Building a Design-First App Business that Stays Small on Purpose — Andy Allen, Not Boring Software

0:00Oh well, maybe we'll do something else, right? You know, the biggest fear was like getting trapped in a business that you didn't want to run. And I see that happen with so many founders. And so very very much from the get- go, we thought of what we wanted to build and how we wanted to build and how we wanted to work. So even the fact that we come out with a new app every year, like that's just kind of an expectation now. And so in doing that, we can't go back and like work on calculator V3 or something, right? I mean, what are we going to add? Like, we could add

0:32a ton of new features to it, but I prefer to say like this is the calculator that we made and it's complete and it it does its job really well. We're not going to change it on you. It's not going to suddenly like have a chatbot in the corner. Welcome to Launched. I'm Charlie Chapman

0:47and today I'm excited to bring you the founder designer behind Not Boring Software, Andy Allen. Andy, welcome to the show. Hey, thanks for having me. We never cross paths, but we were both in Certino last week. And I know this one because I follow you on Twitter and I believe you were once again an Apple Design Award finalist and so you were in all sorts of things. But more importantly, I know because you made some custom merch for Not Boring Camera. This little extremely cool, would you call it a keychain, I guess, but it has all these moving parts. It looks like a a little camera. Oh, funny you should mention that. There's one right here. Ah, there you go. For the

1:41video video watching audience showing it off. You can turn the dial. And I was at every single event because Revenue Cat was sponsoring every single event. And at one of the events I was at, I was talking to somebody and they were like, "There's so much cool stuff here. I got this." And he just held one up and he's like, "It's kind of cool." And he didn't know your apps or anything. And he just watched my face light up like, "Where is he? Is he here?" And he's like, "What?" And then I just basically vomited all the excitement about not boring software and all the things that

2:13you do and he's just like, "Oh my gosh, I didn't realize who I was talking to." So I did not catch uh catch you or one of those. So I don't know if you're going to bring those to other events in the future or if I just completely missed out. But to be honest, I'm a little devastated. Yeah, it's kind of one of the kind of like lesser known sort of aspects of Dubdub. Maybe my favorite, one of my favorite aspects is just the merch game that people bring and people make all sorts of interesting things. So, every year people are trying to one up each other. People are doing like

2:45custom pins and like special edition stickers. So, yeah, for we came out with a camera app this year and that's what was nominated for the Apple Design Award. And we had made some full-size cameras that you might see in the background here if you're ah yes video. Yeah. in your different themes different yeah the different camera themes and uh I thought hey let's make a small one you know and I have young kids and they're very into keychains at the moment and so just made these fun little camera keychains that you can like slide your own little photo in the back and has some moving parts

3:22and things like that and yeah I just handed them I made a bunch of them you know they're all handmade just here uh in my house on my Is that with a 3D printer? Yeah. Yeah. But you know, you can get like very high resolution nozzles for it and so you can actually produce what look like sort of manufactured parts. Really? I imagine just for the threading to work with any degree of feeling nice, they also need to be decently high resolution. Yeah. And it's so you can you can prod I made like so many different colors. I mean, I made probably like 12 or 14 different color combinations of them

4:00and brought a whole bunch of them with me, a big bag full and was handing them out to apparently everyone who didn't even know who I was or what we did. But yeah, it's fun. I love it. You know, that's one of my favorite parts of WWDC is just the merch game that people bring. There was uh uh the maker of Solar Watch had sunscreen. It wasn't necessarily customdesigned, but it was very well tailored to the audience that's experiencing the California sun for the first time. Yeah, I needed some of that. I came back with a bad sunburn. Let's get into Let's get into the show here. And so before we get into not boring apps and everything that you all do over there,

4:37I always start the show with the same three questions, which is just to let people get to know who you are. So it's where are you from? Do you have a formal education related to what you do? and then we'll get into like your career leading up to starting uh not boring software. Originally I'm from born and raised in a small town called Bethl in southwest Alaska. Yeah, it's a small little fishing village. How have I heard of that? Is this wellknown or is it just because

5:08of following you? Um it's not very well known. I mean it's I have like a mental picture of Bethl. I don't know. Maybe it's like it was a wallpaper on Oh, you know, I have I have shared a couple photos here and there. Literally, you can see the whole town. It was like taken in the late '8s, so sort of, you know, I was born in the mid '80s, so I was there at the time. You can literally see the entire town from one photo. And yet, you could see like individuals walking on the street. So, it's very like a very tiny town. There's no roads to it. It's very isolated. It was a very odd place

5:43to grow up in in hindsight, but you know, when you're a kid, it's it's just normal life. That's the world living. Yeah. You're living out there on the frozen tundra of Alaska, you know, living a very kind of subsistence-based life. And somehow my parents had, you know, an early Apple Macintosh and that was kind of my introduction to computers at the time. And yeah, that that's where I grew up. That was it was a very interesting environment and I value it a lot more now. You know, back then you you sort of wonder why you're not, you know, living in the big city with the rest of the

6:21world. But you learn a certain resourcefulness, I would say, living in that type of environment that unbeknownst to me was very applicable to the startup life and the sort of indie app life that I live now. So yeah, I grew up there and then I did get an education related to what I do now. It was it was in visual communication design from the University of Washington in Seattle. I've heard of that degree, but what is that usually for? Cuz it's not like digital media. It's specifically about like communication like what Yeah. What does that entail? So the Yeah, the the more common name might be graphic design, right? But visual communication design is is the kind of like you

7:06know broader context of it. I started studying interaction design as it was called back then. That was like just in its infancy. This was in the early 2000s, right? So people were starting to design websites and things like that and and a few like you know ondevice interfaces were starting to become more common. So studied a little bit of that but mostly it was graphic design. So my teachers were sort of second generation like bow house you know so they like learned from the masters who taught at the bow house who then came over after the war or during the war and then taught here at you know some great universities like Yale and and some in the Midwest and those

7:51taught my teachers who then brought it over to the Pacific Northwest and had a very kind of strict you know international Swiss typography Raphy sort of style of everything's helvetica. Everything's Yeah. One of one of three or four or five fonts, right? Everyone's worshiping at the feet of Masimo Vignelli and and folks like that. And it was a great foundation. You know, it taught grid systems, a lot of things that were very applicable to software in hindsight. And again, really valued that education. But I to be honest, I wanted to be a filmmaker. and design was meant to be something of a side excursion to becoming a filmmaker but found in finding interaction design and digital

8:40media started to learn that well you could tell stories through interactive media right through software and started to pursue that more and more. Okay. So that's the degree you had and film making was kind of a passion but you realized you could do at least scratch that itch with maybe a little bit well maybe not at the time but definitely now a little bit easier of a career path than film making or Hollywood is. So then what did you do out of college then? Did you get into the

9:12field and start doing this at bigger companies, smaller companies? Like what did that look like? So right out out of school, I joined an agency in Portland called Zeba Design. And they're they were more of an industrial design agency, but they were starting to get into as a lot of people at the time were starting to get into this new field of interaction design, right? And designing ondevice interfaces. So their clients were, you know, they worked with Nike and Logitech and all the kind of like big electronic brands at the time. they would design the devices and then it was kind of natural to think well what goes on the device what goes on the screen right the

9:52screens were getting bigger and bigger and taking up more of the interface itself of the device and so we formed this early team that was starting to design that so I was designing a lot of like car key fob segmented you know LCD displays and like very early touchscreen pre iPhone and all this and doing some like installation work where you know I would build full like working prototypes of for like Nike and things like that for different sports sensory training and things like that. Got to work with some very talented you know professional athletes like Roger Federer to develop like you know hand eye coordination tests on like giant touchscreen displays that you would

10:37play you know a scientific version of whack-a-ole on. So, I was like designing these games and then testing them with professional athletes and then fine-tuning them. All this work was done with Nike. So, stuff like that, you know, a real wide range of things at this agency, but it became very clear. I remember at one moment designing the interface for a multi-function printer and then seeing that printer on the store shelf, you know, a year or so later, right after it'd been built, manufactured and shipped. And it was kind of like how I designed it but a lot was different you know and I was like you know we went through this whole process everybody loved the design you

11:18know what happened what changed right and I knew in that moment that I needed to go where software was actually made right there was something I wasn't seeing there was some constraint so is that because you were at an agency so you had this like total handoff you weren't part of the next phase of dealing with trade-offs and the realities of, you know, it becoming a physical thing and you didn't get to have your voice there. you could only really extend that through your final brief or were you even thinking about here's the trade-offs that you might run into like you should prioritize this over that or did you kind of think of your final product as being the endstate and

12:01then it wasn't until you saw it on the shelf that you're like oh wait I wouldn't have made that choice that they made here or there yeah I mean it was more a sense that we didn't know what language the thing was written in you know a lot of this like a multi-function printer or like

12:16I don't even know what that was, right? How were they writing that? Some custom uh you know. Yeah. Some very like custom, you know, firmware and software package built on something like a very sort of specialized use case. Like we didn't know what that was. We didn't know what the limitations were. I'm doing all this prototyping in like in Flash and Director and things like that where you can do some very elaborate things and we're trying to keep it realistic, but you know there's like all sorts of memory constraints and animation and refresh rates and things like that. You have

12:49no idea what those constraints are. You're just designing it. And so you're handing this off. you're handing over essentially a packet a packet of recommendations that says this is what we think you should do and try to do and obviously they're hitting other limitations that you just didn't you couldn't account for right and I think a lot of people are okay with that honestly like a lot of people a lot of designers in the field feel like well I did my part but for me I'm a very

13:20hands-on person you know I'm I'm the filmmaker who wanted to like get in there and do the edit. Right. Right. And apply the special effects. And I very much prescribe to the kind of David Fincher perspective of film making, which is a director should know how to do every role on the team, right? Should know how to edit and do special effects and light and do the cinematography. Everything from like the lowest job to the biggest job, right? At a a certain level, not necessarily at the level of the person they're hiring. Exactly. Yeah. but like know it well enough that you can create a vision within those within those bounds. And so I just knew that

14:00I needed to go where software was made. And where was the biggest software made? It was made at Microsoft. So I never thought I would work at Microsoft. And this was like during the Balmer era. So it was not a cool place for designers to be at all. Yeah. It was very anti-design. I don't know. lots of uh you know clear aqua you know interfaces with Longhorn right in hindsight yeah I mean in hindsight there was actually a lot of great work happening uh under the hood with things like the Zoom HD and Metro and some stuff don't get me going on on my love of uh the

14:37Zoom man stuff is really aged very well I would say um yeah so but a lot of that was kind of just bubbling under under the surface it wasn't really known yet. And so I went to Microsoft and worked on some early like incubation type projects. So worked on a twocreen like the idea for this two-creen tablet that was called Courier. Yes. The long rumored uh you know foldable uh free iPad. But yeah. Yeah. And I mean the great thing there is you know I met what would become my future co-founders on my next adventure. But we really started to develop this idea that like technology should be there really to service like human creativity and most most technology even the

15:28iPad when it came out was very consumption focused right it was Steve Jobs sitting back on the couch book or watching a movie and that's great but we really saw these the potential for especially for mobile tools for creativity to unlock you know creation And so we really came up with an entirely new OS for the courier which was based around creativity. You know we got it pretty far but like you know eventually it was it was kind of killed in Microsoft efforts to consolidate all of their operating systems around one. That was kind of when they you know made everything like Windows

16:07Phone 7 and Windows 7 really made everything very similar. The first attempt at going ARM. Yeah. Your perspective then looking back on that, do you see that as a work that you were doing there had it kept like had the world around it not changed so much within Microsoft you were on the right trajectory or were there things that you're like now you're like ah we should have thought through this in a different way or in hindsight we could have maybe gotten it over the finish line if we had changed how we approached uh how we approached building that. No, I mean I think we definitely

16:43could have shipped something that was very unique and a very a very different perspective. I mean I've even gone back and watched like it leaked you know this whole project leaked. Oh yeah yeah I'm very aware. That's why everybody knows about it which is kind of a blessing honestly. I did not leak it. Let me say that legally for the record. On the record. Yeah. But it did leak. So there's videos and I still think it presents a kind of vision for how we could use software that is still different. Some of that has been implemented by iPad OS. You know, they have a pencil now and

17:22they have like some of the ideas of multitasking and and an operating system that really supports creativity like moving things back and forth between applications and stuff like that. We, you know, we tried to put those sort of creative principles at the forefront of an operating system. I'm still excited about something like that and not sure that we fully seen it realized yet. So, in some ways, maybe it was ahead of its time. Maybe it was like, you know, just speaking

17:50to a certain audience that a lot of technology just wasn't interested in for the longest time. I'd like to think that if we were to like like someone could still make that type of not exactly like that obviously they'd make something very different but in a way speak to that audience. Yeah. And and and sort of try and unlock creativity rather than pure consumption on these devices. I mean, it's sort of my complaint even with new platforms like Vision OS, which are amazing technically, but still feel very consumptionoriented from the get- go. I yearn for these things to be like these great tools. I'm a creator and that's the sort of thing that speaks

18:33to me and that's what spoke to me about the early Macintosh and Apple 2 and early computers were these things as these like amazing creative tools that could unlock so much human creativity and potential. Are there ideas from that that you still haven't seen implemented on iPad OS or or across Android? And in particular, you know, with the rumored iPhone Fold coming out where theoretically more and more people will have a wider potentially creative canvas to play with, you know, in their pocket. Are there ideas from the things you were developing or at least thinking about in that era that you'd think would be interesting to see both at the OS level, but

19:13even at the like developer level? There are a lot of people with interesting ideas like I mean there have been a lot of different kind of conceptual takes at reinvisioning the operating system right like Jason Juan's Mercury OS and things like that that I think just present these very interesting alternative paths right that we could have taken or could speak to us in different ways and I think it just gets you thinking very differently about what could be but I mean one yeah to call one thing out is like we in creativ ity. It's very much about moving things back and forth, right? You're often mixing and matching different things, right? Taking something an asset over here

19:53and bringing it into an application over here to work on it and then bringing it back over here. And like modern operating systems, particularly like iOS and iPad OS, they're just not architected that way, right? They're silos, right? And there good reasons to make them silos, good like security and privacy reasons for that. But it does hurt this idea that of you know the creator who just wants to move things around very fluidly. Right. I think that's where infinite canvas tools like Figma or Sketch Yeah. have become really good at that because while there are designers out there that I'm sure keep their canvas very very tightly constrained. In fact, at big companies,

20:35you see like all these systems built around it. But I feel like the best work when I look at somebody's Figma file from somebody who's really good. Mhm. It's complete chaos because you're just like option dragging and creating copy over here and then you grab a piece from over there. And the fact that copy and paste works across everything, you do end up in this sort of very dynamic, fluid throwing stuff. It's like a messy table. But that's where I feel like a lot of the best creativity kind of comes off. Yeah. I mean, think of how much weight they're just a few little tools

21:04that we have and how much they carry like copy paste operating system level kind of copy paste. Also, screenshots like think of how much people use screenshots. They were not really intended to be used in this way, but it's the only way to like capture exactly what you're seeing in one place and bringing it over to another place in a very portable way, right? And so, you know, we were envisioning a lot of this sort of stuff like in a very kind of fluid creative focused way. Like how could you make more of these like operating system level tools and actions that can really facilitate this kind of very free form way of working rather than workflow where you're going

21:46from A to B to C. Much more free form. You can just mix and match and not have to worry about the walls of applications. Right. Ah, that's cool. So the the Corer never did see the light of day, but a portable device from, you know, a different company did, and the iPhone came out and became this massive thing. Did you jump on that right away? It sounds like before this time, you hadn't been in sort of just application world. You'd been at sort of broader level. When the iPhone came out, did you immediately get excited and start building apps or what was your sort of story of

22:21getting into that? I was very excited about the iPhone. And I didn't start building applications actually until the iPad came out. The first app I built was an app called paper, a drawing app. It was honestly built on a lot of the understanding that we sort of built up through working on courier. And yeah, a lot of those same principles around like free form creation and creativity, although now it had to be scaled from an operating system down to just a single app. But it was it was great. It really kind of shocked us when it came out because to us these were just ideas that

22:56we'd sort of been living with for years and then when it came out it kind of blew up overnight and really had this overnight success that really kind of caught us off guard a little bit to be honest. And the original business model was was it free or was it paid up front? I remember thinking of it as this like tool that everybody's excited about and less of like it's a business. Is that how you were thinking about it? No, I mean it was free. So it was actually a new model at the time, new for for like productivity apps, but it was more common in gaming, which was free with inapp purchases. So

23:31Apple didn't have subscriptions at the time. This was 2012 when it came out. Yeah. Or at least when they did, it wasn't allowed for anybody except for specific types of apps. Yeah. It was really just common in gaming at the time to have free with inapp purchases as the kind of business model. But we I mean even back then we just knew that when you looked at the numbers you just got so many more downloads, so many more people coming in up front if it was free. And we wanted people to come in and try it because this was something new. We knew that once they tried the ink and they

24:03felt it, that's when people became convinced. And I mean back then we get crazy like high conversion numbers too because these were people on the iPad and they were looking for a reason why they bought the iPad to some extent, right? Some way to justify it. And this was like something that was unique to iPad and and felt native on the iPad. I think it was one of those early like native iPad feeling apps. And what was the the main pitch for paper then? You know, it was like a drawing creative app, but like how did that differ from the other ones that are out there? And

24:40this is pre- pencil, too, right? Apple Pencil. Yeah, this is pre-Apple Pencil. Pre-53 pencil, too, cuz we ended up making our own stylus before the the Apple Pencil came out. Was that with the original app launch or was that later? That was about a year later. Okay. Yeah, we came out with the 53 pencil and Yeah. So, what was the pitch? It was it was really this is your digital sketchbook, right? It's like if you have a moles skin that you love to sketch out and capture your ideas, this is our version of it. And yeah, we weren't the first. There were other drawing tools out

25:18there. But I think we were one of the first to try and envision it like reinvision the navigation, the tools, the ink, everything about it in the lens of like someone who's creative. Like for example, most note-taking apps back then or sketch sketching apps back then, if you wanted to capture something, you had to like hit start a new page, title my document, and then start drawing. And we're like, at that point, whatever idea you had in the moment is gone or you've gotten distracted by something else, right? So, we knew that our competition was a sheet of paper or a napkin or something, right? It's something that quick. So, we made it super

26:03simple. You didn't have to title your documents. There were no documents, right? It was just pages within this three-dimensional journal. So, we built it all in 3D. Everything was very gestal, so you could get around very quickly and very naturally. Everything was spatially oriented because a lot of people who like to sketch are very spatially oriented people. And then we spent a lot of time on the inks. You know, we actually made them. We only had a few inks. A lot of people had, you know, infinitely customizable pens and inks and brushes and things like that. The problem

26:36is like it's very difficult to find the few values on those sliders that actually look good together. So, we said, "Look, let's just find the sliders that work, and then we'll open up a dimension of expression through acceleration and speed and eventually things like pressure and whatnot that let you do more and be more expressive with it and get different aesthetics from it, but let's not, you know, bombard you with tons of sliders and things like that." So, I think it really appealed to people who just wanted something that just worked and looked good right out of the gate and sort of worked the way that they thought. And then you said a year into that is when you came out

27:19with a piece of hardware to go with it, right? And that was the 53 pen, right? And that was in the works even from the get-go. That was part of the bigger vision. What we knew that having a tool in your hand was going to be very important because just drawing with your finger is not great. And there's just a certain level of precision that you can get from your hands and your fingers, right? It's great for navigating. I mean, it was the right sort of, you know, Steve Jobs, of course, famously yucked the uh the stylus when he launched the iPhone. And it's great for

27:55getting around and consuming, but when you need to make something, you need a level of precision. There's a reason that we have tools all around us, right? Like scissors and pencils. And I'm very into woodworking, so I love tools, right? And we knew that that was a very critical part to it. And so from the get-go, we were designing like an active stylus that would we were some of the first to do things like pressure sensitivity. You could flip it around and erase with the back side of the pencil. things like that, you know, that were quite innovative at the time helped set up, you know, Apple for what they ended up doing with pencil. Paper is not currently still a running

28:36concern, right? So, what happened there? Yeah. Not for me. It is still in the app store. Oh, it is. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. It still has millions of users. I mean, it's still still heavily used. What happened there is we, you know, this was 2012. We were part of the early kind of app craze, right?

28:55If you remember, everyone was building apps, you know, and we kind of rode some of that excitement. Some of it we needed, you know, so we we raised money. We went the VC route and raised a lot of money. We needed the money to do the hardware to be honest. You can't just bootstrap, especially with hardware. Yeah. Yeah. It's just there's a lot of very real costs there. So, we went that route and the company grew for a while and then you kind of reach a point where you realize, well, this is sort of about how big the company's going to get. And it was clear that we weren't on the

29:30trajectory to become the next multi-billion dollar company, but that's what the VCs and investors are investing in. So, you know, it's no surprise to anyone who's sort of ridden this ride, which is most people who've raised money don't have that billion dollar outcome. You're sort of put in a tough position to figure out what to do. And we ended up selling the company to Wi Transfer. They're a European version of Dropbox essentially, right? Which was acquired by Bending

30:03Spoons, I think. And then, yeah, recently they were they were acquired by Bending Spoons. So I worked for we transfer then for a little while for about 2 years leading some design and product teams there and then just started to get that itch again of like well I kind of want to do something. I feel like I have a little bit more to say in the world of apps. And is that the beginning of the origin story for not boring apps then? It is. Yeah. I mean to tell it a little bit a little bit more deeply is I didn't really know what I wanted to do next honestly. I just left

30:40we transfer and and was sort of looking around and I stumbled on the artist John Baldesari. He's uh Yeah. So, I only know I I say that I make that face as if I know who he is other than because of your original blog post uh whenever you kind of blew on the scene and that was that's part of the story, right, for I never know how many folks don't cuz he's he's like, you know, one of the biggest names in the in the art world. certainly the experimental art world but yeah not so well known among designers and technologists but he you know for the first half of his life he

31:16was very much just a kind of he was an art student and then a very kind of mediocre landscape painter that's what he called it himself right he called himself a mediocre landscape painter until he was almost 40 so like midcareer when most people think you know your art career is over he took all of his paintings, his entire body of work that he'd done over decades and decades, and he just burned it all, lit it all on fire. And in that moment, like vowed to never make any more boring art. And that he wrote that statement out over and over again, thousands of times while videoing it

31:59to just he just said, "I will not make any more boring art. I will not make any more boring art." you know, over and over again in a very kind of performance art way, right? It was a very this was like the early years of experimental art and performance art and things like that and then went on to like do some of the most profound art that has really influenced a whole new generation since then. And you know I it's funny cuz I was reaching kind of that same point in my life you know approaching 40 and that just really struck me and it I felt like you know that's a good sometimes

32:38there's just like a good very simple heruristics right if you can just say I will not make any more boring software that might lead to some good outcomes right and that was that was really it it was like let's just what does not boring software look like did Do you feel like what you had been doing before that was boring software though? Cuz at least in our discussion so far, it felt like a lot of what you've been doing has been you exploring new ideas and pushing boundaries. It didn't seem like you were on the sort of Figma JSON viewer basically sidebar on the left like standard kind of thing, right? Yeah. And thankfully I'd had those experiences, but you

33:19know, I had found myself over the last like two or three years leading up to this slipping more and more into the, you know, what was fashionable at the time, which was building your B2B SAS business. Honestly, I had taken on a little bit more of a product role rather than a designer. So

33:38I was I was the one living in Amplitude all the time, looking at the metrics every Yeah. Okay. seeing where we're moving and and what I can see the existential crisis growing. Uh yeah, it was I mean I was sort of filling a gap that needed to be filled at the time, you know, that's what you do

33:55when you're at a startup, especially one that just is struggling and needs some needs some attention. So I was doing what needed to be done, but it wasn't really the thing that was feeding the soul, right? That was important for me. I think that moment and Baldesari's words there was important to just kind of remember like oh this is why I got into design and it led me into apps which is strange cuz in 2020 like in building an app business was not at the top of anyone's like dream. No, that was definitely a lull in the like cool factor. Exactly. It's gotten more fashionable recently, but it was very much out of fashion at the time, and everyone, ironically, the moment

34:37that I got into it, uh, as well. Oh, there you go. Perfect. But maybe that's a sign that it had lost its cool is now I'm here. Yeah. Well, it's, you know, it's it I've it's so funny cuz I I just found that often times the things that I've done that have had the most staying power or resonated the most have often been these very uncool things. Like whenever you try to be do something cool or like of the moment, it just doesn't really go anywhere or it flubs. But doing these very uncool things has proven to play out well for me at least. And so that was one of those moments

35:16where it was very like no one else is starting an app business. Should we really do this? You know, okay, you make that choice. What's the thesis then? Other than not boring because you know experimental art uh while can change the world isn't necessarily a business the same way. And like your last business you had to raise money and all that. Did you have a thesis this time for things you wanted to do different or how you were going to build this or was it okay if it just made a small dent in the universe in terms of the design world but didn't give you a foundation for

35:52this is can sustain me a lot of it came out of lessons from 53 my prior company and in hindsight I'd realized that we had a great small business with paper but we just hadn't built the business. We hadn't built the incentives, right? We hadn't built the company in a way to support that, right? We we raised money. We took certain paths that made that. And so, some of it was just recognizing that, well, you can have a true like sustainable small business where you can do interesting work and support that through a business if you build it correctly and you kind of incentivize yourself to do the things that you want to do. And so, we were very deliberate. And I say we, it's me and

36:39my partner. There two of us. There's still two of us. And we were very step one, right, in making it okay to stay small is not having, you know, a large a company with a lot of headcount that you have to feed. Yeah. You know, we both had been through the startup cycles. He's been through it twice. I've been through it once where you start a company, you scale it to dozens or hundred plus people, and then you sell it. That kind of thing. And it's funny because when we got together again, we just love working together. And when we got together, we were like, you know, the best like

37:13our favorite time at the company was really when it was just you and your co-founder sitting around a kitchen table making stuff. And what if you could build a company that was just that, right? And if you just like scaled, you know, if you just do the uncool thing and ignore what everyone is saying about you got to scale and that's, you know, you got to like raise money and like that's how everyone gets attention now, right? And just like stay small, you know, you can build a company where you can do the things that you want to do and hopefully motivates you to do the types of

37:48things that you want to do. So even the way that we chose to monetize the work that we do was very intentional in terms of trying to incentivize us to do what we want to do. And was that thinking happening pre even building apps like how you're going to monetize? Yeah, it was part of it. I mean, yeah, you asked about the thesis and so I didn't really address that, but the idea was it was really a thought experiment. We honestly I wasn't expecting it to be a business. It was meant to be a thought experiment. And the experiment being can you build truly design differentiated

38:29software? And that sounds so simple because we all think design is what differentiates good software from bad software. But the more you dig, the more you realize, well really it's because it has this feature. Yeah. The value. We talk about this a lot, you know, at Revenue Cat where I work. It's like people pay for value at the end of the day. And it's not that design can't be value, but boy is that a significantly harder cell. And just to kind of bury or not bury the lead, whatever the

39:00phrase is to to pull ahead here, the apps you've made are a calculator, a timer, a weather app. And so, and each of these, you can correct me if I'm wrong, but other than maybe the camera, that one's a little different, but none of them are things that you could pitch on an elevator. And somebody goes, "Oh, that's interesting." Because I've been doing this a while and talked to a lot of developers and when somebody says, "Oh, the reason is because it's beautiful design and it feels really good." You kind of roll your eyes cuz you're like, "Okay, yeah." Like everybody says that, right? So actually differentiating on design is I can't even think of almost any

39:40like app businesses really aside from I think maybe you that that is really that is it that's kind of the main pitch. It always struck me as weird because again I'm someone who came from the graphic design world and doing physical things and it's not weird in everything else like Moles skins are very popular and you can go pay way less money for one just as valuable and has just as many good features. Exactly. It's you're not picking in your notebook based on features. You're not picking like your sofa based on its features. Right. Like I mean sometimes you are like that is a thing in physical design also. Yeah. Yeah. It's not it's not devoid of it but yeah I mean or cars

40:24you know I mean yeah like there are some feature differences but like they're kind of minor and we have strong opinions about brand and design and the aesthetics of cars, right? Even if you don't think you're an aesthetically oriented person, I guarantee you have opinions about how you wear, what you drive, what you choose to do with your free time, things like that, right? Like you have opinions about things like this. I think those are valuable things. And increasingly, as much as like people want to believe that I don't know, there's there's this constant belief I feel like that people have that that we're going to be more off our screens in the future or something or like the

41:06new technologies means we're not going to be using technology. I don't know. It's this forever kind of lie that technology likes to sell us, right? That like the new device is going to make us more present by putting you strap a computer to your wrist, you'll use your computer in your pocket less. Exactly. Right. Or, oh well, let's just what we really need to do is put the computer on the eyes. Right now you'll be present. Now you'll be free. Exactly. And so maybe it's fatalist of me, but like I kind of just embrace that. I think we're going to be spending a lot more time in

41:39software, you know, in whatever form that takes. And I don't see that as a bad thing. I think software is great and beautiful and it can be what we want it to be. It's one of the most flexible, most prolific, you know, widest reaching mediums that we've ever probably have ever created, right? So, I love software and I think we're going to live in increasingly more and more of it. So, why not be shaping it the way that we want to shape it? It should reflect us, our individuality, our aesthetics, our taste, and that kind of thing. And then when you look at the world of software and what people run on their devices, it's largely the same, right? Almost

42:20everyone is running the same weather app, the same calculator. It's weird. It's like imagine stepping outside and 90% of people are wearing the same exact outfit that you are, right? Like that would be a cult. I mean, so it's I wanted to see that type of world, right? You know, I'm curious how much of the reason people make purchasing decisions based on design has to do with the really has to do with the experience of using it versus the signaling it does externally because I do think there is a significant amount of money being made purely based on design which is like skins in video games, but that is users making purchasing decisions that let them signal to the

43:12outside world something about themselves, express themselves in some way. Whereas for the most part, I think it's true that like especially on your phone, the software you use is extremely intimate. Very few people are seeing what you're using almost ever. And do you think that that's a part of that? Yeah, certainly a part of design is brand and what it what it signals outward, but also what often gets missed when you talk about brand and outward signaling is also how it sort of reflects back on you. Like we often choose things because they help us kind of communicate who we think we are. You know what I mean? Or what we value. Yeah. Value might be premium feel and all this

43:54stuff. But it's like it's externally validated or like you can see it. Right. Exactly. Right. what groceries you buy and all these things. As much as they're signals outward, they're also ways for you to maybe try and understand who you are, if that makes sense, and what values you want to embody, right, and live by and that kind of thing. So, I think it definitely goes both ways. And yeah, software for sure is often been a very private thing. And so it often doesn't have that outward signaling, but I think it's still prevalent to to an extent. And I think there's still a space for this for like design oriented software to again like help you figure out what values you want to

44:37embody. And maybe there is some outward signaling too in some way with software or maybe that's yet to be cracked, right, beyond avatars and skins and things like that. But so that might be part of it as well. But I'm excited about that type of of future where you know we can have a lot of different voices creating a lot of different types of ideas that are expressed through software. I love the idea of, you know, the Italian artist Bruno Munari who was a sculptor but writes a lot about design and he writes about how we're sort of constantly trying to find this balance in life

45:18between the sort of like outward material world and the inward moral world. And design often helps become the sort of bridge between that. And the hope is that art can be brought into the everyday, right? And so that art is not just something that is in the galleries or is in these very like controlled moments in our life, but it's something that we can live with, right? And so the artist perspective helps us reflect on our own perspective and the material can can sort of like, you know, coexist with the moral and we can live every day among art, right? And so I love that idea of bringing art into the everyday where we can experience that. You can pop open your weather

46:04app and you can experience hopefully a little moment of like artistic expression that maybe in some way helps shape your view for the day. You know that's that's you know that's a dream at least. So let's let's actually get into the apps then. You've made this choice. you you wanted to and I don't think we said but the monetization method for these is a subscription that unlocks things within each app and then there's also I think even from the very beginning you had like a group subscription that kind of captures all of the not boring not boring apps right when you launched this is my memory and correct me if I'm wrong but my memory is you started I think

46:44you didn't even release the apps immediately you wrote your I promise I won't make boring software anymore our blog post which we'll link in the description. It's excellent. Like very worth reading definitely. But then following up on that, you released I think a set of apps. It wasn't just one app right at the beginning. And I think it I'll let you say which ones it was, but it was it was more of these like simple utility tools that everybody uses apps, right? Yep. Yeah. So we released weather, calculator, and timer. And yeah, we released three of those. You could get them individually or you could get the full collection of of apps. It's a subscription. And with weather,

47:25it's a little easier. You can say like you can get premium data sources along with it. But for the other apps, pretty much what you were unlocking was like making it look different, right? There's kind of different styles, different app icons, that kind of thing. Yeah. For the most part, you were unlocking skins in those early apps. And so yeah, and we were regularly, you know, every

47:48few months we would push out a new skin, sometimes collaborations with artists that we that we like. So that was kind of the idea. But the way that we looked at it and the way that we tried to position and still do to an extent the subscription is it's a little bit almost like a patron model, you know,

48:07where like it's really fueling the work that we do and we try and come out with a new app every year. So we've come out, it's been 5 years now, we have six apps out and every year we come out with a new one. And if you're part of that, if you're one of the patrons, you just get the new app, right? you get it for free. We're not charging you another X dollars on top of it. And the other thing that we decided early on is like we're going to lock your price in. The people who paid like early on in that first batch, they're still getting a great price now. So if they're still around, you know,

48:41we've locked in that price for them. And so they just every year get a new app that they get to add on top. So that's kind of how we justify the ongoing. Of course, there are like ongoing expenses with things like weather data, which is a lot more expensive than a lot of people realize, and there's like maintenance costs and stuff like that that helps it, but we kind of see it in that way. We try not to justify it in terms of like x many features and things like that. It's more, you know, what you pay for is this ongoing effort to try and build interesting apps,

49:15you know, and if you're interested in following along in the work that we do, it's the best way to support us just by buying our subscription, our membership plan. And yeah, cuz like normally, you know, advice would be don't make that the value proposition cuz if people are coming to your app for a specific value and the thing you lock away is the thing that is nice, but people don't care that much about like alternate app icons or skins, you're not going to get many people to do it. But like like you said, your whole thesis here is that really it is differentiating on design. And that last bit, it was interesting to hear you say that cuz I feel

49:52like for me and for a lot of people in my area, that's more of the thing is almost supporting the work, the artistic work, and coming up with ideas and inspiring people or whatever. And that yeah, it is like a patronage versus I'm getting this out of it. Obviously, you are getting something out of it, but the free versions of a lot of these are are pretty good. So, did that work? Yeah. Well, even the first so the first plans that we launched, there's one tier which was essentially you unlock all the apps. It was like, you know, you get everything, right? We offered another tier above that that we literally called the patron plan that was more expensive. I mean,

50:34it was five times as expensive and you didn't really get anything new. We send people a gift, like a physical gift, but it was really just about supporting us. And it was shocking how many people went for that plan, right? And that was kind of the moment that we realized, oh yeah, this is a little bit of a different business model, right? Like we're not selling or a different proposition. We're not selling features here. like people want to see this work and see us maybe as you know the knights fighting this battle against boring software and they want to fund this effort and so we've ever since then we've been leaning into that because honestly I think that's

51:16what we are and it also allows us to do the type of work that we want to do so we're not trying to chase features that are going to unlock some like new audience for us or that we think are gonna suddenly bump up our conversion rates because we've added these new features and it's more on par with the other apps, that kind of thing. Well, and even if you were thinking that cynically, because of what the value proposition is, the incentives that you've built are to actually do things that are inspiring and feeding the narrative at least that you're doing new,

51:53interesting, creative things that can help inspire other people versus like an innovative feature. Cuz that can be just as innovative, but it's a very different thing. And at least it appears that it sends you down a route where you're not chasing really deep crazy new feature work. And it's more like how can we take a different design approach to a very well-traddened problem space that again you couldn't really pitch in an elevator because it's like how is this calcul like what does this calculator do that other calculators don't? And it's like there isn't really an answer at all for that. Right? There aren't many folks in the software space that do this and so maybe

52:34it's just I don't know maybe it's just a kind of unnatural too much confidence or something but you know my thinking was always like if we just do what we want to do there's got to be somebody out there who's going to like resonate with it right and be interested in it and I don't know how big that business is going to be but guess what there's just two of us it doesn't have to that big. Exactly. And that's the other key piece is like we kept everything very small. Thankfully, we've been in tech long enough and had some, you know, some success along the way that we

53:08can afford ourselves that opportunity to watch it grow, right? Cuz, you know, it's not a big business like right out of the gate. But I think there was just some of that confidence that like if we just do what we want to do, we will attract the right people and we'll see what business is there. And if there is no business there, oh well, maybe we'll do something else, right? You know, the biggest fear was like getting trapped in a business that you didn't want to run. And I see that happen with so many founders. And so very very much from the get-go, we thought of what we

53:42wanted to build and how we wanted to build and how we wanted to work. So even the fact that we come out with a new app every year, like that's just kind of an expectation now. And so in doing that, we can't go back and like work on calculator V3 or something, right? I mean, what are we gonna add? Like, we could add a ton of new features to it, but I prefer to say like this is the calculator

54:04that we made. Yeah. It's a complete product. Yeah. And it's complete and it does its job really well. We're not going to change it on you. It's not going to suddenly like have a chatbot in the corner, right? It's like it's just what it is. And we'll keep updating it, making sure that it works on all the OS versions. Maybe we'll add tiny hooks here and there for whatever new things come out like widgets or dynamic island stuff like that. But we're not going to dramatically change it. And that pushes us on this path to making new apps, right? And then that happens to align with the

54:40sort of thing that we're excited about, which is making and reinvisioning old software in new ways, right? And putting our own spin on it. So things like the camera app was a great example of that sort of playing out, right? Where we had a chance to really reinvision what we thought a camera should be. Yeah. And I want to get into the camera app here in a second, but like going back or everything leading up to the camera app, it feels like your kind of design language is pretty consistent between all of them, which is kind of like we've said, very simplified, not overdone on features or anything like that. But then in particular, it's not about, you know,

55:18it being a iOS app or a whatever. It's its own language which is very focused on a lot of 3D gestural animations. They feel like games. One of the really big ones is the sound design and your choice to which I think a lot of apps could not never get away with. But you play the sound even if the mute switch is on, which is something that makes total sense when the whole point of it is to experience something that you're not experiencing elsewhere. But if anybody else did that, they

55:51would get destroyed uh in reviews and everything, right? Because people get really upset at that. But whenever you go into your calculator app or weather app, that's almost why you're there, right? Is to experience this thing. Is that how you were thinking about it or or do you disagree and you're like, "No, everybody should be pushing more and more sound design that your phone is always making sounds." I think sound is sound design is just not done very well to I mean no it's not prioritized almost by anybody it's almost nobody does it everyone's kind of written it off and said everybody mutes their phones anyways and nobody wants to you know

56:30that's for the kids websites or apps or something right yeah sound is a huge part of video games and you alluded to it but video games were a huge inspiration for me throughout my career and long wanted to inject more of video game design into the software I made. And so Not Boring has really been a vehicle for that. So everything that we do is in a 3D space, a 3D engine, and we 3D model everything, you know, and we just think it brings a certain like tactility and dimensionality and sort of sense of physical space that just really speaks to the way that I like to

57:10use software and hearkens back to I think for a lot of us what is like probably our most connected that we ever felt to software was often video games. honestly like we grew up on video games, you know, and and some of the deepest experiences that we've had have been with video games now. And so sound is a huge part of that. And I think a lot of people just don't do it well. Honestly, I wrote a whole article on this trying to give away our secrets so that other people could do it well. And I am starting to see more people doing it, which is great. And we even literally

57:43gave away sound kits of buttons and things like that. But just for example, one small thing is normally what everybody does when they have, let's say they put a click or something on a button tap, they have one click file, one like sound file, and it just plays the same one over and over and over. And guess what? Like no button ever sounds exactly the same. Like why does it sound so great to like listen to someone like typing on an old clicketity clacky keyboard, right? like that can sound wonderful but not when you move it digital. It's because of all the variation, right? When you

58:20hit a physical button, it hits differently every time, right? And this is a thing that is used in gaming because gaming has the same problem. You might need to punch over and over repeatedly in a row and you don't want or footsteps. That's a common one. Footsteps. Yeah. Or like background music is a thing. Like how do you keep that interesting and kind of changing over time? And so there are all these techniques. And so one of them in video games and one of them is just don't have one sound file, have a dozen sound files for that same button click that are all slightly different

58:52and suddenly it doesn't sound as grading anymore to us. And so there's like a dozen or so tricks like that that we all we just gave away for others to use because I would love to hear more sounds. You know, I'm someone who likes to hear sounds in software and I think it just really amps up the experience that you have. And then the flip sort of corlary to sound is haptics. And again, a lot

59:17of people I think don't use haptics nearly enough. You can make your own custom haptics in iOS. Literally like your own custom haptic patterns, right? So everything feels a little different. Yeah. And you can use the defaults. There's some good defaults, but literally you can make your own haptics that feel, you know, feel weighty or feel like an explosion or things like that. And again, it doesn't take much. Honestly, just takes working with a sound designer. And, you know, I highly recommend that for anyone who's building apps. Consider sound. I mean, it's a great way to

59:51amplify your experience that really doesn't add much overhead or complexity to the app itself. it's just, you know, it's built in or it doesn't add it to the experience, right? It's it's sort of like layered on on top. Yeah. I think the trick in that particular case, but maybe in a lot of things that you do is, you know, you're working in a game engine and your users are expecting a different kind of experience explicitly. Whereas most people making like productivity software especially there is an expectation of things fitting within the stand cuz you're not building an operating system. You're building something that lives inside of an operating system and

1:00:36there is an expectation for most users that things feel and look similar in certain ways. So like you are completely ignoring the whole liquid glass thing because that defeats the purpose of the app, right? you're the whole point is that it's this unique interesting experience. And so, not only are you able to do sound effects that that play even when the mute switch is on, but you can have the visuals when you tap something in your app have a weight to it's like a punch in a video game. It's like things crash or move or skip frames, I'm guessing anyway, to have this feeling of like this was an expensive action. This is a light, thin action. And so the sound, the haptics,

1:01:17the visuals, you can do all this stuff in your app that I at least don't feel the permission to do, not just from the company I'm working for, but from users. Does that make sense? Like No, I mean it does, but it's a weird balancing thing that I feel like you've almost built a business where you are allowed or almost have to now ignore in a way that it does. It feels like everybody else lives on a different platform that they kind of have to live within or different constraints maybe. Yeah, maybe maybe I'm being too optimistic, but I think there's room for it. You know, I mean, the way

1:01:53that we do have some liquid glass. The way that we see it is like we exist within we're not blind that we, you know, we exist within an operating system. And so we don't reinvent everything. We don't reinvent the menus and share sheets. I guess that's true. And so we we see it as a bit of a kind of like, you know, they're providing a foundation and we're building something on top of that. And so we can build our own perspective, but it has to kind of work with the Apple language as well, right? And so we see that really as more of a collaboration really rather than us just

1:02:30doing our own cuz some video games do it where they really just like, hey, it's full screen, you know, it's built in Unity. Yeah, video games are great. The menus can be extremely obtuse. Um, exactly. But it works thing. You're in it and then like you learn that that design language, but like you couldn't do that in a calculator app because people don't live in their calculator app. They're bouncing there from somewhere else and they need this sort of familiarity. Yeah. And they don't want to wait 10 seconds for Unity to boot up either. That's the other thing I'm curious about is because you lean so hard into video game engines. Is that a power concern? I mean,

1:03:08most of your apps you're not like sitting in for a really long time, so maybe not, but is that something that you're you're always thinking about or again, is it you're allowed to make different trade-offs than a typical productivity app? And so it Yeah. So part of it is is yeah, we make utility apps that you're often in and out of. You're not scrolling an endless feed in our apps. you're intended to kind of go into the calculator and pop out, but then also we take it very seriously perf and and battery usage and things like that and startup time. So, we use Apple's 3D game engine called SceneKit and it can be quite performant and so it just depends on how you use

1:03:50it and what things you use. We also don't push it like you can you can try and push it to get very like photorealistic things. We actually embrace a little bit more of like a PS1 era. Yeah. It's very polygon low poly kind of. Exactly. Very low poly. I've gotten very good now at like rendering or modeling very low poly models. We very much think about all those things how we can make it very performant. Actually, our camera app, I've tested it against other camera apps, and we launch faster than all the other camera apps, minus Apple's like default camera app, which you know, granted, they probably have some special sauce. They can like start booting up the camera before the app

1:04:33is even like fully zoomed open, but we can boot up faster than any other camera app. And so, it's not the 3D, you know, the 3D stuff. You can actually optimize that quite a bit. And given that we're doing like PS1 level graphics, I mean, the GPUs on these modern devices and modern phones is way past what PS1 could ever do, right? So, they're very performant actually. Now, yeah, if you leave it open for a long time, like a camera app, I mean, any camera app, you leave it open for a long time, it's going to start eating up the battery, right? So, there's some element of that, but we're very

1:05:10conscious of it. We're very performanceoriented when we think about how we build our apps because we know that people need to use them regularly and yeah they don't want to have to make that sacrifice right so we try and do everything that we can so they don't have to so they can get something beautiful and I mean there's so many like poorly built apps out there that they just eat up battery and you're like what are you even doing with all this juice right like it's it's not rendering anything interesting or there's some background processes you whatever it's doing. So, we we try and be very conscious of that. Yeah. So, you mentioned the camera app and we Yeah, we have

1:05:48to talk about that because quite frankly, for me, I've always liked all of your apps as like toys or experiments to play with, but I'm usually looking for more features or whatever. And the camera app in particular is one that I've found extremely interesting. And I think you're pushing further than you've pushed any of your other ones. Maybe you would disagree, but it feels like there's more like interesting under the hood things happening there and certainly more value in the what do you get whenever you subscribe than normal. So, I'm curious like what led you to making a camera app in the first place and what was the again thesis behind how it's different than everything else

1:06:30other than just 3D graphics? Yeah, we started on the camera app about 3 years prior to releasing it. So it was in the works for a while and it was really just you know I again coming from a film making background and my partner being very interested in photography as well and he's one of the best graphics engineers out there. So it's it was always just a an interest for us. We were just kind of exploring different things that you know what could you do with a camera. We sort of went on a very like ciruitous route trying to figure out what this camera app could be. So we'd pick

1:07:09it up for a month or two and try some things with a new idea and then abandon it and then and we did that off. Was the starting point just not camera what is that like is that okay? So the idea was let what is a camera app from us look like? Exactly. And we go through these journeys. It's not very linear, right? And I think that's just how the creative process is. Like you're trying to figure out what is at the core of this thing and what makes it interesting. And we were like exploring all sorts of different things. Okay. Could we do like 3D photography,

1:07:42right? And then you can look at your photos in 3D almost like and then Apple came out with their sort of spatial photos and things like that. So we were looking at all these different like interesting ways that we could make it better. And then eventually we realized like you know what we make basic apps we just improve the experience of basic apps right like we make a great weather app feel great like something that you want to open. So let's not try and like reinvent too much what

1:08:12a camera app can be and do but let's just reinvent what the experience of using a camera app can be. We started there and we started thinking, well, what if, you know, we use 3D in all of our apps, but for the most part, the controls are actually on like a Swift UI or UI kit layer that sits above the 3D. Like you can spin the 3D or do a few basic things with it, but like once you need to get into much more static, you're not throwing things around or spinning things. Yeah. So, but this was like what if we actually built all the controls in 3D? And then it led us down this

1:08:48path of making a very like tactile camera where the sliders and the dials and the buttons and everything are actually in 3D. When you press on them, they tilt based on where you press, right? You can feel the haptics and hear the sounds. And like we just thought like let's just take that as far as we can and just make that experience of holding the app in your hands as good as possible. And we just found ourselves loving how the thing felt. And then it was like well how did how are these photos need to look right? like and this is a couple years ago now and it's only gotten

1:09:27worse since I would say where photography on the phones has become very processed right and I would say very overprocessed in that a lot of the photos that you take like now we're having these debates like is it even a real photo if you're doing these like multiframe you know exposure compensation and composits right where you're pulling together the sky from one photo which which is underexposed and the foreground which is overexposed and then melding them together. And then sometimes you get weirdness when you try and do that especially when things are the camera app's clear goal

1:10:03is capturing a memory the way that you see it and remember seeing it more than anything else. Right. Well, the way I like to say it is the default camera apps. It's not just Apple, it's Google, it's it's everyone, right? Their goal is to make sure that you never take a bad photo, but I think the result is that you never can really take a great one. You know, I hear that a lot. It's not about never taking a bad photo. It's about never missing the moment you're trying to capture. If you're if you're taking a picture of people at night, it's better to be overexposed with

1:10:44all the weird night things and just be noisy or oversharpened as hell. But like memory preserved, like that's the point. And same if you take a picture of a car going by because it looks funny or whatever. Like you're trying to capture this memory. You're not trying to capture a photograph with a capital P or whatever. Like they're different goals. Which is why contrast doesn't matter. Cuz if your goal is to just make it look like always be an okay photograph, there's different decisions you could make in terms of contrast and stuff to make it look more photography. But I think it's really way more about people taking pictures of menus and memories

1:11:22of all these people together and everybody's exposed exactly the same than it is about taking a picture that you put on your wall the same way. Maybe I'm wrong. You're right in the sense that I think there's a very like scientific there's like a you know there's a version of photography that's very scientific that's like let's make sure that your exposure histogram is perfect, right? There's nothing clipped on the edges. Everything's kind of in the middle. And I think it I think it's true if you show like two photos of like, hey, this one has a blown out sky behind it and this one has the sky that looks, you know, correctly exposed or maybe the way that you remember seeing it,

1:11:58like people are going to choose that one, right? Just like if you show an HDR photo versus an SDR, they're people are like, well, that HDR one looks a little like shinier, right? But I actually think to me, it's funny that you mentioned memories. To me, it feels like it doesn't capture the feeling of when I was there all that well. You know what I mean? Like I feel like it doesn't capture the moment that that I remember feeling in a lot of these photos. It's like it's technically very accurate. Like everything's sharp and exposed correctly. So, what we ended up doing is we just strip all that out, right? So, we I mean the beautiful thing about Apple is they expose their

1:12:37raw data, right? And so you can actually take the raw data from a photo and build your own pipeline. So we built our own pipeline. We call it super raw because Apple is pro raw, but it's still processed quite a bit actually. So we're like, well, what's more raw? Let's call it super raw. And so and also I love Super Nintendo and the whole Nintendo idea of Super, right? So we said, let's call it Super

1:13:02Raw. So it's we just take all that out. And there are a couple other apps that have done this, too. And you can actually get a very beautiful photo cuz the the cameras on these devices have gotten so much better. You know, this made a lot of sense back when cameras were not as good. But like as as the cameras and the sensors have gotten better, it produces decent results. And because it's raw, you get such a wide range of values already. And the other thing that we do is we let you actually edit the raw data in the app. So you can like shift the exposure or pull back the highlights or push it

1:13:41up or you know change the temperature after the fact change the the L. So we apply LUTs as well in real time so you can see them. So that's like another cinematography back to my film making era of like applying LUTs to photos which is becoming more common now too. It's not the same as a filter because it's applied to the raw data and so you can get much more crazy like effects from it, right? And that's how filmmakers get like these wild effects. So we try and model some of them after filmmakers we like like Wes Anderson and things like that. So So yeah, you can get just

1:14:18a much more expressive range of photos and it means you can get like blur and noise. I mean, the odd thing is people like Apple takes out the noise in their photos and then people add it back in, right? Because they want that grain effect and we just say, "Well, just don't take it out, right? Just shoot it with the noise or the grain and embrace it, right?" And so you can get blurry photos or things like that. And so, yeah, it's kind of embracing that idea of photography as as a little bit more of an expressive medium, I would say, rather than like a documentation medium,

1:14:56right? I've gone down this route many times where I want to take my, you know, my nice camera that I have right here that's very small for a full-frame camera, but unless it's out and I have it on a on my strap, it's like I'm not going to take most pictures with it. So I've gone through many many photography apps and you know since the kind of big Fujifilm resurgence three or four years ago, the film simulation app game is is pretty big. And this is why I say the camera app is is somewhat unique to me compared to your other apps because the utility of using it is actually like I could

1:15:37I could pitch this to somebody on an elevator and really pitch it to them which is like there are quite a few apps now that do the sort of film simulation thing in app and a lot of them are really good and a lot of them focus more on film simulations. I think one interesting thing about your simulations is and now I understand why hearing you say it is that it does seem more movie

1:15:58film inspired and the fact that you can bring LUTs in is kind of in that same vein, right? But the thing that I think not boring camera does extraordinarily well is like Fujifilm. One of the big reasons people talk about it so much is the feel of turning dials and like making it the way you want kind of in camera. that I've not found a another app that matches the ability to kind of like there's a dial specifically for switching between film simulations and there's a dial for changing your exposure level. Something about those things. Maybe I wouldn't be able to describe this cuz if I I'm hearing myself say it out loud and now I'm like I would roll my eyes at somebody

1:16:41saying this, but it genuinely does capture that feeling. Also, the fact that the preview is not full screen. It's like inset. You're not making the preview as big as you possibly can. And something about that does make it feel very different capturing with it compared to the camera app or these other very very nice professional camera apps that I also use. It's interesting you hear that cuz the camera app was I mean we've made like weather and calculator and those they're a little bit more utility. camera app was our first my first like creative app or that's how I saw it since paper and so I got really excited about it and I just found like it was unlocking all sorts

1:17:26of like fun sides of my personality and and the way that I that I want to see tools that we hadn't really unlocked with some of the other apps and you know something that I learned early on with paper was like you know That moment of creation is very powerful, right? We we tend to like downplay that and think especially in this kind of AIdriven era where you can just kind of fix it later, right? Like oh, you can you can edit it later, you can do something later, right? I learned, you know, very early on that like no, if you can if you can bring some of that power to that moment

1:18:06of creation. So like as you're using the pencil, it's responding to you in a way. you start to use it differently, right? It's this conversation between you and the tool. And people will draw something very, if you ask them to draw a flower or something, they will draw it very differently if you give them a pencil versus an ink brush, right? Yeah. And that's the tool. And it's not it's, you know, it's not just an effect you can apply. You just discover something different, right? And so a lot of a lot of camera was trying to put those tools back into your hands at that moment of creation so you can see it in real time. You know, what are you doing? What does this focus

1:18:49pull do to the composition? Right? And so that it was as simple as that, you know, it's like, well, stop trying to think of all this stuff as something later that you can do in post and try and do it as you do it in the camera cuz now you start framing the photo a little bit differently, right? or you start, you know, backing up or focusing. That's the biggest one for me is when you have high contrast in your preview, you like I can kind of see it in person and I can kind of see it through a glass viewfinder, but when you see it in the in the preview and you can see especially

1:19:23cuz the preview's a little smaller, it forces your brain to do that kind of, you know, the trick of like unfocusing your eyes to see the shape of a composition. It it kind of does that a little for you. And yeah, just like you're saying, you you discover accident like happy little accidents and reframe your shot based on that as it's happening. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the best some of the best feedback we get from the camera is from people who are like, "Oh yeah, I downloaded your camera app and then I just went out and started like taking a bunch of random photos of thing." You know what I

1:19:54mean? Like remember when you do that? When you buy like a physical camera, you get excited about it. you just start like taking photos of plants and like ants on the ground and like so many of the photos in my album are just these there's a sudden big chunk of my backyard and it's cuz I got a new lens that weekend, you know. Yeah, exactly. Some of my favorite photos from our app are accidents, you know? It's like I accidentally hit the shutter button as I was putting it away. So, it's like this really cool blur or something. And so I miss some of that, you know, and I think I

1:20:25think we're trying to bring some of that back to, you know, that moment of of like capturing, you know, can you bring some of that magic and and creativity back to that moment and not just think of it all as like, oh, you'll do something interesting later, you know? Yeah. H that's so cool. Uh I could wax poetically about this for for way too long, but I've already taken a little too much of your time. So, uh, I'll go ahead and and kind of wrap us up here, but not before I ask you the question, ask everybody to end the show, which is, uh, who's a person or people out there who've

1:20:55inspired you and your work that you'd recommend others check out? Well, I would definitely recommend checking out John Balisari because he is the sort of patron saint of not boring software. There's a great short film, this is actually how I discovered him, a great short film called a brief history of John Baldesari that is fascinating to watch narrated by Tom Weights. I would also if you have I know a lot of people have but if you haven't dug more into Brian Eno I mean he's just a fascinating person who speaks very well I think on creativity. A lot of people, you know, if we're talking music producers, I think a lot of people are are aware of Rick Rubin in my opinion,

1:21:41like Brian Eno, I think, is a better model for software designers and and just has a little bit better perspective, I think, on on creativity and how to apply creativity. So, Brian Eno, there's a great documentary on him by Gary Huswit called Eno that you can watch. It's like an interactive documentary. So it plays differently every time you watch it. Oh, that's interesting. And then he also has a book called What Art Does, which is just like a tiny little book where he talks about

1:22:14the value of art, but honestly, I think it applies to a lot of creative endeavors, including design. So, and then where can people, you know, find you and uh your not boring work? Go to notbore.in ing to find all of our apps or search not boring on the app store to find us. And then yeah, I'm on the usual social channels, Twitter and and the others if uh you're just interested in hearing me rant about the state of of creativity and and the app world that or seeing your latest uh you

1:22:48know uh swag game. That's right. Or or I also like to share my private woodworking excursions. Yes. uh and things like that. So, I try and talk about apps some of the time, but honestly, I talk about a lot of these other random things quite a bit. Ah, perfect. All right. Well, thank you so so much for coming on. This is you like, like I said, like you came on the scene in like 2020, which was right after I started doing iOS development at all. So, uh, it's very cool to to kind of get to talk to you about this and go very deep on all the backstory

1:23:22and then spend a little time on the actual thing we're theoretically here to talk about. But, uh, man, this was this was a joy. So, I really appreciate it. No, it's great. Yeah, thanks so much for having me. So, thank you all for listening. Uh, Launched is part of the Revenue Cap family of podcasts. If you want to learn more about the growth side of the mobile app business, check out SubCub, which is hosted by my good friend and colleague, David Barnard. And of course, check out revenuecat.com to learn about the easiest way to grow and monetize your mobile app business. And you can find everything else launched at launchedfm.com. And

1:23:57uh I'll see you all in 2 weeks, hopefully with my voice uh fully recovered from WWDC. Bye.