl uh kind of code essentially before scene kit oh this was well before scene kit yeah um this was running on like an iphone 4 uh like a little 3d graph essentially of each run um now eventually that baby kind of grew up and got rewritten so i guess i kind of had a new baby um into scene kit and then i was actually doing 3d mountains uh where i would render your run on that mountain itself um but yeah it fortunately i wasn't coming

5:23out on the original edge phone or something and trying to do these fancy open 3d or opengl 3d graphs because that uh probably would not have done too well i was just pushing the edge on like three gs's and fours wow and so then so you launched in 2013 and i i even forget did you launch as a as a paid app or a uh free with in-app purchase no so i actually went against the grain at the time because this was race to the bottom era and i went premium paid up front 4.99 a whole five bucks um yes and that was the launch eventually i

5:59think a year later or so i started playing with the price and upped it to 7.99 as where it ended up uh until i went subscription and free um but yeah i never did the in-app purchase 99-cent you know make it up and volume kind of thing and i'm really glad i did it so and then i mean you've been super open we're going to talk more about this later but you've been super open about your your numbers and share you know regularly about your your revenue and all that so i'm just curious what how much did you make with it paid up front did you have a big launch did you

6:33get a little press i mean that was kind of the deal back then right it was like you know when my launcher pro app launched it was like 299 but we made like 60k in them in a week um so did you have that kind of a big launch and get some press or or did it just kind of trickle in oh god no it was um pretty bad um because i mean i was coming out of nowhere to do this like i i didn't have an audience really um i've been in the ios community a little bit but yeah i was no underscore with 80 apps already

7:04in the market that i could build on top of that audience or anything like that so no the the launch i was quite disappointed with um i mean i went at wwdc some of the apple press not apple but people who reported on apple um were kind enough to volunteer some of their time at one of the bars and talk to a bunch of indies and people trying to make apps to be like hey how can we get your attention you know how should we have a press kit stuff like that and i remember talking to them and then being like oh my god you have an amazing

7:31app like yeah it kind of sucks no one's written about it um and uh finally peter cohen from imore at the time uh gave me my first press article uh in the apple tech blog ecosystem uh like a year after it launched or something like that um just kind of went out on a limb did you have to did you have to work that a little bit do pr or was it just you do that you knew him or or probably almost no i wasn't stranger world but no yeah i was a total stranger and it was just uh you know hey i want to help you out kind of thing um this is

8:10good you should be noticed want to help you out yeah the apple the people in the apple press space are you know very kind generous people but one of the things i've learned with the ski app is not a lot of apple people ski so it's very hard for example for mac stories to justify covering slopes because 10 of their audience might ski i don't know the actual number but you know it's not that relevant versus productivity tools or weather apps or stuff like that and that was certainly a struggle throughout the history of slopes because most of my uh connections interactions stuff like that come through twitter and that comes

8:50through the ios community not necessarily the ski community where it would be better to market yeah this kind of thing i think a lot of people sleep on on that aspect of pr needing kind of channel fit it's like you think oh if i can just get in tech crunch or or you know one of these big publications it's going to like blow things up but exactly what you say it's like it you need to seek out the opportunities in the communities and in the blogs and in the news sites that actually cater to your specific audience because like yeah so many people who browse techcrunch you

9:27know just don't care and even though the volume's high the percentage is low and it's just not worth as much as you think it is for certain apps for certain apps it is you know email or a productivity app probably does a lot better um so anyhow it sounds like it was a couple years of really struggling but you made a little money as a as a project i just looked it up at figures um so i made six hundred dollars in the first two years of slopes existence as a paid up front app not not terrible for for a sidebar not terrible but considering my

9:59consulting rate uh it was not paying the bills i mean this is yeah this is the thing with building your own equity in ip right it's the the outlays are significant right like you have to put you're putting tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of time into it before you start i mean we'll get to the success aspect of this but it takes a while right yeah i mean first season i think it was um eighteen hundred dollars i made so this is nights and weekends taking a month off of work getting a launch not getting any press um you can imagine it was a little disheartening um but you

10:31know i kept with it and then the next season got a little bigger and then it just kind of kept going from there yeah so then i did want to talk specifically um you switched to subscriptions in 2015 which is still actually pretty early um which you know we we talked to mile iq on one of the recent episodes and and they were even before that um but 2016 was the year when apple really kind of opened things up and like any app can do subscriptions yeah i'm really curious like what way back then inspired you to do subscriptions and then did you have any like issues with

11:04apple approving a subscription for a snowboarding app uh no issues whatsoever um so what inspired me uh was the web community so like i said i when i was consulting was doing web um i've been involved with the web since it started um and i've always kept a foot in that arena so watching software as a service take off on the web you know everything there was subscription um and i for a long time felt like the web has figured out a lot of stuff that the ios community is just now figuring out uh they have about a 10 years head start on us so in 2015 i decided like hey you know this

11:45app is people love it you know the users that i had loved it um but uh it's not doing what i wanted to do i think it could be bigger the ski market could certainly support a big app i think um so i decided to you know take a serious run at it basically like look what am i going to do to run this like a business not like a little site app um and at that point i was looking around and there were only a few other apps in the app store that were doing it that weren't dating apps and stuff like that like um strava had a subscription i

12:14think run keeper definitely had a subscription running apps essentially slopes but for running and they had yearly subscriptions um now i forget if they are through the app store or just their web building portals i don't remember that um but i was looking at them and they were charging 50 bucks a year stuff like that um so i kind of felt like hey you know why why don't i give that a shot you know seeing the web and this is how you succeed recurring revenue none of this you know free make it up in volume um none of this race to the bottom and compete on price stuff like charge your

12:50value and charge it every year um and i kind of had the epiphany of hey wait people buy season passes to go skiing they're already paying a yearly subscription basically uh so why can't i just do the same thing and call it a season pass inside of slopes and at that point that was when i really cemented like i need to try this like the ski industry is trying it there is no reason the app for the ski industry should not also try it um so yeah when i launched it it was yearly and monthly um we i got rid of monthly pretty quickly but yeah there

13:26were no problems from apple uh with the original one you saw his non-auto renewing back then like you pointed out we hadn't gotten the go ahead yet um and that was just a gambit i was taking that you know i would figure out how to self-churn um but no problems getting it approved it went right through um yeah i i never got any pushback from that some customers were annoyed but i made sure to take care of the existing paid customers very well still to this day um i'm keeping features unlocked for them some future parodies stuff like that uh this is six years seven years

14:00later and i made sure some of them knew what was coming like this was not a big surprise per se um and made it very clear what they would be getting to be taken care of um and so some of them were annoyed um but i think overall most of them were pretty okay with it and i still have people to this day write in like hey i bought version one i'm still rocking the free version you know thanks for keeping it alive kind of thing so taking care of them and i didn't have a huge customer base yet um it wasn't you know 30 million subscribers or something

14:34crazy like it was reasonably small so the hate email wasn't too overwhelming yeah and if you if you're doing it right you most of your customers are in the future right it should always kind of be true you know so you should take care of your your existing folks but like you know don't hobble your potential future based on appeasing especially you know if you're pricing i'm curious like you went from uh you said 7.99 to a to yearly do you know remember what that price was you anchored on for that first yeah it was 19.99 and then i also had 8.99 monthly which was designed to make the yearly look

15:10better price anchoring see the web and sas and uh i actually got rid of that pretty quickly because i realized a lot of people were buying it and i wasn't sure why because it was a terrible deal and then i realized again mirroring the ski industry uh people want day passes uh or multi-day passes um because a lot of people go skiing for two days a year and so a season pass wouldn't make sense to them and they were buying the monthly as a way to get around that so i quickly pivoted got rid of the monthly and added consumable passes uh into the mix hmm

15:43did you did you i mean it seems like the monthly is a good work around but i guess from a user experience perspective you just didn't want people subscribed when they they were really trying to just do a daily thing yeah i mean honestly it feels like a dark pattern in my industry i know one other competitor that is now dead um at towards the end tried to trick a lot of people based on some dark ux into monthly uh and their app reviews were filled with people saying why am i getting built with this over the summer it's a ski app you know what's going on

16:14um so i figured monthly like it honestly just didn't make sense if i could pull off the consumable thing which i could um that one at the time i did get a little pushback on apple just from the day pass because you couldn't have a um essentially what they were considering a subscription be a day long so back then i just had to call it a single single-use pass which just happened to activate for 24 hours when you turned it on um but protecting consumers yeah it was a minor like one phone call from app review and we were clear and i got it fixed in 24 hours like it was

16:51fine that's that's good so what was what when did you switch so are are you doing auto renewing now on your on your annuals or did you ever make that switch or is it oh god yeah as soon as it came out oh okay yeah as soon as they came out um i switched to auto renewing which was um i guess that happened about two months before my initial set of subscriptions were set to reno um so the timing was pretty good it happened i think right before the season started if i remember correctly yeah that's right and so then but you did have to uh upgrade those

17:24initial non-renewing into the renewing right so you did have probably higher churn that year than in future years oh yeah yeah yeah but i mean that's just part of it i mean there was no clean way to make that transition right um and i was already planning on i'd have to sell them again on the yearly pass anyway because it wasn't going to be automatic so i was prepared for this it wasn't a surprise for me and it was a happy surprise actually that you know i'd be transitioning them to an auto renew setup and i remember checking the first year with the auto renew that you know not

17:59too many people were keeping subscribed if they didn't them record the next season uh and that number was very low so i was happy that you know even though i had switched to auto renew it wasn't taking advantage of customers yeah they had been canceling people i tend to be pretty rational about it especially for good apps i think like if you're being very honest and not using dark patterns to trick people into it at the beginning like folks folks will unsubscribe to these things um i actually think it's really you know if you if you're building value people are using it and you're storing logs right like it's a long-term

18:30relationship with the app i i feel like this is a really great example of an app i mean you knew this and you knew it before a lot of other people i think yeah it was something that um i definitely had to be prepared for as part of the ski industry people don't go skiing every year you know you might go on a great ski trip one year and then not go again for two more years but then you'll come back and getting that uh getting customers to come back and remember the app is always been a struggle um something i still work on to this day but the fact that they cancel

19:02their subscription like that's fine you're not skiing i don't want your money i am giving you literally no value at this point um so please stop giving me money so you launched the app in 2013 you transitioned to subscriptions in 2015 you transitioned to auto renewing subscriptions in 2016 at what point in that journey and i imagine subscription had something to do with it did you feel confident enough at the trajectory and and the revenue coming in to actually get full time uh so that was 2016 um end of it um and i don't think it necessarily had anything to do with the fact that auto

19:43renew was happening because i couldn't see what that churn was going to look like until 2017. right but the revenue that was coming in was starting to look very good um i think uh see i hate this because now i have to go back and look at the numbers they're no longer fresh in my head like they used to be because it's so long ago um but i think that year i made like 80 000 in proceeds and i had more than 2x i was like 2.5x uh the year before that i think it was like 37 000 or something like that um so like seeing that multiple and seeing the

20:20number that i was at i was very confident to say like hey i'm going full time at this point worst case i can backfill some contracts um that wouldn't you know ios contracting especially back then you know that a lot of that was high demand uh yeah so i wasn't super worried uh which was a nice privilege to have to say like worst case this doesn't work out i'm fine but you know it was a bit of a gamble because i was firing a bunch of clients essentially and once you fire them it's hard to get them back um so oh some risk but it felt like a very

20:52calculated safe risk yeah i mean i most most folks are they're they're tied to a w-2 like a full-time job right and they're trying to make that decision it's harder right i think very fortunate that you could blend right like each subsequent year put a little more time into it and focus and and kind of have a soft transition which yeah i mean i don't know i don't know what the advice would be for people to architect that but if you can make it that way like i think that's you did a really good job of yeah not not exposing yourself to unnecessary risk right which

21:22is i think something we're always you're always concerned about when you're launching something on your own right yeah and that the the w-2 transition it happened for me in 2011 when i left my full-time job job uh and went consulting um so i had just done that not with an app but with consulting but i feel like that's still very similar math and metrics and is this smarter is this not so yeah it just it wasn't with slopes that i had to make that call essentially i've given this advice privately a few times so now i'll give it publicly on on the podcast but with the job market what it is

21:58especially for a talented developer in mobile development even more specifically like there's just so much more demand uh i've told a few people that you know who were trying to you know build their india apps is negotiate like i think there's a lot of opportunity these days to do a 30-hour a week job do a 20-hour week job and and blend the best of both worlds so if you're out there and and trying to replicate uh curtis's journey and don't have the the stomach for consulting you know see if you can find another job at 30 hours a week and then have that spare spare time i'm sitting here as an

22:35employer with many employees that have apps and i don't know how to how to weigh in on this one so i'll just sit on the sidelines that's a very polite no you're coming to work tomorrow david um this is not allowed [Laughter] so i did want to dive into the the marketing so so again like this this this kind of arc that that you've gone on from this you know total side project barely making any money how did you start getting that that traction inattention um like where did those early that early growth from 2013 14 15 how did you get that 2x 25 2.5 x year over

23:18year uh honestly part of it is i don't know um i like to think it was word of mouth um i didn't have analytics in place so i can only venture guesses at this point um i wasn't spending anything on ads i think my first experiment from ads was 2016 2017 somewhere in there i did instagram ads for like i don't know 5000 bucks or something like i didn't throw a lot of money at it it was you know a small percentage of my yearly downloads at that point and so a lot of it was just word of mouth luck that the ski community does tend to talk to each

23:56other it's a group activity um you know if you're out talking about your top speed at dinner i'm gonna be like hey how do you know how fast you went um so i feel like there's in that regard at least the core of the ski community the people who go often uh not just the people going up for holidays uh they're gonna talk share things like that um so i think that was definitely an advantage uh that helped my word-of-mouth efforts um now i did try and i hope i was smart um i built like share cards inside a slope so you could post an image of your 3d rendered

24:29day basically to social media um with your stats on there and stuff like that because people wanted to brag um so i tried to do some small things to encourage it um no real growth hacking or anything like that and it certainly wasn't an ad dump like we see today to climb the trunks and do all that kind of stuff yeah honestly it was just a lot of slow slow building it um and just being patient year over year with it yeah i mean that's that's i think uh people are always trying to figure out like this product market fit question or like you know whatever but i think

25:01that's that's probably one of the best signs is when things are growing and you don't know why it's like i don't know i don't really do much it gets bigger every year right that's that's the word of mouth is a very clear signal of product market fit and people that need it and and and i mean that's why i mean we'll get further into how things have progressed from there but that's kind of the first tell you see for a lot of a lot of apps or sas or whatever it's like growth just kind of happens which is funny to think i found product market fit back then because

25:31slopes 2.0 the one that launched in 2015 was an absolute steaming pile of horseshit and i i regret shipping it in many ways i had some great ideas in there but the fact that there was word of mouth around this app i still surprised me back then i thought it was an amazing app but yeah the funny thing with product market fit it's not up to you to decide right it's up to the market and if the need is there and it solves the base case it can be really bad right and still if people need it they need it right um yeah yeah a lot of apps live on that

26:04yeah did at what point or have you even tracked um aso and you know have you done some optimizations because i did find that you rank really high for for real generic keywords like skiing you know today so i haven't been tracking so you know the last 10 years obviously but um you you rank really high for skiing for snowboarding for ski tracking for snowboard tracking have you looked at your app store analytics and and kind of dug into like how much of your traffic is coming from search and that's really hard to know too because like how many people are searching the actual name of the app

26:43versus searching right keywords but i'm just curious like if if aso played into that growth in any measurable way that you were able to see um so i forget the date of it i want to say probably around 2016. um there might be a blog post about this please see my blog and hold that to the source of truth not necessarily what i'm remembering right now but i think it was around 2016. um i did start to do try and do all the right things with screenshots aso all that kind of stuff unfortunately i know my way around photoshop so i could come up with some decent you

27:20know screenshots stuff like that experiment with different ideas in there but that's you know the marketing side of things it's a weird journey because i remember in the beginning always hearing like oh we're gonna do all this development but can't forget to market and i'm like oh yeah sure i'm gonna mark it um and then i try and pull like a michael simmons or something with the flex-a-bits you know the big surprise announcement and everything and that only works if you have an audience uh and i didn't realize that key factor back then um and then i didn't really keep up with the marketing too much um and but then i started to be

27:50like okay i really i need to pay attention to this i'm sorry to look at aso um and tried my very amateur attempts at doing a good job with that um i remember there was one blog post from app figures that was talking about like combining subtitles and titles how you can play off those combinations of words and that definitely helped rank for some of those uh more generic words like ski tracker and stuff like that that wasn't just like keyword stuffing necessarily in the title so i tried a bunch of that um so employee number one um ella uh who came in to help with some marketing growth

28:25all that kind of stuff she had definitely been giving a much more serious go at aso stuff for probably the last two years or so and that's certainly helped a lot so that's that's kind of if i tried aso yes i'm sure it was an amateur um but i feel like one of the key things is i don't know how true it is nowadays but certainly back then if you're at least trying you're doing better than 90 of the people out there because most especially indie developers we vomit at the idea of marketing and aso and screenshots and all that kind of stuff so we kind of leave it to the last minute

29:02um so if you're actually spending a couple days a month trying this stuff you're probably gonna have a leg up yeah and you mentioned app figures like there's uh lots of content out there to like for for the for the developer who's engineering focus like trying to do growth just copy just find like the best example you can find and make it work for you that will be good enough you don't need to invent something you don't need to get fancy start with that and then you can worry about your other problems down the road but like having a little bit of an idea about growth and

29:32like it helps you know you should do it and speaking of which i'm super impressed that the first employee you hired was for marketing and growth because i mean it just you know so typical of like of an indie mindset like i would have thought it would be designer or another developer to get push more features but i think it was really smart that your first employee was for marketing growth so i'm curious kind of what your vision for that position was and then kind of how it's gone to have you doing kind of engineering and and every pretty much everything else and then have somebody like full-time

30:10thinking about how to grow the product so i'd like to say i was smart and had a plan for this i didn't um so she was actually a customer who wrote into me with a health kit bug way back in the day um and then we just kind of started chatting because my email signature for customer support still to this day says like oh can you leave a five star rating they're like gold independent developers um and um she saw that i believe and was like oh wait you're you're independent you're you're a small shop doing this and she snowboarded a lot she was passionate about the space so she was interested um

30:46and like marketing aso all that kind of stuff was kind of her wheelhouse so yeah she just kind of came in and proposed like a part-time engagement thing um to help me go through my day like all the stuff i knew i should do by looking at the web and sas like oh i should be figuring out all these numbers uh running all these analytics coming up with customer segments stuff like that like the things i knew i should do but just never made the time for um she came in and she's like hey i can do that stuff um i've done this before can i get access to an anonymized

31:18version of your database and i'll figure this stuff out for you um so hired or part-time to do that over one summer and it went really well got a lot of great insights and then just kind of built on that from there um and until like what was it may almost a year uh last may that it was full-time at that point so it just kind of organically grew um but i did know hiring a developer or a designer as tempting as it is was the stupidest decision i could make um one of the things i've been lucky with is i can design i can develop i can do

31:55half decent ux um i can pretend i know marketing um i can do i can balance my books and run xero and gusto and do all the hr stuff like being able to do all this stuff has really enabled me to go far with slopes versus a lot of entrepreneurs that have to hire a developer and for that they need to seek funding so the fact i could do it myself um i think was definitely a bit of a superpower and so i knew as much as yeah it'd be nice if i could have someone else dealing with this stuff shipping more features wasn't going to

32:26be the answer to me getting a better product um that's always the itch and kind of my first go-to but in reality i've shipped features that are like oh yeah this is going to be big this is going to help word of mouth this is going to whatever whatever my grand plan is and it never goes that way um it's always a combination of a bunch of other things so i kind of knew that a developer while tempting um would be a huge waste of money at that stage in the process yeah no that's that's really insightful and and i mean it's great to hear it

32:59happen by by happy accident but i think it's super cool are there any um specific things that you can think of since she joined i guess that would be like 18 months ago part time and then almost a year ago full time any specific kind of focus area she's been working on that you feel like have been huge unlocks that you would kind of suggest other indies either find somebody part-time or try and get better at themselves yeah so um analytics is definitely one um so she uses a software platform called tableau which you can build a bunch of workflows and it'll spit out everything that you want to be

33:38able to build with this um and so she's able to segment customers she's able to figure out you know how many active users we had this week this year versus last year what that churn was this time last year versus this year um all of those kind of numbers that you could possibly want to figure out if you have your own data uh an advantage of you know not running this all client side i built my own server back end so i had all the transaction data i had all the recording data i had all of that so having those analytics has certainly helped we can see how you know new

34:12features roll out and how that might have an effect on different customer segments stuff like that it certainly helped to see like hey you know this is we launched this feature and it's not getting the response that we thought it would um you know is there something there we need to look at and then she was doing other analytics on top of that like sending out nps surveys and stuff like that right and that's been really good to see like you know if there was a problem with apple watch or something and then i'm actually able to fix it like we can see the mps score go very far up and

34:42that's good to see like oh we're healthy like this is good we're not shipping a product that everyone's upset with um and then also again web sas and things they did 10 years ago uh customer life cycle uh email marketing um so i had done i think a very very primitive one or two emails but then we brought in actually the gentleman who runs for flight the pilot app um we had chatted a bunch over the years and he recommended a platform called vero and they do just you can build workflows to send out emails um so my server can send custom events to them and that can

35:19trigger uh whatever we want it to trigger um and then we can say 30 days later if they haven't done this event do this stuff like that um so we have a whole like life cycle thing every season that goes out um and that's been pretty good too we always see good conversions on that kind of stuff we see good feedback about you know we're giving them pro tips or something like that um they're definitely feeling welcomed by the app which is nice um is seeing you know we try and make it have a personal touch so me reaching out um and saying like hey welcome to slope

35:53stuff like that um and that definitely gets you know customers like that kind of stuff and they feel like they're not just it's some weird faceless corporation um so email marketing that's that's a thing i think indeed devs or i don't know i'll just say devs in general are shy about because they hate emails and they're like don't email me it's all spam i know it's fake i know it's automated whatever something i learned this process is you're not like everybody right yes people people liked it put a big ol unsubscribe button on there never email them again they're not going to make them super mad right and be respectful

36:24and all that stuff but a lot of people get value out of this stuff and it can drive a lot i mean we were you all like did you have it sounds like you did some that were like content and engagement and then others that were like specifically meant to drive upgrades yeah so it depends on where you are throughout the process how many days you've recorded all that kind of stuff we have a bunch of different workflows um so kind of depending on where you go in there vero lets you set what your conversion rate is or sorry what your conversion uh event is so like this

36:51email we want to see people purchase something this p email we want to see people record again so like one of the emails early on is like smart reminders and making sure that people enable them if they haven't already so that next time they go to a ski resort it reminds them to use slopes uh again getting building that habit stuff like that is a challenge for slopes so we're able to set all those different conversion metrics and then watch and you know see if they work or not but and some of it that was kind of a leg up over the email marketing i tried which was basically a

37:24newsletter um you know a couple times a season um so when i launched it in 2015 the 2.0 actually during the onboarding i prompted for emails um to say hey you want to join the newsletter um and that got me a ton of subscribers like a lot of people were willing to your point of like you know we developers were like no you're not getting my email what the hell are you asking that for um a lot of people were like yeah i want to know um so that kind of built the original email list and then from there where you're able to get new customers if they

37:53wanted to opt in and stuff like that i i have to ask because i know you roll a lot of stuff yourself like you've a good backup developer you've done a lot your subscription infrastructure is a good back end developer developer well let's say uh capable it's capable of things uh was this like the first like external like tooling you brought in like did you kind of try to keep it all in your stuff like what was this the first like marketing forum or something like you used yes yeah it was the first major one and it was a bit of work coming up with all the

38:28different events that we wanted to trigger um like did they just record their first uh activity of the season or is this their tenth activity of the season like different events for all those different things not just like hey they created an account um and yeah so it was a bit of integration getting all those events hooked up and sent over to vro but yeah this is the first real big external tool that we had any kind of integration with yeah because you don't use like amplitude or mix panel or any of the analytics or any of that kind of stuff right you've done most of that in-house

39:02uh so some of the analytics um is done through firebase um and these in-app stuff um all the other stuff analytics-wise we do just through database events um and then through tableau we're able to do reporting on that um haven't hooked in mixed panel or anything like that i've i found a lot of website stuff isn't priced for mobile like at slope scale i'd be paying way too much money for this um they're thinking like web sas where you're like happy to have i don't wanna this is gonna sound insulting but they're they're happy to have a thousand users um like that's that's their scale of

39:38because they're charging much more for a product they're building professional b2b products they're not building consumer products maybe that's a better way to put it um but at the consumer mobile scale yeah no i cannot afford that stuff i remember this i'm going for as a beat to somebody working in b to c to b to b like i remember buying segment uh and mixpanel back then and being just like mind blown like how much it was going to cost us to do this and then yeah on the on with revenue cat now i think we finally just moved off of the segment based plan like you know full

40:08four years in because like the numbers it's just orders of magnitude less it's a big opportunity still i think in in you know if for for there there needs to be more tooling oriented for this kind of scale it's just a different problem yeah it really is yeah i tried to to buy mix panel for my mirror app and then charge per user and i had tons of user and my lifetime value uh was something like 45 cents or something oh no way yeah because it was just monetized via ads and a one-time like three dollar unlock to remove ads and so i burned like you know three

40:48thousand dollars trying to be a big boy and integrate the big boy tools but it's just it was not priced for for for that kind of an app but curtis it doesn't sound like that caused you that much heartburn like it sounds like you were kind of able to bring the tools in when you needed them and it didn't you didn't have to come out of the gate with some crazy martech stack and like have everything instrumented and everything it seems like no i've been i'm a big proponent of i guess being a little bit conservative in how much i take on um how much i'm

41:16screwing over my future self by whatever debt i'm taking on now both technical and monetary just playing it slow and being okay growing organically and slowly um like actually this year was the first year i moved slopes off of a 15 a month digital ocean server um that is what is powered slopes until the find my friends feature came out um and now we are powered by two servers um that have full cores each um and even those though they're like 30 a month uh but like i you know you can get away with a lot um surprisingly uh especially i think one advantage is since i know web and i know ios um i'm

41:57able to design my api and everything to be reasonably lightweight offline first all kinds of stuff so i'm not hammering my server uh like i might with some sdk that just syncs everything willy-nilly and does everything yeah uses uh uses venture capital to subsidize aws bills not talking about anybody in the room exactly yeah i think zero is actually still my biggest uh cost i think i just got the bill and it's 2300 this month um so not terrible at my scale um but certainly my biggest line item uh that's not a human um it's it's a chunk of change uh but it's worth it definitely

42:34yeah i mean that's that's that's the thing you start to move into these tools and the especially coming from india you're talking 30 a month servers and then suddenly your first like thousand dollar month thing can really blow your mind but yeah i mean you don't have to drive a tremendous amount of conversions off of the tooling there to pay for it right and then and then add to that the the value of the information you get learning and experimenting and giving your other employees leverage as well i think is one thing with tooling that's sometimes overlooked it's like it's easy when you're the solo dev and you can like go

43:05and edit the code and things like this but when you need to make tools so that your internal folks can work on that that can that can be um a good moment to like upgrade and whatever yeah and uh speaking of um going a long way with with little tooling and and being frugal um you just announced on twitter or announced you just said on twitter breaking news announcement breaking news some club podcasts breaking news alerts i will have said this in the intro for the podcast but congrats on hitting a million dollars in arr that is a huge achievement for for an india app um

43:44and and one of the things i do really appreciate and kind of wanted to bring up is i appreciate that you shared that as an indie developer and how much you've built in public your your blog posts have been a a great resource for the community and you you've over the years shared revenue numbers marketing numbers like you've shared a lot of stats that i think have helped a lot of people um so what i just wanted to say i appreciate that um and then on twitter too i mean if you're in the aspiring indie developer or even you know well i think curtis you're a little beyond the indie

44:18developer at a million dollars [Laughter] that's fair that's fair but but a great follow on twitter is what i was going to get at um but yeah i'm just i'm curious you know why you've chosen to do that and then maybe kind of some of the the benefits you've seen or or uh or even maybe challenges or anything you regret sharing um and and then you know what benefits have you seen in being so open like that i don't think i regret anything yet we'll see i mean you never know there might be something waiting for me building over on the side and two years from now it's

44:56going to come over and snipe me but so far i don't regret anything i started doing it because i was just very annoyed with bezos charts where you stopped getting a y-axis all of a sudden and i forget who it was uh it was one popular mac software shop um that was saying like oh why it's so important to you know do paid upgrades and all this kind of stuff and they had they showed the massive spike of the paid upgrade and then the long tail and it's like we don't know that long tail like that long tail could be a thousand dollars a day it could be ten dollars a

45:29day it could be ten thousand dollars a day we have no freaking clue um and i felt like uh definitely one of the problems i had going into this business is it wasn't clear what to expect like with all these charts out there that have no axes on the y-axis like i i don't know like it's i just couldn't make any sense of it so i really wanted to put something out there that now that my journey represents everybody else's journey and what they can expect or anything like that but at least to say like hey this is what my journey's been and you know maybe level set some

46:08expectations you know maybe your journey is going to be different it's going to be vc funded so my charts are nothing like what your charts are going to look like um but i just hated that void of information and that secrecy in a way of like oh i found this great marketing tool there this great marketing hack or something like that i don't want to share it with anyone um you know i feel like that stuff we should learn from each other as best as we can um the industry is better off if we're all learning this stuff one person keeping a secret doesn't help and not that

46:40anything i have is particularly secret worthy uh but you know whatever i guess the only thing i really worry about is you know it gets hard as we talk like a million ar and stuff like that like i see why people get rid of the y-axis because at some point you're like am i sounding like i'm bragging by putting this chart out there because that's not really my goal but like there's no way to talk about a million dollars yearly without it sounding like a humble rag or something and so i see why some people might drop those axes but i don't know and people make assumptions

47:15too that that's a tricky part of it is that like you know they don't know your expenses they don't know you know how much you're paying out employees you know how much you're spending on marketing and so there there are a lot of assumptions to be made in those public numbers um but you know at the end of the day those those kind of things that just are what they are like people are going to read what they want to read and make the assumptions they want to make but i deeply appreciate you sharing so much in public and i hope that inspires more people to share because i think it

47:44it is incredibly helpful for folks trying to to grow and i mean this is what we're trying to do with the podcast too is just talk to people about their experiences um because there's so much to learn from each other i mean it's eight years right it's not like uh one you got to one million and it was i don't know if it's eight or seven years now but like uh it you know i don't think that's that that's not like uh that's something you should feel very proud of sharing and i don't think you should have any like keep going yeah just keep going don't worry i'll keep going i really

48:14want to build out um i liked there was a web sas that i was using when i was a contractor cushion i think it's called if i remember correctly there was a freelancer tool for helping you schedule budget send invoices to all kinds of stuff like basically the business dashboard i wish i had as a freelancer and he had a public page that listed all of his operating costs everything from domain names to fonts to employees and i've really been meaning to put something out like that because right now i think i don't know ballpark yearly operating costs not including my salary i think is like three hundred thousand 000

48:48or something like that 400 000 maybe 300 i think so like i think it's good for that context of like okay if i'm looking at probably 1.2 million this season maybe um and minus apple's cut and then what are the expenses and all that kind of stuff now a lot of that i keep back in the business and find things to spend it on like this season i was spending like eight thousand dollars a month to hire people part time um to map resorts uh to go into satellite maps and draw the trails basically and that was like 15 hours per resort uh it was a lot of work

49:22and that's building for a big ambitious two year plan i have um but like having that cash reserve lets me go ahead and do some of these ambitious projects now that i wanted to do since 2013 when i started this but i knew there was no way i could do by myself but yeah i i think that that operating cost is kind of part of the picture that needs to be out there too yeah i would love to for you to write that post so i can link to it and quote it and everything else yeah uh again because people just make a lot of assumptions i

49:50mean even like me hearing the million dollar number i wasn't sure if that included apple's cut or didn't include apple's cut and then you know i wouldn't oh yeah you never include apples cut when you're trying to juice your numbers you always always keep 30 on there well i so actually on that like i've been starting to say you know before apple's cut just because if we were a web sass it doesn't matter what your stripe processing fee is it doesn't matter what any of your processing fees are when you report your revenue it's your revenue if you want to talk profits it's your profit if i'm going to say revenue that

50:22is the definition of revenue right now just because i'm an independent developer who makes a living on apple yes in my mind you know the 15 percent cut the number after that is what matters but still a small business thank you very much not a million dollars in proceeds yet a million dollars in revenue um but you know that's the number that matters to me in my bank account yeah you get that you get that celebratory kick in the butt from apple when you hit that level yeah oh we have an internal like how screwed or we calculation um because it's gonna be plus or minus fifty thousand dollars

50:56by the end of the year that we're going to come in the small business or not um so it's gonna be cutting it close this year i think yeah well thanks so much curtis i think it's a great place to wrap up and you've been so generous with your time um you know people should go check out slopes uh we'll put some links in the show notes but anything else you want to share or pitch are you hiring or anything i will be hiring somebody else in a couple months probably but she's the lady who's been doing customer support for me for a couple years part-time and

51:25she's been managing that mapping project uh so i am hiring but not publicly uh i already have someone for that role sorry no i i don't think there's anything really to pitch uh besides you know check out the slopes diaries on the blog that's where i put all my numbers um twitter usually i'll tweet out numbers well before i write a coherent article about them and you know i tend to tweet my designs in public and everything like that too um so check that out and uh yeah i think that's about it awesome thanks again thank you really appreciate the time sure thing yeah thanks for having me

52:00to make sure you never miss an episode subscribe to the show and your favorite podcast player thanks so much for listening until next time [Music]