76: Christmas Special with Jordan Morgan

0:00[Music] welcome to launched I'm Charlie Chapman and this is the annual Christmas special with the one and only Jordan [Music] [Applause]

0:23Morgan Jordan welcome back to this very uh continually running show that we have here I do one podcast a year and I Make It Count I'm getting close to being in the same category uh I think this is I think our Christmas special from last year was like three episodes ago uh approximately uh so I guess I guess we'll just address that right off the bat here uh We're Not Dead Yet launched uh it's still alive obviously we're always going to do the Christmas special till the day we die Jordan has signed a contract for that marked in blood uh marked in blood uh I actually do I have

1:01nothing to announce but as as they say In The Biz things are in motion uh we're still we're still in the same mode we were before don't expect regular episodes right now but uh I am trying to get some pieces in place so I can maybe get launched back into into some sort of regular Cadence but we're not there yet TBD T exactly uh so yeah so for anybody who's somehow listening to this and doesn't already know what's going on I guess if this show gets going again uh in Earnest maybe they'll be going through the back catalog and be confused when they listen to this this is the

1:40annual Christmas special with with Jordan Morgan uh we started this I think the first year that I started the show which at this point is like 5 years ago which I guess this episode was then four years ago and this is this is our opportunity unlike a normal episode that's about everybody else this is kind of the episode where we get to sit and talk about our feelings as uh Indie app developers in in the App Store world I guess yeah I mean this is year number four we've gradu I mean this Christmas special is graduating high school this year that's crazy graduating well so our

2:16first year was our freshman year yeah freshman year what year did you go to high school I don't know what it's like down in Souther Missouri didn't you graduate high school in fourth grade for I guess third grade kindergarten yeah 2021 that's the one that I have on my website was the first one yeah I guess to to sort of kick off the conversation then there's been some pretty major changes uh in your life definitely in the last year so technically I think you knew that this was happening but you hadn't announced it publicly that you went from a real job as an iOS Developer to joining the dark side that I had

2:51joined last year of uh developer advocacy uh where we sort of fake being iOS developers do you want to tell tell the people uh one what did you do and then how's how's that been going I mean if there's any career ambition I've always had it's to have a fake job um so I'm very hashtag blessed for it yeah no uh let's see so the long story short is uh I've been at my previous job buffer I think nine I was coming up on nine or 10 years I can't even remember at this point but you know you stayed at a company a while um kind of start

3:25wondering what you want to do next uh and I kind of was getting to that point I think a lot of software Engineers go through it where you just kind of get a little jaded I want to say not so much with the the company but just just the The Daily Grind of fixing bugs trying to meet deadlines get projects out you know being the engineer uh capital E and so kind of was was starting to feel the brunt of doing that for so long and when I kind of was uh you know chatting through this with my wife and you know I think even in the in the group chat it's

3:58always met having this podcast cuz like everything that I'm saying I've already said to you but you know it's like you know what's next what do I want to do and and I think I actually talk to to David about the position that you have before you had applied for it like you know months ago and at the time I was like David the growth Advocate at Revenue cat yeah Revenue cat and I was like yeah you know I'm I'm GNA I'm I think I'm all right at buffer right now and you know changes so big and scary when you've been at a company that long

4:26right you kind of you're so comfortable you know how things go um for Better or For Worse what each day is going to look like and so switching that up was like a huge like leap of faith for me especially since you know my wife Janson stays home I have three kids you know so any career change I kind of want to feel good about um but one point my wife made was like well you kind of want to feel good about like being happy about what you do every day and you don't really seem very happy doing what you do every day uh and again I still talk to tons of

4:57people from buffer it's that's not a slight of buffer they you know they treated me very well for a long time it was just more too late you just burn that bridge down uh might well just slander for the rest of the show exactly uh a buffer burnfest the rest of the way no but you know I it was really clear that like I needed to change of pace and I remember I I I reached out to three companies it was when I decided like mentally like yes I'm going to look for something else kind of see how it feels it was uh I I dm' Josh from emerge uh

5:26tools um I talked to browser company got pretty far in the process with them um but then realized I was just going to be jumping straight back into like some pretty hardcore engineering and then I dm' Jake and Jake was hilarious to chat with the CEO of or founder this that whole you know everything I'm talking this is where me being a professional podcaster who does this regularly all the time I bring my expertise to the fold exactly so Jake is the CEO at Super wall where I work I I've known Jake for a long time and when I dm'd him he was just like heck yeah man let's do it uh

6:00you know it's very nonchalant like let's let's let's go before I even knew what I was doing you know um and the thing that sold me was he said like I want you like if you come here I just want you to make Swift jective C which is my personal blog website I just want you to do that for us and I was like that sounds phenomenal um you know I'm almost at a year in I think and January 15th but like the thought of writing for lack of better work content for a company and being paid for it as opposed to like really you know in the trenches with

6:35engineering just sounded like exactly kind of what I needed um at the time coming up for air and I I got to say yeah coming up for air and I got to say like it it does feel fantastic because I'm sure you know um and we can talk about the intricacies of like how we both do things uh in in the same role but it's it's such a different field than engineering because because the way that I explain it is like you have to have been an engineer to kind of do the things that me and you do like it would be hard to jump straight into a

7:07developer relations role in the way that we have them in our companies I'm sure there's a huge span of what those roles look like but for me it's like if I don't know how to program or read docs or write docs for that matter then like I can't really do this so there's this little niche of people that I think are emerging in the industry right now that have been Engineers for a long time but also have those written communication skills and like that's a good mix for a developer for Advocate um and yeah and that's kind of what the thought process behind getting to that point but I I got

7:35to say I I love the job I love the role it's not that it doesn't come without its own set of pressures and stress but they are definitely different like not feeling the weight of a deadline like my I if if I could tangibly measure my stress this past year it just went like it nose dive down you know it's like oh man I hope I can get this article done instead of being like I just shipped a bug that you know screwed up 50,000 users you know worklow you know the the the stresses are different and it's and it's what I need because like as we just kind of it's

8:09it's really surreal that we have these talks every year I mean because we're just getting older and older man I mean there's more gray hair uh every every gray hair and it's just like my kids you know they're getting older and I I care more about spending time with them and you know being a better dad all those things and it really just got to the Tipping Point for me and I think a lot of people hit this in this career where it's like man I'm stressed out a lot and I and I kind of bring it home I'm a little bit more quiet I'm just trying to decompress

8:37and get back into dad mode and to have a job where like you don't feel that anymore um makes a huge difference and I got to say I love the small feel too um I mean at Super wall there's I think eight of us um and for anybody listening uh me and Charlie were joking about this yes we are sworn enemies working at rival huge tech companies um and and our sole mission is to destroy the other one so um as I mentioned Charlie my only reason for doing this is to bring back Intel of course and uh try and try and obliterate Revenue cat once this posts

9:10obviously so you know super wall is a great partner of Revenue cat uh we're happy people to use so there's all these all these mangled tangled webs wee weave I guess I think that's uh I I may have mentioned this last year because I'm assuming we talked about this last year I only listened to like half of the episode cuz I've been busy but uh the one of the weird things about this job for me and I I assume it's somewhat similar for you is like I used to maintain a really strict like curtain between my jobby job and all the Indie and online stuff that I did and all of

9:54that just got completely obliterated uh doing this Dev Advocate thing because part of the reason I was hired and it sounds like part of the reason you were hired is to bring that person into the company like that's literally the point uh so you're supposed to talk about you and be you publicly as an employee of that company and that that has been kind of interesting and it's not it's something I think I would have been uncomfortable with before but I I'm used to it now and it doesn't really make me uncomfortable at all you make a great point because that's one of the things that I like

10:28about the role is like before if I found like an interesting new API because we're just super weird nerds and pour over xcode documentation for fun and entertainment like normal people speak for yourself you know uh like when I find those things like my urge is like maybe to like just tweet it out be like oh has anyone check this out but like I think in like traditional roles or other jobs or like tech companies that are also online you're like you know I don't really want to tweet this right now because like I'm on my quote unquote work hours you know there's all these Optics involved whereas now that's like

11:03it's so fun because that's like my job the more that I be myself and share like even side projects the thing that I'm working on the things that I write about it's truly like a symbiotic relationship where it just helps me um because I enjoy it and it also helps super wall because like you said you kind of personify the company in a way where you can associate yourself freely with the people that you're a developer advocate for and that's why like I feel like this job was really like kind of made for me at this point in my life because I just want to write I want to share stuff uh I

11:36love sharing stuff I always have you know I've been on this podcast for years now saying that and I feel like we both found a job that like pays us to do that um and it's that old adage you know that corny phrase you hear like all the job fairs when you're in high school college it's like find something you love and you never work a day in your life you're like yeah okay whatever you know um but you know you kind of come back around it's like oh shoot like there is there is some truth to that you know um the more you enjoy your job who knew the

12:06better hey little moosey I see him popping up there he's got I was about to say I don't uh we're attempting to do this on video uh so assuming this is on video you will apparently see my dog just pop his head in the frame as he just did to get my attention uh I feel like Paul Hudson right now um you might be able to hear him just going to town on a bone over there too he's been very quiet all day till moment I hit record yeah let him cook uh something that I I think is interesting about what we've both done in the last

12:39you know year and a half with this sort of job switch is I feel like we we sort of personified a thing that the CTO at this company that I first interned with uh they were a like chemical like reselling company for scientists it was not like a tech job at all right um and he didn't they know what to do with interns I was there for like kind of a weird reason uh and every once in a while he would like take me into his office and like give me advice but it was like really generic and I remember him telling me he's like you

13:12should go into chemical engineering he's like because if you can do if you can do chemical engineering and computer science you're worth your weight in gold like you're the most valuable person ever and I was like I have no interest in chemical engineering so that was not something that I pursued but that for whatever reason that stuck with me and I've heard versions of that my whole career which is if you are really into something else outside of whatever it is your main job is most people listening to this probably software development or whatever and you are also into something else then those two combined make for a

13:51very unique set of skills that there's probably not a lot of people who also do% and both of us are weird in that we're nerdy developer types but we also like the sort of content creation side of things we like talking to people and I think we both do this developer Advocate job extremely differently which I think we should talk about here in a second but like in both cases we found a role based on all this extra side work that we've been doing for forever where we could sort of Leverage that to combine the very real skill of like decades or decade plus of software

14:27engineering experience with the thing we're passionate about and then found a job that sort of combined those two yeah but you have to have both exactly it's not like we're just doing the thing that we're passionate about it's like we're bringing along like I I do think there's a lot of people that want to go into like this Dev Advocate thing right away out of out of school and and there's probably places you can do that uh with but I think for both of what we're doing we're the only ones at are company and like you really have to have that full round edness of all that engineering

15:01experience and be passionate about the the actual uh content side of the house if that makes sense yeah I mean because at the end of the day you're you're writing stuff for people like you and me um who were Developers for a long time so like if you don't know how to speak to them relate to them or know what their needs are uh it's hard to do this job um but you are right about like kind of how those things converge together and how it just you know there's that little Spurt of uh of sunshine that starts to peek through when you I get in

15:29that role that feels really right and uh I remember like the first week that I started at Super W it was something with payment links and apple where where they air quote allowed external payment links do you remember that where like there was that crazy scary modal that you had to show like it was like they did but they really yeah yeah uh and I remember Jake was like Hey can you write something about that and it was weird and I remember texting Jan and I was like I can't believe I'm like getting paid to do this right now cuz you know that yeah and I was so used to like you know

16:02grinding it out on code or whatever it was um and I'm like I'm writing a blog post and being paid like a tech salary for it like it feels like cheating you know it's crazy that is how I feel every time I open after effects at work oh my gosh and to to people in the like at Revenue cat you know they're like it's like I'm going above and beyond and to me I'm like anytime I've ever done something something like that regular work it was like me stealing time away like I'd feel guilty and I'm rushing through it and yeah it's it's kind of incredible being able to do a thing that

16:38you actively love doing and we're not even talking about being an indie developer is also part of this job uh it's kind of important that we still understand that World um that's actually something I was going to ask you about too is like cuz again this whole episode's very introspective me and you are both conservative people not politically meaning I just mean like a political podcast let's pivot let's go yeah yeah we're hard pivot welcome to 2024 but like we overthink most things to both of us we did a career change with this right something I've actively thought about a lot both before and since uh and I still think about

17:20frequently is like this like you just said a second ago we have to understand the development World in order to do our jobs well but we're no longer living day-to-day in the engineering World we're not you know submitting PRS and doing code reviews and all that stuff does that worry you ever like are you concerned about like not burning out but like losing touch with the people that we're supposed to be talking to because that's not the world that we live in uh it doesn't for me at all and the reason why is I think I have an even better balance of that now because one and this

17:55is maybe a result of working at such a small empy employee based small company is that I still do engineering stuff uh quite a bit like you know we're making a client app right now and I've done almost all the work on that um and there we added RSS I haven't tweeted about it because I still need to fix some tweaks but it is actually live and prod and like so I got to get my hands dirty with react and nextjs which I'd never done ever to kind of get the RSS feed working so there's these little pockets of engineering that I can go and like seek

18:28out to do so even at my day job when you take the Indie side out of it which we'll get to I still code quite often um and I and I love that and and that's the thing about developer advocacy is I think it just it's so different I think everywhere that's the sense that I'm getting because I'm sure there's roles that at like apple a huge you know established company where you would never do that but I kind of like my my role almost changes every week like some weeks I'm only writing documentation some weeks I'm making YouTube videos some weeks I'll dip in on some

19:01engineering work some weeks I'll just Hammer the support inbox and spend a lot of my time there um so it always kind of varies and then if there's a big release coming out you know I want to get a blog post for it things of that nature uh but no in my case I don't because I can still I have the luxury of still trying to code if I if I want to code um in the role yeah I that last point is something I found immediately too like whenever I switched over I did the thing I try to always do which is be way too extra and

19:32read literally everything there is to read about what is being a developer Advocate and almost immediately I learned it's a meaningless word and everybody does something different and who knows 1,000% I didn't read any of that I was like I'm just going to wing it I I remember when you first told me that you were switching over to this role I was excited because my first thought was like I in the whatever year it had been that I'd been doing it I was like I've never found somebody who actually does is exactly what I do I've met other developer Advocates but it's like the moment I start talking to them

20:04I realize H they're doing pretty much a totally different thing yeah but then you started and then it's like H you're essentially doing it your own totally different thing as well like there's of course overlap for sure um but it still feels like we're we're operating our own just totally different thing it is yeah and that was one thing I was told is Jake said like there's no manager for this like you're just gonna make it up as you go you know and I feel like that's really a great way to describe developer advocacy because you know trying to help out developers with your product or company it just looks so

20:41different all the time I mean sometimes it's maybe I need a new video uh over this certain feature and that's that's why I like kind of going all over the place because like some of the videos I do on our YouTube channel they're a result of me like helping out on support and I'm like all right people are having a a lot of issues with this particular part if I can just do like a three-minute video explaining it then I can just there you go here's a video problem solved and I love that part of it um and speaking of videos I I always joke like with Jake uh and then when I

21:12all uh your CTO at on wwec I I joked about your video production skills too I was like when I started at Super wall I I told Jake right away I'm like listen I'm not going to be able to match Charlie's whizbang cool intros and and top-notch quality so let's just make sure we we're good there and understand that you know I can't do his After Effects mumbo jumbo see that's my that was my worry in the opposite direction I'm like ah Jordan's going to come in here and show everybody what like a good writer actually looks like and we just need I'm not going to

21:44be able to compete yeah we we need to just merge our powers uh because you know writing's always been my strong suit and I enjoy I love writing uh and I'm starting to enjoy video more but like even before this I was not even not even joking this was serious right before we recorded I'm like hey I got this new DJI mic there's knobs on it I don't know what any of this means so like my audio sucks you know so like that that whole world is still really new to me and I and I've picked up a little bit uh over time to try and make

22:13things a little bit better uh but like just that's such a different skill set that you really have to to kind of develop and and I think did you do multimedia stuff in college as well or is this just like something you always enjoyed and just kind of taught yourself along the way I've yeah I've always done it like as a hobby side project I not Consulting but like I would do projects for churches and local ad agencies and stuff so it's been a strength of years for so yeah yeah yeah this is not something I just decided to pick up and figure out it's like a birthday present

22:49I got in college uh was after effects and that was one of the most that's probably still the greatest not birthday Christmas gift I've ever gotten in my life uh it was just like unbelievable to me that I had access to this thing uh that I'd been watching tutorials about even though I didn't have access to it my uh version of After Effects is choosing a default animation and cap cut to show the super wall that's about like as far as my skills go with that stuff uh but it is fun I I really do enjoy it um and YouTube gives you such a dopamine hit like do you I feel so accomplished

23:27anytime I upload a video you know I'm like ah there it is you know you I think that's the developer Advocate version of like shipping a new feature or something it's like when I get a blog post out or a new feature um and that's actually another good thing I actually wanted to bring up with you it's like one thing that was tough for me in the beginning is feeling like you didn't have this like tangible deliverable stuff that you did throughout the week like we'll have the stand up on Monday and we'll all go through what we did and I'm used to being like yes this thing is on track or

23:57these bugs were fix where I research that whereas now your output is is a lot different it's like I made the demo project for this blog post that's going out you know it's really in- depth it's good um you know it's a foundation I can use going forward but that takes that can take like your whole week you know you could be making a demo project all week and if you have things like daily check-ins or something like that you know at first you're like a little self-conscious like all right well I was still working on you know a demo project but it's like a mind

24:28uh set shift that you have to have that takes a little bit um and there was never any external pressure or anything but it in in your own like internalized pressure it's very weird that was the biggest thing I think for me that it took to get getting used to in a Dev a developer Advocate role is like just how your output is not Cod anymore and like to turn that part of your brain off takes it took me months to kind of get that through my head yeah I definitely felt the same because what what I've learned quickly was like one of the things I was better at is these big

25:01hence the name of the show I guess launches like yeah very quickly I was pretty uh like deeply in bed with the product team and the big launches that we do creating content for them and that was like really easy for me uh but I'm not very fast at writing and the sort of more like generic not generic but like Evergreen content that's not related to a specific product feature or something just the weekly blog post kind of thing yeah exactly and we would have these uh you know these strings of time where a bunch of teams were all hitting at the same time and so a bunch of products

25:39were launching and it's like my world would be crazy and I'm like pumping out all these videos and i' feel super productive and then it would be this LOL period while everybody's building actually building things and all of a sudden I would just feel like I'm preparing a lot I'm building a bunch of products uh projects internally I'm sending bug reports like hey this doesn't seem to work right whatever uh I'm meeting with customers uh to learn about problems that they're having whatever but it was like whoa where's all this like output and suddenly I would feel super like uh oh they're going to find out they're finally going

26:17to realize I don't know what I'm doing cast out of the bag um developer Advocate his face exactly and then uh and then you know there'd be a new slew of features that would come and eventually I learned to like be more okay with those lull periods uh because what I would try and do is focus on getting quick wins and but then I wouldn't be as prepared for when the slurry of new stuff came uh because I was just out of the loop on everything and so being in the loop uh whether that's internally within my company's like bigger um and so there's lots of teams there's a lot

26:53of things just happening and it doesn't get pushed to you you have to sort of seek it all out I feel that too even in at our size yeah and being in the loop online which sounds weird I remember whenever I first was in a meeting and one of our other people actually I think it was David their growth Advocate said something about like it's weird but like part of my job is just dming people on Twitter and I would be like uhuh yeah I say that too and now I'm like it legitimately like it's crazy how often you know we'll be like hey does anybody

27:25know anybody at XYZ company in Hong Kong and it's like oh yeah I know like three people over there and it's like that didn't come for free that took a lot of me being aggressively like meeting people talking to people maintaining relationships which to be honest this goes back to the I can't believe I'm getting paid for this that's what I like to do anyway um but it is like a part of the job and sometimes it can be really time consuming but then when it pays off you you were like okay that was worth it even though that was 10 minutes of my time 30 times of the last 2 years or

28:01whatever uh that was all worth it now once you actually you know get the payoff but the payoff is like so down the line that it's hard it's very different than normal software development and and you do quite a few conferences too that's that's something I haven't done in the role yet is like you know we go to deep dish Swift uh the best world renowned conference that there is in the planet uh you know and that's it I I've been there and and that was funny because that my first time like working a booth at a conference like actually being I don't know for lack of a better term yeah you know and

28:33you know people kind of shy they Mosey up there a little bit and you're like hey you know like you want to talk about super wall or you know things of that nature and that was another I can't believe I'm getting paid for this moment too you know like going to a conference that I would pay to just go to on my own um anyways and I don't know I think what we found out is if you're just uh social lunatics who love programming then maybe developer advocacy is a good career choice for you yeah yeah it's a weird I I do think it's a weird

29:06uh it's a weird job and it's it's so specialized uh cuz to do it I mean Maybe I'm Wrong maybe our two like we said our two jobs are unique no i' say that all the time I don't think there's a huge overlap of people that could do it yeah and like I don't think I could transition to being a developer Advocate at Google unless it was about well I couldn't at all cuz it's like iOS but like it's it's like yeah like I have this skill set of like making videos and writing blogs and stuff now but like what really makes I think us to make sense for these roles

29:44is like we're Indie devs who know and implemented subscriptions into our app already and that's a thing that we're interested and passionate about and creating content about anyway MH and it really is it's less about like I don't know I guess if like if if you heard about this and you were like man that sounds like a career opportunity for me it's like what would my advice be to do it it's like well first spend a decade doing the engineering work and then you know what I mean it's like but I do think at like a bigger company where they have big teams there is a lot more

30:17people that are specialized at yeah like apple has someone that just rides docs and just does you know videos just does this where does me and you we're just kind of doing all of those things um bad versions of all the things yeah we're what is it the the term you know master of none but kind of okay at all of it so I mean that's kind of how you have to be with developer advocacy yeah I I I do say a lot like I feel like I get to do a cheating version of like almost every role at the company like that's a good way to put it like I get I'm sure you

30:52get this too I get a lot of DMS from people for customer support things it's like oh I get to like put on my customer support hat and like oh I'm helping you out with this thing but the moment it gets too hard for me or I'm busy and I don't want to do it right now or whatever I can be like yeah sorry man like I'll let me send you over to our actual customer support team and then they deal with it uh same with like customer calls I get to go on customer calls all the time or potential customer calls but then it's like but I'm not

31:18actually in sales so I don't have to like actually do the hard part of that job 100% And like engineering it's like I can like submit a PR here and there but it's like but nobody's expecting me to anytime I do it it's like oh thank you for doing some extra work for us and beond yeah so it's like every I do is like a cheap uh cheating version of all these different hats which we've talked about I think on the show is part of what we liked about Indie development is we like wearing all the hats we like learning about marketing and learning about customer support and learning about all

31:55these things and in the Indie context are fully responsible for it but it's at least smaller in scale yeah and you get to learn so much that you actually want to learn like you're going to learn at a job no matter whether you want to or not no matter the vocation or role that you have um it's just part of working somewhere but like one thing that really appealed to me was super wall is like you know like Jake especially he's he's built an app and like kind of bootstrapped one on his own that did you know like several million in Revenue um and along the way he needed something

32:26like super wall which is uh if I remember correctly kind of how the company started at the time um but like those are the things that I wanted to learn because like I had had apps for years but none of them like made enough money to where like they could just be a job that I had and you know being able to share with them when I started to and to say like hey you know like I kind of hope this is the last job I have to be honest like I want to learn from you and and do great here and I want to learn

32:51how to grow and make enough money someday to be able to just make software on my own um and he was like he yeah man let's do that um and that's that's the really fun thing is like we we see a lot of what works on the App Store and what people do um and you can pick up those things and apply it to your own work and uh try and you know get in growth mode a little bit more and you know when we talk about the Indie stuff I think that's the big biggest them for me this last year too is I kind of thought a lot

33:18less Indie and more of just like how do I make this make money you know like how do I make things grow and become profitable enough for me to take them to that next level and you see it all the time at Revenue cat you see it all the time at Super wall all these companies that are just you know doing insane amounts of money on apps that you would never ever guess um and some that you would some are very obvious but it's it's so interesting to look at that data and you know kind of learn from it and see the trends and and what's working

33:50and what doesn't because it changes all the time so let's actually let's move on to that uh you know we've talked enough about uh being developer Advocates now let's get to what the the people really want to hear about which is the ndfs uh so last year we talked about you had recently I think launched Elite Hoops so it's been a little over a year since that's that's been out how's that going for you first as my job as host here remind the people what Elite Hoops is and then uh and then tell us how it's been going yeah it's uh so what it started at is a way to quickly share

34:26like plays Concepts defense whatever uh for your basketball team so I used uh replay kit to do screen recording with audio on like your iPhone iPad and it works on Mac too um and the idea was like there's this whiteboard just like you would have in real life but if you could record it and send it to your team you could explain things a lot quicker so uh of course I love basketball you know my son's played year round since you know was four you know it's it's like a huge part of our family we love watching basketball every night what's your what's your uh what's your email

34:57address again uh oh this is a good inside joke that numers bring everybody in on so I've had the same email since no joke fourth grade bball the number four not four life the word four life and then like a few numbers at the end that were like my favorite basketball numbers and like I've always had it and I joke with this about this all the time like I filled out mortgage applications with that like big boy jobs like Social Security anytime there's like a it's the worst something where it's like hey what's everybody email and you get you know Charlie M Chapman gmail.com or you get person's

35:33name at me or me or whatever and then and then you always see bball bball for Life uh numbers coming from Jordan I think I had like I was doing a credit check or something you know when when we bought our last car like all right all right Mr Morgan like just need your social all right now what's a good email for you I'm like ball for life have you never like have you created a more more professional sounding one I did I have like uh theore Morgan forf now so like I've been using that more but like I just have like 20 whatever years of like using that email

36:11address um that's amazing you know the shame wears off as the years go on I don't even care anymore I'm just like yep here it is oh man so part of your personal brand yeah wa so we love basketball so it you know the app was natural for me because I love you know being in that area um but it's kind of grown since then so like and it kind of goes back to what I was foreshadowing before about kind of learning from the companies that are doing you know the App Store well and my thing with Elite Hoops is I wasn't going to think of it so much as an indie app

36:41like where I really wanted to get like you know the Press coverage or you know the App Store feature which to be clear I would I would absolutely love those things I still still try for them but I had a huge emphasis on those as growth levers before and I kind of got to the point where I like I'm just going to try and make my own luck with this thing so uh in a blog post I just put up last night actually about like a big feature I just shipped it's this whole practice planner Suite to where like you can create drills you can make practice

37:08plans and then you can run them interactively on your phone kind of like how Instagram stories goes through your stories or you could just print it out yeah and that was the first time where I really like I talked to a bunch of coaches um I know several personally from just you know uh being involved with basketball so long you know my neighbor is a college coach um um I look through a lot of my data I look through a lot of the feedback to kind of arrive at that decision to do that whereas before I just kind of made what sound interesting and fun to me and so I kind

37:37of learned that lesson over the course of so many years and I don't know why it took so long to learn the lesson of build what people actually need and that sounds so incredibly obvious but like when you sit at your computer and you've been at work all day or you've been a dad all day and you have this little nugget of time going through feedback is isn't really fun like you just want to build something that gets that creativity that expression out or that new API that you want to use you know your mind doesn't go there I think there's a lot of there's a lot of advice

38:10online that is people saying build what you love the best thing the best apps are the ones made by people solve own problem that has the passion in it yeah solve your own problem and like I don't think that's wrong there's a lot of great examples of apps because I do think you're generally especially if you don't have a strong sort of product sense which never had to be clear yeah then building something for yourself is way easier you are a product expert in that field you know yourself really well you don't have to figure that out so in a lot of ways it's a lot easier but it's not strategic

38:46in terms of targeting a an audience of any sort of size or potential customer base of any sort of size um and so yeah some of the best apps I I have seen in terms of performance are people whenever I talk to them they kind of sheepishly are like yeah I don't actually even really use it myself like they sort of accidentally ended up into it or they made it for themselves when they were in college but they're way out of that they're not in that stage of life anymore but they're still building excellent software for that group of people um and I think that's just as

39:22valid sometimes it's even beneficial um to be a little bit outside of it cuz you're not building something particular to you you're a lot more open to actually targeting it towards the market yeah no that's that's completely true and it's just like you know at the end of the day people are going to pay for something that really solves their problem and I know everyone's heard that a million times it's on every product podcast it's on every product blog post like what I don't know why it just never went through my head you know and and again I think we're in a very specific niche of people that love making

39:55software on their own to where like your creative energy is kind of Trashed by the time you have time to actually work on this stuff you know so it got to the point where I was like I'm just going to be ruthless about this like if I can't make this make money I'm not going to work on it um and now it's when you look at it as more of a product and less than an India app that's been the shift that I personally needed to kind of grow it and to make it better um and you know I bootstrap all of it and it's an

40:27interesting uh time to be talking about it actually cuz I think I in the group chat the other day I was like hey you know that was my best day on Elite Hoops like 6145 in one day um something like that but since then it's it's kept that pace like within a few hundred every day um and it's been so exciting to see like the momentum actually really start to pick up and one shift that I made is like before if I had any kind of side project income you know it was just that like you know use it for vacation you know just some nice to have stuff you

41:01know it's not that much money but it's it's nice to have that little extra income um that's you don't just dump it into an account for fear of the tax man for years like I did Charlie has $6 trillion do saved up for anyone listening and uh I have been like the I'm too scared to spend any of it but 6 trillion It's all under a mattress uh in the house but what I've done with a lot of the money that I've making with Elite Hoops is I'm pouring it right back into the product so for example I started with $30 of Apple search ads when it

41:30first launched and my my little logic was like if I just get one conversion like baby steps if I can just get one person to convert for $45 then I mean yeah you got to take taxes all that stuff away but like at least I come out on top so like I started there and I've just slowly scaled up as the year's gone on to where now I spend uh $160 in advertising every single day just on autopilot and then I've seen the the revenue go up to like 5 or 600 and so like at the turn of the Year I'll look at it again and be like

42:02all right so should I up this to 2 to 300 and then if the revenue scales with it then I'll just I'll just keep going until it doesn't work but that only works if your your lifetime value per customer that you're acquiring through those is lower than uh or is higher than whatever the cost of that ad was right uh yeah I guess I don't really look at charts very much I look at I look at uh this is this is where I my product knowledge goes down the window I look at Mr and like I love looking at what I make each day um so that's the way I've

42:37looked at it you know as long as I get the conversion a day you know then then I'll the thing the thing is what you don't know is if if you turn those off would your Revenue go down more or less than the amount you're spending for sure and that's where you really have to experiment so I did that and I just kept a simple Excel spreadsheet and I I think I divided up into like four things this was like 4 months ago uh and the the slots were just like organic you know no apple search ads no meta ads nothing just Apple search ads just meta ads just an

43:12Instagram boosted post and I think that's all I tried and organic like you you run it for a week or something like what is that they two weeks for each one so it took like a couple months okay excuse me but they were over different periods of time yeah I didn't run them at the same time so I just did like all organic no advertising for like two weeks then I just did like cuz I don't really have like great tracking in there like I don't even use the Facebook SDK still so it's just like I can just kind of see what that's where the Apple

43:40search ads one is better yes very very much so it's super helpful to kind of look at those things because there you can actually figure out what right cuz ultimately I think that's what you have to do if you want to I mean if your goal is just to grow your audience or your user base then and you don't care if you're making money or losing money then yeah you can just like pour money into all these things but if you want it to be profitable then you kind of need to be able to figure out what is the actual lifetime value I'm getting out of the customers coming from

44:15that ad right yeah and do you can you only really know LTV after like you've been out on the app store for a year and kind of seeing your turn rate and kind of how people are sticking around cuz I only recently hit that like I don't know what was it late October I think is when that one year mark hit for me I mean I'm certainly not an expert at this but I think the way most people look at this is they'll look at the LTV over a period of like 30 days or 90 days um and so really what that tells you is like if you have an annual plan

44:51you're like you said it was like $50 a year or whatever then you get $50 immediately it doesn't matter if they turn after that or not um if you have monthly I think that's where people maybe look at the 90-day more than 30 days but the the reason for that is uh unless you're like you have a bunch of capital because you're like VC funded or something uh you what you really need to know is am I getting the money back that I put into the machine within this set period of time otherwise you can't keep putting money in the machine cuz you run out yeah uh totally before you even get

45:24that back and so I think that's what most people are looking at is 30day or 90 days um and that's why like which is if you're if you're using Apple search ads um I I can only speak for Revenue cat I promise this isn't a shill but like we have a like LTV chart that you can look at and just see what those are oh no i' I've used it uh alah Hoops launched with Revenue cat you know I launched that before I started at Super wall and yeah no I used that chart cuz we talked about this a long time ago I forgot when but like you were showing me

45:55how to use the chart to to kind of at this exact thing you know to figure out LTV um and for a while Apple search ads were just killer for me uh but then I had a competitor come out and I guess just kind of outbid me on all of those and then it didn't work so I've had this journey of like apple search ads were like the money magic machine and then then they weren't and then I kind of figured out meta ads a little bit more and like kind of researched those pretty heavily tried a bunch of different creatives um really thought about like

46:26if I would was just kind of swiping through Instagram or Facebook like what what would speak to me what would make me actually want to install this app and so you know I really kind of honed in on messaging and and little tiny things uh and I think I heard this on the sub Club podcast when someone was on I forget their name uh specializing in meta ads and they were talking about like the audience filters like you can say you want to Target you know this this age range and he basically said something to the effect of like the lower age range Maybe on by default but like those ads

46:58are really cheap to serve up to people on Facebook's or meta network but they don't convert particularly well and I was like man I should look at that because most basketball coaches and there are a ton of like youth trainers that start in like their lower 20s but like teenagers aren't going to pay for elite hoops and so like I remember when I popped it on to to I think 25 plus it had like an immediate effect of like more uh you know just better performance you know more can and this is where I need my tracking better but you know from for my purposes just looking at the

47:30big picture and kind of knowing how things perform like I've been able to get a pretty good idea of where it stands but like you know conversions are better the metrics on Facebook's ad dashboard were a little bit better and it made sense to me it's like oh man maybe I was like serving all these ads to teenagers who who have no you know they're interested in basketball but they're not going to pay $45 for an app um so you learn like little things like that along way that's targeted towards coaches 100% and I'm a big believer in kind of bootstrapping the process yourself because like when you're

48:01spending the money that Apple puts into your account like you feel it differently you know it's not like you're you're playing with your own money so like if it doesn't work like then it doesn't work you know so uh but again that kind of goes back to think of thinking of it as like less an indie app and more of like something that I actually want to grow so um but yeah all of this rambling to say it it it's definitely my most uh financially successful app for sure um especially this last week so that big feature launched last Tuesday a week ago tomorrow and I'm really interested to

48:37see how conversions are starting tomorrow because that's when I popped on a hundred extra dollar a day because before that before that feature launched I was doing $60 a day and then I was like well hey let's just see what happens so uh did a new where did that come from then the 100 like the idea behind it or the number or or or what part of it well well hold on let me re ask that then uh what is the when you said the $100 a day I thought you were meaning that in Revenue you're saying oh in your price okay so the revenue since

49:11you know from about 7 eight days ago it's anywhere from 300 to 600 that it makes a day and I had been spending $60 a day in ads 30 on Apple search ads 30 in meta but when I launched that huge new feature yeah ad spin so 60 on ad spin a day when I launched that big huge feature last Tuesday I did a new ad set and added $100 a day just for that ad set so that puts puts me up to 160 so 130 on meta and 30 on Apple search ads um and you saw a jump in Revenue then after that you know I the jumping

49:51Revenue has been there since before I started that $100 additionally on there and I think where came from basketball season's in full swing so that's definitely the biggest uh that's the biggest Factor so like I'm thinking if I'm if I'm in basketball season and things are working then I'm going to try and double down and see like if this additional $100 really like moves the needle tangibly for me um and yeah and we can do an update a year from now to see how it went I guess next year um yeah yeah it's interesting we we've talked about it some before and certainly lots of people

50:26on the show we've talked about it where it's like there's some apps where you can play the traditional marketing game of you know around iOS releases and go you know all the different people in the tech press and uh but those are like productivity apps or apps that are general public apps that you can sort of Leverage the fact that you're part of the developer Community Apple Enthusiast Community yeah whereas you know an app like Hoops is very much not that so like you're probably unless you got like an apple feature where they they push it to such a wide audience that some percentage of them will be interested

51:07customers for the most part you know a 9 to-5 article is probably not going to do uh a whole lot for you compared to you know something in on Instagram like an influencer in the basketball world or whatever not even basketball world but coaching world and funny mention that because I'm trying influencer marketing next year too that exact idea oh really okay that's something I'm I'm really interested in um not necessarily so much for me because I don't I don't know how much that's going to move the needle on like white noise apps uh but certainly with a lot of people I talk to for my

51:47job uh there's a lot of apps where it it sounds like that is the best way to get to your customers to like find somebody who's A influencer in that Arena who has a big audience um and do some sort of deal with them um whether that's like an influencer campaign where they get a a cut a sale like an affiliate kind of program or just ads um but it's not something I've spent a lot of time personally messing with so I'm it'd be interesting to see how that goes and we'll we'll talk about it for sure because the so I keep saying this big new feature I think I said it earlier in

52:24the show it's it's a practice planner but it can also be used for like individual workouts um and that's what I use it for a lot so me and uh my oldest son vett like we do little dribble drills in the garage in the morning and like we put like his workouts in for each morning in there so like we use it ourselves and I was like man this would be great like that's a great story to tell for some basketball trainer out there you know like hey you know I got it set up with the Le Hoops I start the workout on my phone I can follow along

52:53interactively so I think it could really work but I think that's going to be my biggest expense so I'm going to ease in really slowly because I'm sure they charge you know not a cheap amount for those things um yeah but I love trying those things and I don't know growing a product is something that the process of it is actually really fun for me and I didn't expect that like I love engineering I love design like making the practice planner it turned out really pretty in my opinion like I there are sometimes when I do something I'm like man I really like how this turned

53:24out and there are some things most of the time where I'm like this is good enough like when Elite hoop shipped like it was good enough but like the practice planner I feel is more of like man that feels like a a Porsche like this looks really good and probably because I used so much ux from shortcuts and the photos app so you know but uh I think it's going to it's something that's easy to Market like the story of why you need it and how it can help you is really easy to come up with yeah um but it's weird because like I'm at that point where I'm

53:58really pinching myself cuz like even when I sent you that text like a week ago like man it made like 600 whatever um you know that's new for me like I haven't had a product do that and then each morning I when I keep waking up I'm kind of like all right it's the fun over you know like is this the day where I wake up and there's like no that's why I was interested in where like figuring out where that's coming from cuz it's got to be something like did your is your ASO improved uh uh so that's a good one to check because I changed it up

54:28when I did the release last Tuesday because there was nothing about practice planning in there before because it was like all about sharing your plays now it's like you can share your plays you can run your practices you can save your drills yeah and that's a big one because a lot of coaches they'll look on Tik Tok they'll look on Instagram they all follow their favorite trainers and they're always posting drills that's their main form of content and coaches save them everywhere like on notes clipboards favorites collections on in and so I gave them like one spot to save all of it um and I think one reason why

55:03it's going to you know cu the the trial's one week so I was going to say like maybe since it released last Tuesday that's why things were better but those conversions are coming from before I even shipped that but I think it's a mix of basketball starting and I think the people that are there now like pinch me I'm about to sound like such a product manager but the practice planner is really going to make it here we go we go sticky it's going to make the product a lot more sticky because when you've built up all your practices and you've saved all your drills like you're you're

55:35less likely to churn out of it because you've built up so much of your personal workflow in that um and so yeah I'll text you uh I guess if if trials started if I released this last Tuesday then my trials would start converting Wednesday right I'm really stupid with how all this works um like a one we trial yeah assuming they all have Tri so I'll I'll let you know Wednesday how it goes but like I said it's it kind I said this in the blog post I just put out too like it for the first time in my Indie career it feels like I could

56:07actually grow it into something that I by my own personal metrics have wanted to grow it too um and I just kind of attribute that to just being around long enough and doing the wrong things to meet that goal not the wrong things for everybody like if you just want to have like you said your passion project I've been there then do it but like that's not what been wanting to do lately like I've wanted to make something that could solve a problem and make money I think that's a big part of it though right it's not just you've done the Reps and now you know it's like you started this

56:38with a different goal than spin Stacks or your other projects the goal was not to make this is going to sound bad but it wasn't to make something you're proud of to make a bable product to show other iOS developers look at the craft I've put into this it was to deliver a product that people find valuable enough to pay forh and those are different like you're not making an art piece you're making a business uh a valuable product for people who do not care about iOS or Swift exactly or animations or any of that stuff they're looking for something to make their lives a little better it's

57:16it's so true and I think where we do have a big Advantage especially people like you and me is we've spent so many years trying to make that really nice app that we can put just enough of that into the business oriented you know project and it shows because a lot of the feedback that I get through emails is like this just is nicer than the other apps you know which is great and so like you can kind of it becomes a competitive advantage to where like you learn I think the growth for me is like I know enough design in ux to make it nice and feel great now but like

57:50that can't be the only thing I'm thinking about and that used to be like the only thing I thought about and then you'll end up with a nice looking product that maybe just doesn't solve real problems um and so when you can kind of mash them together it it gets you into this nice flow um and yeah because basketball software has been like such a boring area like that there it's really uninspiring you know so it's like that little animation that takes you two seconds to put in but like you know because you've perfected it or spent too much time or learn the hard lessons before um now that you can carry

58:23it through with your experience and doing it in a way to where it's additive but it's not like your week's Focus um you know that's where it kind of starts to mesh a little bit better yeah and I like I don't want to say that as in the flourishing craftsmanship doesn't have value no obviously you said everyone that does that is a waste of time come on you can't change it now you're so right though it's it's true I think us both doing this Dev Advocate thing not even Dev Advocate thing but working for companies that provide uh tools for developers that are trying to make money we I at least I'm

59:05sure you feel this too am way more exposed to the sort of Indie hacker Community which is different than the iOS Developer Community even though they're both building usually iOS apps but I think it's over-provisioned in the other direction where it's like only value like distill something down purely to just it's like value to the user build that in the most minimal way possible and then ship it and then iterate on that maybe but there's almost like a lack of time spent on quality and a lot of those feel like they become flash in the pan products High revenue for and then you know once the care it

59:45collapses that can happen for sure yeah and so I think obviously it matters there I think the other thing is um you know craftsmanship I think it conveys value uh even if it isn't the value in itself I think this is why you know in the in the 2000s late 2000s everybody's website had you know high resolution stock photography and it you go to a site that has that and it looks nice like this is a professional not a Fly by Night operation that's going to steal my credit card history and then all these stock photo tools like and free ones like un unsplashed or whatever those started coming out and

1:00:29all of a sudden the cost to getting something that has a bunch of uh royalty-free you know high quality photos in it was like almost zero and now every Fly by Night operation can have those and look just as professional and then you saw this total switch into like minimalism or uh do you remember like the Flathead is that what it's called or flat head whatever that the weird shaped people rein a buffer with and I think yeah and like people in the design Community rolled their eyes a lot at it but I think the reason for that is it conveyed value if you don't care about

1:01:09tech and you open a site that has a stock photo of a person at a wooden coffee table talking with a pencil in their hand you're kind of like is this real or is this a scam whereas if you went to one that's all white and it had that generic but like uh clearly it was made by an artist or something because you couldn't just go to unsplashed and get stuff that custom fit your website it was like this little detail that subtly uh conveyed that this is a valuable thing um and then you have like uh stripe whenever they did their landing page with the the animated

1:01:46gradients and it was like you know what that conveyed it conveyed value did it matter no but you went to it and you're like this is not just some Fly by Night operation thing it was also fun and maybe help them attract Engineers or something um so I do think when you open up an app and the welcome screen has some fluid animations and it's clearly not janky immediately that conveys like this is a serious app this isn't just another AI wrapper that somebody made in like two hours uh with some crossplatform tool not that crossplatform tools are bad but like it there was time spent on this and

1:02:28that's what I should expect going through with that app so I do think that there's there's absolutely real value and perceived value in all those craftsmanship things there is I think the best way to put it is like measured craftsmanship is like a competitive Advantage now and I say measured because like you can't go in the direction that I used to go with spin SEC and just make it all about making a pretty app but it's like if you can take a problem and solve it and add your dash of care to it like it really stands out um and anything can change tomorrow but like if

1:03:00you download any of the basketball coaching apps on the app store right now and put them next to Elite Hoops like it's night and day I mean because it's just like they're not you know they're not really cared for at all um and I think that's I'm reaping all those lessons I learned over the years and putting that into like a positive motion now to where it's like I don't lose sight of what's going to make it grow and now that I know just enough how much time and how much effort is just enough to make it look really feel really good and really nice but not overdo it and

1:03:31lose sight of the goal um is that happy middle ground that I had to really find um and it was a struggle and there's a there's a quote that you said last year that really actually stuck with me I still remember it we were talking about how I have this membership card in the settings and like if you're subscribed it'll it's like this it looks like a fake like ID card like renews that you know you know your plan your ID that kind of stuff it like Elite Hoops Coaching Club you know and it just looks like this nice ID card but like I had this little async issue to where like it

1:04:03would flash in few instances like if you open the app up two settings I'd get the response down I'd see that they're Pro the Swift UI you know view would render and be like oh they're on Pro so switch out the view and like before you were mentioning how like if that was spin stack like it' just be a nogo I would spin as much time as it took to solve that problem before I shipped whereas this time I'm just like you know what that's that's I'm going to live with it and I'll fix it later or I won't fix it later but it's not going to move the

1:04:31needle on like you know if someone subscribes or not but it's like something that all definitely notice and so it's like it's about learning those things as an indie developer you know what is truly worth spending your time on and again when when you're in our cohort of Indie devs where you're married and you have kids time is so limited so it's like you have no choice but to be laser focused to actually make it worth your while because you're going to be in a spot where you're tired or exhausted at the end of the night but you still kind of want to get something done or you're in the morning and you're

1:05:00full of that Creative Energy and like maybe all you want to do is work on making something look really cool and splashy but it's like I got to be realistic you know like I got one hour before I clock into my job like what can I do yeah um what's nice enough um and I think that's the biggest lesson that I would kind of give to people in a similar spot um and when I hit that conference circuit like the legend of Charlie Chapman who who's at every single one I'll give a similar talk or something like that but um yeah I mean it's just like you don't learn it unless you go

1:05:32through it and that's how it was for me and some people have gotten that right away and been successful a lot quicker but uh I just like doing things the hard way and taking several years to learn simple things yeah it's interesting like I'm kind of going back and forth on this now as I say it out loud but I do think there's an interesting reality with especially with side projects maybe this applies if you're doing this full-time Indie as well where time isn't isn't finite like it like it is literally but like it feels like especially as you know like you said as parents who are doing this on the side

1:06:12like I have only a sliver of time that I can really spend on this stuff but the reality is the time I spend on this stuff is not you know add up the amount of extra hours I have and put them together it's really like in these big waves of when I'm really excited and passionate about what I'm working on and when I'm not and something I've definitely learned about myself is I can't force it um the way that I used to like you said sometimes you're just tired or you've spent yourself um but what I can do is find find interesting things to like jump start

1:06:54my dtive energy if that makes sense so like you know I I guess I haven't talked about it here cuz I haven't been doing the show frequently enough but I have another app I have a Mac app actually I've been working on called uh screen frames that's the name currently now anyway um I still haven't released it I built it really fast with the idea that I was going to try and release it fast following Yi's like 222 method of like delivering something really really fast and I did the first two twos and then the last part where you actually ship it to the App Store it's not there but it

1:07:25is I did ship it quickly to to people for free um and it it just for context it's like a screenshot for adding like frames Apple device frames around your screenshots uh but it's like a very very Mac appy version of that anyway doing that I was super excited about it and got really into it but the reason that I haven't shipped it is that is not because I didn't follow through it's because it actually got my creative juices going enough goodness to do things that I've been trying to do in Dark noise for forever but like this job for me doesn't sound like it's done it to you as much

1:08:04but every time I switch jobs it's it's usually I have a bunch of Milestones like usually I say um I feel completely worthless for the first 6 months and I have to be okay with feeling worthless because I'll start feeling really bad about myself 6 months is when I start to feel like I'm adding value to the team for the first time a year is when I feel like I'm actually worth maybe what they're paying me uh hopefully by that point um but another one of those Milestones is for the first year that I'm working anywhere uh and I've switched jobs enough times that I can

1:08:35kind of measure this all my side hustles really take a big hit whether that was Motion Graphics back in the day side uh project dark noise whatever um and with this job it's actually taken a longer hit because I also career switched I'm doing something different than I ever did before and I'm in the last three or 4 months feeling like I'm getting that side hustle itch again really um and part of what got that really going for me was doing this totally different project I stopped trying to force myself to to do things and so I do think thinking of time in that way is is

1:09:13useful you you have more time than you're actually going to spend on things almost definitionally uh and at least for me the only way I can sit there and work on side coding stuff while me and my wife watch a TV show after we put the kids down the only way that I ever spend that time doing side hustle stuff is if I get excited about again and sometimes the side project work I need to do isn't fun and I think switching to something else even if it's not the most valuable is sometimes the most valuable thing because it like reignites me working on it oh there's a whole topic there that

1:09:53is so true about and I think this is why we are natural fits for a developer Advocate role like working with new technology or a new thing is so gratifying to me like it just it makes me feel like I just graduated college again and I've had I've been lucky enough to have this happen several times this year so like one was I actually wanted to do like a a side Pro I think Tyler calls it a side side project like a side project for your side project and like my idea that for Hoops was like I wish I could make this online generator that would give you a practice plan like

1:10:26you would say what age you had for your team you would say how much time you had you'd pick some Focus areas and it would spit out a practice plan and like I have not done webdev it's never been my forte like I I've always built my own websites using jeal deployment with netfi so like I am Hands-On like in terms of like making your own website like yes I Pro I coded all of them but like never like or now you asked the uh what's it called to Cod it for you well I was going to say and I use cursor to build that so I

1:10:56ended up building that out and I had so much fun like that might that might have been the most fun I've had like programming in a long time CU like there was this like segment of devel like software engineering that was intimidating to me like web development like I don't know how to like call chat gpt's API I mean I know there's a there's a JavaScript client for it but it's like how do I hide my API key you know like how do I set up the environment variables you know all those things that like I kind of just knew I could learn but didn't want to SP

1:11:25again that limited time on and so like that's where I feel like things like the AI stuff as like a companion have really like yeah like almost uncovered my love for software engineering all over because when I built that I felt so like just gr it was gratifying and when I deployed it and like anyone can go to Elite hoops right now and do it Elite Hoops app you click tools at the top and I was like I can't believe I made that like you know it like does the API call it is it's like the first time you uh build an app and you touch your software

1:11:55exactly all the practices it generates with a unique URL and stores them in nety blobs and you can like share the link and it'll retrieve them and you know all this stuff and uh there's a I've been tweeting about this too there's a NCA scoring app uh that I'm going to end up shipping and that was another thing where I'm like ah this is this just feels so fun and like yeah you know you've got to you got to balance the what you have to do with like what you want to do I feel like otherwise cuz if you always do what you need to do like

1:12:28it's you get in the do drums and that's where things kind of sink and stop so like you're more productive I think with the Indie stuff when you let yourself just kind of get that creative outlet and just work on something that's just fun um because you get it out of your system a little bit you get that boost and then the boring stuff that you kind of have to do you get a little bit more juice to power through it and that's kind of why that find you get momentum like you can carry that momentum into the into the normal app yeah it because like I immediately started on the

1:12:57practice planner when I realized I wanted to do it and it just seemed like this boil the ocean problem so I actually paused it and I made like the free version of the one on the website that I was just talking about and like then I transitioned back into the practice planner and that was a really good exercise for me because one I learned what an MVP of it looks like and I learned that I could just give it away for free and two like I did that creative itch I did a whole new like web technology all that stuff that I've never used like the ser lless functions

1:13:26all those things and then I slid into the practice planner with like a new kind of reinvigorated focus on it and was able to do it and then with like the NCAA app that I'm doing I deployed my own API which I've never done and you know I was joking around wow like I feel like such a programmer now like you know I I have my own API you're doing devops yeah devops you know after being in the industry for whatever 15 16 years I finally feel like a programmer now but like that was so fun like cuz I remember like I was asking everybody like hey

1:13:59like what should I use like you know how much do you think this stuff costs and you know do I use digital ocean AWS which by the way everyone said don't use AWS every single person so um you know I chatted with a few more of my buddies to like kind of figure out what to do and ended up using this service called render where you could use it like I use nly my website so you point it to get a re a repository and anytime you push to main it deploys your your API and so oh interesting yeah so like stuff like that like you got to have fun doing this

1:14:30stuff um and one point I was making I don't know if I tied it back is like that's why I think developer advocacy has been so much fun and will be so much fun is you kind of can make it your job to do those things you know like uh if I'm not feeling another iOS article this week it's like man I'll just learn something new about flutter that I don't know and then I can turn that into an article like even if it's something basic like how do I do subscriptions in flutter like that's still a valuable piece of content in my role that I could

1:14:58provide um and you got to switch it up keep your brain working and and that's the stuff that's always been fun about software engineering oh yeah um so we're like getting close on time but it it wouldn't be an episode or Christmas special with Jordan if we didn't talk about the best-in-class book series uh obviously you've been done with it you were done with it uh last year yep but have you made updates like what's what's the latest on on the book series and explain again what it is I can pull up the hashtag numbers too yeah so the best-in-class book series uh was a fantastic way to drive myself to burnout

1:15:34and Desperation by writing a book for two and a half years is what it ended up being um no it was so the the the elevator pitch was I had an app called spin stack years ago that I had sold to a company to help you know pay we were building a house during covid you know cost shot up um so that's the whole thing it's in it's in the back catalog of our Christmas specials I'm sure if you want the full story on that um but I always wanted to write a book series and so I split it up into five books because one book would be much more sane and

1:16:06reasonable um and I released updates every two weeks on the books I think uh it was apis design accessibility user experience and just kind of like a I don't know where this goes so it goes in this book and so yeah it it took two and a half years to write and my goal for that going forward is now I'm in a healthier place where I have been to where I've been had to grind on it all the time and what I want to do with it going forward is one hash major update when a new iOS version comes out and one minor update throughout the year and so

1:16:36over the past year I've done the one minor update and I'm starting work on the iOS uh iOS 18 update in January and it's uh it's fun because like when I leave it alone I'm happy to come back to it and I found a really good natural flow for it now that it's been out like and done for over a year I found that like a minor and a major is more than enough like no one has ever not once knock on one being like hey I wish you would update this more like that's great and it gives you a deadline which is probably important to keeping up with it

1:17:11exactly um but as far as sales it doesn't sell hardly I mean if I had a graph like chart that I could make real quick like it would go down year-over-year um I think in 2024 it's May let me get my good old Excel spreadsheet yeah it's it's made $4,000 so that's like by far the lowest that it's ever made um so like a few hundred bucks but I mean it's still making enough money to be worth updating it and it's like kind of like one of my babies you know it's like I can't believe that I wrote like cuz like when I select all of it in like the word processing tool

1:17:45I'm like wow I wrote like 1,200 pages over this stuff um and again go back to the previous episodes it was more than worth my time I mean I think lifetime it's made like like $60,000 so like it was more than I ever could have dreamed of making but it's one of the things now where it's like I know where it fits into my life and I come to it a few times a year and that's I've put in enough work with it to where that's it's it's in a position to be able to do that as as your friend I'm just so glad that it's uh out of your life now oh

1:18:24dude yeah especially towards the end it was just uh it was really hard it was definitely I mean there's a cliche about the you know the pained artist trying to finish a book or an author trying to finish the book and it was like man this is real like it's crazy that was just so much work I'm glad that I did it I don't see myself ever doing anything like that again um but it is crazy to think back like I am really proud of it now that it's done like wow I wrote like on every facet of iOS that I kind of know but the

1:18:56the the hilarious part about all this is like even coming to it a few times a year if I would just spend like a day to make the release process easier because it takes forever it's really hard to release oh that's right yeah I would probably like update it every other month with stuff like because I have things all the time that I add in there I'm like oh this is cool uh I didn't know about this like in iOS 18.2 for example there's a new initializer on image to where you can give it a UT type and like a file UR URL and it'll just

1:19:26make the image for you from that and I'm like that's fun that's interesting like I just kind of happen to find that and that's the stuff that I love putting in the book but when it takes forever to release it and like update the covers and get it all uploaded it's just like it's such a slog that like I have to like wake up that morning and be like all right like I'm going to get this out now so one of these days maybe next when we chat next year if I just make it easy to release like it would have a ton of updates throughout the year but uh since

1:19:57that's not the reality though is it's probably better from a marketing perspective to have the twice a year hits yeah for sure so yeah it's to the point where like I wake up and like I'm pleasantly surprised if it sold a copy I'm like oh cool someone bought it you know it happens like three or four times a month probably I think is what it averages out to um but before it was I mean that was another fun memory like I I will never forget like when I first like tweeted like hey this is ready and just seeing like the at the time I used gumroad I was like oh my gosh like I had

1:20:30never personally been through anything like that of making all that money in one day you know um I still I still remember uh being in the Drive-Thru at Starbucks in like somewhere along i44 uh and finally getting to catch up on my phone because it was that day and you were texting us updates and I'm like scrolling through our text chat and I'm like oh my gosh like Jordan's doing awesome yeah that was a really cool day it it was and like I'm so sentimental I I saved everything in day one like you know every kid's first day like the other day Remy my middle child has his

1:21:10first basketball practice like he decided you want to play basketball now like I put everything in there and uh it has this handy widget like you know in your Journal X years ago and anytime I see the day that like I shipped it and released it I was I always read it I always open it CU it's fun to go back in that head space cuz you know when you have it when you go with something like spin stack that's made like I think at its very best it made like 15,000 in a year to making a lot more than that like it kind of you're just like wow it is

1:21:39possible to like do this somehow you know some somewhere it just kind of all works but uh yep that's that's where it's at it's and I I imagine the update's going to be the same every time we do our famed Christmas special every year is where it's like yep I do the minor in the major every year um and for this point it's kind of For the Love of the Game um but luckily I love the game so it'll it'll keep getting updated there you go that's awesome all right well uh I think we're reaching reaching the end here um launch will continue to live maybe going forward it will just be

1:22:14this once a year uh but I think I think I hope uh there will be much more launched uh in 2025 than there was in 202 man it's a great show if you actually listen to this uh and and also feel that way let me know uh I will use every want of your uh encouraging tweets tootes SKS whatever it is that we're doing now on the social networks uh as a point of encouragement to tr to try and fuel me to get get this thing back off the ground again and if not you know don't say anything I guess so speaking of all of the social

1:22:52networks we didn't even talk about I was G to say we'll save it for next year yeah uh but speaking of all that where can people find you and all of the many things that you do on the internet you know at this point I'm just like telling them to go to my website so Swift Objective C it's Swift and Objective C cram together slout because there I list all the 59 social networks that we have to be a part of now so they're all there whatever one we're going to join tomorrow exactly yeah whatever new hotness there is uh we we'll be there but yeah my website's the best place to

1:23:29just find anything I'm up to awesome and uh if you want to keep up with the latest goings on on launched it is also on all of the different places launched fm.com is the website where everything lives uh we are on Blue Sky we're on Twitter we're on Macedon we're on threads uh I'm not on LinkedIn yet but you know if you want me to be on LinkedIn you going to share what you learned about uh B2B sales from your life experiences if you're not on Yeah Yeah from the exactly exactly you know what if enough people want me to be I'll I'll join all right that's the end of

1:24:07the show music's playing I'm going to hit stop on the recording and hopefully this thing actually recorded