How a COVID Pivot Saved the Company — Daniel Kennett, Cascable Studio

0:00We have an app called Casper Pro Webcam, which was our COVID panic pivot that actually saved the company. Whoa. Well, we have to dive into that. Thankfully, an accidental excellent business decision many years ago, I pulled out the camera connection logic and stuff into its own framework. That is another revenue stream for the company like we license that out. We went, "Oh, oh, we could use the SDK to make a webcam, a virtual webcam on the Mac." So, you can connect your camera and then it's a webcam. So from like idea to money was 3 weeks and I'm very proud of that. That filled in the revenue. Welcome to Launched. I'm Charlie Chapman and today

0:36I'm excited to bring you the developer behind the excellent photography app Cascal, Daniel Kennet. Daniel, welcome to the show. Thank you. Nice to be here. We got to hang out a little bit uh a couple weeks ago in Chicago, right, for Deep Dish Swift. And you were a speaker there. And for a while there, you were top tier, the funniest by a significant margin, uh talk, also guest of the show a long time ago, Chad Zel. He came in towards the last minute and he's competing with you. Those were both like some of the funniest talks I think I've ever seen. That

1:22was my favorite talk at that conference. It was so good. Highly recommend people people watch that. Uh so yeah, I'm super excited to to have you on. Uh as soon as I saw that and honestly as soon as I saw or listened to the podcast that you did leading up to uh that conference that they do, I was like, "All right, it's time." Uh you've been on my list for a very long time and we need to make this happen. And so uh I'm glad I'm glad you're finally here. Thank you. It's nice to be here. Yeah. So before we get into, you know, your backstory uh and how you ended up making Cascal,

1:53uh I want you to explain what Cascal is. give the quick elevator pitch so that we know kind of what we're leading up to here. We have a few apps, but the main app, Cascable Studio, is for photographers with cameras that aren't iPhones. So, like we support Canon, Nikon, Sony, Fujifilm, like a few others. And it they it connects to your camera and you can remote control it, transfer files across. But we also have more advanced features like automation and like all the way up to like a shortcuts like visual scripting language for photographers to like automate doing this and that. So it's like a more professional um you know like advanced uh like amateur

2:31photographers use it as well especially for like astrophotography and stuff like that. It's it's a tool in that realm for like advanced amateurs and professional photographers to do more with their camera uh than they can with what it comes with. Perfect. And uh all right, let's get into you know how you ended up uh building these apps. And so the questions I always ask to kind of uh kick off this conversation is where are you from? Uh do you have a formal education related to what you

2:56do? And then yeah, what was your career like that kind of led you into the sort of indie app world? I grew up in England. I live in Sweden. So now I'm from Sweden, but I'm from from England. I guess I have had formal computing education in the form of a computer science degree. I shipped my first India app and started earning money from it before that degree started. Man, you really pitched this

3:20as a really complicated story and then you just bing bang bong answered them uh very cleanly. Well, yeah. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, but like everything's kind of all over the place and and stuff. So, you have a computer science degree, but you started doing the indie thing before that. So, yeah. What's the story there? Why did you start doing that? All right. All right, the whole thing started. Do do you as an American know what a car boot sale is? I know what a car boot is. Uh cuz I've seen Harry Potter. Um so uh I know that that is that is what we call a trunk of the car,

3:49right? The part that you can open in the back. Maybe a flea market is closed. Like a bunch of people put all of their sec crap they want to get rid of and everybody drives to a field somewhere and it's all in the boots of their cars. They open the car boot. People come, they wander around and they buy secondhand stuff. Oh wow. Okay. So, we have garage sales. Yeah. It's like a garage sale that everybody comes together into one place. This feels like something that should be an American thing given our, you know, obsession with cars and big old You do like your cars. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway,

4:19so um when I was a kid, we bought a uh a ZedX Spectrum computer from there. It was like the era where it had a tape drive, like Atari kind of Commodore kind of thing. It was way obsolete by the time we got it, but you could still buy games on tape from like secondhand stores at at that time. And you could buy magazines and it was the kind of era where there'd be a program in the magazine and you type, it was basic. And that kind of got me into oo programming cool. And then, you know, my family, my dad was a journalist and that industry was Mac back then. So like they had

4:53a a Mac in the office. When that Mac became obsolute, it came to my bedroom. So that was a Mac LC2, so like system 7 era kind of 90s. Um, and I really wanted to learn how to program it. And I did several failed attempts to do that. Like I tried Java. I like from a local bookstore bought a Java book. The first sweet solution, right? Yeah. Didn't really get on with it. I tried cuz back then it was all C and C++, right? So I tried that. Didn't really get on with it. Um after a few years few failed attempts I found a thing called real basic which is like a crossplatform

5:27visual basic kind of language. So it's quite simple and I did and I did manage to like get on with that and actually learn programming with it and I started sort of making apps and shipping them. Yeah. What is shipping apps mean in this era? Yeah. So that would be uploading it to a website in a sit file stuff expander and it' list it on version tracker.com which is just a list of things that were released basically. Okay. Interesting. So it's like sort of shareware minus the Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And back then like people would pay the payment provider called Kaji K AJI not the search engine. And then I remember my first check from them in dollars

6:09came when I was 15. So that it's kind of that era in dollars. So people are people were able to pay you cross country even then. Was that complicated? Well, it probably should have been. Um they paid the payment provider and then they would just send me a check for everything. But it was an American company, so literally I just get in the mail like, you know, a month after they sent it a check dollars. That's pretty cool. Um Yeah. Yeah. It was cool. Uh, and I remember 15 cuz we went to the bank and the bank would not let me open a business account cuz I wasn't 16 yet. And I kind

6:42of did this mostly on my own like um valition cuz where it might have been the time, it might have been the location, it might have been both, but schools where I grew up and when I grew up didn't really have computing courses. Like there was a computer on a cart that would get wheeled in once a week and we'd go on the computer, you know, and even when I got to secondary school, which is ages 11 to 16. Then even there, it was a huge school and there was a computer room and like once a week we'd all file into the computer room and learn how to use word and mail merging and

7:13all that kind of stuff. So like that degree was the first actual programming education I got. And what kind of app what kind of app were you making? It was a word processor. It was a very simp like kind of like text edit but a bit more fancy. Like if I'm honest, it was just like dragging controls

7:27onto a screen and like you know, oh, you type text here and you can change the font and stuff. You know, that kind of earned pocket money. I saved up and bought my iPod with that. Biked over to the local Apple reseller. That was before Apple stores, I think, especially in the UK. Uh, bought my iPod with my with my app money. Um, yeah. And then the iPod actually unlocked my first indie business. Oh, really? Okay. At the kind of tail end of my preun university education, um I had an iBook and I want I had music on my iPod and I wanted to share it with my friends,

8:02but iTunes wouldn't let you copy music from the iPod back to a computer. Um I guess it was a copyright thing. So wait, you buy cuz you had to buy the music on your computer and share it to your iPad. What's the story for why you're then sharing from the iPad to a computer? It's because it's your friend's computer. you know, this is the height of the Napster era, you know, all that kind of stuff. So, it's like, "Oh, I got this cool new album. You should listen to it. I've got it on my iPod. I'll give you a copy." And they have their computer with them. Yeah. If I go around to their

8:30house, you know, they've got a computer there or whatever. So, I started figuring out um how the iPod worked and reverse engineering it a bit and figuring out how to get the music back off it. This is feeling like origin stories already for Gasco, but Oh, 100%. Yeah. So, I did that in the back of physics. So my physics grades just went in the last when you said on the back of physics I thought you meant you were using physics. I'm like what? Literally sitting in the back of the classroom tapping away on my computer rather than paying attention to my physics lesson and physics was the science I was good at as well. It was really stupid. I ended up like shipping it again

9:07similar thing uploaded to a website very very basic license key system. Thankfully, thankfully, even though my grades at school tanked, I think because I did computer sciency stuff and I put the fact I was making apps and shipping them like on my application to uni, they still let me in for my computer science degree. Even though I um missed the like grades required by quite quite a margin. And you said real business. So, was this one like making like actual, you know, not just pocket money, but like a real amount of money? Not then, but it did. I was doing uni, learning how to program properly, you know, with proper like programming and then I was

9:46still doing this app, this this iPod app in the sort of in the background, you know, while doing that and it was just very slowly like, you know, ticking upwards. Uh, and that course was supposed to have a work placement in the third year. I was like, I should do my app in that instead. And the university wouldn't let me work for myself for my workplacement because they want they want what they're really wanting is like learn how to work with people, learn how to write a BRD or agile or whatever was popular at the time. Exactly. And the rule that they dinged me on was that

10:19um you can't have the report given back to the university on your progress be written by a member of your family. Oh yeah. Which and I am a member of my own family. Yeah. It's hard to argue my way out of that one. But what they did instead let me do is change my degree to a computer science degree without a work placement and then just take a gap year. So I did that and in that year I worked on it full-time, you know, cuz I still in the umbrella of education and living in my parents house, you know, all that kind of stuff. And by the end of that year, it was like properly,

10:47you know, a business. So I'm curious, you said it was ticking up and up and then by giving it full time, it it grew more. Why do you think it was starting to, you know, it's not just features, like were you marketing it or was it being shared around? What happened was I was kind of following the the the the rise of the iPod, if you like. Oh, that's you're sort of doing the same thing that a lot of people did with the iPhone, right? Yeah. Exactly. And I think I never really did any proper marketing for it, but you know, by that time there were a ton of competitors. A lot of

11:20them were free. Mine wasn't, but I I tried to do a really good job of making it a very friendly app. So like it would auto detect the color of your iPod and the icon in the app was the same color as your iPod, you know, little details like that which the Mac community especially in that time. Yeah. Yeah. Highly appreciated. Yeah. And it was also crossplatform. It was real basic and that would compile from Windows for me. So I shipped it on Mac and Windows. And uh what really really gave it its break I think was there was a popular website at the time called iPod Lounge that became

11:51iLounge when the phone came out. and that did a tutorial on how to copy music from your iPod to your Mac. The business kind of sales pitch was that it's for backup. So if your Mac fails, you know, your hard drive fails, you have a backup of all of your music and the playlists and the smart plays, everything. Your iPod is basically a mirror of it. So the app would recover all that. The playlist, the smart playlist, a lot. So it just mirror it back basically. Was that

12:14how you marketed it as well? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It was like and it was genuinely used for that. Like by by the end like we were getting people referred to us by Apple support like saying, "Hey, Apple said like I I need you to get my stuff back." I Yeah, sure. But this iPod lounge website

12:29did a tutorial on how to do that. And they used my app, Music Rescue, it was called to do that. And that was just so if somebody they had really high SEO, they were like a proper SEO, you know, place. if you also visted um how to you know recover music from my iPod they would get that article which would get my app and that is an argument for why spending a bunch of time on features and polish and everything matters because like the reason they chose that I'm imagining is because it was the easiest one to do an article on because it's like it's more straightforward

13:03they're going to get way less people asking them questions than if they had picked some free like really janky thing. Um so yeah that's that's a case where like doing the the feature work even if it doesn't immediately lead to marketing uh actually can have that impact you know down the road. Exactly. Yeah. I always find it funny when people these days are like well you know you have to use X programming language or X framework to build an app. So, come on. I I bought a house with real basic like you know is a users don't care if it's a good app and it's it fits well

13:36in the platform you know it's polished then you know the underlying technology isn't really super important you know obviously the technology helps you do that and depending on the specific audience you know maybe they care but very likely that's not the case your average end user doesn't care between UI kit and swift UI or whatever you know so yeah that that breeze past the next few years

13:56finished uni was earning enough money to like you know pay a mortgage all that stuff the lot. Um next 2 three years completely screwed it up like completely screwed it up. Ended up with like I avoided bankruptcy like like this like by the skin of my teeth like the skin of my teeth. How did I screw it up or how did I avoid bankruptcy? How did you screw it up? What happened was is two two real things is a a a kid basically with no financial education in like maybe two years went from working in a hardware store part-time to pay for food at uni to earning like a senior developer

14:32salary. This is like the football player story, right? Like saving. Nah, I just like, you know, buy stuff. Credit card, credit card. Oh, credit cards maxed out. Pay it all off. Whole thing, right? And and do that. So then separately, we also like, you know, I hired a friend. We had an idea for a new thing like another app which we were both excited about and we started building that and like we kind of spread everything too thin. The revenue from music rescue just started to drop a bit. Not a lot like it just it just you know the iPod you know the phone was out

15:04by this time the industry had changed how music was consumed was changing like Spotify is coming out a lot you know so our revenue started to kind of do that a bit but because I was basically just spending without thought on kind of a delay as well because of credit cards and stuff you know by the time I realized it was kind of too late. Um, so between this just just being crap with money basically and and not saving and not doing sensible smart things, not really anticipating the fact that this wasn't just the way it was going to be forever. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So,

15:37cuz I had no idea. Yeah. And then everything just kind of came crashing down basically. Did that just like upend your sort of mental model for your self-worth? Like were you very tied up in this as that was your thing or was it like you know you did this other stuff and you had this cool little side hobby that happened to be making money? No, no, that was my thing. That was like it was the worst time of my life. Like it really was like I imagine not just the money but also that like identity. Exactly. The whole thing. I struggled with this since then but I my identity was always

16:08developer programmer rather than business person. So like you know you know failing that way didn't really shake my confidence as a developer. Oh okay that makes sense. It just really sucked. So we you know lost a car just you know suddenly came and took the car one day. Uh fighting to keep the house. Uh I eventually sold it to avoid it being taken basically. Um you know lost lost friends everything like my my entire life was like kind of destroyed. Um, so what we did in a in a very

16:38sensible move was to I know we should move to Sweden. That's the go-to uh go-to move, right? Famously cheap place to live, right? Cuz the thing is the company was the app was still selling like it was earning some money. So in theory there was a universe where I could have like kind of sorted it all out and carried on. Uh, and the way I work is it's very hard for me to I I I deal better with troubleshooting like looking in from the outside. So if I'm inside the problem, especially literally my house is, you know, I'm in the house and they're threatening to take it away. Was there

17:13was this a little bit of like sort of running away from your problems but at the time I was like, "No, no, no. We planned this for quite a while." If you had like, you know, it's all sensible, blah, blah, I was basically fleeing the country. It was within the EU at the time, so obviously I wasn't fleeing crap really cuz you know more like mentally, right? You needed a reset. Yeah, exactly. Just just outside of the physical space I was in. Yeah. Um and I tried and like I eventually I just ended up folding the company. Like I just went, you know, this isn't this isn't going to

17:43come back. I don't think so. Folded it. Still had a ton of personal debt. Um ended up working at Spotify. That's what I was going to ask. Why why Sweden? Uh, and Spotify feels like Was it because of Spotify or was it like you just liked Sweden? The actual story is Obama got elected. Oh, okay.

18:01You don't need to explain anymore. That's why you end up in Sweden. Yeah. Yeah, obviously. Um, yeah. There's this whole thing in the media, I think, in American media how Obama was going to turn America into like a socialist hell hole. Uh, and the Daily Show did a a bit on like, oh, it's America's going to turn like turn out like horrible crappy Sweden. Um, and they did like a documentary on how terrible Sweden won. And the bit was it's actually a really nice place. So they like accidentally did an ad campaign for like move pretty much. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I was like, "Oh, we should move

18:31to Sweden." Yeah. And it was a joke and then just like over a year it just kind of like snowballed into like, you know, like cuz my wife and I were fairly young at the time. Um, and uh, we were like, "Okay, well, if we're going to experience living in a foreign country, it's either now or when we're retired." So I was like, we'll move to Sweden for a year. We can rent, you know, figure out this whole cash flow situation with my previous company, you know. Um, so we moved, yeah, with with without Spotify at all. And I've been there for six, we've been there six months or so,

19:04maybe a bit less. It's not important. Uh, and when we made the decision to fold the company, it's like, okay, well, I do did still have all this debt that I needed to deal with. So I was, okay, well, we needed I need to get a job then. Uh, and a friend of mine on Twitter, um, when it was good, um, worked at Spotify, um, and we were we were Twitter friends and he was like, "You should, uh, you should come work for Spotify." And then I I went for a chat one day, uh, and it was an interview. I didn't realize it was an interview. I That's the best way to

19:35go into an interview. Yeah. Yeah, I think so. And then I ended up getting the job at Spotify, so Oh, that's cool. That's a fun time to be at Spotify, too, right? It was. Yeah. Yeah. I So, I joined before they were launched in the US. Wow. very small. We went to WWDC and nobody had any clue who we were. Like never heard of it. I was, you know, a Groove Shark user who was just like constantly pouring over screenshots of Spotify waiting for it to come to the US. Maybe I even got the Mac app before cuz I think you could download the app. You just couldn't create You could download the

20:04app. Maybe I created an account with a VPN. I'm trying to remember. I remember being very excited about Spotify specifically. It was really cool and it was really early. The company was really Oh, that's pretty cool. And yeah, the time I was there was like a really huge growth period. Like I was employee number 10 and something and it was many thousand many thousand by the time I left four years later. So that was a bonkers time. It was fun. I learned a bunch of stuff that you don't learn being an indie developer like how to work with people. And were you doing indie stuff at all

20:30during this time or were you like I'm a company man? I was just like right no that's done. Just need to concentrate on like sorting out all the debt paying that off like getting that all sorted out. And it was a really fun job. So, I didn't really want to like the the itch wasn't there as it were. Like I was having a great time doing what I was doing at Spotify. Like I was, you know, sorting everything out. It was good. And then once everything was sorted out, you know, all the previous bad stuff was done, everything, you know, settled. I bought a camera and it was the first

21:03Canon camera that had Wi-Fi. And I was like, "Oo, Wi-Fi." Um, and the app was terrible. Like really terrible. And I was like, I could make a better app than this. I should reverse engineer this camera. And then 12 years later, here I am talking to you. Bang. Boom. All right. Roll the credits. Pretty much. Yeah. So, when when you say app, you mean the desktop app for letting you Or is this a

21:26phone app? No, it was a phone app. This is a phone app, right? Right. That's the point of the Wi-Fi. The Wi-Fi was slow. It wasn't terrible because all it did was take the USB kind of interface and just pipe it over TCIP basically. So you had access to everything even though Candace app didn't give you everything. Oh, so you weren't using any like APIs, fancy APIs or anything. You could just connect to it because it was just the I guess USB protocol over Wi-Fi. Is that a thing? I don't I don't know much about that. Yeah, there's like a standard um protocol for cameras called PTP which

22:01is picture transfer protocol and then there is a standard for funneling that over IP which is IP experience with this kind of thing because of all this time you spent. Well, but you were reverse engineering. Yes. So I just reverse engineering but like piping files over USB protocols. Yeah, exactly. Like I the the iPod was mostly disc based so that was okay. Um, but there there was some funny stuff that like to figure out the color you there was the iPod had a P list embedded like you heard of scuzzy? Yes, I know that I know the word scuzzi. It's a cable, right? Or like a

22:40protocol. Yeah. Yeah. Like a like a protocol. So it turns out a lot a USB is kind of sort of scuzzy over a different cable. So you could issue some scuzzy commands to the iPod to get a P list out of it. And that's the most like Apple, right? I imagine none of this existed uh with Canon. No, no, no, no, no. Um, yeah. So, like I did it, you know, kind of learned reverse engineering kind of through that really. And so, you built this, you built this for yourself then or was it initially, was it immediately like, oh, I'm going to make an app and kind of sell it somewhere? No, we

23:12were still kind of reeling from what had happened. Yeah. Yeah. So, this is just a side project. Like, it it scratched the itch of doing like a reverse engineering stupid. I love doing stupid stuff with computers. It's the best. It was just kind of like a fun side project to to learn how this works and stuff. Um, and then just over time, like as Spotify grew, you know, it became a massive corporation like any massive corporation. Uh, I was never that good at the corporate like career game. You know, I filling out the boxes to check to do this thing. I don't know. So like promotion

23:46projects and yeah the company kind of grew around me um if you like. So like I was just kind of in the middle with way more people above and way more people below just picking out Jira tickets and fixing the jury ticket you know it got like I I did some amazing amazing things at Spotify but like by the end I was just kind of like bored of it. uh not not bored of the work I was doing but just you know being in a big corporation and not kind of sucking at at the promotion game and just watching people join you know way after me and get promoted ahead of me you know that kind of thing

24:15and so the side project is during this period of like you're starting to get bored you're just kind of it's a fun tinker thing yeah exactly yeah and it got to a point it's like ah this could be enough I could sell this we could do it my wife and I talked when all this was happening with my previous company she was my girlfriend like we we were we weren't even engaged at the time and she saw She saw him. Oh, she lived it. Yeah. Like we hadn't been together that long like um as well, but she stayed um which is kind of crazy, but but she saw it. So she she had also kind of lived

24:48it and she'd seen the worst of it and she very understandably was also not super enthusiastic about like let's do it again. Perfect. So, but she she supported me and we we set some like sensible goals like um so I had some savings by then and in Sweden the law is once a company is a big enough size they're obliged to give an employee 6 months off unpaid and guarantee their job is still there at the end. Um you know just for for any kind of sbatical. So I took that and the idea was okay at the 6 months if the app isn't selling you cut and go back and you hadn't released it

25:33already by this point. No, no, it it was getting there. So I spent a month or so after I, you know, started my sobatical from Spotify working on it full-time, finishing it up, polishing it, making it an act rather than just a side project. So then it shipped a month or so into into that spectacle and then the most annoying thing happened was it didn't make the it was nowhere near you know replacing my salary but like the the line it was very consistently sort of growing. You released it just for context it was on the Mac App Store or was this through your website? Oh

26:09right iOS app store. Yeah. Yeah. So it was on the iOS app store. Okay. And it was a paid upfront or subscription like what was the business model? It was going to be a paid upfront iPad only app which is stupid like nobody would have bought it. I mean you say that but there's some major successes that are paid. There are Yeah. But those are more broad appeal than Yeah. Just some random guy making an app that worked with like three cameras like a friend of mine did convince me to make it work on

26:37the iPhone as well. So thank you to him. Um but it was still paid up front with 1.0 which was stupid. like nobody bought it cuz you wouldn't, right? So that was part of it and quite quickly it went like, you know, free within app purchase to unlock anything interesting and but like a one-time purchase kind of thing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. So then I my wife and I sat down and we had discussions and then we kind of set rolling goals to make sure it was still going the right way and to and basically avoid what happened last time which was being caught by

27:03surprise by anything. So we we were paying close attention to how it was doing, making sure that you know everything was was you know going in the right direction. Picked up contracting part time to fill in the gap. Yeah. This is relevant I think for the future part of the story. But like your wife is a product manager or Yeah. So um at that time my wife also worked at Spotify and she was in the business development team for Spotify which part of these conversations you can already feel even though she's not you know an employee of the company. Uh yeah yeah yeah she's bringing

27:36a little bit of business rigor uh that maybe we didn't have the first time. Yes. Yep. Yep. Yep. So yeah so we we you know did that and then slowly the app developed over a number of years and did part-time contracting to to fill in the gap of salary. Did it continue that same kind of steady growth the whole time? Mostly yes. um it gets frustratingly flat at times like we've never had a serious like backslide in income but we have had periods where it's just like no matter what we do it's just like a flat line which is great in it's you know you can rely on it. Um but if you need it

28:14to be more to hit a goal of quitting contracting or whatever it's very frustrating because you like you're doing new features marketing all this stuff it's just like flatline like through all of this time it was like a one time inapp purchase. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We we experiment with a few things cuz I I I always and it's kind of gone away now I feel. But there's this race to the bottom for a while where apps are expected to be cheap, like super cheap. And I was like, "Nah, no, no, no, no." Um, if you can afford $4,000 for a camera, you can pay more than $2 for my app, right? Um,

28:43it was always not super cheap, but like for a while we did feature packs where like if you only wanted the remote control automation stuff, you could just buy that part of the app for $10 or whatever and or this and that and then you could buy the whole lot for 30 I think at the time. Eventually I got rid of that cuz just it doesn't scale. And kind of the point of the app is that it's a lot simpler to use than these other tools. Right. Exactly. So we got we didn't really get any

29:06backlash at all for that. Nobody cared um because most people bought the full feature pack anyway. What do you think the the main driver for that continued growth was then? Cuz like you were late enough that it wasn't like you were just riding the iOS or the the iPhone growth, right? Cuz for a long time that was apps were growing just because of that. Kind of like you were with the iPad initially and then you're you're paid upfront. So it's only new users who are coming in. And it doesn't from what we've talked about in the past and what you're saying here, it doesn't sound like you were doing these big marketing campaigns or paid acquisition or whatever. So,

29:44what do you think was causing it to go up? Cuz I would expect it to be relatively flat. Here's a fact for you that I learned recently. B&H, which is a photo store in New York, I believe they only have the one store. The photography market is huge. It's absolutely ginormous. So, I think we're just reaching more people. Um, I think a lot of it, especially with how it went, was word of mouth. We'd always like, you know, we post on social media and we'd try and, you know, post on social media like Reddit, things like that. We'd try, every time we do a big update,

30:15we try and get in photography publications, websites, and stuff. We'd get covered sometimes. So, I think just very slowly we just got to more people. That's pretty cool. Okay. It's very interesting to me because we like a highlight of my career is like as there's a smaller camera manufacturer here in Scandinavia that makes very very large cameras like big huge chunky things and they didn't have a mobile app. These are like large frame large format kind of cameras. Medium for it's called medium format even though it's like absolutely enormous and they came to us and said hey can can your app be our app? We're like yeah cool. So we like worked out like a you know

30:49an agreement and they sent us hardware and they paid for the development cost. Was this like a white label thing or is it literally they're going to No. So we No. So basically if you download our app from the app store, connect one of their cameras, you get the app just like tada, it's free now. Oh, that's pretty cool. Yeah. That we talked about white labeling, but I was like

31:08I I mean we could we can um it would be simpler and cheaper if we just did it this way instead. And they they kind of like that as well. Well, and it helps with probably ASO or whatever. you know, there's more users using the app regularly and probably giving better reviews cuz it's free. Yeah, that makes sense. And then so we announced we launched an update with that in and like some other features for everyone else. And we got like like a drink. So um it just everything lifted with that even though for those folks it was free. So the the income wasn't coming from this new camera

31:41manufacturer. So So it's not just users, your income did go up. Yeah. Yeah. our income went up and I think people good at marketing probably know this there's an actual word for it but I think it um added like legitimacy to our name almost cuz you know if you search for our app and there's like oh this camera manufacturer has announced using you know cascal studio as their app as their like you know first party kind of app it kind of adds legitimacy to the name and I think I think that helped I imagine also just he like ASO like you know if there's suddenly way more

32:18people using it and it's ranking higher uh and the app store is seeing those usage analytics going up I think all that stuff goes into how highly you are ranked you know for certain words I think I I think so and that probably benefits everything else you know in terms of uh in terms of like acquisition through the store. Yeah, I think so. And then from that bump, we were able like I haven't done like the company or I have not had to do any kind of consulting for other people since then. So since then the app and its products like support, you know, the salary and things like

32:55that and that was 2020. So that would have been like five or six years after the app launched, it actually earned me a salary on its own. So it took you know a long long long time. Now we haven't really talked a lot about the app itself. So, you know, initially you built it as a way to do Wi-Fi uh pulling pictures off of your Canon camera, but obviously it's a lot more than that. So, like what what did it kind of grow up to be um when you were in that period of like let's make this for everybody? So, there are two avenues for growth and of of this is adding more cameras and

33:30then adding more features. And for a while, we just kind of threw features at the wall. That's not like I can't attribute any single feature to it, you know, growing up. Like I I joke that the app has been done for about 4 years now. Um cuz it does, you know, it's it's a fully featured solid app. Like and what what are the features? Cuz like it's not just, you know, pulling pictures off of your camera now, right? The app is split into kind of almost modules. So there's there's a remote control module. So you can connect to the camera, see what it sees, change the camera settings,

34:05take pictures, record video, and automate taking pictures and recording video basically. Um, uh, you know, and the automations are fairly advanced in that they, you know, take a picture, record a video, whatever. Change settings do the same. And, um, you know, we've, we've seen people, it's a really nice spike in the analytics every time something happens in space. So like you know if there's an eclipse or a meteor shower or something like that we just seeing like all all our automations just go through the roof on the analytics. Oh that's kind of funny because yeah I imagine that is you know not only is it a big spike in people taking more advanced kind of

34:40photos but it's also like specifically the group of people that don't have custom hardware for it who just want to do it for this one event or whatever. They're going to be like ah how what's the best way to do a time lapse? I have a tripod but like I'm not going to or a focus puller or I don't know whatever random thing you need for different types of events. Do you like think about those at this point as oh this event's coming up let's do a push leading up to it? We are um all right a year ago my wife joined the company and that's one of the things she's working on. Yeah

35:13is do we've been talking about it for years cuz it makes total sense but um I just never did it. I mean it is a job. It's almost like you have to build out a calendar of like here's all the events we think could happen and then work backwards in terms of how do you promote leading up to it. Um oh that's that's really it'll be interesting to to see how that plays out cuz it does feel like what we you know in marketing world uh we always call compelling events. It's like this is an event that other people are seeking out a solution suddenly and so you should be there ready. So yeah,

35:48our marketing things we're going to try and work on is that and actually making video content and not not not just instructional videos, but like just making a compelling set of content for people just to discover us through. Um, again, you'd think photography video company would do that, but I'm I'm I don't know. So you said uh you you you know, you'd make lots of features and you felt like you were kind of throwing those on the wall, but the other side of the coin was adding new cameras. And my guess, uh, you can tell me if I'm wrong, but I would imagine that each camera and

36:18especially each manufacturer that you added was a sudden like you could probably see that change the metrics because that opens up the sort of the TAM for your business. Yeah, manufacturers in particular. Yeah, cuz we tend to release um like our big releases are a new manufacturer cuz they they tend to but not always have like a common stack for their for their all their cameras. So, you know, Canon was first and we added Nikon and that was just like we now support every Nikon camera in the past 10 years or something. Off you go. Um and that that brings in a swath of new users. Um we haven't done that in a while and all the camera manufacturers that are left are

36:59small manufacturers. So, I don't know if uh our next one to do is Leica, for instance. That was the one I actually my brain went to. I didn't know if she supported them or not, but they feel like uh while they're small, it's also an audience that is well, one willing to spend money. And two, it does feel like weirdly Leica is a little bit more proumer. Yes. So, people buy Leas are people who really care about photography. So, I think that would be a good one to add, but I'm not sure. But it also feels like a tinkery crowd, right? Yeah. Yeah. Like there's probably lots of, you know,

37:38professional photographers obviously that shoot with Leica, obviously, but like it almost feels like there is this subgenre of just if you have a Leica camera, you're the type of person who has lots of gear and plays with lots of things and tries lots of things, but it is obviously smaller than, you know, Nikon or or Canon or something. Exactly. Yeah. and they're very expensive and we we have to buy the cameras to to do it. Yeah. I I want to touch on that because it was funny whenever I was talking to you uh in Chicago a couple weeks ago. I I think I made some joke about

38:09like, man, it must be nice to to have to use your business expense for buying all these cameras. And you sort of lamented it because yes, you have to buy lots of camera bodies, but that also means you don't have a lot of cameras you can actually really functionally use for the business. Yes. Yeah. There's two reasons why it's kind of sad. So the first one is like if you want to start an indie app business, choosing a thing where you need to buy lots of very expensive hardware to get going is a really bad idea just objectively like cuz you know and secondly yeah like if you

38:38care about photography we have cameras that people would like I know people that would love to own this like it's a really high-end very very good camera and it sits in our cupboard with a really crappy lens on it because it's just used for testing and validation and like it's it's kind of sad from that that point of too. Occasionally I'll like take it out and like, you know, let it see outside at least, you know. But, uh, yeah. Um, you just have a spot on your desk for, you know, today's your day. Uh, today's your day. Yeah. I think my my funniest one is like that phase

39:11one camera that they sent us, that medium format camera. That thing is worth more than my car. It's just a stupid bonkers kind of system, this thing. And it's 150 megapixels. And I used it to take my passport photo. So, in my passport is a really really grainy de um you know step down image that was originally from a very very very high-end 150 megapixel camera and that makes I don't know that makes me smile. the person at immigration, you know, at the border doesn't care that like maybe they do this. You never know, man. The warmth. Uh medium format would be that is like I would love

39:49to play with that. I don't have the, you know, uh budgetary means to have one as a toy. Obviously, I did say to the the folks at Phase One, it's like, right, so we this camera because they lent it. It's not mine. It's not ours. So this is your camera like you know we want to go out and record some you know marketing shots for our release with you. What's your insure? Like do we insurance like what? And they were like no no no no we don't care. Take it out. If you smash it you smash it. Like it's fine. Like we want you to use the camera. So they're very very like you

40:21know cool about it. Um so maybe I should bring it to a conference one day just so that people that are interested can like could could try it. That would be a fun uh almost marketing kind of thing, right? like you're shooting shots like medium format shots. When I think of medium format, I know there's Hasselblad and all these like people use them for street photography and stuff, but in my head, my only real experience with people I know is people who use them for commercial photography where it's like in a studio with and honestly like shooting a passport is almost more what I think of. Uh is it that kind where it's like it's big, it's meant to be mounted

40:56on something or is this a take it out and shoot landscapes or something with it? I believe the the three main use cases for these things are um landscape photography because you know it stays still you can take very high resolution very beautiful landscapes studio photography like high-end fashion magazines and things they tend to use those big cameras and also uh a big market for them is aerial photography so you know like the satellite view on Google maps or Apple Maps again is mounted to something isn't always satellite light is quite often an array of these things or things like it bolted to a plane and you know they use it to you know very high megapixels

41:37or that is good but the studio version of this extremely like they're not there's not a person standing behind it hitting the shutter right it's almost always probably there's monitors set up and there are multiple movies have parodyied this but the one that comes to mind is Austin Powers where there's like a fashion shoot happening and there's a very very sort of flamboyant character with a camera like you know, saying all sorts of stupid stuff and not, you know, that isn't that far from the truth in some situations. Like I've seen actual photo shoots like that. They do tend to be connected to a monitor as well, so like clients and people can just see what's being

42:12taken. And is that where Casco comes in? Yeah. Yeah. So like Cable can be that for any camera if you wanted to like you can connect it from your phone or iPad or whatever to a screen. There's a special like full screen external display mode where it can be that as well. So, actually that makes me think I I had an episode, actually it just came out a couple days ago as we record with uh Joe from Teleprompter Pro, and he's talked about how, you know, that's similar where it's they're working a lot with these sort of broadcast industry, you know, type users. And he's talked

42:46about like going into the field and like shooting or at least watching people do that and that kind of coming into features and things that they add to the app. Have you spent time in studios seeing how people are using this and has that informed stuff you've done in the app? A little bit. Yeah, I'd like to do it more actually. Um I just need to figure out a way to reach out to the right people. But yeah, we've we've done it a few times with especially like we've worked with lighting manufacturers like studio lighting and that has allowed us to go into like you know actual studios

43:14to see both the app and lighting being used. Uh which is very interesting. Uh does does the app do stuff with lighting as well? Not it doesn't. Um I'd like it to. is the time thing again because I I need to reverse engineer a bunch more things and then figure out how it works. Yeah. Um but yeah, I know I definitely think there's a cool thing of being able to script and automate lighting alongside your camera in the same app. Like I think that would be pretty cool. We've been talking this whole time about we call it Cascable, but the app at this current time is called Cascable Studio. And if you go to your website, you'll see there's actually, you know,

43:49a number of different apps. So yeah, what's the story there? Why why have you sort of split out into different apps versus just shoving a bunch of different features into the one mega app? So, Cascal Studio is already too big. Look, it's you know like it's got a geotagging thing in it for instance for you know applying location to photos and like barely anybody uses it. They probably don't know it's there and you can't market that as its own unique feature. I want to do a really good geotagging app because there isn't one. That's not fair. There are lots of geotagging. I want to do my geotagging app. There we go. That's a separate app. So, we I'm kind of now in the position where

44:26I'm like almost wanting to pull features from the app and I'm kind of scared to do so cuz it's going to like really upset a very small number of people. Um maybe we can give them a free copy of like the new geotaging app once that comes out, but I don't know. Um so, it's kind of that like Caspal is a fully fe Caspal studio. Casual Studio is a fully featured app. Like it's a decade old at this point. 11 Well, it's been shipping 11 years actually. So, it's more than well more well over a decade old. Like the feature set it has is an app like it's a full app and we you know we

45:04add features you know more advanced and we refine the features that are there but like a whole new like category almost and it's still is it still onetime purchase? Yes, if you want it to be. So, we have subscription and one time. Ah, okay. Um, the non-subscription purchase is now $100, 99, which is expensive. Well, but reflecting the fact that it's a professional piece of software, I

45:28don't think it's an unfair price at all. It's very rare we get complaints about the price actually. So, maybe it's not expensive enough. I don't know. But we did add subscriptions a few years ago as and we it was as a way to get in at a lower cost or try the app out for a month for a lower cost. And soon after Adobe went subscription only for their photography tools and that pissed off basically the entire photography industry like in one day. So I didn't want to go subscription only because our market is already very upset about subscriptions basically. So it's a you know the

46:04user confused right the pedal comes up and there's the non-subscription and the subscription and I very specifically don't use the word lifetime cuz we do charge have started charging for updates like in the traditional likeish traditionalish like major updates like new features. Yeah. Exactly. Okay. you know, after a certain amount of time, it's not like an automated, you know, like if you have it for X years, it doesn't get it. Like, we make the decision, okay, well, this feels like a big update and these features are big new features. Is the product that they're purchasing instead of lifetime, do you call it like Cascal Studio 3 or whatever? Like, how do you message the

46:45fact that you're not buying everything forever, but you're buying this current set of features? So this is interesting. So I never we never use the word lifetime anywhere. We call it the non-subscription option. And there's an article on the website, a help article that's like why is it not called lifetime? And we explicitly say because you're not it's not like it starts

47:06with this question gets very difficult when you ask who's lifetime like is it mine? Is it yours? Is it all that makes sense but most people on mobile aren't going to probably open the website, right? No, no, no. Exactly. So we we do um like I need to put that in the app actually. Um but we'll occasionally have somebody email in saying hey I see there's a subscription and a lifetime option and ask a question and then I'll answer the question also say you said lifetime it's not lifetime look at this article. Um so yeah um that's how we but it hasn't been the source of a

47:39lot of pain or strife or anything. No, I I've we occasionally get a question, hey, it's not why why isn't it lifetime? Like, I want it lifetime. And when I send them out article, the answer is is like, oh, okay. Yeah, right. That makes sense. Because we have we have enough history of like not screwing people over that we can look, you can see people who bought the app when it first came out in 2015 were first asked for an upgrade in like 2022 or something. Yeah. Like, you know, you get many years. It's all we and we make the promise that it's always the cheapest

48:11So if you buy the non-subscription and then you do the upgrades over time, that will always be cheaper than subscribing over the same kind of time period. And that that that kind of like makes people like, okay, it is subscription and lifetime, but there is a free mode as well, right? So the the the free mode right now is effectively equivalent to what you get for free with your camera if you download the manufacturer's own app. Oh, interesting. Okay. So you can use our app instead, but it doesn't do anything more. to get more you pay. Like our ratio of paid to non-paid is about 25% paid which I think is pretty high. Um in general we've considered just getting

48:48rid of the free tier entirely and just making it a trial. I don't know if that would actually convert anybody in the free tier though. I mean my guess not knowing literally anything about your market really would be it would and you would probably see higher conversions but there is this sort of especially given how you've described where you think your growth is coming from. Um your free tier is probably providing a significant amount of the word of mouth. Yeah, exactly. Um, that's all me guessing. Like I every industry is a little different, but especially since you have essentially zero per user costs, right? It's not like you're using AI tokens for something or

49:30whatever. Your free users aren't really a drag at all. So like you would be trading potentially word of mouth uh marketing, which in a studio setting maybe is is bigger than a lot of other apps um non-social apps. I mean, you'd be trading that for a higher conversion mo most likely. I mean, we've seen we we wrote about this in our like state of subscriptions report thing this year, but like a lot of people jumped on it this year as a as a story of like I should know the number off the top of my head, but it switching to a hard payw wall can make like your chart look

50:06silly almost in terms of your conversions go up, which makes sense, but like long term, you know, a lot of people will will subscribe for a week and instantly cancel, so they use it or or whatever. So, I don't know. It doesn't. It's a trade-off, I guess. Yeah. Like I I personally like I am an indie developer and, you know, not one that's had like an overnight success or anything. Um, you know, I'm extremely understanding and empathetic to the, you know, the life of the indie developer. And even then, if I open an app and it forces me to do like a subscription with a free trial, like I'm out. Like I I won't complete the onboarding. Like it just like nah. Well, it

50:47depends. I guess if it's funny enough, you know, if if there's a meme happening, I'll do that, right? You know, I need to generate the whatever. What do I look like as an old man? You know, I understand like weather apps as an ongoing cost there, so sure. But like, you know, in general, you know, it's not I don't really like it. Um, so yeah, I we've wondered about putting ads in, but then ads are often horrid. Yeah. And and again because it's like uh it's a professional app, right? It can degrade that. Yeah, exactly. One thing we've thought um is were you aware of how

51:24Twitter did apps? So the icon factory is Twitter how they did like they did upgrades. Oh. Uh yeah. Where they had they had their own private ad network basically and you could spend I think it was $100 a week, month, oh no, something to be in the app. And then they did it. There was none of the horrid tracking and stuff that the larger advertising network had has. There's actually a fellow again at Deep Dish uh person. Yes. Tyler, right? Yes. He started is it guild ads.com? I think that's the the website. It's essentially taking Marco Arman's method that he uses for Overcast, which is also similar, and making it like cross indie apps. Yeah, exactly. So, um,

52:06for a little while I've been idly thinking about doing a similar thing to Twitter, but like trying to sell spots to photography like things, so you can advertise your tripod in there or your camera or whatever. And so that at least relevant to the the people using the app. I I don't really want to become an ad network though. So, like when Tyler started talking about this thing, I was like, "Oh, so we I'm so I actually have quite a uh I have a to-do this week to contact him and actually try it." Um, I just want to make sure I got that right. Yeah, it's Guild Ads, which makes me laugh

52:39because it looks like Guild Dads. Um, which makes me laugh because I'm in a group chat with him. That was It started as like Missouri dads cuz he's also from Missouri. Oh, really? And so I can't not see that every time. But yeah, Gildads.com is what it is. Uh, yeah. I'm very curious to see how that how that works out cuz Yeah, it's basically try ads but not as gross. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So like I I'm I'm we if we do ads it will be with that or something like it very soon I think. So just as an experiment to see if it cuz you know he he himself said that one of the reasons to have it is to push

53:11people to get rid of them almost like you can have like a well Mueller who does carrot uh weather he I don't know if you've seen his ads that he has but he I haven't it's amazing uh and selfishly it's very beneficial to me. He basically added them into his free tier as a way to like basically as a perk for upgrading, but they're all fake ads uh that he made. Oh, interesting. And but most of them are random indie apps. So like there is a dark noise ad in there that he made that's it's I forgot how it's phrased, but it's something in his Carrot Weather voice. So, it's like,

53:47you know, make all the stupid sounds stop or it's funnier than that cuz he's a lot funnier than me, but it's like all these sort of goofy ads that a lot of them are just made up or they're random other indie apps. Um, and he literally has it in there just as another reason to kind of uh upgrade is to just get rid of that banner that takes up some space. Yeah, I I do think we'll do that next because I I don't think really getting rid of the free tier is is going to be that beneficial. Um like yeah I cuz like our free we don't get a ton of support load from free users

54:25like you know it's not like like you say the app isn't costing us any money to run um other than fixedish costs for this and that you know so it's not like you know say hypothetically we just dump that 75%. So we only have paid the paid users we have we wouldn't see any increased revenue from that or reduced costs. So yeah. Um yeah, I think we'll leave it and just try other other ways to

54:54get people to upgrade. So we mentioned earlier like this, you know, spinning off other apps. And you mentioned an app that you're wanting to build for GPS tagging, but you have a number of other apps. There's like Photo Scout, you have a webcam app. We have Cascal Studio, which is the app we've been talking about now. We have an app called Cas Pro Webcam, which was our COVID panic pivot that actually saved the company. Um, whoa. Well, we have to dive into that. Yeah. Yeah. So, thankfully, as a an accidental excellent business decision many years ago, uh, I I pulled out the camera connection logic and stuff into its own framework. That is another revenue stream for

55:33the company like we licensed that out. So, really? Yeah. So, we we have an SDK product um that, you know, it's the same API no matter the camera. So, you import this thing and you can just connect to every camera that Cascal Studio supports. It's like 250. Interesting. Okay. And and then you can just build your app and build the app and not have to care that like, oh, Sony in this firmware update changed this and blah blah blah blah blah. Like, you know, we deal with it. You have a very consistent API. Like that's the sales pitch before it. So, when Coronairus happened, people stopped going outside, so all of the events got cancelled. So, all of the

56:05event photographers lost their jobs. So, all of the event photographers stopped buying photography apps. Basically, we were kind of down the chain from that. And we were like, h okay. So, and what started happening was people were trying to use their their real cameras that they had as webcams because everybody went remote work, right? Well, and like reporters and all these people Yeah. Everybody was trying to figure it out and there were, you know, there were shortages of actual normal webcams. You couldn't buy them. So, oh, well, we've got this SDK. we saw ourselves just kind of go. Um, so we went, "Oh, oh, we could use the SDK to make a webcam, a virtual webcam on the

56:42Mac, so you can connect your camera and then it's a webcam." Um, so from like idea to money was 3 weeks and I'm very proud of that. And and to money means a consumer app that you built. Yeah. Yeah. Selling copies to to consumers. So had the SDK. It's a very simple Mac app. The main complexity was working out like the virtual webcam kind of architecture of Mac OS, but we could just like ship that real quick and then that saved the day basically that filled in the revenue and so yeah it really did like it leveled off your you know aggregate revenue. Did has that continued to be

57:16kind of an important piece or when the world kind of went back to more normal did that slowly level off to a smaller amount and cas died off fairly significantly. the camera manufacturer's also kind of eventually cotton on and now often if you buy a new camera it has a webcam mode in it. So what um we need to do now I think the future for that app is actually making it pro so like you can support multiple cameras connected and like you know other features like that so you learn what the more advanced users are trying to Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And make it an advanced product. Yeah. It still

57:49sells okay but it's it's you know it's it's on the maintenance schedule right now. Um and yeah, so like I do believe in having multiple revenue streams like you know. Yeah. And in those cases too like those are while they feel similar, it's actually like you just said it's very different audiences actually. Um it uses a camera market changes or whatever. Yeah. Um and then your other app is or the other big one that I know about is photo scout. Uh what's the story there? It was an idea for a feature for Cascal Studio from years ago. Years and years and years ago. Thankfully, I didn't try to put in the app because it it was it was already full. And the tagline for it is you

58:32say where we say when. So the idea is like I need to work on the elevator pitch for that. But you want to take a cool photo. You're at the beach. You want a really beautiful sunset. Say you can say okay well I want to be here. I want the sunset to be like particularly vibrant. I want there to be not a lot of cloud cover so you can actually see it. I don't want it to be too windy cuz I want my hair to look good. Add it in. You put the app away and you'll get a push notification that says, "Okay, if you go back there at this time, yeah, you'll get the photo you want." Um,

59:01and we we have like, you know, modules for the northern lights and we have uh like so, you know, if the northern lights are happening and the cl the sky is clear so you can actually see it, you know, you you'll get notified. So, it's looking at what is that KPI? Is that what that's called? For the Northern Lights. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So, so we're kind of hooked into the um Nora, is it? The American Weather Association like thing forecast for that. Um we do position of the sun and the moon and things in the sky. So, if you want a comedy photo of a statue pointing

59:35at the sun or whatever, you can do that. Like, you know, so it has I imagine is this one that you also see spikes uh during like solar events. Exactly. Yeah. funny about the statue thing. Um cuz we were trying to like pitch it to, you know, for marketing and to like Apple folks to get, you know, featured and all that kind of stuff. So I went around Stockholm and like took, you know, did the example of like having a statue pointing at the sun, right? So you the screenshot would be, you know, the statue with the box in the sky saying, "All right, I want the sun to be here,

1:00:07please." So, I did all that and I got back and I was looking through the photos. I said, and I realized thankfully in time that most of the stat a lot of the statues in Stockholm are of guys with no clothing. Uh, and I couldn't really send them to to Apple. Um, yeah, it is kind of in that weird uh, you know, it's art generally speaking. Obviously, it's in a public setting,

1:00:33but it that with Apple, you feel like you want to be extra extra extra careful with everything. Yeah, exactly. So, then we went on vacation. We connected through Paris and we had a day in Paris. Um, oh, the Eiffel Tower. So, our examples are now like, you know, the sun sitting on top of the Eiffel Tower or which is probably a more common, you know, or the sun setting through the arctic

1:00:54triumph. So, the sun is in the arch, the king. Oh, that's actually and we got those photos as well. So, we've actually got real examples of the app in use. Um, yeah. So, so that that's the other app and that's um yeah, that that's not Cascal Studio is our bread winner and I think our main problem with photo scout is that it's very easy to show. Like if you show it to someone, oh, that's really cool. I get it. But like describing it in a in an advert is really difficult. And I and we haven't cracked that yet. So, one of our tasks this year Yeah. um is to to figure that out and get it get

1:01:29it marketed properly because I think it's a great app. I love it. Like it's really cool. Yeah. Well, and I mean that's a it's a thing I do frequently. Uh I've used some different like ones that are just focused on sun before. Um but I knew the name of it and I had never tried it until you know we started talking or maybe you mentioned it during the the podcast you did before. Um, but it is now on my phone as a like because I I do all these weird little videos all the time and like do I want this during golden hour or do I sometimes I want it to be raining because it's

1:01:59funnier or whatever. And so understanding those weird combinations of things is is actually a kind of somewhat frequent thing. Yeah. One thing I wanted to add, it's on our list is to do it has been raining but it is no longer raining. Yeah. Yeah. So like a city is beautiful in that if it's dark and it's wet but it isn't raining you know the reflections everywhere like you can get

1:02:20some really cool shots there. So like that's something to add in you know stuff like that. Um yeah it's just figuring out how to market it because it's it's tricky. Awesome. Well we are uh we are we are at the end here but uh you know I can't let you go without asking the question I ask everyone to end the show which is uh what's a person or people out there that inspire you and your work that you'd recommend uh others check out? I'm actually going to give two then if one one's developing related and one isn't if that's okay. I fine I guess. Fine. Okay. Really

1:02:49tight shift here normally. Yeah. Yeah. First one is my father. He's passed away. He's also not a developer but he did as I said earlier run a his own business doing uh journalism. Growing up with that kind of just put into me that well that's just a perfectly normal thing to do is to have your own business. And that is why it's not why I'm an indie developer, but it's why I considered that I could be cuz it's like completely normal. It's like, well, yeah, I'll just do my own business like dad did, you know, whatever. So that that's just kind of ingrained into me that it's it's completely possible for, you know, anybody to do with so much less scary

1:03:24thing. And it is hard work. Yeah. Exactly. Because it's it's not it's just it's just what dad did, right? So So that that's one. Uh and the other one developer wise is Will Shipley. Okay. So he now he now works for Apple. The big thing he was famous for is an app called Delicious Library. That was a Mac app that came out in mid200s, I want to say. Um, it's fairly it was a Mac OS 10 app, but it was fairly early in Mac OS 10. And it was basically a library for managing well, it was an

1:03:57app for managing your media library, like your DVDs and your Blu-rays and your books and stuff. So you know it had like a barcode scanner so you could scan your thing and it would look look up all the metadata for the thing you scanned and it' put it on the shelf and you could you know it was

1:04:10very beautiful. It's very very very skeworphic like it was that era of apps. The delicious era. The delicious era. It started the delicious era like of apps that were like that like very very beautiful very very very polished. Ton of work going into that. So that that always inspired me a lot just just the the what he was putting out was like you know what you could do on the Mac. Um but also like I'd never saw him in I don't think I've ever met him but I've never seen him speak in person but I've seen him you know like recordings of talks he's given here and there and it's clear

1:04:40he's a very smart developer and also a very smart business person and that that you know inspired me and there there was one talk I heard I think it's just an audio recording of him give he was talking about how he did coupon codes for for something I can't remember the context of he had a coupon code that gave somebody a discount and somebody put their hand up and asked like yeah but your app is $50 What happens if somebody shares the code and then they get your app for $20? And his answer is like, well, I take that $20. Yes. Yes. Oh, man. I think I love that answer. And I think about it

1:05:12like still when I'm thinking about stuff like that, it's like, well, if we're doing a promo and somebody gets it that they shouldn't, so we'll just take their money. It's fine. like you know and and that just kind of that his whole attitude in in running the business and he was uh somebody I kind of aspired to be if you like the products he put out and just the kind of the way he run the business as well panic cable sassa and that lot of panic is also kind of in that thing you know like independent Mac shop that you know they're a lot bigger than I think I aspire to

1:05:38be now but still like you know I used their apps back in Mac OS 8 and 9 like their MP3 player and their file transfer thing and yeah I don't know they've always been another sort of indie company that I've kind of aspired to to So yeah, try and get the panic folks on. You know, they're in that category that from day one they have been on my list and uh I've had some heroes, many heroes of mine on the show, but I still have never been brave enough to uh to, you know, reach out. Uh yeah, I've I've met Cable like once or twice at an event, but you know, in one of those like I love

1:06:14your work, you know, and then he moves on to the next handshake kind of thing. So like uh but yes I I I I should one definitely should one of these days. Photo Scout has a theme song because of panic like it has music in the on boarding. If you open photo scout and you unmute your phone and you sit on the on boarding so nobody will see it hear it. There's a song that plays and if you stay on the on boarding the song has like weather elements in the sound and the weather on the on boarding in the graphics will change based on the music. That's fantastic. So like storm comes in and it

1:06:48breaking. Yeah. Everybody go download it and find it. Yeah. Yeah. I loved it. And I did that because Panic had an app on the iPad. I think it's called Status Board. Yes. Yeah. And their on boarding had like some elevator music like playing in the background when you went through the on boarding and I really like that. So I kind of copied that. Um yeah. Ah fantastic. Those are very very good.

1:07:09Uh all right. So where uh can people find you on the internet uh if they can? and uh and Cascal. Yeah. So, Cascal is at cascal.se. So, casc. That's where all my apps are. I'm Iendac on everywhere. So, I keen DAC. So, I'm on Master Dawn. I'm on Blue Sky. Sometimes my website is Iend.ac. Again, in the history of having names and things that people can't pronounce or remember, you know, I make it really hard to find it. Honestly, if you search my name on Google and stuff,

1:07:43it'll come up. Uh, so I have a blog there where I write very long blog posts very occasionally. I can deck everywhere basically. Perfect. And of course, we'll have uh we'll have links in the show notes for that for that. All right. Well, thank you again for coming and thank you all for uh listening this far. Uh, Launched is a part of the Revenue Cat podcast family. Uh if you're interested in learning more about the growth side of the mobile app business, you should check out Subub uh which is run by my, you know, much more uh professional and adult colleague, uh David Barnard. Uh and then of course you can check out ravonycat.com to learn about the

1:08:18easiest way to grow and monetize your mobile app business. And uh for everything launched, go to launchedfm.com, which is also pretty much our handle uh everywhere on the internet. And if you don't already, you should uh check out our YouTube channel because this is a video podcast now. Uh and we put a lot of work into, you know, our faces uh for for this. So yeah,

1:08:41you should check that out. It's a it's a lot of fun. And uh I'll see you all in two weeks. Bye.