Reaching 50 Million App Downloads! Sub Club Podcast: David Smith, Widgetsmith

0:00i've launched i think it's 56 or 57 apps at this point and all but about six of them have completely failed i say that mostly because it's like i've launched more failures probably than anyone in the app store in some ways and that's the way that you can end up with success i've just kept trying and it got me that little baseline of income that it was like okay i'm not just wasting my time here hey you're listening to the sub club podcast a show dedicated to the best practices for building and growing subscription app businesses we'll share insider secrets from the top subscription apps on the app stores

0:34let's get into the show welcome to the sub club podcast i'm your host david bernard and with me as always jacob biden hello jacob hi hi david number one how are you i'm good our guest today david number two is uh david smith long-time indie developer and podcaster starting with audiobooks in 2009 david has built many successful apps over the years including watch smith pedometer plus plus and sleep plus bus his most recent app widget smith went viral on tick tock and hit number one on the app store welcome david thank you it's great to be here yeah it's great to chat we've uh we've tried in person a few times and

1:15bumped into each other at wwec over the years um i mean you've been doing this pretty much since the very beginning right when your uh audiobooks came out in 2009 when did when did you actually start working on that um so i mean it wasn't even my first first app i think my first app i never went anywhere it was launched in 2008 so i mean i was within a couple of months of the app store launching um so i've been doing it essentially as long as you could um and i think i started working on oh yeah audiobooks the end of 2008 and it's just kind of grown from there

1:43so it's about 13 years in the app store wow yeah about like me and jacob actually we both yeah um had absolutely halcyon days of of paid up front and uh only 200 apps on the app store and all that stuff is a good time did you do were you uh a developer like a mac developer before that or how did how did uh you trip into ios sure so i mean i was a i was a web developer before um i did this and so i mean honestly i started writing apps before i even actually owned an iphone i just it seemed like a good opportunity

2:16and i wasn't particularly happy where i was at work and it was just something that i thought would be an interesting opportunity and i started learning and didn't know what i was doing for a long time but just kept at it and so it's just one of those things that i got into mostly because i seemed like a good opportunity at the time and so you know i just eventually i initially was doing some web consulting as well as my ios work and eventually just the web consulting disappeared and it became ios full-time um and that's you know sort of been the story for more than

2:45you know about 10 years now probably yeah no i was uh kind of similar like i i just saw it come in and was like maybe i should and i went and picked up the mac os uh the the hiligas book and learned mac os programming like yeah because there was no ios book right there was no ios it was iphone os right but uh but yeah it was uh different time fewer apps way smaller community uh so yeah interesting deck hey i did want to start by digging into the story of audiobooks and um i think one of the one of the interesting things to me

3:20because it happened to me as well is how um having this kind of foundation app that that started in 2009 that did well enough and and i'm kind of jumping ahead here a little bit but i i think if i know your story correctly that's audiobooks is kind of what helped you make the leap to be full-time indie and then once you become full-time indie you started to have the time to experiment with all these other apps um and a similar thing with me like i've had a couple of key apps over the years that kind of provided that like foundation of income that let me keep going and then that

3:57allowed me to experiment with all these different apps like launching a pro ended up coming out of already having income to be able to take this big bet uh and then mirror came along where it was doing really well and i was able to take other bets and so it seems like that's somewhat the story of audiobooks so um so let's let's dig into that so it was 2008 you had a failure and then you you start working on this audio books in late 2008 um what was the what was the inspiration and and and how did how did you kick off that yeah so i mean audiobooks was an

4:31app that it wraps it's an essentially it's a it's a wrapper and a player for uh free public domain audio books um that's all it was and it was essentially just coming into the market because um at the time i mean there were there wasn't an easy way to listen to any audiobooks on the iphone at that point um there wasn't an audible app there wasn't you know apple didn't have anything and it was just you could i guess you could listen to audiobooks i think in the music app potentially but it was because you could buy them on itunes right yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah and so that's where

5:02the idea for the app came from and it became and it just sort of it it just it took off in a way that i wasn't really expecting and necessarily that it became you know it was was successful and because it was an app that had a very broad appeal it was something that i think as you say so like built a platform for me to then continue to experiment and try things and uh i mean that that app has gone through originally it was paid up front and then it went free with ads and then i tried selling my own ads for a while i

5:28sort of went through lots of different models over it over the years but um it was certainly the app that i think was my first thing that was commercially viable where i don't think on its income initially i would have been able to go indie but it was the kind of thing where it became a client for me when i was doing consulting work and i would say like you know it would buy my time because it would start to generate enough income and at first it was like maybe it would buy me 10 hours a week that i could work on my kind of like independent stuff and

5:54then maybe the event would do better and now i could buy 20 hours a week of my time and eventually you know about all of my time and i think that model worked really well for me to have that initial success that i could then keep trying things and i mean i've launched i think it's up to i think it's 56 or 57 apps at this point and all but about six of them have completely failed [Laughter] that's incredible and i say that mostly because it's like it is so it's like i've launched some i've launched more failures probably than anyone in the app store in some ways and

6:27that like that's the way that you can end up with success though is that it's just like i've just kept trying and i think audiobooks was a useful one because it got me that a little baseline of income that it was like okay this is not just i'm not just wasting my time here but it allowed me to then just keep trying and lots of things you know lots of ideas and lots lots of things went different places some of them had their moment in the sun and then like failed off like there was a period in the app store where you the classic model is you had a pay-to-front

6:53app and you'd make you know a reasonable amount of money in the first two weeks and then it would make almost no money ever again and that was just the way it was and like that's a model that um isn't very sustainable but you know it's like if you had something that had a bit more just you know regular income as a baseline you could make work and that's how you incentivize a developer to make 60-some apps exactly and i just said it's like a curiosity did the the audiobooks in audiobooks what was the source for this were those like pre-recorded public domain or yeah exactly so there's a thing called

7:28the librevox project where people volunteer to read um classic audiobooks so you know essentially you know dickens or jane austen or things like this that are out of copyright and so people volunteer to read them and then those are just available on the internet and this essentially my app was just a wrapper for that it was just a way to get into that and the people who actually run the liverbox project were actually very happy with it like it was they would because for them there was no easy way to get their audio onto an iphone and so they were delighted that their you know this app was just creating a

7:59venue for their project to get a lot more visibility and interest and you got an incredible like app store parked name just audio books that's a great one that's exactly what i was going to dive into like how did did that was that just kind of a happy accident or in 2008 did you already start to notice because it took me like three or four years i'm a little slow on the uptake to to realize that these like naming a keyword instead of trying to create a brand was actually a fairly successful strategy for a lot of apps so did you just stumble into that or was it somewhat

8:35intentional um i mean it was it was largely just a result of i didn't have a name for i didn't have a better name and because the content of it was so generic it it wasn't like there was a natural branding that i was doing this and it's like yeah it's the early days of the app store so you could just pick a proper noun and it would be available because there were only a few hundred or a few thousand apps in the app store and so i picked it i tried it and it certainly has turned out well in that regard that it still has reasonably good you know search

9:03search search optimization and things because if you want an audio book and you go into the app store and search audio books it's an exact name match so you know audible likely still ranks higher because it has more traffic but um it's going to be in one of the top couple of hits um that's just a natural thing and i wouldn't say it was intentional like this is part of some grand plan but it is certainly something that i found useful i mean many of my other apps uh like i have an app called pedometer plus plus and sleep plus plus which um the plus plus when the app store is

9:33doing its algorithm for searching typically just sort of drops off and so they sort they rank very well for those terms for sleep or pedometer and then but i learned though that it's important to have something be somewhat trademarkable just for legal reasons and copycats and those kind of things and so having something additional to it um was helpful that i could trademark those terms and go after people who are are being you know trying to benefit from the any sort of success i've had on it but i think and those tricks they're always a bit tricky because like they are useful at the time but they're not really

10:09long-lived and you can't rely on them like if apple just tweaks their algorithm slightly then it goes away so it's not worth chasing necessarily but it certainly in this case worked out well for me and was useful but is you know less less of a factor now if you if you made audio books today it would be audio books degree sign tiny cross [Laughter] exactly i was going to ask though about you know algorithm changes over the years and things like that um did you have you seen a because you took it free in like 2010 or something right like pretty early you switched to your

10:43purchase model um so like what i saw with my mirror app was that once i switched it to it was like mirror by app cubby or something and i switched it to mirror with like a little um a unicode symbol that looks like a mirror and so then it was the exact match for mirror and then it just really took off and it was it's been the number one and i ended up selling that app in 2017 but it is still the number one hit for mirror on the app store and um i got to i think around 2015 there was kind of a peak of like

11:19five six thousand organic downloads every single day and then even though it even though like the aso didn't change like it still ranked for all of these keywords and everything else it did slowly kind of start to dip and and i kind of wonder if that was if that somewhat follows the kind of people going to the app store searching generic keywords it was like the iphone more and more people were buying them more and more people were coming like first time into the app so you can either confirm or or or debunk my uh thesis here that that there was kind of a wave and then a a um a crest

11:57and a a fall of the of these uh organic searches on the on the app store yeah i mean i think there's definitely i couldn't speak with authority about it but that seems consistent with my experience where i think there in the early days of the app store there was definitely a higher sense of just curiosity that people would open the app store and just be browsing and just not necessarily looking for anything particular because they didn't know what their phone could do they hadn't like that they have a phone and they knew it was going to be good for you know texting an email but

12:27oh there's an app store let's see what it does and i think that phase is certainly behind us that i think people know what they know what they know what they're you know what they want to use their phone for and very often they're going for a particular thing not just like browsing and i think if you were um and similarly as i imagine if you're just looking for a generic term you may not start in the app store even if that's where you're going to get the app you may start in google in google or youtube or somewhere else yeah like you're that's because there's

12:57a mature enough ecosystem there that there's a better way to find that even though it's the app store is a great place but it's um i think that's some those kind of just generic organic downloads are much harder to sort of to find at this point and i think that's just the reality and did you see that similar kind of build and crest and fall as far as like instance audiobooks is so heavily reliant on organic installs you don't i mean for my understanding you don't do any paid advertising for it um did it kind of pressed around that 2014 2015 and then or have have organic downloads been

13:32pretty stable yeah i mean i think i i know i couldn't tell you a date i don't look actually look at the numbers but it certainly isn't that way that there was that i think there were have been a couple of phases of the app store and there was in the early first maybe four or five years um you had that much sort of just higher interest and it was easier to be be seen and i would say sort of in the last five years the user acquisition reality of being in the app store is very different that it is there's a lot more either like just

13:58organ organic is more challenging and i don't do very much paid but i think that would be the only way that if i actually wanted to affect change um to my downloads beyond kind of just word of mouth and natural um sort of i think at this point a lot of my downloads are coming from sort of the word of mouth version of organic rather than the someone coming to the app store with a need and then trying to find it um and so that's that's just a guess but i think there certainly is those the app store has changed dramatically in 13 years i think there's there's

14:28certainly no doubt about it i think the the user base too i mean i i think about the way that that i was sure what we were talking about i was thinking about like my usage patterns pre and kind of post that era and i think one thing that has changed is kind of i kind of found all the apps

14:41i needed by 2015. you know i kind of got i got my podcast app i got my this app i got my that app i don't really go in there just doing that that way you're talking about uh the like oh what can i find for my phone anymore right it's just not something i do i still occasionally get a recommendation or i find something organically or whatever but um you know and yeah like in 2021 this is very few people's first smartphone right this is like somebody's fifth iphone or plus and so it's just like there's less curiosity i think but i guess that's exactly what we're

15:15arguing here so you mentioned you you've probably failed more than any developer ever on the app store which is really cool i mean i i in some ways feel the same way i mean i'm not nearly as prolific as you but i mean i've had gosh like 26 apps and maybe four or five have been you know reasonably uh successful um but so i'm gonna put you on the spot here are there any any things that really stick out of like you know or and and like i can think of one app because i'm still working the space so your weather app but yeah are there any

15:48apps that you can point to and say you know i learned a very specific lesson from this app in those failures because i think a lot of people who've only ever had one app and that one app was super successful there's kind of a confirmation bias like i'm awesome i did everything right but it's like they don't even know what they don't know they don't know what they did wrong they just happened to like hit some level of product market fit so any any specific apps and lessons uh you learn from these failures yeah i mean i think it's like failure is obviously a complicated thing because i

16:19think i learned something from all of them and so in some ways they were they were useful but i think from a financial perspective is mostly what i'm talking about when they're sort of a failure on that and i think the two areas that the biggest mistakes that i've learned is for one is under trying to really understand and having an honest evaluation of the size of the market you're addressing and some of the things that i've launched are very focused we're very niche and that kind of a thing it is possible to make it work but the economics are incredibly difficult and you're dealing with a very uphill

16:52battle if you're dealing with something that um that is only ever going to be useful to 10 000 people then great that for the 10 000 people it might be really cool but it's very unlikely you're going to make a sustainable living on an avid that unless your economics can be so high that each one of those people is giving you a substantial amount of money on an ongoing basis and i think some of my failures were things where i was like oh this is really cool and it's an app that does this you know something something very specific and it doesn't really end up working out and i think the other thing

17:22that i found too is just having that sense of um that apps understanding what are the ongoing costs are related to an app going to be and making sure that the economics of that can balance out and so in your example of my weather app ultimately like the app was successful it had a reasonably good user base but this was in it existed in a time before uh subscriptions were a thing like they just didn't exist in the app store and so the economics of trying to make it so that people could continuously you know pay for the the weather data that i had to buy for it

17:52just wasn't there and at a certain point it became it's like a change from being a business to a charity because i was spending more money um on the back end then i was you know getting people on an ongoing basis and that was something that i don't think i really it's easy when i'm building something to just ignore that because the costs especially early on are so low when you look at these things and especially with with most if you're some kind of data service or some kind of hosting provider or something you often will have a free tier or something that like the and if in

18:23some ways success can be your own failing because you haven't taken into account that oh if this you know if i get any amount of volume then suddenly i'm going to be spending thousands of dollars a month supporting this app and if the economics aren't balanced for that then it can you have to you know essentially shut it down and deal with that and i think those are two things for that it's usually when an app has failed it's because either i didn't fully understand what the ongoing costs were going to be or i didn't sort of real i wasn't realistic about how big of a market it is

18:52yeah uh yeah the union economics are tricky because at the beginning it's um it's hard to get good data because everything's so small it's like oh i can't really tell i don't really know what my cac is or what my cost of service cogs are so you're just like whatever and then by the time it matters it's too late in some cases and i will say too the you just used several terms that i have no idea what they mean um and i think this is another failing on my part that like you know cat mike hack and my classic service call like i don't know

19:21like it's this is which is fine i think but that's an educational moment cost user acquisition and what's cogs costs of goods sold sorry yeah there you go those were like things i didn't learn until i had a sas company though to be honest right like it's it's interesting like um yeah the different which which i mean just highlights kind of the world we're now right which is where most app developers are running a sas business right um and which which you were with the weather app you just didn't kind of think about it in those changes it was like an app with an api but really it

19:49was a sas business um and and uh that's why we're here at subclub.com to educate people actually it's not dot com.com or whatever but i think there was definitely that teachable moment in that in so far as it's just it's that's another aspect of that failing is i think it's so easy coming at it from an engineering background that i can get too excited about the engineering aspects of what i'm doing that i think oh this is cool cool new api there's this fun new feature there's this cool problem i'm solving and i can go down you know spend a month of my time building this app and then in the end i

20:22haven't really thought about the marketing side or the economic realities or all of those things and in some ways it's like that's fine because part of what i'm like what i'm good at is the engineering and if anything i've been able to just engineer my way out of this problem by keeping i can just keep building and eventually i've had enough things that just kind of naturally hit um and it isn't necessarily the most efficient way to do it or a way i'd recommend it but i think that is an aspect of my failing where it is you know and it's also the reality of being an independent developer

20:54where like i don't have a staff i don't have anyone else in that regard and so it's not like i have a business you know a business team or someone doing user acquisition or any of those things which on the one hand is great because it means my costs are really low that you know i my revenue is divided by one and i get to you know and i keep it so if i was a team of five people and i'm dividing my revenue by five it's quite a hard thing to you know have five times the five x the revenue and so it's like a trade-off that you in some

21:23ways would be great if i had both could have both but i'm not sure if it's actually reasonable or practical to i mean really though that's it's it's a good algorithm for finding uh you know what new new apis are the absolute version of the market shifting right it's when something gets created right there's a new opportunity so exploring those and understanding those and finding out how you can remix those with existing ideas that might that you know as a as a team of one where one is an engineer that's kind of your strategic advantage right it's might not be aso it might not be acquisition all these other things

21:55uh it might be like hey what can i do cool stuff with computers and i think historically that's been a pretty good uh roi for for a lot of companies so i wouldn't i wouldn't necessarily call that a weakness uh sure even though it's both right but yeah and that that specifically has been part of your strategy right so like you you know i mean widget smith which we'll we'll get to in a little bit but even um watch plus plus pedometer plus plus uh or watch smith sorry um yeah tell us about your thinking around using these new apis to get attention to to doing something that's never been

22:36done before as marketing which which is is is a great way to do it yeah well i think it's so this is certainly something i've done time and time again that like pedometer plus plus which is after rigid smith the most successful thing i ever made was the first pedometer app in the app store and it was you know when the iphone 5s launched apple introduced a step counting chip into it and it was the first app that took care of it and it's like for a few weeks even it was the only one and it was one of my strategic advantages is the fact that i'm just one guy

23:06who really likes to program and is pretty good at doing things quickly and that means that i can be there on day one and i think that's beneficial in sort of two main ways that being out there early is something that often gets apple's attention and it's ebbed and flowed in terms of whether that's important for apple's featuring you or not but it's never a bad thing for for apple to feature you or to get on their radar and you know as a an independent developer that's one of the few things that i have that i can kind of pull on that apple gets excited about

23:38where on day one here's this app that takes care of this new thing that they're trying to sell their new phone with or whatever that speed even like a one person team compared to like a three or five person team there's a real advantage if you're just one person like no communication overhead no nothing like you can just do it all in your brain and like it's really hard to be i mean i'm i'm saying this is watching i haven't watched our company grow so much it's like wow the just like getting all these folks coordinated at the same time really is a different world than when

24:04it's just yourself like trying to put things together quickly yeah i mean i think that that's just such a the other aspect of this just so much it's it's so so often i can do something faster than anyone else not necessarily because there's something magic about me but it's just i don't have it there's no it's not like it does that oh there's a designer who will you know do a bunch of specs and then that's going into a then we'll have a sprint planning meeting and we'll break up the features and it's this whole thing like that's not my process i just open up xcode and start working

24:33and so it's you know maybe it means that i'm you know it's like and i end up with as long as i have a good idea in my mind i can just be driving towards it i don't need to go through a lot of infrastructure to get that like i don't have you know a road map with tasks with you know sort of issues that i'm working through and burning down my like whatever all those software things that you need to do if you have a big team and are valuable but i just don't exist for me and so there's that extra multiplier and i think

24:59being there early is just it gets it gets attention and it creates opportunity that there's a vacuum it's a short-lived thing you know the um if you if i had launched widget smith a few a few weeks later i don't think it would have mattered it would have been complete like it is this very ephemeral like thing and once you know once a year there's this giant opportunity for me and i've sort of dove in and taken advantage of it several times and sometimes it's worked and sometimes it hasn't you know like my imessage app store apps didn't go anywhere but that turned out that was a market that

25:31didn't exist but i spent my summer making sure that i was there and if they had if they had been really important and was super cool and apple cared about it a lot then i would have been there and you never know that ahead of time unfortunately but that's i think just something that a small team can benefit dramatically from is like taking advantage of that and being okay with too of not shipping things that are as robust and complicated as fair enough if i was a five-person team it could do more or have more capabilities or you know be localized into more more languages or also launch on android or

26:01whatever those things that i that you would imagine would be beneficial i don't have those but like it's just a trade-off for me yeah uh when the app store is your marketing channel primary right it makes a lot of we did this at when i was at elevate this was a constant strategy for us was what is apple interested in even even for us we were a team of 10 or 20 at that stage but like um adding apis oh yeah sure it kind of makes sense okay yeah we can add that like not on our program not really something but like yeah the benefits were tangible but as you kind

26:30of mentioned it has gotten at some point i think for a team of that size the the benefits of being in the like what's new i forget what the they used to always have a feature like what's new in ios whatever um and you would get in that and it would be a pretty good feature but that has gone down over time so now it's like it's exclusively the to the benefit of really small developer teams right that they can take advantage of that yeah well it's just i think that the impact of being because to your earlier point about i think fewer people are searching for apps and

26:57so being in a featured list in the app store is not as it's not the thing that it used to be that i remember the first time i got featured in the app store and it was crazy like just it was rev it was it was completely mind-bending i didn't go from like more yeah you lasted a week and i went from you know maybe i was having like in the tens of downloads a day to suddenly i'm having like tens of thousands of downloads a day and it was just like like completely mind-bending but that's not the reality anymore like that that multiplier isn't there

27:25in in the same way like it's lovely to be featured but it also is very muted now because it's not for a week it's kind of on this random algorithmically driven basis where if you're the app of the day you're actually the app of the day only for one person necessarily like it's not like everyone in the world got it that day um it's and so those those things lessen the impact of it and their benefit becomes more in aggregate rather than kind of in an acute way one of the things you mentioned kind of in passing there was um not having to wait on a

27:56designer and that's something i actually wanted to talk about um i you know as much as it's like the apple ethos to be pixel perfect and to like have these like amazing you know leather stitched icons back in the day or whatever um i regret spending as much as i did and kind of letting design in some ways overly drive the process um because as an independent developer where every penny i spend is is money that's not going into my pocket i spent tens of thousands probably over well over a hundred thousand dollars on design over the last 13 years um and from what i understand you've

28:38spent very little so so i mean it sounds like that's intentionally part of your strategy it's like you don't one you were saying you know you're not a team of five so you keep your expenses down but two you're you're also not waiting on them so yeah it was at a have you spent much on on design over the years or have you done it all yourself and then has that been a very intentional for for speed and cost yeah i mean i think i i've certainly tried spending money on design and over the 13 years like it's not that i've never done it but it's

29:12it is it i it was never it never paid off for me enough that it would for it to be something i continued doing and i don't think i've done it in five six years now um and at this point the only design that i typically will ever pay for is a app icon design um because that's just something that i can't do very well myself so even like like widget smith the icon i made myself because it's just a blue round wrecked like i i could handle that but it's fine like it's number five in productivity not doing so bad yeah i think you're pretty i think you're a

29:45pretty good icon designer actually yeah you know and i think it's to the point of like i think it's it's easy enough to like if you if you try to learn basic design and get competent at the basics you can go that can take you a very long way and i think really elegant new fancy design that's doing really like groundbreaking or cool things with fancy animations and all that stuff like i love it when i am using an app that does that but that kind of design um like that takes a tremendous toll on your development process and i think a and like a if you're a thoughtful

30:22developer who want is willing to put in the work to just kind of like study what the basics of design are you know you can get good enough that you can do a lot of it yourself and i think that's something that has worked really well for me and i think it's also been to my benefit that it isn't necessarily that i'm not waiting on a designer it is that i'm able to i'm a better developer because i underst i took the time to study what makes a good design for an app and so i'm that informs my development and then it allows me to build things

30:55that'll be you know that are structured such that the design will naturally flow from it and those types of differences that if i just was being hand handed a list like here's a you know a handful of mock-ups go and build it and i don't really understand why things are structured the way they are then i would i would often find myself in kind of i'd pay myself into technical corners that uh if you if you are responsible for both the design and the development you're that the two are blending together really well and so i think it's something that i certainly recommend and i think like

31:25i mean some of the best apps i think have come out of the one developer one designer teams like i think that is a can be a useful model but for me it's just something that i think you know in the same way that often i've you know i've known many designers who learned just enough coding to be able to sort of to to make the basics of the same thing can go the other way that a developer who puts in a little bit of time and is a student of what like if you're using something and you start paying attention to why is this good

31:51um and you don't try and overreach and like try and do things that are beyond your capability like i can make a really nice clean ui i can't make a you know something that is cl is clever and fancy and that's that's fine and i'll just if i scale my scale my applications to fit what i can do then i'm i'm fine yeah i uh i'll share in that like we're revenue cat we didn't have it does i mean we have a full-time uh product designer now that helps with like dashboard work and stuff like that but we didn't i was the only dude person doing design

32:22for the first two years and very similar like i i knew going into it it was my weak spot so i spent a few weeks one summer just like taking i took a like online color theory class and then i just like learned did some like basic tutorials got really good at sketch and like made some mock-ups and you know i had worked with a lot of great designers and kind of had knew what the process was like um but yeah again it's like what's your advantage and in your case it's the apis and being first to market and all that stuff and so you're not likely to get a

32:53lot of like leverage or whatever out of having really great design you just needed to be functional you needed to be good enough something that's not going to turn people off right when they see the app on and that's and that's kind of the bar and yeah i agree with you i think it's actually pretty easy to achieve um at a you know with a with a minimal investment yeah i think you also it is it's i'm very i very much like a model where the initial upfront costs are as low as possible and if i need to double down on something and like it becomes a situation where oh

33:24now i need design resources or i need something more graphically oriented or like things arise like i'm delighted to spend money on an app that's making money yeah exactly rather than spending the money on something before it's even proven itself yeah we've spent a lot on design since like revenue caps hit like our stride but in the early days it was like nah like this api it's like the design of the json is more important than the website exactly yeah it does force this kind of function over form approach and i think that's where your apps have really succeeded is that they're is it you focus on them doing things

34:03well like serving of specific purpose and serving that specific purpose very effectively and that's where i think a lot of the kind of form over function design even within apple i think apple still makes this mistake a lot of of focusing too much on on how things are gonna look and how things are gonna come across versus like well how how is it actually gonna be used by people um and uh you know that's where i think i've fallen down a lot as well it's like spending so much time on these pretty graphics and then and then everything then like the user you can't like iterate quickly on a user interface

34:42based on feedback when it's all so polished and pixel perfect like it's so much harder to do iterative design to enhance the usability of an app when when there's so many barriers and then so much already kind of like set in stone because it was designed this way and you can't step back out of that as easily so yeah i think i think it's great the way you've you've done that the one thing that resonated with me you said david was just how a designer if they don't fully and i love designers all my designer friends are gonna hate me for bad about designers but i think

35:23one one universal experience for developers when you get handed something that it's it looks great and like functional on paper but like there's just like because there isn't like internal knowledge of ui kit right yeah and just like this thing that looks like yeah i know it's just pixels and it should be really simple but like it's actually gonna add hours and days to my to my and and you know if you're not an assertive developer that's going to be like no i'm just not going to do well you can do that on your business right but like because you own it but but if you know if you work on a team or

35:53whatever sometimes there's a lot of loss there where a developer will feel and also like um uh feel like it's a challenge right like oh yeah i can do that right and they end up over investing in these ornate uh user experiences or use user interface elements um just like you talk about like roi and whatever like just not there you know um so i i think it's a very like prudent approach yeah for sure so i did want to touch on real quick and um i want to get to widget smith and talk more about that but um i wanted to touch on the your ios

36:28version stats so um it's something i've really appreciated over the years there's uh fleury has has published stats here and there that your site has been like my go-to place to say you know how's ios 14 adoption going how are do you publish publicly the the version stats of your audiobooks app which is a fairly broad market app it's not perfectly representative probably of the entire market um but yeah tell me about why you published that and then do you actually run a custom analytics stack to power that um or or do you have a third-party analytics provider that you just pull the stats in from

37:06yeah so i mean that came from i think there were certainly i mean i'm running it for years and years because in the early days of the app store there just wasn't good data on this kind of thing and it was so i i i remember finding that it was just so frustrating right i couldn't get a basic sense of like the different device distributions and ios adoption rates and things and so i just wrote something uh myself to do this and i sort of shared it because it was really helpful i thought i i just like if it's helpful for me it's going to be helpful for

37:33someone else and audiobooks was the best app i had to make the public version of this for because it was my broadest kind of user base that it wasn't as like pedometer is great but it's dealing with people who are fitness oriented and so like my some of my adoption numbers are like there's a skew to it and it's a bit less mass market um but it's all built in custom i i've used analytics packages and things before but um in the in especially with apple being and it's sort of like the the privacy consciousness and things it became something that i just didn't want to

38:11have as i would have the minimum amount of third-party code in my apps as i could and something like the kind of analytics i'm collecting is very easy to do as just a little um sort of custom thing that i wrote that's just you know it's just a little website that's collecting some very basic stats and being thoughtful about making sure that it doesn't log essentially anything except for very anonymized aggregated things so i don't collect any user level information whatsoever it's all just being collected um at an aggregate level and it's just something that i wrote and it's a basic thing and i think it's a useful

38:46tool because this is sort of to the same thing of a question about velocity it's like you can't know when you can drop old old devices or which device to optimize for unless you actually collect that data and you actually look at it and so like right now for example something i like i always try and optimize my apps for the iphone 10r um because in all of my apps it is by far that screen size um so that it's the iphone 10 or the iphone 11. um those are by far the most popular phones um in the world right now and so like that's my

39:16primary testing device that's where i start but i wouldn't know that if i wasn't collecting that kind of data and you know sort of i wouldn't have guessed that necessarily and especially because i live in the like apple tech ecosystem and i would in my mind oh it's probably just like the pro size you know like the the 11 pro is probably the the most popular phone because that's what all my friends have but um that's actually not the case that's you know that that is a popular phone but it's by any means the most popular and so having that kind of data to back up my

39:46choices and making sure that you know it's like i i if i'm doing a design i'll optimize it for that and then adjust it for the other ones rather than going the other way around or if i'm doing screenshots for the app store i make sure that my screenshots are perfect for that one and even if sometimes i'll do you know for the the more minor phones i might just say like use the you know scale down the assets for something else but that's a size that i will for sure use and i think also it speaks to there is a i think there's still some of this but

40:14maybe a bit less but in the earlier eight days of the app store there was i felt like there was a group of people who were kind we felt like we were in this together and like especially among kind of indie small developers we tend to try and like help each other out and so like i made that public it was an internal dashboard and then i just like well let me just publish this to a different url um because if it's to kind of just help out and i think that was a nice thing that i think there's just there are fewer indies than there used to be

40:43um but it's certainly an aspect of the community that i think is still nice when there are there are some aspects of it that still exist uh it's also really nice to have um usually i would caution people to roll against rolling their own right uh but uh i think there is this like somewhat uncertain niche of some of these tools get really expensive even like an amplitude or a mix panel or whatever they're more they're the pricing often is more favorable towards uh b2b and like smaller head count or smaller like user-based size apps um and you can lose this this like kind of information i and i

41:18gather it's not an app store connector it's probably crappy if it is uh it's like some of it's in there but not really in a way that like app store connect sometimes has some of this stuff but i like i like just having it myself and there's also it means that i can do additional beyond just demographic collection there are a few things that i will do in here where you know i can add in a hook and say you know like does anybody ever open this page of the app and i can do a little basic like those kind of basic analytics things that you can't do on

41:47doing app store connect and so i can put you know put this into my system and do those kind of basic collections which a more sophisticated analytics package is just like that's just a basic feature of it but um it gives you that kind of middle ground and it's just it's a tricky reality of you know apple wants you know i have to put in my privacy things all you know all the things that i do and so if i start using a third-party thing i have to be completely on board with everything they're using my data for um and so sometimes it's easier to just

42:15roll it have it be basic and simple i mean the actual these apps are not complicated or i think the initial version of this was actually i just based it on the error log of a nginx server where i just ran it yeah they would just make the request and they would actually just all 404 like the analytics request which is 404 and i would just parse the error log and add it to a sql file and it's like that was super straightforward and easy to build and it's just a scripted half of mix panel basically like you know and like that's what i think mostly just to say is it doesn't have to

42:51be hot like super sophisticated and fancy this is a back end utility tool so you can very easily like you could go crazy making it fancy or you can just you know write a little script to process a log file and it'll you get just as much data out of it yeah that's great um i did want to touch on on widget smith you you've talked about it at length so um there's a great episode with you and marco i think what came out like two weeks after widget smith hit number one and so that's a really fun episode people can kind of go get the history

43:23but it's a cool kind of um culmination of this story of launching 56 different apps trying all these different things and then you you go after these brand new features with the widgets in ios 14 and um somebody picks the app up on tick tock it goes viral it hits number one in the app store it's just such a cool story as an indie developer to hit number one and and again you've told a lot of that story uh other places so i don't want to just rehash the whole story um but there were a couple things that i wanted to go over and i don't know if you've talked about

44:00it um since so one of the things that i think would be interesting to follow up on is just how the um durability has been so like you hit number one it stayed there for like gosh like weeks right or almost about two or three minutes depending on the market yeah so how is it how has that gone since and like you're still like number five you're in the top 10 of productivity regularly um has the app been durable um um download wise and revenue-wise like how has it gone after hitting number one like i mean i think it is it certainly continues to be my most

44:37successful app and i think it probably it seems like it will be for for quite some time and you know obviously the first couple of weeks were insane and completely like mind-bending and you know i think i i exceeded my luck like two date app store downloads you know of all my apps over the last 13 years were in a few hours of it when it kind of hit that crazy moment we've seen a couple on revenue cast like a couple viral events like that and i am blown away every single time it's it's more like it outpaces the app store featuring like by 10 or 100 x it's insane and i think

45:12that and obviously that was really cool and fun and like exciting and a little bit like scary and like terrifying but i think it's what's i didn't know where it would settle down to and it's like where is that obviously the nature of something being a flavor of the moment is that like that moment ends and it just vanishes like the the driver behind that you know it's not like it's being featured in tick tock videos anymore at least not in the same way and so the durability i believe now is largely just coming from the fact that that initial spike generates enough kind of ongoing word of mouth advertising

45:47that the nature of especially the nature of what it does is it puts something cool on your home screen and it has that natural if someone sees your home screen or you show them something or you share a screenshot um it has the name of the app in it and it's like it it has that natural oh i want to do that too-ness to it uh and that seems to be where the durability has come from because uh i've tried sort of like the sort of like the paid marketing things to try and keep something going and for me the it's a model that gets v it's it's

46:16very hard to not just like lose your shirt on because you can so easily spend way out spend what you're getting back or not so if you have somebody else's money to blow yeah and so like for me it's just it never makes sense and so like i i want if something's going to be something that i keep working on it needs to be sustainable kind of on its own and for it it still you know still continues to do really well on a on a download basis and it's also um it's you know it has is monetized both with advertising and with subscriptions and so

46:45you know the two together create a really nice sustainable um revenue for me that it's based mostly on usage rather than needing necessarily to have big spikes and downloads to keep it going it's like as long as people keep using the app um if they're opening it they'll see ads or if they're you know power users and who really want like the pro features of it and they pay for a subscription you know if it's continuing to provide value to them that they'll continue subscribing and so it's that durability has been there i think largely it certainly is easy to be durable when you have this wild spike at the beginning to kind

47:17of kick start that um effort um but it seems like the there's enough ongoing utility of it that people keep using it and um that has a natural sort of knock-on effect of you know people just telling their friends about it and i mean it's kind of a cool thing that um even after you know many millions of downloads it continues to find new art find it find a new market and people continue to sign up for the subscription and it's that's happening sort of on its own without me having to necessarily do anything other than just keep adding you know features and improvements to it i don't

47:50need to worry necessarily on that side of things as much yeah one of the things that i was um initially taken aback by but now see the the maybe accidental brilliance of how permissive you were with the feature so um and i made a mistake with launch center pro i was actually trying to kind of ride your coattails with my app and um i was much more aggressive with the paywall so i paywalled one of the like more prominent features instead of instead of paywalling some of the lesser features and then to your point earlier about like user acquisition you know part of how you make user

48:32acquisition work is that you force you can't pay five dollars for a download if you know one out of 200 people are paying you um but widget smith going viral it went viral in part because you were so permissive with the features so like how did you decide where to draw the line in the paywall um yeah how did you make those decisions yeah i mean i think i think a lot of this comes from a place of my goal is to i want a business that lets me keep developing like what i love and what i enjoy is programming that's that's that's i'm gifted in it i enjoy it i love it

49:13and i will just keep doing it like if it wasn't my job i'd probably still be making apps um but and so i don't i'm not chasing some kind of like wild exit or something dramatic and so i think i i feel like i want to make things that people will like using and that will won't be annoying or irritating and that i can feel proud of at the end of the day like that i'm not you know like the people who are paying for my subscription are paying it out of a genuine desire to support the app to do the really advanced like these are my super fans who really

49:47care about it and they're the people who i'm sort of sort of going after for that and so i don't didn't feel necessarily compelled to make the paywall all in your face and be limiting features and kind of doing those types of things and in this case it worked out really well because it it created a um it created its own marketing machine as a result and like what i gave up potentially in having a less permissive market uh paywall strategy i made up for in essentially free marketing for because the app is used by so many more people and i think that trade-off is something that's easy it's

50:28like i don't have or i don't necessarily want to spend the capital to acquire those people but in some ways i'm spending that capital by just making my paywall more permissive and making it have a natural more virality to it um and that for me i think works well for everybody that like more people are getting more out of the app and um i i benefit from it sort of coming along and i don't think it was it's not like this grand strategy that i had for it it was just in general if someone's gonna pay me something i want for what they're paying to be

50:59something that is super clear is super straightforward and is compelling that is something that i feel like i would pay for that it isn't an arbitrary restriction or something that feels kind of mean-spirited that sometimes a lot of paywalls can you can run into these limitations that feel completely contrived that there isn't a reason for it like most of what i'm people paying me for in widgetsmith are things like my weather data the thai data and some graphical assets things that i have to pay for that there are there are ongoing and tangible costs that i have to pay so i can't make those free because

51:31then i go out of business because millions of people are requesting weather data like that doesn't work for me and so making it paid feels good to me and if i think it works well but i think that's definitely something that you can get if you're too stingy with what you offer you're kind of like shooting yourself in the foot because you're you know you want to make that first run experience feel so good that people want to keep coming back and if you get too uptight that the first thing you the first thing the app does when you open the app is ask for money

51:58like if i open that app i'm just closing that app and deleting it like i don't want to i don't want that that my experience to be them asking that's an app that's paying for distribution basically is what you can tell and if you're not then like i mean i think this is not a comment an uncommon strategy but but but you know optimizing for distribution early becoming not a monopoly because there's other apps like widget smith but becoming a dominant per like player or like the best app you get data you get usage you get word of mouth you get a brand and then in the future if it becomes an

52:29operational requirement that you make more money per download or whatever like you have a lot of levers there and you can go about it more thoughtfully than if you try to like try to shoot blindfolded like from from the start there's just no way you can you're going to be able to get and i i talked to a lot of people getting ready to make their subscription apps and whatever and they're like uh they're going back and forth like oh what should i put on my paywall which i whatever i'm just like just don't think about it too much just don't do something stupid like just

52:55do something reasonable and normal and don't try to be too clever and then you know be prepared to iterate and change like over time because it inevitably will that's good advice this is such a fascinating time i wish we could talk another hour just on on on paywall strategies and and freemium i think a lot of developers do make the mistake in the subscription space of because they're spending so much on user acquisition they have to be more aggressive with the paywall but then in the long run you're you're paying for users that you immediately ostracize you know if you're if you're only getting you know 10

53:30to start your free trial and then only 50 of those convert like you're paying for all these people who ultimately have a bad experience in your app and so it works because that's their model but but they're leaving a lot on the table long run by not having a more permissive freemium strategy where you can get people in using the app finding value and then over time bringing them along and it seems like that's part of what widget smith has done well with like you didn't start with ads ads came later right and then the paying for assets i think came later as well um so like

54:04exactly to jacob's point it's like you just got out there with a great product you know found that product market fit it went viral i mean you know it probably wouldn't be the success it is today without that but but then you've kind of layered on some additional money making over time and so that's great um but anyhow we're at the top of the hour and need to to wrap up um uh in the show notes we'll have links to your uh twitter underscore smith underscore david smith um oh my god i never realized the pun widget smith dave oh my god i'm so sorry it's amazing yeah the brand is just so

54:42it's perfect throw it on your lap it's so great yeah that was a as soon as it was one of those names where once i once the name came to me it's like yep that's the name oh it's even it's a good name on its own right and then oh i just love when things are like tidy and tied up like that it's so perfect sorry anyways i was just gonna say anything else uh anything else you wanted to share or uh anything else you want to to mention as we wrap up yeah no i mean i think we covered some good things and i think it is

55:08i i was like sharing my story as an as an independent developer because i feel like in this industry there like there's there's an aspect of it i know this is something you know haven't listened to this sub club podcast before like there's a there's an industry and an an and a branch of this space that is very data oriented and like it it it's your build it's almost like you're building a machine to try like a business machine to try and like spin off money and it's all about how you're getting your conversion rate value to this and then you can put it into this and

55:40it's there's a very like and i respect that and i understand that that is a very like viable business but i think what i always like sort of to share the other side of this story where it's also possible to just make cool things and have them have just have enough enough of a business in them that it makes a good living for you but you don't need all of that infrastructure and all of that other things and i think to our point we've made many times is if you have something that you take the approach of simplicity and straightforwardness and craftsmanship early you can shift

56:13and pivot and change as you go and if you start too numbers driven and you start to like kind of cold in that way i think you can lose just as many opportunities as as you could i personally i enjoy this way i think this is fun i you know i'm very excited about wwdc next week because it's the time that i get to just discover what i'm gonna launch this year kind of thing and so i'm very excited to be about that i think that excitement is something that i wouldn't have if i was you know building something that i didn't enjoy doing in quite the same way

56:48yeah that's so great uh well thanks david so much for your time and um good luck next week thanks to make sure you never miss an episode subscribe to the show and your favorite podcast player thanks so much for listening until next [Music] time you