# Turning a Side Project into a Six-Figure Subscription Business – Eric Duffett, Shot Pattern

Channel: Sub Club by RevenueCat
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V04KKC-s_cQ
Duration: 45 min
Language: English
Words: 9512
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/V04KKC-s_cQ

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[0:00] Hello, I'm your host David Bernard and with me today, Revenue Cat CEO, Jacob Biding. Our guest today is Eric Duffett, a high school teacher and indie app developer. Eric is a founder of Shop Pattern, a golf GPS app focused on strategy. On the podcast, we talk with Eric about his journey from failed first app to success with his second, the advantages of building for problems people are already talking about, and why he turned down a lucrative acquisition offer to keep building. Hey, Eric, thanks so much for joining us on

[0:37] the podcast today. Yeah, thank you for having me. Uh, I've listened to every single episode, so I'm incredibly humbled to be on this side of the speaker. Are you going to listen to this one? This might be the one I skip. Okay, we'll see. And Jacob, always nice to have you. That's great. I unlike Eric, I've I've never listened to an episode of Sub Club. So, a complete opposite. I've just been almost All right. Well, I've been super excited to talk to you, Eric. You were on a blog post. You collaborated on a blog post about not selling your app, and that kind of like introduced me to you and

[1:09] like what you've been working on. I wanted to step back and you are a high school teacher that built an app as a side project like how did that happen and and and yeah tell us a little bit about the the beginning story. Yeah, more than one app as a side project and the first one went very different than the second. So I'm a high school teacher. I teach business and app development actually at an amazing Chicago area high school. And back in 2015, I had an idea for an app and no

[1:38] money to pay anybody to build it for me. And I said, well, I'll just learn how to code and figure it out myself. So, I spent about I don't know 3 months on a Udemy course. Luckily, and coincidentally, my high school sent me to a boot camp called Mobile Makers. They actually train high school teachers how to teach app development. And so it just a really lucky break. They give me the building blocks to just understand the basics because before that it was just like copy paste and like oh I think it works. And from there I started

[2:07] building a meditation app for golfers. As a high school coach I had seen my athletes struggle and I felt like they needed something to deal with the adversity they were facing in their sport. Many of them were pursuing college scholarships. So I thought like hey I see a problem. I see that you're struggling and I I have a way to help you and I want to build something that can help you perform better like build resilience, build some mental hygiene and mental skills. And so I started

[2:33] creating that app for them. I'm smiling ear to ear right now because like the uh my whole thesis with RevenueCat is there's like a million billion niches that need to be filled with software and meditation for golfers hadn't been one that even crossed my mind. So, did you start thinking about the app and working on the app before the school thought they would want you to teach app development or or like what was the order there? Because I I missed that when we were talking about this before. Yeah, they came online about the same time. I knew that it was becoming easier to build apps. I think Swift as a

[3:04] language was very new at that point. I was aware of the mobile makers organization and at the same time I knew I wanted to build for myself. And so I basically got a head start while I was waiting on the school to figure out if we're going to adopt the curriculum and create the class. I'm just like, I'm just going to figure this out and then if I happen to go to training, that'll

[3:22] be a bonus. That's so cool. So then how did things go with that first app? I believe it's called Undaunted Golf. That's right. Yeah, it was a a lesson in what product market fit isn't. Um that's that's most lessons in product market fit are. Um, like I said, I had I had seen my athletes struggling. I knew that they needed help. And it took me basically 5 years from having the idea to realizing I was wrong to get to the point where I actually sat down with them and asked them, hey, like I I saw this moment in time. Tell me about it. And when they

[4:00] talked to me, it's like I guess it was hard, but like I don't know. There's essentially what they said. And they had never looked for a solution. They never tried to buy anything. They never downloaded anything. They never asked for help. There was no purchasing intent or really problem to solve in their eyes. And throughout that 5 years, I had emailed every single college golf coach in the country. Two of them told me I needed to be on Android. So, I built an Android app. I had worked with the design team to like redesign the app. I I sat in my closet for months on end

[4:29] recording all of these audio scripts and inspirational messages and meditations. And then I like again basically five years where I I get to the end and like hey do you want this? And they not really. And along the way there were some signs that other people may have wanted it. I got a couple messages from 50 60 year old men who really liked the app. I got a couple of coaches who again are adults that really like the app. But because I was so focused on that initial hypothesis I completely missed it. And when I conducted those user interviews and they said hey we don't really want

[5:02] this. I was like, "All right, that's that's it for me as an indie. Like, I'm moving on. If I'm going to make money with apps, it's going to be because I do contract work or somebody pays me to write code. Like, this indie thing is just not for me." It's such a such a good highlight that like learning to build an app is a one thing, but like building a product is a whole another discipline. They're sometimes interrelated and often you can be good at both, but like they're not necessarily the same thing. and like one's more human and more data driven and you know the other is you know more

[5:32] technical but I heard so many stories it's really an interesting thing it's often too like the first time somebody builds something that they like they get it in their crawl they believe it's going to be real and then I don't know if maybe some combination of some cost fallacy and just like belief and just like naive but this is not the first time I've seen somebody go a long time on something that never really had legs it's not uncommon what did you do with that app to to market it and how many downloads did you

[5:58] even end up getting in those 5 years? Yeah. So marketing at first I thought like if you publish the app store like if you build it they will come and they didn't come. There was all sorts of issues related to that and like I said I was like all right I need to to push

[6:11] harder. I need to put myself out there. So I got the email address of every single college golf coach in the country. I emailed every single one which is over 300 I'm fairly certain and about five responded and two just wrote back unsubscribe. It it wasn't even like a subscription. I I literally copy pasted every single one so you couldn't

[6:30] unsubscribe. It wasn't a mailing list. And one wrote back this really mean email. And like I said, two wrote back, "Hey, I need you to be on Android." And I thought like, "Oh, this is this is the secret unlock." And beyond that, I tried some really weak efforts at Twitter ads and that was really it. Yeah. And I think it's the coral, like you said, it's what product market fit isn't. It's like if you don't have a kernel of something of a product and and maybe you kind of highlighted it maybe if you had leaned into the couple of people that had wrote in and like you

[6:59] know whatever but it seems like c talking to customers was you know came later which is like especially in BTOC I think not done enough is like talking like talking to it's too easy to like you said just put it on the app store not anonymously but almost anonymously and then people download it somewhat anonymously and then you never have to interact with another human As nice as that can be for nerds, it's so valuable to like talk to these people, right? And you learn a lot about what you're doing and what you're not doing and why they're actually using it or not using it. So,

[7:28] did you end up doing any consulting or I know you ended up building another app? Did you just jump right into that next app and and why did you decide to keep going on a second app after that first experience? So I developed a love for building apps and I stumbled into a problem at the high school that I teach at and and I built an app for the high school and then people saw it and they asked for a couple more. So I started

[7:50] doing side projects, consulting work. They paid me just a little and then as a second kid came along as I need to make more money. I did pick up some contract work. I even applied for some jobs as a software engineer cuz the salary ceiling is much higher. And so I was looking for ways to monetize my ability to make apps and just kind of stumbled into my app shop pattern. It was meant to be just for me. As I started building it, I like the way it looked and then I was like, well, maybe I can make a little money off this. My goal was to make $1,000 a

[8:25] summer just to justify spending money on golf. Like, hey, like if I can have one hobby, pay for the other hobby, it's a wash. Like that's that's all I need. I found it really easy to implement revenue cap. I was like, "All right, I'll I'll throw it in the app store. This is not going to take over my life like the last one did. It is just going to passively sit there and if it makes money, great. But I'm not making the

[8:44] same mistake I made first time." What was the idea behind the second app and how is it different from the first? Yeah, so shot pattern was born out of my obsession with golf. I had been listening to golf podcasts and learning from golf experts. And essentially there's this idea, this methodology of like perfecting golf strategy where you need to go on the course and you need to measure side to side how much room there is to like land your golf ball. And I'll

[9:12] I'll try to keep it in non-golfer terms. And the brilliant people behind like all of the math for how to do this were just like, "Hey, you need to go on Google Maps. you need to use the measuring tool on Google Maps on the satellite image and you can measure side to side on the course. And they had created this behavior where people were going online and measuring the golf course. And I was like them. I was like having a lot of fun measuring golf courses via the satellite images. But then I get out onto the golf course and I of course wasn't disciplined enough to take paper

[9:44] notes or do anything with me. And so I was like, wait, everything's a little bit different than what I thought it would be. So I just wanted something real time. Let me measure the hole in front of me. Let me see what the analytics say in terms of proper strategy. It was a little toy for myself at first to just make that process of understanding golf strategy in real time easier. This was already kind of a a thing, right? And maybe that's what's a little bit different from your first app and then this app is that you kind of latched on to something that influencers were already talking about in the golf

[10:18] space that like there was already some kind of motion behind this idea and then your app I assume just kind of made it easier. Yeah, exactly. So the creator of this way of thinking, his name's Scott Faucet. He had been teaching professional golfers. He had his name mentioned on golf broadcasts. He had this basically system that he was teaching people for at least 5 years prior to the launch of shot pattern. And so yeah, he had he had already created the behavior change of this is the way you need to prepare for a round of golf, prepare for a golf tournament, how to think about it when you're on the

[10:55] course. And so all of these people, all of the content marketing of this is something you should be doing to play better had been done for years in advance of my app hitting the app store. And that was, yeah, like you said, a huge difference in me trying to force a new behavior upon people to just giving them an easier way to do what they

[11:14] already wanted to do. It's it's way easier to write a trend than to than to create a trend, right? So, you launched the app. How did things go? And did it look super different in those early days from the early days of Undaunted? Yeah, I mean almost right away it looked different in that one I I was doing more content marketing up front. I knew not to have the mindset if you build it they will come. So I built the social media presence a week or two before the launch before the app was ready and just started putting content out there engaging in conversations and I

[11:51] continued that after the launch but only like a week or two before. That's actually I would say pretty pretty short. You know, sometimes you can see people build an audience like months before a launch of something. Well, I mean, I built the first version of the app in three weeks. So, talk about night and day differences. Five years of of turmoil versus like 3 weeks to V1 like I'm going to put on the app store. Even though it's not it's not the the myth of like get rich quick is not true, but it is kind of true because like often you do something that's not super valuable for

[12:19] a long time until you figure out the thing that is valuable and then that is very quick. So in theory, you could have jumped directly to that, but like that's sort of in theory, right? But often when the thing hits, it's fast, right? Yeah. So I had a little bit of a social media presence. I put the app out there. I start talking about it on Twitter where a lot of golfers like me are hanging out, engaging in conversations and and I noticed that every time I added value to the community and dropped some screenshots in there, like I'd see a couple trial starts hit. And so it

[12:47] just slowly ticking up. Slowly ticking up. I got a few direct messages from professional golfers on the very beginner level tours. I didn't have to work that hard to get the first downloads to see early signs of monetization. And honestly, one of the best signs that something was working was that people were paying for it that I never heard from. I knew my like four customers before like, oh, like, yeah, there's Norm again. Uh, but this time people were paying me and I never interacted with them. I was like, this is not the same as before. This is working. And so in those early days, I

[13:20] know you had a few kind of key decision points of like, okay, it's working, but like to take it to the next level, you really needed to start investing into it. What What happened there? Yeah. So, like I said, the the first version was built in basically 3 weeks from first line of code to on the app store. And so, it was very very bare bones. And in order to professionalize it and get it anywhere close to what people were expecting, I needed some golf course data. It needed to be aware of like where the T- box was, where the green was, point you in the right

[13:53] direction, like know how many holes were on the course because prior to that, it was just the satellite image from Apple Maps. Wherever you pulled it up, it would like just treat it as a golf course. And I poked around and the only way to get this data from a reliable provider was to pay $5,000 upfront. And I was like, "Oh, like you can't do this again. You got a kid on the way. Like you you told yourself you weren't going to go down this path and it's like a bad

[14:20] ex-girlfriend like calling you back. I've changed." I went to my wife and she gave me some really like sage advice. I guess it was more of a question, but she's like, "Is this a hobby or is it a business?" And to me, what that meant was, again, a hobby is something you spend time on and you spend money on because you enjoy it. And a business is something that actually makes money. And you have to do all the parts. You don't get to just do the fun parts. You don't get to work on it just when you feel like it. It's it's there. It's something that needs your investment. And so I had

[14:54] to decide like, is this going to be something that I treat like more like a job or is this going to be something that I have fun with? Does your wife happen to also be a tax accountant? Cuz because there are some like filing differences between Maybe that's what she was talking about. Um I think she had seen me struggle and justify spending time on something that wasn't going anywhere and was just kind

[15:18] of sick of it. It's literally the tax code, right? Is like when something's a hobby versus, you know, and it's a gray it's a gray line, but I do think if not having clarity there is a problem. Yeah, absolutely. And I think she was just like, "What are we doing here?" and kind of tapped out from the first experience. But I decided to go for it to pay the $5,000 to basically go four grand into the negatives uh at that point. And I was playing golf the next day after like sending the money over and having buyer remorse and and I was joking with my buddy who knew what was

[15:49] going on. I was like, "Man, I I didn't want to pay a hundred bucks for somebody else's golf app, but now I'm four grand in the hole." But that that turned out to be like an amazing decision in two ways. One, it put a ton of pressure on me to like take a big swing at this and to figure out a way to get back into the black because this wasn't something that I could afford to lose money on. And the other thing, like once I said yes to that small snippet of of functionality that I thought I needed, I was digging into the APIs to figure out what else

[16:21] was there to like really take advantage of the money I'd spent. And I found something else that I didn't know I had purchased that unlocked this additional behavior that nobody else was doing. And so I started working on it and thinking about it. And it was another idea that a brilliant statistician had popularized. he wrote about in a book like in the early 2000s and I was like I think I can do that via an app and it doesn't have to only live in your supercomput. And so what I did was I basically was able to take a user's data and reflect it back to them and show them an expected value

[16:59] of any shot that they hit. And that was something that apparently people were really excited about cuz I put it in a tweet and it just blew up more than anything else I had done. And it was at that point where things really started to change once I put a teaser out there for like, hey, I'm I'm in the middle of building this and it's going to be really cool and I think you guys are going to like it and a whole bunch of people shared it and after that I was getting phone calls from influencers and business owners and that was the thing

[17:28] that was sent things off to the races. Is there like golf Twitter? Is this like in golf Twitter? Is that where like cuz I don't think it would go viral on my Twitter. No, it would not go viral on yours, but yes, there's golf Twitter and there's a handful of us that hang out there and Yeah, exactly. And so it was this community that I was a part of before as a regular person and had learned what I needed to know, like what inspired me to build the app and then just kept on like taking these ideas from Golf Twitter, from the content creators and and figuring out how to

[17:59] make them into an app. It's so interesting like people are so much more receptive to things built by insiders for them. Do you know what I mean? Like this we call it community, right? But I think there is this like a new product is such a big risk. Not really, but I think people, you know, it takes a lot. You're not going to pay 100 bucks for somebody's random app, right? But when somebody's from your community and they speak like you and they understand your problems, that I think is such a big bridge. And these are small time kind of gorilla marketing things like you know you

[18:29] wouldn't think of like an app scaling through just tweets you know when you're going at the very beginning it's certainly something right it builds a ground swell builds that base right exactly and I and I knew that I didn't have the money to do paid so I was whatever I could do just to have a little sweat equity to again to build the content marketing to engage in conversation every little piece was basically free money it was just effort at that point that took the the value ad to the community and turned it into a couple of subscribers and things just

[19:01] kept ticking in the right direction. And now you can do what I do, which is, "Honey, I'm posting for work. It's work. I have to be on Twitter at this family engagement wherever we are." Yeah. It doesn't go over real well. So, I'm I'm happy to have found another way to grow the app. Were you posting this from a personal account or he cuz I've seen your Shop Pattern account. Were you building all of this on the shop pattern account or

[19:26] your personal account? Uh, yeah, the shop pattern account. So, like everything lived there and and I toggle between the Wii and the I and I never know which one to use or whether to use a pronoun at all. But yeah, just like everything came from Shop Pattern and said, "Hey, this feature is coming soon." And I teased it out there well before it was done. And and I knew that it was I was heading in the right

[19:46] direction. It's so funny when David told me you were on the show, all I could think of is the Shop Pattern logo cuz that's who you are on Twitter. Like exactly. Yeah. Very funny. How many followers did you have at that point? I mean, I'm just kind of curious like for people listening, building in these niche communities, it's just such a great story that like finding this niche, finding product that has pull in the market instead of having to push it into the market. And then, you know, I would guess it it wasn't a massive following that that allowed this to start getting traction. So, how many

[20:18] followers did you have when you tweeted out those that new feature you were building? Yeah, I I still only have about 2,600. So, I I might have had a thousand and the tweet did again relative to everything else did 25 or 40,000 impressions. Um, was shared by several people and like I said, I had a number of people send me direct messages like, "Hey, I would love to talk just like meet you and and see who you are." And one of the people who interacted with that, saw it, was somebody who downloaded the app, won a golf tournament the next day in part because they used it and eventually that turned

[20:54] into discussions for them being interested in buying the app as I wrote about in the blog. Right. Well, yeah. So, tell us that story. So, yeah. So, you're still early. The app hasn't made a ton of money, but it's showing these signs of product market fit and somebody offered to just buy it outright. Yeah. So they called me up. We had a meeting. And our first meeting was supposed to be basically the minute my daughter was born. And so I I emailed them at at midnight the night before like, "Hey, I I think I'm going to have to reschedule." So we we chat a couple weeks later and they say, "Hey, we

[21:26] really like it. We were thinking of building something like that ourselves, but we really like what you put together and yeah, we'd like to buy it from you." And I was ecstatic for 10 seconds and I realized, wait a second, like I don't have a whole lot to go on in terms of what this app could be worth. And they asked me to put together a a slide deck mainly on the technology that I had used like my tech stack and then they wanted to know download numbers and like number

[21:55] of users. Can you describe like the nature of the buyer? I signed an NDA, so I don't want to go into too much detail, but it was a tangential golf business. They had been in apps before, like they had some awareness of apps, I guess. Yeah, they had awareness of apps. They they had their own app. They saw this at I guess you would call it a strategic acquisition. This wasn't a financial buyer with like an app shop. This was somebody who said, "Hey,

[22:16] that's kind of what I was wondering." Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. They had asked for me to put together a couple of slides of like, "Hey, how many downloads do you have?" And I had listened to the subscription apps report podcast and look at the reports maybe a month before that. And so I like I don't want to go on downloads. It's still like almost nothing. Like let me figure out what I can do here to show you just how well this app is performing. And so I put together my slides and so I'm like pulling up this the trial start benchmarks and I like whoa I'm at 25%

[22:48] and then trial conversion I'm at 75% and I'm looking at the chart and it's like it's off the charts in terms of performance trial the paid of 17%. And this is an organic audience and there's there's some juicing of the numbers because of where the downloads came from. But still, as I'm putting this together, I'm realizing like this has some serious potential. And it's really hard to to put a number on exactly what this could be. Talked to a handful of people. I talked to very good ventures who I I know you you guys know them over there and said, "Hey, what would you pay to build this?" And they didn't say

[23:24] exactly, but they gave me a ballpark range that was helpful. I talked to a handful of other people to try to get some advice about exactly what kind of a number to put on it. and I put a big number out there and they came back with like final offer of 75,000. I sat with that for a while and it's like okay I can cash in a a sure thing and like get a little bit of cushion back or I can

[23:48] keep building cuz I think I can do that. One thing that terrified me was in the the back and forth they had said like we just put this on our road map we are going to build it and kind of left some blank space there. So read between the lines. Either you sell it to us or we crush you. And that part was really intimidating to me. And I reached out to the sub club community online uh community that you guys have put together and just said, "Hey, so people are are offering to buy my app, but I don't really have any numbers to create a valuation with. Anybody out there gone

[24:23] through this or can somebody help me?" And Seth Miller of Raphat chimed in and he sent me a message like, "Hey, give me a call." And as we were talking, I was going through this. He asked me all these questions just so that I could understand how I felt about it. And I said, "But Seth, like they said that they're just going to build this and crush me." And nobody has ever said the f-word on the Subub podcast to my knowledge, and I don't want to be the first. Um, but Seth basically said, "Well, f them. Like, let them try." And I'm so appreciative of him just like

[24:53] giving that me that little jolt of confidence to be like, "You know what? like you built something meaningful. Like somebody can't just roll out of bed and and put this together. It's going to take effort and even though you used AI, like there's still something here. A couple things I've experienced and seen and whatever on that is like yes, that's right. Like you might have been through similar situations with him and I'm not sure, but like the one that's always used when somebody's trying to buy something cuz it's like you're usually being acquired by a larger bigger, you know, somebody with deep pockets. So they probably have a little bit of

[25:24] leverage or whatever and and they're doing a bill versus buy discussion unless it's like a PE app thing you're just like flipping it for the cash flow but like but usually so that will always come up as a way to like sort of you know encourage you to to do the deal for that same reason is the threat is almost like if if they were so motivated and so good and able to build this thing they probably just would have built it right but they didn't you did um and and so because of that I think it's a bluff usually worth calling usually Not always. Like you probably come up

[25:53] negative on that a few times because that's just the nature of why you do a strategic acquisition, right? You don't do it for no reason. But then also like companies I think it tend to be kind of opportunistic. You know what I mean? So it's like they see this app, they maybe could get it for cheap. They maybe kind of are interested in doing it, but like it's not like the people that are going to work on an acquisition are the same people who would build it, right? So it's not like, oh, we're not going to do the acquisition, so let's go build those same people on building it, right? It's

[26:17] like different resources of the company. So it's not always like lock and step like this. So, lots of reasons why if you hear that threat, whatever you want to call it, you should do exactly what you did, which is like take a minute. Kind of creates a similar pressure to buying the database, right? It's like, okay, if I say no to this, it's almost like you you walked away from a $75,000 windfall. You're like, okay, I got to make more than $75,000 now or like this

[26:39] was a big mistake. And that's exactly what happened next. I had a high for I don't know like two weeks because the the day that I walked away from those negotiations, uh, Golf Digest called and did a little interview. I was like, I'm off to the races without them. Like, this is great. And then the weather turns and everything slows down. And and then I hit reality of like, oh my goodness. And I I do my taxes actually and I look at what I actually made. I'm like, okay, at this rate it will take me 75 years to make that money back. Um, and I go from

[27:14] like elation to this even greater sense of loss aversion than I had the first time. And there were multiple times where I essentially had breakdowns or or near panic attacks that I' like, what have I done? Like I'm have so much work ahead of me. I don't know how I'm possibly going to catch up to that number. Meanwhile, I still feel like I have this ghost chasing me of like if I don't figure out how to make the app even better, they're just going to replicate it and I'm gone. And again during that time another indie developer was such a huge resource for me. I had

[27:45] heard Curtis Herberts from Slopes on your podcast. I went over and I listened to like basically all of his episodes on independence and I had listened to his story of how he built slowly over time and I said Curtis this happened. I'm having major regrets. Should I just sell the app or what's even possible here? Is like this is this a realistic number for me to reach in the next 3 years? And of course he couldn't answer that. But he did give me the the calm and the guidance of just like, hey, you don't even know if you would have had that money in the bank account. There's a

[28:16] good chance they're going to try to retrade it after due diligence or during due diligence anyway. And so, don't get too attached to the number. Just build when you can. Give yourself some grace. You'll have the summer and just slowly plot along and see what happens. But you don't have to do all of this at once. And again, don't get too attached to what you think you for sure had if you had said yes. That got me to step away from the ledge and like, all right, I'm just going to do what I can and there's doesn't need to feel like a a race that I can never win. And I just got to

[28:51] plotting and building and adding features to the app that allow me to raise the price and better support my users and give them more of what they already wanted. And so I just kept plugging away, plugging away. And it took me until basically the end of June, that following summer, to release an updated version that allowed me to charge about double what I was charging before. So now the price is 75 bucks a year. Then I started paid marketing. And that's when again I made another jump

[29:20] because of the marketing efforts. When they first approached you, you were barely in the market, right? You barely made any money. You really didn't have any like longitudinal data. than to like wait an entire year later and to even just to see a second data point like I can do things and I can like increase something right now you have maybe the same conversation come up you'd be much more equipped to understand like what that process looks like I think a lot of people go through this especially with compounding businesses is that in the moment the week to week can look very flat or very erratic it has to be looked

[29:51] at almost in in years to really understand like okay is there a compounding motion here and like Curtis's business is a great example cuz like super seasonal as I imagine you guys are too and especially in seasonal businesses you don't see it because you have these massive like seasonal spikes and decays and like the emotions of like oh I made you know onetenth of what I made in peak season last month has got to really drive you nuts but you have to look at June over June you know like to really see a signal was it pretty flat that whole time so like from the turning

[30:23] down the acquisition was money just like barely trickling in and you were just like ah crap for like nine months. Yeah. And so I wouldn't say nine months, but so I I say no in October and then November, December, January, February, things are are Yeah. going down. So monthly is basically all all abandoned. A few new users trickle in. And now I'm so busy building that I've really stopped marketing. And so now that's really weighing on me like, how do I

[30:51] spend my time? How do I do all of this? I still have at this point like a four or fivemonth-old daughter. I I have a full-time job and I just like feeling like I have taken on too much. Then the weather starts to warm up. Some connections I made through the the Twitter community. People who already had an audience are say positive things about me online and and March is great and April's better and now I'm seeing things pick back up and there's there's signs of hope. There's there's a light at the end of the tunnel as I'm finishing up building these these new

[31:24] features. And so then you released a big update in June and and then as you said started market in July. How did things go? Yeah. So again that loss aversion, that pressure of like I have to get to this number or else I'm going to feel terrible. It stinks that that works so well for me. I don't want to go back there, but it really works. So I was like, I have to take a swing at paid in order to hit this number. Uh so I tried I I listened to the podcast. I knew I needed to spend a considerable amount in order to like get the machine to start working. I

[31:57] tried an image only campaign for a couple of weeks. It didn't really go anywhere. It was about break even. And then I was like, "All right, I I need to try video and it's not really my skill set." I'd been reaching out to uh video creators saying like, "Hey, here's a free version of the app. Would love if you talked about it." Many of them were just willing to to send out an odd post like, "Hey, I'm just trying out this new app." But a couple of them came back and said, "I would love to put together a

[32:22] video, but it's going to cost money." So, I paid two creators. One, I paid I think 750 bucks because his follower count was somewhat small. And another one was a creator who had done really, really, really well on TikTok who had this really unique approach and he said, "Hey, I'm going to enter this golf

[32:39] tournament. I want you to sponsor me. I'll put together a video for you." And he asked for $1,500. I thought with his audience that he would likely pay that back pretty quickly because he was getting 50,000 100,000 views on every Tik Tok that that would be the secret unlock. But then I only had two videos. So I had to make at least one more just to fill out the ad set. So very quickly, just so I could get the campaign up and running, I was like, "All right, let me do a screen recording." So I just pull up the app. I do a screen recording with the first

[33:09] idea that comes to mind. I download Cap Cut and like let it do its thing to make some captions and like throw it in the ads set of like all right now I got three now it can run and now this this guy I had to pay all the money to like now that ad can go work and I hit go and I I wake up a couple days later and I'm like rubbing my eyes and looking at my stats and like wait a second wait this is this right? I'm getting installs for like 70 cents with this ad. And I'm looking and it's coming from the one

[33:37] that I made in my basement when I was in a hurry that I check my revenue dashboard and I look at like my average revenue per download is in the 350 to $4 range and my installs are.7. Like I didn't know this was possible anymore. I thought this went away with AT. Like I'm minting money. So like off I run to the bank. I tell my wife like,

[33:56] "Hey, I'm opening up a line of credit." She's like, "You're doing what?" Like don't worry, you'll be fine. Jeez. Um, I ended up getting an interest free credit card, but like I did everything I could to maximize. That's still credit, by the way. That's still leverage. I just want you to know just cuz there's no interest rate, you still owe that money. There's still risk

[34:14] there. Yeah. Felt like like how can I just push this as far as it'll go like into the summer and like with the spend. And so basically thanks to that last second ad, um the revenues from last year, so 2024 ended up being about 185,000. I was able to pay myself $100,000. Like took it all out of the business and just said, I did it. I beat the number that they put in front of me. Like I can't believe that this is how it all came together. But it was a huge monkey off my back to say like, "All right, we did it. Now we can

[34:48] just focus on like building and slowly growing and like having some fun without uh feeling like there's these numbers haunting you in the background. That's really good. That's really great to like be in the green again. You know what I mean? They always were, right? But to like be mentally past the checkpoint. I always This is somewhat similar, but whenever we raise money, they increase the valuation rate and I'm always like gosh like now the valuation's way ahead of our multiple like whatever. And I always feel better once like we're out ahead again. And I'm like, "Yeah." You know, uh, which is kind of a a mental hack, too, to like

[35:20] force us to like keep pushing cuz it's like, okay, we kind of wrote a check and like we had to work to be able to cash it, you know? That's exactly what I felt. And I'm trying to figure out what to do with that now that there's not really a number sitting out there. But it's kind of, like you said, a helpful mental hack to to have to push for something and to figure out a way to get there. And yeah, like I said, just an incredible experience to have gotten over the hump

[35:42] and to to now be where I'm at today. What a cool story, too. I mean, as a as a full-time teacher, you made a 100K on the side hustling an app in the summer, nights and weekends, and like what a great thing. Yeah, I love being able to talk to my students about it. I try to find the balance of like how much do I share, what numbers do I share, how do how much do I work in my experience? But yeah, I feel like an adjunct professor sometimes of like, hey, here's here's how it goes in the real world. It's really improved my teaching. It brings

[36:13] the classroom to life and and helps me add some humility into my teaching as well because I'm supposed to be the person who like has all of the right answers. But when we do our social media advertising work, it's like, okay, if you post it and it does well, then whatever I was going to give you as a grade is out the window. Like, I'm not

[36:32] the one who decides. The market decides. So, I was I was wrong about my own stuff. So, I can't possibly know for certain that that we just do the rest of the podcast on business education because like I think this is like something that MBAs suffer from, you know, not all of them. I've had to go to meet, but I think when you get an NBA, they're like, I went to business school so they taught me all the things to do in business and it's like that's not possible. Like that's not a thing that exists, right? Like maybe you read some case studies, you saw some things that didn't work, but

[36:59] like the only reality exists in the market, right? Like that's the only thing that's real. Yeah. Exactly. And that's what I I try to teach them and give them the the freedom to to prove me wrong if I have critical things to say about their work or or or just to to try to get the real feedback rather than the teacher feedback, pushing them towards not just playing school, but actually learning by doing. That's my my favorite way to

[37:22] teach a class. A as you and I were prepping for the podcast, I I asked you this question and I thought your answer was fantastic. So, I want to ask you, you know, the the app has been doing better and better, and this year looks like it's going to be even better than last year. And clearly,

[37:37] you've built something people want now. So, when are you going to quit teaching? I know it's it's a fair question. Um, one, if I didn't work at potentially the best high school in the country, I'd probably already be out of there. The students I have are amazing. They love to learn. I get paid really well. the colleagues that I have again because it's a high-paying school attracts tons of great talent and so I I work with really impressive people who are inspiring to be alongside and I like my job. I was not looking to get away from teaching. We're getting to a point where I I should seriously consider it. I'm

[38:12] past 500,000 in ARR. I'm probably going to do over 500 $600,000 in sales and half of that's going to be net profit for the year. And so it's becoming a a very real possibility that not is this something I could do but almost something I should do to be like financially responsible to myself. But my biggest worry is uh that my relationship to the work will change dramatically. That like to go from like this is fun money. This is extra for my family that's going to help us have a cushion to now when I wake up every day like if I see the numbers this week is worse than last week. I'm afraid

[38:56] that I will never sleep again because I am so worried that all of this is gonna disappear from underneath me. And I've already felt that when it's on the side and I am just terrified that if if it becomes the only thing, then like I said, I will I will stop enjoying it and it will just haunt me that I can never I

[39:17] I'm just waiting for it to fall apart. Are you at the point where your time is a constraint on growth? Like at some point it's not even about the cash flow. there there's a cash flow in like right time investment or whatever but like are you at the point where you don't think the like nights and weekends can get you to the next level anymore or like where are you in that journey are you still working solo what's the situation yeah so I do everything by myself I do pay some content creators to help me create content both goes to their audience but I repurpose it as ads so

[39:46] that's been a helpful way to start basically having other people work on my behalf but I I still yeah my time is a constraint because I'm the only developer. I'm the only marketer and I basically choose between the two and customer support is 30 minutes in the morning and 30 minutes at night. That might be something you could bring somebody in to help with, right? A little bit easier than maybe the coding or marketing and stuff like that. But but then again, you're now starting to build a real business. Like even that

[40:12] changes the relationship to it, right? Yeah. It's funny too when you and I were talking, you know, I was telling you my experience with almost the exact opposite is that I spent 12 years had four kids during the time running my indie app business with constant existential dread and then I got a job at Revenue Cat. And there there really is something too. The grass is always greener and like for me it has been really nice and my wife even commented after I had joined been at Revenue Cat like a year. She's like, "Wow, your your like your base stress has gone down noticeably and a valid worry like when it is your

[40:51] own thing that this is how you provide for your family is this app and there's going to be competitors. There's going to be market shifts like the ad spend might break and you might up 30K that you're not getting a return on." And I thought about like, oh, do I just raise money to give myself a cushion to grow it? And again, I guess I've realized that I don't want to have a boss in this. And so I'm I'm happy to bootstrap and we'll we'll keep it this way. And and whether or not to go full-time on the app is a question I'll have to answer. And luckily, even if my boss

[41:21] listens to this, he already knows that things are going really well. So he's not going to be too upset with me. It's a great question to be presented with. It's kind of funny. I wonder if there's going to be any sour grapes from listeners who are like want this opportunity so bad and then like you get it and like you're not even sure. But

[41:36] that's how it happens sometimes, right? I think sometimes I see in the indie hacker community maybe like a too much of an obsession with the outcome which is like financial freedom or whatever and less of a less of a focus on just the craft like building for people and enjoying the process and like all that stuff. And I think you're probably more likely to be successful. Maybe it's 51 49, but like I think you're more likely to be successful if you're not doing it necessarily for the money, right? Or necessarily for the like lifestyle quote unquote. um you're doing it for the love of doing it and then uh and for the fun

[42:07] and then eventually like you're probably more likely to to get there and like I don't think the assets any less valuable or interesting as an acquisition opportunity now probably right so even more so and even probably easier to price at this point right now that you've got a couple years of data so I think they're all good options uh from where I'm sitting so congratulations yeah and I just want to like turn it back to you and say thank you to Revenue Cat because uh I really look at what you've built as one of the only reasons why this is even possible from like can I even build something with

[42:37] subscriptions the first time it didn't have subscriptions because it was too hard and like oh a day to implement revocat that's that's super easy and then for to know I was making money to turn down that initial offer because I saw the state of subscription apps report and where I was against the benchmarks and to bet on myself to knowing I was running profitable ads throughout the journey revenue cap was there to like help support me and And like my kids would call me that or tell me I'm glazing right now, but I I've really I mean uh just like sincere thank you because I I've been through this unsuccessfully

[43:15] and I have leaned on the tool set, the community so much as we go throughout this and as I emailed you guys before like helping developers make more money. For me, what that means is I got to take my kids to Disney World. And before I started building, like my wife and I were down to zero. We had an incredibly difficult infertility struggle and we

[43:38] spent everything to get our kids here. And then we're looking at ourselves like, do we sell the house? We're never going to go on a vacation again until we figure out something else because we're like, we got the kids here and we're super grateful, but it might not be exactly what we wanted. And that story has completely changed because of this app and because of what Revenue Cat has helped me with. So, thank you to the

[43:59] entire team. I think we get about 1% of the credit for that. And we take about 1% of the revenue. So, it's an even trade, you know, and I would call that a bargain. What an incredible story. And and and as you shared, like it wasn't a straight path. It wasn't a great rich quick. There were some hard knocks along the way. some really hard decisions, some a lot of stress, but you pushed through and and you came out the other side and have built a really cool business. And so, yeah, as Jacob said, and I'll say it again, you know, congrats. It's fantastic. You thanks so much for listening. If you

[44:30] have a minute, please leave a review in your favorite podcast player. You can also stop by chat.subclub.com to join our private community.

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