Podcast appearances and mentions of David Barnard

The intersection of Technology and Estate Planning is now a dominant talking point in the wealth management space. The pressure for advisors to deliver more client value is intense. As the wealth management industry wrestles with establishing relevance, value, and control with the next generation, the emergence of Technology and Estate Planning to assist the advisor is a central theme in the RIA space and "Fintech." Combining centuries old "analog" concepts with new "digital" tools is the new silver bullet for reaching and keeping clients. Therein lies one of the biggest challenges in delivering this value. The formulation and communication of estate plans and wealth structures for clients and the next generation is tricky business. It requires experienced practitioners and tools that streamline a labor intensive (and often unprofitable) process. Once the picture of one's plan develops, it now requires ongoing maintenance and detailed administration as life marches on and risks and opportunities emerge. I spoke with DAVID BARNARD to understand the state of the art in creating, presenting and managing personalized trust & estate strategies for complex clients with Luminary's digital collaboration platform. Technology and Estate Planning Issues The challenges in visualizing complicated concepts, Storytelling and the importance of communication in a world of numbers and graphs Helping the advisor have equal footing with other professionals The importance of collaboration (and not competition) with the legal and accounting world in providing coordinated advice Staying on the safe side of unauthorized legal or accounting advice and broader staffing issues The future of administrating wealth. DAVID BARNARD is the CEO and Founder of Luminary- the winner of two awards at the 2024 Family Wealth Awards . He previously led private wealth management for AllianceBernstein, overseeing more than $100 billion in client assets, and has served multiple philanthropic organizations as a director or trustee. Luminary's website is here: https://www.withluminary.com https://www.amazon.com/Wealth-Actually-Intelligent-Decision-Making-1-ebook/dp/B07FPQJJQT

On the podcast: David talks about the many failures of his recent app launch, the surprising results of his first-ever A/B test, and the many reasons why you shouldn't plan a big app launch.Top Takeaways:

Special guest David Barnard joins the show. Topics include the App Store — past, present, and post-DMA future — and the excellent new update to his app Weather Up.

My guest on this episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast is David Barnard, who is the Growth Advocate at RevenueCat, the app subscription management platform. The subjects of our conversation are the new guidelines that Apple published, in quick succession, for alternative off-platform payments in the United States and alternative in-app and off-platform payments, as well as alternative app stores, in the EU. Fair warning, we get very granular on these guidelines. I asked David to join the podcast because he is a high-profile independent app developer who has consistently championed the position of independent developers within the mobile ecosystem. In this episode of the podcast, we discuss the specifics of the new guidelines in both the US and EU, the attractiveness of the new options made available in both regions, the less obvious impediments to implementing these options, and the general sentiment of these new opportunities to independent developers.  Thanks to the sponsors of this week's episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast: Clarisights. Go to clarisights.com/demo to try it out for free. You'll see why thousands of performance marketers trust Clarisights every day. ⁠⁠INCRMNTAL. True attribution measures incrementality, always on.

In this week's episode, Ben meets with an old friend of 26 years and 5th generation livestock farmer, butcher and local Norfolk farm shop owner; David Barnard. He shares his journey from graduating from Reading University to running a business in the post-Brexit economy. The pair discuss the success of DJ Barnard Meats and how the Covid-19 pandemic helped to grow the business by delivering their products directly to customers, rather than focusing on wholesale. David shares his passion for rearing his livestock, running his farm shop, building a bond with his customers and providing a personalised service that is conscious of its carbon footprint. Tune in to also find out what they believe the UK Government could do to stimulate more demand for British agriculture and make farming simpler, which will allow our country to rely less on imports.Market Report w/c Monday 4th December. In this week's market report, Andrew shares his take on the state of the grain trade and how happy he is that the cold weather has finally arrived! With the year coming to an end, Andrew shares how difficult this year has been due to reading the market, food price inflation and miserable production.To find out more about DJ Barnard Meats, head over to their website https://www.djbarnardmeats.co.uk/. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Market report w/c Monday 27th NovemberThe market has been dull in recent weeks. With Thanksgiving in the US impacting trading activities worldwide, there is a reluctance among farmers to sell due to ongoing uncertainty and lack of clarity on RED (Renewable Energy Directive).In the coming weeks, the Dewing Grain podcast will cover topics such as weather forecasting, the solar industry's impact on land usage, and the changing landscape of land ownership. Guests will include Adam Jewry from WeatherQuest, David Barnard, a Norfolk livestock farmer, Ian Douglass, an infrastructure planning director in the solar industry, and Tom Goodley, a land agent specialising in land acquisitions.Don't forget our Dewing Grain Walk is next Tuesday 28th November, 11am in Winterton.The What3words to find the location are ‘corrosive pasta gathering.'We hope to see familiar and new faces.As always, thanks to our listeners, old and new, and remember to keep in touch by heading over to @dewinggrain on Twitter and Instagram. To help us push our podcast to new audiences, please follow and leave us a review. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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This episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast was recorded live from the Mobile Apps Unlocked conference in Las Vegas on June 8th, 2022. In this episode of the podcast, I discuss the future of alternative payments on mobile with Allison Schiff, the Managing Editor of AdExchanger; David Barnard, Developer Advocate at RevenueCat; and Josh Burns, the Senior Director of Business Development at FunPlus. We consider how the platform operators will adapt to regulatory and legal intervention into their payments policies, whether alternative payments systems can ever gain traction over the native systems, and how developers can best focus their efforts on driving users into alternative purchasing environments.

Hey, App Growth Community! Welcome back to the App Growth Show, where we host mobile experts to provide valuable and actionable insights on how you can grow your app. No matter where you are in your app growth journey, we are able to help you achieve your mobile growth goals. Today we are thrilled to be joined by David Barnard. David is about as seasoned as you can get within the app space and we are truly blessed to be joined by him. David has been building apps for the iPhone dating way back to 2008, which was the year the iOS apps were officially launched. So he truly has been involved since the beginning to this day. Along with his passion for building apps, David also contributes as a developer advocate to the industry-leading monetization tool RevenueCat. RevenueCat is used by the world's leading apps to build, analyze and grow subscriptions on iOS, android and the web. Get ready to learn all about subscription-based apps and numerous techniques to increase app purchases from a seasoned app veteran. The App Growth Show is sponsored by the App Growth Network, we are an award-winning North American app marketing agency. If you are interested to learn more about how you can grow with us, book a free call with us here to start supercharging your mobile growth today! Chat More With Our Speakers From Today: • David Barnard (Developer Advocate @ RevenueCat, ) https://www.linkedin.com/in/drbarnard/ Jennifer Sansone (Content Head @ App Growth Network) https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennifer-sansone-143bba4/ Feel free to browse through our episodes and have a listen to one (or all!) of our talks about the many facets of what it takes to achieve mobile app success, from user acquisition to retention strategies and beyond. Subscribe now to AGN Podcast to gain insight on the latest app growth strategies and secrets at your preferred podcast directory: Spotify, Apple, Google. Want to chat with our team of experts today to supercharge your app growth? Book a call with us here!

Guest David Barnard (blog) Twitter @drbarnard The Sub Club Podcast Contrast Youtube Video - https://youtu.be/LaCj_Oaw1uoRelated Episodes E115 - Indie Dev #4 - Making an App Best-in-Class with Jordan Morgan E114 - Indie Dev #3 - Focused Work with Michael Tigas E113 - Indie Dev #2 - Tasks by Mustafa Yusuf E112 - Indie Dev #1 - Dark Noise by Charlie Chapman E104 - In-App Purchases and the StoreKit API with Andy Boedo E68 - App Store Review Guidelines with Paweł Madej E27 - Media Outreach with Jeff Gamet E26 - App Store Optimization with Ariel Michaeli Sub Club - Eric Owens, App Business Brokers — How to Sell Your App Sub Club - Ben Bajarin, Creative Strategies — Quantifying Apple's Developer Sentiment Problem Sub Club - David Smith, Widgetsmith - Lessons From 50 Million Downloads Sub Club - Ben Thompson, Stratechery - Apple's App Store Conundrum Related Links How to Game the App Store RevenueCat - The Ultimate Guide to Subscription Testing on iOS RevenueCat - Managing Cross-Platform Subscriptions RevenueCat - Subscribers Are Your True Fans  RevenueCat - Cashing Out: How to Sell Your App Why Amazon Has A Fake Review Problem by CNBC SponsorsRevenueCatUsing RevenueCat to power your in-app purchase infrastructure solves: For edge cases you don't even know you have Protects from outages your team hasn't seen yet Saves you time on future maintenance  As well as new features released by the app stores Empowers your marketing teams with clean, reliable IAP data All that to say, RevenueCat handles all the headaches of in-app purchases so you can get back to building your app. Try RevenueCat today at revenuecat.com.SentryFrom error tracking to performance monitoring, developers can see what actually matters, solve quicker, and learn continuously about their applications - from the frontend to the backend. Source code, error filters, stack locals — Sentry enhances application performance monitoring with stack traces. Quickly identify performance issues before they become downtime.  Breadcrumbs make application development a little easier by showing you the trails of events that lead to the error(s). Real-time application monitoring means data, in real-time.  Dashboards add a visual element to our application monitoring. Over 1M developers and 80K organizations already ship better software faster with Sentry application monitoring. Check out their great iOS dev docs at:https://docs.sentry.io/platforms/apple/guides/ios?utm_source=empowerapps&utm_medium=paid-podcastSign up today for free at:http://sentry.io/for/ios?utm_source=empowerapps&utm_medium=paid-podcastAppFiguresThe tools you need to monitor, optimize, and get more downloads.There's a lot of demand for apps right now, so it's a really great time to give it a try. It's easier than you think.The guys who run it are indie devs who had a need and created a tool. 11 years later, it's an all-in-one platform for developers who want to get more downloads and make more money with their apps.The folks at Appfigures have easy step-by-step guides and intuitive tools to do that, which many indie developers are using to get more downloads:https://appfigures.com/resources/asoAlso check out our episode with CEO Ariel Michaeli:https://share.transistor.fm/s/15b7ff63Try Appfigures for free, and if you like it use the special link to get 30% off for the next 3 months:https://appfigures.com/account/upgrade?p=empower3030Show Notes Does not being a developer help? How to check if there's market for your idea? What markets attract “scammy” apps? The Future of App Store Building a Better App Store Biggest Mistake Indies Do Social MediaEmailleo@brightdigit.comGitHub - @brightdigitTwitter BrightDigit - @brightdigitLeo - @leogdionRedditLeo - /u/leogdionLinkedInBrightDigitLeoInstagram - @brightdigitPatreon - empowerappshowCreditsMusic from https://filmmusic.io"Blippy Trance" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com)License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

On the podcast we talk with Robbie about finding your super users, the real reasons for subscription fatigue, and why pricing isn't as important as you might think, especially early on.Our guest today is Robbie Kellman Baxter, consultant, keynote speaker, and author. She's advised many of the world's leading subscription-based companies, including serving on the advisory board of Strava. Her most recent book, “The Forever Transaction” is a deep dive into everything consumer subscription, and a must read for anyone in the space.In this episode, you'll learn: Identifying and attracting lifetime value customers How to get and maintain customer loyalty Three causes of subscription fatigue Why customers cancel their subscriptions Links & Resources Strava Intuit Survey Monkey Oracle The Subscription Economy Tien Tzuo: Subscribed Eric Crowley Seth Miller CrossFit Shopify Calm Matthieu Rouif PhotoRoom GoPro Elevate VSCO Robbie Kellman Baxter's Links Robbie Kellman Baxter's website Follow Robbie on Twitter Robbie's book: The Forever Transaction Robbie's book: The Membership Economy Robbie's LinkedIn Follow us on Twitter: David Barnard Jacob Eiting RevenueCat Sub Club Episode Transcript00:00:00 David:Hello, I'm your host, David Barnard, and with me, as always, RevenueCat CEO, Jacob Eiting.Our guest today is Robbie Kellman Baxter, consultant, keynote speaker, and author. She's advised many of the world's leading subscription-based companies, including serving on the advisory board of Strava. Her most recent book, “The Forever Transaction” is a deep dive into everything consumer subscription, and a must read for anyone in the space.On the podcast we talk with Robbie about finding your super users, the real reasons for subscription fatigue, and why pricing isn't as important as you might think, especially early on.Hey Robbie, welcome to the podcast.00:00:58 Robbie:Thanks for having me. I'm excited to chat with you both. 00:01:00 David:I was introduced to your work by somebody recommending your book, The Membership Economy, and it really struck me. I was so excited that you agreed to be on the podcast, because here's a book written in 2015, and we'll talk about your other book that was written more recently, but written in 2015. I was looking through it, scanning the chapters, so I bought the book. I was like, this is everything we're talking about now, thinking it's all so novel with subscription apps, but really consumer subscriptions have been around for decades. You've been working in this space way longer than any of us.So, I thought it would be really fun to have you on the podcast to talk more broadly about these principles of consumer subscriptions that apply equally to D to C subscriptions, as well as the app space that we work in. That's where I wanted to kick things off.So, how did you get your start in consumer subscriptions?00:01:57 Robbie:A couple of threads came together. I was in product-marketing for what is now called SaaS, for five years, right before I hung out my own shingle and started consulting. So, I had that background as a product manager working with software products that were being sold as subscriptions, and then as an independent consultant.My fifth client was Netflix. I fell in love with their business model, and I was wondering why isn't everybody else falling in love with their business model, too? This is amazing. Recurring revenue, predictable cashflow, the amount of data they were collecting on their customer. The fact that they're offering was just a much better way of delivering on a promise that many of us wanted delivery for, which is a professionally created catalog of video content delivered in the most efficient way possible. It meant not having to put a raincoat over your jammies to go pick up a movie, with cost certainty and no late fees.I was consulting with Netflix. I was already a customer, and a few people started calling and saying, “Hey, we heard you worked with Netflix. We want to be the Netflix of our space.” Whether that was news, or music, or bicycles, or dental pain management products, or clothes, there was a lot of interest in what it was that Netflix was doing.So, I started trying to create frameworks, trying to say, what are they doing? Which parts are applicable to other businesses, and which parts are just unique to that group of people solving that particular problem?That's really where I got started, and it turns out to be big enough and deep enough that it's kept me really busy for, it's been 20 years, 20 years. 00:03:55 David:Fifth client to, to land as a consultant. That's a. Really great. And so you were with them before they even introduced the, video on demand on the internet, right. You started with them when it was DVDs in the mail, 00:04:09 Robbie:Yeah. 00:04:10 David:Traditional D to C subscription service. 00:04:13 Jacob:But, but even then was satisfying a lot of those, almost all of those conditions. Right. I didn't have to go outside just to my mailbox, not too bad price certainty. I didn't have late fees. and then like, you know, insanely large catalog. Right. you know, it was, it was, it wasn't. We tend to wait for the technology to get that right.And then, then we had VOD being, 00:04:33 Robbie:Yeah. And they were already thinking, I mean, it was amazing to me. So I was there, you know, the time that I worked most actively with dev 2001, 2003, even during that time, which was all DVDs, all three DVDs out at a time, they were already thinking about streaming versus, you know, should they let you download it?And then have it explode after, you know, you know, some duration. What was the best way to deliver it? Should they come through your, you know, for awhile? I remember I think it came through your PlayStation or your, your we, were thinking like, 00:05:06 Jacob:My first like set top box experience with Netflix would have been on Nintendo. Yeah.00:05:10 Robbie:Yeah. I mean, so they, they were already thinking about it and I think that's a really important part of any subscription is even if your subscription works great today and it's good enough to get people to sign up the product team has to be thinking, how are we going to continue to evolve it in particular fringy? Right. How do we continue to stay relevant to these people while also having those new and improved features that bring new people in? And I think a lot of organizations. I have been taught to over-index on acquisition benefits and not thinking as much about those, the sticky engagement benefits that often are really hard to talk about credibly. Right? If I say to you, you know, sign up for my subscription, my, my video subscription, because it's the most, it's the easiest to find the next piece of content. And you're going to love our algorithm, right? People aren't going to believe you. You don't have credibility. So, all they're going to say is, oh, you have Hamilton, I'll sign up for that.And then I'll cancel. And then it's still up to you, you know, if you're Disney plus to get them from Hamilton to princess movies, national geographic titles, ESPN, all the other great stuff that they have. Star wars.00:06:26 David:I'm 00:06:26 Robbie:Yeah. 00:06:26 David:My son right now. Yeah. That's great. And then I do want to kind of step back and you're kind of right into the weeds with some really actionable advice, but I want to, I want to step back a little bit and talk more broadly. So after working with a few, companies in the subscription space and Netflix so early eventually wrote this book, The Membership Economy, which I love.Phrase and wanted to ask actually, did you, did you coin that phrase then how did you at the time and how do you still kind of define this membership economy that you wrote about. 00:06:57 Robbie:Yeah. Well, first of all, I'd love to say that, like I just came up with it and it was so natural and obvious, but, you know, I was thinking, I was like, is it, is it about subscription pricing? Is it about premium services? Is it about recurring revenue? Should I call it the recurring revenue that I was trying to think?What is it? And where I came out was it's not about the subscription pricing, which I think is a tactic. it's a tactic that you earn the right to do by having. Relationship that is trusted with your customer. The customer trusts you so much that they're like fine. You can charge me every month or you can charge me every year and I will just keep paying you and not look for alternatives.And for me, that was based on a certain kind of human relationship. And that's where I came up with this concept of membership that you belong. That it's, you're committing upfront to a long-term relationship as a vendor, and then you earn the right to have subscriptions. So that was kind of where I came up with it.I worked with Netflix. I also worked. At that time Intuit. I worked with a survey monkey and their predecessor. Uh Zoomerang and I worked with Oracle on the B2B side, and those were some of the companies that helped me sort of connect the dots and figure out how. The framework, of, you know, here's some ways to think about what happens when you treat your customers like membership members.Here's what you need to track. Here's how you need to think about it. And here's what it, what it can do for you. Honestly, the first book, all I was trying to do is say, this is a good idea. You might want to consider it for a bunch of reasons.00:08:26 Jacob:Think of it in opposites. I think it's is it the. the Zuora founder's book subscription economy,but but you're right in the sense that subscription kind of implies like 00:08:37 Robbie:Okay. 00:08:38 Jacob:Particular tactic for monetization that does go really well with this concept. But when I think of membership, as opposed to just subscription, like membership implies also community to me, right.00:08:48 Robbie:Yeah. 00:08:49 Jacob:Like building this. This, this ecosystem, this community that, that, which was then in genders trust, which then allows you to monetize, right. And and this great business model. about it in those terms, I think is a really nice way to put it as opposed to like, let's take something.Let's take something that, that we were monetizing another way and just slop noodle on it, which is something a lot in the, in the app world, this transition from paid upfront or micro-transactions driven apps to subscriptions, some have made it and some have not. And I think the ones that have made it are the ones who look at it in that light, in the membership light, in the.Earning their business repeatedly through content or through community. so I, yeah, that, that framing I think is really accurate.00:09:36 Robbie:Your point about, you know, so many companies to slap a subscription price onto whatever they already had, you know? Okay. We have a usage based model. Let's see what happens if we do a subscription based model for the same product, or let's see what happens if we take, you know, a model where you have ownership, where I download the app and it's mine, and I can use it forever, even if it's really, really obsolete.If it solves my problem, who cares, to one where you're being forced to pay every month. Yeah, extensively to get upgrades and maybe access to your peers and some kind of community functionality. It really is a different product. You need a different product for subscription than for, you know, a purchase or usage based model.And, you know, I love teens books. Subscribed is a great book. I recommend it to people. It's very, well-read has a lot of interesting ideas. but I didn't go with that, you know, subscription economy model just because I really want. To focus more on the culture and the relationship and not jump straight to let's get some of that subscription pricing stuff so that we can get a good valuation, you know?00:10:39 Jacob:Yeah. Yeah. I, it, you made me think of this one experience I had just as an anecdote was, X-Box in for three or four years ago, released an Xbox subscription. And I thought this is a really cool one because I could defer, I buy another X-Box every three or four or five years. So it was like, oh, I'll just spread that cost out.I didn't have a lot of cash at the time. I was like, this is a great 40 bucks a month. I get a new Xbox, right. And so I went in to do this at the, at the Microsoft store. What it really was, was they were giving me like a cash advance, like they were giving me, like, basically I had to get a credit check to get a subscription.And I was like, this is 00:11:12 Robbie:That's not a subscription. 00:11:13 Jacob:In mind. Exactly. Right. Like I thought I was joining the, the X-Box club and I was going to just get an expert and they're going to place my Xbox for me. Right. example. of that case of just like slapping subscription pricing on what was essentially a loan.00:11:26 Robbie:Yeah. Yeah.00:11:27 Jacob:Now my credit score, I have loan for a 19 20 16 Ford edge and a next box, on those are my two like credit items I've ever had. So it's really weird.00:11:37 Robbie:And they've come a long way. I mean, Microsoft has come a long way with their subscription strategies, you know, not just on the gaming side, but you know, with, with office 365 and you know, they've done a lot of thinking about subscription, but it really is super complicatedto, to make it work. 00:11:54 Jacob:Right? Like with software zero marginal costs or whatever you can It makes a lot of sense. will say, I will say, I want to give Microsoft some credit, back in the gaming world there Xbox game pass product product, which I also subscribed to has been amazing.I bought a new X-Box game in forever, cause I don't really care about title individuality. I just, whatever it is, $10 a month or $15 a month. And I get access to like 50 different games that rotate. Plenty. That's plenty for me. And I will probably never unsubscribe from that. Right. But it feels like a 00:12:22 Robbie:Yeah. 00:12:22 Jacob:Cause it's, software-driven, in there. There's like there's changing and there's events stuff that comes in and out and they make it a big thing. built it up into this, into this. Yeah. This kind of, it feels like a membership, as opposed to, yeah, just slapping an affirm loan on an X-Box purchase, basically.00:12:39 David:I do want to step back to your, to your book, The Membership Economy, and, I love the subtitle. Find your super users, the forever, transaction and build recurring revenue. finding super users is something we've actually talked a lot about here on the podcast. So looking for those cohorts, one of our recent podcast, guests, Eric Crowley.Talked about locals versus tourists. Seth Miller, another recent podcast guests talked about how, you know, figuring out these cohorts was just a huge unlock for their business. so what's your process? How do you recommend clients find these super users and how do you think about these, super users?You mentioned all the way back in 2015 before any of us were thinking about these things.00:13:24 Robbie:Yeah. Well, so for me, what I think about with super you. So I think about, you know, anybody does subscriptions knows. Segmentation is like re like the most important thing. You have to know who your customer is. Not just at the moment of acquisition, what they look like. You know, when you're like, that's the person I want, but how are they going to behave once they join?The moment of transaction becomes the starting line for understanding your customer, not the finish line. What like, oh, we knew them well enough to get them to buy it. We knew them well enough to get them to buy. And then to get them to make this a habit and then to get them to go deeper and to stay for a long time and maybe even bring their friends.So, you know, the first thing I always do with my clients, I say, let's focus on who you're, who you're making the problem. What is the promise you're making, who are you making it to? and that's kind of part one. And then we map out the journey. What is it? What is the goal that they have that is ongoing or the problem that they have that is ongoing?And what are the moments on their journey where you might be able to intervene and help. Right. So in the beginning it might be just one or two places, right? I'm I'm, I'm QuickBooks. I help you at tax time, but then it might be, oh, and I'm going to help you with some other key moments in your process of adulting financially.Right. You know, one of the things is you move at your parent's house and you pay your own taxes. Another is you might take out a loan for that. Awesome. You know, for whatever car you said, you know, you're going to get an, get a car and you need a loan and you know, they can help you. And so you're layering in those different beds.On a journey cause you want them to stay. You want to keep providing value. and then once you know what that person looked like, then you go tell your marketing team to go get lookalikes, get more people like that. Super users goes one step beyond that, which is not only are they great customers, you know, high customer, lifetime value, easy to serve, whatever.They also were putting their own money and effort, their own resources into strengthening your model. So these are people that bring in. These are evangelists who bring in other members. These are people who give you feedback on your products and services, which sometimes doesn't feel like a gift, but always is a gift.And it's, people who are willing to help onboard. New members. Right? So the ones that, you know, explain in the user group, you know, that, you know, this is, this is how you use that product, or this is, this is my workaround, or this is, you know, what was hard for me and how I fixed it. So those people, you know, that make referrals, that that speak out on your behalf that gather, you know, others they're so valuable.And I got really into this idea actually with CrossFit. my sister is a, is a big CrossFitter and watching her. in addition to all the money she was spending to, to be a member of this CrossFit box, the amount of time and effort she was spending to onboard new members to invite them over. When the, when the box was closed, she and her husband would put out their equipment on their live on a cul-de-sac.They put it all out on the street and invite the whole box, come over and get their workout done there because they love the community so much, right. Their own time and money to support the community.00:16:27 David:There kind of specific, Ways, especially digitally like, with, with or customer service, what are the tools that, that you see people be successful in finding those kinds of users and understanding those patterns and who they are and what they 00:16:45 Jacob:Yeah. 00:16:45 David:Like. And those sorts of things. 00:16:47 Robbie:So the, the starting point, I think is always lifetime customer value. So. You look at the group of customers who stay the longest and spend the most right. And the ones that people would say, we wish we could make more of these, you know, and then you look, you develop hypotheses. What does this group share?And it can be as simple as writing the names of your first 10 customers on a boards. These are the 10 customers we had. These five have been awesome. These. You know, didn't stick around long canceled, complain a lot, you know, whatever the reason is. And then you try to come up with what is, what did this group share that this group doesn't share?That's the simplest way in a, in a data world where you have the data you're doing the same thing, but digitally, how did they onboard? What was the source of the lead? what time of year? Like which cohort are they in? Did they join? You know, people like, for example, with QuickBooks people that join in tax season, Might be behave very differently than people who join as a new year's resolution or who joined in August.Right. What kind of person starts thinking really hard about managing their money in August? Great. you know, so, so looking for those things, developing hypotheses, looking at the data, trying to say what's the difference between our most valuable customers and our not most valuable customers, which is not your worst customers, because your worst customers are often outliers, but just the ones where you're like, they're just not that good.They came for two months, they left, they binged, they used up, you know, they were using us really heavily for six weeks. And then they left. What's different about them than the ones who continue to use this gradual. For five months. and I think that's where the hypotheses come out and then tactically, what you do after, you know, as you look at the difference in onboarding those different groups and you optimize your onboarding experience.To build those habits and then you mark it. This is often requires a tremendous amount of discipline. You mark it to only attract the high value people and not to attract the others. So if I walk into McDonald's with a gown on with my husband and I say, it's our 20th anniversary, show us to your finest team.Give us the best you've got. And we'd like a nice bottle of champagne, right? Customer's not always right at McDonald's. Right. They're not going to say, oh man, Robbie needs champagne. Somebody scraped down to the seven 11 and you know, get a bottle of Prosecco and you know, we'll try to pass it off. They say, that's not really what we do here.Dummy. They might not say dummy, but they might be thinking it, right. That's not what we here, you know 00:19:10 Jacob:The 00:19:12 Robbie:Right. We're here, you know, we're cheap, we're fast. It tastes good. Your kids love it. You can drive through and eat it. But we don't do, we don't do special occasion stuff. And so they know who they are.Right. And they're okay with me not coming in. Right. They're even okay with me saying, by the way, don't go to McDonald's, it's a terrible place to celebrate your anniversary. Right. They're kind ofCause it. 00:19:32 Jacob:Just all 00:19:33 Robbie:Right. The leaning is terrible. It makes your skin look awful. You know, the point is that if they took care of. Right. What am I going to do? I'm going to tell you, you know what, just go there for your anniversary. Just tell them it's your anniversary. They'll run out and get all the stuff you need. Right? And then they have all these people that are expensive to serve. Right? It's the same thing digitally, right? If you bring in the wrong people who are going to binge on your content in the first month, or the people who are going to push you to create features that nobody needs, except that.Right. It's just going to throw your whole business off in the wrong direction. So having that discipline upfront to know what you do and you don't do well. And to say no to some prospects, it's really hard to say no to prospects, right? If they have money and they're like, just add this feature and I'll pay.You know, Netflix in the early days, a lot of people wanted them to have video games. Right? Video games were also on discs seems easy, right? As an outsider, as an expert, right? I'm like, ah, video games, same thing. Video games work in a totally different way. And what Netflix said is we don't really understand how people would view.Games. We don't understand how they've use them. We don't understand how many we need. We don't understand how they value that. We don't understand how to negotiate terms with gaming companies, but that's a whole different thing we're going to, we have plenty of runway here. Just focusing on video content.00:20:51 Jacob:Yeah, it's, it's really interesting that, that, that feeling as a founder, especially true in SaaS, when you have literally 10 customers and like you will do 00:20:59 Robbie:Yeah. 00:21:00 Jacob:For the, your 11th, it's a little bit true in consumer. Two in the early days, like you, you're just kind of like, how do I get the funnel bigger?How do I, how do you, I think you are a little bit myopic on, the top of the funnel and not thinking about this long-term thing, partially because we don't have a lot of data. You launched your app six months 00:21:19 Robbie:Yeah. 00:21:19 Jacob:Trying to make decisions on customer lifetime value. And you don't really have a good sense because you don't know who's sticking around.You probably don't have a ton of data, but one thing you said. That really got my gears turning was that of putting them on a board and just looking at them, looking at the 10 customers or whatever it is, a hundred, even in consumer SaaS, where you have hundreds of 00:21:37 Robbie:Yeah, 00:21:38 Jacob:So it's not that many, you can grab it.You'll be surprised at how many things I've in my old days in consumer's house of like just clicking into a customer and just watching how they use the app, like an individual, right. It doesn't, not data, but it gives you hints and you can start there. And then, and 00:21:54 Robbie:Yeah. Hypotheses, right? 00:21:55 Jacob:Yeah. Hypothesis. And then you actually talk to those people, if you can, like get them on the 00:22:00 Robbie:Yeah. 00:22:00 Jacob:Surprised what they tell you. One of our, our guests Matthew and photo room a few weeks ago talked about, they would take their app to McDonald's and just show it to people to keep the McDonald's references going, and get like in-person feedback.And that helped them learn, you know, they, they were, they were an app that thought that. For everybody and find out later that they're actually like, kind of like a pursuer app for Shopify people, people 00:22:23 Robbie:00:22:24 Jacob:And people with, with e-comm and, and that like kind of exploded their business for this exact case.You're talking about where they found out. Okay. Yeah. We're not for this entire, like long tail of low intent users where for this really core set, but that can be really scary if that sets kind of 00:22:39 Robbie:It's always scary to niche down, but it's almost always. a good strategy. And I wanted to tag onto something else that you said, Jacob, which I think is really important. People often say, how can I make any decisions about, you know, based on, you know, who has the highest customer lifetime value?When, you know, we've only been around for three months or six months, we have to wait until they leave. Hopefully not for three years or five years, but what I've found. And, you know, I wonder if you've seen the same thing. Most people who leave leave in the first two months. So what you really want to do is optimize for onboarding, you know, are they adopting habits that look like people who are steady users getting value, and you can often tell that in the first month, by how many people drop off by who stays and buy, you know, are they bingeing or are they using it in kind of a normal way? And so you don't have to wait for 18, 18 months or however many periods, a lot of it, you get your answer right away. Do they cancel at the end of the first period?00:23:43 Jacob:Yeah, it's good to think about your product in terms of not just. Like signups and getting through the end of onboarding, like that day one experience, but think about what hooks are like, what are the things that people are actually investing contingent on? I always think that that's, that's a, know, you think about this long-term relationship, giving users, in your product to invest and to give back and to connect, like putting in 00:24:05 Robbie:Yeah. 00:24:06 Jacob:Themselves.Like there's passive usage consumption. Netflix does a good job. Like you can save, listen stuff that they do a lot of this just in passively, right? Like you consume content and they learn about you and then they have a profile. but I think some of the best apps, like let put in and that's going, gonna also not only probably make them stickier users, but also it gives you early indications and some things to hook on and be like, okay.I mean, Dropbox, this was a big thing in Dropbox. This story. they, they could get people to like understand the concept, but we had massive product issues, getting people to put a file in the thing, right? Like 00:24:41 Robbie:Yeah. 00:24:42 Jacob:Not necessarily the most user friendly thing. Like is some sort of app that runs in the background whenever they would, they did, they pulled users in, they watched them do it and totally fail.And then they fixed the product. Right. and, that's, that's. core product problem, but it relates to this this story of getting somebody to membership, right? Like getting them 00:25:00 Robbie:Yeah 00:25:00 Jacob:And focusing on that.00:25:02 David:One of the things that you talked about in your most 00:25:05 Robbie:No. 00:25:05 David:That I think, is so important to understanding the activation. Is is this concept of a forever promise. And so, so your most recent book that forever transaction we'll we'll link to in the show notes and whatnot. but in order to activate, in order to even just build a business, especially a subscription business, you need to start with Promise that you're going to make to customers. and then, especially again, like you said earlier to justify recurring payments, like, so tell me how you think about a forever promise and how, how any app, any business that wants to set up recurring payments should be thinking about this forever promise.00:25:47 Robbie:Yeah, it's, it's really simple. You take a step back and you say, when my customers come to. What is the ongoing problem they're trying to solve, or what is the ongoing goal they're trying to achieve and how can I best align my product and my messaging with that goal, that ongoing goal or that ongoing problem.So what can I promise them about it? So with a Netflix, it's about, you know, entertaining. You know, I'm going to provide you with the biggest selection of professionally created video content delivered in the most efficient way, right. With cost certainty. you're never going to have to pay extra fees and you know, there's a lot of, a lot of apps that are around.You know, helping you with some part of your business process, getting a certain kind of work done or tracking your finances or creating beautiful images for, you know, personal use for your hobbies. What have you gaming apps for fun? And I think first getting really clear on what your promise is and who you're making it to, and then you design the features and benefits to support them.Forever on their journey. And you say, as long as you continue paying me regularly, I am going to continue improving the way I deliver on my promise to you. Right? If I'm a gym, I'm going to have new equipment, I'm going to have new classes. I might offer you stuff online. If I'm news source, I'm going to offer it maybe through an app.Maybe I'm getting the access to the journalists. Maybe I'm getting, get the access to conferences or webinars on top of news because. My promise is I'm going to help you understand the world around you so you can make better decisions. And I don't have, like, if you even think about that promise, There's nothing about that promise that makes you say it needs to be a newspaper, right?It could be a conference. It could be classes, it could be a community of like-minded people sharing their learnings and their observations. So why not layer all of that in over time so that you get closer and closer to guaranteeing that they're going to get the impact that they hoped for on an ongoing basis.00:27:55 Jacob:It's interesting. in some ways relates to like what a company mission can be for a different audience. Right? You say, you know, revenue has as a mission. And that's one thing that I won't change, right. That that's kind of what we do. And that's part of joining the company and whatever. But, but I do think there's value in communicating that as well.This is like the customer facing version of that. Like, what's our 00:28:15 Robbie:Exactly. 00:28:16 Jacob:Charter. Like, why are we here? And what can I 00:28:18 Robbie:Right, 00:28:19 Jacob:That's not going to change. Right. It, especially when you think in those terms of not the like person who's coming to do a very quick transactional thing as in, I'm going to binge you put it, or maybe I just some trying this out, or I have this like one limited life or limited pain, like a limited time pain. Like what's 00:28:35 Robbie:Yeah. 00:28:36 Jacob:Engagement that we're going to do, is really interesting ground when I read the, framing of just the forever transaction forever promise. It's really exciting because we have the infrastructure for the first time in human history to really make this efficient at scale that like computers can do these sort of like, patronage relationships for us.Yeah. And, rethinking how we frame and, and relationships with customers, I think. Yeah. I mean, it's some of the work are a bit ahead of us on.00:29:05 Robbie:Yeah. Well, I mean, I, you know, I've been here a lot. Like I got here first cause I was here for a long time, but you know, it kind of a dubious distinction, but you know, I think you're right. Like you step back and you say, what are the problems? What's the ongoing problem. The ongoing problem is I'm constantly running out of laundry detergent.Right? The ongoing problem is I look in my closet and I have nothing to wear for this occasion, whatever this occasion might be. Right. you know, something that I think is really interesting to think about, you know, Amazon. Talks about removing all friction from all buying decisions, right. They started with just books.Right. And you still have to wait two weeks to get the book right when you ordered it, but they had this. All the different friction in all the different buying decisions. We're just going to, you know, layer by layer. We're gonna remove all of those things. And, you know, at some point, you know, I think they want to get to the point where I think to myself, those are really cool headphones that Jacob's wearing.I wish I had those. And before I even say. They're on my ears. And then I'm like, oh, these are uncomfortable. And they make my hair look bad. They're gone. Right. That it's almost magical. That's what they're moving to. No friction. I don't even have to say a word. It just happens. you know, I think having that kind of guidance of like, that's what we're trying to do, there's so many times when I've gone shopping and I've needed something, whether it's like buying a new house or buying a white blouse for an event and thinking this shouldn't be that hard.I have enough money to pay for. I know exactly what I need it for. And I've already spent four hours or four months, or in the case of buying a house for years, trying to find, you know, the needle in the haystack. It should not be this. When, when you say it should not be this hard, that's probably00:30:46 Jacob:An 00:30:46 Robbie:Good, 00:30:47 Jacob:Opportunity. 00:30:48 Robbie:Opportunity.Yeah, 00:30:49 Jacob:No, I I'm. I mean, I'm just sitting here thinking about revenue. Cats are, you know, this is a shameless plug time to talk about my company, but, I think about our forever promise and we, our mission is like we help developers make more money. That's our goal. but I almost think that. Kind of like a short, pithy way of like phrasing. It really it's about how do we remove the way he put his barriers? Like, how do we remove all the barriers for a developer to make money? How do we remove all the for a developer to value with software for other people? and often like people see a lot of these.Yeah. Subscription, infrastructure problems, data problems, all these, all these things are not why somebody got into it. Right. When they started Netflix, it wasn't like, I just can't wait to do like cohort analysis. 00:31:35 Robbie:Okay. 00:31:35 Jacob:Like all these things, it's like, no, we want to deliver entertainment to people the easiest way possible.And so, you know, for us, like, In some ways, our particular problem that we're, we've committed and, and going to the forever thing to, you know, our product is, it's a subscriber, it's a, it's a subscription essentially. but it's a long-term commitment by the nature of it. It's very infrastructure-related so like I've always talked how to, you know, is there something the early days had to give a lot of assurances to folks like yeah.We're, we're sticking around like, yeah, this is, 00:32:06 Robbie:Yeah. 00:32:07 Jacob:The long-term goal for us. But I think, I think that comes down to consumers too. Like the best companies I've seen. In our space doing consumer software apps, subscription apps essentially have like a really deep connection to the mission. And the problem I think of calm, I think of, 00:32:24 Robbie:Yeah. 00:32:24 Jacob:Photo room, this app, we work with that the, you know, they've been in vision, computer vision, and they've worked for GoPro and they've just, this is in their DNA to 00:32:34 Robbie:00:32:35 Jacob:Of image manipulation.And then, and then on the other spectrum of that, you think of. Companies that are just stamping out, don't know anybody ever heard that company stamping out utility apps or like whatever it is, and then slapping a subscription thing on it. Yeah, it works. I'm going to get marginally more LTV than they were, you know, before, but 00:32:54 Robbie:Yeah. 00:32:54 Jacob:Not going to, that's 00:32:55 Robbie:Yeah. 00:32:56 Jacob:The level of like computer or like problem solving for consumers that we were then we were doing before.00:33:02 Robbie:I think you have to be really passionate about the customer needs and the customer's journey rather than on your product. And this is, this is always a really rough conversation because a lot of businesses, really, really, really hold their products in high regard, whether it's. Automobiles or, you know, software, I mean, software, you know, most companies around here in Silicon valley, like the software team, they run everything.Like that's, that's the talent and everything, you know, they can build what they want. And, you know, I, I used to joke that, you know, when you work with. The car world, right? Sometimes it's just about the cup holders, right? It's not about, it's not about the big engine, right. Which is what a lot of the people, a lot of people go into the world of cars, automotive because they love cool cars, but a lot of people who buy cars.Don't buy cool cars. They buy practical cars that solve certain problems for them. And you have to be passionate about the problems you're solving for the customers. That again. So I did a lot of work early on with, in my sort of subscription life in the high-end bicycle industry. I was working with the bicycle product suppliers association, really, really interesting space.But one thing about it is that most people who own bike stores and work in bike stores and sell bikes and manufactured by. Our bike researchers and off-road, you know, risk-taking bike enthusiasts that have nine bikes at home, there's a whole huge untapped market of people who just need a bike to get to school or a bike to get to work or a bike for, for Saturdays to go to the farmer's market.And they ask really annoying questions at the bike store. Like, does this come in pink or can I get a basket for this? Or, this going to get em, you know, Reese on my, on my work pants and at some point, even, you know, like there's always this tension because the people who create the products, sometimes they're like those aren't problems I want to work on.Right. Or, you know, I worked in the hospital, you know, kind of in the, in the, in the health industry. And I talked to a lot of surgeons and they're like, yeah, you guys can do whatever you want around customer, this customer that treating customers like patients, whatever. But I want to see my patient unconscious on a table and I'll cut them open and I'll fix them and make them better.And I don't want to do all that other stuff. Right. it's hard because they're the talent. you know, I think this is a big issue with subscriptions because those Mark Key elements, aren't always the thing that's going to drive engagement, retention.00:35:30 Jacob:It's falling in love with your own product, right. It's falling in love with the 00:35:33 Robbie:Yeah. 00:35:34 Jacob:And not the problem, you know? you 00:35:37 Robbie:Exactly. 00:35:38 Jacob:I mean, I've been in the, you know, in the past, when I was in the weeds, like you start to really over it. I think analytics can actually like be, this is where, yeah.Back to the discussion of like, just throw 10 users on the board and maybe don't like, get the finest. Tooth comb to like go through your data. First is like, when you have like super high fidelity data on everything, you can start to get really data oriented. But if your product is the thing, collecting the data, you sort of inherently bias the data collection you're doing based on the product you have.You miss a lot of opportunities because you're not just thinking about the problem space. I worked on this app called elevate, which was training, and I can remember so many. So many like heated discussions about, this flow, should we do this or X and Y and Z. And not as many as we should have had about like, why are people actually coming to this app like addressing those questions from like head-on, and thinking about ways that we can improve the product with that.The beginning. And I haven't seen that revenue cat too. Like we have a lot of which are really deep and rich and people use and they're in love with, and we can, you know, you can spend a lot of brain power and a lot of focus thinking about the next iteration of that thing. The re yeah, like you said, the, the, the, the bike shop owner who's really into bikes are like really into some particular technology touch with.Yeah, these bigger things, it's like forever promise this, like, what are we actually building? Like what does revenue cap mean? And in a decade when the problems we're solving now, actually, maybe aren't that relevant the case. We've talked a lot about media companies and I almost snuck in a metaverse joke.And now I will just refer to OMA 00:37:14 Robbie:Yeah. 00:37:15 Jacob:Joke your headphones, but like, Yeah, we think about this as like modes of consumption are going to be changing. that's where these, like, missions, customer mission or forever promises kind of come in. It's like making sure that regardless of a Netflix delivered on a DVD or on a streaming set top box, or into some sort of like brain 00:37:34 Robbie:Okay. 00:37:35 Jacob:Like this, the subscribers will transfer.Right. 00:37:38 Robbie:Yeah. 00:37:39 Jacob:Yeah. And this is one of my, like now I'm now I'm ranting, but think is one of the reasons I'm still really excited about all of these pieces coming together, is because it does just feel like we've reached some stage in our economy where we can align a lot more incentives this way.Then maybe we have been able to in the past, which I think is just exciting.00:38:00 David:But as we align those incentives and people get more and more subscriptions. Nice little transition there. Thank you, 00:38:07 Jacob:That's great. David, you're getting this podcasting thing, like really turning it in.00:38:11 David:There is a growing, chorus of, but subscription fatigue, People are tiring of all these subscriptions and no matter how much you can align incentives And everything else, people are just not going to want to pay subscription. So having, having seen the, the growth in subscription, consumer subscription starting way back at Netflix in the early two thousands, and now we are layering on more and more and more.What what's your perspective on this, this concept of subscription fatigue, our consumers really tiring of, paying in this way. 00:38:49 Robbie:Yeah. So the upside of, you know, this explosion and subscriptions is that consumers, and actually businesses alike are much more receptive to subscription offerings. They understand them, they understand the value they can provide if they're done. Right. and they're easier than ever before for any kind of company.You know, from the smallest mom and pop up to the, you know, the biggest multinationals to offer subscription pricing. The downside is there's this glut of subscriptions. Every company has them and not all of them are well-designed as, as we've been discussing. and that leads to subscription fatigue, and, and there's sort of three things.Contribute to that. One of them is where these, the product does not justify subscription pricing, right? This is a product I'm going to need once and you're requiring me to subscribe to it. That feels unfair. you know, or I'm never, I'm hardly ever going to use this in. You're making me subscribe, even though, you know, my use case doesn't justify that investment.Second problem is kind of the flip side of that, which I think of the subscription overwhelm or subscription guilt, which is. This great value. Actually, your product is fantastic, but I can't use all the value because of my own issues. And that makes me feel bad about myself. Like this is when you, you know, you have the new Yorker magazine piling up on your bedside table.Right. And you just cause you just want to Netflix and chill cause you're tired. But like your thought at the beginning of the day is I'm going to get so smart. I'm going to read all these great. That makes you feel bad about yourself, you can't, you know what I would suggest for example, that a new Yorker does is to educate consumers, that you only have to read one or two articles to get the full value of your subscription.It's all you care to consume, not consume all of it or you're, you're lazy. but I think that overwhelm, or, you know, same thing with blue apron where the meal kits are in your fridge and you're not using 00:40:34 Jacob:No, Don't even fatigue. it's a rough subject.00:40:39 Robbie:Yeah. Cause you feel bad, like the meals are calling to you and you're like, don't go out with your friends. 00:40:44 Jacob:Yeah. 00:40:44 Robbie:In the fridge. Don't be a waster. 00:40:47 Jacob:With my spouse about cooking because we have the giant meal kit to do. but it's great. I love the time.00:40:53 Robbie:Yeah. So then, and then, and then I think the last one, I mean, but it's, it's great. Cause it's not the fault. The meal is great. It's I don't feel like eating it today or someone invited me over for like the crazy one is when someone invites you to dinner. And so then it's not even a question of finances.You're like, well, either way, I'm not going to have to spend any more money and I'm going to get a delicious dinner. Do I want to make the blue apron dinner or go to my friend's house? Who just invited me? Well, I can't go to my friend's house because I feel bad throwing the blue apron in garbage 00:41:19 Jacob:To, the lettuce is going to be wilted by the next by tomorrow.So. 00:41:22 Robbie:Day I can cook. And then the last issue, so there's there's know, bad product-market fit. There's this subscription overwhelmed or subscription guilt. And then the last one is hiding the cancel button. And I'm really interested in what you guys think about that one. Cause a lot of subscriptions, make it really hard for you to get out of this.Cancel anytime relationship, even though. That's what they pitched. Join and cancel any time. If you can find the cancel button, which we've hidden behind 27 clicks with a call us on Tuesday, you know, extra hurdle.00:41:54 Jacob:Yeah, I think it's, well, my take is it's terrible. And anybody that does, it should really reevaluate what they're doing in software. Cause like, I think it violates that trust, right? Like, welcome. We're going to ask for this thing where you're gonna you're you're gonna let us charge. We're just going to suck money out of your bank account every month, because you've decided to like enter this relationship with us and then we're going to go ahead and betray that trust.Right. We can turn around and betray that 00:42:16 Robbie:Yeah,Advantage. 00:42:17 Jacob:But, yeah, I hadn't. Thought of fatigue in so many channels like that are so many aspects, but like the, the overwhelming aspect is interesting. And I resonate. I feel that, like, I feel that with, with dinner boxes, for sure, but even in software too, there's certain pieces of software.Like, I feel like, ah, I can't cancel it cause I have these intense and things like that. And that's not really what you want to, those, aren't the relationships you want to focus on. Right? Like so. 00:42:40 David:Side there, I think like I use this example a ton, but, Visco, I'm not a daily user. I'm not even necessarily a monthly user, but when there's a photo of my kids or just a photo, I took that I really cherish. I important into Visco and Fisco makes it better. And that to me is so valuable that I didn't even care.I mean, 20 bucks a year, I think is too cheap for their product. I would pay a lot more, even though I maybe only use it quarterly sometimes, or maybe once a month or, you know, when I'm on vacation, maybe I use it every day for a week, but it's interesting that that product. Doesn't create that sense of, oh, I'm not getting enough value out of it because I get so much value when I do. Yeah, maybe. Yeah. Maybe if it were $60 a year, it would be too much. But I mean, I just, I just would never consider canceling because I it's just, when I have a photo I care about, I take it to Bisco and it's better and it like, that's their forever promise and it just resonates so well with me that I don't, I don't get that, guilt you know, I get more than $20 a year of value out of 00:43:49 Jacob:00:43:50 Robbie:Yeah, I think, I mean, it's interesting. I think one of the things about this, you know, sort of dealing with subscription overwhelm is, you know, is it framed like whatever the customer is, anchoring their pricing to. where they say it's valuable enough. So, so for example, I worked with, one of these produce box companies, and one of their challenges was that most of their customers said that most weeks they ended up throwing something away.Right. Because it's never the exact right amount of produce. Right? So you end up at the end of the week with like soggy kale or, you know, turnips, and then you go on vacation and you come back and they put them into with these turnips. But one of the things that we did is we set expectations. That it's okay to throw out a little bit of produce that you're still getting a better price than you would at the store.And you're still supporting farmers, local farmers. So sometimes it's as simple as just reframing what the expectation is like saying for Visco. You know, if you, if you use, you know, if you use this for two or three, you know, memory pictures a year, You know, doesn't that pay for itself in 20 bucks worth, you know, three great shots of your life.You know, the three best moments of 2021. a lot of it is about, is about, I think, expectation setting and understanding your customer and what the value is. Like. I don't know how much I pay for Amazon prime. I don't care.00:45:05 Jacob:Yeah, 00:45:06 Robbie:I it almost every 00:45:07 Jacob:I 00:45:07 Robbie:Mean, I don't. 00:45:08 Jacob:A decade ago and haven't thought about really 00:45:11 Robbie:Right. But I use it every day. Like I don't care what it costs. I mean, if they start charging $3,000, I would care. But like, if it's a hundred dollars a year or $85 a year or $115, I don't care. And that's a really important point about pricing is that at least I've found with many of the subscription companies I've worked with and a lot of, you know, software products when they don't sell well, when their business isn't growing, they immediately jumped to the. Must be too expensive. We'll have to lower our price. But in so many cases, it's not about the price. It's about the value. I'm not using it. If I'm not using it, it doesn't matter if it's a dollar or a hundred dollars. and so thinking about why aren't they using it before you jump right to, well, I guess I'll take 10% off the top.00:45:56 David:Yeah, let let's let's talk pricing real quick.Cause you, you do have several strategies that you get through in the book and in what you were, what you were just explaining was one of the things I really took away from your book. is it you say in the book that it's more important to understand product-market fit and willingness to pay than finding the exact right price.And so you, you were, you kind of backed into explaining that, but let, let's elaborate a little bit. And essentially what you were just describing was that a product that doesn't have product-market fit, it doesn't matter what you price it. You know, what are, what are your, what else, what are your thoughts on that?00:46:36 Robbie:Yeah. I, I just think, I mean, in so many things in life, you're kind of on a continuum. Like, you know, I remember when many years ago I started doing weightlifting and, you know, I told people that I was doing it to be more fit and you know, stronger, and now it's very common, but at the time a woman doing weightlifting, you know, working out with weights and people would say to me, I don't want.Huge muscles. And I was like, oh honey, you are so far from that being a problem. Like we're at the other end of the continuum. Like there are certainly people, women who work out and get too muscly and that's not what they want men to wear. Like then it intervenes with my ability to do my sport. But for most people it doesn't just happen.And I think in the world of apps, I think most people. Kind of over index on pricing and think that that's going to be the key thing to figuring this out. When a lot of times there's actually a pretty big gap between, you know, kind of where you can make money and where your customer is willing to pay there's lots of room, lots of different prices. And as long as you launch somewhere in that. You're going to make some money and over time, there's lots of ways to become more sophisticated and get to a better and better price point. But a lot of people assume that if they have a highly elastic product, meaning that for every dollar you increase your pricing.Your number of customers drops by a predictable percentage. And I think in many cases for a lot of products that are inelastic, if I use it, I'll pay anywhere between five and $10 month. And if I don't use it, I will pay nothing. And so if you notice that people aren't are canceling and they're the same people who aren't using the product, it's probably not a pricing problem.It's probably a product problem.00:48:17 Jacob:Right. I mean, if you're talking about product-market fit and a forever relationship like that, I'm going to pay incident money in terms of my lifetime. Right? Like I'm going to pay 00:48:27 Robbie:Great. Right. And it's, and the thing is that people assume like, so what I would say is if. If you're trying to figure out your first price, I'd say, don't worry about it too much. if you need to do a land, grab like a Spotify priced low and you can raise your price later, although that's hard, but just do it cause you, you want people to adopt your solution.If you're worried about, you know, hurting your core business, And so, you know, then start by pricing really high and you can lower it as you have increased confidence and understanding of use case. But there's a lot of room in there and that's really, my advice is be somewhere in that range. And if people aren't buying it or aren't staying.Look for the other signs of what might be driving it besides pricing, like, is it that they, you know, failure to launch? They never onboarded. They never activated, they never used the best features. is it that they were using it for a while and then their usage trickled off. Maybe they used it up, right?Either they binged or, you know, they've watched everything they've seen, maybe their job changed. So these features are no longer relevant to their work, but really try to be a detective about where the problem is like. it's like you have a party, in a bar you're not making money from the party in the bar. Like before you lower the price at the front door, see like, are people walking by and not recognizing that you have a party, so you have nobody in there because that's an awareness problem or is it that people come in the front door and can't find their way to the food and drink and music. And so they think it's a lame party is that they leave and they never come back.You know, that's an onboarding problem. Is it that they've been eating all the food and dancing to all the music and they're like, I'm tired of these songs. I'm tired of this food, which is a different kind of product problem, product assortment problem. Or is it, I went downstairs to the food and there was no food and the music, you know, the speakers weren't working and that's an operational issue.Right. So fix the problems before you drop the price.00:50:20 David:That's such...00:50:21 Jacob:I mean I think about it, if you have product-market fit, you're going to go this way (up and to the right on the curve). All the price is going to do is maybe define that inflection on that curve. Exponential curves, the slope doesn't matter often all that much in the longterm. You can optimize it eventually, but it's really getting that product-market fit. Then it just takes care of itself.00:50:52 David:That that is a great bit of advice to wrap up on.Your book, The Forever Transaction, is fantastic. Reading it was so fun just to think about—we put our blinders on with this podcast and in the space we work in with apps—but realizing that so many of the ideas that we think about, so many of the problems we work on, are things that are across the entire industry, across all consumer subscriptions, even a lot of overlapping in B2B SaaS.So, it was just so fun reading your book, and then getting to ask you questions here. I had 30 more questions that I wanted to ask you. I could go another hour or two, but I'll, put links to your LinkedIn, to your website, to your Twitter in the show notes.Is there anything else you wanted to share with our audience as we wrap up?00:51:42 Robbie:No, I think we covered a lot. If there's one thing that I want to leave people with, it's this idea that if you start with the promise you're making to your customers, helping them with an ongoing problem, or achieving an ongoing goal that's important to them, and then you optimize your offering around that, your chances of both acquiring and retaining your customers going to go way up.00:52:06 David:Such great advice. Great place to end.You mentioned that there's some extra goodies listeners can get if they click on the link in the show notes, they can get your book and some extra goodies along with that.So, thank you so much for being on the podcast.00:52:22 Robbie:Yeah. A real pleasure.

Watch the video version of this show on YouTube »Matthieu Rouif is the co-founder and CEO of PhotoRoom. PhotoRoom enables anyone to create studio-quality photos on their iPhone. Before founding PhotoRoom, Matthieu was the Senior Project Manager at GoPro. Matthieu is also the co-founder and CTO of HeyCrowd, and co-founder and CEO of As-App.Matthieu earned his graduate degree in materials science and engineering from Stanford University, and his bachelor's degrees in economics, and physics from École Polytechnique. While at École Polytechnique, Matthieu was a member of the skydiving team and debate team. Matthieu also served as a Parachutist Commando Officer in the French Air Force.Matthieu started developing apps in 2009 as a student at Stanford, and subsequently started two iPhone app companies. He was part of the Replay app team when they won App of the Year in 2014. Matthieu started PhotoRoom after leaving GoPro in 2018.In this episode, you'll learn: Matthieu's retention strategies for keeping app users subscribed Innovative and clever ways to get users to demo your app Balancing your app's pricing and features How churn can be an asset Links & Resources YC HeyCrowd GoPro Photoshop Zenlea Shopify Poshmark Depop Corel Matthieu Rouif's Links Matthieu on Twitter Matthieu on LinkendIn PhotoRoom is hiring! 10 Tools to Ship an iOS App in 2 Weeks PhotoRoom's Website PhotoRoom API PhotoRoom on Twitter Follow us on Twitter: David Barnard Jacob Eiting RevenueCat Sub Club Episode Transcript00:00:00 David:Hello, I'm your host, David Barnard. And with me as always, Jacob Eiting, RevenueCat CEO. Our guest today is Matt Rouif, co-founder and CEO at PhotoRoom, the app for removing backgrounds and creating studio quality photos right from your phone.On the podcast, we talk with Matt about how his time at GoPro led to founding PhotoRoom, how churn can actually be an asset, and how being locked in Apple's basement led to one of PhotoRoom's biggest marketing wins.Hey, Matt. Thanks for joining us on the podcast today. How are you doing?00:00:48 Matthieu:Great. Hey David, Hey Jacob.00:00:51 Jacob:Hi, it's nice to finally meet internet/virtual face-to-face. We've known each other for a little while. I've become fortunate to know you kind of through RevenueCat, but not actually know-know you. So, it's nice to finally put a face to the name.I was looking back through my email and I think the first I ever heard of you was from our mutual friend, Cisco, if I say that correctly?00:01:23 Matthieu:Yeah, Francisco.00:01:24 Jacob:Francisco, who shared with me a blog post that I had seen that you wrote where you talked about RevenueCat as part of your stack. Since then, I think we talked as you were thinking about going into YC, and then after YC, I put in a little bit of money, so this is a good opportunity to check in on my investment.I'm super excited to dive in, because there's a lot of questions. I kind of have followed you guys and kind of seeing some of the stuff you've been doing, but I don't know, like the behind the scenes decision making processes and like, and all that stuff. So yeah, I'm excited to hear the story firsthand.00:02:04 David:Yeah, but before we get into PhotoRoom, you've got quite a history in app development. So, I want to go back to the beginning and talk war stories. A lot of people were in the industry way back when. Jacob and I both started really early as well. So, you got your start during the Stanford class and you were actually a teaching assistant at Stanford at the time, right? I'm kind of stealing your story, but yeah. Tell me, tell me how you got into it.00:02:34 Matthieu:Yeah. Actually I wasn't a teaching assistant in physics. I was doing a master's in physics at Stanford, right at the moment of the first iPhone class. And, I actually went to Stanford because I was fascinated by the entrepreneurship. And I had this business idea of printing photos and sending them.And that seemed a lot easier not to buy hardware, but just use the iPhone which just started at that point. So, I was at Stanford, there was the iPhone class. I wanted to do a photo app. So, see, 12 years later....00:03:05 Jacob:A 12 year overnight success.00:03:07 Matthieu:That's what they say. Exactly. And, yeah, I got, I actually, I got started, programming.I was doing physics before, and I didn't know anything about programming. So I took a class with a friend that went through the basics, and I just wanted to push products on apps. And I found that the iPhone was the best at that point. And actually the photo app became something else.The first company I started back in grad school and they became like a ski resorts app. I shipped, we had all of the major ski resorts. And, It was a great, I did that for two years and a major ski resorts and, yeah.I started an apps company after that, one called HeyCrowd around a social network. So like we had surveys that you could answer to with polls, like, a bit like Instagram stories now, and that didn't work so well compared to the ski resort, but, yeah, I got into iPhone apps right since the beginning.00:04:18 Jacob:I remember the Stanford course. It was on iTunes U that was mass disseminated or was it the later one?00:04:25 Matthieu:No, it was the one that it wasn't Stanford U. There was a, the guy from Fitboard during the class. I don't know if it was doing that.00:04:42 Jacob:Yeah. I remember. I remember it being like the moment when we were like, oh, this is going to go mainstream. Right? Like, because up to that point, you had to learn iOS by doing basically Mac OS. That was like the one point there was the big nerd book you learned Mac OS, and then the SDKs came and you like tried to learn quickly, like what worked and what didn't.But, if you were like me who came from no Mac programming, there was really no iPhone entry into it. I remember when the Stanford course came out. It was like one year too late for me. Because like at that point I had already done a lot of stuff, but it was still really great.I still watched the whole thing. I remember watching it. But it's interesting. We have the same path. I don't know if we ever talked about this, but I was studying physics in undergrad as well. Yeah, I didn't go to Stanford, but I went to a small state school instead, just cause, you know. But yeah, kind of similar story where like I was in, I wasn't in grad school, but I was physics, undergrad.Didn't really know what I wanted to do. I really loved physics and the math and all that stuff, but like, there's a stronger economic pull, let's put it that way, to work on apps. That was the same story for me. Like took a little bit of what I had learned, writing code for experiments and things like this, and then kind of started making apps.And then, yeah, the rest is history.00:06:06 Matthieu:Yeah. I think one of the introduction to physics is like how fast data applies to the real world from science to real world. And you don't find that in a, like a physics job where you kind of find that back in, like a software development where you like, can we solve a math problem, a computer science problem, and you can directly apply it to real00:06:25 Jacob:Yeah. Or like, even with business modeling and stuff too, you know, you think about how a business moves and like what number moves this number. And there's no physics there. You're not approximating a physical system, but some of the same principles apply. Right. You're like trying to find some laws that are underlying it and work from there.So yeah, I found it hasn't been terribly unrelevant, but, but yeah, that's interesting. What else, what else do we have in common? Let's keep going.00:06:48 Matthieu:Yeah, sure.00:06:49 David:Well, actually, I, I want to jump in. I want to get to PhotoRoom, so we're actually going to skip over. You've done a lot now. So after, after that you went to replay and replay was like onstage at a keynote. And you're the co founders that you were working with, you know, as, as you joked, before we started recording, spent a month in the basement and apple, as everyone does before a keynote.But then you ended up at GoPro working on imaging. so just tell me about that. Leaving GoPro. I mean, Great company done a lot of innovative stuff. but tell me about leaving to start a PhotoRoom and what the inspiration, I guess we've heard part of it, you know, 12 years of working on imaging and wanting to build a photo app.But yeah. Tell me about the founding of, of.00:07:36 Matthieu:Yeah, I, I, so GoPro is an amazing company, but it's more marketing and hardware. And, I really wanted to, I grew a bit frustrated about like how we could, do better software. Yeah, a few frustration from that I, as a product, I was product manager by them. So I was like frustrated with the design tool, like a Photoshop and, and, you kind of have to move to, and by that time you had to move to California to move the stuff.And I was based in there in Paris and I decided to stay there with the family and, and kind of, we had an amazing missionary team at GoPro in Paris, but it's really difficult to. To change the paradigm of a kind of a software, like a, if it works from a kind of more deterministic way. So I kind of realize that it's really tough to ship a new software with new paradigm, and we've mentioned our new insights.So I thought there was a big opportunity with the new, new hardware coming on, the iPhone formation, learning the new, the new, yeah, this new kind of way of thinking about software. And, I left the GoPro to start a company and we've just ideas in mind. And I also, at the time realized that there was a. A lot of apps, you know, like after 10 years on the app store, you kind of know the tricks of the app store. And I knew there were a lot of apps in the top of the photo apps that were around razor and background eraser. I realized like, okay, if they're just kind of a, you know, I say scam, but it's certainly scam, but all these apps that are built quickly, there must be some demand around it.And so that's, I started with the background remover idea. Like I saw that there was a mission learning team at GoPro that there was some background removal, paper and all that. Okay. There must be some demand. Let's ship something quickly and see how it goes. And that's kind of the nice thing of like 10 years of development, you know, the right tool to go fast and just shipped a prototype in two weeks.We've actually referring at, by then I have a blog post on like the 10 tools I use there and, And, yeah, it was, it went super fast, super fast to the store and we have some machine learning and, on-device machine learning by then. So it's as a, and it kind of caught up, like you tried a dozen ideas on some kind of stay on the wall on some, like, and just stay on the wall.00:09:43 Jacob:So at the time it was called BGE app background app. Right. was the focus initially, did you have like a big scope for it or was that your entry? You were like, Hey, I know that they there's these photo apps that kind of suck that are doing this background thing. I think we can do it better. And like, let's see where it goes from there.Or did you have like a bigger plans or longer term aspirations? 00:10:04 Matthieu:I think there was, an understanding that people kind of needed that and the tech tech was 10 X better as they say. So it was really interesting, but I didn't, I mean, we didn't have the full plan for that. It's really a few months in that we are understood with Elliot the kind of the market fit.And we understood also like this idea of, and we call it, we translate pixels into concept that makes it much easier to, to, to edit. So w for the room is the best for digital for entrepreneurs. And the idea is that instead of using mask and layers and pixels, you just like, the machine learning, understanding what are the.The big cells and they just tell you, okay. A cat. So we call it cat to catch up on the cat. And you should have actions that are relevant to a Catholic changing the fur color. if it's, if it's a piece of clothing, it should be the texture of the clothing. If it's a, if it's a kind of graphic change of color, you know, kind of, it makes it much more accessible than what exists in like 10 year, 20 years, software that exists by for the editing.00:11:03 Jacob:So, so yeah, I mean, I think that sounds like a very much a pitch and a story that somebody would be taught at Y Combinator. So I'm curious, like what I'm curious, like, how did that evolve? Like how so you, you, you, you guys launched the app in the, I remember I was talking in like the spring of 2019.00:11:20 Matthieu:Yeah. Like may 2019. Exactly. 00:11:22 Jacob:And then, you started YC in the fall or the winter?Yeah.00:11:25 Matthieu:No, we actually, so we started YC in the following summer. We were supposed to do the winter batch after that. So seven months. And, we, we couldn't because our visa issues, at some, with the family, I couldn't move to, to, to YC. Yeah. 00:11:42 Jacob:Can tell you there's one way to solve that problem.A global pandemic.00:11:49 Matthieu:Exactly. Yeah. That's exactly right. So we did it involve, I think we shipped super fast. We failure my co-founder who is like a, like a machine learning genius. and we follow early on the YC startup school, which is kind of the, first step to. And, and so what does it help you? It kind of, you measure the, yeah, the progress.So, how much customer you're talking to, Ahmed, how much money you made and how happy you are doing what you do. And so that's kind of how we iterated 00:12:24 Jacob:You were 00:12:25 Matthieu:Months. 00:12:26 Jacob:During, startup school or 00:12:28 Matthieu:Yeah, the school kind of asks you every, every week, discussion and you make sure you make progress on that. I think these are the right question to make progress on your business.And here's, what's kind of, kind of natural, like two months later. So we started in may, may, June on that, application for YC where I probably in September, like, so, so we did like all summer, we did the startup school scheme and then framework and made some progress on that. And we got the YC application in September and the interviews actually in Paris, In, I think November.00:12:57 Jacob:And then, ha had you, I guess like, your, your aspirations or your reasons for applying, I guess, are in some ways, self evident to somebody. You know, obviously you don't need to convince me, but for the listeners, I, what was your, yeah. What were your motivations? Like? Why did you, well, I guess for one there's, you know, I don't know.I always hear there's a couple of reasons, right? Like sometimes it's prestige, like people want to the prestige of YC, sometimes it's, it's the help, which I honestly think is the, the, the best reason. Cause I, you know, it's, it was honestly really good for us, but then there's also like, you know, it's, it's a great way to springboard venture back.Thing, right as well. So like, did you have like strong reasons? Was it all of the above or what was the motivation for, for getting on the venture? 00:13:44 Matthieu:Yeah, that's a good question. so I think number one reason was, ambition. I think like a lot of your brain startups, you Batara, can be not ambitious enough. And I think if you're ambitious, like YC is really a way of, the alpha taking the ambitious path. Okay. Then how to make it like a business and a product that has a strong impact, like on a very large number of people.So that was, that would be my number one. I think then it's kind of the learning. we are at the beginning of the company, we sit for failure, then what's what kind of is the most important, you know, for their culture. And we talked about it also. And, one thing we really value is learning fast and I think YC kind of helps you, you probably a lot of like, you learn so much faster because you're at the right contact.So it's, I mean, it's. It's on the partners. Like every time we have a office hour, almost every time, like, wow. Blown away, there is like also Atlas. I get the right investors, I mean on the revenue, on the like mobile subscription and like, yeah, like you like auger from Blinkist, like, someone from, John from Spotify.So that's really helpful and also extra connection like we have in AI, we have the VP of AI and locale Facebook, and I don't think we could reach this network with, with. 00:15:01 Jacob:Yeah, the network thing is depends on, you know, what your background is. Obviously you had been in the peninsula, but still it's hard to be really deeply networked and still it's hard to. Invest in your engineering skills. Right. And like your IC skills and invest in a network at the same time, which was kind of my world.Like I had an okay network, but like, it wasn't super well networked. So YC was like a big like boost to that. Right. You could get interest to people. You could get a little bit, it's still, a who, you know, game Silicon valley is still in a lot of ways or the broader concept. 00:15:33 David:Before we move on. I wanted to talk to us a little bit more about the, about the ambition of PhotoRoom, because, and this is something I think is, would be really relevant to a lot of our listeners who are, are building apps in the space. And, and I, as an indie developer for 12, 13 years, feel like I've, I've, I've worked too much with, with blinders on.Not thinking about the bigger opportunity. So like the first app I launched was trip cubby. It was a model it's log tracking app, to get reimbursements from taxes or get reimbursed from your company, for your mileage. And I just, I treated it like a little tiny indie business, lifestyle, business, and everything else.Meanwhile, 00:16:19 Jacob:IQ00:16:20 David:IQ built a huge 00:16:23 Jacob:Probably launched about the same time. Right. I would think. 00:16:26 David:No, they launched much later actually, which is even again, it's like I had a multi-year lead as kind of the, how to do that 00:16:33 Jacob:Assuming the market was there. Like my, like you probably came when the market was finally there, 00:16:37 David:Starting to grow, but yeah. But what's so cool. Is that, I think there's so many opportunities in the app store that people overlook that seem really niche. Like you just started out replacing backgrounds in photos, 00:16:50 Jacob:And now you're going to be the next generation Photoshop. Is that a good one? Is that a good pitch? I don't know what the 00:16:54 Matthieu:Yeah. 00:16:57 David:What, what's the ambition that, where that took you from, okay.We can replace background images too. This is, could be a huge business because we're, un-bundling one of the like key parts of Photoshop, which is a massive business. So what, what, what is the, what was the ambition and what is the ambition that you feel that this, this can be such a big thing. 00:17:21 Jacob:How did you, how did you convince yourself of that? The ability to do that?00:17:25 Matthieu:Yeah. 00:17:25 David:Yeah.I mean, it's, it's amazing.00:17:27 Matthieu:I think it's, well first like working on photo, video editor, like I realized that, I mean, video is big. Like we got, I think we free-play then named quick by GoPro. We got to $100 million. It's kind of tell you like, and most people, they are still using like photo collage. So everyone's working on photo and video is too complex for most people.So like, if you get 100 million for a video, then it's probably like any good, like yeah. Project improvement like 10 X product improvement on photo must get like 1 billion users. And I think it's like, that's one of the YC model, but it was really starting from a pain point of myself, like creating the assets for actually for the app store.Like you have to create a PSD. And I was like, you spent so much time on non creative task. And I was like, I want to make that much simpler. And I think the big heart moment was kind of talking to the user. So, and also like talking, yeah. Talking to people like we kind of build in the open and people told us, it's like, yeah, Yeah, it's a, it's like a actually it's like programming, like a U instead of you're you're doing like, object oriented, editing, like you understand what kind of objects you have and you make actions that are relevant to that.And that's, that's kind of done myself, like really burning myself away. Like it's much simpler. Like you have an object and you, you offer it to the user. What's the logic for the subject lines, Photoshop. It's such a pain to learn. Like I think everyone would remember is kind of the blown away part of Photoshop, but also the pain it is to understate.00:18:51 Jacob:And it hasn't gotten easier in 20 years. Like the only way now you can paint on a sphere or something like, there's nothing like new, I still open it and it's comforting. Cause I learned in CS two or whatever, and it's all still the same, but like, I don't think it's necessarily, like, I think, I think there's even a broader near you.I'm going to make your, your $10 billion company, a trillion dollar company. But I think there's an even broader narrative there around just like the future of software and how machine learning. Further like narrows the gap between like in software, like programming, not in the traditional sense, but like telling a computer what to do and the computer telling, like asking us or like bringing us like the things it can do.And you see this in like varying degrees of it working well. Right. like Gmail, like suggesting like absolutely insane sounding replies that I would never say, like, that's kind of that, but, but I think that's all maybe a little bit too far, but I think what you guys are doing, it's really great. You know, like segmenting photos, like giving people those tools, like taking, especially for a tool like email it's like writing, like, I don't know.An AI assistant to like, say, thanks like I can, I got that. Thank you. But for, for, yeah, like, like cutting backgrounds out and like setting up. Yeah. Just building like, things that to a human, because we're so visual in the way we think seem really basic, right? Like I want the cat in front of a blue background, right?Like that. Just tell the computer and it can do that right now. The existing tooling is like very manual and very skills driven. And you guys are bridging that gap. So like yeah. Who knows something? I don't know. Maybe photos, aren't the end of it for you guys, maybe next you just start tackling the next software domain.Right? I, you know, I don't know that we'll get to 10000000001st and then we'll worry about the trillion dollar.00:20:28 David:And that's the really magical thing about your app and your onboarding that I wanted to ask you about. So exactly what Jake was saying. When I think of removing a background and I've worked in Photoshop literally since the nineties, late nineties, I'm old. but it's, I've tried that like a hundred different times.And even in the most modern Photoshop, I don't even know how to do it. I expect it to be. I downloaded PhotoRoom and in like three taps, your onboarding is magical because you don't get in the way of the person having a desire to get something done. And then seeing it happen. So in like three tops from opening the app, I see a background removed and it was just like00:21:16 Jacob:Okay. 00:21:16 David:Instant, like mindblowing experience. 00:21:19 Jacob:Yeah.00:21:20 David:This thing that like, I know it's so hard and I think of needing professional tools and needing to be a professional to even figure it out. It just happens magically after three or four taps in your app was that I assume that was very intentional. Did you have different onboardings before and kind of iterate to that point?Or what led you to just such a focused get the person to that?00:21:45 Matthieu:Yeah, that's a good grade. She was our interview. I think, we like, if we, especially in the beginning every week, we'd go to McDonald's and pay a meal to student or anyone. And they like the tagline for McDonald's and Frances com. Everyone can come in and come as you are. So we really met like tourists students professionals, and like doing user interview.We got so frustrated. I think that people didn't get to the step of removing background that kind of like00:22:12 Jacob:Oh, so you would give them an unlogged out like a brand new device and like, watch them go through onboard.00:22:17 Matthieu:We would like pay the meal initially for downloading the app. We'd like first ask you three, four questions about their photo usage on their, on their phone. kind of ask them to download the app and yeah. Blinded as yeah. And, and we were like came sneaking. We just were, we were just iOS at the beginning.So try to find people with iPhones and not Android, and that was stuff, but yeah, I mean, people usually stopped before and they don't understand something and like to build trust with them, we figured out like the best is to short tech. So I can we get to the point where. We actually have all these people, we try the app that actually see the bag, the magic effect of Futterman like, so like taking a white sheet of paper, we valued microphone and like thinking, how can we do that?And it got to like adding that as early as possible in the onboarding. I think that's, that's, that's fine.00:23:06 Jacob:I think, I remember now reading about the McDonald's testing and your, your, YC application and being like. That's the moment I knew these guys were going to make it, I guess like it's was brilliant, right? Like I, I don't know how much user testing, like real good user testing is. If you do it in some sort of like professional context, it's probably really weird and like expensive and like hard.And this is dead simple, super scrappy. Right? People don't do it because I don't know nerds. Don't like talking to people like we don't like, you know, it's, it's, it's tough to put your, your app in front of somebody and see them. Not, it's one thing to read like bad retention numbers on amplitude is another thing to like, see somebody actually churn and like, but honestly that's the best way to learn.Like this is the best way to like, get really actionable feedback. So, I'm sure that was, that was super beneficial.00:23:53 Matthieu:Yeah, it's a, it's a trick from Zenly. So the social network and maps, like that really is, one of the best, app in embarrass and they, and we apply that and yeah, it requires some. It's not easy, I must say. But, you really, you learn so much and the pain today is more like we have more qualified users.So it's really easy in the beginning when you're in your photo apps and people just as the app and everyone has photos. So it's easy to explain. Then you want to like talk to your kind of retain user. It's difficult to get them at the McDonald, but now we're friends with all the vintage shops around the block.So in Paris, so we get.00:24:28 Jacob:So that, yeah, that was I kind of my question I wanted to ask. I'll just slide it in now, but like I've noticed, I don't know. I don't know if you had this intention initially, but it seems like you've found a new. Even amongst these apps in something I would say commerce or even e-commerce it seems like a lot of people use these, use your app to take photos of objects, to use as like advertising or gone Shopify.Is that, is that true and statement or am I just like misreading investor updates?00:24:56 Matthieu:No, it's totally true. Actually, it's not. The interesting thing is it came from a personal lead, like using, as you say, Photoshop and wanted it much easier for me, but I wasn't clear who was using the CRA's background apps. I'm talking to like user at McDonald's. We realized like there was all these reselling apps, especially in the Europe and the U S where people.Yeah, they're just like selling Poshmark on vintage in Europe and they, there is no app that's focusing on their photo need. Like everyone's doing like selfies or I dunno, whatever lens on video you can make or, but, no one's in it helping them. And it actually came from the user interview like, oh, that some user told us like, oh, my girlfriend would love that she's selling on Depop.And, and we kind of like it after multiple user asking us in support. asking us, and in talking at the user interview of my goal, we realized that, oh, that's a niche that we should kind of focus on. So that's Allie Kim, 00:25:51 Jacob:Was that pre YC, like pretty early in the process.00:25:55 Matthieu:And it came in a few, just not in one day, but it, I think early, after being taken at twice a 00:26:02 Jacob:Okay. 00:26:03 Matthieu:Like early 20, 20,00:26:04 Jacob:So then my next question, I guess, is like, how do you decide then? So you have a car for strong product. You, you, you might have like varying. This is, I think this is very common for a lot of apps and companies is like, you have probably different levels of product market fit depending on the market.Right? So like maybe broadly across all users of iPhone, your product market fit may not be as strong. But then when you look at this one niche, like maybe it's really strong. And then I think some. End up in a situation where you have to kind of decide, like, do I want to go for this maybe less fit, broader market, or maybe a tighter market with a stronger fit that I'm starting out with.Did you have that internal conversation? And then did you make an active decision? Like we're going to focus on this and then yeah. And then what's the plan after that? Like, or is that the forever plan?00:26:48 Matthieu:I think we, the easy part is as a product guy, I'm really convinced that our usage is really deep. Like we're starting from a different Lego brick, like, okay, you don't need it mask or square pixels, you edit like objects. So, I mean, any app that kind of want to copy that Nike that's to stop doing what it does today.So it's kind of the thing that relates to the missionary understanding excelled in the beginning. So we were confident. Digging into this usage and this product paradigm and like product basic block is interesting. And then we decided to focus on the pro usage and, and it's difficult as a follower. You want to serve everyone at the beginning, we were even doing a video plus photo, like in December of 2019, we dropped the video, just for animation.And then we dropped kind off the casual use case to focus on the pro and, and it's, it's been helpful. You're not like giving up on the other users. You, I mean, some of the features, they're still going to use it, the other, the casual, the people doing memes from, from the app, but she just like when you build features, you think about them.And I, around that, I think YC is helpful because. like if you reach local maximum from one vertical, like product market fit, then you investing so much on the take. It gets better than the, all the local maximums or, or adjustment. Like you can reach them after, and it's not a big deal and kind of believe and believing and trusting that helps you on, on like a, okay, we're going to focus on this one for, let's say three months and we say,00:28:14 Jacob:Yeah. I mean, I think that's a really good point in that I think can trip up people early in the process is that you think. That making an active choice to close yourself off to part of the market as a mistake. Cause you're like, well, I want to serve everybody or, well, I want to, you know, I want to have the most broad appeal I can cause it does, it feels wrong, right.To not serve a use case. but often tactically it's a bad choice because yeah, in the early days, anything. Hey find any users that love your product, even if it's a small group, there's, it's a, it's a closer step to like, get your foot onto that than it is to try to get sustainability on like mediocre product market fit across the broad market.Because then also it makes, yeah, it makes your McDonald's discussions easier. Well, maybe you don't have McDonald's discussions anymore. It makes your product discussions easier. Cause you can say like, okay, these are pilot. We're not going to do all this stuff. We're going to focus on this stuff, which gives you more of a loss city.I just really feel there's so much to getting that velocity early. Right. Like getting something that's like moving and growing and getting fast. And I think that's one of the things, I mean, I don't know, I won't, I won't docks you guys on retention numbers and stuff, but you know, when you have a, I'll just say that when you have a pro user base, that's using it for something non casual retention gets easier, right.Like have a reason to come back. And so if you, I mean, there's not that many apps like that. That on it's hard, it's hard, it's hard. It's rare to find mobile apps that have that opportunity. Right. So when it's there, you need to take it00:29:45 Matthieu:Yeah. 00:29:46 David:How do you think about pricing for that value creation? Since, since those that kind of pro segment really probably gets a lot more value than you're even currently charging. because they're actually making money with your product. Like how did you think through your print pricing? And did you iterate to this point from a more kind of consumer pricing to them to a, I mean, to me it feels like you're in the middle still of somewhat consumer-friendly and really honestly, probably cheap for a professional use case.So how did you land on your current price?00:30:24 Matthieu:Yeah, to be honest, it's like most of the photo apps. I mean, when we started and maybe it's different, they are all pricing like 10 bucks a month and that's kind of given by, I guess, Spotify Netflix, like it's kind of the, the glass ceiling of the price of subscription, even for prosumer. And, and we kind of iterated on the under yearly from 40 bucks to 69 bucks, in, in the U.So we didn't like, we kind of landed on that quite early. you don't want to alienate the user, especially if you put the up-selling in the onboarding, like, to be too expensive. I think we have a major opportunity though, to like address the more advanced business and the more than one person in a shop, it's just, it's really difficult to build this a B2B case in in-app like, you don't have that many apps that use that in the up-sell of the phone.So you probably have to show it like. The the first price, to every user and on the pro you probably can to brigade them after, I think it's something we can do later, like focusing on the product for now and make it simple as much as you're like, if you start with two prices, like the support, basically it is going to go crazy.We still do the support of the users. That's something we try to maximize for simplicity here.00:31:37 Jacob:I mean, it's a good point to make, especially too. It depends on, depends on your cashflow constraints as well. Just like how much, how extractive you want to be, how much you want to push it. Right. because you know, when you have good retention, like there's an argument, an argument to be made to not mess that up by because you're raising your price will hurt your attention, right?Like it's kind of at least on paid, right? Like more expensive. It is. People are going to churn more. and if you're compounding your total, like paying subscribers, that might be more important and then extracting an extra, an incremental $2 or $10 or whatever from each user, right. It might be better off just to keep them happy and longterm.And that's what makes it, I don't know, pricing just so complicated. It's about finding that equilibrium to maximize like the longterm area under the curve and not just, not just like the individual LTVs.00:32:27 Matthieu:Yeah, exactly. I think there was one. yeah, we, you want to talk to, like, you don't want to. Expensive at the beginning, you should have too expensive. Like one of the really source of feedback was also our support. And like, if you're too expensive, you get less pro. And the goal, I mean, the reason we launched after two weeks with was like the feedback from process so much more valuable than the feedback from, for users.I mean, you still want people to pay, like, just stop at 500 bucks in long month is going to be like, there's no way people are going to pay for that. So, and I was actually talking on Twitter that like, we actually put forth first a monthly plan because we wanted people to churn and be able to talk to them.So there was really a focus on learning from the 00:33:07 Jacob:Interesting. 00:33:08 Matthieu:Early days.00:33:09 Jacob:Yeah, I've always. Yeah. The, the short, I think, long, the annual subscriptions obviously have a bunch of benefits to, to, to app developers, but you do end up flying blind for a very long time. Right. Until you really know what those numbers look like. So if you're on monthly, purely, it does kind of simplify things early on.Which is another case to be made for just not over thinking your pricing, like initially, right? Like you guys launched just with the monthly and it was fine that you added, I don't know when you added an annual product, but you brought it in when the time. 00:33:40 Matthieu:I think the logical, so learning from GoPro and replay days is the pricing is quite elastic. So you double your price, you divide by two, the number of pros like minus plus 10%. And so, so it doesn't, I mean, it's, I mean, when you get bigger, it's way of doing experiments on pricing, but in the early days it's worth, it's not worth like taking too much time on that.00:34:01 Jacob:Yeah. I mean, it's good to know if you have an elastic curve, it means you're pretty close to, to the optimum already, right?00:34:06 David:Did you start from day one at that $10 a month price point?00:34:10 Matthieu:I think we were at eight or nine. it's pretty much like every pro for the pro apps. Like not selfies was at that on the photo and it's, and I think. The co, I mean, it goes from Spotify on Netflix. Like, everyone's like a, it's like if comparing industry report, they tell you a comparing you to Spotify on that fixed anyway.So it's a, I think it's a good, like a way to start on as they increase the price, they increase kind of the time of all the possible ATV of all the apps, which is really good. Thank you.00:34:40 Jacob:If they don't take care of it, inflation will don't worry. 00:34:43 David:But, but that's just amazing two weeks, to an MVP that you could charge $8 a month for, and people actually paid it.00:34:50 Jacob:Well, 12, 12 years in two weeks, David, if00:34:52 David:Well, right, right, right. No, no, that's a great point. But the point being that there, there are still opportunities that when you have experience and domain knowledge, that it's not the, the programming, it's not the, it's not such a monumental task to build something that's really valuable to people in this space on mobile, that you can build something good quickly with that experience.00:35:17 Matthieu:The first app was really crappy though. Like I think we 00:35:20 David:Yeah. 00:35:21 Matthieu:A few weeks before having our pay first paid users.00:35:23 David:Gotcha. I did want to talk a little bit about your marketing, so, What did you do at launch? Did, did you get a little pressed? Did you, you know, talk to apple, how did you get that initial code?00:35:35 Matthieu:So yeah, we were super, I mean, apple has been super supportive to us. I think. Before GoPro, GoPro acquired replay. so we play was, app of the year, senior as, elevate. So 00:35:46 Jacob:You guys at the year in France, is that what the00:35:48 Matthieu:No, so so I have a card, I brought the screenshot that, 00:35:52 Jacob:The U S 00:35:53 Matthieu:So we didn't, yeah, we didn't, get the U S we didn't get the U S and north America, and it's kind of a private, taser, but it's, we got like most of the Europe and Asia. And, yeah, and then I was seeing like the star that elevate their they're thinking the other U S and we should get that. 00:36:14 Jacob:It was good for you that we hadn't localized maybe 00:36:18 Matthieu:Yeah, 00:36:19 Jacob:That was the thing we were like only English at the time.00:36:22 Matthieu:Well, elevate is such a difficult business to localize. So I think it's a photo video is easy to localize it. Yeah.And, and so we got like, we got the keynote, so, and we kind of, I mean, the app is really good at marketing. using the latest technology of, apple in, like the metal and using the lasers, the GPU, I kind of build a relationship from there, with the apple team and also like learning AR that's kind of the narrative of apple, like to showcase apps.Leveraging the latest technology. They do their marketing through developers and that's awesome for us. Like it's super opportunity. And so what was that? When we started, it was well, we're using a Carmel to do the background removal and we did use like really early on in September of 2019, we use our KPIs to remove the background, to do some live preview of the photo.And so we got into, there is an accelerator inference in the biggest, like sexual life is one of the biggest things. Accenture and apple has a program there and we got in there and they helped us and like marketing and, and business, during the summer. And we had some tech workshop and in September we got Macy's, marketing from the using Eric.He, three, I think, API APIs. So I think all the days was marketing through, using the latest tech software and hardware from.00:37:42 David:And where did it go from there? Yeah. So after, after you've, you've gotten some traction in some of those early customers. did you jump into paid user acquisition 00:37:52 Matthieu:No. 00:37:54 David:Of, of, paid to, organic growth?00:37:58 Matthieu:Yeah. So we got into, we didn't do paid until like, we really got traction and market fit. So early 20, 20, and we started to have some, we got Gary V tweeting about us, like a video, farmer. So that was like a viral video demoing the app. And we kind of, I mean, the thinking was if some videos of demoing for term or viral, it probably works so-so as ad.So we kind of use these viral videos and try ads on that. Started ramping up, I think before YC, Facebook ads. So in April of last year and, it kind of, yeah, it was a good, channel of acquisition for us. And we always had in mind, like, we don't want to spend too much, we wanted to have it under control, but the payback was really good.So we kind of, added mix like, I don't know, it was three 17, maybe at that point in between the, between paid 30% beta and the 70%. And, yeah, organic and so that we ramped that up and I think it wasn't a good time to all this marketing and we kind of fast in that, at that point, because there was a COVID, the beginning of the COVID and all marketing was going down.So it was super cheap to try stuff there. 00:39:09 David:Yeah. 00:39:09 Matthieu:So I tried to be a part of these tick on that an influencer. I like a lot of times. So like all of that, we were at the right time and at the right moment for that day,00:39:17 Jacob:So how much, like are you balancing? I mean, obviously there's always so much you're balancing as a founder. but you know, how much are you thinking about investing back in the app and like broadening your appeal, making it better new markets, like new platforms versus. The scale of approach, like how can we scale marketing and, and continue to grow?Or is it like 50, 50? Like, do you have a top priority right now? Or, or how has the, like, how has your, your mind thinking about like your biggest growth levers?00:39:48 Matthieu:Yeah, we try to try to have a higher, level kind of privacy laws. So let's focus on retention or let's focus on this specific kind of users. So, in the U S for just three months, and we tried to align product and growth, on like a three months of that. And so that's kind of. that's yeah, that's how we think about it with Elliot and, and try to have it on growth and on product and kind of put us to talk more to these kinds of users, so to improve on, on these kind of shoes or just, just niche for instance.And, I don't know if people are selling on this marketplace for a month and then we'll see maybe another nation, another country, but still improve the experience for everyone.00:40:29 Jacob:And are you thinking about marketing in terms of like specific people selling on specifics, like marketplaces, like the you're actually going like channel by channel that, that, that, that closely. And does that inform like features or does that inform creative or how does that feed back into your part?00:40:44 Matthieu:Yeah, we're good. We're getting into that. Like we tried to understand bearer by a persona use case. What's the LTV and what's the retention is, and I think we are at the scale where we start to do that, but before it was like a general, a general creative for everyone and kind of demo the value of the app.And we were super lucky that our creative we're working for them. And I think like now, like the way marketing works, it's, like a. Facebook or Google are doing most of the optimization and you're more into like, what can I add up my creative so that it fit the focus I want to do for it. I don't know if the U S so I'll be a make sure you're in English.I'll make sure if you're like looking at multiple countries, try not to be too localize. I think there is a Netflix called neutralize, or they have a specific wording on making the, the artwork or the creative, not to localized, not to English, for instance. Okay. So you just content that's good. So it's kind of, that dictate kind of what we try to do with growth and marketing.00:41:39 David:That's great. Well, I have a million more questions, but we do need to, to wrap up. We're going to put links into the show notes to find you on Twitter and LinkedIn and, and PhotoRoom is such a great name, easy to Google, easy to find on the App Store. but you're also hiring, what, what positions do you have open?00:42:02 Matthieu:We're hiring a lot. We're hiring on growth and paid acquisition, hiring project designer, iOS developer, Android developer. And the way we think about the team is really to have a, like, we are 10 people, and we have a strong impact to millions of users. So, really leveraged like a small team, high impact.I think it's possible because of apps. So, we're looking for really senior people for that, and mostly in Europe. So we have like a, two, three days a month, in the Paris HQ, but, you can work from anywhere in Europe.00:42:35 Jacob:Yeah. And I'll, I'll second that. I think working on this product would be really interesting. Purely based on my insider knowledge as an investor and your friend, but for real, I mean, a lot of apps don't, you know, get to the point you have. You've got a lot of tailwinds and I think actually, the upsides are go far beyond the App Store.The future is very, very, very big. And you guys are ambitious. So take these jobs. Thank you.00:43:02 David:Yeah. 00:43:03 Matthieu:Yeah. We were thinking be everywhere. We stopped for a while, but we were like mobile first, not mobile only. And we have the web app web tool that we launched last week. We have an API for any developer that wants to remove the background. We have photo and attribution, and have the module folks using it.So it's really, I think we want to be close to the entrepreneurs, and we want to communicate through pro images that sell. And so sometimes it's not an app, it's just a photo and button. And so you can use the API for that. So, yeah. 00:43:33 Jacob:It's pretty great when you have a good product market fit, it just gets really fun. 00:43:37 Matthieu:Yeah. And we have that kind of, now that we have money, we kind of, we have like super smart people on the machinery team. So, we have the best thing on the market to do that. And that's super exciting. Now we're shipping new machinery next, I think next week. And it's going to be awesome. I can't wait to see the result on the analytics.00:43:52 David:That's amazing and 10 people. I thought you were bigger. I guess you want to be, you want to be, 15 or 20 with all the postings you have. 00:44:01 Jacob:That's why I'm really bullish on this market, David.00:44:04 Matthieu:Yeah. 00:44:04 David:Yeah, 00:44:05 Jacob:A small team can do a lot of stuff in this space. It's crazy.00:44:07 Matthieu:Yeah, It's00:44:08 David:It is crazy. Well, thank you so much for being on the podcast. It was great chatting, and thanks for sharing your insights, Matt. 00:44:13 Jacob:Yeah. We'll have to catch up again in two years to see how, see how it's going. 00:44:17 Matthieu:Yeah, of course. With pleasure. Thank you guys.

David Smith is a full-time independent app developer. Since 2006, David has owned and operated a small company focusing on creating applications for the iPhone and Apple Watch.David has built many successful apps over the years. His most recent app, Widgetsmith, went viral and hit #1 on the App Store. It has over 50 million downloads. David's other successful apps include Watchsmith, Pedometer++, and Sleep++.David also co-hosts a weekly podcast called Under the Radar, where he and his co-host Mario Arment discuss Apple-related topics.In this episode, you'll learn: How to transition from a hobbyist to a full-time app developer Two big mistakes to avoid when starting out as an app developer How customers find new apps in 2021 The biggest waste of time and money for an app developer Links & Resources The LibriVox project Mirror app Launch Center Pro app David Smith's Links David's Website Audiobooks app Widgetsmith app Watchsmith app Pedometer++ app Sleep++ app Under the Radar podcast David's Twitter: @_DavidSmith iOS Version Stats Follow Us:David Barnard: https://twitter.com/drbarnardJacob Eiting: https://twitter.com/jeitingLike this episode?Subscribe to Sub Club on Spotify or Apple Podcasts to get the latest news on mobile subscription apps.Episode TranscriptDavid Smith: 00:00:00I'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 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.David: 00:00:19Welcome to the Sub Club podcast. I'm your host, David Barnard, and with me as always Jacob Eiting. Hello Jacob.Jacob: 00:00:43Hi David Number one, How are you?David: 00:00:46I'm good. Our guest today, maybe number two, is David Smith, long time indie developer and podcaster. Starting with Audiobooks in 2009, David has built many successful apps over the years, including Widgetsmith. Pedometer. His most recent app, Widgetsmith went viral on TikTok, and hit number one in the App Store.Welcome David.David Smith: 00:01:10Thank you, It's great to be here.David: 00:01:11Yeah, it's great to chat. We've chatted in person a few times, and bumped into each other at WWDC over the years. You've been doing this pretty much since the very beginning, right? Audiobooks came out in 2009, when did you actually start working on that?David Smith: 00:01:27So, It wasn't even my first first app. I think my first app that never went anywhere, it was launched in 2008. So, I mean, I was within a couple of months of the App Store launching. So I've been doing it essentially as long as you could, and I think I started working on, oh yeah. Audiobooks, the end of 2008.And it's just kind of grown from there. So it's about 13 years in the App Store.David: 00:01:46Like me and Jacob, actually, we both had apps...Jacob: 00:01:50In the on days of paid up front, and only 200 apps on the App Store, and all that. It is a good time. Were you a developer, like a Mac developer before that? Or how did you trip into iOS?David Smith: 00:02:06Sure. I was a web developer before 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 and I wasn't particularly happy where I was at work and it was just something that I thought would be 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 I got into mostly because it 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 they just, the web consulting disappeared and it became iOS full-time, and that's sort of been the story for more than a, you know, like 10 years now probably.Jacob: 00:02:47Yeah, no, I was, Kind of similar, like I just saw it coming and it was like, Hmm, maybe I should. And I went and picked up the Macco OS, the the Hillegass book and learned Mac OS programming, like, yeah, because there wasn't the iOS book, right. There was no iOS, it was iPhone iOS. But yeah, it was a different time, fewer apps way, smaller community.So, yeah. Interesting decade.David: 00:03:15I do want to start by digging into the story of Audiobooks, and, I think one of the, one of the interesting things to me, because it happened to me as well, is how having this kind of foundation app that, that started in 2009, that did well enough. And, and I'm, I kind of jumping ahead here a little bit, but I, I think if I know your story correctly, 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, 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 allowed me to experiment with all these different apps, like launching a pro ended up coming out of, of already having income to be able to take this big bet. 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, so let's, let's dig into that. So it was 2008, you had had a failure and then you, you start working on Audiobooks in late 2008. what was the, what was the inspiration and, and, and, and how did how did you kick off that?David Smith: 00:04:31Audiobooks was an app that it's essentially, it's a, it's a wrapper and a player for a free public domain Audiobooks. that was all it was, and it was essentially just coming into the market because. at the time, I mean, there were there, wasn't an easy way to listen to any Audiobooks, on the iPhone at that point.And there wasn't an audible app there wasn't, 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...Jacob: 00:04:57Yeah, you can buy them on iTunes. Right. And they were like, 20 bucks a pop.David Smith: 00:05:02Yeah. And So that's where the idea for the the app came from, and it became, and it's just sort of, it, it just, it took off in a way that I wasn't really expecting and it was successful.And because it was an app that had a very broad appeal, it was something that I think, as you say, it's sort of like built a platform for me to. Then continue to experiment and try things. And, 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 awhile.I sort of went through lots of different models over it over the years, but, 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 into, 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 generating 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 then make the event, it would do better. And, and now could buy 20 hours a week of my time and eventually it bought 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 of it, about six of them have completely failed. Jacob: 00:06:18That's incredible.David Smith: 00:06:20And I say that mostly because it's like, it is so easy.It's like I've launched. So I've launched more failures probably than anyone in the App Store in some ways. And they're like, that's the way that you can end up with success though, is, 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 that, 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 paid up front app 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. isn't very sustainable, but you know, it's like if you had something that had a bit more, you know, regular income as a baseline, you, you could make work.Jacob:00:07:13And that's how you incentivize a developer to make 60 some apps it's still like,David Smith: 00:07:17Exactly.Jacob:00:07:18And I just said it like a curiosity. Did the Audiobooks in Audiobooks, what was the source for those are those like prerecorded public domain or.David Smith: 00:07:27Yeah, exactly. So there's a thing called the LibriVox project where people volunteer to read, classic Audiobooks, such as, you know, essentially, you know, Dickens or Jane Austin or things like this that are out of, 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 act, who run the liberal box project were actually very happy with it. Like they, they cause for them. There was no easy way to get their audio onto an iPhone. And so they were delighted that there, you know, this app is just creating a venue for their project to get a lot more visibility and interest.Jacob:00:08:06And he got an incredible like App Store parked name, just Audiobooks. That's a great one.David:00:08:12That's exactly what I was going to dive into. Like how did, did, did that, was that just kind of a happy accident or in 2008, did you already start to notice? Cause 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 intentional?David Smith: 00:08:37No. I mean, I think it was largely just a result of, I didn't have a name. I didn't have a better name and because the content of it was so generic, it wasn't like there was a natural branding that I was doing this and it's like, yeah, it's the related to the App Store. So you could just pick a proper noun and it would be available because there only a few hundred.Grow 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, search, search optimization and things. Cause if you want an audio book and you go into the App Store and search Audiobooks, it's an exact name match.So, you know, audible likely, still ranks higher because it's has more traffic, but, it's going to be in one of the top, couple of hits. and 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, like I have an app called pedometer plus plus, and sleep plus plus, which, the plus plus when the App Store is doing its algorithm for searching, typically just sort of drops off.And so they start, they rank very well for those terms for sleeper 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 kinds of things. And so. Having something additional to it, was helpful that I could trademark those terms and go after people who are, are being, you know, sort of trying to, trying to get that benefit from the, any sort of success I've had on it.But I think in those tricks, they're always a bit tricky cause like they, they are useful at the time, but they're not really long lived and you can't rely on them. Like. It's something. 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 know less and less of a factor now.Jacob:00:10:24If you, if you made Audiobooks today, it would be Audiobooks, degree sign, tiny cross, probably.David:00:10:31That's I was going to ask though about, you know, algorithm changes over the years and things like that. Did you, have you seen a, cause you took it free in like 2010 or something, right? Like pretty early you switched to the in-app purchase model. so like, what I saw with my mirror app was that once I switched it to, it was like mirror by app heavy or something.And that switched it to mirror with like a little, Unicode symbol that looks like a mirror. And so then it was the exact match for a mirror. And then it just really took off and it was, it it's been the number. And I ended up selling that app in 2017, but it's still the number one, one hit for mirror on the App Store.And, I got to, I think around 2015, there was kind of a peak of like five, 6,000 organic downloads every single day. And then even though, 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 debunk my, thesis here that, that. There was kind of a wave and then a, a, a crest and a, a fall of the, of these, organic searches on the, on the App Store.David Smith: 00:12:06I couldn't speak with authority about it, but that seems consistent with my experience where I think they're in the early days of the App Store, there is 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 in particular.'Cause 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, oh, 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. They know what they're to know.They 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 th and I think if you were. and similarly, I imagine if you're just one looking for a generic term, you may not start in the App Store, even if that's where you gonna get the app, you may start in, in Google or YouTube or somewhere else.Yeah. Like you're, you're, you're, that's because there's a mature enough ecosystem there. That there's a better way. Find that even though the App Store is a great place, but it's, I think that's some, those kind of just generic, organic downloads are much harder to sort of define at this point. And I think that that's just the reality.David:00:13:15Similar kind of build and crest and fall as far as like. Since, since Audiobooks is so heavily rely on organic installs you don't. I mean, from my understanding, you don't do any paid advertising for it. did it kind of pressed around that 20 14, 20 15 and then, or have, have organic downloads been pretty stable?David Smith: 00:13:35Yeah. I mean, I think I know, I couldn't tell you a date. I don't know if it, I actually look at the numbers, but it certainly isn't that way that there is that I think there have been a couple of phases of the App Store and there was the early first, maybe four or five years. 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 ACQUITY user acquisition. Reality of being in the App Store is very different. That it, it is, there's a lot more either like, or just organic, organic is more and more challenging. And, I D don't do very much paid, but I think if that would be the only way that I've actually wanted to affect change, to my downloads beyond kind of just word of mouth and natural, 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. and so that's just, that's just a guess, but I think there certainly is those, there, there, the App Store has changed dramatically in 13 years. I think there's, there's certainly no doubt about it.Jacob:00:14:31User base too. I mean, I think about the way that, that what we were talking about as 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 I needed by 2015, you know, I kinda 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, the, 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, you know, and yeah, like. In 2021. This is very few people's first smartphone, right?This is like somebody's fifth iPhone plus. And so it's just like, there's less curiosity, I think, but I guess that's exactly what we're arguing here. Okay.David:00:15:18So you mentioned you you've probably failed more than any developer ever on the App Store, which is really cool. I mean, I, in some ways feel the same way. I mean, I'm, 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 reasonably successful. But so I'm going to put you on the spot here.Are there any, any things that really stick out of like, you know, and I can think of one app, cause I'm still working in this space w your weather app, but are there any apps that you can point to and say, you know, I learned a very specific lesson from this, in those failures. Cause 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 do. 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 you learned from these failures?David Smith: 00:16:18Failure is obviously a complicated thing because I think I learned something from all of them. And so in some ways they were, they were useful. But I think from a financial perspective, it's 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 one is under.To try 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. were very niche and. That kind of a thing. It it is possible to make it work, but the economics are incredibly difficult and you're dealing with a very uphill battle.If you're dealing with something that, there is only ever going to be useful to 10,000 people then great. That for that 10,000 people it might be really cool, but it's very unlikely. You're going to make a sustainable living on an app at 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.I think some of my failures were things where I was like, Ooh, this is really cool. And it's an app that does something, very specific and it doesn't really end up working out. I think the other thing that I found too is just having that sense of. that apps understanding what are the ongoing costs of related to an app going to be, and making sure that the economics of that can balance out.So, in your example of my weather app, ultimately like the app was successful. It had, a reasonably good user base, but at that, this was, it existed in a time before, subscriptions were a thing. Like they just did it 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 weather data that I had to buy for.It just 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 on the backend. than 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, with most, if you're some kind of data service or some kind of hosting provider you often will have a free tier or something that like the E and if in some 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 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 constantly going to be, or I didn't sort of real it.Wasn't realistic about how big of a market it is.Jacob:00:18:54Yeah, the unit economics are tricky because at the beginning, it's, it's hard to get good to 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 to service cogs are. So you're just like, whatever. And then by the time it matters, it's too late.Right. And in some cases,David Smith: 00:19:12The two that you just used several terms that I have no idea what they mean. and I think this is another failing on my part that like, you know, Kat Mike hack and my Sasser service caught, like, I dunno, like it's it's, this is fun. That was just fine. I think. But that's...Jacob:00:19:24An educational moment. Cost of user acquisition. And what's the cogs cost of goods sold. Sorry. Yeah, those were like, those are the things I didn't learn until I had a SAS company though, to be honest. Right. Like it's, it's interesting. Like, yeah, the different. Which, which, which, I mean, just highlights kind of the world we're in now.Right. Which is where most app developers are running a SAS business. Right. would you, would you wear with the weather app, you just didn't kind of think about it in those terms. It was like an app with an API, but really it was a SAS business. and, and, that's why we're here@subclub.com to educate people.Actually, it's not.David Smith: 00:19:58Yeah, well, but I think there's definitely that teachable moment in that insofar 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 that, oh, there's this 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 haven'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. and it isn't necessarily the most efficient way to do it or the way I'd recommend it. But I think that is an aspect of my failing, where it is.You know, and it's, it's also the reality of being an independent, independent developer where. 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, a business, 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, my, my revenue is divided by one and I get to see, 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 to five X the revenue. And so it's like a trade-off that you, in some ways it'd be great if I had both have both, but I'm not sure if it's actually reasonable or practical too.Jacob:00:21:29I mean, really though, that's, it's a good algorithm for finding a new, new API APIs are the apps or 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, might not be ASO. It might not be acquisition and all these other things. it might be like, Hey, what can I do? Cool stuff with computers. And I think historically that's been a pretty good, ROI for, for a lot of companies. So I wouldn't, I wouldn't necessarily call that a weakness. though it's both right, but yeah.David:00:22:12Yeah. And that, that specifically has been part of your strategy, right? So like you, you know, I mean, Widgetsmith, which we'll, we'll get to in a little bit, but even, watch plus plus, but domino plus plus, or Widgetmith's sorry. yeah. Tell us about your thinking around using these new API APIs to get attention.Doing something that's never been done before as marketing, which, which is, is, is a great way to do it.David Smith: 00:22:42Yeah, well, anything. So this is certainly something I've done time of day. And again, that like predominant or plus plus, which is, after Bridget 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 to put a step counting ship 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. Probably one of my strategic advantages is the fact that I'm just one guy who 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 featuring you or not, but it's never a bad thing for a, for apple to feature you or to get on their radar.And, you know, as 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 where on day one, here's this app that takes care of this new thing that they're trying to sell their new phone withJacob:00:23:44Yeah. And that speed, that speed. Even like a one person team compared to like a three or five person team. There's a real advantage. If it's 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, now 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 it's. Just yourself, like trying to put things together quickly.David Smith: 00:24:09Yeah. I mean, I think that, that, that's just such a, the other aspect of this, just so much. 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 it.We'll have it, then we'll have a sprint planning meeting and we'll break up the features. And it's this whole thing that like, that's not my process. I just open up X code and start working. And so it's an, you know, maybe it means that, I, you know, it's like, and I ended 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 roadmap 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 being there early. Is just, it gets, it gets attention and it creates opportunity that there's a vacuum. It's, it's a short-lived thing. You know, the, if I, if I had launched Widgetsmith a few, a few weeks later, I don't think it would've mattered. It would have been complete.Like it is this very ephemeral, like thing. It wasn't, you know, once a year, there's this giant opportunity for me and I've done 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 message App Store apps didn't go anywhere, but. That turned out that was a market that didn't exist, but I spent my summer making sure that I was there and if they hadn't, if they hadn't been really important and was super cool.Cool. And apple cared about it a lot, then I would have been there and yeah. Or 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 whatever those things that, that you would imagine would be beneficial. I don't have those, but like, it's just a trade offJacob:00:26:09Yeah. Search your marketing channel primary. Right? It makes a lot of sense. We did this at, when I was at elevate. This was a constant strategy for us was what does apple interested in? Even, even for us, we were a team of 10 or 20 at that stage, but like, yeah. Adding APIs. Oh yeah, sure. It kind of makes sense.Okay. Yeah, we can add that. Like it's not on our product roadmap, not really something, but like yeah, the, the benefits were tangible, but as you kinda mentioned, it has gotten at some point, I think for a team of that size, 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.And you would get Nat 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.David Smith: 00:26:53Yeah, well, and it's just, I think that the impact of being fee, because to your earlier point about, I think fewer people are searching for apps. so being in a featured list in the App Store is not as the, is not the thing that it used to be. That I remember the first time I got featured in the App Store and it was.I just rev. It was completely, mind-bending where I would go from like, yeah, you lasted a week. And I went from, you know, maybe 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 completely mind-bending, but that's not the reality anymore.Like that, that multiplier isn't there in, the same way. Like, it's 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.David:00:27:52One of the things you mentioned kind of in passing there was, not having to wait on a designer and that's something I actually wanted to talk about. 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.I regret spending as much as I did and kind of letting design in some ways, overly drive the process. 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.And from what I understand, you've spent very little, so, so I mean, it sounds like that's intentionally part of your strategies. 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, 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?David Smith: 00:29:07Yeah. I mean, I think I've certainly tried spending money on design and it over the 13 years, like I it's, it's not that I've never done it, but it's, it, 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.And at this point, the only design that I typically will ever pay for is, icon design. because that's just something that I can't do very well myself, but even like recently, like Widgetsmith, the icon I made myself, cause it's just a blue round direct, like I could handle that.Jacob:00:29:41That's a good icon.David Smith: 00:29:43Which has been it's fine.Jacob:00:29:44And it's number...David Smith: 00:29:45Think, yeah, like.Jacob:00:29:47Icon designer actually.David:00:29:48Yeah.David Smith: 00:29:49And I think, but it's to the point of like, I think eight. It's easy enough to like, 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. And we're using an app that does that, but that kind of design, like that takes a tremendous toll on your development process. And I think. A M like a, if you're a thoughtful to the developer who wants, 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 understood, I took the time to. Study what makes a good design for an app.And so I'm w that informs my development, and then it allows me to build things that'll be easy 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 of 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 often find myself in kind of, I'd pay myself into technical corners that, if, 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, I 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, we 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 learn just enough coding to be able to sort of, to make the basics of the key, to the same thing and 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?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, is clever and fancy and that's it. That's fine. And I'll just, if I scale my scale, my applications to fit, what I can do, then I'm fine.Jacob:00:32:13Yeah, I, I'll share it. Not like we're revenue count. We didn't have a, it, I mean, we have a full-time, product designer now that helps with like dashboard work and stuff like that, but we didn't have, I was the only person doing design for 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 an 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.But yeah, again, it's like, what's your advantage? And in your case, it's the API APIs and being first to market and all that stuff. And so you're not likely to get a lot of like, Yeah, leverage or whatever out of having really great design, you just needed to be functional. You needed it 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, at, you know, with a, with a minimal investment.David Smith: 00:33:14Yeah. And I think you also, 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, now 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.Jacob:00:33:36Yeah, exactly.David Smith: 00:33:37it, rather than spending the money on something before it's even proven itselfJacob:00:33:41Yeah. We've spent a lot on design since like revenue cat's hit like our stride, but in the early days it was like, not like this API is like the design of the Jason is more important than the website.David Smith: 00:33:53Exactly.David:00:33:53Yeah, and it does force this kind of function over form approach. And I think that's where your apps have really succeeded. Is that there is it, you focus on them doing things well, Like serving a 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 either within apple.I think apple still makes this mistake a lot of, of focusing too much on, on how things are going to look and how things are gonna, come across versus like, well, how, how is it actually going to be used by people? And, I, you know, that's where I think I've fallen down a lot, as well as 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 based 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.Jacob:00:35:12The one thing that resonated with me that you said David was, just how a designer, if they don't fully. And I love designers, all of my designer, friends are gonna hate me for talking bad about designers, but I think one, one universal experience of 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. 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 going to 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 it. You can do that on your business.Right. But like, Because you own it, but, but if it, you know, if you work on a team or whatever, sometimes there's a lot of loss there where a developer will feel. And also like, I feel like it's a challenge, right? Like, oh yeah, I can do that. Right. And they ended up over investing in these ornate, user experiences or use user interface elements.It just like you talk about like ROI and whatever, like just not there, you know? so I think it's a very like prudent approach.David:00:36:22So I did want to touch on real quick and. I want to get to Widgetsmith and talk more about that. But, I wanted to touch on the, your iOS version stats. So, it's something I've really appreciated over the years. There's a flurry has, has published stats here and there that your site has been like my go-to place to say, you know, how's I was 14 adoption going, how are so you published 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. but yeah. Tell me about why you publish that and then do you actually run a customer analytics to power that, or, or do you have a third party analytics provided that you just pull the stats in front from.David Smith: 00:37:09So, 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 remember finding that it was just so frustrating. Right. I, I couldn't get. Basic sense of like the different device distributions and, iOS adoption rates and things.And so I just wrote something, myself to do this, and I sort of shared it because it was really helpful. I thought, I, I, I, if it's helpful for me, it's going to be helpful for someone 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, at some of my adoption numbers are like th there's a skew to it and it's a bit less mass market. but it's all built in custom. I I've used analytics packages and things before, but, in the, in, especially with apple being. I think it's a sort of like the privacy consciousness and things.It became something that I just didn't want to have. I want to have it the minimum amount of third party code in my apps as I could. And something like the, the kind of analytics I'm collecting is very easy to do as just a little, 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 just so I don't collect any user level information whatsoever. It's all just being collected, at, at, at an aggregate level. And it's just something that I wrote and it's, it's a basic thing.And I think it's a useful tool because this is sort of to the same thing of a question about philosophy. It's like, you can't know when you can drop all the old devices or which device to optimize for. And this, you actually collect that data and you actually look at it. and so like right now, for example, send that, I re like I always try and optimize my apps for the iPhone 10 R because in all of my apps, it is by far that screen size.So the it's the F1 10 or the iPhone 11. those are by far the most popular phones in the world right now. And so like, that's my primary 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 wouldn't, you know, in my mind, oh, it's probably just like the pro size, you know, like the, the, the 11 pro is probably the most popular phone because that's what all my friends have. But, that's actually not the case. That's, you know, that is a popular phone, but it's by no means the most popular.And so. Having that kind of data to back up my choices and making sure that, you know, like, I, I, I, if am 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, my, the more minor phones, I might just say, like use the scale down the assets for something else, but that's a size that I've we'll for sure. Use. I think also it's speaks to, there is, I think there's still some of this, but maybe a bit less, but in the earlier days of the App Store, there was a, I felt like there was a group of.People who were kind of, 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. because if you had 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. 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 exists.Jacob:00:40:52It's also really nice to have. usually I would caution people to roll against rolling their own. Right. but I think there is this like somewhat unserved niche of some of these tools get really expensive, even like an amplitude or a Mixpanel or whatever. They're, they're more. There, the pricing often is more favorable towards a B2B and like smaller headcount kind of, or smaller like user based size apps.And you can lose this, this like kind of information. I, and I gathered not an App Store connector. It's probably crappy if it is. David Smith: 00:41:24Like some of it's in there, but not really in a way that like abstract connect sometimes has some of the 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 I can add in a hook and say, Oh, like, do, does anybody ever open this page of the app?And I can do a little basic, like those kinds of basic analytics things that you can't do on that, do an App Store connect. and so I can put, you know, put this into my system and do those kinds of basic collections, which a more sophisticated analytics packages, just like, that's just a basic feature of it.But, it's a, it gives you that kind of middle ground and it's, it's just, it's a tricky reality of, you know, apple once, you know, I have to put in my privacy things, all the, you know, all the things that I do. And so. I start using a third party thing. I have to be completely on board with everything they're using my data for.And so sometimes it's easier to just roll 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, engine X server, where I just ran it and they would make, they would make the record.They would just. Yeah, they would just make the request and they would actually just all 4 0 4, like the trend analytics requests were just 4 0 4 and I would just parse the error log and add it to a SQL file. And it's like that, that was super straightforward and easy to build. And it's just a script and it's...Jacob:00:42:47Mixed panel, basically like in...David Smith: 00:42:49Like, You know, and like that's where I think mostly just to say is it doesn't have to be like super sophisticated and fancy.This is a backend utility tool. So you can very easily, like you could go crazy making it fancy, or you can just, you know, write a little scripts to process a log file and it'll get just as much data out of it.David:00:43:09Yeah, that's great. I did want to touch on, on witness Smith. You you've talked about it at length, so, There's a great episode with you and Marco. I think what came out like two weeks after we just hit number one. And so that's a really fun episode. People can kind of go get the history, but it's a cool kind of, 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. somebody picks the app up on Tik TOK. 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, and again, you've told a lot of that story. other places I don't want to just rehash the whole story.But there were a couple of things that I wanted to go over and I don't know if you've talked about it, since so one of the things that I think would be to follow up on is just how the, Durability has been. So like you hit number one, it stayed there for like, gosh, like weeks, right. Or almost a month.And then, yeah. So how has it, how has that gone since, and like, you're still like number five you're you're in the top 10 of productivity regularly. how has the app been durable? download wise and revenue wise, like how, how has it gone after hitting number one? Like.David Smith: 00:44:37I mean, I think it is, it certainly continues to be my most successful app. And I think it probably, it seems like it will be for, for, for quite some time. And obviously the first couple of weeks were insane and completely. Like mind bending and, you know, I think I exceeded my luck like to 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.Jacob:00:45:03We've seen a couple on revenue casts, a couple of 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 a hundred X. It's insane. David Smith: 00:45:15And I think that, and let me say that it was really cool and fun and exciting and a little bit like scary and like terrifying. But I think it's, what's, I didn't know where it would have, where it would settle down to. And it's like, where is that? Come see 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 Tik TOK 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, that 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 and it has the name of the app in it, and it's like, it, it has that natural, oh, I want to do that to witness to it.And that seems to be where the durability has come from because, I've. Tried sort of like the, the sort of like the paid marketing things to try and keep something going. And for me, it's a model that gets very, it's very hard to not just like, lose your shirt on it because you can.Jacob:00:46:22Yeah.David Smith: 00:46:22Spent a way out, spend what you're getting back or not have.Jacob:00:46:26Someone else's money to blow.David Smith: 00:46:27Yeah. And so like for me, it's just, it never makes sense. And so, like, I w I wonder 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's still, you know, it still continues to do really well on a, on a, on a download basis. And it's also, it's, you know, it has, it's monetized both with advertising and with subscriptions.And so. You know, th the two together create a really nice, sustainable, revenue for me that it's based mostly on usage rather than, needing necessarily to have big spikes in downloads to keep it going. It's like as long as people keep using the app, that they're opening, it they'll see ads, or if they're, you know, power users who really want like the pro features of it and they'd pay for a subscription, 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 of kickstart that, effort. but it's, it seems like the there's enough ongoing utility of it, that it keeps people keep using it. And, that has a natural sort of knock on effect of people just telling their friends about it.And I mean, it's kind of a cool thing that, even after. You know, many millions of downloads, it continues to find new art, find it, find a new market and people will continue to sign up for the subscription. And it's, 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 need to worry necessarily on that side of things as much.David:00:47:56Yeah. One of the things that I was, initially taken aback by, but now see the, the maybe accidental brilliance of how permissive you were with the feature. So, and I mean, I made a mistake with launch center pro. I was actually trying to kind of ride your coattails with my app and. I was much more aggressive with the paywall.So I pay walled one of the like more prominent features instead of, instead of paywall and some of the lesser features. And then to your point earlier about like user acquisition, you know, part of how you make user acquisition work, is it, you forced, you can't pay $5 for a download. If you know, one out of 200 people are paying you.But we just 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? yeah. How did, how did you make those decisions?David Smith: 00:49:01Yeah. 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. And I will just keep doing it. Like if it wasn't my job, I'd probably still be making apps.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.Or paying it out of a genuine desire to support the app, to do the really advanced, like these are my super fans who really care about it. and there are 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 up 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. it created its own marketing machine as a result. And like what I gave up potentially in having a less permissive market, pay 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 like 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. and that, for me, I think works well for everybody that like more people are getting more out of the app and, I, I benefit from it.It's sort of coming along and I don't think it was, it's not like that this grant. Strategy that I had for it. It was just in general, if someone's going to pay me something I want for what they're paying to be something 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's sometimes a lot of paywalls can ha 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 tie data, and some graphical assets, things that I have to pay for that there are, they are ongoing and tangible costs that I have to pay.So I can't make those free because then I go out of business because millions of people are requesting weather data. Like that doesn't work for me. And so, yeah. Making it paid feels good to me. And if anything, it works well, but I think that's definitely something that you can get. If you're too stingy with you, with what you offer, you're kind of like shooting yourself in the foot because you're ma 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, the first thing the app does when you open the app is ask for money. Like if I open that app, I'm just closing that up and deleting it. Like, I don't want to, I don't want that, that, thatJacob:00:52:05I mean, that's, that's...David Smith: 00:52:06Be them asking.Jacob:00:52:08That's an app that's for distribution basically is what you can tell. And if you're not then like, I mean, I think this is not a comment on an uncommon strategy, but, but, but, you know, optimizing for distribution early, Becoming not a monopoly because there's other apps like we just missed, but becoming a dominant 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 operational requirement that you make more money per download or whatever, like, oh, 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, I talked to a lot of people getting ready to make their subscription apps and whatever.And they're like, ah, they're going back and forth. I go, what should I put on my paywall? What should I, whatever. I'm just like, just don't think about it too much. Just don't do something stupid. Like just see 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.Cause inevitably, well...David Smith: 00:53:06That's good advice. David:00:53:07This 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, you're paying for users that you immediately ostracize.You know, if you're, if you're only getting, you know, 10% to start your free trial, and then only 50% of those convert. It's like, you're paying for all these people who ultimately have a bad experience in your house. And so it works cause 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 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. so like exactly 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 moneymaking over time. And so that's great. but anyhow, we're, we're at the top of the hour and need to, to wrap up, in the show notes, we'll have links to your, Twitter underscore Smith, underscore David Smith, Jacob:00:54:35Oh, my God. I never realized that pun Widgetsmith, Dave. Oh my God. I'm so slow.David Smith: 00:54:43Yeah.Jacob:00:54:44The brand is just so it's perfect, but we're on your lap. It's so great.David Smith: 00:54:49That 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 theJacob:00:54:53Oh, it's even, it's a good name on its own. Right.David Smith: 00:54:55Yeah.Jacob:00:54:56I just love when things are like tidy and tied up like that. It's so perfect. Sorry.David:00:55:02Anyways, anything else? anything else you wanted to share or, anything else you want to mention as we wrap up?David Smith: 00:55:08Yeah, no, I mean, I think we covered some good things and I think it is, I, I always like sharing my story as an independent developer, because I feel like in this industry, they're like, there's a, there's an aspect of it. I know this is something, you know, I've listened to this podcast before. Like there there's a, there is an industry in a branch of this.That is very data oriented. And if you're built almost like you're building a machine to try it, 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 the eights. There's a very like, and I respect that and understand that, that, that is a very viable business.But I think what I, I was like sort of to share the other side of the 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 and pivot and change as you go. And if you start to numbers driven and you start to like kind of cold in that way, I think you can lose just as many opportunities, as, as, as you could.And I personally, I enjoy this way. I think this is fine. I, you know, I'm very excited about WWDC next week, because it's the, the time that I get to just discover what I'm going to launch this year. Kind of thing. And so I'm very excited to become about that. I think that excitement is something that I wouldn't have if I was building something that I didn't enjoy doing in quite the same way.David:00:56:52Well, thanks, David so much for your time.Jacob:00:56:56Good luck next week. 

In this episode, we're talking about the "Glass Pipeline", or as more popularly known, the control tower and the role it plays in getting end to end visibility.  We discuss the concept, what it means for businesses and the journey to get there. I am pleased to join David Barnard, a supply chain consultant, practitioner and lecturer at the University of Georgia. Having +20 years of experience working within the supply chain with businesses worldwide, he brings tons of insights into the topic on top of every supply chain professional mind. We dive deeper into: What is the glass pipeline?How it can help manage macro-level changes such as COVIDHow to own your entire supply chainThe future jobs and opportunities in our industry 

App Subscriptions - right now they feel so familiar and omnipresent. Need some examples? Do you watch movies on Netflix? Listen to music on Spotify? Get things delivered by Amazon Prime? Many app developers have gone to the subscription model to make money. Today's guest is David Barnard, Developer Advocate at RevenueCat. He talks about the pros and cons of app subscriptions. Spoiler alert - it's not all roses and rainbows. Today's Topics Include: ✔️  Development Background: Building apps from the beginning of Apple's iPhone SDK ✔️  Role at RevenueCat: Solve problems and make it a better product to monetize apps ✔️  App Subscription Pros: Customer and advocate uses RevenueCat to make money ✔️  App Subscription Cons: Bugs and code challenges create headaches and disasters ✔️  David's App Business: RevenueCat, Launch Center Pro, and Weather Up ✔️  RevenueCat's Mission: Help developers make more money ✔️  Why RevenueCat? Basic and broad platform without complexity for subscription apps ✔️  App Testing: RevenueCat's new price testing feature sets best price to generate revenue ✔️  COVID: Accelerated RevenueCat's business by working remotely before lockdowns ✔️  Money in the Bank: Series A funding provides additional revenue, growth, and flexibility ✔️  Free, Paid, or Freemium? App subscriptions experience slow progression on app stores ✔️  App Subscriptions: Keep consumers in mind to use app consistently and deliver value ✔️  Product Roadmap: Focus on retention, price optimization, and planning process ✔️  What's David looking forward to with app technology in the future? Widgets on homescreen and iOS 14 release for privacy focused user acquisition Links and Resources: David Barnard on Twitter David Barnard on LinkedIn RevenueCat RevenueCat Blog Weather Up Quotes by David Barnard: “If you're adding subscriptions to your app, you need all this infrastructure.” “We charge our users because we provide a really great service that actually helps them make more money.” “You've really got to match the value you are delivering to users.” “Subscriptions are incredibly difficult to implement and get right.” Follow the Business Of Apps podcast Linkedin | Twitter | Facebook | YouTube

App Subscriptions – right now they feel so familiar and ubiquitous.  Need some examples?  Do you watch movies on Netflix? Listen to music on Spotify? Get things delivered by Amazon Prime? Many app developers have gone to the subscription model to make money. Today’s guest is David Barnard, Developer Advocate at RevenueCat. He talks about the pros and cons of app subscriptions. Spoiler alert – it’s not all roses and rainbows. Today’s Topics Include:  ✔️  Development Background: Building apps from beginning of Apple’s iPhone SDK ✔️  Role at RevenueCat: Solve problems and make it a better product to monetize apps ✔️  App Subscription Pros: Customer and advocate uses RevenueCat to make money ✔️  App Subscription Cons: Bugs and code challenges create headaches and disasters ✔️

David Barnard started developing apps soon after the first iPhone was released. In the last 12 years, he has seen each minor and major change play out in the appstores - from the first paid apps and their price drops - to the explosion of freemium - to the advent of subscriptions. In today's episode, he tells the stories of living through the roller coaster that the appstore has been.If you're wondering as to what relevance details from a decade ago will have to our world today, this episode will help you think about the unseen forces that influence what we see on our phones, and about how Apple's policies have influenced the kinds of apps that flourish. Just as important, all of this helps contextualize the looming privacy changes that will effectively deprecate the IDFA in iOS 14.This episode provides a fascinating and in-depth look at how the last decade helps us learn about what's ahead - and we're excited to present it.KEY HIGHLIGHTS

Today we continue our conversation with David Barnard about the de facto deprecation in iOS 14 of the Identifier for Advertisers, or IDFA. Today we focus on the effects of this change. We talk about how this will affect app developers, advertisers, and the broader online advertising ecosystem. Mailing List Every month there are more […]

Today we talk to David Barnard about the de facto deprecation in iOS 14 of the Identifier for Advertisers, or IDFA. We discuss the history of the IDFA, what’s changing in iOS 14, why Apple is making these changes, and how the loss of the IDFA stands change online advertising. Mailing List Every month there […]

Ep 137Alek utekao na more, Miki na ranč gde sprema Mac mini za školarca.CR2032 vs BR2032 vs LIR2032 Coin Cell Batteries | Comparison(BR2032 je u Mac miniju, CR2032 u Apple Remote za stari AppleTV)Dragan Pleskonjić javio za RedDot zone - Aplikacija za praćenje Pandemije. Marko Stošić, član razvojnog tima, nam je u gostima.Russell Kirsch, inventor of the pixel, dies in his Portland home at age 91: Digital Photography ReviewApple Releases macOS Catalina 10.15.6 Supplemental Update With Virtualization Bug FixSloba Marković o iOS app za Parking servisApple Expands AppleCare+ Signup Deadline to One Year - TidBITSGde posle tracking cookiea: Can Killing Cookies Save Journalism? | WIREDJim Dalrymple objavio da se njegov dugogodišnji saradnik Shawn King povlači iz IT sveta.Apple tXe MeGaBaJaRene Ritchie: Apple is wrong about Xbox game streamingApple News hajdučija.Apple is still tending its walled garden – The VergeSetapp subscription service now includes iOS apps | AppleinsiderJames Thompson, Ryan Jones, Markus Müller-Simhofer (Mind Node)Fortnite Introduces Direct Payment Option on iOS Despite Apple's App Store Review Guidelines - MacRumorsEpic Games: FreeFortniteEpic Games has filed legal papers in response to AppleEpic is suing Google over Fortnite’s removal from the Google Play StoreTwitteraja: Federico Viticci, Jason Snell, Jacob Eiting, David Barnard, John Gruber, Pedro Marques, Miguel de Icaza, Steve Streza, Rene RitchieRene Ritchie: The EPIC TRUTH About Fortnite's WAR on APPLEDaring Fireball: Epic’s Campaign for 'Open Platforms' Ignores Game Consoles’ Massive Closed Market‘Fortnite’ Developer Says Apple Will Soon Terminate Its Developer AccountsJeff JohnsonDaring Fireball: Epic and the Terms of Apple's Developer Program License Agreementinessential: Worrying EffectMatt Mullenweg o Wordpress iOS app mukama sa Appleom.Daniel Jalkut,Steam's 30% Cut Is Actually the Industry Standard - IGNEniko o razlici između 12% i 30%.Epic Games paradoxHundreds of iPhones with Fortnite installed flood eBayDaring Fireball: Thoughts on an ‘Apple One’ Subscription BundleOstaloThe Case of the Top Secret iPod - TidBITSThe Smallest & Powerful 100W USB-C Wireless Charging Hub by Lauco TechnologyBrackets - A modern, open source code editor that understands web designiOS Dev Weekly - The best iOS development links, every FridayZahvalniceSnimljeno 22.8.2020.Uvodna muzika by Vladimir Tošić, stari sajt je ovde.Logotip by Aleksandra IlićArtwork episodeExhibitionist2014.ulje / oil on canvas46 x 28 cmprivatno vlasništvo /private collectionby Saša Montiljo, njegov kutak na Devianartu.

David Barnard founded Contrast in 2008 and has been building apps ever since. His apps have seen millions of downloads and have been featured by by Apple and just about every tech and lifestyle site, including the NY Times, WSJ, GQ, TechCrunch, CNN, and more.   David recently joined RevenueCat as Developer Advocate to help subscription app developers build and grow their apps. Topics covered: (5:30) The mistake that beginner app developers make (7:50) The secret to getting a marketing edge (10:30) How to get massive press & Apple Features (16:01) This campaign works better than press (20:00) Build an app to sell or dominate a market? (30:42) The best traffic source for David (37:51) Subscription Paywall Best Practices (46:36) Best way to get quickest installs upon launch (49: 17) How to transition to a subscription app (59:24) Monthly vs yearly subscriptions (1:03:58) How IDFA affects mobile app monetization *************** Join us live every Friday at 9am PST on YouTube! Every Friday on YouTube, we reveal app marketing secrets working today, audit your apps, and answer all your questions related to increasing downloads and revenue. Get your app audited. *************** Check out our app marketing agency. Follow us: YouTube: AppMasters.com/YouTube Instagram: @stevepyoung Twitter: @stevepyoung Facebook: App Masters ***************

A discussion with developer advocate David Barnard to discuss how RevenueCat simplifies the puzzle of implementing native in-app subscriptions.

In this episode of the MDM Podcast, I speak with David Barnard, a vocal developer advocate on Twitter, about whether the App Store's closed nature and its treatment of developers is fair.

Today is part two of my conversation with David Barnard. Last week, in Episode 037, David joined us to talk about the music cooperative as a business model that is helping teachers build sustainable studios by joining together. Today David’s talking about how to form a cooperative. Some of our discussion applies specifically to coops, but a lot of our discussion centers around how to write a business plan, which is a great exercise for any teacher no matter what business model you’re using. For a full transcript of this episode, visit musicstudiostartup.com/episode038 For updates on the Finance course, visit musicstudiostartup.com/finance

Today’s guest comes to us from the UK to talk about another business model that is helping teachers make a sustainable living: the music-co-operative. David Barnard of the Musicians' Union describes the culture shock teachers felt when the jobs they expected to always be there, suddenly disappeared, forcing them to become more independent and entrepreneurial. Just a heads up, business culture and regulations are different around the world. The way the UK music co-ops handle lesson fees might not work where you live. Here in the US, the Federal Trade Commission would consider this price fixing a violation of antitrust laws. With that disclaimer, you’re still going to get a ton of great takeaways about co-ops that you could apply in an American context. For a full transcript of this episode, visit musicstudiostartup.com/transcriptepisode037 FREE Course:  Vision & Values: A Studio Owner's Guide to Finding Focus in a World Full of Options www.musicstudiostartup.com/vision

The first episode in a special series recorded at the recent Education Conference hosted by the MIA. “Music Education – the HUGE opportunity for our industry” was held in the Victory Service Club, Marble Arch on 24th October and focused on the opportunity that Music Education offers to the whole industry. In this first episode you will hear an introduction by David Barnard of the MIA Education Committee, and keynote addresses from Mark Pierce of Youth Music & Paul McManus, CEO of the MIA.

David Barnard, creator of apps like Launch Center Pro, joins John and Rambo for a special indie development edition of the show. The pros and cons of being indie, how and when to outsource tasks to others, and much more. Also, the state of inter-app communication on iOS, the power of customizable UIs, and what makes us excited about the iPhone 11 Pro. Sponsored by Spike: Get Spike conversational email. An all-in-one communication and collaboration workspace that turns your existing email into simple, chat conversations. Hosts: Gui on Twitter: @_inside John on Twitter: @johnsundell Links David on Twitter Launch Center Pro Weather Up RevenueCat

On today’s podcast, Matt and Matt sit down with Stinson, LLP, partner and subject matter expert, David Barnard to demystify intellectual property. Intellectual property is the living and breathing heart of your startup and you have to learn how to keep it safe. Luckily, that is exactly what Barnard is here to do.   Learn about protecting your IP and the differences between patents, trademarks, copyrights, and trade secrets. In this episode of the Startup Hustle, we will find out how to best protect your million dollar ideas and what to do when someone violates your IP and what are the appropriate actions to take when that situation occurs? What is a patent troll?   Get the answers to these questions as we dive into the wonderful, and sometimes strange world of intellectual property. Are you curious about other ways you can bolster your startup?   Learn more about:   Full Scale: https://fullscale.io/   Stackify: https://stackify.com/   Stinson: https://www.stinson.com/   GigaBook: https://gigabook.com   Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/startuphustlepodcast/   Subscribe to our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDXy14X95mzCpGSHyDvvoVg   Follow us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@startuphustle 

In this episode David and Rose dive deep into the new version 3 of Launch Center Pro - with David Barnard from Contrast! They look at the history of the app, changes in version 3, and how it fits into their workflows today.

Ben Bajarin is joined by Carolina Milanesi and David Barnard to discuss the recent Creative Strategies App store consumer research and what David has learned running a company that makes consumer apps.

WARNING: THIS IS PART TWO OF A TWO-PART STORY. PLEASE LISTEN TO SEASON 2 - EPISODE 23 FOR MORE DETAILS ON THIS CASE. After his release from prison in 1970, Roy Fontaine had accepted a job at Whittingham hospital, and he was staying at a prison hostel nearby in Preston. Under the watchful eye of staff, Roy carried out his duties as the hospital porter. While waiting for his boyfriend, David Barnard, to get parole, Roy Fontaine started a fling with one of his co-workers Mary Coggle. Roy used his leisure time, before the prison hostel curfew, to visit an RAF drinking club. While there, he began talking to Hazel Patterson, a well-liked widow who owned a newsagents. *** LISTENER CAUTION IS ADVISED AS THIS EPISODE CONTAINS ADULT THEMES AND DESCRIPTIONS THAT SOME LISTENERS MAY FIND DISTRESSING *** More information can be found on our website at http://theywalkamonguspodcast.com For early advert free access and other extras visit https://www.patreon.com/TheyWalkAmongUs MUSIC: Wounded by Kevin MacLeodCalmant by Kevin MacLeodMesmerize by Kevin MacLeodPromising Relationship by Kevin MacLeodRoad to Hell by Kevin MacLeodDespair and Triumph by Kevin MacLeodMusic featured in this episode can be purchased through iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/gb/artist/kevin-macleod/204264696All music sourced from http://incompetech.com/ and used under an Attribution License - http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ YOU CAN FOLLOW US VIA OUR SOCIAL MEDIA PROFILES: Twitter - https://twitter.com/TWAU_Podcast Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/theywalkamonguspodcast/ Facebook Group - https://www.facebook.com/groups/1346814312074979/ Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/theywalkamonguspodcast/ Acast - https://www.acast.com/theywalkamongus See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In this edition (July 2017) of our podcast I talk with David Barnard, Head of Bernstein Private Wealth Management, as we reflect on the first half of the year for our clients, and the future of the business and industry. In this edition of our we discuss: A look at markets and our client experience at the midpoint of the year, the state of Bernstein today, and our evolution over the past few years, the major transition in markets happening now, what matters most in getting a financial plan right in today’s environment, David’s initial impressions of new CEO Seth Bernstein and what impact it may have on our business, who are our clients and how does David define investment success on their behalf. The information contained herein reflects the views of AllianceBernstein L.P. or its affiliates and sources it believes are reliable as of the date of this publication. AllianceBernstein L.P. makes no representations or warranties concerning the accuracy of any data. There is no guarantee that any projection, forecast, or opinion in this material will be realized. Past performance does not guarantee future results. The views expressed herein may change at any time after the date of this publication. This document is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. AllianceBernstein L.P. does not provide tax, legal, or accounting advice. It does not take an investor’s personal investment objectives or financial situation into account; investors should discuss their individual circumstances with appropriate professionals before making any decisions. This information should not be construed as sales or marketing material or an offer or solicitation for the purchase or sale of any financial instrument, product, or service sponsored by AllianceBernstein or its affiliates

(Almost) live from the scene – by which we mean recorded and released within hours of the Apple event – Sean and EJ discuss Apple's announcement of the iPhone 7 and Apple Watch Series 2. Links and Show Notes Tweetbot 4 for Twitter Live coverage: Sept. 7 Apple media event - Six Colors Upgrade #104: I Really Do Want to Win - Relay FM Amazon and Apple out new iPhone 7 ahead of announcement Apple (@Apple) | Twitter The Prompt #20: TAKE ACTION - Relay FM Daniel Bader on Twitter: "Top 10 iPhone 7 features: 1) Jet black 2) Jet black 3) Jet black 4) Jet black 5) Jet black 6) Jet black 7) Jet black 8) Jet black 9) Jet bl" David Barnard on Twitter: "iPhone 6 : iPhone 7 :: iOS 7 : iOS 10 /via @tiem_san https://t.co/b3aTwPlBi1" Marco Arment on Twitter: "I think he almost just said “MacBook One.”" Amazon.com: Jaybird X2 Sport Wireless Bluetooth Headphones - Ice (I bought Ice but it appears to be currently unavailable. There are several other color options.) Amazon.com: Bose QuietComfort 25 Acoustic Noise Cancelling Headphones for Apple devices - Black Ep. 159: ‘Phil Z', With Special Guest Marco Arment — The Talk Show With John Gruber — Overcast (Timestamped link to the discussion about Lightning audio and DACs) Sean - @splunsford EJ - @muffinworks

Today we continue our conversation with David Barnard of Contrast. We talk about target demographics, the role that search plays in an app’s success, and lessons learned with App Store preview videos. Save the Date! If you enjoyed Release Notes this year (or just wish you had been able to attend), be sure to put […]

We’re joined today by David Barnard of Contrast. David shares with us the story of how he got into app development, what he’s learned as a successful indie who doesn’t program, and his strategy for developing financially successful apps. Mailing List Every month there are more great articles and content about the business of Mac […]

This week, Myke returns to talk to Federico and Stephen about challenges developers face in the Mac and iOS App Stores with special guest David Barnard.

David Barnard of Contrast, Matt Kelsh of Shifty Jelly, and Ged Maheux of the Iconfactory talk to Marc, Seth, and Rene about their experiences shipping iOS 7 apps.

This week Myke is joined by David Barnard. They talk about what it means to be an ‘App Producer’, how he came to build a company that builds apps and how recent developments to the economics of the App Store is changing his business.

The Iterate roundtable returns with Seth Clifford, David Barnard, Marc Edwards, Russel Ivanovic, and Rene Ritchie discussing the economies and realties of making and selling apps on the iOS App Store and Android's Google Play.

David Barnard of App Cubby, Seth Clifford of Nickelfish, Marc Edwards of Bjango, Gedeon Maheux of the Iconfactory, and Rene Ritchie of iMore discuss designing and updating for Retina and HiDPI displays: preparation, process, tools, formats, distribution, and the future of resolution. This is an Iterate round-table! New iPad Retina display impressions Preparing for Retina display Updating apps for Retina Tools and process Icon distribution and formats Interface elements and formats Compression and universal apps Retina display and the Mac/Windows The future of Retina display/HiDPI and resolution independence Panel David Barnard (@drbarnard) of App Cubby Seth Clifford (@sethclifford) of Nickelfish Marc Edwards (@marcedwards) of Bjango Gedeon Maheux (@gedeon) of Iconfactory Rene Ritchie (@reneritchie) of iMore.com Feedback Email: podcast@iterate.tv Twitter: @iteratetv Facebook: Iterate page If you're one of the best-of-the-best-of-the-best in mobile design for Android, BlackBerry, iOS, webOS, or Windows Phone, we'd love to get you on the show, or if you've found a drop-dead gorgeous app on any platform and really want us to talk about it, contact us and let us know.

This week we look at Win­nipeg’s recent tran­sit fair increase, UMSU’s hol­i­day ham­per pro­gram, U of M pres­i­dent David Barnard’s future plans, and more. Fea­tur­ing music from Sarah Slean.

From the Man­i­to­ban news desk: sto­ries on Occu­py Win­nipeg, review com­mit­tee for U of M pres­i­dent David Barnard, what’s going on with the South­wood golf course prop­er­ty, and more!