2 Designers Built This iOS App That Brings In $160K+ a Year ✦ Ryan & Sarah

0:01It's called cat on chair. The app actually start with this clay charm I made. It just crossed 240k first time downloads in terms of sales. We made over 160k. As a a graphic designer, I have to change my style quite often. But doing something for myself, I can draw whatever I want loyal to my aesthetic. is from building the product people love and people enjoy using and they want to share it. If we don't have a good

0:34product, we won't get the grocery. [music]

0:42Hi Ryan and Sarah, could you briefly introduce yourself and tell us what kind of app you are currently building right now? Hi, I'm Rya. Hi, I'm Sarah. We built a pomodoro timer app called kon chair together. I'm the kind of the developer product manager of this app and Sarah is the illustrator for for this app. Hi, I'm Sarah. So I mainly work on the illustration and animation side of the

1:11app cat on chair. Both of you are the owning founder and employee behind the cat on chairs. So how do you uh divide the works across like product engineering, illustration, animation, marketing and design and also customer support? So yeah, I'm mainly focused on the UX UI design set of the app and the development and kind of like the product strategy. Although we we both can work on that together as well. um we both have our input on this part and I will carry on the customer support side of thing for emails some user feedbacks and also currently I'm working on like the UGC marketings so I mainly work on the visual side and

1:55I also do photo shooting and video shooting and video editing and also have a some social media accounts. Thanks for sharing this background. I really like the app. So that is the reason I want to like interview with both of you and learn more about the behind the scenes story. How long have you been building this app and could you give us overview of the latest number like the total download, total paying customer and the most recent monthly

2:23revenue so far? Um so our app has been released for a little bit over a year. We released around last year September and now it just crossed 240k first time downloads for the past year and in terms of sales we made over 160k USD. You can tell from the revenue we have some big spikes for the past half year little bit over half year. Yeah, we can talk a little bit more in detail later on what happens during those spikes, but that's kind

2:59what how our apps are doing right now. Thanks for sharing this number. Let's go back to the beginning of how you guys building this app. Where did the original idea came from? Oh, uh, let me grab the Yeah. So, the app actually start with this clay charm I made. Guy really likes the charm. So he give it a name. It's called cat on chair. So that's how we start

3:27with the name and then we built the app. Uh I really like the name and I need to use it for something. I want to be something for the name itself. Um, so we were looking things around and I uh heard people are talking on Twitter and they were using uh I think back then it was cloud sonet 4 or 4.5 um building i apps and I always wanted to build i apps so I just going to give it a try just land on building a pomodoro because the concept of uh the cat being on chair while you are working and like just the cat being

4:08there with you really fits the name and it fits the concept overall. So that's how we landed on the um idea. I also wanted to start drawing something I really enjoy illustrating for. So uh drawing cats and furniturees is something I really like. So that's how we started. I also have a cat and I can tell you have to really love cat and you do have a cat. So you can draw something like that because it's not something um that AI can do as well to feature this kind of vivid hat character. I wonder because the focus app market already be very competitive. So what drew both of you

4:48that there was still a room for another focus app or you just feel like we want to do it, we just do it. I think for us the biggest reason is just we really want to do it. um like we we both love cats and per illustration are all about cats. I know there's big market for cat lovers and even though the Pomodoro app market itself is kind of crowded but I think we can uh stand out just by uh putting more effort into the design and into the illustrations,

5:21animations. Um so we kind of just went for it. I think I didn't think too much about how we can make a better focus app. We were more interested in making um something people can personally connected to or feel comfort from it. That's why I I also add the gift and you can switch around furnitureures when you spend time with it. It can slowly grows

5:52into something that's more personal. Let's deep into how Ryan is building this iOS app with almost no coding background. Basically v coding everything at the very beginnings. Which AI tool were you using for web code this entire app? And did you use Figma in the beginning to design the initial UI MVP flow and the design system? So I tried pretty much all the AI tools out there. Um I started with cursor um

6:21because that's what I'm familiar with. Uh like it's very close to VS code and just with some AI on top of it. And then I move to cloud codeex um anti-gravity as well. And right now my main stock uh is just codeex and cloud code. I use both so I can sort of get a different perspective from the eye. As for Figma, we did have a uh like I don't know how should call this like um wireframe UI mockupish thing. I can share it. Um it's really messy like I mainly just use it to kind of show showcase what the layout might be looks like. This is the

7:09very early version of it, but it helped a little bit in terms of help me thinking, but it did not help in terms of development because back then AI was still pretty bad at translating Figma design into code. Um, especially on our side and the design just didn't really do much. I spend more time talking with AI and trying to change the layout to be exactly what I want and then like draw everything on Figma and yeah after a while I just never touched Figma for UI again. Now my Figma is just a tool for me to like uh doing some crop uh for the different furnitureures. So uh like for

7:58for different icons even with this I can still use AI for a lot of the the cropping but yeah I'm using much much less Figma right now. Did Figma launch any MCP at that time or you just send a screenshot to cursor but it didn't really works really well? Yeah I tried both ways. I tried the MCP I tried the official MCP and a third

8:24party one. I tried to paste screenshots. None of them really worked um for me. I tried it like last year. So back then AI probably not that smart. Especially they are not really good at UI for uh OS app with Swift UI or just UI K in general. Now it might be better but now I'm just too tired to do any actual UI design in Figma. for many features we have now. I can just have a rough idea in mind how I want the UI looks like, how I want the introduction to be and just tell AI this what I want and you can search for some

9:04inspiration online but eventually I still need to make a lot of manual changes after the first version is done. So yeah, I spend definitely spend a lot of time on tweaking the the UI to be exact what I want. I wonder what was the biggest unexpected technical challenge you had while building this app. For us the biggest one I would say is the eye closing slash like data persistence. So the problem was around like the eye closing just didn't work for the first version. This should be pretty common features for iOS app. It should be well supported by OS, but AI just didn't really do what I told it to

9:45do for the first version and I was too lazy to double check to test it out. So, we released the first iCloud sync version and it did not work at all. Then after people like sending us all the bug report. So I just kind of have to went back to the code and doing a lot of research myself figuring out what is the right API framework to use for my use case and then I totally you use this to do it. Even with that the first revised version did not work either. Uh we spent probably like two weeks on that and it still has problem with data not being

10:24synced properly or sometimes people losing data. Although losing data part is kind of like a separate issue. It's more on the like swift data back end sourcing. But still in general we probably spend more than a month just trying to get the eye syncing to work properly. Um right now it's working fine. We rarely get reports that but still like iCloud syncing for us is not a super reliable um because it depends on like users internet it can be slow nonresponsive but we are too limited on our resource to build like a different back end with account system or not so that's just how it goes. I think I was

11:06one of the user who report the issue [snorts] on Red. You mentioned you didn't have any background in coding. So how did you figure out the back end stuff? Yeah. So I didn't really have much coding background but I was pretty familiar with HTML sets. So I kind of know how people solve coding problem is just Google it and I go on with stock overflow and see other people's answers to the similar issues. That's pretty much what I did. I had a developer friend who's pretty uh good at iOS coding. So they told me similar things with like what framework I should use for iCloud. So that helped as well. But

11:46in in general even with the right framework to use it still take a long time to for AI to build a usable thing and yeah right now it will be a lot easier because AI is much smarter at Swift. Um but back then it was a pain. One of the feature I really like is this like realistic physics interaction for collecting these different objects. And I wonder how did you come up with the idea first and then build with your AI

12:14agent. This is a physics effect we made for the gift. It's just meant to be a bit more playful. People can play around with this and they can drag it, throw it. We kind of get this idea from like a old toys we used to play with when we were young. when you rotate the toy. And that's where the idea came from. But it took me a while to build it. At the beginning, I just described to AI the sort of physics I want to do and have it to build it. It did not work. AI cannot figure out the actual physics. This simulation just seems so off. It's not

12:54natural at all. Then I have to Google it. I thought this should be pretty simple like games. A lot of games has similar physics engine built into it. So maybe iOS has some similar stuff as well. It turns out it does. It's called like spread kit or something like that. So I just told AI now use spread kit to build this thing where the gifts will drop from top and people can drag a gift through it. And after that it's much smoother but it still takes me a long time to get a performance right. Um because each item is a PNG and it had to render with GPU or something. So in the

13:35beginning, the performance was not very good. It often lags, especially when people launch the app with a lot of gifts. It takes a long time for everything to load. Uh so yeah, it took me a lot of back and forth to get a performance right, but now it's working pretty good. You can just play around

13:53with it. How many items you have so far here? Yeah, I have like 50 gifts. Not a lot. A lot of our users like they don't sell the gifts at all. They like to see everything power up on the screen. Some people have the whole screen filled with gifts like over two 300 gifts. Cool. For me, like after I accumulate multiple, I have to sell because I need

14:15to buy the lamp shirts. Yeah. Yeah. Like that's part of experience we want to improve on is some people really enjoy just collecting. Um but the kind of mechanics of the app sort of requires you to sell the gifts to be able to buy new stuff. Uh so there's bit of conflict between people who just want to collect versus people who want to buy more stuff. So we are thinking about how do

14:42we sort of satisfy both group of people. They can both collecting but still like being able to get new new things. Is there any kind of like partial sale feature you are thinking? So I can just sell half of my for the sake of collecting the new lamp or chairs, but I can still play around with the items. We are thinking to make a new room for just collecting gifts and display them, but also you can display some chairs and furniturees in the room and also some gifts you earn. And cuz I made some plants gifts in the gift set. So I want to maybe plan put some plants near the

15:21window and you can pick which plants you want to put. Yes. Fun. [sighs] Yeah, I love that one. When is this new feature will come out? Not sure yet. I don't know in another month or two pro probably. Yeah. And we are still thinking about the layout of the new room like how people should

15:42decorate. It's going to take a while. Okay, I'm looking forward to that collection room. I would say anything unexpected happened when you were designing for iOS dynamics island. Um, yeah, I think a lot of challenges are around like the technical side of things in the first version like I want to do show the lab activity on the dynamic island, but it takes AI a long time to figure out how to show the timer on there. It seems like a really simple feature. I think many apps has that feature as well. But somehow back then actually around June last year it just did not work well with AI like it has

16:22really tough time to figure that out. But uh with some googling it work out in the end. Uh after that I think more issues happening around the kind of the performance slash like render images on dynamic island it iOS has really strict or very limited memory space for those widgets. So we have to use much smaller assets uh like resolution size and yeah eventually it worked out but we still had some problem with like older devices running our 17 or smaller devices that limit is much smaller so we have to take out some assets uh from the widgets but now everything's okay. We really wanted to add animation there. But because our

17:06animation are like frame based. It's all rasterized. It's impossible to do in the dynamic island or live activity widget. But we figure out how to show the animation on home screen with like home widgets. So that worked pretty well. Yeah, I do use that right now. We briefly touched this one a little bit like how do you gather all the customer and user feedback? We have different

17:30channels for collecting user feedback. Um I think at the beginning we are mostly relying on uh renotes people making comments on our posts, sending DMs. Uh we have group chats as well. A lot of people mention stuff on there. So that helped a lot during the sort of beta testing or initial phase. Uh after the launch after a while we will use the

17:55user droids for collecting feedback. people can just send in their requests. That will work really well. It help us track what people want and they can also up up vote other people's requests. We also get feedbacks from emails as well. We have a many channels but in terms of like um working through them, figuring out what to build next, it's all kind just happening in our mind. We can't just look over everything and think about okay maybe we should build it first or maybe this is emergency we have to fix it now we don't really have another like ticket trucking tool for those things you user droid sort of act

18:39as a ticket trucking tool in a way uh but we certainly don't put everything on there so still a lot of thinking just happening in our mind so I got a lot of DMs and uh comments and my red notes account. So I mainly most of time when I receive some problems I just send it to Ryan and Ry will fix it cuz I cannot fix it

19:03sometimes. Yeah. So I I can answer a lot of questions about the updates or some features that we just uh released. Yeah. And Ryan fix the problem. [snorts] Yeah. Wow. So it's more about AI fixing it. Right now AI is getting much smarter. So usually what happens when there's a problem uh Sarah send me the the people's comments and I copy the comments send it to AI and AI fix it. Uh before I have to provide a little bit more context around the problem but now AI is getting much smarter. I can just copy paste. When Sara send you a bunch of user problem, does Sara grouping

19:47different user feedback into different category or just like sending a bunch of problem and you just send it to cloud or cursor and they just fix it? Yeah. Well, it kind of depends on whether it's a bug or it's a request. If it's a bug, I will just send to AI. AI can fix it. Um, many of the bugs are relatively small besides like the iCloud stuff. Um so usually AI can just fix on

20:11the go maybe in like half hour and over. Uh for some bigger bugs I have to work with AI figuring out what is the problem like like what might be a right solution for this and I need to do a lot of testing as well. Uh for feature request a lot of comments or DMs on red note are kind of similar to what we have in user droid already. in that way I I can just not ignore it but just let it go because we have a sense to track user droid uh but if it's something small or if it's something new I will usually just do it

20:47with a on the spot AI usually is pretty smart at this as well that's usually on the small feature like for a lot of bigger features right now our most requests are public focus together room uh so they don't have to invite their friend they can just join kind like a public lobby for those bigger feature requests we had to really think through the user flow like uh especially on the back end like how do we make a room be public although AI is doing a lot of work but I'm just there to make sure the logic or the user flow sounds about right um but I usually takes a long time

21:27on the planning side and the AI builds pretty fast but the testing side takes even more time. We just have to make sure everything's right. But even with a lot of testing, bugs still exist. That's kind of just how development goes. Uh so it's always release it, fixing bug, and release again, fixing more bugs. If you own an app, there's endless bugs you have to fix in the daily life. For the larger feature, you still need to mapping out user flow. So did you go back to Figma or Fion and mapping out the flow or you just verbally describe the user flow uh with AI agents and the

22:06other part I'm curious about once AI implements something you just try on your local and keep testing until it feel like ready to go. I think for bigger features well I certainly don't use Figma anymore. Um but I do uh sort of plan things ahead in my head how the UI should looks like how uh the user flow should be like for example for the upcoming public room and kind of think okay there should be a list of the rooms and what information we should show on the list for each room that sort of thing right now a lot of times I do this planning with AI Um

22:49there is a skill made by Matt PCO. He's a really senior developer really bullish on the AI stuff. So that skill was mainly for me to think through a problem with AI and AI will ask me questions grow me on the user flow on the architecture of the code what not that help a lot in terms of thinking through the problem and I I will give my feedback although a lot of times I'm kind just kind of being lazy take whatever AI just works fine most of the time but for certain things I have to provide my feedback as well or thinking through on my own like take the public

23:28room as an example. For me, I think it makes sense for the public room to have a name rather than just showing whole bunch of the attribution or details about room. But that will go into the question or the problem with moderations because you don't want to have people abuse the room name like saying something bad and that's always a tough thing to do. In the beginning when I talking with AI, we were thinking about different way to moderate this. Uh but later on I realized we have names for chairs, names for background, names for cats and all those things are already defined in the app. We do have a custom

24:08name for cats, custom name for custom name for backgrounds, but that's much smaller things to moderate. And we can just like combine the names of the furniture background people use for that room that that's pretty uh distinguishable between rooms and we can get around with the moderation issue mostly. Um so yeah a lot of things I so talking with AI do help me think through the problem as well for the testing right now uh we still do a lot of manual testing like I just play with a feature on my phone we have different phones so we can try different sizes but I'm testing out how to automated those

24:53process because Apple has a framework for automated UI testing I just had to ask AI to build the test case and build the the flow. So it works for some features. For some features, AI are able to build a test case, run it, figure out what's the problem and fix it. But for certain features like focus with friends

25:18requires me to do the manual testing. That's not something uh AI can do right now. But we we will also look into like hiring a virtual assistant to do the testing. But then I was kind of lazy with managing people. The current setup is definitely not great by any means. But yeah, it works fine. It seems like a lot of planning or thinking in your head and no line, no Figma just talking to the AI to figure out this stuff. What are the common screen side you need to focus on because

25:50iOS have so many different screen? Right now I think 70 60 70% of users are using iPhone. So that's our main target for sure. Uh and just to simplify things, I usually just make sure the everything looks good on iPhone. And we can't sort of just ignore the really small size iPhone like really old ones. I do have a smaller like iPhone 11. I was just kind of quickly to check on the UI, make sure it looks fine. But we definitely want to make sure that iPhone

26:24looks good first and we move on to iPad. for iPad. It's right now everything works, but it's definitely not like the most optimized in terms of the layout. A lot of time it's just a scaled up version of iPhone or it's just uh the same iPhone layout. I just haven't got the chance to really think uh through how we might take advantage of the bigger screen which uh we will do eventually when I work on the Mac version. It's coming as well. But by then iPad mic will need a a different layout for thumb screen so it can show

27:05more focus sessions in one screen. That's that's for saying yes designing for like different screen size always be the the most biggest challenge. Uh let's switch gear to like Sara side because I really like the illustration animations. I'm curious about like what tool do I use to create all these illustration animations? Um, I use Procreate and Procreate Dreams. I use Procreate for mainly the illustrations and Procreate Dreams for the animation and I started using these two apps since they released. So, it's been a long time. I'm kind of familiar with it and I have a lot of brush. Um, so it can create many textures. That's

27:45mainly the two tools I use. [snorts] It's pretty simple. Could you briefly walk us through about your drawing process? Yeah. So, yeah, like Ryan, most of the brainstorming part just happened in my head. Yeah. Sometimes I took pictures of chairs or furniturees I just saw on the street or when I watch YouTube. I love to watch room makeover videos. So if I saw some furniture really interesting, so I I will uh write it down or take a screenshot. When I want to draw something today, I kind of can flip through them. When I start a animation, I I can also maybe um see some cat videos on social media

28:37to make sure I understand the movement of a real cat so I can mimic them. And yeah, so then when I start in the animation, I usually draw the first and last uh scene and I go back to add the uh scene frames in between. And to make sure the the flow is uh fluent, I add a little bit here for like animations or illustrations. Uh she will create like a draft for just like with a line work for it first. Then we can test it out in the app and see how it works, how that works between different scene and on different furnitureures uh what

29:20not. So it will be easier to change later. We try to work closely so we don't waste time on creating something we don't want. Yeah. I have a grid for the furniture. So I I have to make sure every cat can sit properly on the chair and the chair won't be too big or too small. And the lamp also the um side [clears throat] table can stay where I want them to

29:47stay. So I have a grid for that. It seems that you are inspired by all these kind of different object in your life. You find something interesting and you might just come back and draw. How do you come up with what to draw for the seasonal item stuff? The reason why we want something like seasonal stuff keep because we want people to feel um the world in the app is actually changing and it's like a real in the real time changing in the real time. I would say

30:16people would kind of more connect to it. And uh most the seasonal stuff just uh come up very naturally in my head. Like for the uh spring, we have a uh greenish and outside outdoor scene for spring. And if for the autumn it it will have a um like orang-ish like with some fallen leaves.

30:46Yeah, it just very natural. One of the background I really like remind me of like Seattle and Vancouver raining season [laughter] in the raining city. I think lots of like inspirations came from my daily life from from where I live and also something I really enjoy illustrating. So I think it's finding something that you are really enjoyed. It's also a way

31:10to keep inspiring. Yeah, for sure. Has any of Daisara's illustration or animation ever inspire and eventually become a new product feature request? Yeah, there are a few uh like a smaller one would be sometimes she would draw different colors for a chair and she couldn't decide which colors to use and we end up just make a new feature where you can switch different chairs or different colors of a chair. We used to only have this feature for cats and you can switch different codes but now for certain chairs you can switch colors as well. Uh for some bigger features it might be like we had this gift collection system

31:55and we have different gift sites and when we were working on the uh timeline feature where people can see all their past focus sessions um Zaf think it's it will be really nice to add stickers feature on here cuz I I love journaling so a lot of times I'm just like doing plush in my uh journaling books. So, I think if I make my gift set into like a virtual sticker, it will be super cute. So, I'm just ask Ryan to do it for me cuz I I really want

32:32use this feature. Let's talk a little bit about the pricings. So, how did you like come up with the idea of how much we should charge? We just did some research on the market and see what other similar apps has charged. We sort of aim on the higher side of things because there are always apps charge less. Um but yeah, that's pretty much how we came up with pricing. We didn't do any special tricks or or any testing on this. We just went the easy way. Although it would be nice if we did some like different price for different region and AB testing out in the beginning but right now we can just

33:18trust our gut. Although we do have different pricing based on regions based on like purchasing power uh or not but we can just went with our gut think okay for this region based on their purchase power and this might be working but we did not do any scientific testing for that. To keep it simple, what does the current revenue break look like across different segment lifetime purchase subscriptions or any shorter conscription and also buying these

33:48objects? I think right now maybe 50% of revenue came from lifetime and probably 40 to 45 came from annual maybe 40 and we have a little bit uh quarterly pricing which we launched couple months ago. Then this was based on kind of like a users feedback because a lot of our user only use our app for a like big exam or big test. So they might only need it for a couple months. Uh so it makes sense to

34:22have a quarterly pricing. And uh for the actual furniture cat you can buy I I don't really have a like number in my head but it's not a lot. Sometimes we might get one user to buy everything. At the beginning, you share the current total revenue and also a few huge growth in the past years. I'm curious about what did the first three months look like after you launched the app such as download like paying customer and revenue stuff. I would say for the first two weeks it went pretty well and that was because we released a kind like a preview teaser video on Red Note before

35:02the release that uh went a little bit viral or we have like 1k likes. Um so that helped it was 10k. Oh 10k was 10k [laughter] like for first video. Yeah. Okay. No right 10k likes. Yeah. So it was viral that helped us to get a lot of beta testers and the initial search or initial like group of people who use the app. So maybe we got maybe 1k 2k users in the first few weeks. Um and after that this come down a lot more. So maybe for each month we only got 100 new users something like that for the next couple months and the first breakout moment was

35:49around December last year. We made some new posts on Reno and two posts went viral. Uh both got around 10K likes just compound from there. What triggered the the second and third spark? At the beginning, I know you only have Red Note, but right now you expand to different marketing channels. What kind of marketing channel do you have?

36:11Instagram and Tik Tok and threads. Yeah. And and Reynote. Oh yeah. And Reynote. Yeah. I mentioned earlier our initial birth are all from Reynote. And for the second wave, I think somehow Instagram influencers maybe they saw like our renot. I don't know how it happened, but they just knew about our app and they

36:35shared us on Instagram. It's all free. It's all organic. We didn't really ask them to do it, but two posts went really viral like one post got 2 millions views and after that someone threats sharing our app again and that two people actually. So, two of those posts went viral again. Uh so combine everything together that's our second spike around March this year that just uh sort of boost us to around um I would say 7 800 daily downloads which is pretty awesome ever since organic. After that we tried more influencer marketing. We reached out a lot more influencers to make paid collab. Maybe only few of them went

37:25pretty good, but most of them are kind of we only got like a few thousand views. Some are like 10k, 20k, not a lot, but I guess that sort of helped to at least maintain the relevancy and we we had like Apple feature around July Augustish. I was on starter story podcast as well. So I guess after that a lot of people sharing our apps more. Um now we are kind of in the 900 daily download range. Right now I couldn't say everything is organic because we we did have like three four months paid influencer marketing running. Although the exact contribution of that it's hard to tell because people can just saw the

38:12video search on apps uh store and download it. It's really hard to know where people come from. In the future, we are gonna add another screen on on boarding to ask people like how did you heard about us? So that can give us a little bit clear idea what are the traffics look like. I'm still thinking whether to add it or not. But that's how our marketing is going so far. Sarah posts a lot of like illustration process or some sort of from the stories on the red no but Instagram like the influencer or user generates contents. Have you think about different marketing strategy

38:50across different countries and regions? Uh I think the reason why I didn't post the um like the founder story kind of video on Instagram just I don't have time to make two versions. It's time consuming for editing both. So I just decide to do one and but maybe in the future I will do the English version two and I start posting some drawing process on Instagram and Tik Tok too cuz um I I

39:20don't have voice over for those videos. So I I can just make one video and post on every social media. I think in the beginning it's uh on Rhino side people really love seeing those founder stories and the algorithm it's easier for like newer account or smaller account get bigger traction on renot compared to other platform. Uh that's also one reason why we didn't invest too much of our energy on like Instagram or Tik Tok in the beginning. We want to focus on Renault first. Um now I think for Instagram, Tik Tok founder story still works. Um but it definitely gonna take longer time to do it and we are focusing

40:06more on the UGC. Uh so it's easier to produce more videos while still sort of maintain those um organic vibe like it doesn't feel too much like you are paying ads on the platform. We also tried out doing ads on Facebook and Instagram for a little bit. It didn't work for us. The cost is too high and we are just losing money. When we were running our ads, it did not work for us. But I know there are many

40:35founders use ads are doing pretty well. Right now the general consens are using to market their apps. I think that is part of building your own app. you have to figure out the user growth and retentions uh and also marketing stuff. So I wonder what do you both of you wish you could learn earlier years to understanding about the product marketing side. For me doing product marketing is very much like doing social media that's just how it goes for like more than app development. in term of doing social media now it's all about numbers and you have to produce a lot of videos to get the results you might be

41:19lucky maybe first or second video got the traffic but for most people I think you need to hit a certain number to see the results then it's always just a long game you have to start early you have to keep posting which takes a lot of effort for me that definitely takes my energy out of building the product which is the reason why I didn't really do much in

41:43the beginning. I think the product itself is also important when you um ship on the uh social media for like a demo. Um you have to have your product at least aidic appealing or people want to um share it organically and people like it and then people will um it's like promote it for you themselves. And also everything doesn't have to be perfect. You can just ship the demo first then learn from the user feedback and create and make it

42:18more perfect. I know most of you already quit the job and just building this product on your own. So far what's you enjoying the most like being a founder and building your own product? I think for me building part is definitely the best part of all this. I have an idea and I think through it and I build it out. I can use it and that's why I really wanted to do this in the beginning. It's just being able to build the thing I want right now because we get a lot of traffic. So the second best part about everything is just being able to earn money without like doing

42:56anything sometimes and we can take a full week break and we still got have a revenue and everything's all right. Um, so that's pretty awesome for me cuz I was a graphic designer and doing a branding design for many years. But um, as a a graphic designer, I have to change my style quite often cuz it's always served for someone else. But doing something for myself, I can do draw whatever I want, whatever I like

43:27and um, loyal to my aesthetic. I think it's pretty cool. Yes, you have like full control and freedom on something you enjoying doing. What kind of advice both of you will give to designer who want to build and launch their own product but not sure about how to begin because you need to take a lot of courage to do this kind of

43:50stuff. Most app I saw they have the minimalism and bold design. I thought my drawings are too hand drawing like too handdrawn style. After making this app, I feel oh maybe uh if there's no similar app on the market and if you make one then you'll be the first one and it will be

44:12the special one. So just try it. We have a lot of copycats after our app but none of them are as good as Sarah's drawing. We have that going for us. For me, I think similar advice. Just try it out. Uh like if you have an idea, even it might not be flushed out or you might not have any unique perspective or anything. Um but just build it out, play it yourself and maybe you will have some new ideas or new like insights you get gathered or combined with other industry or other niche. Like for us, we just kind of combine little bit of uh Animal

44:55Crossing type of games with like Pomodoro app. So mix your own personality or your own interest in this. Uh it's is nice. Leverage you strength and just do something you personally enjoying about that will one day become something you provide value to more users. Last few question before we wrapping up our call. Which cat in this app is each of your personal favorite cat? [sighs and gasps] My favorite is definitely the the black

45:27cat cuz they're based on my own cat. It's called Jinx. And let me show it. This is Jinx. How many cat do you have at home? Like just one cat. We just call Well, I my parents also have a orange cat. It's uh the uh Oh, no. Not Loy. is it's on uh my parents

45:49cat. Some of the other cat was inspired by my friend's cat like the the cat uh Charcoal and the cat Phoenix. Uh I honestly don't have a favorite cat. Yeah, your favorite cat will be Jinx, too, cuz it's our cat. Sure. Sure. Yeah, my my favorite is also Jinx. Yeah, I love them all. They are all really cute and with their own like personalities and movements. Yeah, my cat is British show hair. So, I know there's some cat is pretty sure hair is

46:28exactly looks the same as my cat. That's awesome. Yeah, we got a lot of that feedback as well. Sometimes our user will find that exactly like coat or color or of the they are see cats cats behind us. Yeah. You grab him. Oh, yeah. That's Jinx. Hi. Hi. Hi. How are you? I can tell it's exactly the same as that first kitty you have on the app. He become famous right now. [laughter]

47:05Yeah. Yeah. Yay. What is your favorite chairs? Pairs. Uh, do do you have a favorite hair? Actually, I don't know. I like the newest one. It's always the newest one. It's always the one. I like the ice cream. Actually, the cafe chair is also pretty cool. Okay. My favorite chair, I think, is this one. What's on today? It's a TV. Sometime we don't have like a chair chair. We have like rocks, we have ice cream, TV. Yeah, just anything cat can climb on and sit

47:47there. How many damn chair selection you have so far? And how many kitty we can select? We have like 10, 11, 13 cats. Um 33 chairs, 33 um rock lamp. And we have a lot of backgrounds as well. I don't know how many backgrounds. I didn't count but over 10 for sure. And a lot of gift sets and the to-do notes icon, the gift box

48:18as well. If someone invests 100 millions tomorrow, what is the first things each of you would do with this amount of money? Wow. I would just take a month off. We'll definitely hire marketing and maybe someone help us answer custom support. Probably we're going to hire more developers as well so we can build like maybe Android version, Mac version or

48:46maybe even web version by that point. Yeah, just build a whole bunch more. We can build more apps as well. We have other ideas but right now we are just kind of limited by our for me at least is limited by my mental energy because I always say design two apps in my head. Yeah. And for me well even I'm not sure if I can hire someone to uh do some drawings for me. Um but maybe I can like because lots of company they have two or

49:20more animators and doing the same style. So I think it probably possible for me to hire someone so we can draw more cats, more chairs and more backgrounds. Yeah, for sure. Where can people try cat own chairs and follow both of your founder journey online? People can download it on app store iOS only. Right now it's cat on chair and in terms of social medias you can just search cat onchair app on pretty much all the platforms except rh not on rhino is like

49:58yeah are cats mand names. I will put all these links on our description box below. Thanks for both of your time and I really enjoying both of your conversations and energy so far and thanks again for both of your efforts and programmanship to makes every detail Chinese. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for having us. [music]