23: Launching Activity++
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Welcome to Under the Radar, a show about independent iOS app development.
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I'm Marco Arment.
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And I'm David Smith.
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Under the Radar is never longer than 30 minutes, so let's get started.
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So today, what I think we wanted to talk through is a) a little bit of follow-up on the pricing discussion we had a few episodes ago,
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and b) talk about the actual app that we were talking in vague terms about then that I recently launched.
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And given that even for someone like me, launching an app is a fairly rare thing in the scheme
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of what we do.
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And so having just done it, I wanted to kind of talk through what that process is like,
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both sort of functionally as well as emotionally, and kind of just go from there.
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So first, the app that I launch is probably worth saying is called Activity++.
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If you have any familiar with any of my work, you're probably familiar with an app called
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called pedometer++ or sleep++ or emoji++.
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I've kind of got into this thing where
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plus plus is sort of like,
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it's actually really helpful from a naming perspective
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because I just take whatever proper noun or verb
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that describes the thing that I'm doing, add a plus plus,
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and that kind of works as a trademark thing
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that people recognize.
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- Which is great 'cause it helps you avoid
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actual trademark conflicts because activity
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is not a trademarkable word in that area.
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Like you're not gonna have a conflict with that.
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Although it doesn't do you any favors with App Store search.
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- No, it does not.
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But that is a, well, as best I can tell, like half helps,
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because the plus plus, as far as I can tell,
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is ignored for the purposes of search.
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This is best I can tell.
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And so when people search,
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I do very well for generic searches,
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but I do not do well for exact searches,
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which, you know, is good and bad,
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But the plus plus naming kind of came by accident more than intentionally.
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And so it just sort of was one of these things of like, well, now that it exists and whether
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or not it's great or not in the App Store search, it just sort of is its own thing and
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would be worse to change than to stick with.
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So that's just sort of where I am.
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>> I like it.
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But and it seems, and I think it works well.
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It rolls off the tongue.
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kind of knows how it works.
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And I like it.
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And I like that it's geeky, too.
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But anyway, so Activity++ is something
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that takes advantage of some new APIs that were added in 9.3
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and watchOS 2.2, where we can finally get access
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to all the data in the Activity app.
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So if you have an Apple Watch, you'd
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be familiar with the three rings.
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There's the red ring, which is your active calories,
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the green ring, which is your amount of exercise, and the blue ring, which is the amount you've
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stood or hours you've stood in a day. And we finally have access to that as a third
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party. And so what I did is I just said, I have a lot—I use the activity app a lot.
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I like that sort of concept of measuring how I'm doing in terms of activity and fitness.
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But I don't really like Apple's activity app, especially on the phone. I find it really
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awkward. Like, it's trying to do so much, and because of that, it does the basics kind
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of awkwardly. So as soon as I saw that I could do this, whenever they announced 9.3, which
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I think was a couple months ago, I dived into it, like, this is something that I wanted
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to do. And so I did. I made an app that is an alternative to that. This is an area that
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I think if you're a developer looking to find a new market to get into, this is always something
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that I found some success with, of looking through the API diffs every time Apple releases
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something and saying, "You know what? This is something new. This type of app is entirely
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not possible before and then suddenly is possible. So you're necessarily going to be competing
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in a smaller market," which I'll mention a bit later, but it's always a helpful thing
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to kind of dive into that. Because the reality is there's three types of apps that are probably
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sort of worth making. There's something like this, where it's sort of new and novel because
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it couldn't have been done before, for policy reasons or technical reasons, like this data
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just wasn't available to third-party apps before. You can go ahead and do that. Or there's
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like the apps that are just like truly novel, like someone just sort of invents something
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totally new, which are typically very hard to do or think up. Or the third is the type
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of app that are just, it's like the same thing, just done slightly better or different.
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And the last two, like if you can do for the second one where you have like true innovation,
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like you just invent something amazing that could have been done before, but now you're
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doing it in a better way, more power to you, that's awesome.
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That's pretty rare and kind of hard to just do on a regular basis.
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So most people end up doing the apps that are just like the same thing that's been,
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you know, existed before but done better.
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But those are really competitive because by nature of being something you could have done
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before, people already have.
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And so whenever you have an opportunity to do the first thing, to be able to just do
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something that wasn't possible before just because of technical reasons or policy reasons,
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it's a great opportunity.
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And so that's what I did.
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I've now launched it, I think I launched it last Thursday, and the launch has been going
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It's been doing very well received, which is always really affirming with something
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like this, because you put it out into the world and you never really know what's going
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But in a bit of a twist, it is a paid-upfront app, and in fact it is a $3 paid-upfront app,
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which if you were listening to our discussion two or three episodes ago where I talked about
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pricing, paid-upfront was the form of business model that I had, in our final conclusions,
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had kind of thrown out as not possible.
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And so that's a bit of a surprise.
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And I wanted to kind of talk through why I did that, because I think it's helpful as
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a thought process to sort of show that what we're doing as independent developers, and
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developers in general, but especially as independent developers, is we have to be making these
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decisions that ultimately, like, there's no right answer for.
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You can never know, like, which business model is going to be best.
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You never know which design decision is going to be best, like when you're designing your
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icon or designing your layout.
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There's all these things that you just have to make a decision and you have to just sort
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of live with it.
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And you have to work out what process makes the most sense for you.
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So in this case, I looked at it for pricing, and as we finished in our last discussion,
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I was probably leaning towards something like free with ads or something like that.
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And the more that I thought about that, like the next week, I listened to the episode a
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couple times and I was just kind of mulling it over and I kept being like, "You know
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like, I don't like how this feels. I don't like that more and more of my business is
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becoming reliant on ads, especially in the time of kind of a little bit of turmoil is
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the wrong word. But there's a little bit of upheaval in terms of exactly what the right
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advertising platform is, what that's going to look like come when I add ends this June.
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And it seemed like a really poor time to be doubling down on that model. And so I said,
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you know what, I'd rather have diversity in terms of I'd rather have a paid app, even
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even if it didn't perform theoretically as well as a free app, just to have some diversity,
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to have some backup in terms of if one of my free with ad apps starts to really plummet
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in terms of revenue, I have something to back up.
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And the biggest thing that was holding me back was the thought that, "Oh man, this is
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a watch app though."
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And so if you don't have a watch, people are going to be annoyed.
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But I saw in the app store, there was an app called Heartwatch, which is by a gentleman
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named David Walsh, who is a similar kind of thing,
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but it's focused all on the heart rate data
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that the Apple Watch collects, and it's a great app,
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and I'd recommend you taking a look at it
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if that's something you're interested in.
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But I was kind of curious if he was having
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sort of this trouble, 'cause he's like,
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he had a paid app, and it didn't seem,
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like in his App Store reviews and in general,
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that he was having trouble with people complaining
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that, oh, I bought your app, and I don't have a watch,
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you know, boo-hoo.
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And so I was like, okay, maybe that's not a problem.
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And then I did what I always do,
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I'm trying to deal with these types of problems is I went to a spreadsheet. Because, for me,
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I can't make decisions like this without a spreadsheet usually, because I need to have
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something that I can kind of point to rationally and say, you know, is this viable? Is this
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going to work? Am I being foolish? And I, in just looking at myself, it's often easy
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to kind of confuse, you know, confuse or betray myself by kind of what I want or what I think
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would be nice, but numbers, if you're doing it right, typically can't do that.
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And so I took a look at how much money I make per user right now in Podometer++, which is
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my single biggest app, which is like, in my mind, the best case scenario for a new app
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would be to match that.
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And right now, and I do it on the basis of new users, not active users or existing users,
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because that gets really complicated.
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So I tend to look at it as like, based on the number of downloads I get, how much revenue
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do I get each day?
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And for pedometer right now it's like 20 cents a user or something like that, which I think
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for freehab is actually not too bad.
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And so then the nice thing when you think about that though is like if you sell an app
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for $3, you end up with $2.10 back from Apple for each user.
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And so as long as you can maintain a tenth of the downloads that you get otherwise, you
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will kind of break even.
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And I looked at that and I was like, you know, 10x, that seems doable.
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seems possible, like the number of downloads per day that Activity++ would have to maintain
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that isn't completely inconceivable.
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And so I went for it.
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And the nice thing about free, or sort of starting paid rather than free, is that I
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can always switch and go free later if I want.
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I can use the App Store receipt system to know if someone paid for it up front or not,
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and if they did, then great, you know, I'll just sort of hide the ads or hide the in-app
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purchases or whatever it is.
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But I can always make that change down the road.
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And so that's what I did, and it seems to be working.
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I feel good about it, which is probably the best thing.
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In the end, I like that it feels a bit more premium.
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It feels a bit nicer of an app to not have any ads in it, to not have to think about
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that kind of stuff, and to just put it out as something that's good.
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It's also, as we discussed in the pricing episode, a paid-up front model is just so
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much simpler on you, on the developer, for both designing the app around it and also
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just having to code all the in-app purchase stuff or embed other people's crazy kind of
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creepy ad frameworks.
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Paid up front is just so much easier and simpler and it really does just simplify the model.
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What's the relationship between you and your customers?
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What's being done with their data, if anything?
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How do you survive?
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How do you make money?
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It's all right up front there.
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There are downsides to it, of course, but I think if you can make the numbers work out,
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Paid up front is of course the easiest way to do it, and overall, by easy I mean simple.
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It's the simplest way to do it, and there's a lot of benefits to that.
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>>COREY Yeah, exactly.
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And, you know, like I said, I'm happy with it right now, and I think the reality is,
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with pricing, is there is no, like, there's no good answer.
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There's no, like, right answer.
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Because the reality is, as soon as, if, as developers, we determine, like, "Oh, this
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is the perfect thing to do," you know, if you do this, this, and this, you'll maximize
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revenue fully.
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Like, sort of almost like the stock market, as soon as that becomes known and everyone
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does it, it'll almost inevitably become the wrong thing.
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>>JEAN-PHILIPPE Right.
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by the nature of everybody doing it, it saturates that type of thing and then becomes problematic.
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And so ultimately, you just have to go with your gut and decide what you're going to feel
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comfortable with. And in this situation, I was like, "You know what? I like this app. I really
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felt proud of it." And I was like, "I don't want to put ads in it. I like the way it looks. I want
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it to look that way." And so this is the road I went down. And I think the market was better than
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I was fearing it might be. It's definitely still in the very steep drop-off phase where
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your first couple days are like, "Yay, this is awesome!" And then it starts to go down,
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and every day I log into iTunes Connect, and I'm like, "Is this the bottom? Is this the
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bottom? What about this? Is this the new bottom?" And I don't think we've quite reached there
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yet, which is a bit scary. Is it going to go all the way to zero? Where's this going
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But, you know, so far so good, and I think there's still something to be said for paid
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upfront apps.
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And the funny thing is, I didn't, ahead of anyone that I was aware of, complain about
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the price at $3, which also surprised me slightly that it wasn't like, "Oh, $3, but I guess
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once you're paid, you're paid."
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And the difference between $1 and $3 is much more intellectually minor compared to free
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So, yeah, that worked out kinda well.
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- I think maybe one of the reasons you're able to do it
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for this app is, as you said at the beginning of the show,
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like the kinda different apps that you have,
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different types of apps that are possible to make,
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in this case, this is a very non-crowded category.
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So it is, in many ways, it behaves a lot more
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like the early app store, back when the entire app store
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wasn't very crowded, which was actually very short-lived.
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But, you know, that was like maybe a couple of weeks.
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But at that time, you could sell something for five, $10,
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It didn't even have to be that good and people would buy it because they wanted that
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kind of thing and there just were no other alternatives or there were very few other
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alternatives.
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In this case, when you do what you gave as the first type of app you can make, which
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is the kind of app that just recently became possible by some kind of API or technical
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change, you effectively create or you enter a market where there is almost no competition
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It is kind of like those first few weeks at the App Store
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where you can charge a price up front,
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and if people want that kind of app,
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they'll be more willing to pay for it
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because there aren't 50 free alternatives
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that do the exact same thing right below it
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in the App Store search.
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- Exactly, and you know,
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it's a nice thing to take advantage of.
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But yeah, so the launch has been going well.
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Something else I wanted to talk through
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a little bit about the launch,
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'cause I get this question a lot
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from people who are launching their first app,
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and it's like, how do you get attention?
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for a new product.
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And some of it is just like, well, you just kind of have to keep trying,
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which is not a very satisfying answer.
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But I was very grateful for--
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I had a few news and press sites write up the app,
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which is always really kind of exciting and awesome to see,
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like, you know, something you made on a site that you respect deeply.
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And so the way that I would--
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the biggest recommendation I can make with that
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is to make sure what you're doing when you're reaching out to them--
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to them, and you should be reaching out to the press ahead of time, especially the sites
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that you read yourself.
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It sounds a lot better if it's not a cold call, insofar as you read the site, you know
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the kind of things they do, you know what excites them.
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Some sites are really interested in the visual design or the typography or those types of
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Other sites tend to be more feature-focused, and so when you're writing your emails, write
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a different email to each of those people, letting them know, take advantage of the test
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flight system, which is something that I did this time around, where it's nice to be able
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to send out copies of your application to the press.
00:15:31
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I personally take the approach of always asking if they want access to it.
00:15:36
◼
►
Like I'll send them an email first.
00:15:38
◼
►
Whenever I've had people do this to me, where you just sort of blindly get a test flight
00:15:43
◼
►
invite for an app that I've never heard of, that's not really what you want.
00:15:47
◼
►
Like you want to have the personal reach out first and say, "Hey, this is something I'm
00:15:51
◼
►
working on," maybe include a few screenshots or a video or something like that.
00:15:55
◼
►
Send that out to somebody and at the end just say, "Hey, if you want to check this out,
00:15:59
◼
►
I'd be happy to send you a test flight."
00:16:01
◼
►
And if you're doing it right and if you're sort of targeting your message to them appropriately,
00:16:06
◼
►
you look at what other articles they've read and you say, "Hey, I saw that you wrote this
00:16:11
◼
►
article about another fitness tracker," or something, or "That seems to be something
00:16:17
◼
►
that's relevant to you, and actually, if you are correct in that, go to a website, see
00:16:22
◼
►
who's the one who writes about the products that would be appropriate.
00:16:27
◼
►
And you send that over, and more often than not they'll say, "Sure, send me a test flight."
00:16:32
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►
But it's much better coming from that respect than just a blind thing.
00:16:35
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So that was just something I wanted to mention.
00:16:37
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But yeah, then otherwise you just kind of keep at it.
00:16:42
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►
It certainly is easier, I will say, having done this for so long and having some amount
00:16:46
◼
►
of reputation and platform, it is doubtless easier in that regard.
00:16:53
◼
►
And the way it's like, "Oh, that's nice for Underscore to be able to reach out to people
00:16:58
◼
►
and know it," but the reality is everyone starts off this way.
00:17:03
◼
►
The first time I wrote an app written up by a publication, it was a big deal for me, because
00:17:10
◼
►
I'd tried many times before and gotten nothing.
00:17:13
◼
►
So you just kind of have to keep trying and hope that in the end it'll happen.
00:17:17
◼
►
Be respectful of people, and if you write an email to somebody and they don't write
00:17:21
◼
►
back, it's not the kind of thing that's like, "Oh, I wonder if they didn't get it.
00:17:25
◼
►
Let me bring this to the top of their inbox.
00:17:26
◼
►
Let me respond three times."
00:17:28
◼
►
Just be respectful and understand that they may have not responded because they just don't
00:17:33
◼
►
have time or they're not interested, and they're trying to--it's easier to be kind by just
00:17:38
◼
►
not saying anything sometimes than it is to try and respond back in the negative and just
00:17:45
◼
►
sort of hope for the best.
00:17:47
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Our sponsor this week is Pingdom.
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Now I personally have been a Pingdom customer for I think almost 10 years now.
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We used it in the early days of Tumblr, and I use it for all my own projects since then,
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and we used it the entire time I was at Tumblr, actually, so they might still use it.
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And it is just so good for monitoring websites for uptime, for error conditions, or even
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for changes.
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And you know, Pingdom, I know just from having used it,
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that my stuff breaks in minor ways all the time.
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You know, I might have a server with low RAM
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or a disk is running low, or there's some kind of weird connectivity issue where half
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the servers disappear for a minute, and oh, that was a problem with the host maybe, or
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with a routing issue somewhere.
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So Pingdom has helped me find all these things over literally almost a decade.
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I think I started using them in roughly 2006, 2007, so it really has been almost a decade.
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And they are just the best at this stuff.
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We've even used Pingdom, you and I, David, have both used Pingdom to do things like monitor
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the WWDC page for changes back when it was like a first come, first serve ticket system
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where we would have it set up so that like if the WWDC page changes it would alert us
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as if one of our websites was down. So you can do SMS alerts, you can do push notifications,
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you can do emails and so it's great for that, it's great for monitoring your own stuff.
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All you need to give them is a URL to hit and you can have them either check to see
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if it gives a response or if it gets a certain substring or doesn't give a certain substring
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as a response, you can do SSL, you can do cookies,
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there's so much stuff you can do with Pingdom.
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I definitely recommend it personally,
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and I don't do that a lot.
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I personally recommend Pingdom for anything you have
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Thank you very much to Pingdom for sponsoring our show.
00:20:21
◼
►
- All right, and the last thing I wanted to kind of
00:20:24
◼
►
talk through about a launch is kind of the actual dynamics of it, like the actual timing
00:20:30
◼
►
and sort of logistics of doing it.
00:20:33
◼
►
Because it's kind of a tricky process, because when you are trying to launch an app, you
00:20:39
◼
►
don't really know when that's going to be.
00:20:42
◼
►
Sometimes I think I submitted this application as soon as it was physically possible to submit
00:20:47
◼
►
9.3 binaries.
00:20:50
◼
►
And from that point on, my goal is to be ready to launch it whenever Apple is available.
00:21:00
◼
►
Because like we've been saying this episode so many times, there's a certain element of
00:21:04
◼
►
like first mover advantage with something like this.
00:21:07
◼
►
If you're building something that's newly possible, being the first or second application
00:21:13
◼
►
that takes advantage of that API is going to be much more useful to you than if you're
00:21:18
◼
►
just like one of 10.
00:21:20
◼
►
And so I wanted to be, you know,
00:21:21
◼
►
like I sat there in iTunes Connect,
00:21:24
◼
►
trying to hit submit and having it come back and say like,
00:21:27
◼
►
we're not ready for this binary version yet.
00:21:28
◼
►
We're not ready for this binary version.
00:21:29
◼
►
Like essentially every 10 minutes until,
00:21:32
◼
►
I think it was about 10 p.m. that night,
00:21:34
◼
►
when it finally went through.
00:21:36
◼
►
And it's like, you know, that's,
00:21:38
◼
►
I wanted to be that confident that I was like
00:21:40
◼
►
the first of the 9.3 apps in line.
00:21:43
◼
►
- That's dedication.
00:21:44
◼
►
- Well, this is the thing though.
00:21:45
◼
►
Like I've spent months working on this
00:21:48
◼
►
And so spending an afternoon sitting there hitting next,
00:21:53
◼
►
it's like try, try, try, gives me any advantage.
00:21:58
◼
►
I'd feel foolish if in the end,
00:21:59
◼
►
that not doing that would have come back to bite me.
00:22:04
◼
►
In this case, it ended up taking a bit longer
00:22:07
◼
►
than usual for App Review,
00:22:09
◼
►
which can be always a bit worrisome.
00:22:10
◼
►
We talked about that a little bit in our last,
00:22:13
◼
►
or our second to last episode, I think, about App Review.
00:22:16
◼
►
But it's just the reality sometimes, you never really know.
00:22:19
◼
►
And so what I did though, and this is like the thing that I always try and make sure
00:22:22
◼
►
that I've done, is have anything that you're going to be doing about the launch.
00:22:27
◼
►
Like I tend to have like a blog post that launches along with the app, and you know,
00:22:32
◼
►
certainly keeping people in the press aware of the situation, but have everything ready
00:22:37
◼
►
So that like whenever Apple said, "Hey, you're approved," I could go ahead and launch it.
00:22:41
◼
►
You know, so I had my blog post written, I had the screenshots all done for that, like
00:22:45
◼
►
Like everything was ready and waiting, which is much better than, you know, you finally
00:22:51
◼
►
get your approval email, which is, you know, "Yay, that's exciting!"
00:22:54
◼
►
And then you're like, "Oh goodness, now I need to do all this work."
00:22:57
◼
►
But like you had weeks or days when you had nothing else to do for this application that
00:23:02
◼
►
you could have been doing it.
00:23:03
◼
►
So definitely something that I recommend doing.
00:23:07
◼
►
Kind of comically this time, emphasizing how much you have, how little control you have
00:23:11
◼
►
over the timing.
00:23:12
◼
►
I ended up launching this app while I was on vacation with my family.
00:23:15
◼
►
I actually hit release this version while I was sitting in a children's museum in Phoenix,
00:23:24
◼
►
which was kind of just like a strange place to be sitting on a bench and like, "You know
00:23:28
◼
►
I need to get this out."
00:23:29
◼
►
But it worked.
00:23:30
◼
►
The iTunes Connect app that Apple puts out is very useful and can do all these types
00:23:36
◼
►
And one thing I will say, and this is a recommendation if you are new to this, is launching an app
00:23:44
◼
►
that doesn't have any backend services related to it is incredibly relieving because there
00:23:51
◼
►
was no servers for me to monitor, you know, see our sponsor.
00:23:53
◼
►
Like I didn't have any notifications or things that I needed to worry about because the app
00:23:56
◼
►
is entirely local.
00:23:58
◼
►
And so that's always kind of a recommendation.
00:24:01
◼
►
If you're kind of timid about what this is going to be like, maybe start off with something
00:24:05
◼
►
doesn't have a backend, or as simple a backend as possible, because it is really reassuring
00:24:09
◼
►
that there's nothing in this app that can—there's no data that the user can lose, there's no
00:24:17
◼
►
backend infrastructure I need to maintain.
00:24:19
◼
►
It is just an app that you launch, you have permission to access your health kit data,
00:24:24
◼
►
it pulls it in and shows it to you, and that's all it does.
00:24:28
◼
►
And so that was really a nice thing, especially when I'm on vacation.
00:24:31
◼
►
I launched it and kind of participated slightly in it, but then went back to my vacation and
00:24:37
◼
►
went to the Grand Canyon the next day and hiked around there with my family and didn't
00:24:42
◼
►
really pay much attention to it, which was odd but nice.
00:24:45
◼
►
>> That's awesome.
00:24:46
◼
►
>> So you just kind of have to keep that in mind when you're launching these things, that
00:24:51
◼
►
you have no control over it.
00:24:52
◼
►
And being -- you just kind of have a Zen thing, which is like, accept that.
00:24:56
◼
►
Accept that you have no control about the situation and just kind of roll with it as
00:25:01
◼
►
Because there are certainly times that I would get a bit frustrated, but ultimately, it worked
00:25:06
◼
►
It worked out fine.
00:25:07
◼
►
The app's in the store, it's live, and I just decided, you know, this is the right time
00:25:12
◼
►
to launch it, because if this is when the first approvals of 9.3 apps are going to go
00:25:16
◼
►
out, I want to be in that wave, if there was a wave.
00:25:19
◼
►
As far as I know, there hasn't been much of a wave, and so some of my fears were a bit
00:25:24
◼
►
unfounded, but you never know.
00:25:28
◼
►
Because a lot of these things, you just end up kind of fearing the unknown when you're
00:25:31
◼
►
launching an app.
00:25:33
◼
►
I've been doing this for seven and a half years, I think, and I still have tremendous
00:25:40
◼
►
this anxiety about launching something new.
00:25:43
◼
►
And I say that because hopefully that's helpful to listeners
00:25:47
◼
►
of the show who are launching things to themselves.
00:25:50
◼
►
When you look at, it's like, if you're launching
00:25:52
◼
►
your first app, you're probably just as nervous
00:25:54
◼
►
as I still am about it, and that's okay.
00:25:57
◼
►
That's part of the process.
00:25:58
◼
►
I, and you have these fears of like,
00:26:00
◼
►
what if this is actually not very good?
00:26:02
◼
►
What if I'm putting this out in the world
00:26:04
◼
►
and everyone's kind of gonna laugh at me?
00:26:06
◼
►
It becomes very like I'm in high school
00:26:09
◼
►
or middle school or something,
00:26:10
◼
►
like this kind of that feeling of being nervous
00:26:13
◼
►
of what other people think of you.
00:26:14
◼
►
- Oh, I'm the same way.
00:26:16
◼
►
- Yeah, and I think that's healthy to say though.
00:26:18
◼
►
Like it is difficult,
00:26:19
◼
►
and no matter what you're gonna feel that way,
00:26:21
◼
►
so just like embrace it and understand that it gets better
00:26:25
◼
►
because if you've been building it right,
00:26:28
◼
►
if you've been making a thoughtful design
00:26:32
◼
►
that works well and is functional,
00:26:34
◼
►
and you've tested it and you've beta tested it,
00:26:35
◼
►
and you've beta tested it with the right people
00:26:37
◼
►
are hopefully, you know, would be honest with you if it really wasn't very good, and if
00:26:42
◼
►
they say it's good, then just trust them and go for it.
00:26:45
◼
►
And you know, maybe it'll be awesome, maybe it'll be mediocre, but you know, it doesn't
00:26:50
◼
►
do any good to fret too much about it as much as you can.
00:26:55
◼
►
And then yeah, and then it's out in the world.
00:26:57
◼
►
And now it's like the funny thing, I always try and celebrate launches, and it's like,
00:27:01
◼
►
you know, we were on vacation, but we did our best to kind of celebrate that it was
00:27:03
◼
►
out in the world, especially I try and bring my kids into that, because they have a vague
00:27:09
◼
►
sense of what daddy does, and so it's kind of fun when I can show them, "Hey, here's
00:27:12
◼
►
this thing I just launched in the App Store."
00:27:13
◼
►
I can show it to them in the App Store.
00:27:16
◼
►
And then the funny thing about launching is it feels like this big deal, and then it's
00:27:20
◼
►
And then you just move on, and now you get a big, long list of bugs, the things you have
00:27:24
◼
►
to fix, and you just keep going on that.
00:27:28
◼
►
And so it's like, you want to celebrate it, and now it's like, "All right, now it's
00:27:31
◼
►
to 1.1 or 1.01, or you identify all the issues that you just never even thought could be
00:27:38
◼
►
issues, which is always the most striking thing to launch an app for myself. You have
00:27:42
◼
►
somebody who gives you feedback and you're like, "Huh. You were absolutely right, but
00:27:48
◼
►
I had never, ever thought about that." And that's always the best and most fun feedback
00:27:54
◼
►
time I ever cast beta was six months long.
00:27:58
◼
►
- There you go, and it was a much better,
00:27:59
◼
►
I was on it from the first one to the last one,
00:28:01
◼
►
and I would say it got a lot better.
00:28:03
◼
►
- It did, it really did.
00:28:04
◼
►
Everything I hadn't thought of, everyone brought up.
00:28:08
◼
►
All right, I think that does it for this week.
00:28:10
◼
►
So congratulations on the launch.
00:28:11
◼
►
Any closing thoughts?
00:28:13
◼
►
- No, I think the only thing I'd say is,
00:28:15
◼
►
you know, launch something.
00:28:17
◼
►
It's exciting, like I always hate,
00:28:19
◼
►
I get a lot of questions from people,
00:28:20
◼
►
like how do I get started?
00:28:21
◼
►
And it's like, you know, the best way to get started
00:28:23
◼
►
is to write something and ship it.
00:28:25
◼
►
There's not a magic rocket science to this.
00:28:27
◼
►
And you just have to do that.
00:28:28
◼
►
And the more you do that, the better you get at doing it.
00:28:31
◼
►
And the better your apps will be as a result.
00:28:33
◼
►
And I've launched a lot of products,
00:28:35
◼
►
as I have a bit of a penchant for doing.
00:28:38
◼
►
And I imagine in June, we'll get a bunch of new APIs
00:28:41
◼
►
and new opportunities.
00:28:42
◼
►
And so I'd encourage everyone to look at them.
00:28:44
◼
►
Just don't look at the same ones that I'm looking at.
00:28:48
◼
►
We don't have a problem.
00:28:49
◼
►
We don't have a problem.
00:28:52
◼
►
Thanks, David.
00:28:53
◼
►
Everybody, please go out and buy Activity++,
00:28:55
◼
►
'cause David won't say it, but I will,
00:28:57
◼
►
and we will talk to you next week.
00:28:59
◼
►
- Thanks, bye.
00:29:00
◼
►
[BLANK_AUDIO]