18 years of App Store paychecks – David Barnard, Launch Center Pro & Sub Club

0:00I have received a payment from Apple into my bank account every single month since September of 2008. And it dawned on me at some point that I must be one of only a handful of people in the world that could say that. Like same bank account, same company, not same app. James Thompson, I think, is the only person who for sure has me beat because it's the same app, same company, and he's been in the app store since day one. Welcome to Launched. I'm Charlie Chapman and today I'm excited to bring you the longtime iOS developer behind Hit Apps, Launch Center Pro, WeatherUp, and many more. And the host of the Subub podcast, David Bernard,

0:51David, welcome to the show. You forgot colleague. Colleague. Yeah. Well, I mean that's true. The most important part of you as a person in the app, you know, community is your uh relevance and connection to me. Yeah. I think exactly. So, I want to start this off by asking you, are you a big milestone person? What are you celebrate milestones? Are you a like, you know, it's our,

1:18you know, halfyear anniversary of when we got the dog or whatever person? Then no, obviously. I thought I thought you were talking about like a uh agile framework or something like you know when you're developing apps you set milestones and neither. This is my very professional segue into celebrating that this is the 100th episode or like real episode of Launched which if I'm honest feels kind of crazy when I actually sit back and think about it and I feel honored to be your hundth

1:50guest. What is the current episode count or do you know the current episode count of Sub Club? I think it's in the 180sish closing in 200. So yeah, to you you're like a hundred episodes like wow for me uh this is it's it's been a crazy kind of long journey. When I started this I knew hardly anybody and that was 2020, January of 2020. So, right before the pandemic started and it's kind of spanned this crazy, you know, it was like every week for a while and then it was every other week and then I got real jobs that well I had real jobs the whole time but I it just took over

2:28and I couldn't keep up with it and now we're on this like real cadence now that I'm you know your colleague and part of the the Revity Cap podcast family here and it it feels good but it's kind of it's kind of wild to have gotten to me what is like a big milestone episode count. Yeah. Well, for six years now, every two weeks and I don't think I've missed ever except for like a delay because we were doing a live stream and it gets released later. And not only that, I've done like 25 mini episodes now that got interspersed with the uh state of subscription apps report. So that

3:02that does inflate the number a little bit. Yeah, definitely different paths uh through all of this, but we'll get into we'll get into all that. But uh to everybody that's uh listened, a lot of people have been listening for a very long time. Thank you for continuing to join me in all these all these conversations and I hope to continue doing this for a long time cuz this is like one of the most fun parts of my you know kind of every other week with my job is just as I've always said tricking people into hanging out with me for an hour which is you know very well is something

3:32I really like to do. Well, Revenue Cat apparently tricked you into being a lifelong employee because with Launched now being part of Revenue Cat, you'd have to start a whole new podcast if you wanted to continue if you leave. That's true. True. Yeah, that's true. But anyway, all right. This isn't about me. The reason I have you on is because we can make it about you, Charlie. Yeah, that's really Thank you. Finally. You're the first in a 100 episodes, you're the first person to finally get it that this show podcast host. like I'll just interview you on show 100. That's what we should have done. Yeah. Yeah. We Well, we did that. So, Stephen Hackett came on uh it was a few

4:11years ago now and interviewed me about Dark Noise, which was kind of a weird surreal experience. That was pretty fun. Actually, I think that was right after on Sub interviewing me on uh Weather Up. That was fun. That's true. Yeah. Yeah. This is a very like I almost said uh Yeah. I don't know what the right word is, but we've all been on each other's shows all over the place. But anyway, the reason the reason I thought you were like the perfect person to have on for this episode is one, I felt like I could get away with a little bit of naval gazing, talking about myself,

4:43talking about kind of the parallels between our careers that we're at now, but also, you know, through the course of doing the show, I've talked to a lot of people through all these sort of different eras of app development in in all these different forms. And you have been there from the beginning. you were like right there at the very beginning. You've sort of both lived through and been a voice in the community through a bunch of these different eras. And so I'm excited to like sort of pick apart at those, look back at all these different times in your career and kind of how that relates to everything we've really talked about on the show for a long time. So I'm excited

5:19to get into that. I was thinking before I'm going to hijack your show for a very special purpose at WWDC this year. it popped into my head that I have and I thought of this before. I think I tweeted about it maybe like a year ago or something, but um I have received a payment from Apple into my bank account every single month since September of 2008. And it dawned on me at some point that I must be one of only a handful of people in the world that could say that. Like same bank account, same company, not same app. James Thompson, I think, is the only person who for sure has

5:56me beat because it's the same app, same company, same and he's been in the app store since day one, which later Well, of course, but like paid like like like money has gone into my bank account from Apple for 18 years straight. And so I'm hijacking your show just for a sec while we're on the topic because I was mentioning this to somebody at Apple at WWC and they're like, you know, next year is the 20th anniversary of No, sorry, 2028 is the 20th anniversary of the App Store. So I'm I'm at 18 years now. This month, actually, just just a couple weeks ago was my 18th year anniversary

6:38of having an app continuously on the App Store. So, we may do some kind of like get together, some kind of maybe even like a panel if there's only like two or three of us. But those of you listening to this show, I know James Thompson. I'll get in touch with him. But if you can think of people who have continuously been on the app store since those very early days, ping me because I would love to work with Apple to do something super fun and special at WWC28. I think you might get a decent, you know, crowd for something like that because I think there's more people than you

7:12think. The amount of people I've talked to here that, you know, released an app within the first year to my surprise cuz I didn't think of them, but they didn't really enter the community until later, right? um always surprises me because there were only what a thousand apps that launched and so James Thompson again it may be one of the only ones to have had it continuously since launch day maybe like Icon Factory but they've kind of come and gone and people have like sold their company and like there's a lot of people who've been around but it's like they they had an app for a

7:47while and then they removed it and then they built another app like you know again I I very much look up to James Thompson. He's so incredible in other ways as well. Have you had him on the show yet? Okay. He was my third guest, I think, or fourth guest. The first week I released an episode every day for a week to launch the show and he was uh he was on that which was crazy to me. So, so I think I'm kind of cool for having been around 18 years, but James had an app out for what Mac uh what was it even called back then? Mac OS 7 in the '9s. So he has had an Apple platform app continuously

8:26closing in on like 40 years which is or 30 years uh which is just crazy. Yeah. With a brief stint at Apple. So I don't know if he is allowed to have a external actor in that time. He worked on Watson the like Sherlock you know that whole origins of of those uh terms. Yeah. If you want to know more about, you know, this story, I think it was episode four of this very podcast and we went through all this history. But man, yeah, you you really kicked us off with the naval gazing quickly

8:55on this one. I did. All right. Well, before we get too far into that, we will get back to this topic. Uh, I'm sure. Uh, I want to introduce everybody to who you are. So, the three questions I always ask to to kick off this show is where are you from? Do you have a formal education related to what you do now? And what was your career before you started making apps? All very interesting questions. Um, so I actually grew up in South Texas in Brownsville near South Padre Island, Bokeh Chica, Sarbase, where Elon is now launching all the rockets. So it used to be like, where are

9:34you from? Like the tip of Texas. Never heard of it. Now I just say, you know, where Elon's doing all the crazy stuff in South Texas. That's where I'm from. So I I grew up like swimming and surfing and fishing all around where Starbase is currently. And then do I have a formal education?

9:50No. But yes. So I actually studied sound recording technology which was kind of a weird degree plan. I knew since I was like 12 I wanted to work in the music industry and specifically be like a music producer engineer. And so Texas State is was at the time I think the only four-year university in the world that had a full recording studio as part of the like it was part of campus like it was a campus building like this recording studio and the the director of that program who I've stayed in touch with a little bit since you know this is like 26 years ago that I graduated um but I I've

10:30come to very much appreciate the structure of the degree plan because he he wanted to give, I think, a well-rounded college education because there's not a lot of jobs as a recording engineer. So, all of us, you know, hot shots come in and we're like, "Oh, we're going to make, you know, hit albums or whatever, but it's like there's just not a lot of those kind of jobs around. You end up doing like live audio mixing or like working a production company." So, we took I mean,

10:58we took electronics and had one like intro to computer science course. We did multimedia stuff. We did a video production class and all this kind of stuff. And what was really cool about all of that is that even though I wasn't like studying, you know, coding or app development or anything, it it was that kind of end toend production process of like, okay, I have an idea or I have a song, right? I worked in multimedia direct, what is it? Adobe director, Macromedia Director,

11:27I think it was at the time, the precursor to Flash and like burned a CDROM that was like interactive. And so there were a lot of projects based classes that I ended up taking, which I think did actually prepare me to work on apps because you had to think end to end and kind of take something from, you know, a rough idea like a a song on a napkin to like, you know, pressing it to a CD. So, not directly related, but surprisingly relevant. Thinking back, I even took a design class. I took a like I was working in in design in the '9s. So, so but it was like one class. So,

12:08I was just recently talking about this actually with relation to my kids in like I feel like they don't have at their age. They aren't doing as many like take-home projects, which apparently they do when they get older and that's all fine. But I was thinking about how much the projects I did through school, even if they're completely like silly and they weren't reinforcing what the lesson was or whatever, it's the act of like doing the end to end thing like I got to have this thing done by this time. I need to get materials. I need to put this together. The glue has to set. Like all these

12:40little little things. It's like it builds these frameworks in your mind that you can completely translate to completely unrelated fields just because you've now like built something end to end. And I think projects in school like a lot of people do capstone projects. I think those are some of the most valuable things you do in school forces you to ship. Yeah. The that final, you know, 10% that takes you 90% or whatever. like actually doing that is so valuable no matter what the actual, you know, underlying skill you're doing it for is. So yeah, so you got an audio engineering degree, but well, I guess you are podcasting now, but not exactly, you know,

13:18mixing albums for people. So what was the what was the translation from that into building apps? So I did actually become a recording engineer and did was a freelance recording engineer for um five six years. So there there's actually music I produced and mixed that's still on the Apple Music store and Spotify and places like that. I actually heard a song that I recorded on the loudspeakers at the Austin airport. They do like a local thing. It's like the Austin airport radio station. And I'm sitting there and I'm listening. I'm like, and it was a cover song. So, I'm listening. I'm like, "Oh, that that was that's probably the original." And then I listen a little

14:02more closely. I like, "No, that's the one I recorded. That was pretty fun." Oh my gosh. So, that I think about that all the time when people talk about wanting to see their apps in real life, like on the subway or something. I'm like, that is that is our industry's equivalent to, you know,

14:17hearing your own song on the radio. Hearing it at an airport, though, feels even cooler, honestly. Well, in some ways that's cool because it was like, you know, Austin was it was all about like kind of supporting local artists and so the song is not like something that would get played on anybody else's like pop playlist. It's cool in reality when you think about it, but it's more cool in the like you're in this like professional life setting and then all of a sudden you just it's like it's like seeing your app on a billboard in Times Square. Is that actually as important as being featured on the app store? No. Is it a hundred times cooler? Yes. And I I think

14:52it's kind of like that. It's like something about that setting just feels like that would be very cool to hear. Yeah, it was fun. And and then it was fun just the the kind of throwback of like, oh yeah, back when I was like creative and had this like weird like what do you do? I'm a recording engineer. And then now people ask what do you do? Like I work in tech. Yeah. Yeah. It's better than saying I'm a podcaster though. Let's be honest. I never call myself a podcaster. No. I know. Yeah. Yeah. That's like the least cool thing you can say, I feel like. Yeah. Brief

15:25history of the Sub Club podcast. Jacob, our CEO, and Corey, our director of marketing at the time, had to practically beg me to start the Sub Club podcast, which is funny because now, I mean, it has done really well and like people seem to really enjoy it and get a lot from it. And it's,

15:41I guess, kind of my like claim to fame now in a in a lot of ways in in the broader like app space. Um, but they had to beg me because I was like, podcast? Really? Like, who needs another podcast? Those are going nowhere. Yeah, exactly. Uh, but that was further in your future. So, at this point, you're recording music that's going on to be super famous and played across Austin airports all over Austin. Yeah. So, that's that's a like that was your career then. That was your main job. Yeah. Yeah. And then that's the transition into apps is that I was making no money. Uh just

16:16scraping by. I actually worked part-time for my dad's commercial real estate company remote just handling some other tech stuff and doing promotional materials for him and stuff like that just to like make ends meet. And then I got married and my wife was working 9 to5. And when I was in the studio, which was, you know, hit or miss depending on whether we had clients or not,

16:38but when I was in the studio, I was working like noon to 2 am, like very musician schedule. Sometimes like 300 p.m. to 3:00 a.m. for the for the guys who really, you know, had the the gig life where they they're uh would just always go to bed late and do their best work at like midnight. So, it pretty quickly became apparent that, you know, if we wanted to start a family, if we wanted to see each other on a workday that I would need to find a new career, and I'd become a massive Apple nerd in the studio days, you because I I had a a MacBook Pro to do live recordings and and we

17:19used a Mac in the studio. I was using Macs in the 90s at the uh university. And so I was following Mac Rumors and Daring Fireball and like all these like old school I stuff that's not even around anymore like Renee Richie's iife Mashable. What was before Mashable? The one that was more focused on like apps in the Apple community that was in the that may have been before my time although there's a bunch you know in gadget obviously used to be way bigger. Oh yeah. Read read the live streams of them live blogging Apple keynotes before Apple would uh stream them. So anyways, long story short, I was such an Apple nerd that when the iPhone came out, I stood in line or sat

18:00in line overnight with my brother and was first in line in San Antonio to get an iPhone. If you've seen this picture on Twitter, I love posting it every year. Uh I was in the news the next day with like this goofy face holding up the iPhone. Um and then the funniest part of that story, I've told it before, but maybe your audience will find it amusing. My wife was staying in San Antonio with her sister and mom just randomly the same night that I stayed in line all night and she woke up the next morning to a newspaper. And this was back when they still did this kind of thing,

18:32print newspaper in front of her door with her soon to be husband on the front page holding an iPhone. The big goofy grin. Uh, that's fantastic. So that first year with the iPhone, I I was just so blown away and again told this story many times, but my dad and uncle when my brother and I were online, my dad and uncle are business partners. My brother was working with them at the time and they were

19:01like, "Oh, get, you know, get get us one, too. Like we want to be cool, like get us one, too." And and so they allowed you to get two iPhones each person in line. So I bought one for my dad, my brother bought one for my uncle. And I remember when they got those, you know, he was in his probably 50s at the time and he just took to it like a duck to water. And I was so impressed by that. And so I think, you know, a lot of people just the whole like multi-touch, ease of use and and those kind of things. But I feel like, you know, having, you know, done

19:33some design, some interaction design, you know, some some of my background, then combined with, you know, having helped my dad for 20 or 25 years at that point, since high school, I was kind of his tech support, seeing him take to it like a duck to water really impressed upon me that first month of the iPhone, like this is going to be huge. And so being, you know, somewhat entrepreneurial, I was thinking from those pretty early days. I think toward the fall of 2007, I was thinking like, okay, like what kind of business could I build? And then I actually was listening to I think it was Mac Break Weekly with Leo Leor and Amber MacArthur. And I remember them

20:16talking about Yeah, I I I don't know if Amber's probably not there anymore, but I remember them talking about the early Facebook app wave and that there were people who just kind of rode that early wave. And that specific moment crystallized for me like this is going to be almost like a generational opportunity to be at the cutting edge of a new wave of technology. And so I know like in hindsight you can look back and say, "Oh, David, you're you're like polishing up this story and like you know hindsight bias and all this kind of stuff." But I swear to you and actually I I have

20:52the receipts. I wrote an investment proposal in my company and my dad and my dad mom and uncle did invest in my company and I have an investment proposal that just lays it out. And here, you know, 18 and 1/2 years later, I I pulled it up like 6 months ago and I like, you know, not to like too much here, but like that's what this podcast is for. I was just so excited about the platform. And so there were rumors in the fall of an SDK and then Jobs eventually confirmed, yes, we're going to do an SDK. And so from the fall of 2007 on, I was jotting down notes of what

21:35I thought I could potentially build, thinking about business plans, reading every blog post, following the jailbreak community. I ended up buying a second iPhone just to jailbreak cuz I was really scared to jailbreak my main device. I bought a second iPhone and jailbroke it. That wasn't until after the invest I actually used part of the investment from my fan because I was broke recording engineer, remember? But I used part of that investment to go buy a second iPhone, jailbroke it just so I could be playing with all these experimental third party apps in the jailbreak scene. Um, which like I don't think I mean this is part of the history and maybe

22:10you know part of why you're having me on. I don't know a lot of folks these days even know that that happened that that in those early days and it was insane. I want to pick at that a little bit too. Like you said you got an investment and a lot of people nowadays are like you got an investment to be an app developer. Like what is the what is the money that you needed? Obviously you said you bought a new phone but like but what was it that made you think I need a cash infusion to be able to try this out? What were you using that for? Were you hiring people? Like what was the thinking

22:44there? Yeah, I took very little salary, but it was if I'm going to build a business, there are things I will need to spend money on. And at that time, you know, my wife was working in a nonprofit, barely making any money. Like, we were just kind of scraping by and I was banking barely any money. We didn't have a bunch of savings. We didn't like, you know, a lot of people these days it's like, yeah, you're working your cushy like, you know, 250k a year programming job and and starting your side hustle and like it's just a completely different world for me in 2008, just broke as could be, barely any money coming in. And so if I were going to stop making this

23:28poultry amount of money that I was making and you know spend money, I would either have had to gone into debt or or taken an investment. And that's where I put together the investment proposal. I mean it's like a four or five page investment proposal. And I had kind of talked to my my dad and uncle. They actually work in commercial real estate. And my greatgrandfather was a this is the way they always tell it a a broke farmer who got into real estate just for him just to make ends meet. And then my grandmother ended up buying the real estate business from him and then

24:02my dad and uncle bought it from my grandma and now actually my cousin bought it from my dad and uncle. So it's like now this fourth generation company, but I grew up around, you know, very entrepreneurial people and, you know, sitting around the family dinner table and family reunions and stuff. Everybody is talking about like, oh, we're going to buy this, you know, land and we're going to put a a storage unit on it or an apartment building and we're going to this, that, and the other. So I was just around that my entire life. And then I was working, you know, in my dad's company from early days. I mean, I was like 12 or 13, like just helping any way I can and like

24:35filing stuff and making copies and everything. I think that's one of the things that I have always found interesting following you as long as I have and then since we become co-workers, we talk all the time. I think Ryan Jones fits in the same kind of bucket where a lot of people who get into the kind of the indie app development scene are like you said coming at it from they have they already have an engineering job relatively cushy and then the idea of putting money in to the business is like scary and completely not a thing you even think about because it's like everything you're doing is just kind of like bonus. It's just time. And what you have always been,

25:16I feel like a good example for me on is how like it's okay to spend money to then, you know, push things forward or help you make more money, you know, farther down the line. And it sounds like that kind of it's just ingrained in how you think about things. Um, as well as the fact that you're coming at things from a slightly different angle. And and so, you know, back to that that story, I wrote this investment proposal. They had already kind of been saying, you know, they weren't by

25:42any means like, you know, wealthy or anything, but they had, you know, they had more savings. Turns out though, they actually they had bought some gold for the the 2000 1999 2000 like, okay, things are going to get crazy. Like, we're going to buy they each bought like $10,000 worth of gold or something. And then that had like tripled in value. And so they actually like dipped into that and sold a little bit of that those like gold. They actually had like physical gold coins in

26:10a safe deposit box. David Bernard's app journey begins with dipping into the family gold trust. It sounds so much like if that's the headline, it makes you sound like you're like a son of a baron or something. That's hilarious. No, I never thought of it quite that way, but that is exactly what happened. Uh, I mean, growing up, I was like very like my my parents had to get a loan from my grandparents to even get a house to afford a house. And like I grew up very like kind of middle class, lower middle class. And my dad has done well for himself, but most of it was like after

26:49I left for college. And so I did not grow up with a silver spoon in my mouth or anything like that. Um but anyway, so so they had kind of always said like, "Hey, you know, if you ever want to do something entrepreneurial," and I've been telling my kids this as well. It's like, you know, we'll figure out a way to dip into savings or retirement or whatever and and you know, help get you started. That offer having been extended over the years, I was like, "All right, here's the thing." And so I wrote up the investment proposal and they each invested $10,000. And it's insane if

27:21you're around like VC or even angels these days. The deal that I gave them, I gave them each 10% of the company and we structured it as a loan and had lawyers draft up the papers and I paid interest on it and I immediately started making payments on that $20,000 loan to each of them. Uh so and they kept 10% of the company. And they kept 10% of the company. And then very proudly I I I did pay off both loans completely and then I bought them both out over uh several years later. And so they so I own 100% of the company now, but it was from having bought them out at what was Yeah. I mean,

28:03you know, we didn't like, you know, go get a third party valuation or anything, but I feel like I gave them a pretty fair price. And between the interest I paid on the loan and the buyout, like they did pretty well on their $10,000 investment, which I'm very happy to say. So the company made enough money for you to do that. What was the story then? How did you build your, you know, your first app and then the app's kind of since then? So initially I thought, okay, like I'm just going to learn to program. So I bought the famous Coco book, Aaron Hildigas's book on Coco development because there were no iPhone books. Oh, this is everybody

28:37I always feel like talks about the Stanford the Stanford course thing, but I I actually haven't heard this one. Okay. Okay. This is again this spanning the decade. Seinal man. Um when the IO when the iPhone what do they call iPhone OS developer kit came out, they had an NDA on it. So, so you could not post code samples, you could not post tutorials, anything publicly. And so everyone was just kind of trying to figure stuff out and it was all based on Mac OS development. There was no iPhone book. There were no iPhone courses. It was a brand new set of frameworks all based on the

29:23Mac OS frameworks. And so the only way to really like brush up and figure out what to do would be to study like Mac OS development. So I bought that book. I got probably a quarter of the way through it and realized, okay, this is kind of a career. It's not something I'm going to pick up in a month and like build an app and have it on the app store day one. And and this is where I was starting to go was like, okay, maybe I just build like a tip calculator or something that's just ridiculously simple. And there were some of those. And some of those actually make quite a bit of money,

29:56so maybe I should have. But but a few weeks in, I was like, "All right, I need I need somebody who actually knows what they're doing." And so I found a local guy, Jonathan Johnson. He's still in tech. Forget where he's at now these days, but um he was I think I just like put an ad in Craigslist or something like this beginning days of Twitter. Twitter was around at this point, but it wasn't

30:18obviously what it is today. Yeah, I joined Twitter in 2007, right around the time I got my iPhones. And that was actually in some ways the community during that time. Like a lot of what I learned about like the jailbreak community and stuff like that was from Twitter. And I mean it pretty much immediately followed like Craig Hawkenberry who was big in the jailbreak scene, you know, Twitter was like probably the first one of the first native iOS app. Yeah. Well, it was one of the jailbreak apps before the store even came out. Yeah. Yep. So, I found Jonathan and and paid him as a as a contractor. I think I was paying him $50 an hour as a contractor. And so, you're asking

30:54earlier where the money went. Well, I'm I'm really glad I did take that $20,000 investment because then I had money to go, okay, I can't do this part. Let me hire somebody. You know, I I paid to have an LLC drafted up by lawyers. I hired a I hired a designer to work with on branding and icons and things like that. and and just went for it. And and so, you know, those three weeks of of learning to code, I do feel like gave me a really solid foundation. Like I've I've always, you know, when new when they announce new frameworks and stuff at WBC, like it's kind of English,

31:31so you can kind of understand what's going on, but it's like I have just enough of a a foundation to to better understand exactly what these things do and what they mean and things like that. And yeah, we just got to work and built Trip Cubby was our first app. So Trip Cubby was the first app, which is why your first company name was AppCubby. Is that right? Yeah. Okay. So, you know, in thinking through what kind of apps to build, one of the conclusions I came to was that the most obvious thing to do would be to build apps that directly save andor make people money. you know,

32:07if you're going to spend money on something, if it makes you money back, that's that's a a much more of a no-brainer thing. And so, the idea between AppCubby behind AppCubby was that it would be uh looking back, I kind of che, but um but it was to have a cubby of apps and each app was like a cubby of data where you would store data and like get meaningful stuff from it. So, I actually wrote out, you know, and this was again, I mean, it's hard to even think like before having all my kids and before being so busy with the day job and everything else, is I just worked, you know,

32:43like 18 hours a day while my wife was at work and nights and weekends and and and so I had a list of like 30 or 40 apps of under the Cubby brand and so Trip Cubby was the first and outlines and stuff. You mean? Yeah. So, Trip Cubby tracked mileage for taxes and reimbursement. So, you know, a lot of people don't even know like you can write off the mileage driving to doctors, hospital, uh, anything medical. It's just this weird like tax break that And so, especially if you know if you're going to the hospital a ton or visiting somebody in the I I forget what all the rules are, but you get that

33:20write off. you get write off for business miles and I believe there's another like donation like if you drive to Goodwill you can technically I think write it off that feels very relevant if you live in a place like Texas where you're driving long distances to go to these things. Yeah. And gas was expensive and there were no electric cars and like all that kind of stuff. So it tracked mileage for taxes and reimbursement. And this was your first this was your first app then that you released? Yeah. And did it break out? Was this like, you know, immediately the company is

33:53h swimming in in cash and you pay off the loans instantly and, you know, retire to the Bahamas? So, another part of the story, and I've told this before, but I'll tell it again. One of my great regrets in life is that because I had borrowed that $20,000 from family members when they announced WWDC 2008, I was looking at the numbers, you know, priced out flights, looked at hotels,

34:22and I was like, "Okay, I should probably go to this if I'm going to be a serious app developer." But then the other side of me, just the intensely frugal and like this is my family's money. Is it going to look like I'm taking a vacation to San Francisco on family investment? Like, is this the best use of that money to get this business off the ground? And because, you know, I think the the ticket alone at the time was like 1,500 or something like that. And then between hotels and flights and everything, it was a big chunk. I mean, this you so we're talking probably 20% of

34:58that investment. So, like, you know, $2 to $4,000 was going to go to this one trip to WWC. And so, I I I just decided, you know, I I I just can't do that. Like, it's just it's just too much. Come to find out at WWC, they were signing up people for developer accounts on the spot. And what happened to me is that even though I applied for a developer account within hours of them releasing the form to apply for a developer account, I did not get accepted into the developer program, which made all sorts of things hard. Like it was hard to I think Jonathan Johnson, I think he ended

35:36up getting a developer account and maybe we should have just launched on his account to be there day one. And just to like to back up, the the reason is you had to be accepted into the program. Like now you can just sign up and pay $100 and you're in. At that time they were very like restrictive on how many people they were letting into the program. And then like you said once you were in the program there was all these NDAs so people could weren't supposed to talk about what they what they had access to or how things worked. And so by not being in the program, you're not

36:05only were you cut out from releasing on the store, but you were cut out from a lot of the developer resources that were even available at that time. And actually, this is a fun part of the story that I can tell now because he's since retired after WWC. I'm freaking out because I'm like, it's a it's a month before the release of of the App Store. The App Store was July 10th, 2008. And so this is like early June. WWC has just happened. and my developer account has not been approved and I go through all the WWC videos which it may have even been the year before video because like you

36:40know the the videos don't come out and and maybe I wouldn't have even gotten access because I wasn't part of the developer program and everything goes down under NDA. So, so I I look at these slides and see that the evangelists all put their Apple email in these videos like, "Hey, reach out to me. Let me know what you think about these." Very different time. They were like begging for like feedback and connection with developers and put their email right on the slide to say, "Contact me." And so I wrote this um I should I should pull it up sometime and see if I could maybe screenshot it and post it to Twitter or something, but I wrote this like desperation email

37:21and I and I put like six people in there. Um like the top evangelists I found in those videos just saying like, "Hey, like I I I'm e." And in the middle of all this, my my wife gets pregnant or we get pregnant with our first child. So, this was like May. We find out like she's pregnant. I've like jumped off a cliff without a parachute. The money's quickly running out. And so, I write this like Hail Mary desperation email. Hey, I am building an app. We're going to have it ready for day one. I borrowed money from family. My wife's now pregnant. I'm freaking out. Like,

38:01give me a freaking developer account. I mean, it wasn't I mean, it was very It wasn't at all demanding. It was cordial. Yeah. Exactly. It was very just like desperation of like please I beg of you tell me what I need to do and of all the people to reach back out to me and and then for me to happen to have found his email on the slide it was John Galindi you know famous storied Apple evangelist who'd been there since the I think the '9s he I was actually hanging out with him last year at WWDC so WWC 2025 and it was so fun and I I he won't come on the sub club podcast um because

38:42it is associated with revenue and stuff but uh if I ever start a side podcast he's like sign me up I'll be your first episode um but he was walking me through his story of you know being a kid in Canada in the '9s and like being so fascinated by Apple and eventually getting the job and now I mean he ran WWC for like 25 or 30 years and just such a cool incredible human being. So he doesn't email me, he calls me and we talk for different time, different time and we talked for like three hours or something just crazy and and and so then the craziest thing is like okay this you know high

39:21up guy he even at that time was already running evangelism at Apple you know at that time he was running WWDC he's like you know I'll I'll I'll make sure you get an account didn't give me oh Um, and so I don't think they had like 10,000 people apply. I think it was just they were so overwhelmed by the excitement around it that it wasn't that they like were denying 10 out of every 11 submissions. They were just slow to process what they did have. And you know, you had to get it. They had to verify a Dun's number and like it was a company account which I

39:58think made it harder than a personal account. All that kind of stuff. And so so he worked on the in the background like asking to get me an account. And I still missed that launch of the app store on July 10, 2008 because I didn't have a developer account. I had an app ready. Everything was ready to go. And and so you asked a question like did it just take off from day one? No. In part because I was a month late. Yeah. Um, had it been day one, my whole life story probably would have looked different and and not necessarily for the better cuz I think the scrappiness of of everything did

40:35I feel like teach me a lot over the years. So, we we released it in August and then by that time I'd actually run out of money and I hit up my dad and I was like, "Hey." So, I think the first month I made like five grand or something and which I mean was pretty good. Yeah. I was about to say a lot of

40:53people listening would be like, "What?" Uh, yeah, that's still a good start. Yeah, paid up front. So, these weren't subscribers who were going to renew over time. And this was a $10 price point, so it wasn't even that many customers. I mean, that's a whole topic we could dive into the part of the history of the app store. But I hit my dad up. I'm like, "Hey, you know, I I basically I've got this account receivable. You know, Apple is going to at some point, which it wasn't even, I think, clear at the time, like when they were going to pay." And still clear always. there were

41:24minimums. So, I didn't even know how much of that 5,000 I was going to get because like each region had a different minimum that you had to hit the threshold and it was like over $100. So, if it if that that 5,000 were spread across a bunch of different regions and each region only hit like 75 or 80 bucks or whatever, I could have only gotten that first check at like 4,000 or something like that. So, I hit him up and I'm like, "Hey, Dad. um you can I get a little bridge loan and uh and I you know I thought it was a pretty reasonable ask and everything well you know in the interwining

41:58months as a commercial real estate guy who's just constantly up and down and property rich and cash poor and having to make payments on all his staff and to reiterate this is late 2008 this is no this is like yeah September of 2008 I'm broke. It turns out he's broke. Yeah. I was about to say the the commercial real estate was in an interesting point at that time, right? You It was just going right before the crash. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It was right before the main crash, but like the the cracks

42:31were already starting to appear. I didn't even think about that correlation, but exactly that. And so and and and that moment was actually super impactful for me as well because he was like you know this is this is essentially a a payday loan which I had never probably thought about it before that and you know if you're not in those kind of situations where you're taking need to take out a payday loan you don't think about the economics and the trap that a payday loan could be. He's like, "If I give you this 5,000 early, then by the time you know October comes around, you're going

43:04to need another 5,000 and then you're you're just going to be in the cycle." Yeah. And so he was like, you know, if you're really that desperate, I could maybe like, you know, I think he was like, I could sell off a little bit of a retirement fund or something like that to to get you the cash, but I just I don't have the cash. And I think you should explore all ways to survive through this so that you don't get trapped in the payday loan cycle. And so we sold one of our cars and became a onecar family. and we we sold my wife's Honda Accord and I think we got about $4 or $5,000 for

43:46it and and and did not get into that that payday loan cycle and got just enough to kind of survive to that first paycheck from Apple after that. Uh I think is around the time like Gruber linked to it. U Mac um what's what was a big uh magazine? Macw World Mac World linked to it. Jason at Mac World and this this is when I actually this is part of the story you probably would want to touch on anyway is that that's when I started making a lot of friends in the industry and and you know in in some ways yes it was way easier for me to do that in 2008 with an app and everything was so

44:27novel and it was a freaking mileage log app like why would anybody care but I was just constantly putting myself out there so I think I mean I talk about a lot here. But like it's not a requirement, but it is one of the ways that you can kind of break in even even today is just engaging a lot with the community. And it it might not pay dividends quickly. It might not pay dividends, you know, ever in terms of the app you're building right now, but by being engaged, being like a trusted person, like nice, somebody who people like to talk to and work with, or maybe

45:04not even work with, but just trust, it slowly does pay off over time in terms of the opportunities you get in other areas that you never expected. And yeah, like being on the radar of people who who write about this stuff frequently and being a trusted source of information for those people, all of that can slowly pay dividends over time. But it is a long game. You can't be like trying to extract value out of them as quickly as you can cuz nobody wants to interact with those people. And I you are like a prime example of one of those people that's been doing that for a very

45:39long time. And I see you from behind the scenes doing that today in new avenues. And you really care a lot about how you treat people because your reputation is such a major part of the value that you're bringing to everything. And it's not just like being part of the community, but it's also just tactfully putting yourself out there. So many of these connections that I now have started with just a cold email. Like I I I I should dig this one up, too. I mean, I think I emailed John Gruber just to his like comments at Daring Fireball and I said, "Hey, remember that mileage log app that

46:16you ripped apart in the when the app store first launched?" Because there was this one that came out that was like embarrassingly bad. It was like uh like Windows phone UI. Um that was just terrible. And and so the first day of the App Store, he stumbles upon this or he hears about it on Twitter or something and just rips it apart. And so I don't send him my life story. I don't beg him to be, you know, featured on Daring Fireball. I just send him a quick note like, "Hey, you remember that story you wrote about this mileage log that that that was just an embarrassment to

46:50the burgeoning iOS platform. Well, I've created a a mileage log that is much more platform native and feels like an iPhone app." and and then did this did very similar for like Jim Del Rimprimple and the Macworld crew and you know all those different publications that I've been reading for years. I just, you know, sent pitches to their to to the like tips at email addresses and that's how it it all kind of started. And then, you know, once once John Gruber linked to that linked to my app, then that kind of was like then I could use that as a little bit of calling card of like, hey,

47:30look, you know, John linked to it, like here's the story. Um, but I mean and as you were saying, you know, I, you know, I don't think people realize and might even think like, oh, David, you know, everybody now and everybody in the industry knows you and the podcast and whatever. To this day, in fact, yesterday, I sent out like five cold emails to people I've never met before to invite them to this special thing we're doing before App Growth annual. And you know, a lot of the podcast guests that I end up getting on are just cold emails of me putting myself out there. And so, you know,

48:07almost 20 years on of just being and the thing is it's not about like shameless self-promotion. Like I I think there's a version of this which is asking Chat GBT to just spam everybody in the world, right? And that doesn't maybe it works for some people, but it does not work for what either of us are doing. And it doesn't work to like send a, you know, five-page email telling your life story. It doesn't work to beg. It doesn't work to pitch too hard. And so I've always been very thoughtful and and even kind of gentle, for lack of a better word, with my pitching. It's like,

48:43you know, it's like three paragraphs max, two or three sentences each. It's something that's easy to scan, that's clear, that's not like asking too much. And that's the same thing I do today to you know get podcast guests you get people excited about I think it's easy to especially you know people listening pitching you know 9 to5 Mac or whatever right for or John Gruber for writing about them if you're asking if you're trying to convince them to write about you've kind of already lost the game like the game and I think the people on the other end would agree with this is like you're offering them something they need to write things that's interesting to

49:19their audience so your job is to like pitch them the same way you pitch to your customers like this is valuable to you. Not like like you said, tell your Sabb story and be like this would be valuable to me cuz while many of them are very nice people and love to do that, they're not going to have a

49:34very long career if they're just writing things for everybody else and not for their audience. And yeah. Yeah. And I think the same works for all of these types of things, right? Is like you be valuable to them and make it a mutually beneficial kind of relationship and that's going to work out a lot better in the long run. Yeah. And the the undertones there make a big difference, too. I mean, I think part of why John Galindi called me is that the way I wrote the email, you got to think about your audience and and what you're trying to say and how you're trying to say it. And and you're exactly right. It's like if you're pitching somebody in the press,

50:08you want to pitch them on the relevance to their audience. Like this matters to you because your audience is going to care about it. Therefore, you writing about it is good for you and for your audience and for authenticity and all those kind of things. Well, what does Apple care about? Apple cares about having a great developer community and people who are passionate about the platform. And so, my email to Apple was was way more like I I think I even got into like I'm a huge Apple nerd. I was I maybe even linked to the like photo of me being first in line for the iPhone. They

50:39want those stories. I I never I've never asked him and maybe he wouldn't remember, you know, 18 years on, but I I can't help but think, you know, John Galenzi called me in part because he saw somebody who cared, who would be a value ad to the iPhone developer community at that time, not because it was like some big Saab story or whatever. Like, if I had said like, I'm I'm I'm broke and I'm desperate, that's a very different email. And it's kind of like, okay, I'm sorry that it happened to you, but so I think part of why he did respond is because he saw something in me and

51:14the passion and and and the way I framed things that that mattered. And so that's, you know, continued throughout my career. This early app, it sounds like some of the the ones that you then built kind of from there were sort of built to some degree on this, you know, relationship with the press. You're putting it out there. This wasn't like paid advertising or anything like that, right? Yeah. I've almost never done paid in 18 years to to my detriment probably. But uh yeah, but there was another form of distribution that you hit on in the early days, right? That wasn't from press, but was instead from what I don't even know if it had the name app store optimization at

51:52the time, but you struck gold, so to speak, in the whole very good keywords in the early days. Is that right? Yes and no. So early on I was not very cognizant of as of of search optimization as a tool. I was more focused again probably to my detriment on rankings because at that time you know when the apps were launched you know prices were more like you know 10 bucks up front 20 bucks. It was more what software was priced at the time. And then what happened was that people started to see that if you discounted to $2.99, $1.99, even 99 cents, you would rock it up

52:39the charts because the charts were purely based on volume. And once you were in the top 100, this was a time when not only were individuals scanning the top 100 to see like what cool apps had launched, press was scanning the top 100 looking for that new breakout app. And so for the apps that managed to get into that top 10, there was a momentum there that really helped them in the very early days. I think I overly focused on that and didn't focus on uh keywords. Um, but several years in, so this was maybe 2011, 2012, another thing I've done throughout my career is look for new opportunities

53:21that are enabled by either new devices, form factors, APIs, and otherwise. So, when the iPhone 4 was announced with the frontfacing camera, the first thing I'm thinking, it's like, okay, what what what's what can you do with a front-facing camera? like what what kind of software does this enable that couldn't exist before and the most you know glaringly obvious thing in the world was like a mirror and and so I was like and I had I had built with Leighton Duncan another early Jailbreak guy. We had partnered up on this app called Kido Vid which that that was one of those apps I always thought should have done better. It was so cool. It used the backfacing camera where you could

54:03point it at anything and it would turn it into a kaleidoscope on your phone and there were a few different settings of like, you know, different number of fractals in the kaleidoscope and all that kind of or mirrors or however you would say it, but it was all a bunch of like video and photo code and you would tap the screen to pause and then it would save it as a screenshot. And so we already had all this code around like video and photo sharing and and all that kind of stuff. I think in just a single weekend, he took it from the rearfacing camera, made it the frontfacing

54:36camera, and then got rid of all the kaleidoscope features, and now it was all a sudden we had a mirror. And we launched that as a free app. And the other thing is that I add launched that same year. And so it was a it was a two experiment for me. Apple Yeah. I've long since wished they they did it again because it was Apple's take on ads. They were much more nice and polished and you didn't have another SDK in your app and all the privacy concerns and all the you know gambling ads and gun ads and stuff that you have in in today's world that you have to like constantly

55:12be vigilant fighting against and scams and all that. So anyways, it it was like a two-prong experiment around the IAD which was insane. it, you know, when it came out of the gate, they were paying like 30 and $60 CPMs. Yeah. They were like trying to get people using it. Clearly, they were losing money on it. Apple Yeah. And then it was an experiment in, you know, frontfacing camera and and so it did it did fairly well. Like I I don't think it got much press. Maybe got a little bit of press. Just like, hey, you know, if you've got your frontfacing camera, here's something

55:44you could do with it. And I will say to this day, I'm a little embarrassed of having done so well. And you know, spoiler, I ended up making over a million dollars on that app. And we'll get to how that came about, but I'm almost embarrassed of it. But but honestly, it was a fantastic app. And like I really thought about the user experience. And everybody's like, "Well, can't you just use the camera?" Well, yeah, you can use the camera, but you have all the camera chrome and buttons and everything around. This was like full screen. It launched right to the frontfacing camera. You

56:12don't have to switch the camera around. It had a zoom feature where you could actually zoom in. It had a a light feature where it would turn the screen to full brightness and then surround the screen with a white border. So if you were in low light, it would actually like brighten up so you could actually see what was going on. You could tap the screen to pause to take a selfie. Like there's like all these little, you know, people underestimate the the conveniences you can add by turning a a utility that's kind of built in that people use already turning that into something like actually custom the UX actually being made for that purpose. Honestly,

56:50I did something similar with I have an app called Overviewer which is no with uh overviewer which is like right for teachers and a lot of teachers would just AirPlay the camera app to their Mac. This is during COVID especially whenever they're trying to share their desk and so I just like quickly hack together for my wife basically the same thing. It's like show the camera and then she kept bringing up little things that would be nice and then I just added those and then you end up with an app that's like yeah it's just showing the camera but there's all these little features that make life a little better if if you're using it in this way. Um, and yeah, that it's like quality of

57:26life things can go a long way, especially when it's something you use all the time, which a clamshell mirror is like the prototypical thing that you'd carry around in a purse or whatever. So, like this is it turns your iPhone into something a little more convenient. So, so what ended up happening with mirror is it did it did fairly well and I think people did start searching the term mirror and so it would show up in search. I think it maybe even got featured at some point just as like a you know somewhere buried in the utility feature whatever but I saw I watched you know I watched the industry super closely and this is one interesting thing about my career is that

58:02because I wasn't coding I did kind of have a lot more free time if you will in that I was so focused on like how do I make money and how do I turn this into a business so I'm like scouring the top 100 every A I'm like reading all blog posts about other apps and their successes. I'm talking to other developers on Twitter. I spent a ton of my time very focused on the business side

58:29of things. And so one of the things I was you watching was these apps that really took off. And Camera Plus was by the team Tap Tap Tap that had done some other big apps. And so the launch was really hyped and all this kind of stuff. And the app they launched was called Camera Plus. and it was just camera with a plus symbol. And I was looking at that I was like that's so dumb. Like that's not a brand. Camera plus is not a brand. Like people are going to type camera and then

58:57spell the word plus. Like if you tell somebody camera plus like this is violating all the thems. So I'm I'm there thinking, okay, these guys are obviously really smart. They've done really well, but what the hell are they thinking? Camera Plus is such a dumb brand. But but I was so fascinated because I was like these are smart guys. I know they're not idiots. So like why did they do this? And then what I figured out pretty soon after that that they had, you know, very intelligently figured out before I figured it out is that Apple at that time and still to this day to a certain extent though they've watered it down quite a bit gave a very very very high boost

59:41in search to exact word matches. So, if somebody goes into the app store and types in camera, camera plus because a plus gets ignored because it's a symbol, not a a word or a letter, they were an exact string match for the search camera. And that app, I mean, must have made 1020 million, maybe even more than that over the course of its life early in the in the app store. And it was just perpetually the top result for camera. it was perpetually like I think in the top 10 or 50 for like years because of that and and so so then it dawned on me pretty quickly afterward. It's like,

1:00:20oh. And so I had seen like scanner plus like what scanner plus? Why? And they had, you know, again, they had noticed this before I did. Same thing. Scanner plus, you know, PDF documents and like all these kind of like keywords that that are commonly searched. Weather, there's I mean, if you go look at the weather category still to this day, there's weather plus, weather plus+, weather percent, weather degree, weather this, that, and the other. all kind of taking advantage of that and and almost embarrassed to admit this, but I was kind of trying that with the weather up name, hoping that up was such a short and and like inconsequential word that I would

1:01:02still get matched as being an exact string match for weather. I don't think that actually worked, but that was part of why I called my app weather up because I thought maybe that they would just ignore those twoletter words the way they ignore symbols. Um, so when I switched mirror to mirror unic code symbol for mirror and this is like an interesting app. What was the name of the app before? It was like it was branded. It was it was mirror by app cubby because appcubby was a brand

1:01:34that people had the word mirror in it from trip cubby. It was mirror by app cubby. Yeah. Okay. So the the insight wasn't using the keyword or stuffing the keyword. It was literally like only make it the one word that you care about and then some sort of character that you know is going to get trimmed off when it comes to ranking. To this day, there is a subset of Unicode symbols that are allowed inside app names and it's a bizarre I have not if I were smarter I could probably ask IBT to figure it out at this point but um there's some set of some subset of Unicode that works and

1:02:10some subset that doesn't. emojis won't work. So, you can't do emoji, you know, weather smiley face, weather cloud, you know, emoji. But yeah, so I found this little symbol that looked kind of like a mirror. It was like two a circle with another circle inside of it. And so just a random unic code. It wasn't plus random unicode. No. Wow. Okay. Because there already was, I think, at the

1:02:33time a mirror plus and a mirror plus. And I also didn't want it to be quite so obvious and lame. And so so it was mirror space unicode symbol. And I mean pretty much to the day that that released with that name downloads just shot up and for years years it was the and it still is actually to this day. I sold the app in 2017 but to this day it's the top result for mirror. it just it it it won that that ASO battle and has has maintained that position. And one of the things that most surprised me and and still looking back surprises me is how consistent it was. It wasn't like like

1:03:17you know one day 20,000 downloads and the next day five. It was like always within a pretty tight range. I should go back and look at my app figures charts because I still have all that data still in app figures. I can go back and look, but it was a pretty tight range between I think like 7 and 10,000 downloads a day. Every single day completely. The metaphor I always think about with ASO stuff is is like search traffic is just this like raging river. And if you can successfully put a tube in that river, you just start siphoning this incredible amount of of traffic that heads

1:03:55in. Now, you have to make a page that converts people and then you have to make an app that people stay with or or convert by paying or whatever to, but that initial stream is just like this crazy amount of traffic that you can get if you're intentional or lucky or whatever and you can end up highly ranked in in those search results. High intent search results in particular. If somebody searches mirror, that is exactly what they're looking for 99% of the time. Exactly. And I I've always said and you and I have talked about this, so many of the indie app developers that have stood the test of time either lucked into it or or did it very intentionally. And and and and

1:04:38I don't think enough of them fully credit those kinds of things for that long-term staying power. And for example, David Smith to me is one of the most famous examples of this. And I don't think a lot of people even know some of the backstory before Widget Smith blew up, but he had a book called I mean he had an app called audiobooks and he had the keyword audiobooks and that was his that was his like salary. I mean, I've never talked to him in detail. So, I'm speculating here, but from what I could see from the outside, it looked like that app was kind of the foundation

1:05:12of his whole business where it was paying the bills when while he went off and like tried all these other experiments. He had a weather app. He I mean, he's one of those, you know, launched similar to me. I mean, I've launched like 30 different apps over the years, and mirror was kind of my foundation that allowed me to do Launch Center Pro and Weather Up and because I had and he obviously knew this, too, cuz he kind of had a brand and still has like pedometer plus and, uh, you know, there is a a lineage from that era, uh, you know, living on to this day. For sure. I

1:05:42think Slopes is another good example that, you know, early on he was one of the early skiing and snowboarding apps. And so and and there's this there's this weird thing about app store search that there is a there is a waiting to the history. I I I don't know exactly how to how you would quantify that or how Apple's algorithms quantify that, but there is something to momentum there where once you get to number one, it's like really hard to unthrown you and there's just like this staying power. And so there's so many apps that even if it's not super obvious, like you know, uh Curtis didn't launch, you know, Snowboard++ or snowboard degree sign or whatever. He launched

1:06:27Slopes and a fantastic app and he's built a great business and everything like that. There was a foundation of traffic for him over the years by being one of the top results for those skiing and snowboarding terms that laid that foundation that then he was able to build the business on top of that probably just wouldn't have happened had that search traffic not kind of kept him above water long enough to continue building upon that momentum. Yeah. And you know, just to keep the the naval gazing, bring it back to me as we as we should be doing more often in this show, you know, Curtis and David both launched guests. I think episode 14 and episode 24 I just looked up. So if

1:07:08you want to hear their stories, you know, they've Curtis and David are also sub guests. I don't know the number off the top of my head, but you can back toback go listen to the subclub episode and the launch episode and you get very different stories because we focus on very different things. So we talked about like early days making these sort of lots of smaller apps and making good relationships with the press. Then you had this kind of breakthrough with understanding the nent field of ASO and and building mirror and kind of creating like you said a foundation for you to try things. But I think people that have followed you for a while and don't think of you as David the

1:07:45subclub guy, they probably think of you as David the Launch Center pro guy. In fact, literally yesterday I was listening to the connected podcast. Love that podcast. And they were talking about old apps and one of them started talking about Launch Center Pro. Like still, it's one of these like foundational apps that people think about a lot. And that was I think certainly when I got into the field, that's who you were. You were the Launch Center Pro guy to me. So what is the story of that app and it kind of wild history. Oh man. Um, well, and funny story here, before I dig into the the broader story, we hosted a party at WWC this year just a couple months ago,

1:08:26the mansion party at WWDC this year and several OpenAI employees attended and we're all standing around in a group as things are wrapping up and and I forget how we even got on the subject, but Launcher Pro came up. I think I was saying, you know, back in the day I worked on Launch in

1:08:44a Pro and then all the all the guys in the circle were like, "Wait, you're the Launch in a Pro guy?" And I was like, "What?" Okay. It's funny cuz Yeah, it was it was such a massive thing. And yeah, like somebody who got in in the last, you know, three or four years maybe hasn't even heard of

1:09:01it because of what we're about to talk about. Like, how did that how did that come about? I was just spending a ton of time looking at API docs and references and new things and opportunities and stumbled upon URL schemes. And I I forget, you know, I I I don't remember looking at drafts and and some of these other apps that took advantage and I don't remember if drafts launched before launch in a pro or after launch in a pro, but that's certainly another app that took a lot of advantage of URL schemes. I think Insta Paper was actually one of the inspirations and I forget if it was Marco or somebody else or some other group of people had created this thing

1:09:44called X callback URL. Yes. Was that drafts? We should say also again keeping it back to me. Greg Pierce from drafts has been on the show as well as Marco Arment. I don't know the numbers off the top of my head. I'm just going to keep interrupting them. Well, this was fun. I guess maybe this is appropriate as a hundth episode since we could ending up randomly talking about like 30 of your episodes. Um, so X callback URL and and again like working in iOS today, if you hadn't been around

1:10:14the past decade, you wouldn't even know why this exists or or how this could exist or anything. But, you know, URL schemes are are a way to launch an app, but you can launch it with some amount of context or whatever. And so, like the the easiest example that still works today, and this is really the origin of it, is that on the web, if you have an email address and you want to hyperlink an email address, you don't use http whatever. The link is actually mail to just m a i l t o colon and then the email address. And so that is a that is is a valid URL scheme

1:10:55in most operating systems and probably has been for like 30 years and maybe even part of the HTML spec or something. So that when you click the link, it knows to open your native mail app and fill out the two form with that email address. Your browser will look at that. It'll tell the operating system, hey, somebody wants to open the mail app, whatever that is, and here's the email address. And then the operating system knows, I know what the default mail app is. I'm going to send it to the mail app with that information. And that carried over importantly into iOS, probably more or less for mail, actually. Yeah, it probably started just for mail. And then you

1:11:32know all your audience will probably be nerdy enough to understand how URL schemes work is that in addition to being able to put in you know mail to and then the address um even the mail to URL scheme accepts additional parameters. So, you can put and I'm going to not get this right, although I should, but I believe you can type out, you know, mailto um davidrevenue.com and then you put the question mark to then like break the URL into now you're going to add parameters and then you'd have subject equals feedback and then amper amperand body equals write some feedback and then when you tap that link it opens the mail app. It prefills the subject and then it prefills the

1:12:18body. So what had just started happening around the time that I picked up on was M drops must have been before launch in a pro because I think you're right. I think Greg was one of the originators of X callback URL but but it was a really smart way to allow apps to interact in a way that was just never possible before and still to this day isn't great. like Apple now has like actions but they're kind of buried in the share menu and nobody actually uses them and like it's just kind of a always been a bit of a mess and so X callback URL allows you to use these URL schemes to get to

1:12:57an app give it a little bit of context and then return you back to the app. So Craig Hawkenberry must have been involved. He's been involved in so many. You should if he hasn't been on the podcast. He's I actually haven't had Craig or anybody from Icon Factory, which feels Yeah, I've reached out a long time ago, but I need to try that again because that would be Yeah. big. So the perfect example of this is, and this is why Mark Armet comes into story. He was working on InstaPaper at the time. And so what you could do is in Twitter if you wanted to save a link you would tap

1:13:31to share the link and it provides a better user experience is that you would share to Instaper and it would use this X callback URL. So it launched to Instaper and then one of the parameters was the URL for the app that it had come from. And so Instaper would have a URL scheme, Instaper colon, and then add parameters of like the link you wanted to save, the title you wanted to save it under, or whatever, all those kind of things. And then an additional parameter would be take me back to Twitter because Twitter is what sent me. And so I don't remember if all of this was happening

1:14:07before I launched or if it happened around the time I launched that it got that sophisticated but it was around that time that a lot of people were kind of recognizing the potential power of URL schemes. Yeah. essentially like at the high level it's like and even now it's almost worse like you said but there was no way in the system for an app to invoke another app and send it information but because of this that technology that we talked about existing for a long time there was a way to sort of backdoor your way into that so you could tell you could be like my app

1:14:43gets opened by this URL scheme and it receives information and I can publish what I'm expecting that information to look like and then other apps can invoke me and I can look at what those apps do and I can invoke them and so it wasn't like this standard that Apple set and importantly it wasn't super standardized so like you said you developers had to kind of work together to make it work to a degree but because Instaper had created this any app can add a link inside of themselves that will go into InstaPaper once Marco published this information and so it kind of started creating this standard that was very loose and people like yourself could build apps that kind of take

1:15:25advantage of this thing that a bunch of people are trying out at the same time. So, so the very first version of Launch Center was Launch Center or not Launch Center on a Pro. Lunch in a Pro was the the second app in the series. But the very first iteration was actually another kind of hack that I was paying attention to was that you could do persistent notifications that stayed and this was when you would slide over to your notification center. It was very much intended to be a you know a text message that you couldn't miss and then it it wouldn't just like pass out. you would send a

1:16:01a parameter to to the notification saying this is a this should stay permanently on there until they open the app and then clear it and then so this was like a notification center hack to be a quick launcher and so we initially tried to get approved just as a like basically a quick launcher and and we we tried to like make this the URL scheme stuff a lot easier to do. So we had this what we call URL composer or something like that. So, if you wanted to like be able to quickly call your wife, there's a teel telephone URL scheme. And so, you would select your wife from the contacts,

1:16:37her number would populate in there, and then that would become a a shortcut that would then be in your notification center. So, anytime you want to just call your wife instead of going to the phone app, going to the favorites, and like all these tap tap tap tap taps, you would just swipe over and tap it. It gave you a way to make deep links into your own apps that invoke an action just instantly. Remember this is pre-shortcuts, pre-workflows I think even existing. Uh like very very very none of this. So Apple rejected it. Um and another thing to this day I'm I'm pretty salty about because the ideas from launch in a pro did become workflows. The workflow guys actually were

1:17:17building something else at the time and asked us to integrate and then I responded to them saying, "Well, we're we're maybe going to even compete with you on your core product." And they were like, "Okay, screw that. We're going to compete with you on your core product." And so I genuinely think Workflow exists in part existed in part because of that single email where I was like, "Ah, we could integrate more deeply with them." But I mean, gosh, what a different like history of Yeah. Yeah. And for those of you who don't know, Workflows, third party app that eventually was bought by Apple and is the foundation for shortcuts, the app shortcuts built into iPhones

1:17:54today. So anyways, going back, they rejected it. I'm still salty because eventually before Apple even allowed third parties to have launcher widgets, shortcuts once Apple acquired them, had their own widget that was a launcher widget. Yep. Yep. It's like, you know, 5 years ago, Apple, you told me this was a bad experience, a misappropriation of our SDK and then like what happens 5 years later, they they build that feature into you haven't gotten to that. So, yeah, you you made launch center, the plane, you know, launch center and it was just that, but it was said no. They said no. And so we had already put all this work into it and we're like,

1:18:35well, let's just launch it without the notification center thing because there's still some value where you could because we kind of had built a little bit of a launcher view in the in the main app where you could also just tap from inside the app. So you could launch the app and then tap and you could create this whole list of shortcuts where it wasn't just so you could put it in your doc and have the top 10 things that you do on a daily basis right there in your doc and then you tap once and then you tap into it to to go do something specific. And again it's it wasn't

1:19:06just it wasn't an app launcher. And this is what we eventually like was our tagline. Launch actions not apps was our tagline because you weren't it wasn't just an app launcher. It was like you would launch an app with context. You know, one of the examples we gave at the time was like, don't just open Instagram and then have to go around and find the camera button and all that. And they've they've most of these apps have made these kind of primary use cases way easier to get to these days. But at the time it was like you had to wait for Instagram to launch and then once it launched

1:19:35it was like on the feed and then you had to like go into a menu and then go to camera like there, you know, it was a whole thing and you had to wait for Instagram supported X callback URLs. Uh not X callback. They just had cuz X callback was its own kind of like branch of it was just a a a spec for a specific kind of URL scheme to be able to do the like launch back thing. But URL schemes themselves were actually pretty common and and they were used by apps for for other purposes as well. So like I don't know why Instagram would have had it in there other than like I mean some apps use it

1:20:13on launch internally or if it's launched from a notification you you have you open to that specific thing and like there there were reasons it's it's all a bit fuzzy now was it more than a decade ago that we were doing all this but yeah so so Instagram and a bunch of big apps did support rudimentary URL schemes they didn't support like more sophisticated stuff so so we launched it and And massive credit to Federico Vitici. He's the one who really latched on to it and kind of helped popularize it and and we didn't think it was that exciting cuz I thought the notification thing was

1:20:50what was so exciting, but they didn't know that that was what the app was intended to do. And he latched on to it like, "Oh, wow. This is like a really cool power thing. I can put these 10 like deep links with context all right here and easily that's like Max Sto's bait right there like you know even anybody who knows him to this day it's like you give him a new way to make automations and he's going to go he's going to go I mean what's funny though is like this was I mean in some ways this was the start because there were no like automations before this like

1:21:22this was the start so launcher pro launcher came out and it it did fairly well in part because of it and I mean plenty of other people picked it up in the press, but he was he was definitely a huge kind of champion of it. Talked a lot about it and it started showing up in more and more docs because that was the best place to have it. It was right in your doc so you could easily access it anytime. And then we realized, okay, we can't do the notification center hack. We need to make a better launcher experience. And so we built Launch Center Pro as the like, okay, this is really a a a

1:21:54launcher. Breaking news here on Launch. Breaking NDAs. I heard from an Apple employee who will go unnamed that Launch Center Pro getting accepted on the App Store went all the way to Phil Schiller because there was a specific rule against against mimicking the home screen. And that rule still exists in the in the I've seen apps get denied for this before. It's like you're not allowed to

1:22:21build an app launcher is usually how or mimicking the home screen is how it's always phrased. Yeah. And I and I think what allowed us to slip through and and I'll be eternally I am inter eternally grateful to Bill Schiller for allowing it. Although I'm also very frustrated the way things are set up that building this innovative app that ended up helping launch workflows which then got acquired and became shortcuts and now is such like a deep part of the operating system. The fact that the the app that really kicked all of this off had to go all the way to a senior VP to get approved is in some ways kind of ridiculous. Like we were just trying to do something like fun

1:22:59and innovative. And the fact that it had to go all the way to him is problematic. But I am grateful that he did say yes. And and I think what got us over the line is that we were not an app launcher. We weren't mimicking the home screen in the sense of just apping launching apps. The whole value of Launch Center Pro was launching actions and that's not what the home screen did. And Launch Center didn't have this. It was the Launch Center Pro update that had to go through all these approvals, right? So Launch Center because it was just a list. It was like a list view. It didn't look

1:23:36like the home screen. It didn't look like the home screen. And so Launch Center Pro was tiles. We actually did kind of intentionally try and make it made it familiar. Well, no, no. Well, we made it somewhat familiar, but we actually very intentionally made these like blocky grids and like it didn't look like a home screen. Like you couldn't set a background like we had like two or three default backgrounds that you could select from. There was another thing that to this day I think is was a fantastic interaction. I believe Justin, my business partner on that is the one who came up with this. But when you when you tap on the so you could create actions

1:24:12that were like immediately tapable. But you could also create kind of folders. But with the folders instead of tapping and then pulling your finger off and then going and tapping something else, you could tap and then drag and release. And so you know because we were thinking like this is a productivity tool. This is for nerds. This is for people who are going to like was that before or after path? Do you remember path? I do remember path with the little spray out thing and it had Yeah, it was kind of a similar different than the way launch center pro felt to my memory but but

1:24:43I Oh man, I you're making me nostalgic for that era where there was so much more exploration of of well of like not just UX cuz I feel like we are in one of those periods now with all the AI tools of like what's the user experience for this but specifically touch interactions. It's like everything was new and everybody was experimenting constantly and it was so much fun. Anyway, sorry I interrupted. Great great example of that and another launched potential launch guest is Lauren Bter with pull to refresh like that still exists to this day and as a paradigm that was an experimentation in a third party app that then became a thing that Apple adopted and now you know

1:25:23so many apps adopt that pull to refresh paradigm. That was exactly what you're saying was like an exploration of multi-touch UI originated with a thirdparty developer that ended up becoming a system thing. So when Launcher Pro launched, we had already kind of had that momentum going from Launch Center and Launch Center Pro got a ton of press and attention right out of the gate. So, what was the reason for making Launch Center Pro as a separate app versus just updating it like you know nowadays is how you generally do that? I'm actually struggling with the same decision with weather up and landing on the other side of it. It's that when you make a massive change to the

1:26:08UI, are you kind of pulling the rug out from people who have muscle memory really like what you're doing? Like it wasn't obvious to us at the time, but then everybody complained after the fact that it should have just been an update. But to us it was like, okay, people who like Launch Center

1:26:24can keep using it. Like it's fine. And I have a whole blog post around the thinking around this. But it was like it it's a great app just the way it is and we'll keep like adding URL schemes and like making it more powerful over time. But Launcher Pro is going to be that, you know,

1:26:39even like that interaction we just discussed like that was a little experimental, a little nerdy. It wasn't just like open the app and tap and then move on. It was like there's folders and like you know complex gestures and things like that. And so our thinking was we're going to have launch center. It's kind of like the training wheels like easy to use like 10 shortcuts. It's a list everything. And then launch center in a pro was going to be the like nerdier more sophisticated pro version. And so that that was the thinking behind it. And at the time this was paid up front, right? before you could do subscription apps, at least for productivity apps, right? And so

1:27:15that was part of the complaint was like the hardcore, but I still think we made the right choice. I mean, I kind I think I did apologize for it, but it was like really it it was it was so much a different app that that I think if we had if we had have made that choice for people, then we would have gotten the other 10% of people complaining like, "Why'd you take away my lunch center? I really liked it." and like, you know, now I don't like the gestures and I don't like the home screen layout and like, you know, you messed it all up. And so I think we were just

1:27:41kind of like either way, you know, we were kind of screwed. With Weather Up, we're actually about to launch a massive revamp of the user experience of it. And I am a little nervous that we're going to get that 10% that's just like, why' you take away, you know, I liked it the way it was. It's like,

1:27:59can you add a setting to revert the UI or can you add a setting to turn on the old UI? That's my every time one of my friends releases a a big update and it starts getting praised, the first thing I'll send them is, "Hey, can you add a setting to turn on the old UI cuz it's just like death." It I think Reddit has done all of us a disservice by creating and maintaining. I'm not saying that they shouldn't have done that, but it creates this idea in people's heads that's like, "Why don't you just have a setting to keep the old one around?" Kind of ignoring how hard that

1:28:28is. But anyway, so Launch Center Pro released and got like to a claim, right? The people were very excited about it. Um, it added a lot of new power features and the UI was much nicer. Yeah, co it was it was featured, you know, Apple did actually end up featuring even though they barely approved it. Yeah, it's funny how about facing those can go sometimes. Yeah, it got covered in like Techrunch and The Verge and like all the big publications at the time. Everybody on Twitter was talking about it. And then one of the interesting things that happened over time was that because it was in

1:29:00people's docs and because sharing a a screenshot of your home screen was kind of a bigger deal. There were even there was even an app it was an app that got investment or acquired or something even that was a like share your home screen and keep your home screens updated and keep a history of your home screens and how they've changed over time because people were still like excited like what's the new thing? What do people have in their docs? What's an app that I I should there was so much more of the like fun hobbyist side of iPhone that I feel like there are still pockets of but

1:29:29it's maybe kind of disappeared in some extent but and so it just had this it had this nice kind of floor but it was paid up front and so that floor would kind of start to trickle off and we were constantly in this cycle of like needing to kind of make the news again and with a $5 paid up front and actually a lot of the life of launching a pro is $3 paid up front. Like that's all a lot of people ever paid us. A lot of inbound. Yeah. And then it was it was on sale for 99 cents a few times. So there were like plenty of people who only ever paid us a dollar for something that

1:30:03they put in their dock and used every single day, multiple times a day. Wanted constant updates. That I think that's an important piece too is like because this system wasn't it wasn't like a standard. It's not like, oh, I support Apple's blah, and everybody who releases an app that supports this, you just get for free. You kind of had to like keep updating and keep up with all the different things going on for all these different apps, right? Yep. Yep. URL scheme. And then like, you know, one of the things we did do that that I mean, we kind of helped perpetuate URL schemes because as it became popular, people would bug the developers of apps saying, "You need to put in a

1:30:40URL scheme." And then they would point people to our docs that would explain how to do it and why to do it. And then we had a submission form where they could then submit those URL schemes to us to include in our directory. And there were there were so many things over the years like

1:30:54um I we got approached for investment because it was like hey you're in all these people's docs. You're kind of a platform in some degree, right? Yeah. We got approached I think by if I remember correctly it was Google or somebody like that who wanted the data on like what apps were being used and how frequently they were being launched and we're like ah that's not really a good alignment with how how we do things but it it did become this kind of hub of that whole URL scheme movement and and you know drafts did a lot but drafts drafts was more about like notes and

1:31:31the kind of text, bouncing text around back and forth from apps and storing text and URLs and all that kind of stuff. And so it just its utility was different enough that you know he's done very well over the years and and great app and everything but because we were just such a and it's a good example like to this day like there are there are niches within niches and it's like we were in this like broader productivity niche that like was a little more accessible to the a random person and I've been surprised over the years by people who tell me like oh yeah I used Launch Pro back

1:32:06in the day and I'm thinking like you you're not nerdy enough. you're you're you know like people in the pro people like Federico who have this audience of people who are like who are nerdy and want to do these productivity things or they run a business or whatever and want to automate stuff and he is good at making that kind of accessible by giving recipes or shortcuts or whatever it is now to kind of help people and it because Launch Center Pro is kind of at the mastrom of all this but like there was a massive community actually the equivalent now would probably be the notion

1:32:38community like you go YouTube, you're going to see all these people who make content to help people understand how to do this pretty nerdy stuff. And it's to help them automate a, you know, spreadsheet because they're setting up a manufacturing line or whatever. It's it is like crazy how broad brush these things can be used for. So, you would think, you know, with all that attention and all that like ground swell and and we we were getting, you know, Vitici was probably writing about us like once a month as a new app would come out and he'd use Launcher and Pro to do cool stuff with it. You know, you think we're just like rolling in cash, but it was, you know,

1:33:17again, 99 cents when it was on sale a few times and like $2.99 a pop. Like, we did all right, but we weren't making great money and money, you know, wasn't mirror mirror was like this slow build and I that was actually a little bit of during that time I was making 50% of launch and our pro money. My partner Justin was making 50% of launch and pro money but then I had mirror on the side. So I think you know we're only making like 120 maybe 150 a I think at the peak it was like maybe one year we did 150k each. So we were not like making millions off of this thing, but Mirror Mirror kind

1:33:59of like was that other base. Although so much of that money was continually reinvested in other experiments and apps and hiring contractors. I had two separate projects that I got $50,000 into with contractors that I just had to pull the plug on. Like I realized I was throwing good money after bad. So yeah, just just like kissed a h 100red grand worth of projects goodbye because I I didn't see a path to recouping the money I'd already invested, much less the additional 50 or 100,000 it would have taken to launch. But you know to your point about investing money like I was I was always very open to spending money to make money and reinvesting what I made back

1:34:37into it. But Launcher Pro never like made a ton of money. I mean over the years it ended up grossing over a million dollars but but that was over the course of years and that was gross and you know Apple took 30% at that time. There was no small business program. I mean o over the course of the

1:34:5418 years I need to go back and calculate but I know I've paid them well over a million dollars. So like me little you know indie app developer who has never really made enough to like pay me more than a a a good tech job. like I've probably I'd never made more as an indie developer than I have at Revenue Cat as an employee. That's good context for people to hear too that are listening because I think a lot of people think because you hear about those there's a very wide variance on the amount of money people are making and it's not connected to how wellknown they are in the

1:35:29community. Those are deeply disconnected things. It's not even connected to the utility of the app or how well known it is or like there's so many like It boils down to things around like size of the audience the that like the ASO like people weren't searching for launcher and like you know it wasn't something you think you need and then you go search. So we didn't have that kind of like SEO base that a lot of apps have where I'm going to go snowboarding so I search for a snowboarding app and I find slopes like you know those kind of obvious connections weren't there for launch in a

1:36:03pro. And I think that's one of the reasons like even though it was so well-loved and so popular, it still was a very kind of productivity niche and then we weren't charging very much. Subscriptions weren't a thing at the time. And so I will say like looking back, one of my big regrets and I another thing I remember very vividly was sitting at this restaurant in Wimberly with Justin and

1:36:25my cousin Brock who was working with us at the time and and now works with me on on Weather Up. We're sitting around having lunch talking about it must have been like iOS 10 I think and there were kind of a couple of new things that we could do with Launch Center Pro but there wasn't any like big marquee feature but we're like should we make this a paid update because that was the only way back then to like take your existing user base and actually make another three oh my gosh $3. But it was super controversial. It was like people would get really pissed that oh you know I already paid

1:37:01every version would make people so mad and then the other problem was a technical problem is you have to create a new skew so it'd be like launch center pro 2 and then you would lose all your ratings you would lose all the whatever search momentum you did have and so that summer and then that specific lunch you know Justin was actually lobbying for you know we need to make more money and in order to make more money, we really need to do a paid update. And I argued against it because I just didn't feel like we had enough to justify a paid update. Looking back, we probably just should

1:37:39have done it, taken it on the chin, and maybe we'd still be working on Launch and Pro today, but that that was that kind of like pivotal moment, pivotal business decision where looking back, I probably would have done it differently. But it was those are such hard decisions to make in the moment especially when there's at that time there was just so much backlash. I mean in in the era of 2026 when you have like $10 a week subscriptions the fact that we were charging upfront one time and people got all this utility for like a buck or three bucks and then would [ __ ] and moan and

1:38:13[ __ ] and moan if we charge them another three bucks. just crazy to think back how different the app store was at that time and especially so if you were known in the community right because like your reputation is also part of this and in Launch Center Pro's case that mattered right like you were kind of trading on that whereas Mirror it's like none most of those people didn't know who you were and didn't care so it kind of depends on which you know type of you know business you're running but but you kind of mentioned uh you could have been working on Launch Center Pro today So

1:38:45implying you are not currently working on Launch Center Pro today. So yeah, what's the what's the rest of the Launch Center Pro story then? So part of the Launch Center Pro story is what I already said is that workflows came out and they were like four super sharp young San Francisco guys who were like I think living in a hacker house at the time. Yeah. And you know, here Justin and I, I think at the time we both had already had three kids. Like we're just in a very different life stage and different kind of ability to grind on these things. And and so part of the story is that

1:39:25Workflow came out and and started to eat our lunch to a certain extent. Now, we integrated with them, they integrated with us, and we did have a somewhat friendly relationship with them over the years, but they just did they did so much. like they really went nuts on it. And so a lot of the more and more of Vitici's post and more and more of the community was more focused on workflow

1:39:46because they they were just moving so fast and adding so much and you know being so innovative. I believe that actually I talked to Ari before workflow came out. It was stuck in app review for like three months and I think they eventually let it in for a similar reason that they let launcher pro in. He was sweating it for a while there. And again, absolutely. And I don't know if you cuss on on launch, you can bleep it. If not, it'll be cut out. Bat crazy that Apple was on the fence about Workflow and then like three years later ends up acquiring it. So part of the story is is Workflow

1:40:26competing and kind of sucking some of the air out of the room for those like, you know, productivity nerds. And the funny story I have to tell since we're here and I have a a mic to tell it with. Um I should interrupt here. If you're looking at your if you're looking at your, you know, podcast player and you see, wait a minute, it's how long and it still has this much left. You're getting essentially an insight into what me and David's weekly one-on ones that are ostensibly about work uh look like. Uh we we both were blessed with the the gift of gab as they say. So we have no

1:41:00problem talking and selfishly this is why episode 100 is perfect. This we're we're recording this on a Friday. We can just we can pull on threads and go a little crazy. But thank you all for still listening if those of you who are still here. So with that disclaimer, little self-s serving side tangent here because Launcher Pro was kind of the hub of URL schemes for a long time. Even

1:41:26after workflow was released, so many people were still requesting URL schemes for launch in a pro. We were still kind of a little bit more of the mainstream and and Workflow was a little bit more the kind of nerdy. I I believe they were they were charging like 10 bucks and we were charging three and five at that time. Also, all of your users you had had for five years or three years or whatever at that point, they could all go buy workflow and then workflow is getting new money while you were not like they had the advantage of starting over like you were kind of talking about

1:41:57wanting to do. Yeah. And most people use both because workflow was never really a they never really did a whole launcher UI and and I I don't even know I didn't hear from Ari on this ever, but they may have tried a more launch than a pro UI and got rejected by it. That could be. Yeah. And I I did hear from other people there there are other launchers that that were released eventually and and so there are other launchers still on the app store to this day. But I did hear from people who said that Apple specifically told them that Launch Center Pro was grandfathered in and that

1:42:34they weren't going to allow any more launcher apps that broke the the rule about mimicking the home screen. Um, so so that may have actually been part of it. I've never asked Ari that is that they may have tried to go down that road and Apple said no, but they were just they were never quite that kind of quick launcher that we were. I mean we even Justin did incredible engineering around launch time and so at a time when app launching might take two or three seconds like we forget how you know constrained the ARM chip was back in those days I mean some of these were even

1:43:08preapples silicon and even the early days of Apple silicon like they were just getting started um you know workflow was never quite that so we did still kind of have you know most people would use both not just one and those kind of things but because we were kind of that that hub hub for URL schemes. We had so many URL schemes that were directly submitted to us via our form that had like a very detailed explanation and and then developers would send us these really complex URL schemes and the parameters and how they work and all that kind of stuff. So we could then build our URL

1:43:43composer to make it easy for people so they didn't have to type out these long URLs. We actually put fields and then the fields would combine into it would eventually, you know, resolve down to a URL because it had to in order to launch the app, but we would kind of take care of a lot of that and the URL encoding and like special characters and like all that needs to be encoded. So, so we built up this database of URL schemes that was proprietary like people were submitting it to us. There is there's not a way to like decompile an app and find this. a lot of these developers

1:44:18would submit them to us and not go document them or whatever. So, uh, at some point I figured out that that not only did workflow borrow from our list of URL schemes, they actually copied our data like we had a a JSON file with all our URL schemes and we' update it remotely. So, it sat on a Amazon S3 bucket. We left it in like public and open. you could get it from the like documents folder and everything like that. And so they they either grabbed it from the app or grabbed it from from our S3 bucket. And the actual file with all of our structure and all of our URL schemes and

1:44:56all of that was in the workflow app binary. Not only that, but that survived the acquisition from Apple. I was going to ask, is that in shortcuts somewhere, you think? I think I brought it to Arya's attention at some point and I don't know if that triggered alarm bells and I don't know what clauses he had in his contract with Apple when they acquired Shortcut. I don't know how, you know, sweaty I made him when I I brought this up in a Twitter DM a couple of years after he got

1:45:24acquired, but I found it in the shortcuts binary and I I believe it was removed very shortly after. So, you've you've contributed to at least versions of iOS. Yeah. things that I typed into a JSON file were part of what Apple shipped in one of their system apps. That's amazing. So, I you know, I've I've I've thought back over the years like should I have sued them and like I mean cuz technically that was like copyrighted material but then it's like it just would have been a nasty thing. And then I think you know you could argue that it wasn't copyrightable because it was somewhat discoverable and it was code from other people. like there was there was enough ambiguity,

1:46:04but and I'm not like super salty, but I I almost wear it more as a badge of honor. Yeah. Yeah. Especially now, it's probably easier. I'm sure there was a time, especially when it felt like one of your businesses was and kind of was like kind of slowly dying. It It's probably hard emotionally. I think the more frustrating thing was that we had put literally hundreds of hours into this. And so it was a bit of a, you know, pardon the pun, but it was a bit of a shortcut for them to take to like grab our database instead of having to compile that themselves and reach out to the developers and like build this like ecosystem that people are submitting

1:46:42it to you. Imagine building your business on top of just sucking down somebody else's data and then using that to build like a model of some kind uh for your own, you know, product that then those that but you would never be worth that much probably if you were to ever do that. different thing though because it wasn't I mean people were willingly submitting to us but it was like proprietary information that wasn't and that was like kind of the whole point is like if we had just been scraping the web or like you know there was at the time this is a whole another tangent

1:47:16Apple at the time did not limit the number of URL schemes that you could query so inside an app you could basically run a loop that says is this URL scheme accessible yes no is this accessible is this accessible Is this accessible? Is this accessible? And so what some um enterprising um I believe it was like ad and attribution companies did was they would scan every binary because in the binary you could get the basic URL scheme. You could get the like the equivalent of the mail 2. So like Instagram colon like that was uh viewable in the binary. The additional parameters and all of that was encode in a way that you couldn't just like decompile and figure out. Um,

1:47:58but the URL scheme for an app was in the binary in an easy to access JSON file. And so they would scan hundreds of thousands of apps. They built up these databases of hundreds of thousands of apps. And it was used for fingerprinting. That's what I was going to say. If you know literally every single app somebody has and then you're trying to map person A on this app to person B on this map, which is very valuable for somebody running a advertising company and you need to know between apps who the same person is if you're like this is 100% match and a bunch of other information and

1:48:34you also learn things about people like oh they use you know Evernote instead of Apple's notes apps they use you know it's like you could also almost profile them based on the games and apps. that they had installed. But anyways, my point on that was like we weren't just scanning binaries. We were and that that's why this took us hundreds of hours. It wasn't hundreds of hours of like scraping the web and like finding all this. It was hundreds of hours of some of it we would find. Some of it we would reach out like when people would ask us, we would email that developer and say, "Hey, can you document your RL scheme?" when people would submit to us, we still had to

1:49:08like take their submission and like translate it into exactly how everything worked and how the the how to build the URL schemes and all that kind of stuff. And so it was it was a lot of manual labor. It wasn't just kind of scraping scraping the web for data. And that that's why I think we could have had a strong copyright argument because there was so much work behind it and because

1:49:28it was non-public information. But it's just a it's a road I'm glad I never went down. Yeah. Yeah. That's not one of the things I look back in a very different place. Yeah. Exactly. Um, so like we said, you know, an hour and a half ago or something, Launch Center Pro is no longer a thing that you're working on. So what led me just in the store like 6 months ago? Okay. It was six I cuz I thought it was still in the store and when I was prepping for this, I looked it up and I'm like, "Oh, it's not in the store." So you did have it staying around for a really long time. We

1:50:01weren't making great money. We didn't release that paid update that that I do to this day regret. And you know, eventually with three kids of his own and being a very talented programmer, Justin, my business partner who I still like we just had I saw him at the open house, the high school open house two nights ago and we have lunch and like we're still friends to this day, but you know, he just he he ended up joining a startup and and then this launcher pro became his side project versus like for a long time it was his full-time job. 100% think that was absolutely the right thing for

1:50:37him to do. It was hard for me at the time to have him, you know, abandon me, um, as it were. And then that part did get tricky. And I'll I'll say this kind of as an admonition to folks who are, you know, partnering with other people on an app. Like if you're a developer and partnering with a influencer or a developer and a designer pairing up and things like that, you don't think about it until you have to. But the unwinding of those relationships is where it gets very tricky. And so what ended up happening was, you know, Justin was really enjoying working at this startup and making

1:51:17thousands of dollars a month. had three kids and but you know he was working 68 hours a week at this new startup and very well-intentioned he's like oh yeah yeah yeah we should do this feature like you know next weekend I'm going to work on it on Saturday well he'd already worked 60 hours that week for a startup and then he's got kids and life and everything and so it just kept getting pushed back and pushed back and pushed back and so you know when you don't update an app and as we discussed like part of what we were dependent on was kind of making the news and doing interesting

1:51:46things in order to kind of a ahead of things. it did start to just trickle off which like for Justin it was like oh well lul my you know eight or $10,000 a month you know passive income is now six or 7,000 and meanwhile I'm like okay my like income is is taking a hit and thankfully you know I had I still had mirror at the time and so you know bills were paid and everything but it was it was a pretty stressful time and and and then you know and this is another thing I I don't say this to like embarrass Justin or anything but it's something Like if you're working with somebody in

1:52:22some kind of a partnership or a co-ownership, there are certain things you probably should define at the outset about how like what each person is responsible for and then if they're not fulfilling their duties, what what happens. So my argument to Justin was, "Hey, like your half of the partnership is that you do the coding and I do all everything else like product and marketing and everything else." And like I paid for a lot of other things as well because it did feel like, you know, he he in some ways, you know, his time was maybe more valuable than mine or whatever. So

1:52:57like, you know, we didn't always split expenses down the middle even when we were 5050 partners. Um but anyways um so my argument to him at some point was hey like you're no realistically you're just not going to code anymore on this app like we just need to face the facts. So let's take your you know $6,000 a month find a contractor and pay them to keep up the app and like you

1:53:24can help manage that and we'll we'll keep things going. And he really liked his passive income. Yeah. Yeah. and was like, "No, my 50% was like I built this thing and like now I'm like getting the rewards and like, you know, working with you making barely over 100k a year for a few years.

1:53:43Like this is kind of making up for the lost time that I could have had a better programming job. Like this is an asset I built and now the assets paying me back. Like why do why does my income So so we did eventually settle on, okay, we'll hire a contractor, we'll split it 50/50." I was like, "Okay, fine." Like, I don't think that's fair, but like I I just don't want to see this die. So, we hired a guy and it just it didn't work out. He was overseas and Justin had worked with him before and so we thought he was it just didn't work out. But, we had I mean, we got a couple updates in

1:54:16and it did all right. And so eventually, and you know, going like super deep on all this stuff, but I I that's what this is for. All that just as kind of like a word of caution for folks because I think it is very instructive and I certainly learned a lot and and do things differently now in those kind of partnerships. But yeah, it's like decisions you make at the beginning can can help you avoid both parties being in a situation where like what they want makes sense but they're

1:54:47no longer aligned. Right. Right. And so yeah, like you can't do any everything to avoid that. Sometimes that's just the nature of, you know, living life in business partnerships. But yeah, there's there's definitely lessons you can learn or like clauses or or things you can put into contracts to like keep incentives aligned or at least have something happen based on that. But then at the end of the day, you need trust, which it sounds like you you did have, and that's really the most important thing. Yeah. Eventually, Justin was like, "Okay, you know, it had been like I don't know, two years or something, and I was like, "I need to go find another partner." Like,

1:55:23you know, I I forget. I think I think we I agreed to keep paying him like 10% or something just to keep some money. And it had dwindled so much that it's like he wasn't losing as much. And so, I found a new developer. You know, that's part of this whole thread, too, right? Is that I didn't ever learn to code. And so, I was always dependent on either a partner or a contractor. So, either I was investing $50,000 and not getting a return or I was partnering with somebody and then ending up with with conflicting interests or, you know, hard things to work out. So, I found a new guy

1:55:59that I worked with for several years and it it it it we we shipped some good stuff, but it's like it we we just never kind of recaptured the glory and momentum. We tried to shift it to subscriptions, but when we did that, we only updated the iPhone app because like that was like 95% of the usage was the iPhone app. And we're like, "Okay, we'll update the iPhone app and then then then we'll get back to the iPad app and make it universal and all this stuff." And that was not wellreceived by the nerd community. And and you know again looking back I mean I understandably like the

1:56:37iPad was a big thing and for people who were deep into it they were they were using it on iPhone and iPad and so it was kind of ridiculous that we didn't make it universal and didn't update but for us as like a cutthroat business decision like if 95% of our revenue and 95% of our usage is on iPhone we need to make like the smart business decision and like focus on making a really killer iPhone update and that was the like change over to subscription. So, we really wanted it to be like a great new update with a lot of cool new stuff, but that in in part because the community that would

1:57:16have otherwise um shouted it out and like been excited about it, that was the specific community that was upset. Exactly. and and and so you know I said earlier I regretted not doing a paid update but that may have ended the same way that the exact community that that was otherwise excited about the app and talking about it would have then switched to criticizing us for charging again that switch to subscriptions just bombed. It bombed so bad and you know it was probably too little too late you know like people had moved on shortcuts had been released there just wasn't enough that we could do to kind of rekindle the fire and so then then there like when widget smith blew up we did

1:58:04take another crack at it with like home screen customization and you know and you know having having had a few months that were like 60 and $80,000 is very spiky, but when that has happened in the past, you know, even making 10 grand and knowing that that's like the peak and then it's going to like settle back down, you're not peaking and then going to continue going up. So, you know, I think each of those updates probably did make 10 to 20 grand, which if you know, amazing if it's a side hustle, not amazing if like you're trying to Yeah. And so it was sometime in that intervening

1:58:42time that I was like I I got to get a I got to get a job or some kind of a job. And um oh funny funny story too that was kind of like going on in the background of all this. Justin and I almost sold Launch Center Pro to Zapier. Oh interesting. Yeah. We got pretty deep in talks with them actually multiple times. The first time it fizzled out was because it was so early with Zapier. They're like, "We think your price is really fair, but we just don't have that much. Like, we can't invest that much cash, so we will give you stock in Zapier for the app, but we can't give you very much cash,

1:59:27and we want to hire both of you." And this I will I will uh throw Justin under the bus. He was like, "Nah, like I don't want stock in some like Silicon Valley company like cash." Uh, well, I mean, but this was this was like this was maybe Oh, I understand. I'm I'm something like that. It was way it was like they were still pretty under the radar at the time. And so, and they they I mean, famously now they only ever raised I think a series A and never ever raised again. like they

1:59:59were able to get profitable pretty and this is why this is why they didn't just throw money at us. But that's a crazy one because you know doing nap back at the napkin math on what the price they were willing to pay and the value of their stock at the time that would probably be $50 to $100 million today had we sold the app for stock. Looking back you know Justin and I thought oh we're like hot shot like we've done launch in a pro we can do it again. This is another like lesson for entrepreneurs out there that, you know, we thought, oh, we, you know, launcher pro is

2:00:34going to keep going and we're going to build other apps. I think we were kicking around multiple other app concepts at the time. And Justin was like, yeah, you know, the the opportunity cost of getting a job at Zapier, like who are they? Like, are they going anywhere? Whatever. I was even more so like he was like, I could do that. Maybe we'll just kind of work on stuff on the side. I was like, you know, you're going to hire Justin and buy the app and and I'm just going to ride off into the sunset. And that was maybe even part of it, too. But but that fizzled out. And then there

2:01:04were there were actually two other times where I almost sold it to him because it I mean to this day they don't have anything on on iOS. Yeah. It's kind of surprising and I think it's just been a focus thing for them where they've explored it multiple times and we've had many conversations about what all the cool stuff they could build tying into but you know they're they're way more B2B and like background automation versus like more active stuff but I think there's just so much cool stuff they could still do. So there were multiple times that I that almost sold Launcher Pro. And then the very last time was this that spring when I was like all right I I probably

2:01:39should get a job. I actually reached back out and had dinner with the three co-founders. But I had dinner with the three Zapier co-founders at WWDC in 2019 to talk about like them buying Launch in a Pro. And that that's another funny one because they were super gung-ho and then the developer I was working with at the time he went through some interviews cuz they they were they were thinking about it like as a package deal like they would acquire the kind of an aqua hire and then that guy and I would join as full-time employees and kind of be the mobile division at Zapier. But he

2:02:18he he's an in you people can probably look him up so I don't want to throw him too under the bus. I haven't mentioned his name for a reason. He's incredibly talented and and honestly one of the sharper developers I've ever worked with and and the he's like one of those kind of 10x developers that just gets so much done and and and works like crazy hours and would just like grind but he kind of failed on the like uh what do you call it the um technical interview? No, not technical

2:02:46the culture. So he kind of failed on the culture piece and so that fell apart in like July of 2019. Meanwhile, I had been talking to Jacob about joining Revenue Cat. So to come full circle, it was right after that all fell apart and again that that's not something I regret. I think you

2:03:09it's been amazing joining Revenue Cat. It's been a fun seven years here and I joined part-time. That's another thing I for almost two years I was only part-time at Revenue Cat and then part-time I was still working on Launch Center Pro and other apps. Yeah. And just like to roll back a little bit you like you had kind of led up to as Launch Center Pro was kind of going down and I know you had other apps and stuff. You started thinking I should look at getting a a job. You had never

2:03:35had a tech job before at a company right? No. So like what was why were you just I want some job. I was like, I need money to put food in. Yeah, that's fair. Okay, that's fair. Okay. And then why Revenue Cat specifically, why were you talking with with them? Yeah. Well, and and just side tangent here. I mean, the the dreamy, you know, indie developer path that a lot of people idealize and think, oh, wow, you know, and I mean, I don't think I was had an especially storied indie developer career, though. very flattered at, you know, the people who do recognize me for launching a pro. I never made great like tech money, you know, like I made decent enough money

2:04:19living in Texas, like having a small family, like being pretty, you know, frugal enough, but I was not bringing in hundreds of thousands of dollars. I think the peak I ever made as an indie was like 150k. And I did like I did sell a few apps. So I had a few like big influxes. But then I I you know like when I sold Mirror that sold for like over $400,000 and that's actually kind of nice when you sell an app and I don't know if the the tax rules are the same today, but at the time I was able to pay long-term capital gains on it. And so I paid 15% tax, not like employment tax

2:04:54that I was getting. But like that was that was my paycheck that I I sold my paycheck for $400,000. And so another that was you quit a job in a in a way. Yeah. And so so yeah, it's like I quit my job now I've got all this money in the bank and like now I got to make something happen. And so I reinvested a lot of that. I lived on that. And so that was actually like I was burning through that money trying to make something happen throughout this time. And then toward the end it was like, "Okay, I don't want it to go to zero." Negative. I got pretty close. Yeah. It's like it's like

2:05:33when you're learning to drive, the main rule is don't let the cars touch. When you're learning to live life, the main rule is don't let the money get to zero. That's the goal. Yeah. So then to to get back to your question, why launch why Revenue Cat? I was working on switching or I had launched weather up as a subscription app in the intervening time. We haven't even talked about weather up and I know we haven't talked about the app that you have that's active still today. So, you know, I'm great at this job but yeah, weather up is it was like your third run at a weather app

2:06:05or was it your second and a half cuz you like rebranded? Yes, it was weather up was second and a half because weather I had perfect weather and then the second shot was weather atlas and then weather atlas got rebranded to weather up. Yeah. For SEO reasons as we kind of talked about earlier. Yes. Weather at Well, Weather Atlas was great at the time because it is a very map focused weather app and that was kind of like what we were trying to pitch it as was like if you care about mapping weather maps like this is the app for you. And so we launched that as a subscription and had

2:06:38all sorts of problems like we we didn't want to you were not using RevenueCat, right? Well, Revenue Cat didn't exist when we did it. That's the thing. We launched it in like 2016 right when subscriptions started become a thing. I mean, funny enough, I think our price was 50 cents a month or $10 a year, which is just crazy in the day of like $10 a week weather apps. But yeah, it was so much work and maintenance and headache to build out a whole server to manage receipts and validate receipts and all that stuff. So we were doing client side receipt validation which was kind of a no no, but a lot of apps were doing it. So there was some like you know libraries to do it

2:07:19but like they weren't very well maintained and like you know Apple wasn't officially supporting it so things would break and and so much engineering time went into the subscription and like honestly had Revenue Cat existed before WeatherU and we used Revenue Cat I might not have ever joined Revenue Cat because I think one of the one of the big failures of weather up is that we spent so much time troubleshooting subscriptions, building that stuff out that I mean had we executed on the list of things that that we wanted to do with the app, I think it it would have been successful, but instead of being able to execute on all of the features and and

2:08:04there's still things that, you know, looking back again, the the sequencing of things is also very important. like we kind of felt like we needed to have a and you and I have talked about this a lot. It's like should you focus on covering your bases? Like you know there were certain expectations of whether what a weather app should be and we felt like we needed to kind of cover the bases of what a weather app could be and then we'd layer these innovative features on top. What we should have done was do the bare minimum possible of like what a weather app could or should be and very

2:08:41much focus on the differentiation. And we kind of got that backward. And so it it launched and like the reason to exist was that it was a more map focused weather app, but it that wasn't like super exciting and super differentiating. like maps were always like a tap away and like the storm app was a thing where it launched right into an even more sophisticated mapping features and so it's a great app but it just didn't have that differentiation. Well, I can show you pictures of the whiteboard of like all the innovative features that, you know, Carrot Weather has since launched and we eventually got to some of them with weather up. But I think the the sequencing of how we

2:09:23built and when we built was actually part of the failure mode of weather up. But an even bigger one was just so much engineering time went into stuff that didn't matter that that wasn't product that was window dressing. And I mean that that's even a failure mode you know in some ways it's actually

2:09:46partly a failure mode of AI today just like it has been a failure mode of programmers in the past. But there was also a lot of time spent like making everything reusable and like I I was not a good you know product leader in kind of helping to drive the technical side and then you know some of the folks I've worked with over the years are a little bit more the kind of code perfectionist where they were thinking about like reusability and like beauty of the code and things like that. That's actually I mean if I look back on my career, one of the things that I wished

2:10:21could have gone differently is I I do feel like paired up with the right programmer who had more of that mindset and moved quickly and everything like that. I feel like you know weather up could have been more success. There were a bunch of other apps I wanted to build over the years that I didn't that I think could have done well, but I never quite had that like sympatico is what they say in Spanish of like that that just the right part. Justin and I got close. I think that's the closest I've ever had and he I really enjoyed working with him. But that's a, you know, tricky

2:10:53thing about being an app, you know, developer who doesn't actually code is that I was always having to either pay contractors or work with partners and having to kind of navigate that aspect of the relationship and and and just genuinely and in hindsight not ever being especially good at that side of things where I could have gotten better at. Yeah. And we're already like so significantly over time that we won't get to pull on this thread as much, but might as well bring it up here is like you kind of are playing the not playing the role you are doing the role of developer now like you have an app out there now that you built completely on your own, right? Did you do you feel

2:11:35like you're getting a a taste of you know having an engineer who's mindmelded with you a little bit more now that you're building with these AI tools? It's been really fun to be able to just yolo prompts and get a build like minutes later instead of like days later. So, you know, when I come up with a CR you one of the toughest things over the years for me has been like I've never we've never really done much experimentation like like I I don't think I've ever done an onboarding AB test. Yeah. Anybody who listens to us as RevenueCat employees is like what? It's like, yeah, we work with people and help them set theirs up all the time, but uh I've done some experiments

2:12:17on that with mine, but yeah, not as much as I've done with other bigger companies. Yeah. And like even a payw wall test, the only payw wall test I've done is because revenue cap made it so easy to do that. You know, one of the tensions has always been if I ask the contractor to do

2:12:34something, am I going to get a dollar for-doll return on that time investment that they put in? And that's a really tough question to answer. And again, that's something I feel like I I probably failed at more than I would ever want to admit. But these are the things like at a bigger company, at a funded company, it's like you have more opportunity to fail at those things. Whereas at

2:12:54an indie developer, you focus on the wrong things. You burn a bunch of cash on the wrong project. Like that's your that's your paycheck that you just ate. Um, and it's just a very different life. Um, and so, so it has been a ton of fun working with AI in that I can actually yolo some of the things that I wouldn't have paid a contractor to do and I wouldn't have kind of burdened a partner with because it like felt inconsequential. So, like the app I launched is called Grit Method and it it it's I'm almost embarrassed to have launched it kind of like the mirror app but for very

2:13:33different reasons. talking to so many successful apps on the podcast and like you know I mean I've had Dualingo on the podcast every everything from like you know people making you know 10 million a year to people making a billion billions a year and so Grit Method is a incredibly niche app. It was never like in like intended to make a lot of money or anything. It was really just like I wanted to like do something fun and because AI does let you do these explorations, I wanted to

2:14:06to like okay what if I can just like tinker and build what what would what will I build? What can I build? And that that was genuinely a blast. I mean it wasn't a blast working nights and weekends and my wife was not super happy with me the three months that I was working on the app because I did get pretty obsessed. But like if you go look at the app, I mean I'm very proud of how I turned out. Like I didn't I didn't work with the designer. I forced myself to like just figure it out and I worked with like design MCPs and you know figured out color schemes and everything like

2:14:38that. Even all the promotional art everything like that is me and AI together put them together claw design and prototyping the designs in in chatb and stuff like that. But even the app itself, like there's like animations and onboarding and things like stagger in in a nice way and even when you hit the back animation, it slides back nicely. Like I was able to do all those little like fun touches that you just don't get to do if you're thinking like is this a dollar fordoll return of a programmer's time to implement this thing when time and money are are two of the biggest constraints on building. So that part of it was a ton of fun, but I never expected Drip Method to

2:15:23make much money and it didn't make much money. And real quick, what's the app itself? Like what does it do? So like gosh, like six or seven years ago, I was doing this thing with my kids, just thinking through like what are the values I want to instill in them and like what matters and how do I want to bring them up and stuff and I boiled it down to these like four daily kind of questions that I thought would kind of like help them be thinking about character. And so it was like do hard things like write something down like that you're intentionally going to challenge yourself today to

2:15:53do what are you going to avoid like recognizing traps like you know I'm going to avoid video games today because my hard thing is like do the whole weeks of homework in a day or whatever. And then be grateful. So just you know gratitude is is such a a great thing to be mindful of and to force yourself to think you know what am I grateful for? And then the last one is funny enough for the kids it was what will I do to help around the house because we were like really struggling to get them to like do chores and stuff. So it's like a way to kind of like built in and and in grip method it's

2:16:30like help others. So like what can I do to help somebody else either immed in my life immediately or or surrounding. So, I did this as a as a paper journal for the kids. And we it never really took off internally, which maybe is a good sign that it wasn't going to take off as an app either, which again I fully expected. I wasn't expecting this to take off or make money, but it was just one of those things I've always had in the back of my mind that that I just I loved the idea and it was fun to do with my kids. And we and I feel like it did like we did it enough that it did help like

2:17:03instill some character and and make them think about those things and it opened conversations with them about like how to challenge yourself and to be thinking of others and to be grateful and things like that. And so so I've always had in the back of my mind that like it'd be fun to build this, but like no way am I going to pay somebody 50k to do it. in no way am I going to ask a programmer whose time is valuable to like yolo $50,000 worth of time to build it. And so when I was thinking around in the spring of like what would be just a fun easy project to just explore

2:17:35vibe coding as like my first vibe coding app and so I was like oh that's perfect like you know and so I ended up calling it habit tracker for character and yeah it's a really fun app. I mean, I've been using it and, you know, kept my streak ever since it launched on the app store. Um, and it was it was a ton of fun to build. Ton of fun to build. And I mean, you know, for an indie app, I mean, it made it's closing in on like $2,000 of revenue, which isn't terrible, but I did spend $2,000. You don't want to calculate the ROI on your time. So, I'm not broken even on the money

2:18:09I spent on ads yet. I worked with a UGC platform to do UGC, but it was I man I just fell into all the same traps that like I I preach against on Twitter is that by the time I launched the app, I was so burnt out on it that I didn't do all the things I planned for marketing cuz my hope for the app wasn't to like make a ton of money, but I was like, "Hey, if this could make like a grand a month, I still haven't even submitted it to Apple for being featured. Like maybe if I could get it featured, it could make 500 bucks a month or something." But as soon as I finished,

2:18:41I was so burned out that even though I spent that 2,000 on UGC platform, I I wasn't even like paying enough attention to it and like dialing in script like all the things you're supposed to do after you launch an app. I did nothing. I did none of it. I think that's a familiar story to lots of people listening. You know, you burn yourself out building and then you just kind of dribble it out into the world. And then even worse was that pretty much immediately after that, I came up with an idea for another app where I was like, "Okay, this one this one actually probably could make

2:19:13money." And and that's what I'm actually working on now as my ship a ton app. By the time I had enough energy to start vibe coding again or or to that I should have been putting into marketing, I just started vibe coding a new app. Just follow You're truly a developer then. I am. You should see all the Xcode projects. I now have like three new Xcode because there's another app I'd like to vibe code that I think is really fun. Probably not as much, you know, revenue potential as this one, but a fun it's actually a fun spin on screen time apps, which are a huge category right now. And so

2:19:51I have two separate open Xcode projects that are partially finished at this very moment. So I am a true developer now, even if AI is the one writing the code. All right. Well, let's see if I can land this plane, although it's going to be a long descent. So, the last tangent we left off, you decided to join Revenue. The reason you heard about RevenueCat is you started building WeatherU up to launch as a subscription app. You did launch as a subscription app presumably in the pain of subscription app stuff. You came across RevenueCat as it was being sort of launched and built and built up. No, that's actually quick interruption to your story. Jacob cold DM'd me and made me

2:20:30aware of Revenue Cat. So I became aware of Revenue Cat through and I mean full circle. So going back to you know 16 hours ago when you talked about you cold DMing people. It works in the reverse. Yeah, Jacob put himself out there. Cold DM'd me or andor emailed me. I think it was both. Um like hey I saw you on Twitter like complaining about subscription issues. I'm building this platform. you should check it out and use it. So that that was actually the start of revenue for me. Okay. And so you joined initially as a contractor, eventually came on as a full-time I think your initial title was

2:21:06developer advocate. But what you were really doing and what you eventually changed your title to was growth advocate like marketing but specifically knowing and being able to talk to the audience of people who build apps and are trying to market their apps and build subscription apps. And you kind of already touched on the origin of your podcast Sub, but it was basically people asking

2:21:27you to start a podcast for Revenue Cat and you built it as very similar in a way to this show. It's an interview style podcast, but you're talking to people usually at larger companies, but you've talked to plenty of indies. We have a lot of overlap as we've already talked about about the stories of you know building and growing more in particular their app and like the things that they've methods they've used things that they've tried. We've talked a lot about how jealous you are that like I like to say that launched, you know, now that we're both part of the Revenue Cat, you know, podcast family, Launched is like your like dessert, you know, it's it's fun. It's more

2:22:06easy listening maybe in a ways, but Subub is like your vegetables. It's like when I listen to Subub, I like to have, you know, I have notes open a lot of times and I'm writing things down, ideas. It's way more dense. It's much much more buttoned up, but it's really like really really dense and high quality information for people that are like trying to take the business of of an app more seriously. Yeah. And yeah, I've I've joked with you many times, although it is 100% true that I'm jealous that you get to do launch and I have to do Sub I love Subub and I love my job,

2:22:41but I I I do put a ton of work into I don't think, you know, people even I don't think, you know, Rick, our our mutual boss, even realizes how much effort I put into um thinking through like it's so it's so much more fun and easy in some ways to do this kind of a show. I mean, no offense. I think I know I'm agreeing with you. So, okay. Um, but it's so much easier to to like tell stories and ask people questions about their their their life story and the story of their app and like all of that stuff is really fun. and interweaved in there are and and even in this podcast I've tried

2:23:20to interweave and call out some like specific lessons that I think people can learn kind of learn from my mistakes and learn from you know the successes and failures of my career. I have put a ton of effort into both guest selection and topic selection for sub club to make it very tactical of like you know my goal with every episode is like you should leave each episode with like three AB tests or like two new strategies you're going to try. If you're listening to a Subub episode and you're not walking away with your mind spinning about like how lessons from that episode could help you very concretely specifically improve your app. I haven't I haven't done my job. And so

2:24:06that not only takes a lot more effort in prepping like last night or no this morning I was hassling you cuz I was like where's my like doc? Yeah. I'm very intentional about I don't want people coming in prepared other than the question I always end with because I'm pulling on the threads although this one you know we did not maintain a coherent story in this one really at all but I also already knew you although I've learned a ton already with us talking but yeah compared to sub club where it's like you're preparing guests and you want them coming in with the knowledge of what you're going to ask so that they're prepared for like again high density answers

2:24:43not them live remembering and thinking about things and then and then hosting the show is very intense because instead of like I want it to be fun and entertaining to a certain extent and Jacob as the co-host I feel like does bring a lot of levity when he's on a lot of the shows with him are kind of more fun and entertaining and like we'll take more side tangents and stuff like he he makes it way more fun but I've always felt like I want to make it fun enough where It's like an enjoyable listen. It's not just like super dry like business school lecture, but I want to make it like a very valuable use of people's time. And so, so even throughout the the

2:25:26podcast, I'm intensely focused on like, you know, what threads to pull on that are going to most be relatable to folks. you know, it's really easy to to talk to, you know, like when I was talking to Dolingo, it's like I constantly had in the back of my mind like, you know, there's no other app in the world like Dolingo. So, like, how do I frame a question and then how do I respond to that answer in a way that's like relatable to the indie app developer who's just getting started all the way up to the VP of marketing at another big app or whatever. and and I love it and and I love

2:26:04hosting sub club and everything, but it is a ton of work. And so I do joke about like how jealous I am of launched and how much easier it would be if I just were hosting a like chill kickback talk show. It's just a very different type of podcast, but and serves very different needs. And that's why we have two podcasts on the in the burgeoning revenue cat media network is because they serve two very different purposes and both are valuable. They're just aimed at different uh intent and different um audiences. Yeah. Like anybody listening to this, especially you know if you have an app in the store and you're trying to grow it, like you need to listen to it. Honestly,

2:26:46I would recommend just going through the back catalog and like seeing what kind of catches your eye or the thing about Subub 2 is the show notes are nice and detailed and the titles will give you like an idea of what the kind of topic will be. Obviously, again, there's lots of threads that you pull on for each one, but you can kind of get a good idea. And quite frankly, it's a major source for me to do the job that I do. like I'm a developer advocate and I talk to engineers, but I talk to CEOs of companies, lots of people who are building building apps and it's it's like

2:27:20kind of the foundation for me for a lot of the kind of industry knowledge of what does work, what doesn't work, what's popular right now, what's not popular right now. So, highly highly recommend it, especially in an era where a lot of these sort of good industry download shows are there's not as many of them as there used to be. I feel like like even when I got started 6 years ago, there was a bunch of podcasts that I could just mainline and feel like I got a good history of what the app store is like nowadays. Sub is kind of one of those like really good foundation kind

2:27:55of shows. So, obviously, you know, I'm also paid to say that, so don't give me too much thanks. Uh, but I also do mean it. While you're while you're praising SubC, let me pitch Sub Live. As if I weren't busy enough and putting enough effort into educational content for subscription app developers, we are now I am now hosting a weekly live show every Thursday 9:00 a.m. Pacific, 1800 Central European time where I bring some of those same experts on. And one of the things I've experimented with is actually having a guest from the podcast on the live stream where it's almost like a part two, but in the live stream we actually take audience questions as well. And

2:28:34so it's a really fun interactive. So we have talking points similar to a podcast where we will kind of discuss different topics, but then we'll take questions about those topics and then we'll open it up to like a full Q&A at the end. And so that every single week, again, it's a lot to to manage. And you know, I'm doing two guests a month on the podcast and four guests a month on the live stream now. A lot of emails, a lot of talking points, docs, a lot of all of that. But I think it's been really fun and we I've had some really great guests and

2:29:05the main podcast I have kind of been focused a little more on bigger and bigger apps where like I almost think that the the floor now is is you know I'm generally inviting people on who are making over a million dollars a month in revenue up to the Dualingos of the world and life 360 like publicly traded com like executives at publicly traded companies are coming on the show now and so I'm kind of orienting the maid podcast more around that and so for this audience They actually might even be more interested in the in the live stream because yeah, I'm bringing more on the live

2:29:37stream. I'm bringing on more like consultants and do it's a little more kind of David's choice just whatever interesting topic or interesting guest I think I can be on. I love whenever you have somebody on who's an expert at like running ads on Meta or whatever and like people's questions. Even if I wouldn't have had that question, hearing him like talk through like Yeah. Yeah. Sometimes I've done this, sometimes I've done that. It's like that's super valuable because I've never It's almost like having a co-orker who's done all this stuff before. So, yeah, those are those are really great. Cool. Well, I think I think we kind of made it to the end here. So, I'll end by asking

2:30:15the question I ask everyone to end the show, which is what's a person or people out there that have inspired you and your work that you'd recommend others check out? I didn't think about this very off very much cuz you just sent it to me like an hour before the podcast. was like, "Yeah, but that was like 8 hours ago." David, you you've had our long long full day. I'm supposed to be thinking about this the whole time. Yeah. Uh the the first name that popped into my head because I just had another conversation about him recently is Donald Norman. And most of you won't know who

2:30:49that is, but he wrote a book called The Design of Everyday Things. Oh, yes. And yes, I actually read that book I believe in those first few months of starting App Cubbies. So, back full circle like when I was starting the company, I read the Aaron Hildigas book and I believe it was around that time or just before that I read Design of Everyday Things and he had a follow-up book that I read. I forget the name of the follow-up book, but it's just and you know, I don't know, it's almost 20 years later, so I don't know how much it holds up today. It gives you that foundation of

2:31:23understanding usability and user experience in a deep way that that just gives you the like mental tools to to to reason through why something may work better as a UI paradigm than something else or like think through user experience in a really detailed way. And funny enough, I feel like that's almost affected my day-to-day life as much as it has impacted my career because it has changed and maybe in some ways poorly because there are so many things in our everyday life that have such terrible user experience. And it's just so baffling to me, you know, having read that book and and thought about user experience for 20 years now, you know, the the like a stupid little things

2:32:19were and and one of the things that bugs me the most is companies that that think they're being Apple cuz like the iPod had the click wheel and then like the iPod Shuffle where you had to like learn these magic incantations and like those were never even that great from Apple. like multi-touch was was Apple at its best. So many of the like removing buttons and simplicity for the sake of simplicity was actually not good Apple, but people copy that. And so when you have a device that has a single button where like you got to click the button twice to get into this mode and then you

2:32:51toggle through four different modes, it's like those little things, it's like that could just be a dial and a switch. So, but it has made me way more discerning in the in the things I buy because I recognize those kind of things. And then the things that are designed really well. Shout out to Kia. Not everybody may love this as much as I do, but I bought a Kia EV9. I never thought I'd be like I was like a diehard Honda guy and like, you know, Kia, oo, that's like, you know, a off-brand, you know, Walmart brand, whatever. I had a very negative like brand perception. But we bought

2:33:26an EV9. Incredible vehicle. They are killing it over there at the Hyundai group. But the thing I absolutely love about my Kia is that there is a the cup holder is not your standard like two cup holders. And maybe if you're lucky, it's two different sizes of cup holder. Instead, it's a rectangular box. And inside that rectangular box, there are two buttons on the side. You almost have to see it, but you press a button and a little cup holder ring slides out. And there's two different sizes. There's a large cup holder ring and a small cup holder ring. And so no matter what size drink

2:34:05you have, if you if you sit down in the car and you've got a m like a co a ceramic coffee mug, like a big old handle and a big round ceramic coffee mug. Stanley. No, not well. Stanley's are like designed for it, right? Stanley has actually specifically a lot of those water bottles are specifically designed around a diameter. That's why they're small at the bottom and they get bigger at the top. They designed the Stanley around fitting cup holders. Instead of designing the water bottle to be a great water bottle, they have to design the water bottle around cup holders. You see some that are like tiny at the bottom and they have this big like lump

2:34:40that ridges out. It's like in order to get like a 36 ounce and then have the base be small enough to fit in every cup holder. All of our European listeners are just horrified at the the American drink sizes right now. No, but this is what's so great is you're, you know, you get your uh uh you make your fantastic espresso or cappuccino and you've got your big cappuccino mug and you go sit down in the car and then you just push that little ring out of the way and you have this giant square

2:35:12thing that you can put like any kind of giant mug or anything. I think it's absolute genius idea. um is like one of my favorite things and every time I get in the car and I'm fiddling with those and like my drinks are like perfectly and then I you know you don't have to think like I need to transfer from my coffee mug into like one of those like to- go mugs so that it fits in my cup holders so it's not like falling around in the car. Freaking love it. And that's the kind of thing you'll get out of design of everyday things is that those little subtle things that you interact

2:35:43with every single day there are ways to make them better. So now when I get in my we inherited a Ford Bronco and freaking drives me nuts. It has two little cup holders. They're both exactly the same size. There's no accommodation. It's just like this. Here's a cup holder. Whatever. It's like you have to adapt to the cup holder instead of the cup holder adapting to you. Perfect like analogy of great user experience and and thinking about the user. All right. Well, that is the the perfect uh perfect story to end on here for the podcast about apps. So, thank you so much, David, for coming on. Honestly, genuinely, like I don't do a lot of like special

2:36:22episodes, and as a hundred was coming up, I kind of was just thinking like I should do something, right? And when I realized like I've had you, you know, I've talked about this on the show a bunch of times with different guests, but I have a selection of people and I still have a decent list of people that I know I won't be embarrassed asking more last minute questions of. And so you have been one of those like obviously David should be on launch. Like it's like all of the things that the show has always been about, you like cut across all of them. Um I know pretty much every

2:36:53one of your guests. Yeah, exactly. But it was like even if I do embarrass myself in front of you, it's like we're co-workers. You have no choice. And so all of a sudden it clicked like ah that's perfect. And I know us we will go along. We will go on lots of tangents and this feels very appropriate for for the 100th episode. So, just super super fun. Two years of the app store and 18. Yeah, 18 year. Yeah, the classic nice round number 18 of the app store. Yeah, it's crazy that that's only two years away. That should be really fun when we get there. But yeah, so thank you

2:37:24again for coming on. Where can people, you know, find you and your work? Well, subclub.com. There it is. Subclub podcast on YouTube, Dr. Bernard on Twitter. Those are all the best places to find me. I've been trying to blog more on the revenue cap blog, but yeah, those are the I I I ramble a lot on Twitter, so that's probably the best place to catch my ramblings. Perfect. Uh, and thank you all for listening all these years. Uh, those of you who have been, I really appreciate that I get to do this. Like I said, this is like a selfish show that I get to trick people like David to come hang

2:37:58out with me, although he's contractually obligated to hang out with me every week. But yeah, it's genuinely been an incredibly fun project all these years and hopefully many years to come. And to the to the five of you who made it all the way through whatever this ends up getting edited down to 2 hours and 30 minutes. We're at 3 hours of recording. We've crossed three. We've crossed three. Yeah. Thank you. If anybody does make it to the end, it's incredibly flattering to have you listening this long. So, thank you. I think Malin and Kai, who make a bunch of different apps, uh, and who've been on here, I think they were the ones who made this joke on a guest when I

2:38:33guest on their podcast a long time ago. They were like, "You should come up with a code word that you put at the end of episodes and just ask people to retweet just that word or not retweet, reply to the episode with just that word to prove that they made it." Uh, and I've never done that, but what would be what's the what is a random word that you can think of that people should respond with, uh, if they made it this far? Usability. Usability. All right, usability. So, just just usability with an exclamation point. That's what people should respond with. So, reply to the tweet or toot or blue sky or whatever all of our words for all of our places that we post to

2:39:10uh with the word usability with an exclamation point uh and no other context. And we'll see if literally anybody does that. Uh anyway. All right. So, I love that. That's great. Uh, Launch, like we've talked about a bunch, launch is uh part of the RevenueCap podcast family now. Uh, and you should go listen to SubCub. That's David's uh, podcast that he does. And for everything else

2:39:31launched, you can go to launchfm.com. And I'll see you all again in 2 weeks. Bye.