From blogger to self-taught indie developer — Matt Birchler, Indie App Developer

0:00One of the things I really appreciate about building iOS apps versus things on the web is user account management. Oh, it is so much easier. I don't worry about payments. I don't worry about syncing my payment system with my app. Actually selling software on the app store has made me appreciate Apple's cut more than I had previously. I get it now. Welcome to Launched. I'm Charlie Chapman and today I'm excited to bring you the blogger behind Birch Tree, YouTuber behind A Better Computer, podcaster with Comfort Zone, and indie app developer behind a growing catalog

0:36of delightful apps, Matt Bertler.

0:53Matt, welcome to the show. Oh, thank you. Thank you for having me. I'm very excited to be here. Longtime listener, first- time caller, all those things. Very excited. I was I was starting to say uh before we recorded and then I was like, "Wait, we need to hit the record button." That uh your intro was very challenging to write cuz I've always thought of you as Matt, the blogger guy. But then as I'm like writing up my notes, I'm like, my goodness, like the the things that I identify you with at this point is just ever growing. It's like every form of media I consume, I feel like you've

1:28you've kind of worked your way into. Yeah. Uh it it's probably something I should interrogate about myself a little bit of why so many things, why not just focus? [laughter] Well, this is the perfect place to be. Yeah. Thank you for the the kind intro. Yeah. So before we get into I guess all of your projects, although this is kind of going to be one continuum I think, but uh I want to introduce everybody to who you are. So the three questions I always ask to start the show is where are you from? Do you have a formal education related to all the things you

1:58do? And then what was your career like? We'll say before you started blogging cuz at least I think that was kind of the start of your maybe public creation process. But maybe maybe I'll learn that that's not that's not true. I am from uh the suburbs of Chicago. I actually still live there now. Uh moved away and then came back and I do not have a formal education of any kind in sort in any of the stuff that I do honestly [laughter] especially with development. I've taken one class in my entire life around development and it was in high school which was a distressing number of years

2:34ago and was a Qbasic class and I hated it so much that I swore I'd never do it again. And then I came crawling back a decade or two later. Before I started blogging, I didn't go to school for again any of the stuff that I do. I went to school for actually with the goal of getting into like TV production. Uh I wanted to just This is a running theme on this show. Uh so much so that people are starting to make fun of my reactions, my face, uh whenever somebody says that they were in visual effects or film or TV. Uh but it is interesting and I I wonder if you

3:07know you want to do some self- interrogation. I wonder if that field in particular lends itself towards people who do like a hundred different things. I don't know cuz like I I loved it. I did it in college. I interned. I did it for like 5 years and really enjoyed it. When I graduated college is that

3:24so I focused on doing like sports stuff. So I was camera like a cameraman on the field on a football game. I was um the uh the jumbotron replay guy. Um I just doing like those at basketball games. Um just did a whole bunch of like college sports and it was just a lot of fun. Does it ruin sports for you now where you're just like uh you know you're uh analyzing the playback controls of the

3:52jumbotron. It blows me away how good they are cuz it's like if you if you like play sports and you like watch professional athletes and you're like, "Oh, I I can appreciate like how hard that was for them to do and for them to make it look easy." Like that's I feel like how I feel when I see like a really good just like football game um presentation is like, "Oh, they are making this look so easy that they do this like 16 games a week uh all year long. Like it's super impressive." So, it's actually probably made it better for me. I actually have I have a little

4:23bit of experience uh doing a micro version of that at the church I grew up in uh where we had like a three camera system and it was it was very you know simple in terms of what we were doing but like I would direct and you'd have one person running the board and the person running Iris and then three camera people you know and the one that always gets me is I guess most sports trucks have a replay person and their whole job is queuing up replays But like when I think about managing that, uh, that seems complicated to me is like knowing when to do that. And

5:00then they always seem to queue it up at a really good time. And you especially notice it in sports that are a little less polished. I'll say like like MLS uh in particular is one it's one that I follow very heavily and you can tell they're not as polished as the the MLB people for example. But yeah, it's uh that is very interesting. Okay. So that's what you were doing uh kind of as your as your career then? That's what I was trying to do as my career. I should note I graduated in 2008. Not a great time to graduate from college. Um so the job

5:30yeah the job market was uh challenging. Um and the and I was I got I got married right after college. So, like all a lot of the TV jobs that were even remotely available if I could beat the 30 other people interviewing for them were like, "Oh, you're going to be like doing 2:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. and you're going to be like chasing tornadoes." And it's like I that's not the life for me. I'm so sorry. Um, and so I just I did like like retail management, like nothing exciting, nothing that I enjoyed, but like it sort of paid the bills. And then I got my foothold in and so I guess what

6:07how that led to me like blogging and doing that was it was so mind-numbing and unexiting my daily my daily job that I needed this creative outlet and I always liked software. I thought I had a good eye for what good looked like. Um and so I just started writing about it. Um and so I started my blog in 2010. Uh and I've been doing it ever since. And was that Birch Tree? Was that the like

6:32original name of the blog? Yes, it was. It was. And was it basically just kind of like a lot of blogs of that era? Kind of the things I'm interested in, which I assume was like new software kind of Mackie maybe or iOS stuff at that time. Yeah. I mean, it was in the early days, it was very much emulate John Gruber, emulate Sean Blancc, and just try to be try to get viral hits and like try to get people to pay any attention to you and like looking at like your daily metrics on um Mint or whatever the like weird analytics thing of the day was and

7:09be like, I got over 10 today. That was awesome. [laughter] So like or or like oh no I didn't get over 10 because I visited the site three times and I always have to remove mine and it's like when you're when you're at that level it's like it it is it is tough. Um [laughter] but uh yeah that was it for several years and then things eventually got a little a little traction and yeah I'm curious how that happened because you know before I think I remember when you started the YouTube channel certainly I started following very early but before that my memory is you were

7:41one of the prolific bloggers like you mentioned Guber and Sean but like I remember them having the kind of classic blog conversation where people are blogging as responses to each other. I remember you having that with Guber and with Federico Vitici around that era. So you obviously kind of got to that point. What was the path there? Were you just kind of grinding or was there kind of

8:06strategies? In every single topic we talk about today, strategy will not be my strong suit. It's always just been flying by the seat of my pants and figuring out just what what was I interested in writing about, I would write about it. And I really liked again these other people kind of in the space and this was in like the earlier days of Twitter and stuff and like you had a chance to like like get on their radar and to get them to follow you and like I just did it a lot and I was definitely I don't know I I would definitely do the thing where

8:35like you would like just like write something and you're like, "Oh, I bet this famous blogger would like this." And then you like at them on Twitter and be like, "Hey, thought you might you might like this." And you do that enough times and eventually they click the link [laughter] and maybe well and you make something quality or or something that they would be interested in, right? That's

8:53that's the goal. Yeah. Yeah. That's a button that you can hit that backfires, you know, relatively quickly if you over hit it. This is true. And I'm I'm horrible at self-promotion. So like I would do it like once and then like run away and like almost pray they don't see it. like [laughter] like this. This is one of the things I learned early on as well is like uh you want to go viral. You want a lot of people to see what you write on your blog or write on social media or whatever and then they do and then you're like I don't know if I wanted

9:21that. Maybe it was actually nice when only a few people saw it because then you get all this feedback and like people when it escapes your bubble that's like when it gets that's when you know if you've done something like actually good I feel like or like if if it escapes your bubble and people are still relatively nice. Yeah. I feel like posts on threads in particular uh just exit my bubble very quickly and often in my bubble nobody sees it. I I don't know what it is about that platform, but it's the same experience as you get on the other platforms when something gets out

9:50of your bubble where you start getting all these replies that are like they don't know the context that you were talking about or they don't even know at all what you're talking about but they think you were saying something totally different and yeah that can be overwhelming when it's a lot. This burned me many times especially in my earlier years of like not understanding that I am the only one who has read everything that I've written and that like other people have the vast majority of people who would see my site were seeing me for the very first time and this was all the context they had. Uh,

10:19and so I've tried to be very mindful when I write things, especially things that are a little opinionated, uh, that I try to if someone's reading this for the first time, they have no idea what I've said in the past or, what I've done in the past, how would they see this? Can I just make sure they understand a little bit? Uh, that's a useful skill, I think, to develop. Do you find that you've kind of been able to develop some thicker skin to deal with when that happens and people getting upset or have you changed how you word things and that just doesn't happen as often as it used

10:52to? I think I definitely have a thicker skin. I think in the earlier days of doing this, I definitely wanted everyone to like me and I didn't have the confidence necessarily to like if I thought something and published it and some disagreed with it and said here's it's wrong, here's why you're wrong, I would assume they knew better. And like I feel I'm more confident in the things that I write these days. And I think one of the things is also I write a lot of things that I never publish, which I never used to do. It was a volume game. You had to get stuff out there. And so I have a lot

11:26of drafts that I like just never end up publishing because I'm like I didn't make a there wasn't a really good point there or like I heard somewhere someone say that like when you're making like a YouTube video or a blog post or something you're trying to what like what's the person consuming this going to get out of it. And you're usually entertaining them, you're teaching them something or you're trying to convince them of something. And if you're not doing one of those three things, you can still post it, but like those are the three things that you want to do. Like, oh, they they really enjoyed

11:55reading this. It was funny. It was a novel story or something. Or like you've moved them closer to your position. Or just like, hey, here's a thing you didn't know. Now you know it. Don't you feel great? Um, those are kind of the if it's not falling into those, I I tend not to end up publishing it. And so you think of at least Birch Tree, but maybe this applies to kind of all of your things as those are the three things that you can fall into like you're happy to entertain someone, you're happy to move them closer to your position, or you're happy to just teach

12:24them teach teach them something. I think so. I think at this point in my I I am definitely leaning more towards the convince you of something. [laughter] uh which I is is a really challenging a lot of very especially on the YouTube channel. It's a lot of like educational kind of content though, right?

12:40That's true. Here's something that's happening in the world. Here's software I like, but I want you to know more about. And yeah, what differentiates your videos from a lot of other tech videos. I feel like I know we're getting a little ahead, but is that almost tutorial? like I wouldn't call them tutorials, but it it almost gets more into that realm versus like a Mac stories which is very much more like a review kind of thing. Yes, if you want to get into my head. Birch tree and a better computer are completely separate things which is why I didn't call my YouTube channel Birchree. Birchree is

13:13more for me to complain and to be like this is how things should be. This the the world should be better. Tech should be better. this this should work this way or look this person they get it [laughter] go read them so burst tree is more like me working out whatever I'm thinking about which is again usually I like this thing I don't like this thing but a better computer especially in the early days was even more like just here's a feature in this app here's how you use it and then I'm done in like two minutes it got a little bit more you youtubery at a certain point but like

13:46the goal from that one was I don't think people understand how much their computers can do for them. And I wanted to show like here's a cool app and here's what you can do with it. And I just I wanted to show it in a way that was like I'm not trying to be a hype man necessarily. Um but I want to show like here's a thing that maybe that I'm getting value from. I think other people could as well. And here's like a real use case for how to use it. And so I try to only talk about things that I like on that channel. It's very rare that I'll

14:18talk about something I don't like. Uh that'll pretty much only be if it's like a huge thing that like everyone is talking about. Um I did that with a couple of the AI browsers that came out last year. I did one about Opera's AI browser, which was the worst software I used that year, [laughter and gasps] but like it was so notably bad and I was trying like all these like aentic browser things and uh it was notably bad. But yeah, so a better computer is really supposed to be like I would love it if every video that comes out, which is less and less these days because I

14:50have no time. It shows you something new gives you a cool new app that you can try out. And Burst Tree is just whatever literally whatever's on my mind that day. Okay, that actually now that you say that out loud, I'm like seeing it in a way that I had I hadn't really thought through before, you know, as a consumer of all your content. So we've talked about a better computer a bunch. So let's rewind a little bit. you were doing blogging, you were working a job that was not the most exciting and at some point you decided to start a YouTube channel and I'm curious

15:22what the like reasoning was for that and like kind of what led up to a better computer. So I started the channel in June of 2020. So obviously a pandemic project. I kind of oversold it where I said I have zero background. I had been doing videos showing how to use software for a couple years at work. So, I was doing like training videos internally. I was doing like on our uh YouTube channel way back in the day, we like posted like here's how to use this feature and we had like a hundred of these and I just like cranked through them and they were like

15:57oh these are great. And this is at the point you've you've moved at that point into is it project management at a like software company, right? because I didn't have an education in it. I had no history uh work history that was relevant. I got in through uh the support team actually. So when I started doing these videos, I was just a support team member like email and support. I do want to pull on that thread a little bit uh because for a portion of our audience and certainly a lot of people I talk to in the world who want to career switch um into some sort

16:28of software role, whether it be like a QA type role or project management or whatever. I often talk to people who I'm like, "You would do really well at this role that I do a lot, work with a lot at my software company, but I have no idea how people get started." Like all the software engineers pretty much had computer science degrees or went to a boot camp or just like did it on their own and kind of got a job doing it or whatever, but I never know how people get into that field. So, I am really curious. The support role is sometimes the answer I hear. But was that an

16:59intentional thing where you like wanted to get into something in software and that was your way in or how did you think about that? I wanted to get out of where I was and so I was looking around and I did want to get into software cuz again this was in 2015 that I switched over um to the place I'm still actually working today and so this is like the height not or maybe close close to the height of like

17:23Cambridge Analytica. and like you know bean bag chairs and pool tables in the office and we didn't necessarily have that but um but yeah like it was like I would really love to work in tech. I write about tech all day. It's like my hobby could become my job and I'll be just be happy every day. uh and it was you know it's a little more complicated than that but it is a good thing on the whole but anyway so I was looking generally and uh yeah through uninteresting details I basically I knew someone who worked there and they made they were a reference for me and they're like you

17:57should talk to this guy he doesn't have a history but he's worked in again retail management he's like worked with people understands how to do that stuff and I put on my blog I put my blog on my resume and I was like, let's just I think that genuinely, you know, obviously the hiring I'm doing is different than that, but I do think showing like selfotivated work like that can go a long way as long as the work is, you know, quality of

18:24some degree. Yeah. But they were like, "Oh, so you like you understand tech. Okay, this is this is great." And so that kind of got me in the door. And I mean it it it truly was for the first year or so I was there. It was answering emails and and talking on the phone with people who had forgotten their password and who didn't who didn't know how to do whatever. But I've I worked my way into our integration team. So I was working with like developers who were doing API stuff. And then I just I was like, "Hey, I I do videos. Do you want some like

18:54training videos?" And they're like, "I don't know. Can you just do it in not too much time?" And I was like, "Yeah, sure." [laughter] And so made the videos and then that just got attention of some of the other people in the org and you know it was a small company at the time so everybody kind of knew everybody and uh eventually we were growing and needed new roles and it's much easier to hire from within so uh they're like hey and somebody you already know you can

19:19trust to be reliable. Exactly. So yes I've had a very I' I've I like to say I've had every job at the company. Um, I was in support, then I was a product owner, uh, moved into full-time design, and then now I'm a product manager. Um, and that's a role that's changing quite a bit now with all the AI stuff. But yeah, no, that's perfect, though. I feel like those stories are less, you know, unless you happen to know somebody who went through them, it's less known how you can kind of wiggle your way in cuz I feel like everybody in many of these roles has a

19:53totally different way that they got into it. It's like challenging to get started. Then once you're in, you obviously build experience and then you know you can you can kind of continue that from one place to another. This is a lot of professional life I'm learning. Once you get a toe in then you you then things get a lot easier but you just need you need to get in and once you're in it's you know you can do I think that's the majority of jobs in the world probably. But you know I am a software developer, my wife is a teacher and those are both careers that are very

20:24on rails in terms of like you go to school. They don't have to be on well teaching you do but for both of us at least it's very on rails and like you go to school you do this thing then you get a job in this thing and you're a junior and then you move up you know it's like a very kind of linear path or known branches but most jobs are much more made up and less like cookie cutter uh and everybody kind of has a unique you

20:49know path in there. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I def I definitely feel that but it's interesting. Yeah. I don't I'm a very like when it comes to like career stuff, I'm a very like play it safe, conservative, standard, like down the just down the middle sort of guy. Uh I've been at the same company for 11 years, for example. Um and uh yeah, it is a little interesting that like oh I didn't plan for this at all. Like this wasn't I I should have gone to school

21:15for this. I should have planned ahead. But uh yeah, but it can still work out. Yeah, maybe. Yeah, maybe for the the you know kids in school listening uh it's not you don't have to decide your entire life immediately now. It can be helpful but you know uh it can be helpful but it's

21:28you can change your mind. Um but getting back to the YouTube channel then so at this point you are in kind of a tech job. You had done some video tutorial type work with this support role kind of it sounds like. And so was it just like this is fun and so I like the idea of doing this or like why start a YouTube channel and then maybe more pressing why do so much of it because it's pretty prolific. Like just scrolling through your list I'm like my goodness I didn't realize how much you posted. As I get more successful in my professional life I my YouTube goes down

22:02which is the unfortunate situation but uh so it goes. Um, in the early days it made me realize how not stressful my job was [laughter] because I was able to work like before work and right after work and and like just crank them out and like now I'm just exhausted. I just really liked it. I really enjoyed making them. I thought YouTube would be a new and interesting venue. And at the time I was concerned about

22:30money. [laughter] I've never like made a living off like this like my creative work, but like you know I made like some money from the blog and the ad market was crashing like like literally I was making like 5% per month what I was this was in 2020 in 2020 it was atrocious um and so like my blog went from like a nice little boost at the end of the month to effectively zero which was tough. um as like well also there's you know like blogs were cool when I started in 2010 but like people don't really blog like they used to some people do there's definitely like blogs out there

23:09but it's not like the thing um that you would necessarily do and I was like well if I starting today and I wanted to have like this one man show like just creating stuff for people what would I do and YouTube seemed like the thing that worked for me so I was like yeah I can do this YouTube thing I planned on never being on video I planned on doing just like very short, like literally just tutorials. Um, and so that grew a little bit. That changed a little bit, but yeah, I just it seemed like a new outlet to like uh connect with more people. Um, and truthfully, I kind of

23:43wanted to see if I could get some like sponsorships and if I could like review products and like the dream for me, like even when I started blogging was like if I get this big enough, people will just like send me things. Apple will send me iPhones. And uh it turns out no, Apple will never acknowledge my existence at

24:00all. Yeah, cuz the channel's decently large at this point, but I don't recall you doing a lot of, you know, sponsored review kind of stuff. No, the thing I learned is that as soon as because if you have a YouTube channel that has a a remotely decent number of subscribers, you will start getting pitches. you will start getting emails from people and the vast majority of them are from garbage [laughter] products. Uh I started in 2020. Uh soon after that like a lot of like uh NFT projects were like hey would you do a video about us and I was like no I don't want to do that and just like a lot of

24:38stuff like you will get a lot of offers and they will be for things you do not care about and on the rare ch on rare occasion that you get one that you do are like oh this is cool this is great uh yeah of course I'd love to yeah send me the product um there's restrictions or there's like expectations and it's like well you're definitely going to do a review, right? And it's going to be by this time, right? Or like it's uh if you even if it's like a sponsor break or something and they're like, "Well, we need to like approve the script, then we

25:07need to approve the ad." And it's just like all this back and forth. And I'm like, [sighs] "I hate this." [laughter] I went through the exact same thing with this show. I found it was less challenging than I expected to find sponsors and it was more work than expected to manage them. And I never had like a problem one either, which if I would have kept doing it, I inevitably would have. It was literally just the emails and the getting copy figured out and recording ads and making sure I had ones booked for the right ones. I'm like I I in my case it I was using it to try

25:47and pay for an editor which was really helpful because I couldn't keep up with the editing part and then it was just like this is worse. I would rather be editing and it's not that different in time. Uh so yeah, I think some people probably enjoy it. Probably most people don't but unless you're so big that the returns are really big, it almost is

26:06like not worth the work. If it was my job I'd put up with it. It's the YouTube stuff at its peak, which has it dropped a little bit cuz I just don't do it as much anymore, but like even at its peak, it could disappear and my like personal finances would have stayed the same. So, it wasn't like and when I thought about that, I was like, why am I like spending all this time like um and like one of the things for my YouTube videos is I never have a script. I just at best I have an outline where I just start talking and then I just edit it down to

26:37whatever. And so the idea that like, oh, now I need to write a script for this thing. Yeah, it's just, it's just annoying. So, um, I also, this was a weird thing. I somehow got into the like, uh, mechanical keyboard world and was like reviewing mechanical keyboards for a while there cuz I was looking for like the best mechanical keyboard. And I was just like, I'll I'll find the

26:57perfect one. I'll finally be done. I'll finally be happy. I'll finally be happy. And somehow I just was like on all these lists and like everybody was sending me keyboards and like every couple days one was showing up and like we'd see like a long box on the front step and my wife would be like another one. But it like it actually like made me kind of numb to them. I was getting like so many of the thing that I loved and I was like [sighs] here's another one. And then it's like I got to use it. I got to test it and I know this one's not going to be

27:22as good as the one I'm already using. So I'm going to whatever. So, that's an interesting I guess that's like your taste of the big tech YouTubers doing reviews of phones and all that, you know, the MKBHDs of the world. I feel like it must be incredibly difficult to keep your brain in the headsp space of a real user. when you get to the point where like these are just piles of objects that are all very similar and you're honing in on the like most minute of details and like and you probably appreciate this more than others having that taste. But I I have to imagine part

27:59of what makes the people who are so good at it so good is their ability to like drill down and understand some nuance that like is easy to no longer think about when in your head you you see it like in a way that no normal human ever sees these objects because most people

28:17aren't comparing thousands of them. Yeah, that is that is the big thing with like critics of like in any any space is like um I I I saw this thing about like on Rotten Tomatoes they have like the critic score and then they have the audience score, right? And there's like sometimes they're like very different and usually the audience score is much higher and they're like, "Oh, these critics just hate good movies or whatever." And I heard someone say like, well, if you think about it, a critic is watching basically every movie whether they want to see it or not. And so they're inherently watching movies that

28:51they have no interest in. It has to be really, really great for them to even come around on it. Whereas people tend to just go to the movies they want to see. And so they're self- selecting to like most of the movies that they're going to watch because they're not if they have no interest in a movie, they're just not going to watch it. Uh but a critic is that that's the job. And so, yeah, for like someone like Marquez Brownley, he's I'm sure he's getting every single phone that's released, he's picking and choosing which ones he wants to like even review. But yeah, I mean,

29:21especially at this point, like they're all so similar. And like, and if you're a reviewer, novelty would be the thing that matters. Um and you and your with your movie example that's the perfect like you know avantgard you know Oscar bait type film uh a lot of times or maybe not Oscar bait but like stuff bait for critics themselves a lot of times it's like a normal person watching it's like this is just so weird or bizarre and it's like for the people who watch movies all day long it's like they're just craving something to make them feel something again you know um and on the phone side

30:00that's where like your nothing phone or whatever that's like maybe impractical in certain way and I shouldn't say nothing cuz I don't know that much about it but at least early on I feel like they were just trying weird stuff that to a reviewer is like such a big deal whereas to a normal user it's it's a small checkbox but it's like they care more about like normal life and living

30:21with it. Yeah. No, 100%. I think that's probably why f I'm guessing uh like phone reviewers are like folding phones more than the average person. I bet they like like those phones that have like the cameras that like flip like rotate physically rotate around like those things. You just don't see those all the time. It's a new thing. And yeah, it's

30:41100% a thing. I watch 100 movies a year. Like that's that's like one of my things. And so I totally get the novelty thing. Like if it's just like blleh like I don't know. I I'm going to watch another one in three days. And that that actually that's a good uh segue to your sort of next phase of your media empire so to speak here which is at least to my perspective and this is another one where I'm curious if you'll correct me if I'm wrong but you talked about you weren't an engineer this isn't your background but if you go and you search Bler on the app store you're going to

31:14see a bunch of apps and the first one I remember uh from you is directly related to your love of movies, which is quick reviews, which is an app, you know, I adore this app because I adore this style of app. It's a thing I think more developers I wish they focused more on, which is the app is basically designed around being essentially screenshottable. I know you have an export, but like the idea is that it's giving you images that you can then share on social media in the very native format of a JPEG, you know, bit map images, and they're perfect for every social media platform. Um, and

31:54it's a way for I'll let you actually describe the whole thing. I'm already waxing poetically, but this style of app and this feature within existing apps, I think, is a really cool thing. So, I'll let I'll let you explain like the history behind this app, like how you even got into, you know, deciding you

32:10were going to try making an app. This is my favorite app. Uh, it was my first app that I It's my second app I've officially released in 2017. I released an app. It was a weather app. Shocker. Um, it was horrible. Um, [laughter] but I did technically release that. But, but my first actual app, yeah, was uh early 2025 uh quick reviews. It is an app where you just you can review things, movies, TV shows. It's optimized around movies, TV shows, and video games, but you can also do books and anything else you want. And the idea is that you have a image of the thing

32:43you're reviewing. You have the review on the other side, and you just give it a score of one through one through five and it exports an image, and you can post it wherever you want. And I had been doing this for several years before I made the app. It was originally a sketch document that I had [laughter] that I put together. And so I would just open up the sketch file. I'd duplicate the artboard and just like change everything around to review uh whatever I was doing next. And that was okay, but I needed to be at my Mac. It was only I could do it. I couldn't like people

33:20would always ask like, "Oh, what apps using to make those?" And I was like, "It's not an app. It's it's sketch." I got the the bug to figure out This is before LLM. So, this is all just Stack Overflow and everything. I figured out how to make a very simple like onepage JavaScript app. Uh, and I made a website quick reviews. And had you ever done like HTML JavaScript

33:41development before that? Sort of. Uh, because I'd been blogging and I'd used WordPress for a lot of my early days. I'm very good at HTML and CSS. I think I am better than some of the developers that work at CSS. I love CSS. It's my favorite. Um, yeah. Well, and we'll get into it in a second, but we didn't we I forgot to bring it up during the YouTube thing, but like you also I think you even

34:01described yourself as a designer now. And you had that role you mentioned earlier at your company. I did. Yeah. Yeah. And that's all just selftaught as well. That's selftaught as [laughter] well. Yes. Um Okay, I'll stop pulling on that thread and going. So, I made I made a little website very simple jQuery everything. Like I didn't know how to do anything else, but I

34:20could figure out jQuery. That's a name I haven't heard in a while. I know. Yeah, that's what a lot of people said when they saw the source code. Um, [laughter] it worked. It worked. Hey, that's all that matters. So, I did that and it got a little bit of usage, but it really only worked on the desktop and I couldn't figure out for a long time how to like export an image. So, I was the use case I gave people was like just screenshot it. Just take a screenshot. Um, and that that worked all right, but again, it was only on my computer. I didn't have any

34:52history um because I couldn't figure out how to do off and I didn't want to do database stuff. It was literally essentially Twitter or Mastadon or whatever it was. Exactly. Exactly. Wherever you were posting these and so then I was like I'd love to make an iOS app but I don't know how I would do it cuz I' I did the weather app years before and it was so my brain just

35:12didn't click. Was that Objective C or I guess that would have been Swift? It was in the early days of Swift. I think it's when Swift was announced where I was no long I was less intimidated and I was like this is a good time to jump on board and give it a try. Pre-Swift UI auto layout existed but it was confusing. I didn't I

35:30couldn't really figure it out. Well, that sentence was true from the point auto layout came out until you today I think. Okay. [laughter] And that's coming from somebody who likes auto layout. But yes, it's it's definitely confusing. Yeah. Um, I I was trying I was trying to like plant my I was like I know CSS. I can lay out HTML beautifully. Like I know exactly what I'm doing there. And I was like trying to make it work and it just wasn't getting there. I was effectively Yeah, that weather app was effectively the equivalent of like laying out your HTML in tables. Like that was the equivalent of what I was

35:59doing. Like it was it was rough. It's a feat to get an app in the store though, even a bad app. uh especially with no software engineering background at all, but even for somebody who's been doing web development for a long time, there's something about writing something in a language you're not familiar with and then getting it through all those processes is alone a feat. And I have to imagine that was still helpful even if in some ways you felt like you were

36:23starting over from scratch. Yeah, I I think I think so. Like at the bottom of my list in App Store Connect of like all my apps right now, right at the bottom there's uh today's weather no longer or developer removed from sale. [laughter] So I'm always reminded of it. Um, but at this point you had Swift UI at at Swift UI was a thing. It was I think it was a little young, but it was in its second year or something maybe. I forget exactly, but like Swift UI, I know

36:49people hate it. Some people hate it. It has saved me. It is so easy for me as like a newbie to like get going. Well, and as a web person, it's so much more familiar, right, to use a declarative UI framework like that. 100%. So I knew that existed. I wanted to give it a go and there was this new thing called cursor that was like hey these this this AI can help you. Um and I was like okay we'll see. Um and I like the very first thing I made was just like an app that let me enter my weight connected to health kit and like would

37:21log it just like can I do anything and I got that working. I was like, "Okay, okay." And I started working through it and it took me, you know, like a month and a half, I think, of pretty hardcore focus on it. But it's actually remarkable how much more rudimentary like AI coding was a year and a half ago. Like it was so hard. It was like you had to tell it to do one small thing. It would screw it up. You'd have to do it again. And like it would like do everything in one swift file. The

37:51entire app would be in one swift file. and you'd have to remind it like you might want to do a second file and it's like oh I never thought about that but I I figured it out and like I'm actually really happy I had that experience of doing this first app with like AI but very rudimentary AI like you had to get in there and I was in there I was writing a lot of code still even as an iOS developer if I'm working on something relatively new especially I kind of just don't even look at the code and and then I'm uncomfortable with how much I just pushed out But like you

38:23couldn't really get away with that back then. Absolutely not. Yeah. Cuz it would it would do crazy things. Yeah. Exactly. Um but like you you kind of I had to had to like understand like I I definitely understood how that app worked like at a very core level that I think helps me going forward cuz like not only does it help me with that app cuz I know what the data structure is, I know like how the views work and everything and how they interact with each other. It helps me on these newer apps where I'm using like immensely better tools to generate the stuff for me. I understand what to ask

38:56it to do and how I will know if it's doing the right thing. Yeah. Um because Yeah. It's not like it like it was at the beginning where you would tell it to make a a simple function, it would screw it up. Like you can do incredible things where it'll just like go and grind for an hour for you. [laughter]

39:14Um, and that's very scary. And it actually understands like Xcode projects and stuff in a way that those early versions it just did not it did not know. It knew Swift, okay, but it did not understand what the project itself was. Yeah. Yeah. So, um, but yeah, that's basically that was the thing that got me over the hump is like, okay, cuz I I I liked Stack Overflow, but learning from Stack Overflow is really hard because I because I don't have a again, I wasn't going through like courses or anything. I was like just the way I learn code stuff best is through just like having a problem to

39:49solve and figuring out how to solve it. And so you can copy paste from Stack Overflow, but like their problem is always slightly different from yours and they maybe assume that you know something that you don't or you have something set up already that you don't and so like you like do what they did and then it doesn't work and you can't figure out why. that AI like LLMs are remarkably good at even if literally all they did was exactly what Stack Overflow did in terms of the output. They can contextualize it where you're at at any given point. And that to me was like one

40:21of the biggest things. And probably with cursor, even in those early days, it was good at that. Yeah. Cuz I could be like, "This is what I'm trying to do. This is this is like the error message I'm getting or like you're using the wrong words cuz you don't know all the words yet." Exactly. And it's like figuring it out and it's figure again like you said in the context of my app this is how you do a curl request like it was very basic stuff [laughter] like how do I make a request to this API endpoint like it was very very simple stuff but like it knew the API I was

40:49trying to hit it knew what data I needed to pull and like it was yeah talking about the app specifically I mean you're mentioning API requests but the original version of this was a sketch file where you're presumably just changing text and stuff so what API requests was even needing to make. Yeah. So, that that was the big thing is with the sketch version and the web version, you would have to bring your own uh BYO poster image, movie title, metadata, um like what year did it come

41:19out, who's the director? You probably had to set the colors yourself then to had to set the colors yourself. And now, like, oh, it's it's so cool. like it I'm I'm genuinely like so it makes it makes me very happy to use use it now because it's powered by the movie database um TMD DB which is an incredible resource um really really cool that they exist at all and are very generous with what they let you do with it but basically when you type something into the app it's searching that and it's returning a list of whatever and you say it's this one and that API has everything it has

41:54here's all the movie posters for it here's is all the cast information. It has an enormous amount of information about like everything. And so, yeah, quick reviews just pulls all those in. I figured out how to do like uh color detection. So, it figures out the primary color of the movie poster and automatically like themes the review to that. I figured out how to do complimentary colors so that um on so there's like a review background and then there's the score and the score has a little background color on it, but that needs to pop. So, I figured out how to make that the a complimentary color

42:27that'll always pop. The text is white or black depending on contrast ratios. And there's just a lot of cool stuff. And like you used to have to do all that manually. And so now in the new app, it's just you just type in a movie and it works. The way I actually use the app myself is I have it hooked up to my letterboxed account where I do the social stuff as well. And so I review it on letter box actually. So I actually never even type anything into the app really. [laughter] I just post to letterbox and then I open quick reviews and there's a way to hook up your

42:57letterbox account because letterbox does not have a public API but they do have an RSS feed and so I'm using the RSS feed to pull in your recent reviews and it automatically syncs those in um and does all that same logic on it like pulling all the metadata and stuff that you wouldn't necessarily get from letter box. Do you have word count like limits for quick reviews? Cuz it has to fit in

43:21that frame, right? Or can it grow? It does have to fit. Uh I don't have any limits. When you do the review, we there's a slider so you can like you can make it fit. Ah, okay. Okay, that makes sense. Nice. That is one of my white whales is like when they if you write a really long review, have it automatically make the

43:38text exactly the right size or whatever. I have not figured out how to do this yet. This is like one of the hardest fable on that, you know. Maybe as we're recording, I think I have two days of Fable left unless they extend another week [laughter] as they always do. I mean, I we kind of already described it, but it's like the reason for doing this as an app is because you could just Well, I assume it sounded like the reason for doing it on the app initially was because you wanted it on your phone and you couldn't really do the web version. But then I wanted my phone. Yes. Then there was

44:08just a ton of convenient features you could add because now it's a native app that's just easier to kind of build all this stuff into. Yeah. One of the things I really appreciate about building iOS apps versus things on the web, which I've also done since then, is user account management. Oh, [sighs] it is so much easier because you don't have to have it. If you don't want an online account, then everything can just be local and you don't have to like hold users information. And yeah, I don't worry about payments. I don't worry about syncing like my payment system with my app and like understanding if a payment

44:47fails. What do I do now? I need to like actually selling software on the app store has made me appreciate Apple's cut more than I had previously. Um I think 15% is probably a good number. Um I don't want to go back to 30. I'm definitely not arguing for that, but I get it now. I do think there's some real

45:04value there um that they're bringing. And speaking of that, uh also like your web version was just a free app sitting on the store, right? Or sitting on the web. And this one, while it is a free app, there are purchases inside of it. Was that part of the initial release or is that something you kind of added at

45:21at a later point? That was one of the things with the initial release. Um these APIs, uh there's a few other APIs I'm using there. they aren't necessarily free or may not always be free. Um, and so I wanted to make sure all of these projects do not lose me money. So, I'm trying to break even on them. So, there was a subscription all the way all the way from day one. Um, all the stuff with like pulling things from the movie database that and letter box like that's all behind the payw wall. So, basically from day one it was if you liked the web experience and just wanted it on your

45:51phone, all that is here and you get history and you get just a nicer experience on mobile. But if you want these added features, it's 10 bucks a year, which I thought was effectively nothing if you're doing a lot of this. So, is it similar to YouTube and the blog in terms of like this is now part of your sort of mix of not your full-time gig, but like your sort of side hustle uh money or like or has it really not done anything and it doesn't even necessarily

46:19feel worth it? It definitely feels worth it. It is. I would say at this point if I if my reputation was based on the revenue the things made the software would definitely be the number one thing a pretty big margin actually at this point my development stuff is definitely the biggest like it's more revenue than like YouTube or the blog did you expect that I hoped for that I guess [laughter] I don't know that's fair I guess it was the more the latest one you did so you always hope the newest one's going to be bigger than the the later one you do yeah I mean that was always the

46:51hope, but it was never. Yeah. As with most of my things, I did them it because I wanted it because I was like getting walking out of a movie theater and I was like, I'd like to write that review right now, but I have to wait until I get home. And so, okay, I'll just write

47:03an app and we'll solve the problem. Easy peasy. Exactly. And I was like, well, let's see if we maybe someone will buy this and then we'll just throw in inapp purchase there and see what happens. It sounds like that's still kind of your biggest app, but since then, uh, as I alluded to at the beginning of this, you've released a whole bunch of different apps of different degrees, I'd say, of, uh, what feel like you had an idea of something you wanted and you made it and you went ahead and released it to like more robust things. Did you like catch the bug and you just kept making apps or

47:32like what was the sort of story behind all the apps you've been building since then? I would say the development bug has bit me hard. I've talked with um Chris Lawley, one of my co-hosts on the Comfort Zone podcast, big YouTuber. He's got into development recently as well. And the thing like I keep telling him is like once you like can solve your own problems, like any problem, it is so liberating. It is like it's it's just incredible. So like I'm kind of shipping my own productivity system in a way. My podcast workflow uses I have an app called quick subtitles that generates high- quality subtitles for

48:12files. I have a one called chapterize which is for adding chapters and metadata to your podcast episodes. And I use those like two to three times a week. And every time I'm like, ah, this is a friction point or this is that's annoying. I don't have to like just hope that it gets fixed one day. I just like open up Xcode and I fix it and it's done and I have the thing that I want and like the more I feel that like the more just like it it's just an unbelievable feeling when you get in that loop of you run into a problem with software and

48:46it's annoying and then you realize that you can make this little tweak and fix it and then forever more it will be easier for you once you have a hammer everything's a nail kind of thing gets into your brain and then it's like it It definitely can be very very addicting. Uh especially if you have the infrastructure in place to be able to

49:03just kind of keep doing that. Yeah, that's literally I'm on my app store connect right now and I'm slightly overwhelmed but um yeah like yeah I well I wrote down I think I have all of them listed. I'll just say it. So quick reviews is the one we talked about. Uh you have a lot of quick apps here. So there's quick reads which is like a save articles read it later app. Quick notes which is like a dictation app. quick subtitles, which is doing transcription and giving you SRT files. I'm assuming you use that for uh your YouTube uh and videos and stuff. Um and then chapterize, you already talked

49:37about Weave, which I don't know how I missed you releasing this, but I am a Typfully user, and Typefully is an app for uh posting to lots of different accounts, but it's a web app. Uh and so they have Yeah, there's no mobile. I don't know if it's like a religious thing for them because it seems crazy to me that they they wouldn't have one uh for especially for social media posting which is what it's for but weave is a client for typefully like an iOS client which I didn't even know was a thing you could do as far as I know it's the only one on iOS uh they have an API they have

50:12a very powerful API that lets you do most the things you can do on the web client and I was like like you I was like I love Typefully but I'm not always at my Mac [laughter] And so I was like, "Yeah, let's let's see what we can do with this." And this is easily my smallest app. Uh because it is for people who uh it's just for Tyful users. It's not for all social media users, but um but like it's it's very nice and I use it on a regular basis. Like anytime I'm crossosting, I'm using I'm using my own

50:40app. And again, it's it's the same. Immediately replaced the typefully uh like progressive web app icon on my on my home screen. So uh but I'm a new user. So if you start getting like, you know, bug requests, sorry about that. Or not requests. I won't be requesting bugs. Bug requests. Yeah. Yeah. I could really use some more bugs. You also have best uh best o masto which is essentially giving you an algorithmic timeline for mastadon which to mastadon people who really love mastadon might seem crazy but for people who find mastadon infuriating in a lot of ways and one of those ways being discovery in particular uh is actually a

51:18really clever app I feel like uh and I wish there was more things like that in the mastoverse I guess um and I think that's I think that's all of them that's all the ones I have written Wow. But maybe there was one I missed. There's one more. It's There's one. You missed one more. That's fine. It's called yearly run goals. I have one called yearly run goals cuz I at the start of this year I was like I'd like to run 365 miles. I want to run an average of one mile a day. And I didn't know how to track that. And I like downloaded a bunch of workout apps and

51:47none of them really had this feature of like running towards a goal and like showing you a graph as you go. And I was like, I can make that. [laughter] I have a hammer. And so I made it and it's uh and it's it's it's great. It's what I use. I've got it on my phone like and again it's the same thing like I will like pull it up and I'll have a question like like yeah it's like right here. It's showing me my progress for the year and I'm like oh when um what am I in pace for? I'm ahead of pace but what's what

52:16am I actually on pace for? And like I okay added pace and like but yeah it's literally this is all of my apps is I have a problem I want to solve it. I tend to do the same kind of thing, but what I found is, you know, I have an app that solves my problem and I use it and I get in that flow just like you're talking about. From that stage to the release on the app store is like a big hurdle because at least to me there's this feeling of like

52:45um now I have to support it forever. There's like this, you know, getting support emails is a is like a burden to me and it feels weighty. So I usually sit on most of those unless it's like this thing that I can kind of I think like this is going to hit for whatever reason. What's been your experience? Cuz it seems like you tend to release once it has you know value which is what I would advise people to do but you seem to like you do that. Have you found the sort of weight of having these apps around has been something that feels like a burden or is there a way you've

53:18worked through that or just not at all? I don't know if it's a burden yet. If we go back to YouTube, I know a lot of people who will like do a YouTube video, finish it up, and then they'll schedule it for like next week because they post on Mondays. When I finish a YouTube video, I publish it immediately. Once I'm done with something, I like to get it out in the world and that and that's it. Like, it's it's it's out. I don't like having a backlog or a queue or whatever. And so I think once I feel like it's useful to more than just me

53:53and a lot of these like you mentioned like I named a lot of these quick like I especially early on I was definitely naming things to like make it very clear this is a simple app. This is not a big thing. That does make sense now that you say that. Uh it kind of signals like

54:08this is a get in get out type app. Yeah this was the idea. And so they're very utility. They're like utility apps. Like these were big in like the early app store in a way that like like we talk about super apps now. Um like all the things that you know slowly got sherlocked. It was like if you saw an opportunity in the in the iOS ecosystem for something that the system probably should do, people would just make utility apps that kind of filled that

54:32role uh for a long time. Exactly. So I I just I just I like to get them out. I have been doing to my credit I don't release everything. Um, I've been doing a series of posts on my blog this year called uh about micro apps. Uh, because I like early this year I was like, this was after, again, this is after Claude um, Opus 4.5 came out in like November last year and that was like the AI model that like cleared a hurdle where we're like, oh, the code is actually very good now. Um, and so I was like, I think 2026 is going to be the

55:05year of people like just building these micro apps and like figuring out I want to solve this problem. I'm just going to sick an AI bot on it. And so I'll make these like tiny little things. I made like a tiny little Obsidian plugin um to format my blog posts. Um I just these like teeny tiny things and I just don't release them. Um like maybe I'll use them on my computer, maybe I'll stop using them after a couple days, but like uh there are some things that I don't release. [laughter] And actually my uh I have a folder on my computer in my home directory just

55:34called apps that's at 99 folders right now. So there's a lot of stuff here. They aren't all like things that I've built, but uh there's a bunch of like weird stuff in here that I've played around with that never went went anywhere. Someone built an API for or like a a thing for processing F1 race data uh in a cool way and I was like,

55:54"Oh, I'll make a visualizer for that." And then I just failed miserably. So, that one's not there. And so, there's there's a whole bunch of stuff here that never really turned into anything. But, um yeah, I don't know. It's it's definitely that that bug of I see a problem. I see a friction point and I just hm can I can I fix this and sometimes I think I can sometimes I

56:15uh think someone else can do it. We've talked [snorts] about you know your plethora of your media empire as it were but so far you know your blog your YouTube channel and your apps are all solo endeavors. Uh, so the last big like, you know, totem piece of your media empire from at least my outside perspective, um, is not a single one-person thing. It's it's a partnership and you alluded to it earlier, but you have a podcast. Uh, do you want to talk about the origins of

56:45where that came from? Yeah. Um, so the podcast is Comfort Zone. Uh, it's hosted by me, uh, Christopher Loi, and Neil. Um, Neilan uh wrote for Mac stories. She's big on Mastadon. Two great people, some of my favorite people in the world. And we just talk about tech. Uh, and the idea of the show is that we want to get out of our comfort zone of tech. Uh, and uh, this one started uh, cuz Chris and I had kind of known each other for a long time. Um, just in in the same world, but never really together. Never really talked to each other outside of like

57:22love what you do. Okay, bye. [laughter] And uh we we talked about doing something for a long time and we eventually got this idea and we were like um we will only do it if Neil will do it with us. We were like Neil would be the perfect third person on this and uh and she said yes. So we did it and yeah we've done uh we're recording episode 110 shortly. So we've been doing it for a little over two years. It's a lot of fun. It is definitely the most just like pure fun of the projects um that I get to work on. And it is cool

57:53to have a team on that one cuz like that that is definitely the grind of like the iOS app stuff especially because you can't just like release an app. You have to you have to have a marketing page. You have to have a privacy policy. You need to have terms of use. You need to like have all these things that Apple demands you do uh to deploy them and then you need to market it and you have to do all those things. So like you're the developer, you're the marketer, you're the administrator, you're the sport person, you're everything. So, it is nice to have a team in this case

58:20where uh Neil is the social person. She makes sure people know about the show and she posts all that stuff. Chris is the editor after we record. He's the one who does all the editing and then I based on the apps that I've made and the uh I don't even know what the role would be, but the producer. I get an MP3 file from Chris and then I turn into subtitles and the nice file that shows

58:42with chapters in your podcast player. So, it's a lot of fun. I'm always jealous. You know, I obviously love doing this this show. That's why I've done it for uh getting dangerously close to a 100 episodes at this point. Actually, this might be episode 99 uh whenever it comes out, which is kind of wild. But the weird thing about this show is while it's serving the purpose of my original goal, which was to trick people that I want to be friends with into talking to me for an hour and a half, uh it's different people every single time. And there's there's a lot more, you know, I wouldn't say there's a

59:18lot more work, but it's just a different thing to get into it. And like starting the show is is almost like at the beginning of our show was us building a little bit of rapport and then usually very quickly you're just kind of hanging out and it's super fun, but then I don't get to do that again with you in a week or two weeks. It's a new person. And I love doing that, but I'm always jealous of the sort of camaraderie and then like the growth over the lifespan of a show, which you've been doing for is it getting close to two years or is it a

59:46year? A little over two years. It's over two years. My goodness. Uh so like doing a show with the same two people for two years, it's like it becomes home in a in a way, right? like you have inside jokes and the audience is actually part of those inside jokes and you know what you're getting into when you start an episode or at least I assume you do. I I don't actually run one of these. So maybe this is all just me uh you know uh looking over the hill and thinking no I mean that is I don't mean to make [laughter] you feel jealous but very

1:00:17often we will sign on like we start my time we were start recording at 10:00 a.m. I will often sign on at 10:00 a.m. on the dot and before 10:01 not even a minute passes and we're like Chris is saying welcome to comfort zone like we just we just really do get into it. That is definitely a nice thing. Um there's running jokes. It's very fun. it it that part is easy because like we do have uh we use notion to like write show notes for ourselves and we kind of know what everyone's going to talk about but it's it's pretty simple [laughter] and all things considered

1:00:50how does that compare do you feel to your other work all three of them which is like extremely you know you're pushing the boulder up the hill until release point and then it you know goes over versus a show that kind of it's more like you're on a treadmill or I don't know what the metaphor is, but it's like pulling you along. Like you have to stay on, but it it's a machine that you're like a part of. Even with this show, I just described it as if this is all this work that I'm doing, but really I'm just hanging out and I do a little bit of

1:01:22show prep, but like I feel that is one of the things I love about this show compared to most of my other creative endeavors, which is like there's going to be an episode that comes out. I'm going to get on this train or I'm gonna miss it and that's just going to happen. Whereas everything else I do, I'm dictating the terms the whole time and I have to push to keep it moving. Even though technically that's true with the podcast and well a little less so now that it's part of a kind of network and I have editors and stuff but for a long time I was doing literally all the work

1:01:53but it felt like I was being pulled through that work in a way that's very different than you know even YouTube except for the people like you described who are on this schedule. I think YouTube might feel similarly, but the way you do YouTube is it's like when you have an idea, you do the thing and you push the thing through, which means every single piece of work you're doing, you're you're like making it happen the whole time versus it kind of sucking you

1:02:18through the process. Okay, we've gotten deep. Um, yes, you said you wanted to get into your internal psyche. Uh, yeah, self-examination. [laughter] Oh boy. I guess what what I would say, which I don't know if this is fully answering, but is kind of where my head's going, is I definitely have a tendency to want to do things on my own and control things on my own. Especially when I am doing things with a good team,

1:02:47it is really nice. It is very nice not to have to worry about everything and not have to do it all yourself cuz Yeah. Like I mean for example, Chris and Neil are much funnier than I am and it's very nice to have them on the show. Thank you for agreeing. It's [laughter] very nice to have them on the show and like they will vamp and they will find the funny bits that I may have just like walked by as I'm trying to tell them about how a

1:03:14network attached storage uh thing works. [laughter] That's very naturally funny. Naturally funny. So, it is it is nice not not just like on the like, oh, it's great that someone else edits the show, but it is nice to just have the mental uh being able to offload some of the effort of like, yeah, I don't have to be every part of this. I don't have like with with the software, I need to do all the things, but it is it's great to have

1:03:40someone behind you sometimes as well. So, I think a mix is good for me. Um because it is I wouldn't want someone telling me how to necessarily make these apps for example like I like having the control of like that and like when are we releasing and oh did you communicate this like that's [laughter] very um annoying for me uh yes communication is is very annoying to me [laughter] which is interesting because you do a lot of it uh as I do I do hobbies yeah when communication is like the job that's when I get like gh. But anyway, I I think a mix is probably

1:04:17good, but it is definitely less of a mental load when it's multiple of you. Maybe it changes if it becomes like a huge like if it like this was our job. This was like all three of our careers and like it actually really mattered that we got sponsors and held on to audience and we're consistently growing the audience. It might be a little bit more stressful, but kind of like uh what you described like it is just a guaranteed hour of the week where I get to talk to two of my friends and that's great on its own. Ah, that's great. All right. Well, uh I think you know

1:04:51speaking of trains that we're getting off and on to uh our train is about to reach an end here. So, uh, before before I let you go, I have to ask you the question I ask everybody to end the show, which is, uh, what's a person or people out there that have inspired you and your work that you'd recommend

1:05:06others check out? The first name that came to mind for some reason is David Smith. Oh, yes. And I think it's because he is also someone overflowing with ideas and is going to put them out there. [laughter] I feel a connection um to him. I've also followed him for a million years. Yeah, he's done a bunch of like podcasts and stuff that I've really enjoyed too. Such a great like feel-good story too of somebody who if you followed him for a long time, he never lost that like one of us feelings cuz even through the, you know, sort of mega success of Widgetmith once once that blew up, I don't feel

1:05:47like he lost that that personality or edge. He still shares his thoughts pretty raw, you know, not in podcast form anymore, but in in blog form and yeah, he's and he's just a kind person, which is, you know, the community can always use more people like that. Yes. So, so that that's that's that's who my brain went to. There's plenty of people, I'm sure. Like I I already said I I definitely straight up copied Daring Fireball style blog post. I think Sean Blanc was uh the first person who made me realize like, oh, your like side hustle could be a career, which I've never done, but I was it was like a

1:06:24really eye opening thing of like, oh, there's like a whole new thing you can do [laughter] if you uh really put your mind to it. And so that was Yeah, that was really inspiring uh years ago when I was getting going. Ah, perfect. All right. Well, uh, where can people find you and your massive plethora of projects? [laughter] You [clears throat] you you can find me at birchtree.mme. It's my blog. It is the oldest thing that I do. It's also probably the thing I'll be doing after everything else goes away. So, that's where I post about everything. So, birchtree.me. Nice. Nice and easy. All right. Perfect. All right. Well, thank

1:07:02you all uh for listening uh or watching if you're watching on the YouTube channel. Um, so Launched is part of the Revenue Cat podcast family. If you want to learn more about the growth side of the mobile app business, you should check out the Subclub podcast hosted by my good friend and colleague David Barnard. Um, and you can check out revikat.com to learn about the easiest way to grow and monetize your mobile app business. And of course, learn more

1:07:26about Launched at launch.com. That's all we got for you uh this time. I'll see you all in two weeks. Bye.

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