From a Failed Agency & Mowing Lawns to a $70K/Month App Business

0:00That company ended up collapsing. I was personally in debt over $200,000. No income and no ability to actually pay that off. Went through a complete like the absolute lowest point in my life. And I'd never ever wanted to touch computers again. I never ever wanted to do programming again. Welcome to Launched. I'm Charlie Chapman. And today, I'm excited to bring you the YouTuber and prolific indie app developer behind over 30

0:25active iOS apps, including the brand new, very cute Swipe the Cat game, Adam Lidle. Adam, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me on, Charlie. I'm quite excited to to chat about apps and and yeah, find out what it's all about on the podcast. This will be really fun. Uh you're I mean you've been on my list for a very long time. We met I think for the first time last year in California. Is that right? Yeah. Yeah. Uh worldwide developer conference last year and you were kind of on the the cool table with all the cool developers. Cool table. We were we were sitting together. We barbecue or something and you sort of um like invited me along. I was like,

1:14"This is cool. I get to sit at the cool table with it was the the developer of Apollo as well." He was there. Christian Se I was a bit of uh like these are people that I've read about and that I've seen online but never never sat down and and I was a bit starruck and a bit like, "Oh, this is this is a pretty cool experience." Yeah. WWDC is wild how you get all these journalists that you read their stuff all the time or app developers that you've looked up for a while and everybody's just kind of crammed in this random suburb in California. Yeah. And being in Australia like

1:47we're just so far removed from everything. I'm kind of just sitting in my office on my own doing my own thing and I don't really see the impact that I have in the real world. I have a pretty normal life and then I go to worldwide developer conference and then the people that I chat with online are real people. Yeah. And speaking of uh being in Australia, normally whenever I have uh an Australian on this show, it's really dark cuz I'm in my office. I'm drinking a bunch of tea

2:16trying to stay awake. But actually right now uh it is daylight and yet we're talking here together. And that's because we're actually uh we're in Singapore. We're here for iOS comp, uh, which is an iOS conference that's happening starting tomorrow, I think. Actually, starting today, I think today. And, uh, so I was like, hey, we should we should like get together and try and

2:36do this, uh, in person. And of course, I couldn't just do the easy thing and find a meeting room. I was like, we got to have the Marina Bay Sands in the background. And so, I built this kind of crazy little mobile podcasting setup. And so, hopefully this sounds okay. But, uh, if you're listening and it sounds a little different than normal, that's why. But you should check out the

2:55YouTube channel and then you can see us in in beautiful Singapore. It's not a green screen. It's a real background. It's not It's not like we're on Zoom with the background added in. This is the the real deal. Exactly. Uh all right. So before we get into all of your apps that you make, uh I want to introduce you to the audience the way I normally do, which is I ask three questions to kind of kick things off, which is where are you from? Do you have a formal education related to what you do? And then what did you do before you started making indie mobile apps? Yep. So I'm from

3:26Australia. Uh lived there my whole life and it wasn't until last year that I've actually left the country and since then I've been traveling all over the place to conferences and and checking out the world. No formal education in anything. From the age of 19 I loved tinkering around with computers. I loved uh like just building my own PCs and getting really stuck into it. And I think I found a passion and a love for computers because I understood computers more than people. So you can program a computer to do something and it'll do it. Whereas with a person, you can people are a bit complicated. I feel like that line is getting blurrier uh with with AI. It's increasingly I'm

4:09like trying to talk to it like an adult talking to a child or manipulating it or something. It's it's very odd. And then when it doesn't do something, you sit there and we're thinking bit about it like it's a human. Yeah. Yeah. But it's not, right? You find yourself asking please. Uh okay. So you didn't have a formal education, but you were you like doing stuff with computers. How did that eventually end up with you making iOS apps? It's a bit of a long journey but I was doing sharewware at the beginning at 19 years old. I was building shareware appear that's showing my age. Was this

4:42on the Mac? Was this on Windows? Windows. Okay. Yeah. So this is the age of Doom and Doom 2 when they would come out and you could play the first few levels for free and then you could send money off to Doom to ID Software and they would post you out a copy of the the floppy drive with with the game. So, were you doing games or was there a big shareware scene on Windows? Because I I haven't personally heard as many of those stories before. There was there was a huge Windows shareware scene. Uh, so you ranked on Google. You found like it was good. Well, wasn't Google at the time,

5:17but you got found on Alta Vista and people find your software, they download it, they get it free for 7 days, and then they can unlock it. So it was there was a big scene developing software. I had a passion for building pretty simple games and also some share like shareware software. Basically just trying different things, playing around with it, seeing what worked, seeing what didn't work. But ultimately what happened in that scene was uh Bit Torrent came out, Lime Wire came out, and nobody was downloading Sharer anymore and paying for it. Now all of a sudden they could just get it for free on any any of these torrent sites. Yeah. Yeah. So I then moved into doing setting up my own

6:07agency doing web development design and software. Wasn't quite sure what I was going to do but I knew that like I I have a passion for building and creating and it was all selftaught. Selftaught the whole way. And I just landed myself, one of the the people that were using my software, my shareware product was working for the education system in the UK. And I announced on my website, I'm no longer doing shareware. I'm going to be doing software. If you know anyone that wants software built or you need a software developer, chat to me. Yeah. Yeah. And the first contract I landed was uh for the like a big roll out of a a learning platform for like preschoolers schools

6:50in the UK which was pretty exciting. Kept me busy and and paid for quite a bit of Yeah. It paid that was web uh web at the time. It was Visual Basic. Yeah. Yeah. I was actually I was going to ask too what was the what were the games that you were building in? Everything was Visual Basic 6.0. Uh that was my first real learning of development. It was a nice way to ease into it because you could just drop a button onto the visual field. You double click it and then you could say put the code behind it. What that would actually do there are some limitations and I was reaching the

7:26limitations in it and that you sort of just move your way to different programming languages. After that there wasn't a lot of demand for like bricks and mortar store needing software actual like executable software. So my skills transformed into doing web development as well doing PHP vanilla JavaScript and just creating platforms or creating services or websites whatever sort of work would come my way. this whole time uh you've always been like running your own agency or making your own shareware. It's always been you were your own boss kind of situation. Uh the last time I held a real job I was 15 years old working in a video store showing my age again. Okay. So So you're doing web

8:13development and uh and then a new platform opens up that uh lets you distribute software in a kind of new way with the app store. you jump on that right away or there there's a bit of a decline, a bit of a my web agency went under. I was pretty silly enough to go personal guarantor on company cars, all of the I took out these loans. I was thinking that the business is making so much money and it's doing so well that I can continue to I'll be able to pay back all these loans and and just live like live for the future like live for now without worrying about spending tomorrow's

8:49dollars. Yeah. And good times are going to keep rolling. The good times stopped. My my bread and butter were making websites for brick and mortar stores. This was back in like just after the do boom. And you could make a website for $5,000 $10,000. And that's how that was the going rate to make a website. So every time I got a new website signed up and it was it was $10,000 coming into the bank account. And then a little product called Squarespace and Wix and everything released their version of what I was doing. But instead of being like $10,000 to make a website, now it's $30 a month. And pretty much overnight, the company started to just not get any revenue,

9:31but I still had a lot of debt to pay off and ended up that company ended up collapsing. I was personally in debt over $200,000. no income and no ability to actually pay that off. Went through a complete like the absolute lowest point in in my life and I'd never ever wanted to touch computers again. I never ever wanted to do programming again. I became so burned out that I couldn't even concentrate on doing it which at the time was bad because I still had clients that I was servicing at a business that wasn't running. So I had lots of people calling me telling me how upset they

10:06were that like a self spiraling thing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. So I I completely gave it up. My coping mechanism was going for long long long walks. Like I went through quite a few pairs of shoes just just going for walks. And I realized if I put a lawn mower in front of me, I could do long

10:24walks and get paid to do it. So I set up a lawn mowing business and started mowing lawns. Wow. Far away from computers, far away from anything in my previous life. The fittest I've ever been in my life. All the sunshine in the world. And it was actually really nice to get away from computers, get away from the office, get away from clients, get away from everything, but the the money wasn't as good as software. And like I was finding myself work waking up at 6:00 in the morning and going to bed at 6:00 at night. That whole day in I don't know if what the weather's like where you are,

10:58but like 40° weather, 100° F. That's intense. Yeah. So, and then Yeah. doing that 12 hours a day and then coming home body was absolutely aching and I loved it but it was hard. So the same thing as you know asking Claude to to update my website and then sitting there and drinking coffee in my air conditioned house. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So you you had your uh uh office space

11:29kind of moment where you escaped the software world and you got a real job in the real world. Yeah. And I mean, you see it all the time. So many developers say, "I just want to disappoint sitting in a in an air conditioning and having a relatively stable job." Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So So then Yeah. How'd you get back in it? I mean, we're at an iOS conference. you're giving a talk tomorrow. So obviously you you got back into computer somewhere. I got I got back into it pulled me back in. I was so I was managing my lawn mowing job and it was it I applied everything

12:14that I knew about the agency I ran, everything I knew about running a business and that is to basically do a job but then overd deliver under promise overd deliver. And basically that got people coming back, got me referrals and within 6 months I had 90 clients on my books which I found out later is quite quite an amazing achievement. Seems like a significant amount of people. This is just you or did you have employees? Just me doing it. So then the issue became managing my clients, managing where I need to mow, how I need to invoice, how I need to quote, keeping track of all the things I'm doing. Yeah. Where So what city are you in? uh this or with at this time anyway

12:54in Melbourne Melbourne. So, what is the what is the rain situation? Because that's the struggle where I'm at is just keeping up with my one very small lawn. Uh yeah, it's like the night I want to do it, I feel like it always ends up raining and then now it's too long and it takes way longer. Like was rain a thing that would blow up your whole schedule if you were that saturated? Yeah, that's quite insightful to to think. I didn't realize that until I'm actually in the field and and you you have, okay, I'm going to do 30 jobs in the next couple of days and you look out and it

13:25rains, you're like, okay, I'm not doing 30 jobs, but they still need their lawns mowed. It's like when an airline when a weather event messes up the airlines, it's like the downstream impacts. Yeah. Uh cuz you still have lawns you have to mow the next day, right? So, Yeah. And they're constant maintenance. So, you can't just let it slide for a few weeks because they won't get you back because the lawn's overgrown. Right. Right. So, I I think I know where this is going. Uh you're looking for a solution to this management problem. Well, I was looking for a solution and I didn't want to be the

13:55one creating the solution. So, I was asking other other people in the industry. I'm like, surely there's a solution that can like show my route, my the best route I can possibly take. It can schedule all of my all of my mowing. the delivery man problem already. Yeah. But then also do the quotes automatically follow up on the quotes when they accept the quote books it in like just stuff that I would do in my day-to-day job as a developer automate that sort of stuff. And I was like who cuz you have that mindset. Well, exactly. And then I'd ask like people in this industry, how are you managing it? And the way that they were managing it, everyone I talked to, they had

14:35an A4 like a a piece of paper. They had it in their truck. On one side was all the jobs they had to get through this week. They cross them off. Next week they flip it over and they cross off all the all the jobs again. So the only way that you could manage your whole your whole client load, your whole inventory, like everything was to do it on pen and paper. Goodness. And I said, why why isn't there a solution for this? And one guy turned around to me and he says, well, if you know someone that could build it, they'd make a lot of money building it. I was like, well,

15:07I guess I have to build it, you know. So, that's how you got sucked back into to computers. That's how I got sucked back in. And I had no experience developing apps. My experience was uh PHP. Yeah. What time what time period are we talking about? Is this in is this post iPhone in the app world? This is post iPhone. So, we're talking 2020. So, in January 2020, I decided to teach myself app development. And the only way I know how isn't to do what any normal person would do and do a course or go get some formal training. No, I decided that every month from now on, I'm going to build an app

15:47and release it to the App Store and to Google Play. And then that that started a trend of every single month I would build a new app. There was no intention to actually generate any revenue from it. I was just putting it onto the app store and just in my mind I'd created so much damage and so made people so upset and I was causing so much sort of um when my company collapsed I'd hurt quite a few people and I just wanted to make a mark and make an impact that was a bit more positive than a legacy of a failed company in debt and uh a lot of people upset with him and I was

16:26like well the one thing I know is development and coding, but more as a creative outlet, more as a like a an art form. And then that was how I got back into developing apps and then doing it on a scale. And that's the other thing about me. I think I just do things on a scale that is a bit silly sometimes. Yeah, I'm already picking up on that. Uh number of wands, number of apps. Uh it's like once you do a thing, you're like, "What if I do it times 100?" Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So, so this was a like kind of an educational goal of you said once a month. Once a month. This is

17:05before AI before this is all I was learning as I was going releasing on a on a monthly cadence. How do you manage that? You did you have a process where you're like, "All right, I just released an app. Now I need to come up with an idea for a new app." Did you have like a list of ideas you would pull from all the time? like how did you even it seems like it would have to kind of be almost like a conveyor belt system to do it that frequently. Pretty much I did have some ideas like a pipeline of ideas and then as I was building more ideas came to mind. So when I started off

17:40I think I had about four or five different ideas to to do like just apps that I wanted to use in my daily life. And then basically it would work out to be a week of planning, a week of development, a week of trying to get it through the app store and then a week of overflow of any sort. A week of trying to get to the app store. Like yes, that makes sense. I I worked a consulting job a long time ago that was it was actually Windows Phone, but it was the same deal. We would always tell people like we need a full week to get it into the store and they're like what? Like it's this

18:10is a different thing than the web. You don't own your apps. Yeah, you don't just pay you just have the privilege of getting it onto the app store basically. Okay. So then you were you were getting apps out there. Were you pretty much just like you put an app out there and then you move on or did any of them like catch on and you actually started kind of building uh actually I guess the first question were were you even monetizing them at all or were they totally free? They weren't monetized at all. So just run through personal accounts on the app store and they weren't monetized. My only

18:43distribution was posting it onto Facebook to just my friends and family. Yeah. Saying, "This is what I'm doing. This is what I'm building. Come check it out." And I had one of my most successful apps, pretty much the second app that I ever built, and it did really well. It got a lot of downloads. And in my mind, I thought, "Oh, this is just normal. This will happen every single time." It sort of kept the motivation and kept going. And this is 6 years ago now. So the app store was a lot less saturated than it is now. So it didn't take a lot if I knew now what I know now then like you could

19:19have cleaned up but back then um I didn't know what I was doing and I stumbled across one that worked and then what do you think made it work? What which app was it? in my darkest time I was going through like finding trying to find deep meaning in life and I was like a atheist and then I was like well I think there's something out there and then I was going down the path like the new age path and at this stage in my life I was going down the new age path and I wanted to learn about things like tarot cards okay and had like a tarot card reference and I was like I'm going

19:52to make that into an app so I made an app that was a tarot card reference app and released on the app store And what made it successful was it was called like tarot card. Yeah. It was the name of what people were searching for. I didn't do it on purpose. It was just what happened. And it just got a lot of downloads. And I thought, yeah, well, this is going to happen every time I release an app, but it it didn't. I ended up selling that app thinking that I I'm going to have another hit again in the future. But it took me four years to get another hit in the app store quite like

20:26that one again. And if I had realized what I was on then, if I had realized how to monetize it, cuz I wasn't monetizing anything at the time, I would have realized that it was a lot more valuable than I put than I thought it was or even understood it was, but you learn. Yeah. So, how did you transition from you're making these for free uh and not necessarily trying to make a business out of it to now you make a bunch of apps. As far as I know, your main business isn't a lawnmowing tracking app. Like, what was the transition to where you ended up? So,

20:58I was building I'd built the lawnmowing tracking app. It took about like 6 to9 months to actually build it. I released it thinking that this is what the world needs. market validation. People that I talked to said that this is what they need. People just find it on their own. Find it on their own. I released it and nothing really happened with it. No influencer marketing, but I because I was part of community groups. I was posting in Facebook community groups and also mowing associations that I was part of putting into the forum saying, "Hey, look at this app that I've that I've found that I'm using for my mowing business." because I don't think in those industries that they're assuming

21:40that I'm self-promoting because I don't think many people mowing lawns are building software. The sniff test that Redditors generally have uh where they can smell it a mile away. Yeah. Yeah. So, it was getting downloads uh but clearly not enough downloads to generate meaningful revenue. And that one had a subscription, I'm assuming. Subscription. So it started out for free as like in a beta form and then as I built it that started I started to monetize that one but the realization that I had was I spent 6 to9 months building this thing it got no traction but this other app over here that I built in a week got more traction why did that happen and how can I replicate that and

22:19not not waste another 6 months on so when you realize that like uh the app store and maybe this is just broadly the business world uh values value more than They value time spent. Yeah. Uh and those are like they don't have to be related at all. Obviously, you can generally create more value by spending more time on something, but like you can also not do that at all and just waste

22:41a bunch of time not creating something that's valuable to real people. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I thought I was creating something valuable. It just turned out the market size wasn't as big as a consumer app. Or you didn't know how to reach it or didn't know how to reach it. Yeah. Oh, that's interesting. Okay. So that's out there and you're like, but I guess because of the tarot card app, you were like, I think I can I think I can still make a business on this platform. And so

23:09then you dedicated yourself to figuring that out. So I dedicated myself to figuring it out. I started to monetize apps and I was getting some good revenue coming through. and I was on Google Play and I was on the App Store and I was creating hybrid apps. I don't know if you've heard of these like a platform called Cordova at the time. Oh, Cordova. Okay. So, I was building in HTML and JavaScript and the back end. That makes sense cuz that's the world you came from. That's where I came from. And I was looking at the numbers and I was getting a lot of downloads from Google Play,

23:43not a lot of downloads from the App Store, but the App Store was making per download more than what Google Play was. So I was left at a at a crossroad that this this building apps in HTML and JavaScript, they don't look all that great. They don't function all that well. I have to learn native development. Do I go down the Android path or do I go down the the iOS path? Did you consider like React Native or Flutter or some of the other hybrids that are a little closer to native feeling? I played around with React Native and I was I didn't like it. I didn't

24:17like it all that that much. I think I wanted to just throw myself into something a bit more uh like I've been from doing Visual Basic and like all of these sort of fringe technologies my whole career. I was like this time maybe if I'm going to learn something I'm gonna learn something that's

24:34a bit more probably gonna get I'm not comparing React Native to a fringe. You heard it here first. But I was thinking I want to do something native. I mean at the end of the day you can always I can always learn both platforms or like you said like Flutter or something like that. They can be on both platforms. But when I looked at the stats and I looked at the sort of the downloads and the market, I was like, if I can work out how to scale up on the app store, revenue would scale up quicker than on Google Play. Because Google Play, like at the time, I was getting

25:06100 downloads per dollar generating or whatever it is few years ago now. Whereas the App Store, it's got to a stage now for every download I get, it's about 50 cents in revenue. So for two downloads, I get a dollar in revenue. So if I could scale up the app store side of it, I knew that I would be able to generate much more revenue than Google Play. So I went to Swift UI and really never looked back. Okay. So that was that would have been what like 2021 2022. I think it was later. I think it's 2023. So I've only been in Swift UI now for only a couple of years. How was that? Just uh

25:40out of curiosity as somebody who's been doing this for a very long time but had never done really you hadn't done Apple world development. What was that transition like? Difficult. Yeah. Because I'd already played around with React Native. I sort of understood how Swift UI sort of works with with the flow in terms of a declarative UI framework. Yeah. Yeah. So I don't really know the technical name for it. Like Visual Basic was like UI Kit was in the sense of Yeah. Yeah, you know, you like put a button on a on a actually both of them had like a visual editor and then it's like

26:15you write a line of code to decide every single thing that happens and you say this is this many pixels in Swift UI you have that like kind of like markup in HTML like you're just kind of declaring what it should generally look at like and then the system itself decides what that actually means. Yeah. Yeah. And then the other the other difference is like if you set a variable over here, it pushes it through all of the the views. Whereas in in HTML and JavaScript, you would have to physically manually data in every single. So it made life easier, but it was really hard getting

26:45my head around it. And I got quite frustrated with Xcode and I got very frustrated with um how slow it was running on at the time the only way I could build on iPhone was to build on a MacBook. I was a Windows person. So I had to buy on marketplace a broken MacBook with no screen and I plugged into HD HDMI for and I was coding on that and it was slow. It didn't work for it. I didn't like Xcode. Nothing nothing seemed to flow with it. And and I found myself with JavaScript, HTML, with PHP. I've got to a stage where I can think of the solution in my head as I'm wanting to build

27:24it. But Swift UI coming to a brand new language that had different framework. I could no longer visualize what I was actually coding. I was just banging my head translate. It was like it's like speaking a foreign language like you think in your native language and then you have to translate it into the new thing. Yeah. Interesting. Okay. So it was it was challenging in that respect but then a few years ago one of the first apps that I built in Swift UI was like a learn piano app. And

27:50this is like an app that I've been trying to sort of mold and and this is where my real passion is. And what made me fall in love with Swift UI was I wanted to be able to just detect notes through the audio. So you could play a note and the and the app would know what note you're playing. And if I

28:10wanted to do that in React Native or any of those other ones, I don't know how I would ever do it. Yeah. You'd have to bridge it to uh native code anyway to do that. I think Yeah. And when I fell in love with Swift UI, it was like, oh, there's an API for that and you just do this. I'm like,

28:27I like that. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah. Well, I'm curious. What's the name of it? It's piano. It's like one word combined, right? Yes. It it started out as it was called learn piano notes and music, like just keywords. It started to get some attention and started to get downloads. And that's the strategy that I do. I release it for free, get some attention, get some downloads on it, and if it if it sinks, I don't come back to it. If it rises the top, then I start to monetize it and I start to add new things to it. I wanted to gify it and in my mind

28:59that meant turning into a game for some reason. So I turned it into a game and it's called Piano Run. Piano Run. Okay. Yeah. So you have and this was at least initially this was an iPad oriented app, right? And the idea was to learn how to play piano and it wasn't gamified at the beginning, right? Is that correct? Had lives and you'd lose lives but that was Yeah. So there's some gaming. The vision for it was to always be a game. So some uh in version 1.0 there was some game elements to it, but the vision that I wanted was like a a Candy Crush almost like you're going

29:33through a progression of a quest with different level progressions. You unlock stars, you unlock different things, like very ambitious. Uh so version 1.0 was a pretty basic version. You have a YouTube video that's called like how I ruined my app by listening to users. It's about this this story that I find really fascinating. So, like I'll let you tell the gist of it, but it it has to do with going from the sort of iPad more learning focused app to this gamified thing, right? What what's the what's the deal behind that? You plug it into the iPad, you plug it into your piano, like the MIDI port, and you play the notes on the screen, and it it sort of teaches you how to learn

30:13the piano while you're playing a game. It's really aimed for my kids to play and get them involved in the piano and get them actually really excited about it. There's different levels. There's a a level with a car where you drive a car. So, the idea is that instead of plugging in a game controller that has like 12 buttons, you plug in a piano which has over a 100 buttons and so the kids will sit there playing the piano playing a game and it works well on the piano. But 90% of people downloading it don't use it on an iPad. And only a very small percentage of people using

30:44it on the iPad actually plug it into the piano. So the feedback was that if you're playing on the touch screen, you're not really learning anything or doing anything. You're just touching buttons on the screen. So I've been working for the last few months on turning that getting the feedback from users which was on the iPhone. It's a it's a pretty crap game. turning it into an iPhone game and then ended up having this weird Frankenstein app that now no longer works as as I envisioned on the piano but also doesn't really translate well to an iPhone app and it confused everyone. Is that where you landed or have you course corrected since then? That's where it's

31:31landed. And then like I said, so I know in my mind there's something there with learning the piano in a gamified way. I know Dolingo is sort of going down that path now. And there's actually Dolingo for piano cuz I was going around saying I'm making I'm making the Dolingo for piano learning and people like yeah you know Dolingo have made a piano learning. I didn't know I knew they had the chess one. Uh oh that's interesting. So it's it's not necessarily in that way. It's more in terms of unlocking stars, unlocking and trying to beat your top score and coming back to it. I went back to

32:05the drawing board and I realized what had happened with the app is the DNA of it was just wrong. So, if it was based on being an app for the piano, I can't translate that to an iPhone app because it just doesn't doesn't translate well. Maybe I should have just stuck with the iPhone the iPad version of it. you plug it in and not ever released it as a iPhone app. I've been trying to really personally learn piano and also learn sheet music and sheet music is where I really struggle with it. So, what I've been leaning down the path of is like a gamified app. Instead of learning

32:45songs in like a drop down arcade fashion, now you're learning the placement of the notes on the actual sheet music or uh Yeah, I can't remember. Yeah. Yeah. So, basically, instead of There's apps out there that can teach you how to read sheet music, but they're all very black and white. They're all very very theory based looking. It's more like score. Yeah. And that doesn't appeal to me. I find that really boring. I want to play something that I can get a top score, go back,

33:15try again, go back, try again, and I don't need a piano to plug it into. I can just do it anywhere. So, that's the basis of where the app's going now. And then the crossroads, I mean, now is this kind of a completely different app. Can I now change the app all over again and confuse people even more, or is this its own app? And and that's where it's kind of landed at the moment, but I'll I'll get to the conclusion of that by the time I've finished building it. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Is that is that one of your like core apps as far as the business or is the money kind of coming from a

33:48really spread out group of apps? It's pretty much coming out from a spread out group of apps. So the portfolio every time I build a build an app I put onto the app store it generates bit of revenue and over time like I think it's over 50 apps that I've developed and I've cled a lot from my portfolio or sold a lot but those apps mostly are generating revenue spread out across the apps which means

34:11that like I've never actually monetized any of the piano apps. This is really just a passion project. one of your that's why I'm so passionate about it. I'm building it and I mean even on my YouTube channel I preach a lot about which is what we were talking about before. Don't spend 6 months on an app when you can do it in a week. As I'm talking I'm sitting there thinking I really should take my own advice cuz I am spending a lot of time on this piano. Yeah. But I think there's I think there's

34:36an element of you have a successful business that can allow you to uh indulge yourself a little bit. But it's not just indulging yourself. It's like you're building skills. Like you're focusing on the craft because sometimes you just need to spin up an app that's based on an idea, monetize it, do all the like standard kind of tricks. Yeah. And make some money from it. But also like you want to have something you're passionate about to feed like bringing new ideas or UX design patterns or

35:02whatever that then you probably carry into all of your apps that you do, right? So now I'm curious. Uh cuz your most recent app, the Swipe the Cat game, is one of the most delightful things ever. And we'll explain what it is in a second. But I I'm very curious where that's gonna land on because I don't actually know. Is this one of your passion apps or is this one of your like money-making apps? But before we get to that, just describe like what this app is and how it kind of came about. As the name suggests, you swipe the cat. Basically, it's a gamified game where a cat

35:33pops up on the screen and you have to swipe it off the screen. And it's based on those Tik Tok trends where you swipe the screen without putting your your finger on it. And the whole objective was that I want to build an app that could potentially go viral. That was the objective. Build something that could go viral. This is a viral trend happening on on Tik Tok at the moment. If I hook into the viral trend, that could equate to a viral a viral app. For those that don't know, this is like on Tik Tok reels, whatever. There's there's a bunch of these videos that have popped

36:05up everywhere where there's like a there's like a transparent thumb that goes like up, down, up, down, up, down, and then whatever's on the screen reacts in time to that. And so as you're sitting there watching it, it's just a video. If you move, start moving your thumb, it legitimately does feel like you're kind of like moving the person or the character on screen or whatever. Yeah. I find them very delightful on on social media. So, whenever I saw you say like, I'm trying to turn this into an actual real thing, I thought that was a genius idea. One, cuz they're cool, and two, because I've seen that that approach taken for games where people will literally market as,

36:47you know, those fake ads for games that like everybody knows aren't real games, we made that real game. Yeah. And it seems like those at least that's a pattern I've seen people try. Uh, so I'm curious uh to hear the answer. Did that work? I guess in terms of download, yes. In terms of revenue, no. The lesson I learned from that is games are very difficult to monetize. Yes. And you have to go down the path of um like advertising and sponsor like those that sort of path to make it that generally seems to be what people want from the game. Unless you have like Candy Crush

37:20or something where you can unlock extra abilities within the game that you need to actually finish the level. The monetization strategy that I used for it was you could unlock different scenes and you could play the game and unlock coins to unlock the scenes yourself or you could shortcut it and and unlock unlock scenes. Turns out people don't really care enough to to purchase use real money to unlock scenes. I think it comes down to having not done the the game element myself. I think a lot of it comes down to like does your game build a habit or is your game like a fun core

37:54experience that is you do it, it was fun, and then you move on. Yeah. For the experience one, I feel like you have to monetize it very differently than the come back to this every single day type app. Uh and this one feels more like an experience type thing for the most part. Yeah, it was the in-game currency model that I went with and I'm very happy with the end product and I love the the direction that I took with it. And every single frame on the game I have actually hand sketched. Let's you've talked about this on on YouTube, but like if you haven't tried it,

38:26uh you should just stop this video and uh and go try it because it legitimately is like delightful. And especially having liked the Tik Tok style things, it's very fun to like do it for real, but it is a like exquisite feeling app. And there's a couple different elements, but the biggest one is I think the the handdrawn feel of the animation. You have an interesting approach to how you generated all those assets. The idea was generated through chat GPT and through Nano Banana. And then I hand handd draw over a few times. And then I used Sora to animate just five frames between each of the scenes. So I animated by hand three frames either side of the the animation and then Sora did

39:09the the rest in the middle which turned out to be a very time consuming thing to do to sketch out each of the cats one by one. Well, three at a time. So, the whole business model was to put as many assets in there as possible that people can purchase and unlock, but it was very tiring and very time consuming. So, I don't have as many assets in there as I wanted to put in there, which also might be one of the reasons why monetization doesn't necessarily work on it. If you're going down a business model where you need to keep producing content for the game,

39:41then you've created a job for yourself. Yeah. Well, I mean, and that is a a whole model for games, right? Is like that is most of what you're spending your time on is creating new assets, but it feels like with with this one, are there people clamoring for more assets or is it kind of like going through the the initial set of the game, you kind of get the like fun of it and then you move on, do you think? I don't get many people asking for new assets. So, I don't think there's a demand for for new assets in there. So, it's a fun game. It's nice to play and I've learned a lot from it

40:15which I'm building into the the next app as well. But at the end of the day, I think when it comes to monetizing games, I've talked about this in the past. I'll never make a game again. And I said that a few years ago, but I've made a game. You'll never do computers again. You'll never make a game again. Yeah, we know. We know how this plays out. Yeah. But like a big thing you talk about online uh and on your YouTube channel is monetization and distribution. We've talked a lot on this episode about like you building your skills on in software and all of that, but there's this whole marketing

40:50and business side that you spend a lot of time on too. How has that evolved since you started doing this to now in terms of I know initially you were just throwing it into the app store and hoping. What now is your primary method for distribution like getting people to find and download your app? The primary method for distribution is app store optimization. Getting it ranked on the app store, finding keywords that you could actually rank for in the beginning, building an app around it, and then getting it ranked on the app store. So coming up with an app idea is part of the app store optimization process. So when I come up with an idea, I will assess whether or not I can

41:26actually whether people are actually looking for this and how many people are actually targeting this keyword already. How do you what do you use to do that? I use Astro. Astro. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. It's made by Matteo. He's another indie app. Yeah. Mateo, if you're listening and I want you on the show. Yeah. Astro. Beautiful like Mac app, too. It's kind of a cool uh cool app. But yeah, great way to uh see if there are keywords related to the idea that you've already had to validate the idea. So, come up with an idea, look to see if there's keywords, what I would type in to find

41:59that app, and then look to see if those keywords are popular. If they're not very popular, the app, I never build it. If they are popular, I look at how much competition there is. If there's too much competition, I never build it. But there's a nice sweet spot where you can find a keyword. And it's getting harder and harder these days, but there's still keywords out there that if you come up with an idea, you can build it, you can rank for it, and you can generate revenue. And I think that was the part that I really nailed right at the beginning, which was getting it onto

42:29the app store, getting it optimized, getting people using the app. What I always failed with was the monetization side of it. And then it wasn't until just recently, just over a year ago, I upgraded all my pay walls and um tried an experiment and it it worked. In that moment, I realized I was already getting people downloading my app. It was already people were already using my apps. They were finding it on the app store. It wasn't an issue of trying to get more people using my app. It was actually finding a way to monetize that more effectively. And that went from the

43:04business generating $10,000 a month to $70,000 a month. Just wow. Just that very stark difference. You look at the stats and you can see before I put the payw wall in, after I put the payw wall in. It sounds like you had gotten really good and built up the skill set of the very top of funnel like pouring people in. Yeah. But you were losing people at the monetization step, I guess, like the actual or conversion step uh in your payw wall. And so if you have all these people coming in and then you lose everybody right there, it's like, well, if you just sit and spend time

43:36focusing on that, you can widen that funnel and all of a sudden it changes everything. But then what is a normal conversion rate? what is I was sort of thinking I've monetized I've done this experiment that experiment and you kind of get fractional little tiny changes. So in my mind I was thinking any change is just going to be like a steady steady flow. I didn't understand that it was the payw wall issue. I just thought it was a slow incremental process and then it's hard to know like what those numbers are. Like we like at Revenue we have a a status subscriptions report. Yeah. that will show you what our based on our customers what like averages

44:15are for a lot of these but obviously it's very different for different types of apps. I think the more important thing is like like payw wall optimization can make a really really big difference if you have a big bucket of users coming in. But a lot of people will start focusing on paywall optimization before they get distribution and then it's like yeah like making a 10% change or 5% change that's a big payw wall conversion change but if you don't have that many users coming in it doesn't really matter. But if you don't have many users coming in you don't actually get to see the results of that change until later on is step one. which is why I

44:47think your approach of you start building the app, validating that there's users that want this makes a lot of sense in your swipe the app or swipe the cat game. I wouldn't think that would have been a a search optimization play because people aren't like, "Oh, I want to go find an app that does this and searching for it." So, how did you you said it it like did pop and get users. How did you do that? So, the whole objective of that one was to learn about getting a game to go viral. So, it wasn't necessarily So, I think I've pretty much worked out how to do app store optimization and I

45:21wanted to expand my skill set and learn something else instead of just doing the same thing over and over and over. I think I' I' I'd looked at it and I've I've reached a stage in my own career, my own development cycle that like doing the same thing over and over and over doesn't really appeal to me. It's learning something new, doing something new, and expanding my my skills. So, I was really challenging myself to work out how to make it how to make an app go viral and and the best way to do that is to base it on a viral trend. So the objective that I set for myself was

45:53I'm building an app that will go viral that people it has to be so good in terms of the visuals that when people record the screen and put it onto Tik Tok, it looks like one of those Tik Tok videos already and people just assume it's someone's animated it by hand and then they find out it's a game and then they go back into that feedback loop and then download the game. Most people when they're playing a game don't record it and throw it on TikTok. So like how did you how did you create the viral mechanic through my socials mostly? Yeah. Creating the viral mechanic and

46:28then get people use it in the game over screen. There's the ability to share it with a friend, share your top score and also later on in the release cycle. I actually put leaderboards in there and achievements and things. So I've been learning a lot about the Apple the the games app that they have. Yeah. Game center. Yeah. So, that has been a good way to sort of if your friend's playing a game, it pops up in their Apple Game Center app. And I mean, that's a good way to get the the app out there and get a bit more exposure. Has that moved the needle? Like, I wouldn't think

47:02that many people actually look at that. I think what when I look at it, I think it's mostly like a very specific demographic that would be on there. The people that are on the game center is actually from my observation more so like mums mums that are on on like um Farmville and things like that those sorts of achievementbased games. That is an interesting observation cuz yeah that

47:28maybe that's like a neglected uh big user base that most people aren't thinking about possibly. Yeah. Interesting. Okay. So then what is the thing that like you said you learned and tried a bunch of different things to try and make it go viral but what's the what made it like work do you think the novelty I reckon just the novelty so putting onto the socials getting people people shared it I ran some competitions tried to drum up some some interest with some competition so get the top score gift card so it was just trying to get some viral growth from it in terms of that I threw anything and everything I could at it and then also put some Tik Tok videos out there

48:06of the actual animation and that continues to get downloads for it to to this day. The lesson that I've learned with that is you don't base it on keywords or anything that's evergreen. Then you have to continually be marketing it on Tik Tok or marketing it to get people using it. And the whole my philosophy with building apps is I do it because I love the act of creating it. I don't necessarily want to create a job for myself doing something. So, I move on to the next one. Then I'm I'm building the next one with the lessons that I learned from that one, which was go

48:42for a viral trend. Go for something that will do well on Tik Tok with good visuals, but then always have the app store optimization as the evergreen. And then that way you have the opportunity to have that amazing growth that reinforces the app store optimization. And then as that growth disappears, as the viral trend disappears, then people can go to the app store and they can search it and find it in in the app store. Yeah, that's that's a good observation cuz yeah, it's a very different strategy to build something quick based on a viral sensation and then like monetize it as efficiently as possible for the short window you have. Yeah. To make it. Yeah. Yeah. No, I didn't think about

49:23it because everything else you've done has been this like tweak and optimize over time and make it work, but this one it's like it has to it all has to happen during this moment. Yeah. Uh oh, interesting. Yeah. But I like to look at it as the experiment was to get to go viral with it. The optimization was clearly isn't optimized the way that I would have loved it to be optimized. Maybe it could be optimized better, but it was the test. Can you get something to go viral? Yes, you can get something to go viral. I need to learn lessons for the next time that happens. Have everything

49:55in place so when it does go viral, you have like the optimization of the payw wall in there or the monetization strategy in there. And it's just a constant sort of progression of learning the craft. And I mean speaking of craft, I think the other thing with this uh like we're talking a lot about it as a business and optimizing monetization and all that, but like it's also a nice uh sort of portfolio piece. Like it is a fun, cool, very easy to look at and immediately Grock app. Yeah. Uh and

50:26for that I I mean I think you should be proud of it as just a achievement. I'm very proud of it. Especially in this age of most people playing this game of making lots of apps and monetizing them. There's not a quality there. Well, you're touching on something that is the motivator for the deep motivator for that one and the the piano game that I'm making, which is people ask me, "What do you do?" Not people that I interact with online, but people in my real life, "What do you do? I build apps." Oh, do you build apps for a company? No, I build my own apps and put them on the app store

50:56and people subscribe to them. Oh, any any that I would know? Yeah. I go, "Well, no. Unless you're looking for a pregnancy tracker or counting your steps or like all these little keywords that I've targeted in the portfolio in the past and I realized like there's there's nothing that I'm proud of that I could show someone on the street cuz they don't care. Oh, you've optimized that pay wall. Well, they don't care. I want it to be something I wanted to be proud of something that I could show people. It's like they're providing value to people who are searching the app store to solve a problem. They solve the problem. It's not that it's not valuable, but there's there's

51:29an element of like, yeah, this is this is you and your craft and you're kind of expressing yourself and having those little portfolio pieces to be able to show off, but also just to be able to like be proud of and improve your craftsmanship that way. Yeah, I think I think that's really cool. And I wish I feel like the the current indie scene is in a weird state right now. And it feels like there's almost a strict bifurcation between like growth hacking and like craft people. Almost like they don't like each Well, I don't think the growth hacking people really even care think about the craft people, but the crafts, you know, focus on the craft people. They seem to like look down

52:08on all this stuff because a lot of those people are just it's like the app doesn't matter. it's more about distribution and marketing and all this stuff. And so I wish there was more people that kind of straddled the line uh a little bit. Well, I think what the trend that I'm seeing quite heavily in the in the whole indie space is now just turnurning out apps built with AI and getting them onto the app store. So now there's an onslaught of sort of syype apps going up on there. And yes, you can monetize them. Yes, you can generate revenue. And I mean I've kind of

52:39done that in my earlier stages of my career which was to build an app per month, get onto the app store and go through that process. So there is a time and a place for building those types of apps. Yeah. But you you part of what you're doing is learning through that process. Yeah. Right. Like that's each one should be better than the last one incrementally. And it almost feels like sometimes there's an inversion on that with the AI tools of like it's all about how fast can you make it with the least amount of effort. I'm guilty of this too. like I I enjoy I'm enjoying the

53:08whole vibe coding uh era, but there's very much a place for making quality things for people. I think it's just the thought process. If you break it down to what you want to achieve with the app, then that guides how you build the app. You can build it with AI or you can build it yourself. But if you have a very clear understanding of what you want to do with the app, AI is just a tool. Coding is just a tool. Right. But I think what I'm seeing is people are just outsourcing the entire process to AI. They're seeing a keyword. They're saying, "Build me an app that counts steps

53:41and then puts it out in the app store." I really think the the benefit of building your own stuff and creating your own stuff is to hone that craft and to understand the psychology of why someone would actually care about another habit tracker, care about another step tracker and then go down that path and try to understand what makes your app different. Yeah. I think there is actually an interesting parallel to what you said at the beginning of this which was you were building bespoke websites. Squarespace and Wix come along. Yeah. And it takes a thing that would take a long time and was kind of expensive and you can get 90% there very quickly and everything kind of becomes

54:20a little sy but it changes the whole landscape but it didn't get rid of making software as a as a career. It just changed what's the expectations are. Yeah. Uh, and I we're going through that right now. And obviously everybody's either overly excited or overly scared or somewhere in the middle. But yeah, I hope people don't lose sight of like building good things for people is a thing to like aspire to. I think the people that don't lose sight of it are the ones that are going to succeed. So I think we're going to have an influx of people outsourcing their thought process to AI, but the people that use it as a tool and as to leverage their own creativity, now's the

54:57time to be building apps. So, it's kind of it's an exciting time, but at the same time, it's at the end of the day, it's only a tool used as well as the person building on it with it. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Before I let you go, I want to ask you the question I always ask everybody in the show, which is, what's a person or people out there that have inspired you that you'd like other people to check out? There's this guy on on Twitter on X, Victor Sarah. So his story is he had an app store, had a business making apps. Apple shut his account down and then he sued Apple for shutting

55:33his account down while also setting up another account building apps. So he's gone through this whole court process with Apple about his app being shut down and he he lost the core case and he was very worried of the repercussions of that. But in the meantime, he's gone from zero again to building a successful app business. And now I think he's generating like $60,000 a month from his app business, which was more than what it was when they shut down his previous business. So I find his his philosophy and also his craft with building the apps really insightful and really nice to to check out. So I recommend checking him out. Okay. What what are some of the apps

56:09or what's like one of the big apps? There's like a an auto captions app where he you can put videos in there and does captions. He's got a payw wall that is beautiful that has video in there. His onboarding process with the the captions app is him explaining what the app does with captions

56:26down like just really nice sort of polished look to the apps. So he's really quite an inspiration. And the other inspiration is Jack Fris. Yeah. He he started off building a tool to release to Tik Tok reals and and YouTube. And then he's just started to sort of fumble his way around and play around with app store optimization person. Yeah, that's what that's what I really like about him is that he's is another one of these people that are doing it for the craft. And then the the side effect of doing it for the craft is hang on a second, this is making really good revenue and

57:00now it allows me to continue doing what I love and reinvesting my time and energy into doing what I love. So they're the types of people that I really am inspired by online. That's great. Awesome. All right. Well, thank you uh so much. I think both of us need to go back to our hotels and work on our slides for tomorrow. Uh so this was super fun. Uh where can people find you and all of your apps? Uh so it's adamleapps.com. It's adamidleapps on all of the socials, Instagram, X,

57:29and YouTube. Yeah, check it out. Awesome. Thank you again. No worries. Thanks for having me on. You can find more launched at launchedm.com and uh we're on all the social medias at launched FM. Uh and I'll see you all in two weeks. Thank you so much for listening. You can find more launched at launched fmm.com and you can find me on pretty much all the social medias. I'm_chucky on Twitter or charliemchapman pretty much everywhere else. And of course, huge thanks to Revenue for making

58:01this episode and all future episodes of Launch possible. I'll see you all again in two weeks.