The App that Cuts Screen Time by 57% (Backed by Science) — Frederik Riedel, one sec

0:00I built the first prototype on a weekend, put it on my own phone. I used it myself two weeks and my screen time was reduced by 50% after that. And I was like, "Okay, this is really effective." Actually, when when I installed the app on my own phone, 20 seconds afterwards, I accidentally ended up opening Twitter and I ran into my own app. And I was like, really? Okay, I'm on to something here. Welcome to Launched. I'm your host, Charlie Chapman, and today I'm excited to bring you the founder of One Sec, the app to help you cut down on your screen time, Frederick RLE,

0:45Frederick, welcome to the show. Hello. Happy to be back. Yes. And we're saying back because as I I actually talked about this in uh the previous episode, but uh we we did a live episode together in Finland at uh Arctic comp. Yes, it was a lot of fun. Somehow I ended up uh playing the symbols on stage with a band and you uh I think we had a hat of percussion instruments handed to us. Uh, it was a very it was a very uh interesting vibe, but as is kind of becoming a common theme here, uh I'm failing at the live recording thing. And so now we get to do this in

1:22a more like kind of proper longer uh uh launched setting anyway. So it's probably a better episode, but yeah, we get to we get to talk about one sec in in a more traditional uh launched uh mode here. So I'm I'm very excited. The story here is really good and there's a bunch of threads I didn't get to pull on while we were on stage. And so, uh, I think at the end of the day, this is this is going to be fun. Yeah, I'm I'm really happy we do this. Uh, so before we get into, you know,

1:48one sec and your story and everything, uh, let's give people a quick pitch for what one sec is. Just kind of your elevator pitch so that we have a baseline for what we're building up to. Mhm. So, my my elevator pitch is actually always showing the app because it's kind of like a hard thing to explain, but it's super easy to show, right? So imagine this is your home screen and you have your social media apps there and whenever you open a social media app like Instagram instead my app on one sec comes into foreground. Now I have to to put it in the area where it's not blurred and yeah it it just intercepts you from opening social media apps

2:25um to help you be more mindful about when you open these apps. This actually comes from like a problem I had myself in 2020 in the first lockdown in Germany where I was just feeling like uh I was using Instagram way too much much more than I thought was healthy for me and I didn't feel good about it but at the same time I also didn't want to delete it completely because I felt like there is still some value of using social media and as as of today I still feel the same way. Um,

2:55but I was just feeling like I have to get back in control. I don't want to be the product anymore. I don't want to use social media like people in Silicon Valley want me to use it. I want to use social media as a tool how I want to use it. And my problem was really that I had this goal in mind of using it less, but I failed to accomplish it. I was using like all the tools that ex existed back then like screen time tools whatever and nothing really helped me. And then I was like yeah my problem is actually that in the moment when I open the app my brain does not think about

3:31what's going on. It's just like a reflex muscle memory and like autopilot kind of thing. You just open the app because you're stressed or you're bored or whatever. And I was just feeling I need some kind of way that interrupts me when I open an app like Instagram or Twitter or whatever. And um yeah, give me the chance to think twice and like kind of like allow my long-term bra thinking

3:57brain to kick in and override my dopamine seeking short-term brain that just wants fun, right? And and this actually Yeah, this allowed me to do that, right? It just pauses me and allows me to make an intentional decision. And sometimes it's okay, like you're sometimes like, "Yeah, I'm bored. I just want to look what's new on Instagram." But then at least it's like an intentional decision and it's not like you accidentally uh sit on your couch and scroll for

4:25half an hour and then you don't even remember why you opened it and what you did on the app. And yeah, that's one sec in a very short. It's not really an elevator pitch anymore. Uh but that's it's a long elevator, you know, elevator. Uh and we'll we'll dig into that sort of origin story here in a minute. But uh first I want to kick us off with kind of the the introduction to who you are. Um so the three questions I always ask to to kind of kick off this conversation is where are you from? Do you have a formal education related to what you do? And then what led you up

4:58to one sec more deeply than you know just what we just talked about? Um, so I'm from Stoutgart in Germany in the south of Germany. Two of the big German car companies come from that are struggling right now. I guess Mercedes and Porsche. And to be honest, I'm also like I'm I'm not really a big fan of them. Like I I guess they build really great hardware, but they struggle so much to build great software. Like they're not really fans of CarPlay, but like actually when I'm using a car,

5:26all I want is CarPlay. I don't want any of their own navigation software or like horrible. I'm definitely in that category that treats cars as gadgets that get me from place to place. And so yeah, uh I'm definitely a sucker for like CarPlay, good sound system, smooth and quiet, uh is really the most important thing. They did a lot of weird things in the last couple of years where I'm like, yeah, like what is actually your goal? Like are you really trying to build a a great product that that is beneficial for myself or are you like why are you trying to push your own software solutions

6:00so much like the best user experience you can provide is like if it's kind of like invisible right you go into into the car and CarPlay already has access to my calendar and can show me like the navigation um address of my next event I it's just a tap of a button and then my podcasts are there and like it's perfect like wow anyway we are we are getting distracted. Um, so that's that's where I'm from. H, but I never had anything to do with them for like for exactly that reason. I

6:28I felt like a lost lost cause because they they really think in a in a very narrow way, right? They kind of like, yeah, we've always always done that this way. We will never change that. And um I I can just hope that kind of like this crisis going on right now will wake them up and like allow them to finally innovate uh a little bit again because the yeah what what they have been doing in the past years is really not uh very attractive for me as a potential customer. Um exactly what what was your second question again? So yeah so then what what's your education? Do

7:01you have a formal education related to software engineering or what what's your background there? Yes and no. I I would say not necessarily because I have started making apps when I was still in high school. So I started kind of like without formal education but then later on I actually studied software engineering at University of Stogart which was also I think very good for me to get more professional at making software because before I was kind of like a cowboy coder

7:27putting everything all one file not really knowing anything about object object-oriented programming. I just w wanted the app to work and yeah the uh university career really helped me to professionalize that and become better at like working together in a team using git and making nice reusable code and you don't really need that anymore today with uh all the LLMs but at least for the past 10 years it was very helpful to to have these skills to get where I was. So you started building apps uh when you were 16. What was the like

8:02why did you start building apps? What were the first apps that you were building? I think it was even earlier m maybe it was it was like a a time period where I wanted to build apps but it was so hard back then. It was kind of like when Xcode and interface builder were still two separate apps. I think that must have been like like with iOS 3 or iPhone OS 3 or iPhone OS 4 in that time. And the my problem was that like kind of like the tutorials, they were all outdated, right? When whenever I tried to download the new Xcode, which happened, I don't know,

8:37twice or three times a year, I was like, "Okay, I'm going to try it again, and then I would like have the latest Xcode, and then look at some YouTube video or some some book or whatever." And they were all like based on like a previous version of Xcode. And it was like so confusing because everything looked different and the buttons were different positions and in the end it was all like split across different apps and I struggled a lot to get started and to have like my first moment where I was like okay I kind of understand what I'm doing now and on top of that it was also uh kind of expensive for me as like a 14 year old boy you had to pay the $99

9:17enrollment fee to even be able to get started. I um was delivering newspapers to be able to buy a white plastic MacBook back then like for I think it was like €900 and I even upgraded the RAM to 2 GB like a completely different world. I think when I was like 15 it suddenly clicked because then I was able to build like an user interface in the interface builder and have like an IB outlet or an IB action that would trigger an alert view pop up. So when I press the button, suddenly an alert pops up and I was like, "Oh, now I kind of like have the connection between like

9:55a user action and then actually running code and something else happens." What I did then was hiding and unhiding views like when you click a button full view. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So So that Yeah. That that's how I how I got started. But yeah, why did I get started? That's a completely different story. I was back then we got these Texas Instruments graphics calculators from our school for like math classes and they were really amazing like um calculators where you could also program on and I was just putting in like formulas to make like homework easier to solve and that's my first programming as well actually. Yeah, exactly. and and and then I

10:36was like, okay, I I kind of like enjoy doing this and this is kind of like how I think or I I guess I was also attracted to building tools that make my life easier. But then at the same time, I had like an iPod touch which was so much more powerful than my graphics calculator. Like it was actually kind of slow these Texas instruments. It has a color screen, a touchcreen, some like sensors like accelerator and so on, internet connection, Wi-Fi. And I was like, "Yeah, this would be much cooler to actually write software for this." Plus, a lot of my

11:07friends have an iPod touch as well. So, we I could like build tools that we use um together. I was just trying for two years, I think, overall to have my first success experience on the iPod touch, making an app for it. And then I did this whole cowboy coding thing where I was just hiding unhiding views. And I'm I built an app called Irat Stone, which is like a Minecraft guide tutorial app that it just has a bunch of screenshots and uh videos and texts describing how

11:40you can build cool machines in Minecraft with the Redstone system, version of a website basically. Yeah, exactly. I I guess you could have done the same thing on a website, but of course through the app store it was it was much easier to uh monetize. It was a 99 cent app. Plus, I guess also for discovery, it was much easier because back then there was no Minecraft Pocket Edition. So, when you searched on the app store for Minecraft,

12:06my app would show up. I guess that was a convenient coincidence that I I didn't plan that. Um, but I guess a lot of people were like, "Yeah, okay. If at least I can get inspired when I'm on the school bus and look at some cool mechanisms that I can later build on my computer when I'm home." Plus, you can put it like besides your computer, I think, as a website. Back then, kind of like on an iPod touch, it the the web was still a little bit slow and then usually these websites would have a lot of ads and it it's just not like a great experience back then,

12:39but uh yeah, with a native app, people were actually really enjoying to use it. It gained a lot of attention, I guess. People were really happy to learn about this redstone system and build cool machines in Minecraft that their friends then didn't know about how to how to copy them. So, you're a student. You're making a bunch of little toy apps for fun. You make this one and it kind of catches on and you're actually making like money from it. Did that change your mind in

13:07terms of were you like, "Oh, this could be like a career." Like what how did you go from there? I think that was not the moment yet where I thought this could appear career because it felt very instable like this is you never know how much money you make the next month and it was fluctuating a lot but in general it would go go up like 2013 I think the app became one of the top five most purchased apps in Germany then I was like okay this is this is insane how like you can make a lot of money on the app store apparently but still I I didn't think this could

13:42be a job for me because I was like 16 17 years old just about to make my high school diploma and I thought I wanted to become an electrical engineer because that's also related to that but I'm really glad I did not and someday I received an email from Apple I guess they were like oh this is kind of like suspicious that this app is making so much revenue and then they figured out oh there's actually like a a person that's underage age making this app. This is not compliant with the developer guidelines. Oh no. And they were like nicely asking me, hey, like this is not really okay what you're doing. They eventually suggested that we transfer my account

14:25to my parents. And they were like also at the same time, yeah, but actually we like what you're doing. Don't you want to uh come to Dubdub DC in San Francisco on a student scholarship? And I was like, okay, this is uh this is crazy. I would have never thought that I would sit in a crowd and watch like an Apple keynote at some point. And and that was actually the moment when I realized

14:48when I was in San Francisco at Dubdub that this is actually like making apps is like a proper job. Yeah. Before it was all just like yeah like I do that in my bedroom after school. Yeah. It makes some money but like yeah I I should get like a proper job to be uh sure that in 10 years I I still make money from it. Yeah. Okay. So and then like you said you eventually got a software engineering degree. Were you building and releasing apps throughout this whole this whole process? I never stopped making apps basically. I I had times where I was making one app per week

15:29and one sec was actually one of them. You know, most people uh have an idea, they'll sit there and chew on it and work on it and it's not ready. It's not ready. But like how do you get into a mode where you're releasing a new app every single week? Like that's a pretty intensely tight deadline. Yeah. Especially back then when the tooling was so much more complicated and actually I I wasn't even capable of using the tools in in the right way. I could have saved

15:57I could have probably made one app per day if I knew how to use an UI view controller back then. So yeah, what's the why why one a week? Was it just like each one was an idea you wanted to try it? You put it out there and then you just move on to the next thing. I just had time. I was bored. Like that was my hobby basically. When I came back from school, I was like, "Yeah, I'm just going to make a new app." And usually when I have an idea, I cannot stop thinking about it until I actually do it. Usually it was like I have an idea, I build it, and then put it on

16:29the app store and then I have the next idea. And then maybe like the app from 3 weeks ago gets some attention and I then I go back to that and I'm like, okay, I'm going to like build an update for it for the like highly most requested features. And the apps that never got traction,

16:45they were just sitting there until either Apple or myself removed them from sale at some point. Do you know how many apps you uh you ultimately have released in the app store? It must be more than 50 because when Helm came out, I broke their their first prototype because they did not yet implement the paging API. Yes, Helm the We've had them on the show, but that's an app uh an app that's like it's a Mac app that lets you use App Store Connect. You logged in with your developer account and uh their early version didn't have the ability to to page because they weren't expecting

17:20that many apps. Yeah, I Exactly. I I opened it and I was like searching for one sec and it did not show up and then I I sent it a message, hey, like your app is broken. I cannot find one sec. Like this is the the reason why I want to use your app. And then they discovered that eventually, oh yeah, you you're kind of like have so many apps on your account that we we have to like implement like the paging API to go to page two or three whatever. So I think like I don't have a count on it, but it's somewhere between I guess 50 to 100 more more towards 100 maybe 80 90. Goodness. Wow. So okay,

17:55but you're not doing that now. You now have one second, we'll get into it, but it's like a company company. you have employees and all this stuff and it's a big part of your focus. Where does that come into play? Had you already started slowing down and putting more focus on an app to grow it bigger or was this in was this just part of your like basically weekly cycle of apps that was coming out and then for some reason you started focusing on it? Yeah, that was actually part of my weekly cycle. Well, it was not always weekly, right? But then I guess in that year I released three or four new apps overall. Uh I I actually had like um one

18:31like big app uh called Redpoint which is a climbing fitness tracker for Apple Watch which was my main project back then because it it was like a nice niche app you know there's no competition because making a climbing app for Apple Watch only is like kind of like yeah it it can maybe sustain half a developer but that's it. It's not getting VC funded uh competition. Exactly. I I was young and I I was living in Berlin in a shared apartment. So I was very happy with with my situation. Uh but still I was of course exploring new ideas. And one of them was one sec. And when I released it, it was kind of like every other app that I made where I was

19:10like okay maybe this will get like I don't know 100 people or so in the first week. And the the story was what you said earlier. It was basically like you don't like how you're getting sucked into social media, but you don't want to completely get rid of it. Like a lot of people just try to go cold turkey. So you're like, "Oh, there's APIs that Apple has that lets you jack in basically to when somebody's opening an app and you can sort of interrupt it." And that was that was the sort of driver for why you made it. But it wasn't like I'm going to build this

19:38big company off this idea. It was just another one of your Not at all. It was kind of like how I made every other app before. It was like a personal personal interest or personal problem I had and I was like, "Oh, this could be a nice way to make make a new app or explore like a new technology." And yeah, one sec was just one of these apps where I I never planned to scale it or make something big out of it. And when I released it, I it just felt like, oh, next week I'm going to work on something else. But yeah, it it blew up when I when I launched it. I put a

20:11screen recording on Twitter and it got a couple of thousand of likes and retweets on the first couple of days and the app was had like suddenly a couple of thousand users. Did it break out of your circle or was it just within your sort of circle on social media? It really resonated with people and then it kind of worked its way out. I didn't have a lot of followers back then, maybe 700 or so on Twitter. And I guess it resonated with a lot of people because everyone was like back then in the co times like scrolling a lot and like people were sick of that. And everyone was like, "Yeah,

20:49I actually want to do something useful with my time, but I always end up on on Twitter or whatever." And then you have kind of like a super simple idea of like a kind of like a clever way to use Apple's APIs. And I guess in in my like developer friends circle that resonated a lot from kind of like this tech technical perspective. But then of course there was like an whole ADHD bubble that got into this and it kind of like yeah evolved from from there. So it was pretty

21:18immediate then that you felt this is different than the other apps that you've been doing. Yeah. the it hit me really hard. I was like I couldn't sleep because there was so much attention on the app suddenly so many users trying it and being blown away how how well it works for them and how quickly they could gain back control for their social media habits. And I was just overwhelmed by yeah seeing the impact of the app and kind of like having found something that resonates with more than just like a super small niche of people because you you were just releasing things right away. It wasn't like this was in test

21:59flight. It was out there for real people. So when you had this big influx of users, did it immediately start sucking your time because of like people have feature requests or bug reports and like that's where kind of all of your energy started naturally going? Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. I built the first prototype on a weekend, put it on my own phone. I used it myself two weeks and my screen time was reduced by 50% after that. And I was like, "Okay, this is really effective." Actually, when when I installed the app on my own phone, 20 seconds afterwards, I accidentally ended up opening Twitter and I ran into my own app and I was like, really, okay,

22:39I'm on to something here. This this even I as a developer am kind of like fooled by it or benefit from having it right away. This just shows how addicted we are all to social media and how well a solution like one sec can help to combat that. And yeah, using it for two weeks and then I was like,

22:57okay, this works great. I'm going to put it on the app store and I'm going to see what what happens. And then yeah, when when I saw the the resonance, I really spent two weeks to build like a proper good version of it and make it a lot nicer, a lot a lot more polished. And then after two weeks, like the first big update came and basically since then I have never stopped working on it. But it it

23:19was still a long time until I did it full-time and um stopped more or less working on my other apps. So, how did you get to that point then? Because, you know, initially it sounds like it was pretty successful, but it wasn't like this is sustaining you full-time and definitely not you're hiring employees right away cuz at this point it's everything was fully indie, right? It's not like you had any employees or anything. So, until today actually fully indie. Well, but you have employees now, right? Yes. Yes. Indie in the sense that you haven't taken on funding or anything like that. Yes. No money. Yeah. Right. Right. So from the point of solo to starting

23:58to bring on help, what was the trajectory of its growth? Was a lot of that just organic, you know, the product market fit. It's you just are watching that thing climb or were you starting to like I know now you do lots of different marketing things. Were you doing that back then to try and grow it up to this point? Back then I think the initial growth really came from my tweet because that lasted like a long time. There were always like phases where suddenly it would get more the same original tweet. Yes. The same original tweet. That's kind of brought me quite far. And then actually at some point I started to pay for it to be

24:38shown to even more people. Yeah. Yeah. Because you know it's effective. Exactly. It kind of like has proven itself that it works organically and and Yeah. that that really worked well. That was also actually before Elon Musk took over Twitter, so I was more happy to pay money for to them. Nowadays, I don't don't do that anymore. Did you try replicating that? Like did were you making more videos, but it was just that original one that was that was really working. At some point I did a new version of that tweet that was like more polished and uh and it also worked really well, but but I kind of like knew that it would work back then because I it it was like not

25:18changing everything about the original tweet. It was just like making it just a bit more polished and making the wording a bit nicer to explain what the app is doing and uh putting like an app store link in there with a campaign parameter that I can actually track the traffic coming from there like stuff like that. And then I also put it out in a couple of different languages at some point. The original was in English I'm presuming. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Interesting. So, okay. I mean really it sounds like product market fit is kind of the thing that was driving that early growth then like the tweet itself was really effective but the reason it was effective was because

25:56it's a need people genuinely have and people were were downloading and using it at this point was it was it a subscription or was it one-time payment? Initially, it was a onetime payment, but I quickly switched to a subscription just because it's more sustainable. But actually, the people that purchased it back then for what was it like 3.99 or something, they still have access to all the pro features until today. I'm I'm super thankful for their early support. So, I'm very happy if they are still using one sec, which a lot of them actually do, they can still use all the pro features that we have added over the years. So once you switched over sub to subscription,

26:32once you realize like this is going to be taking up your your sort of time and you're going to keep investing in it, you're building uh you know bigger and bigger customer base that can fund you. When was the point where you realize like I either need to or can bring somebody on to start helping accelerate things more? I think that was two years after I launched one sec. Okay. And I was spending kind of like my whole day just replying to emails and which is like a really nice I had a suspicion that's often the first hire people make. Yeah, it was like a really nice task

27:12for one sec because most people start their email with like something, oh, your app has changed my life and I'm so thankful for it. Yeah, it's it's very positive. But then of course there's always this like but I'm having this bug and kind of like yeah it it was just too much time and too much energy I to put into that and I felt like I I want to focus on building the product and I don't

27:35want to deal with all this customer support emails anymore or I just can't do it anymore. It was too much. And at the same time, I was making like 10k MRR and I felt like, okay, maybe now is the the right time to start thinking about hiring my first person. Did it feel like scary? It it was scary in the sense of like who am I to tell someone else what they should do with their life? You want to contribute something to one sec, but then I have to like give you feedback and

28:09tell you my honest opinion. And what if I don't like it? I have to tell you that. Uh, and I was like really anxious to do that because I felt like I'm not entitled to tell someone else what they should do with with their time and with their life. But I quickly realized that it's actually a very beneficial relationship for both of us because the the person Lucas that I hired, he was super happy. He was a student back then. He was super happy to have a job

28:35with a very flexible hours. like it doesn't matter if he replies to emails at 3:00 a.m. or at 3 p.m. He can work on the weekend. He can cooler than you know at a factory or fast food or kind of and on top of that he he works on a product that he actually cares about. He uses it himself. Everyone in our company uses the app themselves and they're fans of the app like kind of like everyone is affected by it. And so there's like a deeper purpose in in the work and took me a while to

29:06understand that that people are actually grateful to be able to contribute to something to one sec. Did you already have somebody in mind or were you like I need to hire somebody and then you had to go through a process of finding somebody who fits your work style and has that same passion? The the funny thing is I hired almost all my employees or freelancers through social media. I so yeah if you want to get a job at one sec follow me on Instagram because I sometimes I I just put a story we need a new person uh to join our customer support team. Do you know anyone? And then usually

29:45it's like a friend of a friend or directly a friend and and in the end that just shows that social media is a great tool and I don't want to stop using it completely because there is still a lot a lot of value in connecting us and allowing things to happen. I've always appreciated about one sec and all of your sort of branding around it is that ethos. I feel like oftent times people in this space treat social media like it's like it's the devil like it's like it's a vice even when they have the same type of feature set where it's like like screen time is like

30:19helping you reduce it not completely get rid of it but it's always it's always in this it's like sugar it's like well you don't need any it's all bad but everybody's going to give in a little and I appreciate that you always highlight how like no these are like beneficial things to creating networks in society and for me like keeping up with family spread around the world like these are good things. It's just they're weaponized by uh people who are depends how of course. Yeah, exactly. Like you could say the same thing about the iPhone, right? For me, it's like the best invention humanity has ever done. But of course, you could also argue it's kind of like an

30:56addiction machine that enables social media to do what they do. But I I disagree with that. I think yeah the iPhone is a really great tool and social media is also a great tool not as great as the iPhone but uh still it it enables us to yeah stay connected around the world and maybe we wouldn't have met if social media didn't exist like just enables so many so many things and connections and uh I think like if if you think social media is the devil which I I can agree like they do a lot of evil [ __ ] on uh on their apps to keep us hooked. You can also delete it completely,

31:35right? You don't have to build like complete blockers or something. Just just delete it and yeah, you're fine, right? Or I don't know, get rid of your phone or whatever. You hired somebody to help with customer support and it sounds like that went really well. Presumably did free up your time and and the relationship worked out and then you've done a lot more since then. So, where did you kind of move from then? Yeah, when I had the time again to focus on building the product, I focused also a lot on marketing and I quickly realized that Instagram especially is a great

32:12channel to acquire new customers like kind of like previously how I did it on Twitter. I brought that over to Instagram because of of course on Instagram you have like a completely different target group of of users at least in in Europe or in in Germany Twitter is or nowadays even less but back then Twitter was only really used by journalists and some researchers but like the normal people they they would use Instagram as a social media and then yeah I started making uh content for Instagram as well and was also paying for that content to be shown to more people. And I figure out that works really well because of course

32:53on social media I find my target group uh of people that spend a lot of time on social media and want to spend less. It's kind of an ironic like perfect targeting where it's like the exact group of people that you want. It's like advertising to sports fans on your favorite sports team's forum or something. It's like a 100% of the people are interested in this topic here. Uh

33:17the difference is it's not some niche place. It's the biggest social network in the entire world. Uh but literally every single person there is potentially in your TAM which is kind of wild. Yeah, exactly. I agree. They It's kind of like back when I did red point my climbing fitness tracker for Apple Watch. I was putting posters in clim climbing gyms because that's where my target group is. And I guess subconsciously I took that that learning to one sec as well. And yeah, when I

33:45started doing that, I could see that my revenue was kind of like doubling every single month. And I was like, okay, like this is insane. And next month it was it was more again. And uh then suddenly a lot of famous people discovered on sec and they were putting on one sec in their stories because of course if you're like a famous person with a lot of followers you are even more likely to have like negative effects from social media like the more likes you have the more views you get the more attention you get. I guess you the more dependent your brain gets on all of these and

34:21then you are also much more thankful or grateful to find a solution like one sec and to realize oh this actually helps me and this is really effective and then people are just like okay everyone has to know about this tool this is so amazing and they just made like a video and put

34:34it on their put it on a real or on Tik Tok and uh yeah it it really it really blew up from there. So, you were focusing on that marketing. Did you ever hire people to help with the marketing or is that still kind of one of the areas where you're spending a lot of your time? I hired someone to to help me with marketing, but I would still say that mostly I was in charge like she is supporting me with it. She's also creating content, but we we work together on on our concepts on our and on our ideas because I think in the end marketing is equally as important as the product. And that's

35:10also something I I had to learn the hard way kind of or the I didn't know it from the beginning. But yeah, I quickly realized of course if you build a product and nobody knows about it, it can be amazing, but it just doesn't work. And I I guess that's Apple is also a great example of that. They build amazing products, but they are also insane at marketing, letting everyone know how how great their products are. Yeah, they put a ton of wood behind every arrow. Whereas, you know, a counter example of just as big of a company with Google, they'll throw so many things at the

35:41wall and sometimes they'll make something that you love and you want to succeed, but there's not the marketing push behind it. And even a company of that size, it ends up kind of dying on the vine, uh, which is always depressing. How have you found that transition going from like it's just you to it's mostly just you but you have some help to now you're like a person that's over a big team where

36:06presumably things are happening that you're not even necessarily that involved in sometimes. I think we are 18 18 not 80 1818 people right now. 80 would be that would be a lot. Yeah. I hope that never happens because I'm I'm actually quite happy with the size of the team. I think it's still the size that I don't have to have like a management layer in between. I don't really want that to happen because it just creates so much overhead and you're remote, right? You don't have an office. Yeah, not yet. Like actually Leo from structure, they have an office now in Berlin, which is Yeah. Well, we were talking about that in Finland. Uh

36:43yeah, that's a that's a really maybe need to get him back on just to talk about that. that that is a really interesting step is having physical space. uh it feels like it kind of changes things and yeah depending on how that goes maybe we will do that as well for one sec at some point but but of course it's also super nice to be flexible and fully remote just allows everyone to be super flexible and I I think that's also the kind of people I tend to hire or I was not really looking for these types of people but whenever I was interviewing someone and they showed very strong

37:22independent working skills. I had a good feeling of hiring them because I my priority was always that I don't become a manager. I want to keep working on the product and on the marketing and I hire you because I think that you are really great or much better at what you do than me.

37:42I just trust that you take the right decisions, much better decisions than I could probably take. And of course, we can always disagree about something and argue until we find a good solution, but in the end, I don't want to tell you what your job is. I want you to see the opportunity and execute it and also ask questions about my input. Right? If I say something stupid,

38:11don't just implement that. Then tell me that I'm stupid and let's find a better solution together. and kind of like this. Yeah, these characters I accidentally hired people like or not accidentally, but it was not planned from the beginning, but I I've had my my gut feeling that these people are probably good to have on the team and it it was really valuable for me until today because yeah, I don't have the feeling that I have to micromanage everyone. We all share the vision. We all use the product. That helps a lot. It's a very simple vision. We want to build the best tools to keep people in control of their digital environment. And yeah, everyone agrees and

38:56likes that mission and that makes it very easy to to not have this management layer in between. Well, obviously I think that's everybody whenever they're in that position is ideal. I think growing to the scale that you have, it's rare to to have maintained that, but sounds like the hiring process is part of how you've been able to do that. Yes, definitely. And that's also why I don't really want to grow more now the team. Yeah, because I feel like we have special special skills for everything that we need. And that's so much fun now because I can just execute projects that are much bigger than I would have been able to handle myself. and I can execute them in a quality

39:40that I would have never been able to do by myself because I just know I have like one of the best people here to help me with that problem and to for example we have an amazing browser extension for one sec as well that you can use on your computer and this is built and and engineered software engineered in such a beautiful way and it works so so nicely I would have never been able to do that by itself and it just feels amazing that we can now offer these products in our portfolio but I don't have to be the person who has to learn JavaScript and then like handle all these

40:21new frameworks and so on. Having the financial manners to execute these kinds of larger projects that is a whole new level of satisfaction for myself. I guess I I just love building products, but now having the the ability to do that on a more abstract level to kind of like still be able to influence everything that like and and put my approach into it like how I think a product should work and should look and um should be developed. Then having someone who executes that vision in a way where they still think about what I told them and reflect on it and disagree with me. That's

41:06a lot of a lot of fun. Speaking of people doing things for one sec outside of your expertise, there's another part of the one sex story that is super unique and wild to me and that is you basically have like a research arm that's doing university level research on all of this stuff that one sec is part of. Walk me through like how that came about.

41:34Kind of like the same as always, right? It was a person that loved WSE. They used WSAC themselves. And that guy just sent me an email and was like, "Hey, I'm a researcher from the Maxplank Institute here in Berlin and I love what you're doing with your app." And he he congratulated me to the practical implementation of his theoretical work and he definitely did on purpose. Of course, I read his paper and like I was studying psychology for 10 years before Yeah. No,

42:04for me the idea of once was really just an an impulse and I was like this could actually work. Let's give it as a try. He sent me this email quite early after I published the app like maybe three or four months after it was released on the app store and I was like okay this is amazing. This is kind of like exactly why I love building apps because it gives me opportunities and yeah things that I couldn't achieve otherwise. And then of course I replied to his email and was like yeah let's let's do something together like uh and then we just had a video call and

42:38we were discussing oh yeah can we maybe have like a little experiment in the app where we ask people to donate their data of their first six weeks of using one sec and ask some surveys in the meantime and we were really blown away by the results because we could see that on average the social media time was dropping by 57%. % I was hoping to see like a statistic significant result, right? Something like I don't know 12% or something like where I could say okay it's

43:08statistically significant that one sec works but seeing that it's like cut by more than 50%. That was insane. And how do you how do you measure that like cuz you don't have a control right? Yes. By now we actually did some experiments where we have a control group but back then we were looking at how many times you would try to open an app and we would assume that if one sec wasn't there all of these attempts would actually lead to a session on social media and then we would like look in the sixth week how many times do you actually open it and that comparison was 57%. But we were actually able to reproduce that by having now we we did

43:50experiments that had like a proper baseline period where we were just recording two weeks of your social media usage and then suddenly the one sec intervention kicks in and we were able to see the same effect. So kind of like our assumptions from back then regarding the baseline, they were true. And like all the experiments that we ran, they were always showing numbers around 57% reduction, which is kind of like almost seems like a nature constant of attention that you can steal from someone without noticing it. Yeah. Cuz you know, you did this original experiment, you got that result. Probably a very nice thing to put on your website and kind of help with marketing and

44:28all of that. But you've continued like you said to work with researchers. It's gone pretty big, right? Like you're working with governments and and organizations around the world, right? Yes. It has grown a lot. Like we have shown that one sec as like a a research tool actually works and we we have published papers in quite big journals, peer-reviewed journals that are like well known

44:52in the scientific community, especially like in human computer interaction psychology and so on. And researchers trust us now because we became kind of like a a proxy between social media companies and researchers. Of course, a company like Meta or X or Snapchat, they don't like to share their data with researchers because it's rare that it would be beneficial for them. They know exactly what they are doing. So they have no interest that researchers like look at real user data and can say hm this is maybe not really good that teenagers open Snapchat 10,000 times per week or it's just valuable IP right like or maybe not IP but it's like they even if it's not nefarious

45:37which often it is but like you don't want to share with the other social networks the things that are working for you because it's it's one of your you know competitive advantages or whatever. Exactly. and and one sec became kind of like the proxy in between that allows researchers to conduct experiments and to like observe real social media usage patterns of target groups and we are always super happy to help them because we kind of like in the end we profit a lot from doing research. You have a user base that is both knowledgeable and probably enthusiastic about you doing this, right? cuz like another company that would have this would be Apple or or Google

46:15which Google obviously has their own services so they wouldn't be incentivized but Apple would be incentivized to do this but Apple's can't assume that its users are okay with sharing this data right like they have to be a lot more cautious with that whereas the one sec user base it's like it's part of your whole onboarding experience this is a thing that's important to us they all know exactly what they're agreeing to in that onboarding but that's also not something that we do by default, right? Every research project that we do has like their own consent form. So

46:47it's all approved by ethics commissions at a university and it's always anonymous and opt in. If you ever see a little banner in one sec, hey, we are running new experiment, you can just tap on it and participate in it. And then usually you will donate your usage data for six weeks and answer some surveys in the beginning, in the end, sometimes in the middle. Um that kind of like

47:12we we connect your responses from the survey with the usage data, but it's all anonymous usually. Um so we we don't know who you are. We don't need to know that for our research purposes. Um but but yeah, as you said, nowadays we have worked with the German and the Danish government. We're also currently running something in the UK, a larger project, governmental project and and with a lot of cool universities like Stanford, Cambridge, Oxford, uh the Maxplank Institute, insane researchers and professors working with us and we're all super happy because we as one sec it's not like more work for us if you're testing an intervention. We already have to

47:56like ask the users to donate their data. And for the researcher, they just get access to a gold mine of data they would never be able to access themselves. Putting on the cynical hat, like obviously it's worth doing at a personal level because if you feel like you're helping the world, you're getting to work with all these cool institutions, but just going pure like business mindset. Obviously, the original thing that you did, now you get a big 57% improvement number. or you get to put research back yada yada but continuing to do the work

48:28to work with these people. Do you feel like it's still helping the business in some way? I would definitely say yes. I mean I think it it's also something that you you just have to try like if you always look for only for like the business numbers and you want to be sure that this helps your MR then probably you wouldn't do it. Now in the end it turned out to be like one of the key differentiators because on one sec is the only app uh in the screen time space that has like uh peer-reviewed scientific studies that show that it actually works. There are users that tell me

49:04I only downloaded one sec because I know it's not snake oil. there is evidence that it works. Their government or a university that they trust is working with you like Yeah. It adds this lend of like authority like this is trustworthy. Yeah. Exactly. And and even if you have a lot of reviews then people just think like nowadays on the app store this is all like fake or I don't know this is just like a weekly subscription [ __ ] app and it's really hard to convince people and at the same time you have also therapists who recommend one sec to their patients because they tell us yes like I have used it myself I know it's a good app but seeing that it's even like there is

49:46scientific evidence behind it makes it much easier for me to recommend it to someone that has like problems with anxiety or depression. Like one sec is not certified to help with that obviously, but if it helps, it helps, right? Yeah. Yeah. And if what it's certified to do is help people reduce screen time with these specific social media apps at some degree of efficacy. And so if the the therapist clinically trained blah blah blah is going for that result, they're trying to reduce screen time because they think that that's helpful, then yeah, it's like it's a it's a tool that is known to work in this in this way. Yeah, that makes sense. Exactly. And

50:29at the same time, it it's also amazing for us to develop new features, new interventions in collaboration with researchers. they sometimes have like ideas of things they want to test and then we sometimes have to change around a little bit how the intervention works in one sec for example one thing we did two years ago with the Danish and German government was testing a delayed intervention so the idea is that the intervention doesn't kick in when you open the app but it actually gives you something like 3 minutes per hour of using Instagram and if these three minutes are over then it will show the breathing exercise and you have to kind of like go through

51:07it to unlock more time if you still want it. And it turned out that this modified version of the intervention was super effective with a target group where one sec was previously struggling to be effective with which is namely teenagers and like younger people because of course they have a very high pressure to be present on social media with their peers. They just thought that one sex intervention was too frustrating. So they weren't able to use social media to the degree where they were feeling comfortable that they don't miss anything and they are well connected with their peers. For them it was really too much, right? they were just deleting it again

51:51after like they they would agree that they spend too much time on social media and they want to change something but the original one sec intervention wasn't not what was helping them the right way. So we were thinking about how can we make it less frustrating while keeping the effectiveness high and we ended up with this delayed intervention and we tested it and we saw okay the effect is a little bit less than our 57% it was just 42% but still of course a very large reduction and in the end if the dropout is lower like the absolute time across the target group that you save is of course much higher than before we don't have anything if we put an intervention

52:36that's like super frustrating. You have to wait like 1 hour to open Instagram and people were would just like say this is too much. I don't want this. Exactly. So we would reduce the friction a little bit. Exactly. make sure that the user intervention fit is is more balanced and suddenly people were very happy to use it and because they could just like do whatever they need to do on Instagram but they would also know that they are kind of like protected from scrolling half an hour without even noticing. Now did that idea come from the researchers or was that just an

53:13idea that you had and then you were like oh let's go ahead and do a research project with this idea. Yeah I think most of our research ideas they come from us. Usually our product development is years uh ahead of what researchers want to look at and also researchers they tend to be quite bad at product development. If you have ever seen like apps they develop purely for research, they are horrible. And that's also actually what makes our relationship so attractive for them because they get to test something with an app that people actually use voluntarily. Like right,

53:49you don't have to pay them money to use one sec or to use your artificial lab app. They they use it anyway, which means it's a way more realistic, you know, result as well. Exactly. Last question on the research side. Have you been to any like researcher conferences or events? Basically, what I'm really asking is, is that crowd nerdier than the like WWDC iOS crowd or are we nerdier? I've never really been to like a research research conference. I've been to like a computer science conference where it's like Yeah. It's kind of like the same

54:28people. Yeah. But I really want to go at like one of these psychology conferences at some point. I've been on airplanes with like doctors coming to or from conferences and they always seem so cool and I'm like man I wish I was at the conference they were just at surrounded by a bunch of people like them cuz it seems like one of the things I love about our community is like

54:50we're all nerds right with computers but everybody's also nerdy about other things. It would be really cool to go to one of those events with people who are like extremely nerdy about these sort of research psychology topics and then see all the things that they're also into. I think they are not into much because if you're into psychology like the they are all workaholics. They work so much because they aren't all woodworkers like every software engineer eventually becomes. They don't have the time for that because there is so much competition in the psychology space that like if you want to become successful, if you want to become a professor or something one day, you really have to work your ass off. It's

55:29Yeah, it's makes sense. Kind of a rare thing in the well really in the app space generally, but especially in the indie app space. uh most people don't apply for or hold patents but you do. So what's the story behind behind that? When I launched one sec, it was quite clear that I'm on to something. Especially seeing the researched results, I was like, "Okay, this is actually a really effective way to lower your screen time." And then on one day, I had a friend visiting from the US who who has like a pretty high position in Silicon Valley or like one of the big tech companies, not a startup. and he really recommended me or he pushed

56:14me hard to file a patent for one sec because he knows how big tech companies work internally and kind of like this is the the only way you can protect yourself from getting copied at some point because they he saw and I saw the potential in this idea. Of course, we want as many people as possible to use this. And of course, it would be a dream if this at some point becomes part of the operating system, but at least I wanted to give the

56:45big companies a reason to talk to me first before just copying or stealing my idea. We actually spent a lot of energy into filing a patent because that is a lot of work actually to get into this like legal. Is it just in the US? Yes, it's in the US. It would have would have been way too much uh or way too expensive and also way too much energy to file it in in more

57:13languages. Well, and the effect you're looking for, that's that's what you need anyway, right? Uh protecting against the platform owners, which are all US-based companies. Exactly. Exactly. Or like that that's also our biggest uh biggest user base is in the US. And and of course then it was also super nice that we did the research because we could just quote that in the patent and show like this is really like a significant idea and this is not not a random invention. This actually has an impact and in the end the the patent attorneys from the United States patent office they agreed and they approved the patent just half a year ago. I guess it

57:50took a long time but uh I I was really happy and relieved when they finally sent the the letter. Do you have it like framed uh on your wall? No, they don't actually send the certificate anymore. It's digital, but it looks hilarious. Like it's it looks like it it's supposed to be like a a 3D like with like fancy certificates printed on it. Yeah. I would hire an artist to uh you know create a physical rendition of it. Yeah. Yeah. No, but I think in the end it's it's nice to have that, right? It it makes us a little bit futurep proof. I I just hope that

58:30it it gives uh these big companies a reason to talk to us first before they just do it. That makes sense. All right. Well, uh I think we've we've reached the end of the show here, so I'll ask you the question I ask everyone to end the show, which is what is a person

58:45or people out there that have inspired you and your work that you'd recommend others check out? I would say the whole indie house which we we we didn't even get to talk about that that's just a bunch of friends of mine all indie developers and we always spend the dupdub week together in San Jose or in Certino we rent a big Airbnb and all indie developers all making cool apps but I think like 90% of them have already been on the podcast as like people like Yordi and Leo and Clayman's a hit of course and Paul and like yeah the the whole the whole India house. There are actually

59:20two that I would mention or recommend you to bring on the podcast. Okay. Um, one of them is Zep or I don't know how to pronounce his last name, Widel or Vidal. He's from the UK. Okay. And he is like this private API guy, UI nerd. He knows all about that. And he he also has an indie app, Duet, which is also nice. And um I guess just for like his his knowledge on UI kit and private APIs that would be a fun guy to talk to. And then there is Neil's Ben Schneider who makes an app called Lingo which is a language learning app and we actually also have an integration with one sec with Lingo

1:00:03where you have to learn vocabulary because before you can open Instagram. Ah that's pretty clever. I would say he's like the prototype for an indie developer because he takes so much advantage of his of his lifestyle. Like every time I see him, he lives in a different country. Right now he lives in Panama and he travels with like an Aldi bag. Like he doesn't have a suitcase. He just has like a plastic bag from from the supermarket with all his stuff and that's that's it. That's all he needs. And he he just travels the world. A true nomad nomadic lifestyle. Yes. Yes. He I

1:00:40think he knows what's important about life and that's Aldi. Yeah. Yeah. No, exactly. Aldi.

1:00:51Uh that's great. All right. Well, uh let's go ahead and land this plane. So, where can people find you and your work? I think everywhere on the internet. Um I'm on most social media platforms. I really like Masterone. I'm I'm a bit sad that it didn't work in the end. I think they were too slow to make it like appealing for normal people to use and I I think it still is a bit too too technical, too weird. I really like the idea, but I think the the train has really

1:01:22left that it gets mass traction. But for me, this is kind of like how social media should be, right? I I have zero urge to open master right now because I know there's nothing going on. And I I have maybe five new posts and I can read them. Close the tab again. Macedon has a good community,

1:01:42especially the like Mac developer. Yeah, but but then I of course I follow these people. You're not missing anything. You have no algorithm that puts like stuff you don't want to see and you you just get stay connected with the people you care about. And I think that's how it should be. It's like a non-addictive social network. And that's kind of like how social media used to be. But yeah, I I still think that they they had a lot of opportunities that they didn't use to

1:02:12to make it really work for normal people. And uh yeah, maybe some someday it will it will happen. If you want to get my attention on on something, that's probably the best way because you you're gonna be one of the five people I see when I open the app next time. There you go. All right. Sweet. Well, uh, thank you for coming on. This was super fun. I'm glad we I'm glad that we got to do this uh in our sort of normal setting here, but it was also very fun to to do it on stage and to play play instruments with you. Also, a shout out to uh to the conference to Yes. who organized

1:02:50it and Frank I would recommend everyone to go there next year. I don't know if they already announced it when it's going to happen, but it's a really lovely, really authentic conference with like Yeah, you just see the people put a lot of love and attention to detail in it, but in the like the right things, right? It's not like overpolished,

1:03:10but yeah, just have that they have like this random musician there um like this oneman band. It's just super lovely and well well organized and like putting the priority on the on the right things. Yeah, highly recommend Arctic Conf. Uh if you're if you're in Europe, it's the last couple years it's been in I think February. Um so probably around that time next year. But yeah, I would I would very much recommend it. The vibes are, as they say, very very good. So thank you again uh for coming on and uh for everyone listening, thank you for listening all the way to the end. uh launched as part of the RevenueCap podcast family. Uh if you want to learn more about

1:03:48the growth side of mobile app businesses, you should check out SubCub which is the sort of non-indy more professional side of the house uh run by my uh friend and colleague David Barnard. And for everything else revenue, go to revenuecat.com and for everything launched you can go to launchedfm.com and you can find us on all of the social media uh like we just talked about and it's usually launched FM is the handle there. And we're on YouTube. This is a YouTube podcast now as well. So, if you want to see our smiling faces and see that Frederick is in Europe and I'm in America

1:04:20as his background slowly gets darker through the whole recording, you can do that there. And you can see me through my beautiful new M5 Pro webcam. Upgraded fancy. Last last week, my uh my webcam quality was still much much worse. Perfect timing then. Perfect timing. All right, so uh that's it. I'll see you all in 2 weeks and don't forget to download one sec.