75: Sean Allen

0:03welcome to launched I'm Charlie Chapman and today I'm excited to bring you the prolific iOS development YouTuber Shan [Music] [Applause] [Music] Allen Sean welcome to the show it's great to be here great to be here I uh I miss the background music though the nice yeah yeah well now you made it weird cuz I was going to add that in post uh so it sounded like it maybe give it a little Reverb but uh good we just get it awkward right off the bat and get that out of the way do it yeah yeah all right so I'm super excited about this I haven't just a little background here uh

0:46we've met a couple times since getting here never met before and I've been like awkwardly avoiding asking you questions uh I'll start talking about stuff he's like I gotta leave I yeah yeah literally just like walking away um so I finally get to get into things and something I haven't told you yet is uh when I when I joined the like iOS Community it was kind of a weird thing I'd been doing like web development for a long time and I got an opportunity to do join an iOS team so I was like yes I'm going to jump on that and then I went home and

1:16downloaded xcode for the very first time I literally knew didn't know what anything about Swift anything and the first thing I watched was a Shan Allen video the very first thing the literally actually no I'm lying uh the first thing is I started like I read a couple chapters or a couple sentences of Apple's like Swift book and then I was like all right I'm going to YouTube right to YouTube yeah exactly do you remember which video it was it yes it was the storyboards versus code video and I think that's like it's a perfect example of what I like about your video style which we'll get into here in a

1:49little bit but it was like I didn't know what storyboards were had never heard that word before and you like helped give me the context for a thing so that whenever I was at a meeting at work or something I had some of that context as a like complete new Junior person it was so cool yeah yeah know that's awesome I remember the whole storyboards programmatic debates funny looking back on it I was looking for the title and I was like wow I guess I have been doing this long enough to say that I remember the olden days CU nobody talks about that really anymore I just had a

2:21conversation with Jesse a little last night at the speaker dinner when I guess she mentioned she hasn't really touched UI kit and at first I was like wow how is that possible but then you're like oh yeah s eyes really been out for like 5 years now so it's not know someone can still have a good amount of experience and have never touched you like it yeah so before we get into YouTube and your like Indie app thing that you've got going uh I want to give everyone a background on who you are so the three questions I always ask is uh where are you from um do you have a formal

2:48education related to what you do and then we can talk about your career that like led up to starting your YouTube channel all right let's do it so I'm from uh Pennsylvania small town and and the formal education no I don't have a computer science degree which actually plays in the whole start of the YouTube channel and everything I have a finance and economics degree so the whole reason I even like we out to San Francisco in the first place was to get into like venture capital and all that stuff um but then I learned how to code and that completely changed changed my whole life

3:17um so yeah the career leading up to becoming a developer was working at a small startup I was the growth lead so I'm trying to build these static web pages for my Google ads campaigns um or no I'm sorry had I needed static web pages and then I didn't want to bother my developers cuz it's like a team of three and they're building the product so hey can I have my little landing page so I just learned myself and then that magical moment of I have this idea in my head of what I want to be on the screen you type a couple words and then it

3:45shows up on the screen and it was just mind-blowing and I was like oh this is what I want to do like I caught the bug right away oh yeah it's like an addicting like I don't know if you all have many probably have experienced it themselves but if you've ever witnessed somebody else do it like coding is hard like we all like to say like oh what we do is really easy but when you're first trying to understand these Concepts it's really hard but that moment where like you get something to work and you like your brain lights up and then the extra bit is when it you want to change a

4:13small thing and then you like go back in and you fight that you get that to work and it's just this feedback loop of uh like whatever the drug is in your brain that makes you happy it was just a real Revelation for me because I I didn't start coding till my mid-30s so I just grew up thinking like like you said oh that's magic that's way too hard I could never do that no way and then when I like did it as simple as it was just basic HTML CSS nothing insane but that little moment was like oh this is like we're good I can do this like let's

4:41go and then I was just that's all I did I just became obsessed with it for a little bit so at this point it's web development then right or literally just static HTML Pages yes but I knew that's not what I wanted to do so at the same startup they were building a crossplatform app this is in 2014 by the way um and they built it in ionic which is Javascript I think know what it's called ionic oh ionic I didn't know what it was I just knew the app sucked and I was I was a big apple Fanboy and I was playing with it and I was like I can't

5:09believe like I'm a part of this team building this app like I was like oh my God I'm like embarrassed of it I didn't want to show anybody too so anyway that's when I knew I was like it was going to be native iOS development and it was always iOS just cuz apple apple Fanboy okay so you went straight from like I need to build a static HTML site to I want to do some kind of native iOS stuff what was the next steps like how do you start doing it yeah so at the time again I'm in San Francisco and boot camps you know were pretty big back then

5:37and there was an iOS boot camp called mobile makers that like went out of business I think in 2016 2017 um so I was like one of the last cohorts to go through that um pretty successful cohort though because there's only eight of us I think that's probably why they went out of business but I think two of them ended up at Apple eventually one of them was like a founding iOS Dev on like the coinbase app so they well yeah anything did came like three or four years later but they like at the gate they got they got hired pretty quickly wow so how was I mean how was

6:04that experience i' I've never gone through a boot camp or known somebody personally who's gone through those it was interesting especially with what I do now in like teaching cuz like they teach you the The Bare Bones like they teach you the basics right um but yeah it was just8 hours a day that that's what I say was good about it because we can all say like oh I'm going to learn to code I'm going to be self-disciplined I'm going to do 5 hours a day whatever life happens you know people don't do that it's like when people say I'm going to get up and go to the gym every

6:29morning like okay I'm going to learn a language and then you're like you're just keeping up your street with one du lingo thing exactly so the benefit of the boot camp is you know you paid I think I paid 11 Grand so like yeah I'm going to be there every day 8 to five right so it forced me to like really focus on it for a short period of time yeah that's cool so okay you get through that boot camp what next where you just like I'm getting an iOS job that's what I'm want yeah that was the goal I I applied to like 60 companies which and at the time I

6:57thought that was a large number but then like hearing from a lot of people I was like oh I got lucky um wow but it only resulted in three interviews and I failed all three of them except one of them I thought went well in I'm sorry no I knew it went bad but I knew I was better than that so I told them I was like hey do you have anything I can do over the weekend like give me a take-home project is there anything I can show you my skills because I feel like that interview did not represent like my skill set yeah so like okay cool

7:21here do this you know little take on Project knocked it out in the weekend I guess I like blew away their expectations and then they sent me an email Monday like wow this was very impressive to do over weekend uh why don't you come in I misread the email why don't you come in to meet the team my naive was like I got the job they're going to hire me I missed I missed the part which is basically like the final interview which you've all done final interviews that's the 5H hour you're talking to five different people you're on the Whiteboard so I'm I walked into

7:47that thing thinking I'm just like a little meet and greet Hi I'm the new member of the team and so I did no prep no nothing uh luckily it went well enough that they hired me it probably helped with the nerves a little bit oh yeah until the moment you find out like what you did you're like yeah that's true that's true luckily like obviously the Whiteboard went horrible but the culture interviews with like the CTO and the CEO went very well so I think that's kind of what did it in the end yeah it's weird interviewing like I know on either side interviewing is a hard thing

8:16finding somebody on that side is also really hard but the live coding interviews especially like over Zoom it just feel it feels like you're interviewing somebody on their like code presentation skills not really how good they are at like creating code alone and then submitting a PR or something which is 90% of what we all actually do M yeah yeah that's interesting okay so then you got the job what was what was that experience like like what were you building and yeah so it was it was a company called Breathometer they were actually the first um they were on Shark Tank they were the first to get all five

8:49sharks invested I think they got like a million dollars this is like 2013 and it was like a at the time it was like an alcoholic like obviously thing right do a breathalizer Breyer test thing right so was it aice that you like yeah it hooked into the it hooked into the headphone jack rip um so it would been gone anyway but what they sold me on like that wasn't why I went there they were going to do this um like this breath thing that could detect uh acetone in your breath which for for like you know diabetics or like losing weight anyway was a cool like Fitness

9:16type angle and they brought me on to basically build that app and that was kind of like their next phase that's what they sold me on I'm telling you this because a lot of times startups will like paint this beautiful picture I like oh you're going to do this we raise our series a we'll give you a raise you know so just be careful of that because I got burned by basically I got sold on the one project got put on a different project which is like a oral health thing that I couldn't care less about and then like three weeks after I started our man oh by the way I got I

9:43signed on for 60 Grand which obviously that is different everywhere in the country uh for a developer in San Francisco that is below minimum wage i' would say so the my vice president came up and said okay hey you're you're doing very well we're underpaying you because what they did they hired two of us at the same time and they both gave us that so they were trying to get like a two for one deal two two Junior developers don't know anything for the price of one kind of um so anyway he knew he was like okay we need to not not anything crazy but just market rate yeah yeah um but

10:10again it was the whole series a promise hey we're going to raise our series a next month when that happens we'll bump you up ah yeah ah the series they got delayed uh you know so here we are that was in like February and then we're you know four or five months later still getting the runaround and then finally I was like I'd got some contracts on the side and I had enough to like go full-time so I was like hey I I didn't like Bluff or anything I was like I'm putting in my two weeks you know like I'm out and they like panicked they're

10:32like whoa whoa whoaa what do you want what do you want what do you want so I said 120 and then they came back with 100 and I was like okay um and you stayed on uh for a little bit longer then the as some startups do the company started like falling apart yeah that's another thing about startups I'm sure most of you have like some um experience in it but especially like Silicon Valley and everything you think everyone has their together from the outside everyone knows what they're doing they're a bunch of geniuses and it's just a complete circus behind the scenes like re cat

10:57right reat like re yeah I mean saying it's a circus behind the scenes it's a circus in front of the scenes as well as most people here have probably seen uh yeah we literally have a little spinning wheel and plushies um wow yeah it's very circus-like isn't it um yeah but yeah yeah like any company you go to they're trying to sell you but like startups by the nature of having raised rounds uh one of their skill sets is pitching people so yeah yeah you can get pitched pretty hard especially if it's like your first experience with these typ of companies and stuff so then the next

11:30step is continuing on with me being just naive dumb Sean doesn't know anything about the industry right so I got burned by that and then I was like a year and a half into my career again self-taught just did a boot camp learned on the internet internet I got a recruiter email from Facebook which they recruit everybody you know I think once you're like on LinkedIn for over a year with like a developer job you just get like a automatic email from these compan Bots that are scraping yeah but again I didn't know any better I'm like oh Facebook wants me okay like great yeah so I kind of got not not a big head but

11:57I was like oh I'm going to go for that so I like and I knew this job was coming to an end so I like quit that job and I was like I'm going to spend the next you know month or two just practicing cracking the coding interview whiteboard stuff just basically interview prep um to long story short I went and interviewed at a couple of the big companies and just got like laughed out of the room basically like again the Whiteboard because I don't have a computer science degree so all the types of questions you're going to get asked at a Facebook interview I just did did

12:23horribly on like I don't think I got asked iOS questions really like one time I interviewed at you actually at YouTube even after I had the YouTube channel and they knew I was for iOS and I didn't get asked a single iOS question that's so yeah that's so interesting in the job description is IOS yeah yeah yeah I don't yeah that's really strange but this is actually where the the Genesis of the YouTube channel comes in because I started my YouTube channel cuz I was pissed off and it was like out of spite cuz I felt I went through that experience YouTube YouTube decided not to hire me I'm going to get them to pay

12:51no I'm sorry this YouTube was a few months later this was after the Facebook one um just cuz I felt like like robbed I was like I know I'm a pretty decent iOS developer and I just felt like that wasn't a good representation of like what I could do that type of interview so I was like okay I'm just going to put all my knowledge out on the internet and and someday you know after 2 3 four years whatever someone will just know me and they'll want me and they'll hire me right cuz I it was like a recruiting networking thing it was more than like

13:18I'm I'm not making a business out of this I'm using this to try and get a job no the business didn't come till like I was 3 years into it um oh that's interesting that's the that's the origin of this podcast too like I I was in Consulting like I described earlier and I knew I was going to get sucked back into like the Microsoft tech stack cuz that's why they hired me which would be fair and so I was like I need a job that says iOS but I knew nobody would hire me if I had 6 months of experience so I was like What if I can trick people

13:44to talk to me for an hour on the internet kind of work yeah and it worked right like yeah it was really helpful for networking so so yeah so essentially it was going to be like a whoops um just like an online resume you know yeah exactly basically and like building a brand and all that stuff just to people just building your brand sounds cheesy but just I wanted people to know me and know my skill set know what I could do just show them um so I'm a big believer in like like show me what you can do don't tell me you know bull um but yeah

14:10so that's how it got started and then it evolved into like oh I'm actually like helping people a and like just going to the very beginning what was the beginning like what were you doing were you just uh teaching Frameworks were you like I know all of your current stuff but I intentionally avoided going back as much as I wanted no I mean I so I at the time I was watching a lot of uh Casey niat videos this is anybody that watches YouTube a lot this is when Casey was doing his daily Vlogs back back in the prime um so I started doing some Vlogs about like my life in San

14:41Francisco as like a developer skateboarding and like I did have a booster Bo oh really oh you a booster board wow you really did do the cas I did not actually film on it cuz I was terrified of it yeah that would be scary yeah I wasn't that good at it um talking about uh well I almost said Swift UI talking about story boards on boosted so so I did like kind of Vlogs because I knew that is what kind of made me unique like actually being in San Francisco and Silicon Valley and like kind of showing that cuz again in 2017 there wasn't a ton of people doing that like now you

15:09kind of get that all the time but um yeah so I did that and then also just kind of I always knew to kind of teach below what I knew if that makes sense yeah I I've always tried to not like act like I know more than I do so like even now like my my content's pretty much for like Junior developers pretty basic for the most part um and that's also because I don't want the miscon misperception of like acting like I owe no more than I do yeah and like I know I don't want to feel like a fraud you're you're there's already enough imposter syndrome that

15:36when you're like trying to teach something above your skill level you know so yeah did you find like once you started doing that did you start feeling more confident because like the idea of teaching somebody is like oh I I guess I do kind of know what I'm talking about yeah I mean when you teach something you definitely have to like know it way better than just hey I read the documentation once I built it and work it's working yeah there you go yeah no you definitely have to and in the beginning you know this just the learning curve you know the YouTube comments can be a little brutal and a

16:01lot like really never heard that well well nowadays yeah but they're right most of the time they like oh you messed this up why you why you even teaching this topic you don't know what you're talking about CU you messed up this you know little aspect of it um you know got that a few times in the earlier in the career and that was kind of like a wakeup call to be like oh I need to research these videos more and like kind of like cover every angle like kind of like know everything about the API kind of before I start teaching it so in in

16:24the early days I feel like there was an ERA where YouTubers talking about about how you should approach comments was a Hot Topic I haven't heard that in a while though but you were doing it during that era so it sounds like you're on the you should look at comments and like use them as feedback yeah I mean it's I don't think anything has changed I think I learned and adapted because I I even do it in my courses now sometimes people say like you repeat yourself a lot because I'll like I know you might be thinking about this because it's like I can like hear the YouTube comments as

16:53I'm like explaining something you know after after years of doing it so I always try to like you know head it off at the past Eight Mile it I like address it before they like tell me Tell to me so oh that's interesting okay so you started doing that uh where's the point where I mean I guess really the question is did it get an audience really quickly or were you kind of just making this thing and you were doing it as a fun hobby there was only a couple people watching it mean yeah that's how they all start um it took me 6 months to get my first

17:22500 subscribers okay and then I did a series um my first interview prep series things on like you know deleg protocols or classes versus struck just like the very basic cuz that's what I was doing at the time I was doing interviews so I was like I'm interviewing at all these places here's what I'm getting asked non-stop so I took like the top questions I was getting asked and made a video about each one oh that's really and I would say that's kind of what made my channel you know take off cuz I went from so 6 months to get to 500 subscribers and then another 6 months to

17:51get from about 10,000 from 500 to about 10,000 yeah that's like hockey stick yeah that was that was like a playlist of I don't know 10 to 15 videos I don't know and that that's kind of what got things going what do you think like was the main obviously the content has to be good but in terms of like finding that first group that causes the snowball was that was it like a SEO kind of thing like were you hitting the right questions do you play that game like how's that yeah you have to I mean cuz you know we all go on to YouTube to

18:19search for things I imagine right so you kind of put yourself in those shoes on what do I think are most topics being searched and I knew the interview questions uh once were but I think what differentiates me a little bit and like I'm not saying I'm for everybody right everybody learns differently so there's a you know certain teacher for each like learning style but I think what differentiates me is I learned how like the people watching my content are like I'm going to go on YouTube and learn to code and like that's like exactly how I learned so you know I I wasn't I wasn't

18:45like a child prodigy don't have a computer science degree again I didn't start coding till I was like 32 so I remember what it was like to not know anything be like scared and try to learn how to code from YouTube videos so I always keep that in mind when I'm like teaching things and explaining things so I think that's kind of what differentiated you know my content what made people resonate with me especially people in in those same shoes that were doing that same thing right and you you mentioned earlier like you're still kind of aiming at that Junior midlevel uh developer so does that mean like has the

19:14target audience grown with you or do you like you mentioned repeating yourself do you feel like you're still reaching kind of the same audience it's a new kind of cohort of viewers or something that you're kind of targeting yeah it's interesting cuz there are some people that have been around for like a very long time I see Dan and Michaela sitting in the front row Dan's been around for like day one we're doing live streams to like 10 people wow there um so yeah definitely people have stuck around um there is there is definitely new cohorts uh all the time but it's been fun like watching people evolve cuz now that I've

19:47been doing it for seven years I've seen people go from like the just learning phase to now that are all these like big tech companies like 5 years into the career they're killing it now it's like oh I remember you when you were you know what is that so what you're describing sounds like a little Community is that in YouTube comments or is there somewhere else where you're kind of engaging with the audience uh mainly Twitter Twitter oh yeah yeah yeah there's some people that are uh YouTube comments a lot but it's mostly like Twitter yeah that's the yeah Twitter seems like or well the micro blogging

20:16platform of choice whatever it is tomorrow um but it seems like that's I think guber is says it all the time where it's like that's the best comment system that he can imagine for a Blog it feels like it's better designed for that than the comments under a YouTube video or something Reddit also it for like a different type of audience it feels like could also be that right yeah no I just I like the back and forth on Twitter at least on my back end on YouTube like the comments it's very easy to get lost um because there's no like mention system like when people tag me on Twitter it

20:45shows up at the top of my notification feed I sees it I see it I sees it um I sees it sees it um yeah but YouTube kind of they kind of get lost after a while so usually I'll reply once to YouTube comment and like that's it it's gone into The Ether there's no like back and forth yeah yeah it's not a place for a conversation or for other people early to jump in even though it technically can it doesn't feel natural the same way yeah and they keep tweaking the homepage to move things around and that's confusing yeah yeah that's true so okay so at this point you're getting the

21:14hockey stick growth uh you got your silver button or whatever what is it no no not yet that's 100,000 I think I got that in October of 20122 oh wow okay later okay okay so going back to that though at this point where you like hm this could be like a business business like were you making money already through YouTube I mean you make a little bit on AdSense but it would be like a hundred bucks a month and maybe I would get like a small sponsor here or there for 100 back then like 100 or 200 so it was nothing that I thought I could make

21:43into a business at that point right it took three like three years of growing an audience until I actually was like oh I think this could be like a business um and ALS when you say three year that's 3 years of you like this is a tool for networking and finding a job that was completely how you were thinking about that cor correct y well I just I didn't know what would happen like I knew just becoming known in the community you know for whatever reason like I knew like that would open doors what doors I I don't know right give me no but like I

22:11just knew that it would be a nice asset um cuz it it's like you know your network is your net worth and it's just another way of building a network so I didn't know what would happen from it but I knew it'd be good to have yeah and it feels like a rare thing so you probably want to hold on to like oh I have this I need to not let it go and I mean it is unique I mean there's well now there's more people doing it but at the time when I started there was like four other iOS Dev YouTubers so it was kind of like a unique thing yeah that's

22:34cool so okay so you said about 3 years in it started feeling like it could be a business did you change gears did you change how you're doing things or what was that like um it was so let me go back a little bit because it wasn't until I launched my first course uh that I was like oh this could be a business because I knew it would make a decent amount of money but it like blew away expectations and I think obviously like Co had something to do with it cuz I launched it at the end of 2019 and you know my business did very well during Co

23:03I feel very like bad saying that um but because you know everyone's stuck IND doors everyone's like I want to learn a new skill let me try something I work at an e-commerce site so it was similar yeah yeah so that's when it was like oh okay this is it we can do this yeah okay so oh yeah so then once you decided to do that what was the game plan were you making content based on sponsorship deals where you're going out and looking for sponsors like how do you kind of build this into a sustainable no I I didn't start going out looking for sponsors until actually just recently um

23:33when I just started to kind of like make a push cuz the bad thing and maybe some indie devs can can know this I was um talking to Yi about this last night that once you uh make a certain amount of money especially like an India app where it's kind of on autopilot same thing once I have a couple courses out there like you can really struggle with motivation um cuz you know you can coast and still be fine right it takes a long time until it starts falling apart and then catching back up is like way harder at that point so that's where I'm at right now you know I just people

24:02may know I just kind of launched a new course because my old courses they kind of die after 3 to four years you know if you build something on iOS 13 and iOS 14 especially in Swift UI it's just a pain to go back and update you have to basically re-record everything because it Chang content that you can just go up exactly yeah so the reason I was saying that is you were asking um I can't remember I went like how how did you change kind of how you were doing the the YouTube channel to make a bus so the big shift was going after views versus

24:32going after the right views so meaning I can do a video I my channel could be so much bigger if I wanted it to be because you can just make General software developer stuff like I have some videos that do very well like 37 tips for junior software developers and that gets a ton of views but that's JavaScript developers watch that you know they're they're not buying my courses yeah so now that was the shift and trying to get more views more subscribers which is just a vanity metric doesn't really do anything for you I switched it to okay I'm gonna do this super Niche iOS thing

25:03that is going to drive traffic to my courses or make people think like oh I like the way he teaches and then explore more like on the courses so I kind of focus more on like like for example 100,000 view video about General software development does almost nothing for me or my business but because the way you're making money is through the courses that you're selling so a a YouTube video that gets 1500 views which from the outside looks like a failure oh that video sucked but that's that's 1500 people that are learning from me that could you know Drive traffic to the to the website so it's kind of it again to

25:34sum it up the shift was going after the right viewer instead of any viewer yeah I mean I guess that's like a marketing 101 kind of thing is like you can buy a Super Bowl ad but there's going to be a million people that don't care about your product that see it or way more than a million people exactly uh or you could buy a ad in a like magazine that it doesn't get very many people but the people every like 100% of the people are going to care about your product there yeah yeah that's interesting so that's why you're not like dropping phones on day one to see if they Smash and stuff

26:05yeah interesting okay so at this point are you still doing Contracting work to mix with it or like what's the what's the sort of makeup of the business while you're building this out yeah so it it was just purely videos and courses in the summer of 2020 I did a pretty big project because uh he was taking my course and I told him though like five times he's like I want you to build this app for me I want you to build this app for me I was like no no no so then finally I got around to like okay I'll do it but like here are my terms I think

26:36it was like 100 Grand U half paid up front I you know I just started listing things like if I'm going to do this like it's going it's I'm going to make it so like I'd be stupid to say no kind of thing um so yeah I worked with uh Tim Condon there is over there he worked with me on that project because we did uh um did in Swift did it Swift on the server he handled that oh wow so anyway in 2020 that was a pretty big project uh for me like income wise and then um but that was kind of like the last one I did

27:01after that I was like no I just I wanted to focus on building my business cuz I mean it's a classic saying like if I'm giving someone else my time I'm building their business sure I may be paid well in the short term but like especially with the thing like YouTube and the videos like it just compounds right I always compare it to like just building another brick on the wall um every time I release a video because those videos are out there you know a video I did three years ago still getting good views still driving people to the website so okay so you you're focusing on the sort

27:28of video and training and all of that but you're not at this point really day-to-day building software like for a company or for yourself or anything what how are you keeping up with it how are you making sure everything you're saying is still relevant like what's the method for keeping up with that yeah just watch a lot of wwc videos a lot of um documentation that kind of stuff and yeah cuz I did a lot of like the new stuff that came out too so there's there's not a lot of like no one really knows yet you know right aside from the WC videos and and I guess like again

28:00going with the like the target audience it is more introductory level thing so Mak sense well and also the way I thought about that is just it's like a pyramid right there's way more people looking for the introductory stuff like the more advanced the niche you go the smaller the audience gets right so it's like yeah you can Target those Niche things but it's hard to build a business out of yeah you'd have to start charging way more which that probably at certain niches maybe they have more disposal income because they're more senior but yeah it's probably a lot more challenging I also think and maybe I

28:30don't know people can say but I don't think senior developers like to buy video courses I think they want to like get me right to the answer give me the documentation I don't want to watch yeah I don't want to watch a 15-minute video I don't need that just like point so that's also why I keep it basic because I don't think see typically right in general yeah yeah that makes sense now what seems like it would be really helpful this is a segue for the for the professionals here what seems like it would be really helpful is if uh you had an app of your own that helped feed into

29:00the content that you were making and made that classic Disney flywheel did you ever think about making an app I did I did I did well you kind of let into it a little bit ago about like how do you keep up with things cuz what I started to feel like started to feel like a mathematician that just taught like fifth grade math all day oh wow you know what I mean and it's like well how how I'm not really flexing my muscles like I'm kind of feel stagnant um you know I see everyone else building cool stuff so I kind of made the decision to try my

29:26own Indie app made a huge mistake though uh cuz I learned distribution is the hardest thing which is pretty common knowledge right but me I'm pretty naive if you can't tell I was like I can I can I'm good I'll I'll figure it out I'll I'll figure out distribution you know I have an audience I have like well yeah well but yeah but I made it app for YouTube creators if I would have made an app for if I would have made an app for like a general audience or iOS developers yeah so I guess that's that was the point I was trying to make that

29:51was the lesson learned I thought distribution was going to be easier than it was it was not in hindsight I would have been like okay I need to build build an app for developers or a general app like I'm spoilers uh the job I'm at is podcast app you know everyone in the audience use a podcast or a habit Tracker app or a dark Noise app I don't know if you heard of that one you know anyone it took him a second I caught him off guard um but you know what I mean like a more General app for like the audience so um yeah I did start my own

30:18app but the mistake was doing it you know not in my Niche but it also scratched my own itch I use it every day I built it for myself so what is the app what was the decision point for going into it and like how did you launch it why did you run into distribution problem yeah so so the app's called Creator view it's essentially an app for people making money on YouTube like like myself running a business to track everything schedule content track your income track your taxes it's basically like a business manager tool which is a pretty Niche concept is it hitting like YouTube

30:49apis or like what's how is that a little bit cuz I do I do some basic like analytics but for the most part it's just all I have a little calendar that's all my own stuff it's not not pulling down from YouTube or anything like that um and essentially where that came from is I had a Notes app that had all my business stuff in it or or in the notes app and I had a Google giant Google spreadsheet and I remember like trying to strategize about my business I would have my spreadsheet up I would have all kinds of notes and i' be like there's

31:14got to be like a I wish I had like an iPad app cuz I remember i' be like walking around like looking so that was the original idea was like I need an iPad app that can like do all this and I wanted it to be like nice Apple you know typical stuff so yeah that's what kind of started it and like as you were building it you were kind of feeding that back into the channel right you were talking about it as you started it and how how did you find that experience like that seems like that would be different than the sort of courses and

31:40stuff that you had been doing before yeah I just I just thought it would be interesting um there was no like business reason for it I just thought it would be interesting because I think even if you're working at a full-time job I think most people's dream is to kind of run their own thing I I'm not saying everybody wants to be like entrepreneurial like that but like if you could just wave a magic wand and make your salary building your own app like I feel like we would all kind of maybe in this room but I feel like if I surveyed like my kids Elementary School

32:04class 90% of them would say they want to be a YouTuber yeah so you know you're living the dream you're right next to astronaut and firefighter that's right no but I meant like the developers right the developers had a job like yeah I'm sure you would love to be you know making full so anyway I thought that would be like interesting just to share the process share what I was learning um because the idea was to like shift my whole Channel I I shift yours a lot by the way then this way then this way um so the idea was to shift my channel cuz I was kind of getting bored with like

32:32typical tutorials again I felt stagnant like I said like I felt like a mathematician teaching fifth grade math and felt stagnant so I was like okay I'm going to shift my content towards like indev you know the business of apps cuz that's truly like what I was genuinely interested that's what I wanted to do yeah and then I failed and then the videos didn't get any views because like you can talk about doing it but like unless you kind of have the authority and The credibility of backing it up like I've done this look I've built an app to x amount of money whatever it is

33:00then that has more staying power so you're saying the content itself didn't perform well yes it didn't well it didn't perform well and I didn't perform well so just those two combined uh I didn't meaning the app itself yeah yeah yeah oh that's interesting okay so yeah so the app itself uh you built it it's like really good for your personal use case uh it's a it's an iOS and iPad app iOS iPad and Mac Mac so I mean I use it every day I love it I mean I'm a little biased but I love it and it's like super Niche because it's not just for people who

33:31have a YouTube channel like that's pretty niche as it is it's people who have a YouTube channel that are making like decent income off of it yeah right so it's like pretty Niche and it's hard I know Ariel's still here but it's hard to Target for ASO cuz like YouTube's got to be my title but then that gets a lot of like YouTube people and then people are looking for YouTube analytics like people that are actually looking for a YouTube business tracker that's tough I need to talk to him you need to talk to Ariel yeah he might have some tips for you um oh that okay that's cool so

33:58you you built this out you're proud of it you go to launch it what was your strategy for trying to make this like a success from like a marketing standpoint yeah so the the plan was to try to get to some number 5K Mr 10K Mr something like respectable and then go to partner with one of the YouTube gurus so there's there's a whole YouTube genre to teach you how to YouTube um and they have a giant following so the idea was like and I wanted to get initial TR ction on my own because I didn't want to give up a lot of the company cuz I didn't want to

34:31just pay them to sponsor I wanted them to be a partner in it invest it all that stuff so I was like if I go to them now I have to give them so much cuz there's there's nothing here you know but if I can go and show hey this is making 10K a month it's already got x amount of users you can see the trajectory now if they for one that'd be probably more attractive to partner with for them and then two I wouldn't have to like give up the entire company you know as a percentage okay so you're trying to make this a successful enough thing first how

34:56well that was the plan um um how I just did like Google or not Google adws but uh App Store ads and I guess I never really got to the point where I I was basically I don't have a good answer I I didn't really have a plan that would be challenging cuz you you have a really big audience but that doesn't overlap a lot with it's kind of like I Curtis is here I think I may have literally referenced this in the last time I did this live episode but he talked about in slopes how it's hard to find an audience for something that's Niche that has

35:29nothing to do with the like iOS Community like we all know each other and like 9 to5 and all these different uh uh press Outlets like there's kind of mechanisms for that but if 9o5 Mac wrote an article about your app it's like how many people are reading 9o5 Mac that are also running YouTube businesses four of them four there's exactly four yeah so like yeah distribution feels incredibly difficult it sounds like you had a plan if you could get it high enough and the the goal was to just go with like adverti paid adver I actually just remembered what derailed me took I completely forgot about this so I had a

36:05co-founder in the beginning and it was good to have accountability to keep each other you know like if I didn't feel like working on the app one day he would submit a poll request and I would feel like like oh I didn't anything yeah there it's like a gym buddy right you have that accountability and he got hired at Apple so obviously yeah couldn't compete with that what a jerk yeah yeah he's on the watch Team now um so that really took the wind out of my sales and that derailed me for a little bit and then I kind of like never really recovered from that because then I

36:34switched back to like okay let me get some money coming in uh so I just kind of switch back to videos and courses that's that's kind of what I do I bounce back and forth between courses and YouTube videos and then a a season of working on the app yeah but I have to go back because the app doesn't make any money so it's like I'm putting all my human capital all my effort into this thing that makes no money when I have this thing that is pretty leveraged right with the YouTube channel it's like oh I can do just a little bit work here make a good amount of money or I can do

36:59a lot of work here and make no money so there's that like yeah that's interesting it feels like it feels like you're in a place right now where you're a little frustrated are you proud of the app itself like are you happy that you did this well I'm happy I did it I'm not I am proud but I'm not proud I think we all feel this right because the app you probably have in your head like I I would say the app I've built so far is like 10% of what in it was is my vision so when I say I'm not proud of it it's

37:24like and you know you know all the flaws of your app so yeah I think Jordan Morgan said something in a blog post about that like you're you're too close to it right you you know all the flaws you know what could be better so when I when you ask me if I'm proud of it I'm like oh I can do so much more I want to do so much more um but yeah at the end of the day yeah I'm proud of it but does it feel good to have something out I mean I guess you already had something out there with the YouTube channel

37:46that's going so it's not I feel like for a lot of Indies like me it was like that was our first sort of taste of like there's real people out there that I'm like impacting you know but I guess you get that a lot with the courses and with like you talked about seeing people move into the the community and do well and everything yeah and coming like here like I had so many people come up and just say I just want to say thank you just want to thank you you help you help me out so much and I I've said the same thing a bunch of times but it's like

38:12it's so cool to put like faces to those views right yeah all I is an avatar or just like a view count and it's like you you kind of like intellectually know you're helping people but actually see them shake their hand hear their story like that's just a like I've been very energized by this conference and like talking to everybody oh yeah yeah this place is incredible yeah good um so something like you've done something new just recently related to your career in business you're actually like working for somebody again which it sounds like you haven't been doing for a while not quite yet I start I start Friday oh you

38:42start Friday okay what's the story there yeah I had my course launch and then I had this thing to do here that we're talking about um this little thing um so yeah so I start Friday um but it's uh I wanted to work at a a startup a small team um because you know just working by myself out of my apartment on the YouTube channel just got lonely after a while I have no one to talk to there's no team it's just okay so yeah I was like and again that whole like I feel like I wasn't pushing myself even like my app is nothing crazy right and all

39:11this AI stuff The Vision Pro I was like man I want to be like working in the future again or feel like I'm working in the future kind of thing or like where things are going so I put out a tweet um saying basically hey I'm available for hire you know let me know and I said I'm looking for a cool team cool project I don't know if I said this in the Tweet but in my mind I was like yeah pay me market rate but it's not like a money thing right cuz also when you work for yourself for 5 years working for somebody else again is very hard yeah

39:38yeah especially having the backup like my my tolerance for BS probably be low so I like I don't need this out so I wanted to make sure cool team cool project was like number one priority it couldn't be just a pure money play um yeah so I put out that tweet and luckily the the CEO of this company called podcast AI um building an extra ation podcast app we can get into that in a second but telling the story of how it happened um luckily he'd kind of been a fan of the channel been following me for a while um he had another product in the

40:05Creator space that I like consulted on for a little bit so there's a little bit of a prior relationship so I gave that context to to say cuz I went from tweet to offer in 8 hours well it's you're like 10 years later you're finally cashing in on what you originally started the YouTube channel for Bring It full circle creating a network yeah I was like I was like one day someone's going to hire me just because they know me like that's what I said when I started so yeah 7 years later uh it actually happened yeah that's I mean that's really cool I know like it's

40:34everybody's experience is different and right now I almost feel weird like being really proud of working at Revenue cat cuz I know it's like a hard environment for everybody but it it really is like if you invest in the community um it might take a very long time but those relationships especially if you're being honest and being real and being helpful to people that comes back to help you yeah like I like to say I always internally track like the Goodwill I have with my audience it's like a weird thing as like a Creator cuz when you sell something when it's too high you're like I'm just going to like be mean for

41:06a little bit no no it's like when you if I'm constantly which it probably feels that way now cuz they just launched the course if anyone that follows me on Twitter when I'm constantly like here's my next course here's this right that's all I tweet about you're like draining Goodwill when you do that all had newsletters we read for a while that we like really liked and then you're like well but lately like everything they do is about this product they have right right yeah so I try to keep it internal like level of that and I released a bunch of my courses for free lately put

41:31them on YouTube so I felt like I built up enough Goodwill and launched the course so now I'm now I'm probably spamming the hell out of you guys probably annoyed but yeah I'm in I'm in that mode right now but that'll stop soon um yeah that's funny I mean that's that's how I talk to my kids I talk about uh earning trust and spending trust and it's like you can lose trust as well obviously by doing something wrong but you also spend it by like uh asking for something or whatever and if you do that too much and you're not building it back up it drains out like

41:59that's that's how relationships work yeah so I I mean I always try to give more than like I get that makesense yeah yeah yeah yeah and like I mean having a YouTube channel kind of dedicated to helping right Junior developers get into the field feels like uh it would be fulfilling in that way yeah yeah that's good cool well uh I'm going to try and do Josh a favor here and try to start wrapping up okay so I'm going to ask you the question I ask everybody to end the show I'm going to read it cuz if I don't I'll say it wrong uh so what is a person

42:28or people out there that have inspired you that you'd recommend others check out yeah so there's there's kind of two paths I want to go with this I'm going to say I don't know this person I just we interact on Twitter a little bit and I'm probably going to butcher the handle because it's a Twitter handle it's Aether uh aurelus or something like that I can tweet it out but uh they're young put it in the show notes yeah they're they're a young kid they're designer/developer and it's kind of part of the build in public thing so the two paths I want to go is with the youth so

42:55I don't know how old he is he's in college right so anytime I see like teenagers or super young people like putting in work putting out good apps it just blows my mind like I said I didn't start coding till 32 at 18 all I cared about was dominating in Golden Eye like I did not care about like building a career was like yeah okay you know so it just blows my mind so I get super inspired when I see the youths of the world you know I feel like I just H 10 years like man kids these days yeah but no it blows my mind I'm like oh my God

43:24what I was doing at 181 19 like yeah like the Swift student challenge that Apple does for dubdub every year is the same kind of deal where uh you go and look at their projects and it well looking at their projects is always like really cool but if you've ever been in person and or like talked to those kids man yeah I do feel old uh it's always like they start talking about things that like I I still don't even understand you forget that they're in like high school or college and then they start talking about like finals and you're like wait what hold on this isn't

43:54right yeah yeah they're yeah we're all do I didn't know that about him that he was still in college at the time cuz I emailed him I was like hey can I hire you to like take a pass at my app creator viiew like don't don't Cod it or anything just like take a you cuz he was doing all kinds of cool little interactions like nothing over the top just like the perfect amount of subtle interaction like Apple touch right like that we're all like obsessed with and he's really good at it and he was like I can't for another 6 months cuz I have like finals or something like that I was

44:21like wait a second I was like oh man um so yeah so they used and then the whole buildin public thing um not the Mr updaters of the world but the uh like the people that are actually here's this cool feature I build or here's my new onboard flow or here's the setting screen what do you think kind of thing like I I love seeing what everyone's like building out there and it just makes me want to you know add that to my app or build some version of it my app yeah yeah it's really fun seeing somebody uh who like I'm not like usually one who will click on the

44:48hashtags and read through everything but that is one where when I see one that's interesting I'll actually like click it and you're right like a lot of times it's a bunch of grifters but but then you get those ones where like you can see a nugget of something exciting but it's really early and then like you follow that person and then you know a year later they're like really successful or they've made this really cool thing and you feel like you got to like kind of be a part of it feel like you discovered a band before they got cool yeah yeah yeah yeah that's exactly what it is oh I knew them

45:19whenever they were nothing uh yeah it's yeah it's that is really exciting that's one of the great things about I mean the internet I guess but just being to find people early on in those uh in those paths and then watch them grow so that' be my pleas share what you're building on Twitter or Macedon whatever you're on like I love seeing it I know everyone else loves seeing it too yeah no that's great uh yeah that'll be in the show notes I'll uh I'm probably already follow this person I'll see their I'll see their profile picture and immediately know but I never know anybody's actual handle exactly yeah all

45:49right well I'm going to try to actually wrap this up then so where can people find you and your work yeah so uh just youtube.com/ Sean Allen and then on Twitter Macedon is Sean Allen Dev all right sweet all right that's the end normally there's music but clapping will suffice perfect thanks for listening if you'd like to discuss the show you can find me on Twitter Macedon threads or whatever the social media app of the day is at Charlie M chapman. me we'd really appreciate a rating or review on your podcast app of choice and you can find show notes and more at launched fm.com [Music]