The Balance Between Growth and Craft — Jordan Morgan, Elite Hoops

0:00What I discovered is Elite Hoops during basketball season, the beginning of October to like the end of March, like that's when I'll make 80% of the revenue, give or take. And what I discovered is it's getting so much on its own. Apple search ads do really, really well for it. I wish I could even spend more. Like I up the spend on it all the time, and I've hit the ceiling of like what people search for in a day, and I'm pretty confident I capture most of that. Welcome to Launched. I'm Charlie Chapman and this is the annual Christmas special with the one and only

0:28Jordan Morgan.

0:35Jordan, hello. Hello. Welcome back. It's that time of year. Yes, this is uh this is becoming one of my favorite traditions. So, for those of you who don't know, uh, every year since I started this podcast, I think so it's been like four or five years, uh, we've done a Christmas special where we get together and a normal episode of launched, as you hopefully know, is I'm interviewing somebody about a new app or something that they've released and kind of the story behind it. And this episode is uh is basically my chance to naval gaze with one of my best indie app friends uh Jordan who we've sort of had

1:13these I don't want to say parallel indie lives but they've been crisscrossing. You you were doing this longer than me. You released an app before me and then you got out of the app game and you became an author for a while and so this is our chance to sort of talk about our

1:26feelings for for an hour and hang out. It's therapeutic. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, lots lots of overlap. I mean, everyone in southwest Missouri is just waiting to hear the indie dev tales between us. So, we gota get That's another piece of of lore here is that uh we are both from Missouri in the United States. Uh which this might surprise anybody who knows a lot about Missouri, but it's not the land filled with indie iOS developers. Uh, we like to joke that there's a rule, unwritten rule here, that you're only allowed to have one indie app developer per major city because we have like a little group

2:00of us, but there's literally only one of us in each in each city. It feels like it's true. Yeah, there's there's not very many. Um, and that hasn't changed in the five years we've been doing this. Well, we've had some move out. Uh, yeah, Colombia, I think, still is looking for one. Uh, I don't know of any there right

2:17now. No, no, they're we're we're sparse. I figured it's been long enough and hopefully now that this podcast has been rebirthed as a Revenue Cat podcast, hopefully there's a there's a new audience maybe who doesn't already know our full backstory. If you don't, I'd recommend just go through the the back catalog and well, really, you should

2:39just listen to every episode of Launch. set aside a Tinder 5 hours and you're Yeah, you should go through find all the Christmas specials and listen to them. Actually, it's become kind of a tradition of mine to listen to our previous episodes, which is always very fascinating. It's like a weird weird way to reflect on your year, to listen to yourself from

2:59past years, recollect that year. Yeah. Yeah. It's kind of funny. If you don't already know our story, I wanted to give just a quick recap of how we got to where we are and then we can kind of jump into the last year's, you know, things that we've been trying and and how we're feeling on those. It was right after I launched my indie app, Dark Noise, White Noise app. And right before, like a month or two before I launched my app was when you launched Spinstack, which was your indie app that you had been working on for

3:29a very long time. Yeah. much longer than I had been working on dark noise. But since that time, uh, you have s you sold spinsack. So that was sold. Then you have reacquired the the opensource rights to spinstack. I I don't remember how that went. I have the whole app now. Yeah, that was this year. Like I it's back in my app

3:49Apple developer. Oh, that was this year. Yeah, I I think it was this year. They gave me open source rights to it I think last year and then this year I was like, "Hey, can I just have it back?" And they're like, "Yeah, sure." So yeah, it's back in my developer account. Maybe we can get into that because that's a whole interesting thing is a very long uh recollection of selling your selling your baby in a way in in

4:10that case for you. They gave it back for free. So Bad Baby. Yeah. Yes. Exactly. If we did uh episode titles, that would be the title of the episode. Bad baby. So after you sold your app though, you didn't immediately jump back into the indie app developer game. you became a an author. So, you wrote the best-in-class iOS app book series which took a few years off of your life uh both literally and in the color of your

4:38hair probably. Now, it's an achievement. You have this big book and you keep that updated over time. I've released a couple little little apps. Uh none of them were major big deals. I had a app that was free for teachers that, you know, got some press coverage and stuff, but it wasn't it wasn't even paid, so it wasn't a big one. And then I switched over from a paid upfront app to subscriptions and then very quickly after that joined revenue where I talk about doing that you know all day long. And then you actually before you you also joined me

5:09in the sort of developer advocate game. You also jumped back into the indie app developer game with elite hoops, right? That was before you switch jobs. And can you remind us uh like what the main pitch is for elite hoops? Yeah, it's just I call it a toolkit for basketball coaches. You can share plays, run practices, and save drills. Those are

5:29like the main core tent poles of it. Yeah. Aimed at basketball coaches specifically, like not players. Yep. Yeah. We talked a lot about that in previous Christmas specials. And then both of us have released Vision Pro versions of that app. Probably won't talk about that here, but that was a thing that happened. You joined Superwall, uh, a great partner of Revenue. Is Is that the corporate by

5:52line before the show? It's not a cor No, no, no. I I love Superwall. I like Jake. I like Brian. I like the whole team. Super wall is great. I was trying to think of some good like burns to give the internet some drama, but I don't know. I didn't have time. I do wonder how many people who watch our companies online will think that this is

6:09like a I can't believe they're together. Nature is healing. Look at them. Nature's healing. Yeah. No, me and Jordan, we go way back. But also, the Superwall team's great. Like uh we have a good relationship. I feel like. But yeah. So now you're a developer advocate. I'm a developer advocate. We both have uh sort of side apps on the side. And then over the last year, we've actually both released new apps, which I do want to get into, but first I want to catch up on like what the latest is with Elite Hoops. The last

6:37episode, I was just listening to it. You talked a lot about uh your like paid advertising that you've been doing with that. Yeah. And you were like, we'll we'll check in next year to see how that's gone. cuz you had recently kind of been ramping it up and so I guess now I get to ask you

6:51how has that gone? That's actually a really good uh thing to talk about cuz I have like a lot of new news there. So yeah, at Tri Swift my talk there I mentioned paid ads as well and like the ironic funny thing about that is I've never been doing paid ads right or correctly. I think I said that to you a lot during this episode. Everyone I talked to that does actual marketing has has has told me that. So like you know when they ask

7:19like hey what's your uh you know CPI? What's it cost? What's your LTV cost to acquire customer? All these things. I'm like well actually I don't even have like the Facebook SDK installed. So like I just kind of know like what my installs normally look like when I turn ads off and on. And some like there's two reactions. Some of them are like

7:36nice like oh you know okay I get it. Like I know what you mean. And other people are like dude you are what are you doing? Like you're wasting money. like you have to be able to like know what's working. So, I think uh cuz you know I'm pretty transparent with the numbers. I think this year I've spent 16k on ads. I only spent $30 a day right now because two reasons. One, I hired a marketing agency this past month to show me like how to do this, right? Yeah. To like teach me how to actually do paid ads correctly. And two, what I discovered is elite hoops during

8:09basketball season, cuz it's like 90% of the paid user bases, they're American, probably higher than that, probably like 95. Over the few years it's been out, I know it's seasonal. So like the beginning of October to like the end of March, like that's when I'll make 80% of the revenue. Like give or take that if I had to guess off the top of my head, I'll make most of the revenue in these next, you know, four or five months. And what I discovered is it's just it's getting so much on its own. Um, Apple search ads do really really well for it. I wish I could even spend more. Like I up the

8:39spend on it all the time and I've kind of hit the ceiling of like, you know, what people search for uh in a day and I'm pretty confident I capture most of that. You're saying Apple search ads are doing well. Do you know that now? Like are you looking at your cost of acquisition and

8:52your LTV? And is the math mathing? The math is mathing. And this is where I have to put the the big ironic asterisk. So yes, I started this app 2023 before I joined Superwall. So like my uh app doing really well is on Revenue Cat, which I always, you know, h have to laugh at the the irony. But I do tell people like I want apps on every platform because I want to know like what the pain points are, how things Yeah. So I have apps on RevenueCat, on Superwall, with the mix with neither one. When you guys first launched like the Apple search ads attribution thing,

9:25I turned that on like the day that I saw your video about it. So yeah, like I can go and look in the charts and see like where actual paid conversions are coming from and segment it by like the Apple search ads stuff. So yeah, I can see that that does really well, but it caps like 500 bucks a week. Like that's the most I can spend on it. Like I would

9:44spend more if I could. That's a limit like Apple just has for everybody. No, no, no. It's just like that's the search volume. So yeah, but I don't know how much you want to dive into paid ads at at the moment, but the preview is from my learnings with the marketing agency is I think the term they said was like, "Turn that off right now. You're

10:03burning money. Turn off Apple search ads. Turn off the ads that I've made on my own, like the way that I have it." They're like, "Turn that off right now. The money that you're making right now is not because of this basically is what they were saying. Like you're just you're making money because it's in season. your search, you have good ASO for it. Your Apple search ads are working like this. This is not making a difference what the setup that you have

10:27current. So they're saying to turn off your non-Apple search ads. Correct. My meta ads. Yeah. So the meta ads specifically. Yeah. Yeah. Gotcha. Yeah. That the ads as I have them today are pointless basically is is kind of what they're saying. The biggest reason they gave is like one they're like yes you need attribution. Like you have to figure out how to do it. And I think I may have even put this like in our group chat. I was like, you you either die the righteous India or live long enough to have to finally install the Facebook SDK or something like that, you know? So, like the biggest reason they said is

10:57like, so I made one and this might have been this year, so we may not even talked about it. I I can't remember if we chatted about it last year, but I made one video that went semiviral and hit like I don't know, say like 200,000 organic views and then I pumped ad spin behind it. And whether it's correlation or causation, you know, because I don't have the SDK, revenue like did super well in that time for me. And I and I'm pretty confident that's where it came

11:21from. Yeah. But what the marketing agents and they're called uh EVO uh consulting, EVO, they're they're great bunch. Just finished up with them. Le learned a ton that I'm sure we'll chat about. But they were pretty much saying like you're just milking the same creative like you've been using the same creative like all

11:37year. It's that's not going to work. like you need you need to refresh their creatives and you need to do that fairly often. So this one that you have like it's done, you know, like it it served its purpose. Yeah. You know, it's time to move on and you got to use something else. So yeah,

11:52that's that's kind of what they gave me. But uh yeah, so TLDDR, I'm a big believer in paid ads. I've used them a lot. I've spent a lot of money on them and now I know kind of how to do them correctly cuz I never have had the setup exactly how it's supposed to be. So, you

12:08do have that set up now? That's next on the list. So, I what I have right now from the marketing agency are how to correctly run a paid ads campaign. Like, they taught me how that looks. I have to get the Facebook SDK installed. Um, which that doesn't take long. So, that's like my next technical thing I have to do before I I turn these on. And as part of the consulting package, I have 20 creatives to use, which to me was the biggest value ad because I don't like making creatives. Um, it's like I just don't like it, you know? So, I have like a very good game plan, a

12:40professional that knows what they're doing, set everything up for me, they gave me the playbook, now I just have to kind of execute on it is is where it's at. And your idea is that you're going to do your own creatives and then run them as ads basically. This isn't using influencers. This is using their creatives. So, yeah. So, the videos themselves, there's different formats, but they made them all for me. So, like they have like their own creators that they contract with. And the thing that really impressed me is like the first thing that they did is they came up with this massive like notion doc of like who my

13:14ICP is like my ideal customer persona what the strengths of elite elite hoops are why people would download it how to talk about it and it was almost surreal seeing that cuz it's like this thing that I've worked on for like two and a half years like they knew it better than me like I was like oh dude this makes like so much sense like okay yeah like this is how from a very different angle than you a pure marketing one. Yeah. And it just like reinforced to me like how people have that talent. They have that bone in

13:40their body to kind of like dig through. And if you told me like I had to make a notion doc like that, like I would put it off for months cuz it just sounds like that kind of thing is so mentally taxing to me. Like okay, my ideal customer persona. That's what chat GPT is for.

13:54Yeah, absolutely. Chat it up. I don't know they would do a good job. Although it's a good way to get started. It is a good way to get started. But uh so yeah, so what they've delivered to me is basically a lot of information on how to market elite hoops, the people that I'm trying to reach, how I should talk to those people, and most importantly, how to correctly set up a ad campaign with Meta, and here's a good starting point of creatives you can use to to get going on that. So really, I've had paid ads and they've never been done correctly, and I want to see what

14:25happens when I do set them up correctly. um because it does so well just with Apple search ads and organic search right now that like maybe this is the that last little bit of gasoline I need to kind of make it you know go to the next step and and grow faster than it is

14:40right now. So I guess that gives us our uh you know first follow-up item for for 2026 Christmas special. Yeah. And you know it'll be like oh I never installed the SDK you know I just like hey I'll do it later. Oh yeah that's gonna start next week. Uh yeah. Oops. What about over the last year though? Like has it been growing? Like I know the ad agency was saying the creatives aren't the reason that it's doing whatever it's doing, but has the needle

15:06been moving basically? Yeah. So the start of the year, this is kind of what it's done the last two year. Then it goes up and to the right until about the end of March, beginning of April, and then it'll stay basically straight the whole way through until I get back to October and then it'll go up again. What are we saying goes up though? Is that revenue or is that your

15:27like MR or something? You could pretty much say every healthy business metric. Like I get that it's seasonal in the sense that that's when the money starts coming in, but like is it growing, flatlining, and then growing on top of that or is it like goes up, goes down, goes up, but then the baseline kind of stays the same, you know? Let's uh let's look at some

15:48charts and find out, why don't we? Yeah. No, it's it's grown every single year. It's It's never kind of stayed stagnant. So like AR is going climbing climbing climbing till we get to about May and then from May all the way to September like it barely moves. It doesn't really go up, doesn't really go

16:10down, just kind of stays where it's at. So you're not getting new subscribers at that point? No, not really. Not during that time, which surprised me because I thought I could really hit like the summer ball circuit um like AAOU teams because that's that's their time. And since, you know, I ask people like their demographics during onboarding, a lot of them are AAU coaches. So, I don't know if they've already subscribed or what, but what the data is telling me is it correlates to the basketball season, which is not surprising, but I am surprised it's I can't like kind of hit that growth year round because

16:40people are looking for a solution still during the summertime. It is funny because I'm looking at like I split it out by 12 months and it looks like if you started at the top right of the graph, you'd be going down like the ski slope and then you have like this nice settling period where you know you can kind of coast and then it goes down again, you know. So like it's it's weird. I I have this thing that seems to kind of grow is in a spot where it's a somewhat mature. It hasn't been out I mean in the grand scheme of things very long, but like I can I know when it's

17:08going to start growing a bit more. But your your churn once annuals started hitting did not overcome the new subscribers you you brought in. It stayed straight. So, like during what I call the off season, I'll get like one or two conversions a day and then because churn is depressing, I don't ever look at it, you know, but obviously what that chart is showing is like they they pretty much cancel each other out, you know, which is one reason why I have the luxury, I guess, of being able to like really try paid ads even more because the revenue is is good for me day in and day out now to where I know

17:45it's going to make at least 500 to a thousand pretty much every day. So, I want to take that and and see I've never been shy about just putting money back into the business. Like, you know, what would happen if I got to the point where I could spend 500 a day on ads? Like,

18:00what does it look like? The description of us too is that yeah, you will reinvest and I am 5 years in still scared of the tax man suddenly showing up. And so, it just But you could buy like a Lamborghini in and a mansion. I could buy like a Mc McDonald's happy value meal. So don't don't feel bad. No, that's good though. Yeah, cuz like my story is definitely different. Like

18:24dark noise is coasting more or less. It's not really going down like it goes down some, you know, a big part of my user acquisition is is press and Apple features, right? So that's my big waves anyway. So like September, October, I'll get a lot from either Apple features when a new version of iOS comes out or mentions on podcasts, especially like end of the year, like what's your favorite, whatever, what apps are on your home screen. Those always give me some big spikes, but those those subscribers I found I don't know the the raw numbers, but at least based on the shape of the graphs, it seems like those

19:04tend to have a higher churn, which makes sense cuz it's more people like kicking the tires. they have disposable income because they're the type of people who listen to productivity apps, but like they're not necessarily fully invested. They weren't searching for it. They heard about it on something. And so that churn is higher. So depending on how that year goes, some years, you know, I'll lose more subscribers than I gain because I had a really big year the year before, not as big. Some years it goes kind of the inverse, but more or less it's like, but I haven't been investing heavily into Dark Noise like I would

19:34like to be. It's more or less I'm keeping it up to date every year with the latest iOS features and it's kind of plugging along. So, it's not like a growing thing, but I did release a new app which I listening to our last episode, I actually talked about it. It had a different name. It was called Screen Frames initially, which was just my like that I guess to back up. I had decided I wanted to try just building an app fast cuz I've I've always been like you. I would sit there and just kind of obsess over something for forever. And I'm not a person who lets projects die

20:07very often, but I will work on them for a very long time before I release them. And so I was like, I'm going to try this. Yordy Bruin had this method called the 222 method that was popular or maybe still is popular where it's like you work on something for two days and get a working version and then you give it two weeks and you should have a version on test flight and then two months you should have it out in the store. Or maybe his is two hours, two days, and two weeks. His is really

20:33quick. Very quick. It gave me anxiety. His like Yeah. Yeah. But either way, I I made mine a alternated version of that, but it was the same thing where I was like, "All right, I'm going to get a working version as fast as I can." And I did. Uh and and the idea that I had was I wanted a Mac app that let me add device frames around screenshots. So like app developers, probably a lot of people listening, you frequently use an Apple shortcut or Figma or something where it's like you take a screenshot of your app in a certain phase and you want to share it in some marketing asset. So you

21:05need to put the frame of the phone around it so it looks like it's in a phone. And this was just to automate that basically. And so I wanted I had a very particular way I wanted it to work. I wanted to be able to copy and paste pictures into it and then copy and paste pictures out of it and just do everything immediately like that. And so I built a really, really quick, really, really dirty version that I never would have even built it that way in the first place. And then I got that version cleaned up enough to get on test flight, even where it was slow. Like it was very

21:34slow because of architecturally the way I did it was kind of insane. Like it was literally I guess I This is the Christmas special. We can go into stupid details. The way I built it originally was uh you know, you can rasterize a bit map image out of a Swift UI view, right? UI graphics render image renderer or I don't remember how I don't remember actually anymore. Yeah, it's going through UI kit I think. But either way, it's a Swift UI view. I'm rendering it

22:03into an image. But the screenshots are are decent sized obviously. And then the frames that you get them in are, you know, a decent sized image. And so the way I built it all originally was like I wanted you need to be able to preview what the image is going to look like. The way I did it was I literally would render the the bit map and then put that bit map in the canvas. So like what you had in the canvas was not Swift UI views being rendered there. It was the bit map which meant if you changed literally anything it rerendered the whole image. And

22:37that's fine. Like it was you know and this is why I did it. It was like it was fine. it got the job done. But like especially as you, you know, if you had a Mac screenshot, well that's, you know, a 5K image depending on your screen and then you have the ability to drag in like three or four images to have, you know, the phones lined up, which is pretty popular, but that's a big image even if you don't need it eventually that big. Anyway, I I built that version, got it on test flight really fast. Um, and then, you know, life got in the way. And so when we recorded last

23:06year, I was in that phase where I had released it the test flight, but I hadn't gotten it fully released. Anyway, this is a lot of context to say I did release that app in I think March of this year. It's now called Framus. Uh which our our mutual friend Josh Holtz, I just gave him my name and said, "You need to give me a real name." That's good. Although, here's a fun little

23:27better than chat GPT at those names. Yeah. Yes. And the best ones. ChatGpt is bad at naming still. Yeah. one thing it is just not good at. But uh this is another fun little tidbit. The And maybe you have an answer for me here. Well, no you don't cuz I've asked you this before but uh the Mac App Store sucks. Did you

23:50know this? Uh it's very bad. Yeah, it's it's depressing every time I go to it. Yeah, but as a product it's very frustrating. And and the reason I say this is my app is called Framus. Like a pun on Frame and Famous. And what I have determined is that the Mac app store just autocorrects behind the scenes the word famous into famous which means uh my app never ranks to the top of the word famous. It's always like fifth and it's fifth behind like random apps but they have the word you know famous whatever and they have nothing to do obviously

24:26with anything my app has to do with. Would you like to give me a a live demo of what you're behind right now when I start famous? Number So, you're you're seven. Okay, this is great. Number one. Yeah. Yeah. Art for you. Hyphen famous paintings. Okay. Number two, famous quotes. All right. Number three, famous cities. Now, we're really going to go off the rails on four four through six here. Four, currency converter calculator. Exclamation point. What's in the subtitle? How did the word famous exchange rate to USD is the subtitle. And then this might be my favorite. Number seven before famous is Kingdom Rush HD. The most f Oh, there

25:09we go. The most famous strategy TD. Okay. So, of those currency calculator has famous nowhere in it at all. And to be clear, you searched like with an R, right? I'm getting ready to send you the screenshot. Oh my gosh. Yeah. So, I thought I fixed this. So, that, you know, the app came out, did pretty well, got press in a lot of, you know, the big podcast and stuff and I was very excited and then I noticed this problem and it's like I'm doing all this earned press and so people are going to the store and typing in Framus and they don't see my app and

25:46it's like this is insane. Like totally insane. You know, I'm asking around and everybody, all the the sort of usual experts are like, to be fair, I don't think most people know as much or care as much about the Mac App Store. They're like, "This doesn't seem right. I bet it'll fix itself in a few days." And lo and behold, in a few days, I was ranking up at the top. And I thought, "Okay, this is great." And I didn't pay much attention to it for a while. And then I go back, you know, a few months in and I'm back down again. Like, what the

26:14heck? And then after a couple more of these like little press cycles, I realized I'm pretty sure I'm just ranking higher for the word famous because when I get a bunch of earned media, it's like, oh yeah, lots of people are downloading it here, but then it kind of like falls back down. I don't know that that's the case, but that's my only guess because it does seem like when there's a bunch of activity, it fixes itself. And I thought it was like the algorithm fixing itself or like some engineer heard me complaining and uh you know fixed whatever hard-coded not probably not hardcoded but whatever

26:46thing in there is making it say you know they may have typed famous and we might be showing that they typed famous but let's just assume they actually meant famous because that seems to be what's happening. Very aggravating. Just put famous in it but it looks like you did that. So that was that was my

27:01big amazing idea. Well I have it in the subtitle, right? I literally was thinking do I do the like you you have it open. What do I I have something in the title, right? It's like screenshot sharing or screenshot frames or something. Yeah, let's see. It it says um frame colon screenshot frames and then your subtitle is famous device bezels framer which I love. I love Yeah. I mean, you

27:24just got to lean into it at that point. Yeah. Very aggravating. But anyway, I don't think that's a big deal because it's not like my ASO on the word famous matters. What it has to be hurting though is it showing up on the app store or uh somebody hearing about it on a podcast or whatever, searching for it on the app store and then it's like if you don't see it in the top five result, the top three results, that surely hurts the amount of people who actually convert. And even if you do see it at that point, it makes it it's below a bunch of apps that kind of give

27:56you this vibe of like this doesn't seem like, you know, very legitimate. Yeah, I don't love it. But anyway, all that to say, that app has been doing really well for me actually. Like, it's a meaningful amount. Like, it's a noticeable bump. Your SEO is fantastic. If you just type Framus, it's the top top result on Google. So, I mean, you got And honestly, that's probably what more people do on the Mac anyway. So, yeah, that app has been doing pretty well. And there's a couple interesting things I did with that app that might be worth talking about. I made it a subscription, but then I kind of tried a slightly

28:30different monetization method that I I don't know yet if I've decided if I regret it or not, but basically it's a subscription for like $10 a year, or you can you can do a lifetime purchase for like 20 or something, but that lifetime purchase only unlocks the frames that came out in the year that you purchased it and all the previous years. So, so I'm selling the 2025

28:58frames and anything that came up before. Actually, I'm in the process right now. The idea was I would run a Black Friday sale and then after the Black Friday sale is over, then I switch over and I'll start selling the 2026 frames, which is I'm literally like this weekend is what I'll what I'll switch over to. And so, it's it's annoying because it means I I have to make sure I go in and and do that. But, it's actually not too complicated. And so, we'll see. Well, I'll find out next year what that looks like because if I if I convert, you know, 30 or 40% of the people who

29:32did that, which I probably won't, maybe 10% of the people, it might still even out to being similar because it costs more than the regular, you know, auto renewing subscription would. So, it'll be interesting to see how that goes. I like that model cuz I remember uh I don't know how I remember this. years

29:49ago, Apple design award winner agenda. They called it what? The cash cow, which I think ironically, it was like an ironic name, but like that was their thing. Like if you bought I don't think they actually had a subscription. Maybe it was just like an inapp purchase or non-consumable, but it's like if you bought the date that you bought the tier entitled you in perpetuity to the pro stuff up to that date. But like if they released another thing like after a year or whatever then like you had to buy it again or whatever with the idea being like you never lost the pro features uh

30:22features that you paid for which I thought was interesting. They were trying to do the sketch model cuz like sketch at that time was really popular with the whole you just get updates up to a year after you bought it or whatever. But on the Mac that's like an easier thing to do. But on on iPhones, it's like you can't really do that because you can't sell you can't like really give them access to old versions of the software. And so yeah, Agenda's way of doing that was I I don't actually know anybody there, so I don't know technically, you know, how they did it, but like they would have had to have

30:56built a system into the app where every single feature had to have a like year gate on it. But then the crazy part about that to me is just the QA. It's like you have to be able to QA every year's version of it. So somebody who bought it and didn't pay for the upgrade and had it for 10 years, you need to be able to run it in that mode to see the is this version that we're releasing

31:22this year totally broken in that mode. And I feel like every single year that would just get more and more and more complicated, right? Yeah. I mean, I found a blog post about it from seven years ago. So yeah, gosh, time flies. But yeah, it looks like they're still doing it. I should get them on the show because that would be very interesting to talk

31:39to. I think the developer was someone that was pretty like he had a presence on Twitter and then I think the great, you know, social media divide happened and I I don't know, maybe that was he's on Mastadon or somewhere, but Drew, I think his name was his name. But yeah, I always thought that model was really it it felt sustainable, but it felt technically like the implementation of

32:00it would be difficult to do. I feel like the implementation's pretty straightforward. It's the QA that's hard because I'm essentially doing the same thing in Frameus, but it's not complicated because it's just the content that changes. So, it's like if I release a new feature, it's like you'll have the new feature, you just might not be able to use it with a current frame or whatever like that. Yeah. So, testing wise, it doesn't really matter. It's not like I need to test every single piece of content that my app can show. But, if you're doing it around features, it's like I just feel like it would get

32:32really complicated. But, I'm sure they If they've been doing it for this long, I'm sure they have all sorts of interesting ways to deal with all those. I think uh when I when I Googled it is a is a perfect time to talk about the the great press power of Charlie Chapman that I constantly always uh give you half half joking uh digs about on on when we chat throughout the year because I I try to get press all the time and it never works. But I just Googled Framus and man we got Max stories tech crunch 9 to5 max six colors daring fireball like

33:04you you just crushed the press game. That was my first uh uh fireball which that was it your first one. For some reason I thought there was another one but yeah. Yeah. I'm the only loser in our friends that that hasn't been fire balled. So John, if you're listening come on man hook me up. It's funny like your app portfolio is almost like the iOS power user guide. like if if if Apple was to do like a you'll love these like power apps by any developers like almost all of yours could fit in that you know dark toys and and Framus and and all those

33:34things. It's luck that I kind of landed in it to a degree in a lot of different ways but also like when I joined an iOS team for the very first time and I' I'd been doing web development and I was like I need a side project and I need to build an app uh or else I'm not going to be helpful on this team. I have a list of app ideas because I'm a nerd and picked this one because it doesn't have a backend. The very first thing I did wasn't start coding, which was I love that. That's usually our starting point. Do we have to deal with the back

34:03end? Nope. Let's build. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Well, and in my case, it was because I I was doing backend development. It's like, I don't want to spend time doing the thing I already know how to do. The first thing I did was I wrote down, all right, I'm going to treat this like a product. Like, cuz I want to wear this hat. This is really fun. And I I was like, I need three guiding principles for why this exists because there's a million white noise apps out there. And I could actually I'm just going to pull it up because we can do that. All right. So,

34:30this is literally the first doc last updated August 4th, 2019. So, apparently I moved off of this doc into something else. So, yeah, this is truly the original the original words. So, I actually had three and here's what they are. So the first one is configurability, targeting pro users who want to use as many options and hooks to work the app into their workflow as possible. So that was literally the first thing cuz that was what I felt like was the least served and it was an area I knew. So if you're asking why do I get press among that crowd? Well, that was literally my guiding principle

35:03number one when I built it. The next thing is speed, which is kind of the same thing like open the app and playing a sound should be as fast as possible but still really speaks to that same demographic though. That's what I mean. Yeah. Yeah, cuz what do they hate? Electron apps, you know,

35:16something slow, something not efficient. You know, that's why I didn't have onboarding at first, which I should change, but like the idea was it should get you to a sound as fast as possible. When you first open the app, you don't even see other sounds. You literally see a big play button, and that was like part of

35:32my, you know, overly thinking it idea. I think that's part of the part of the it strengths. Honestly, I don't disagree. I should try it because I, you know, it's one of those things where it's like if it helps with conversion, yeah, it's worth and as I've added more features behind the scenes, like I still get emails about adding the ability to create mixes, which is a feature I've

35:55had in there for like three years. It's like if I had a simple you can mix sounds here, uh, then people might hit the button that literally is on the main page to create a mix. Tip kit that bad boy, man. Throw throw one in. Or or I tip kit it. That's true. That's

36:09true. So yeah, speed was the second one. And then the third one was keep it dark parenthesis expect fat fingers. That's where the the name dark noise comes from is like the apps that me and my wife were using were bright and when you use it at night it was annoying. And I wear glasses and that's why I said expect fat fingers. My the very first design, which is really really ugly, was literally like a circle that it was as wide as the screen was because the idea was it should just be the easiest thing to hit in the world. And then I for looks reasons I shrunk it, but then I made it

36:43white and everything else is very very black and dark. Kind of like the alarm, you know, the alarm has the big orange, you know, snooze or whatever. I think that's a big part of the press thing. I you know there's a lot of things I I do obviously to try and make that work but a big part of it is because it's it's aimed squarely at that group and what came along with the target pro users that wasn't part of my original thinking but immediately like a couple months after releasing because iOS 13 came out like a month after I released it. I learned very quickly aiming for prousers

37:19means implementing whatever features Apple gives you right away, which was fine by me because I was one of those dorks who like was into it and wanted to do all that. But that also makes people I say it makes Apple very happy, but Apple is obviously a big cloud of lots of people. So that's people on App Store editorial are hunting around for apps

37:40that utilize their new frameworks. engineers inside of the spaceship are hunting around for apps that utilize their features because they're testing, did we break this? Did we mess this up? And if they find an app that, you know, a lot of the standard apps that you you hear about or whatever, it's like they listen to a lot of the same podcasts, uh, not all of them do, but a lot of them do. And like those apps that always take advantage of the latest features, those are going to be the easiest apps for them to test out and see like, did I

38:10break this? Does this run on Vision Pro? Whenever Vision Pro auto will run your iPad app, they're going to use the usual suspects as well as obviously the YouTubes and the Netflixes and the big apps that everybody uses. But if they're trying to test like, did my esoteric widget feature, does that work over here? Well, they're going to go to one of the indie apps that they know implemented it. Those are the things that have really helped on on sort of that press. It's funny because uh I' I've almost like part of me is like man I just give up like on press but it's so it can be so powerful and

38:42like I know I'm skipping ahead here but like when it came to Alex that was the one where I was like I think this one can do it you know for a lot of reasons because you know it's like that power user app it it's built all around iOS features and you know I don't want to give away names but like I had a few people in Apple using it like throughout the summer like you know engineer uh a few in human interface and the app store editorial team. So, I'm like, "This is

39:07it." Like, the stars are going to align. And then when the launch day came out, and actually I feel like press was kind of weird with this cycle. Like, there wasn't there the usual like here are the apps for iOS 26, which I feel like that wasn't day and day. Like, didn't that happen like a week or so after?

39:24No, most of them never happened at all. Talking about the press, not Apple. Like the press, there's usually because there was always like every year there was that kind of article on all the big sites. definitely took a hit across all of them. I think Techrunch eventually did and 9 to5 like a month later or something did, but it was way less

39:42impactful. Yeah, it was all about liquid glass. I was surprised. I really expected this year and you know this is the the other side to the coin of what I just said is I don't know what the right phrase is. You're throwing your lot in with something you can't really control, right? And that is a risk. And this year was an example of that because like I thought for sure that there would be a big focus on like who's using the Apple

40:05Foundation models in interesting ways. Dude, I totally forgot that even came out. Yeah. And it was like the press didn't lean into it. But honestly, Apple didn't really lean that hard into it if I remember correctly. Yeah. I don't remember like a bunch of lists about it, which is this year I felt like was massive. There was so many things that you could angle an app launch towards that yeah I don't know I feel like this was a year I felt like I lucked out because this was a good year to release a new app because there was so much you could show off like new

40:36stuff with appetentence foundation models the new design language like all these things and I don't know I guess one thing in retrospect that may have happened was the launch was so big for Apple that I think the focus was just on Apple's ecosystem at large instead of like the third party apps that we're

40:54building for him. Yeah, that's true. Let's talk about Alex. So, I talked about the app that I released. Um, but yeah, you've released I think two really briefly Elite Football, which is your soccer app. That was last year. Oh, that was last year. It's been out for a bit. Yeah. And I know that's not like a huge app for you, so we we don't have to get into the details on that. Yeah, you released uh Alex, which to me felt like, this isn't the disc on Elite Hoops because Elite Hoops is like a capital A app still, but Alex felt like a return to form in the sense of like this is a, you

41:31know, Jordan Morgan TM app. Like it felt like a U app in that sense. Uh not as big of a market, not as big of a business. and you knew that going in and that was not uh your thinking, but it was an app that scratched the n itch, which I'll let you explain what it actually does, but importantly, it just felt like you. It had that level of like delight and polish and all that stuff that that I think of as a Jordan Morgan

41:59app. And that was really fun to watch. But yeah, what's the story behind behind that? Like where did that come from? You nailed it. Like I ever since Spinac, cuz Spinac was a lot like that. like, you know, it was more like polish and form over the actual function of like what problem does it solve, who is it for? Um, but it's pretty. I wanted to have that again cuz like you're right, Elite Hoops I think of much more as a business. Like I integrate new iOS features cuz I can't help myself and I always will. And one that I was really proud of actually last

42:26year was like the custom like pencil kit. like you can you can customize the toolbar and I added like all the elite hoops like glyphs of that coaches use to draw plays like squiggly arrows and you know boxes all this stuff and like it had the custom haptics so like I still do stuff for it but Alex was just like I want another spin stack that that's what it was like I don't really care if it makes tons of money it'll be nice if it can but like I'm at least unlike spin stack I'm at least going to have like a very clear market for it and like who

42:56would use it and why they would use it. So, all that to say, I'm I annoyingly track so much data about my life to where it's it's getting to the point where it even annoys me. Like sleep, I track my food, I track water intake. I've tracked my food almost like ever since Apple Health came out. Like whenever

43:14What do you use for that? Uh I use food noms. And I joked with uh Ryan for a long time when I'd seen him at Deep Dish Swift. I'm like, I'm still not a pro user, dude. Like you give way too much for free. Like I don't like you got to do something. And then he finally all the new all the new AI uh like input

43:29stuff. He finally got me last year. And it was funny because it was like a fun moment for him, you know, and he's doing really well with food noms, but I was like this is the year, man. Like I I finally converted. So that's a good lesson in product development at at large. Like he needs to get on here, man. He's got a

43:42great story. Well, no, he's been on the show quite a while ago. Yeah. The show's getting old enough now. I used to have a rule that the only person who's ever allowed to return is you. And it was kind of a running joke. The famed Christmas special. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. I already broke that once I started, you know, Revenue Cats already tearing down all the, you know, foundations of the show, but the the launch episode was our live episode

44:02we did at uh at our conference. Oh, yeah. So, he's been on twice technically then. Yeah. With uh uh Ryan Jones with Flighty. And it was really fun. Even though that episode was great, like legitimately. It was. Yeah. It was very fun. But it was also like God, I wish I had another hour. Like

44:19it was death to to only have 30 minutes. But that was a good signal to me that like I can have on people who I've had on before. You need both the Ryan's back. Actually, you need you need to get Ryan Jones back and uh and and Well, but Ryan Jones Oh, you mean like

44:34do a normal episode with them? Just a Yeah, I mean Flighty is an interesting one cuz it launched the same time that Spinstack did, but it's been around and as did Food Noms as did uh Dark Knight. Did Food Noms launch around that same time? I believe it was 2019. Yeah, it may have been 2020, but it was in that same we've talked about it. There was a post swift UI like boom. And it's ironic because I don't think any of the apps we just labeled our Swift UI apps,

45:00right? But it was right around the time that Swift UI came out. And maybe it's really more attributed to Swift like matured by that point. I I don't know the details cuz my story has nothing to do with the lay of the land. I I don't think. But it feels like there was this boom in from like 20 maybe 2018 2019 through 2020 2021. Like it didn't feel like it died with the pandemic, but there was all these like indie apps. When I started the show, it felt like there was just constantly these new apps coming out and everybody was referring to it as like a resurgence cuz there had been

45:34this lull for a while. And I feel like we're back in one of those lulls lately. I was just about to say that same thing. And I don't know if it's because of it's our jobs, like we're so focused on helping people grow revenue, but like my whole feed is is like growth hacking. Like if you ask me to to just list like, hey, what's that indie app that just came out recently? Like I don't have one off off the top of my head. You know, here's my theory because I've thought a lot about this. Uh and it's actually one of the reasons why I was very excited to

46:02try and get the show back going again. I think that in whatever year it was, 2022, 2023, whenever Twitter became untwittered, and all that drama happened, there was a big lift and move away from the internet of a significant portion of the legacy of craftsmanship, app developer, influencer type people. A lot of them went to Masttodon, but then once they got there, you know, it's it's an interesting platform and I'm a supporter, yada yada, but like it's not a place where uh you find new people and new voices and it doesn't really foster

46:46this sort of growing community. It's a place where people go and hang out with some of their friends to a degree, but it's very different. It was almost just like a specific type of influencer group, which is the I don't know how you describe it. It's not just indie app developers. It's specifically like the legacy of the old delicious Mac app generation. you can draw a straight line and you can you can find people and connect these dots, you know, through through tap bots and uh like all these people who went transitioned into iOS and did really really well and I think that connected to that group that we're talking about

47:21in 2019 2018 and like there's this kind of continuity of people and then in this one moment like it was decapitated and there was nobody there and so if you're coming out of college and you're wanting to make There's two factors that are true. You you got a job at a company, but you're wanting to do stuff on your own or whatever, and you're on on Twitter because that's the platform where you go if you want to like find people in in our space. The people you're going to see are either going to be all AI oriented, which is where all the sort of exciting action is happening. But that's

47:53happened before with web. So, that's not new. But then uh on the app developer side, there isn't anybody on this sort of craftsmanship thing advocating for that anymore. It's pretty much all I don't want to say all like vibe coders because that's not really true, but it's people who are talking about their MR or how they've yeah ran these big influencer campaigns and put, you know, I put $30,000 into this thing and I got $100,000 out like and I'm not I'm not saying those are bad, but it's very different. You know, it's funny because like as you were saying that I realized that it's almost like

48:32that with me more personally, too. Like I don't talk as much anymore about like, hey, here's this new API cuz it doesn't feel like that's the conversation. Yeah. And it I know we've reminisced about this before, probably on one of the previous Christmas specials, but like the time back when like NS Hipster had a new post every week or you had just like good friends like you know Becky from Yarn Buddy, I don't think she really is on social as much anymore. or they were just like all these internet friends that were all in the same spot for a short period of time and it was

49:03those were the like those were the days you know there's still people doing it like Clemen Strasser he's one who I see very actively talking on social media and posting about things he's doing things he's trying you know and and sort of pushing the medium now his is more game oriented sure um but I feel like he's doing that I feel like uh Andy Allen who if you're listening, Andy, I would love to have you on the show. He's definitely somebody who is still actively constantly talking about the craft of iOS development, you know what I mean? I only say that to say that that it does

49:38still exist. It's not just completely moved into the the business side. And it's funny because I feel like the majority of my time running this show, I would have all these conversations and talk to people who were like, I was embarrassed to to care about the business or to try subscriptions or to try this. And it was all about trying to get people to be a little more open to the idea of like it's okay to not let your business die and to actually like treat it like a business and not just as a piece of art. And then all this it was like it violently switched to now I'm

50:12like whoa like I love the business obviously I work for both of us we work for companies that are all about making money and and making sustainable businesses whatever but there's a little bit of a like but software is cool too like let's make cool crafted you know well well done things. One of the things that doing this podcast has helped already with in the recordings I've been doing, you know, I've done maybe five or six of these recordings at this point is I come out of them and I'm just like, people make cool stuff. Like

50:39it feels good to talk about that again. Not because the other stuff is bad, but because I think I at least was getting a little over oversaturated with uh just the like money money side. And so I yeah, I definitely think there's there's a balance there. But anyway, very long aside to say, you apparently agreed because you wanted to make an app that was about the craftsmanship side. And so, yeah, what is that app? Okay, so after our 30 minute aside, it's a caffeine tracker. Someone has been waiting 30 minutes to just be like, what is the app? What does it do? So, yeah. I mean, we were chatting about this before

51:14you started recording, but you know, we're both coffee drinkers. Um, and like I said, I I track so much data about my life because I just think it's nerdy and fun and interesting. I've always tracked caffeine and I had let's see two dubdubs ago when uh Luca Bernardi he did a session over like the interactive widgets and he oh and it was it was a caffeine tracking widget. Yeah, I forgot it was and I was like that's perfect. Like I I use a shortcut all the time. Like this is the use case. And so, you know, Elite Hoops had been out for a couple months by that point and I was

51:48like, "Ah, this is a great time to like do a spin stacky project where I'm not going to really worry too much about the revenue. I'm just going to make sure there's a there's a defined target thing that it does and just kind of go off the rails." So, I had like the loose design of it done over that summer just for kicks and giggles. And it just sat on my phone for years unchanged and I used it

52:11all the time. This is not a unique thing for Jordan. No, I feel like Jordan randomly pulls out like a screenshot and we're like, "Whoa, what app is that?" And he's like, "Oh, yeah. This is a little app I built for myself, you know, a long time, like an entire to-do app or something. Side quests. I go on a lot of side quests." Um, you know, and sometimes

52:29they're useful, sometimes not so much. But I didn't have like the app done. Like if you opened the app, it was pretty much like placeholder stuff. Like I had like You were just dumping it into Healthit. Yeah. Yeah. It's just And that's one of the great things about the app is I don't own the data model which is a which is great for me because it just goes to Health Kit. Like it it's all through Health Kit. So yeah, I would use the widget and I would use the shortcut to just log the same things like espresso. I I'm I'm so boring. I drink like the same coffees all the time. But

52:57I don't even remember what like pushed me over the edge to do it. Like I don't know if this was like a I know over the years I've brought up the group chat, you know, like we we've we've chatted for years and I don't know if like and and you guys are my indie like throughine if if one of you finally just convinced me to like make it into an app or or how it happened. Like

53:13I don't remember. I don't either. It's probably the shipon that that's what it was. That that'd be ironic. And this year I was just like I'm going to do it like I'm I'm very nerdy with like lists and goals. Like I have a reminder to make my goals for next year I saw coming up in like a week. Don't you have an app for that

53:30too? Am I remembering that correctly? I did. I finally sunset that one. But you know, the blog post for that was like very popular like a lot. And you know, people always say like, "Oh, ship it." But you never know like, you know, if they're actually going to use it. It was very like, yeah, everyone wants the mockup, you know. But my goal for this year, like I'm looking at my indie goals, and it was to ship I've always wanted to ship a new app with a new version of iOS because I had never done that. So that was like my goal this year is like I'm not going to really worry

53:58about Elite Hoops and iOS 26. Like I want it to look good. I want it to work, but I'm not going to worry about like as long as it works with liquid glass because that audience doesn't No, they don't care. They're already going to be upset that the OS changed. Exactly. Like their why is this all bubbly and soapy now? So, and it was a crazy summer and it it was actually one of the most fun times I've had building and I really needed that cuz like that joy of building I just hadn't had in a while. And I spent that whole summer just going nuts on it. And it was crazy

54:28because with the advent of like AI uh assistants, I could just build out I got to a point where I had Claude code almost perfectly make an app intent for me. Like cuz I I made like how I wanted it and I had my patterns and I had like the entities. I had just the way I wanted it all in one file. And then from there I could pretty much just dream up what shortcut I wanted to make or what action I wanted. and cloud code could could do it almost perfectly the first time. So I ended up having like I don't know I think there's like 50 to 70 app

55:00intents in the app. It's an interesting side effect. This is a little technical but they they changed the app intense what two years ago from this kind of insane like UI thing where and it was it was not saved in a plain text file. it was in some sort of XML or something weird format and they changed it to code and obviously at that time they I'm almost sure certain that the reason they did that was not because of AI coding tools becoming popular but they very quickly became popular and I guess now that actually would make that way easier to do. It is because like the the API is

55:35like simple to get started with but kind of hard to master. But I just like I found the sweet spot with Claude where it could just spit them out. And so I went crazy with that and then I I had so many powerful shortcuts. Like I was having so much fun with it. Like I would just think up something like I don't know when's like caffeine going to be out of my body and like how many shots of espresso is that equivalent to? just crazy stuff like you know I'm like why not it takes me like 5 minutes cuz now I have the baseline down and I had already

56:06written like the plumbing for it years ago like the health kit stuff to retrieve the data so like the hard critical paths were already finished. Yeah. I mean the whole point of the app was I wanted that nice pretty indie app. That's what I wanted to make. And if we link to the press kit, like if you go to alexcaffracker.com and look at presskit at the top, like you'll see all of the iOS ccentric features that I shipped for it. And it's

56:29just like and I marketed it that way. I'm like this is like a iOS playground for caffeine tracking and it turned out really fun. I'm really proud of it. Like I think it's one of the prettiest apps that I've made. And it's funny because one of the the biggest compliments it gets is the onboarding. Like I'm like,

56:45"Yeah, but do you like like the app?" you know, but just everything like there's visual lookup, you can scan to log drinks, there's the interactive shortcuts, it has the foundation models, all of the liquid glass stuff, alarm kit, widgets. So like I I hit every single box that I could. It was on purpose cuz like I wanted to make an insanely good iOS app that shows all the features and it was playful and that was like really like freeing for me because Elite Hoops is more like they have a job to get done. They don't really want like the nice cool animation. Whereas from the start, like

57:18I came up with the idea to have Alex be a mascot a long time ago. I could just kind of riff on that and just be goofy and sarcastic in a lot of places. And I forget one big inspiration for the design was at the time, remember two years ago, photos went through that big redesign where they kind of went all in on this single long scrolling content view where they kind of shifted away from tab views, which that's that's since reversed. But I I liked the idea on a smaller scale. I was like, "What if I can make Alex just be like one just sheet of stuff about caffeine?" Like

57:51there's no toggling tabs. There's no other places to go. Like it's just one view and everything is there. And so that's where I ended up. And uh it it turned out really nice. It turned out really pretty and it's always going to be my little thing to tinker with every summer. Yeah. It's my muse. Absolutely. And again, I'm I'm really thankful that Elite Hoops is growing and is like doing stable growth, you know, whatever you want to call it, because like it gives me an excuse to have this little thing to just kind of play around with. Um, now don't get me wrong, I would love for it to grow and make as

58:23much as as Elite Hoops does. And I think there's paths to get there. And a little like realization that I had is when I was looking into this genre of health apps, I think, I can't prove this. I think what's happening is if you go to the health app and you look at some sort of metric like uh water intake and you scroll down or weight or uh steps, it'll say recommended apps and it'll list like four or five third party apps. So if you look at weight, you'll see uh happy scales on there. Uh if you look at step counts, pedometer plus is on there. If

59:00you look at water intake, water minders on there, water llama's on there. And in my head, I'm like, "Dude, these have to be driving crazy amounts of downloads because so many people look at the health app." And my hope is that eventually they'll do the same thing for caffeine. And I was shocked. So, Caffeine doesn't have one right now. Caffeine has no like use these apps to

59:21track your caffeine. Oh my gosh. It would be so cool if you suddenly saw a stream of users. I wonder if they surely they must expose that in App Store Connect. I don't know. And I've even tried to get businessy. Uh, let me put my suit and tie on. I got on LinkedIn and like tried to find like Health Kit engineers or like anyone that worked at HealthKit. And I don't think anyone like accepted my request cuz it's LinkedIn and they're like, who is this weirdo, you know? But I'm just like, guys, if anyone like you should put caffeine apps in cuz I'm not the only

59:54one. Uh there's uh High Coffee has been around for several years. It's a great app. It has like a lot more like knobs and stuff you can turn than Alex does. Um, and then there's a few other ones. And then water minder actually and water llama. They both allow you to to put caffeine. It's not the sole focus. Water intake obviously is. So that's kind of my pie in the sky wish. Like if the health app does that, like this thing could really grow quick and for uh air quotes for free because it's like the health app is on every iPhone. Obviously, Elite Hoops has a much clearer clear clearer like

1:00:32TAM. You know, you know, you can target coaches and that coaches are going to be willing to spend because it like saves on their time for their job. It's like a it's a tool. This feels like way more kind of like more like dark noise in the sense that it's way more just ubiquitous. It is. It's still a lot less than I guess like a white noise app or something like a smaller percentage of users would use it. But it's like it's very widely applicable. Like it feels like the type of thing that you know if you handed it to one of these people that knows how to play the

1:01:06influencer campaign game, they could go out and find health influencer people who are already recommending people track their caffeine cuz there's got to be just massive markets of people that do that and like, hey, like maybe recommend this app as a as a nice one or run some sort of deal or something with them. Like it does feel like there's a a little bit more, you know, consumer app playbooks that you could run with this than Elite Hoops, which is it's not it's obviously not B to C, but it's almost more like that. It's much more a consumer app than

1:01:39Elite Hoops would be. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I almost when I, you know, contracted with EVO for this month, I almost did it for Alex because I'm like there's so many angles of like the UGC uh playbook that you could run with it. Uh but I was like, ah, I'm I'm just going to be a big boy and, you know,

1:01:58focus on Le Hoops. Well, and in reality, like the the value and the amount people were willing to spend is going to be very different between those two. I mean, I guess cheap is very very subjective to whoever you're talking to, but like for this to make significant money for me, it would be a volume thing. Like the the downloads would have to be extremely high. And it may never be, but the other angle to this is like the prestige play, too. Like, you know, of course, everybody wants like a Apple design award recognition with Apple. So, it's like this is almost like my Apple reward

1:02:28bait app, too. Like, if one was going to get any recognition, like it would be this one. the sports like coach oriented this changes my actual life apps, they often win stuff because design the design award is just as much about innovation in some capacity as it is about uh you know it looking beautiful

1:02:47or whatever. For sure. For sure. It really is. I'm glad that it's out because like I I get I kind of have my cake and eat it too now. Like if I just want to do like fun pretty iOS stuff then I'll open up Alex and you know it doesn't even support the last version of iOS. Like I didn't even bother with iOS 18. It's just like this is for iOS 26. I'm building it for iOS 26. Like I'm just going all in on it. And when we were laughing about the press stuff earlier, like uh Apple, they they did ask for the promo art and I was really

1:03:15like psyched about that. But remember, I think this is on the the archives, too. When they asked for the promo art for Spinstack, they didn't use it for a full calendar year. So it's like they haven't used it as of this recording that I know of. I mean, I have app figures and you know, they ping you now from App Store Connect like too. I think be like a

1:03:33major feature. So, it hasn't been used that I know of, but like it's the promo art is so bananas that like if it gets used, I'm going to be I'm going to be so excited. Like, yeah, I think I sent it to you. It's like I had a designer just like go nuts with all like the little Alex glyphs and like it had Siri orb glow. It was like, you know, like pulsing through the top of the espresso cup. So, it it was wild. Maybe they saw it and they're like, "Yeah, we're not using that." So, so we'll see. So, like the goals are like make a pretty app and you know,

1:04:04it's it's the app I use most on my phone. So, that's kind of like a fun fun thing. I'll never get tired of working on it. And I have a laundry list of ideas like like we all do for the stuff that we make. But, yeah, I mean, it's out. I'm proud that it's out. It was a it was just a personal like achievement. Like, I just

1:04:20want to ship with a new version of iOS. I've never done it. Um, so I can mark that off the list. It's been done and you know, I'll I'll soup it up every year for sure. Awesome. Well, I think we're we're getting uh short on time, so I guess we should we should probably go ahead and wrap this up. Another another year in the books, as they say. It was super fun doing this. It's always super fun doing this. I'm glad uh launched survived cuz, you know, this is the only

1:04:46time we're allowed to talk. Absolutely. Yeah. We we were born bound by our contracts at both jobs to not speak formally outside outside of these walls. Exactly. No, this is great. So, I guess uh where can people find you and uh I guess your work? No, I'm just kidding. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Uh XJordan Morgan or

1:05:07my blog swiftc.com. And I I think I list all the apps out on there too if you ever want to check them out. So, I am actually unlike blessed by the ASO god. So, if you search for Alex or you search for Elite Hoops, you'll you'll find them up there pretty high. RIP for Frammus and it's ASO. Yeah, it's all good. It's all good. But, you know, if you're listening and you haven't you haven't downloaded it yet, you should go search frame scroll scroll scroll find it. Download it or look at any of the 10 major press

1:05:36outlets that have covered it as well. Yeah. Yeah. There you go. There you go. Thank you so much for listening. You can find more launched at launchedfm.com and you can find me on pretty much all the social medias. I'm @_chucky on Twitter or charliemchapman pretty much everywhere else. And of course, huge thanks to Revenue for making this episode and all future episodes of launched possible. I'll see you all

1:06:01again in 2 weeks.