100: Launch Center Pro & Sub Club — David Barnard

David Barnard:

I have received a payment from Apple into my bank account every single month since September of 2008. And it dawned on me at some point that I must be one of only a handful of people in the world that could say that. Same bank account, same company, not same app. James Thompson, I think is the only person who for sure has me beat because it's the same app, same companies, and he's been in the app store since day one.

Charlie Chapman:

Welcome to Launched. I'm Charlie Chapman. And today I'm excited to bring you the longtime iOS developer behind Hit Apps, Launch Center Pro, Weather Up, and many more. And the host of the Sub Club podcast, David Barnard. David, welcome to the show.

David Barnard:

You forgot colleague.

Charlie Chapman:

Colleague. Yeah. Well, I mean, that's true. The most important part of you as a person in the app community is your relevance and connection to me. Yeah. Exactly. So I want to start this off by asking you, are you a big milestone person?

David Barnard:

What are milestones?

Charlie Chapman:

Do you celebrate milestones? Are you like, it's our half year anniversary of when we got the dog or whatever person?

David Barnard:

Then no, obviously. I though you were talking about a agile framework or something. You set milestones and then... Neither.

Charlie Chapman:

This is my very professional segue into celebrating that this is the 100th episode or real episode of Launched, which if I'm honest, feels kind of crazy when I actually sit back and think about it.

David Barnard:

I feel honored to be your 100th guest.

Charlie Chapman:

What does the current episode count or do you know the current episode count of Sub Club?

David Barnard:

I think it's in the 180s-ish, closing into 200.

Charlie Chapman:

So yeah, to you, you're like a hundred episodes. Wow, for me, it's been a crazy kind of long journey. When I started this, I knew hardly anybody and that was 2020, January of 2020, so right before the pandemic started and it's kind of spanned this crazy... It was every week for a while and then it was every other week. And then I got real jobs that... Well, I had real jobs the whole time, but it just took over and I couldn't keep up with it. And now we're on this real cadence now that I'm your colleague and part of the Revenue Cap podcast family here. And it feels good, but it's kind of wild to have gotten, to me, what is a big milestone episode count.

David Barnard:

Yeah. Well, for six years now, every two weeks, and I don't think I've missed ever, except for a delay because we are doing a live stream and it gets released later. And not only that, I've done 25 minisodes now that got interspersed with the state of subscription apps report. So that does inflate the number a little bit.

Charlie Chapman:

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

David Barnard:

Well, Revenue Cat apparently tricked you into being a lifelong employee because with Launched now being part of Revenue Cat, you'd have to start a whole new podcast if you wanted to continue if you Revenue Cat.

Charlie Chapman:

True, true. Yeah, that's true. But anyway, all right, this isn't about me. The reason I have you on is because-

David Barnard:

We can make it about you, Charlie.

Charlie Chapman:

Thank you. Finally, in a hundred episodes, you're the first person to finally get it, that this show is really about me.

David Barnard:

I'm a podcast host. I'll just interview you on show 100. That's what we should have done.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, yeah. Well, we did that. So Stephen Hackett came on, it was a few years ago now, and interviewed me about Dark Noise, which was kind of a weird surreal experience. That was pretty fun. Actually, I think that was right after-

David Barnard:

We had you on Sub Club interviewing me on Weather Up. That was fun.

Charlie Chapman:

That's true. Yeah. This is a very, I almost said... Yeah, I don't know what the right word is, but we've all been on each other's shows all over the place. But anyway, the reason I thought you were the perfect person to have on for this episode is one, I felt like I could get away with a little bit of navel-gazing, talking about myself, talking about the parallels between our careers that we're at now. But also through the course of doing the show, I've talked to a lot of people through all these sorts of different eras of app development in all these different forms, and you have been there from the beginning. You were right there at the very beginning. You've both lived through and been a voice in the community through a bunch of these different eras. And so I'm excited to pick apart at those, look back at all these different times in your career and how that relates to everything we've really talked about on the show for a long time. So I'm excited to get into that.

David Barnard:

I was thinking before, I'm going to hijack your show for a very special purpose. At WWC this year, it popped into my head that I have, and I thought this before, I think I tweeted about it maybe a year ago or something, but I have received a payment from Apple into my bank account every single month since September of 2008. And it dawned on me at some point that I must be one of only a handful of people in the world that could say that. Same bank account, same company, not same app. James Thompson, I think is the only person who for sure has me beat because it's the same app, same company, same... And he's been in the App Store since day one, which I did get until-

Charlie Chapman:

You mean outside of working in Apple.

David Barnard:

... a month later. Well, of course, but paid. Money has gone into my bank account from Apple for 18 years straight. And so I'm hijacking your show just for a sec while we're on the topic because I was mentioning this to somebody at Apple at WWC and they're like, "You know, next year is the 20th anniversary of..." No, sorry, 2028 is the 20th anniversary of the App Store. So I'm at 18 years now, this month actually, just a couple of weeks ago was my 18th year anniversary of having an app continuously on the App Store. So we may do some kind of get together, some kind of maybe even a panel if there's only two or three of us. But those of you listening to this show, I know James Thompson and I'll get in touch with him, but if you can think of people who have continuously been on the App Store since those very early days, ping me because I would love to work with Apple to do something super fun and special at WWC 28.

Charlie Chapman:

I think you might get a decent crowd for something like that because I think there's more people than you think. The amount of people I've talked to here that released an app within the first year, to my surprise, because I didn't think of them, but they didn't really enter the community until later, always surprises me.

David Barnard:

Because there were only, what, a thousand apps that launched. And so James Thompson, again, it may be one of the only ones to have had it continuously since launch day, maybe like Icon Factory, but they've kind of come and gone and people have sold their company. There's a lot of people who've been around, but it's like they had an app for a while and then they removed it and then they built another app. Again, I very much look up to James Thompson and he's so incredible in other ways as well. Have you had him on the show yet? Okay.

Charlie Chapman:

He was my third guest, I think, or fourth guest. The first week I released an episode every day for a week to launch the show and he was on that, which was crazy to me.

David Barnard:

So I think I'm kind of cool for having been around 18 years, but James had an app out for what? Mac... What was it even called back then? macOS 7 in the '90s. So he has had an Apple platform app continuously closing in on 40 years, or 30 years, which is just crazy.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, with a brief stint at Apple. So I don't know if he is allowed to have a external app during that time. He worked on Watson, the Sherlock, that whole origins of those terms. Yeah. If you want to know more about this story, I think it was episode four of this very podcast and we went through all this history, but man, yeah, you really kicked us off with the navel-gazing quickly on this one.

David Barnard:

I did.

Charlie Chapman:

All right. Well, before we get too far into that, we will get back to this topic, I'm sure. I want to introduce everybody to who you are. So the three questions I always ask to kick off this show is where are you from? Do you have a formal education related to what you do now? And what was your career before you started making apps?

David Barnard:

All very interesting questions. I actually grew up in South Texas in Brownsville near South Padre Island, Boca Chica, Starbase, where Elon is now launching all the rockets. So it used to be like, "Where are you from?" The tip of Texas, never heard of it. Now I just say, "You know where Elon's doing all the crazy stuff in South Texas? That's where I'm from." So I grew up swimming and surfing and fishing all around where Starbase is currently. And then do I have a formal education? No, but yes. So I actually studied sound recording technology, which was kind of a weird degree plan. I knew since I was 12, I wanted to work in the music industry and specifically be a music producer engineer. And so Texas State was at the time, I think the only four-year university in the world that had a full recording studio as part of the... It was part of campus. It was a campus building, like this recording studio.

And the director of that program who I've stayed in touch with a little bit since, this is 26 years ago that I graduated, but I've come to very much appreciate the structure of the degree plan because he wanted to give, I think, a well-rounded college education because there's not a lot of jobs as a recording engineer. So all of us hot shots come in and we're like, "Oh, we're going to make hit albums or whatever," but it's just not a lot of those kinds of jobs around. You end up doing live audio mixing or working a production company. We took electronics and had one intro to computer science course. We did multimedia stuff. We did a video production class and all this kind of stuff. And what was really cool about all of that is that even though I wasn't studying coding or app development or anything, it was that kind of end-to-end production process of like, "Okay, I have an idea or I have a song." I worked in multimedia direct... What is that?

Adobe Director, Macro Media Director, I think it was at the time, the precursor to Flash and Burned a CD-ROM that was interactive. And so there were a lot of projects-based classes that I ended up taking, which I think did actually prepare me to work on apps because you had to think end-to-end and take something from a rough idea, like a song on a napkin, to pressing it to a CD. So not directly related, but surprisingly relevant. Thinking back, I even took a design class. I was working in InDesign in the 90s, but it was one class.

Charlie Chapman:

I was just recently talking about this actually with relation to my kids in... I feel like they don't have, at their age, they aren't doing as many take home projects, which apparently they do when they get older and that's all fine. But I was thinking about how much the projects I did through school, even if they're completely silly and they weren't reinforcing what the lesson was or whatever, it's the act of doing the end-to-end thing. I got to have this thing done by this time. I need to get materials. I need to put this together. The glue has to set. All these little things, it builds these frameworks in your mind that you can completely translate to completely unrelated fields just because you've now built something end to end. And I think projects in school, like a lot of people do capstone projects, I think those are some of the most valuable things you do in school.

David Barnard:

Forces you to ship.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, that final 10% that takes you 90% or whatever. Actually doing that is so valuable no matter what the actual underlying skill you're doing it for is. So yeah, so you got an audio engineering degree, but... Well, I guess you are podcasting now, but not exactly mixing albums for people. So what was the translation from that into building apps?

David Barnard:

So I did actually become a recording engineer and was a freelance recording engineer for five, six years. So there's actually music I produced and mixed that's still on the Apple Music Store and Spotify and places like that. I actually heard a song that I recorded on the loudspeakers at the Austin Airport. They do a local thing. It's like the Austin Airport radio station, and I'm sitting there and I'm listening, and it was a cover song, so I'm listening, I'm like, "Oh, that's probably the original." And then I listened a little more closely. I'm like, "No, that's the one I recorded. That was pretty fun."

Charlie Chapman:

Oh, my gosh. I think about that all the time when people talk about wanting to see their apps in real life on the subway or something. I'm like, "That is our industry's equivalent to hearing your own song on the radio." Hearing it at an airport though feels even cooler, honestly.

David Barnard:

Well, in some ways, less cool. Austin, it was all about supporting local artists, and so this song is not something that would get played on anybody else's pop playlist or whatever.

Charlie Chapman:

It's less cool in reality when you think about it, but it's more cool in the... You're in this professional life setting, and then all of a sudden you just... It's like seeing your app on a billboard in Times Square. Is that actually as important as being featured on the App Store? No? Is it a hundred times cooler? Yes. And I think it's kind of like that. It's like something about that setting just feels like that would be very cool to hear.

David Barnard:

Yeah, it was fun. And then it was fun just the kind of throwback of like, "Oh yeah, back when I was creative and had this weird, what do you do? I'm a recording engineer." And then now people ask, "What do you do? I work in tech."

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, yeah. It's better than saying I'm a podcaster though, let's be honest.

David Barnard:

I never call myself a podcaster.

Charlie Chapman:

No, no. Yeah, yeah. That's the least cool thing you can say, I feel like.

David Barnard:

Yeah. Brief history of the Sub Club podcast. Jacob, our CEO, and Corey, our director of marketing at the time, had to practically beg me to start the Sub Club podcast, which is funny because now, I mean, it has done really well and people seem to really enjoy it and get a lot from it. And it's, I guess, kind of my claim to fame now in a lot of ways in the broader app space, but they had to beg me because I was like, "Podcasts, really? Who needs another podcast?"

Charlie Chapman:

Those are going nowhere. Yeah, exactly. But that was furthering your future. So at this point, you're recording music that's going on to be super famous and played across Austin airports all over Austin.

David Barnard:

At the airport.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah. So that was your career then, that was your main job?

David Barnard:

Yeah. Yeah. And then that's the transition into apps is that I was making no money just scraping by. I actually worked part-time for my dad's commercial real estate company, remote, just handling some of their tech stuff and doing promotional materials for them and stuff like that just to make ends meet. And then I got married and my wife was working 9:00 to 5:00. When I was in the studio, which was hit or miss depending on whether we had clients or not, but when I was in the studio, I was working noon to 2:00 AM, very musician schedule, sometimes 3:00 PM to 3:00 AM for the guys who really had the gig life where they would just always go to bed late and do their best work at midnight. So it pretty quickly became apparent that if we wanted to start a family, if we wanted to see each other on a workday, that I would need to find a new career.

I'd become a massive Apple nerd in the studio days because I had a MacBook Pro to do live recordings and we used a Mac in the studio. I was using Macs in the '90s at the university. I was following Mac Rumors and Daring Fireball and all these old school stuff that's not even around anymore, like Renee Ritchie's iLife, Mashable. Who was before Mashable? The one that was more focused on apps in the Apple community that was in the-

Charlie Chapman:

That may have been before my time, although there's a bunch of... In Gadget obviously used to be way bigger.

David Barnard:

Oh yeah, read the live streams of them, live blogging, Apple keynotes before Apple would stream them. So anyways, long story short, I was such an Apple nerd that when the iPhone came out, I stood in line or sat in line overnight with my brother and was first in line in San Antonio to get an iPhone. If you've seen his picture on Twitter, I love posting it every year. I was in the news the next day with this goofy face holding up the iPhone. And then the funniest part of that story, I've told it before, but maybe your audience will find it amusing, my wife was staying in San Antonio with her sister and mom just randomly the same night that I stayed in line all night. And she woke up the next morning to a newspaper, and this was back when they still did this kind of thing, print newspaper in front of her door with her soon-to-be husband on the front page holding an iPhone.

Charlie Chapman:

The big goofy grin. That's fantastic.

David Barnard:

So that first year with the iPhone, I was just so blown away. And again, told this story many times, but my dad and uncle, when my brother and I were in line, my dad and uncle are business partners. My brother was working with them at the time and they were like, "Oh, get us one too. We want to be cool. Get us one too." And so they allowed you to get two iPhones, each person in line. So I bought one for my dad, my brother bought one for my uncle. And I remember when they got those, he was in his probably 50s at the time, and he just took to it like a duck to water. And I was so impressed by that. And so I think a lot of people, just a whole multi-touch, ease of use and those kind of things. But I feel like having done some design, some interaction design, some of my background, then combined with having helped my dad for 20 or 25 years at that point, since high school, I was kind of his tech support.

Seeing him take to it like a duck to water really impressed upon me that first month of the iPhone, this is going to be huge. And so being somewhat entrepreneurial, I was thinking from those pretty early days, I think toward the fall of 2007, I was thinking like, "Okay, what kind of business could I build?" Then I actually was listening to, I think it was Mac Break Weekly with Leo LaPorge and Amber MacArthur. I remember them talking about... Yeah, I don't know if Amber's probably not there anymore, but I remember them talking about the early Facebook app wave and that there were people who just kind of rode that early wave. And that specific moment crystallized for me this is going to be almost like a generational opportunity to be at the cutting edge of a new wave of technology. And so I know in hindsight, you can look back and say, "Oh, David, you're polishing up this story and hindsight bias and all this kind of stuff." But I swear to you, and actually I have the receipts.

I wrote an investment proposal in my company and my dead mom and uncle did invest in my company and I have an investment proposal that just lays it out. And here, 18 and a half years later, I pulled it up six months ago and not too much here, but-

Charlie Chapman:

That's what this podcast is for.

David Barnard:

I was just so excited about the platform. And so there were rumors in the fall of an SDK and then jobs eventually confirmed, yes, we're going to do an SDK. And so from the fall of 2007 on, I was jotting down notes of what I thought I could potentially build, thinking about business plans, reading every blog post, following the jailbreak community. I ended up buying a second iPhone just to jailbreak because I was really scared to jailbreak my main device. I bought a second iPhone and jailbroke it. That wasn't until after the investment. I actually used part of the investment from my family because I was broke recording engineer, remember? But I used part of that investment to go buy a second iPhone, jailbroke it, just so I could be playing with all these experimental third party apps in the jailbreak scene, which I don't think... I mean, this is part of the history and maybe part of why you're having me on. I don't know a lot of folks these days even know that that happened, that in those early days, and it was insane.

Charlie Chapman:

I want to pick at that a little bit too. You said you got an investment and a lot of people nowadays are like, "You got an investment to be an app developer. What is the money that you needed?" Obviously, you said you bought a new phone, but what was it that made you think, "I need a cash infusion to be able to try this out?" What were you using that for? Were you hiring people? What was the thinking there?

David Barnard:

Yeah, I took very little salary, but it was if I'm going to build a business, there are things I will need to spend money on. And at that time, my wife was working in a nonprofit, barely making any money. We were just kind of scraping by and I was banking barely any money. We didn't have a bunch of savings. A lot of people these days, it's like, yeah, you're working your cushy 250K a year programming job and starting your side hustle. It's just a completely different world for me in 2008, just broke as could be, barely any money coming in. And so if I were going to stop making this poultry amount of money that I was making and spend money, I would either have had to gone into debt or taken an investment. And that's where I put together the investment proposal. I mean, it's like a four or five page investment proposal, and I had to talk to...

My dad and uncle, they actually work in commercial real estate and my great-grandfather was a, this is the way they always tell it, a broke farmer who got into real estate for him just to make ends meet. And then my grandmother ended up buying the real estate business from him, and then my dad and uncle bought it from my grandma, and now actually my cousin bought it from my dad and uncle. So it's now this fourth generation company. But I grew up around very entrepreneurial people and sitting around the family dinner table and family reunions and stuff, everybody's talking about, oh, we're going to buy this land and we're going to put a storage unit on it or apartment building and we're going to this, that and the other. So I was just around that my entire life, and then I was working in my dad's company from early days. I mean, I was like 12 or 13, just helping any way I can and filing stuff and making copies and everything.

Charlie Chapman:

I think that's one of the things that I have always found interesting, following you as long as I have, and then since we've become coworkers, we talk all the time. I think Ryan Jones fits in the same kind of bucket where a lot of people who get into the indie app development scene are, like you said, coming at it from they already have an engineering job, relatively cushy, and then the idea of putting money into the business is scary and completely not a thing you even think about because it's like everything you're doing is just kind of bonus, it's just time. And what you have always been, I feel like a good example for me on, is how it's okay to spend money to then push things forward or help you make more money farther down the line. And it sounds like that it's just ingrained in how you think about things as well as the fact that you're coming at things from a lightly different angle.

David Barnard:

And so back to that story, I wrote this investment proposal. They had already kind of been saying they weren't by any means wealthy or anything, but they had more savings. Turns out though, they actually, they had bought some gold for the 1999, like, "Okay, if things are going to get crazy, we're going to buy..." They each bought $10,000 worth of gold or something, and then that had tripled in value. And so they actually dipped into that and sold a little bit of that. They actually had physical gold coins in a safe deposit box, crazy stuff.

Charlie Chapman:

David Bernard's apps journey begins with dipping into the family gold trust.

David Barnard:

It sounds so much more-

Charlie Chapman:

If that's the headline, tt makes you sound like you're like a son of a baron or something.

David Barnard:

That's hilarious. No, I never thought of it quite that way, but that is exactly what happened. I mean, growing up, my parents had to get a loan from my grandparents to even get a house, to afford a house. And I grew up very kind of middle class, lower middle class, and my dad has done well for himself, but most of it was after I left for college, and so I did not grow up with a silver spoon in my mouth or anything like that. But anyway, so they had kind of always said, "Hey, if you ever want to do something entrepreneurial," and I've been telling my kids this as well, I was like, "We'll figure out a way to dip into savings or retirement or whatever and help get you started." That offer having been extended over the years, I was like, "All right, here's the thing." And so I wrote up the investment proposal and they each invested $10,000.

And it's insane if you're around VC or even Angels these days, the deal that I gave them, I gave them each 10% of the company, and we structured it as a loan and had lawyers draft up the papers, and I paid interest on it, and I immediately started making payments on that $20,000 loan to each of them.

Charlie Chapman:

And they kept 10% of the company?

David Barnard:

And they kept 10% of the company. And then very proudly, I did pay off both loans completely, and then I bought them both out several years later. So I own 100% of the company now, but it was from having bought them out at what was... Yeah, I mean, we didn't go get a third party valuation or anything, but I feel like I gave them a pretty fair price. And between the interest I paid on the loan and the buyout, they did pretty well on their $10,000 investment, which I'm very happy to say.

Charlie Chapman:

So the company made enough money for you to do that. What was the story then? How did you build your first app and then the apps since then?

David Barnard:

So initially I thought, okay, I'm just going to learn to program. So I bought the famous Coco book, Aaron Hildegas's book on Coco development because there were no iPhone books.

Charlie Chapman:

Oh, this is interesting. Everybody I always feel like talks about the Stanford course thing, but I actually haven't heard this one.

David Barnard:

Okay. Again, this is spanning the decades. I'm an old man. When the iPhone, what do they call it? iPhone OS-

Charlie Chapman:

IPhone OS, yeah.

David Barnard:

... Developer Kit came out, they had an NDA on it. So you could not post code samples, you could not post tutorials, anything publicly. And so everyone was just kind of trying to figure stuff out, and it was all based on macOS development. There was no iPhone book, there were no iPhone courses. It was a brand new set of frameworks all based on the macOS frameworks. And so the only way to really brush up and figure out what to do would be to study macOS development. So I bought that book. I got probably a quarter of the way through it and realized, okay, this is kind of a career, not something I'm going to pick up in a month and build an app and have it on the app store day one.

And this is where I was starting to go was like, okay, maybe I just build a tip calculator or something that's just ridiculously simple. And there were some of those and some of those actually made quite a bit of money so maybe I should have. But a few weeks in, I was like, all right, I need somebody who actually knows what they're doing. And so I found a local guy, Jonathan Johnson, he's still in tech. I forget where he is at now these days, but I think I just put an ad in Craigslist or something like that.

Charlie Chapman:

Because this is beginning days of Twitter. Twitter was around at this point, but it wasn't obviously what it is today.

David Barnard:

Yeah. I joined Twitter in 2007 right around the time I got my iPhone. And that was actually in some ways the community during that time. A lot of what I learned about the jailbreak community and stuff like that was from Twitter. And I mean, it pretty much immediately followed Craig Hockenberry who was big in the jailbreak scene. Twitterific was probably one of the first native iOS apps.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah. Well, it was one of the jailbreak apps before the story even came out. Yeah.

David Barnard:

Exactly. Yep. So I found Jonathan and paid him as a contractor. I think I was paying him $50 an hour as a contractor. And so you're asking earlier where the money went. Well, I'm really glad I did take that $20,000 investment because then I had money to go, okay, I can't do this part. Let me hire somebody. I paid to have an LLC drafted up by lawyers. I hired a designer to work with on branding and icons and things like that and just went for it. And so those three weeks of learning to code, I do feel like gave me a really solid foundation. I've always, when they announced new frameworks and stuff at WWC, it's kind of English so you can kind of understand what's going on, but it's like I have just enough of a foundation to better understand exactly what these things do and what they mean and things like that. And yeah, we just got to work and built Trip Cubby was our first app.

Charlie Chapman:

So Trip Cubby was the first app, which is why your first company name was App Cubby. Is that right?

David Barnard:

Yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

Okay.

David Barnard:

So in thinking through what kind of apps to build, one of the conclusions I came to was that the most obvious thing to do would be to build apps that directly save and/or make people money. If you're going to spend money on something, if it makes you money back, that's a much more of a no-brainer thing. And so the idea behind App Cubby was that it would be, looking back, it's kind of cheesy and everything, but it was to have a cubby of apps and each app was a cubby of data where you would store data and get meaningful stuff from it. So I actually wrote out, and this is again, it's hard to even think before having all my kids and before being so busy with the day job and everything else, I just worked 18 hours a day while my wife was at work and nights and weekends. And so I had a list of-

PART 1 OF 5 ENDS [00:33:04]

David Barnard:

I was at work and nights and weekends. And so I had a list of 30 or 40 apps under the Cubby brand. And so Trip Cubby was the first-

Charlie Chapman:

Like ideas and outlines and stuff, you mean?

David Barnard:

Yeah. So Trip Cubby tracked mileage for taxes and reimbursement. So a lot of people don't even know, you can write off the mileage driving to doctors, hospital, anything medical. It's just this weird tax break. So especially if you're going to the hospital a ton or visiting somebody in the... I forget what all the rules are, but you get that write off, you get write off for business miles. And I believe there's another donation. If you drive to Goodwill, you can technically, I think, right it off. I don't know if that's still the case.

Charlie Chapman:

Oh, interesting. All this feels very relevant if you live in a place like Texas where you're driving long distances to go to these things.

David Barnard:

Yeah. And gas was expensive and there were no electric cars and all that kind of stuff. So it tracked mileage for taxes and reimbursement and-

Charlie Chapman:

This was your first app then that you released?

David Barnard:

Yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

And did it break out? Was this immediately the company is swimming in cash and you pay off the loans instantly and retire to the Bahamas?

David Barnard:

No. So another part of the story, and I've told this before, but I'll tell it again. One of my great regrets in life is that because I had borrowed that $20,000 from family members, when they announced WWDC 2008, I was looking at the numbers, priced out flights, looked at hotels and I was like, "Okay, I should probably go to this if I'm going to be a serious app developer." But then the other side of me, just the intensely frugal and this is my family's money. Is it going to look like I'm taking a vacation to San Francisco on family investment? Is this the best use of that money to get this business off the ground? And because I think the ticket alone at the time was like 1,500 or something like that, and then between hotels and flights and everything, it was a big chunk. So we're talking probably 20% of that investment.

So two to $4,000 was going to go to this one trip to WWC. And so I just decided I just can't do that. It's just too much. Come to find out at WWC, they were signing up people for developer accounts on the spot. And what happened to me is that even though I applied for a developer account within hours of them releasing the form to apply for a developer account, I did not get accepted into the developer program, which made all sorts of things hard. It was hard to... I think Jonathan Johnson, I think he ended up getting a developer account and maybe we should have just launched on his account to be there day one.

Charlie Chapman:

And just to back up, the reason is you had to be accepted into the program. Now you can just sign up and pay $100 and you're in. At that time, they were very restrictive on how many people they were letting into the program. And then like you said, once you were in the program, there was all these NDAs, so people weren't supposed to talk about what they had access to or how things worked. And so by not being in the program, not only were you cut out from releasing on the store, but you were cut out from a lot of the developer resources that were even available at that time.

David Barnard:

Yeah. And actually this is a fun part of the story that I can tell now because he's since retired. After WWC, I'm freaking out because I'm like, it's a month before the release of the App Store. The App Store was July 10th, 2008. And so this is early June. WWC has just happened. My developer account has not been approved. I go through all the WWC videos, which it may have even been the year before video because the videos don't come out and maybe I wouldn't have even gotten access because I wasn't part of the developer program and everything was under NDA.

So I look at the slides and see that the evangelists all put their Apple email in these videos like, "Hey, reach out to me. Let me know what you think about these."

Charlie Chapman:

Different time.

David Barnard:

Very different time. They were begging for feedback and connection with developers and put their email right on the slide to say, "Contact me." And so I wrote this. I should pull it up sometime and see if I could maybe screenshot it and post it to Twitter or something. But I wrote this desperation email and I put six people in there, the top evangelists I found in those videos just saying, "Hey..." Oh, and in the middle of all this, my wife gets pregnant or we get pregnant with the first child.

Charlie Chapman:

A lot going on at once.

David Barnard:

So this was May, we find out she's pregnant. I've jumped off a cliff without a parachute. The money's quickly running out. And so I write this Hail Mary desperation email. "Hey, I am building an app. We're going to have it ready for day one. I borrowed money from family. My wife's now pregnant. I'm freaking out. Give me a freaking developer account." It wasn't at all demanding.

Charlie Chapman:

Very cordial. Yeah, exactly.

David Barnard:

It was very just desperation of like, "Please, I beg of you. Tell me what I need to do." And of all the people to reach back out to me, and then for me to happen to have found his email on the slide, it was John Geleynse, famous storied Apple evangelist who'd been there since I think the '90s. I was actually hanging out with him last year at WWDC, so WWDC 2025, and it was so fun. And he won't come on the Sub Club podcast because it is associated with Revenue Cat and stuff, but if I ever start a side podcast, he's like, "Sign me up. I'll be your first episode." But he was walking me through his story of being a kid in Canada in the '90s and being so fascinated by Apple and eventually getting the job. And now, I mean, he ran WWC for 25 or 30 years, and just such a cool, incredible human being. So he doesn't email me, he calls me and we talk for-

Charlie Chapman:

Again, different time.

David Barnard:

Different time. We talked for three hours or something, just crazy. And so then the craziest thing is, okay, this high up guy, he even at that time was already running evangelism at Apple. At that time, he was running WWDC. He's like, "I'll make sure you get an account." Didn't give me an account.

Charlie Chapman:

Oh, no.

David Barnard:

And so I don't think they had 10,000 people apply. I think it was just they were so overwhelmed by the excitement around it. It wasn't that they were denying 10 out of every 11 submissions. They were just slow to process what they did have. And they had to verify a DUNS number and it was a company account, which I think made it harder than a personal account, all that kind of stuff. And so he worked in the background asking to get me an account, and I still missed that launch of the App Store on July 10th, 2008 because I didn't have a developer account.

I had an app ready, everything was ready to go. And so you asked the question, did it just take off from day one? No, in part because I was a month late. Had it been day one, my whole life story probably would've looked different and not necessarily for the better because I think the scrappiness of everything did, I feel like, teach me a lot over the years. So we released it in August and then by that time I'd actually run out of money and I hit up my dad and I was like, "Hey." So I think the first month I made five grand or something, which I mean was pretty good.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, I was about to say, a lot of people listening would be like, "What? That's still a good start."

David Barnard:

Yeah. Paid upfront. So these weren't subscribers who were going to renew over time. And this was a $10 price point, so it wasn't even that many customers.

Charlie Chapman:

$10 price point.

David Barnard:

I mean, that's a whole topic we could dive into, part of the history of the App Store, but I hit my dad up. I'm like, "Hey, basically I've got this account receivable. Apple is going to at some point," which it wasn't even, I think, clear at the time when they were going to pay.

Charlie Chapman:

Still not really clear always.

David Barnard:

There were minimums, so I didn't even know how much of that 5,000 I was going to get because each region had a different minimum that you had to hit the threshold and it was over $100. So if that 5,000 were spread across a bunch of different regions and each region only hit 75 or 80 bucks or whatever, I could have only gotten that first check at 4,000 or something like that. So I hit him up and I'm like, "Hey Dad, can I get a little bridge loan?" I thought it was a pretty reasonable ask and everything. Well, in the intertwining months as a commercial real estate guy who's just constantly up and down and property-rich and cash-poor and having to make payments on all his staff and buildings and all that kind of stuff.

Charlie Chapman:

Just to reiterate, this is late 2008?

David Barnard:

No, it was September of 2008. I'm broke. It turns out he's broke.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, I was about to say, the commercial real estate was an interesting point at that time, right?

David Barnard:

It was just going into the-

Charlie Chapman:

Or right before the crash. Yeah. Yeah.

David Barnard:

Yeah. It was right before the main crash, but the cracks were already starting to appear. I didn't even think about that correlation, but exactly that. And that moment was actually super impactful for me as well because he was like, "This is essentially a payday loan," which I had never probably thought about it before that. And if you're not in those kind of situations where you need to take out a payday loan, you don't think about the economics and the trap that a payday loan could be. He's like, "If I give you this 5,000 early, then by the time October comes around, you're going to need another 5,000 and then you're just going to be in the cycle of needing money every month."

Charlie Chapman:

Because you spend... Yeah, it becomes this recurring cycle. Yeah.

David Barnard:

And so he was like, "If you're really that desperate, I could maybe..." I think he was like, "I could sell off a little bit of a retirement fund or something like that to get you the cash, but I don't have the cash. And I think you should explore all ways to survive through this so that you don't get trapped in the payday loan cycle." And so we sold one of our cars and became a one-car family and we sold my wife's Honda Accord and I think we got about four or $5,000 for it and did not get into that payday loan cycle and got just enough to kind of survive to that first paycheck from Apple. After that, I think it was around the time Gruber linked to it, what was the big magazine? Macworld. Macworld linked to it, Jason Snell at Macworld.

And this is when I actually, this is part of the story you probably would want to touch on anyway, is that's when I started making a lot of friends in the industry. In some ways, yes, it was way easier for me to do that in 2008 with an app and everything was so novel and it was a freaking mileage log app. Why would anybody care? But I was just constantly putting myself out there. So I was-

Charlie Chapman:

I think that's, I mean, I talk about a lot here, but it's not a requirement, but it is one of the ways that you can break in even today is just engaging a lot with the community. And it might not pay dividends quickly. It might not pay dividends ever in terms of the app you're building right now, but by being engaged, being a trusted person, nice, somebody people like to talk to and work with, or maybe not even work with, but just trust, it slowly does pay off over time in terms of the opportunities you get in other areas that you never expected. And yeah, being on the radar of people who write about this stuff frequently and being a trusted source of information for those people, all of that can slowly pay dividends over time, but it is a long game. You can't be trying to extract value out of them as quickly as you can because nobody wants to interact with those people.

You are a prime example of one of those people that's been doing that for a very long time. And I see you from behind the scenes doing that today in new avenues and you really care a lot about how you treat people because your reputation is such a major part of the value that you're bringing to everything.

David Barnard:

And it's not just being part of the community, but it's also just tactfully putting yourself out there. So many of these connections that I now have started with just a cold email. I should dig this one up too. I mean, I think I emailed John Gruber just to his comments at Daring Fireball and I said, "Hey, remember that mileage log app that you ripped apart when the App Store first launched?" Because there was this one that came out that was embarrassingly bad. It was like Windows phone UI that was just terrible. And so the first day of the App Store, he stumbles upon this or he hears about it on Twitter or something and just rips it apart.

And so I don't send him my life story. I don't beg him to be featured on Daring Fireball. I just send him a quick note like, "Hey, you remember that story you wrote about this mileage log that was just an embarrassment to the burgeoning iOS platform? Well, I've created a mileage log that is much more platform-native and feels like an iPhone app." And then did very similar for Jim Dalrymple and the Macworld crew and all those different publications that I've been reading for years. I just sent pitches to the tips at email addresses, and that's how it all kind of started. And then once John Gruber linked to my app, then I could use that as a little bit of a calling card of like-

Charlie Chapman:

Yes, exactly.

David Barnard:

"Hey, look, John linked to it. Here's the story." And as you were saying, I don't think people realize and might even think like, "Oh, David, you know everybody now and everybody in industry knows you and the podcast and whatever." To this day, in fact, yesterday I sent out five cold emails to people I've never met before to invite them to this special thing we're doing before App Growth Annual. And a lot of the podcast guests that I end up getting on are just cold emails of me putting myself out there. And so almost 20 years on of just being... and the thing is, it's not about shameless self-promotion. I think this is a version people get it wrong.

Charlie Chapman:

Right. There's a version of this, which is asking ChatGPT to just spam everybody in the world, right? And maybe-

David Barnard:

That does not work.

Charlie Chapman:

... it works for some people, but it does not work for what either of us are doing.

David Barnard:

And it doesn't work to send a five-page email telling your life story. It doesn't work to beg. It doesn't work to pitch too hard. And so I've always been very thoughtful and even kind of gentle, for lack of a better word, with my pitching. It's three paragraphs max, two or three sentences each. It's something that's easy to scan, that's clear, that's not asking too much. And that's the same thing I do today to get podcast guests, get people excited about.

Charlie Chapman:

I think it's easy to, especially people listening, pitching 9to5Mac or whatever, or John Gruber for writing about them, if you're trying to convince them to write about you, you've kind of already lost the game. The game, and I think the people on the other end would agree with this, is you're offering them something. They need to write things that's interesting to their audience. So your job is to pitch them the same way you pitch to your customers. This is valuable to you, not like you said, tell your sob story and be like, "This would be valuable to me." Because while many of them are very nice people and love to do that, they're not going to have a very long career if they're just writing things for everybody else and not for their audience. I think the same works for all of these types of things, is you be valuable to them and make it a mutually beneficial kind of relationship, and that's going to work out a lot better in the long run.

David Barnard:

Yeah. And the undertones there make a big difference too. I mean, I think part of why John Geleynse called me is that the way I wrote the email, you got to think about your audience and what you're trying to say and how you're trying to say it. And you're exactly right. It's like if you're pitching somebody in the press, you want to pitch them on the relevance to their audience. This matters to you because your audience is going to care about it, therefore you writing about it is good for you and for your audience and for authenticity and all those kind of things. Well, what does Apple care about? Apple cares about having a great developer community and people who are passionate about the platform. And so my email to Apple was way more, I think I even got into I'm a huge Apple nerd. I maybe even linked to the photo of me being first in line for the iPhone.

Charlie Chapman:

They want those stories.

David Barnard:

I've never asked him, and maybe he wouldn't remember 18 years on, but I can't help but think John Geleynse called me in part because he saw somebody who cared, who would be a value add to the iPhone developer community at that time, not because it was some big sob story or whatever. If I had said I'm broke and I'm desperate, that's a very different email and it's kind of like, "Okay, I'm sorry that it happened to you, but..." So I think part of why he did respond is because he saw something in me and the passion and the way I framed things that mattered. And so that's continued throughout my career.

Charlie Chapman:

This early app, and it sounds like some of the ones that you then built from there, were sort of built to some degree on this relationship with the press, you're putting it out there. This wasn't like paid advertising or anything like that, right?

David Barnard:

Yeah. I've almost never done paid in 18 years, to my detriment probably, but yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

But there was another form of distribution that you hit on in the early days that wasn't from press, but was instead from... I don't even know if it had the name App Store Optimization at the time, but you struck gold, so to speak, in the whole very good keywords in the early days. Is that right?

David Barnard:

Yes and no. So early on, I was not very cognizant of search optimization as a tool. I was more focused, again, probably to my detriment, on rankings, because at that time when the apps were launched, prices were more like 10 bucks upfront, 20 bucks. It was more what software was priced at the time. And then what happened was that people started to see that if you discounted to 2.99, $1.99, even 99 cents, you would rocket up the charts because the charts were purely based on volume. And once you were in the top 100, this was a time when not only were individuals scanning the top 100 to see what cool apps had launched, press was scanning the top 100 looking for that new breakout app. And so for the apps that managed to get into that top 10, there was a momentum there that really helped them.

In the very early days, I think I overly focused on that and didn't focus on keywords. But several years in, so this was maybe 2011, 2012, another thing I've done throughout my career is look for new opportunities that are enabled by either new devices, form factors, APIs, and otherwise. So when the iPhone 4 was announced with the front-facing camera, the first thing I'm thinking is like, okay, what can you do with a front-facing camera? What kind of software does this enable that couldn't exist before? And the most glaringly obvious thing in the world was a mirror.

And I had built with Leighton Duncan, another early Jailbreak guy, we had partnered up on this app called KaleidoVid, which that was one of those apps I always thought should have done better. It was so cool. It used the back-facing camera where you could point it at anything and it would turn it into a kaleidoscope on your phone. And there were a few different settings of different number of fractals in the kaleidoscope and all that or mirrors or however you would say it. But it was all a bunch of video and photo code and you would tap the screen to pause and then it would save it as a screenshot. We already had all this code around video and photo sharing and all that kind of stuff. I think in just a single weekend, he took it from the rear-facing camera, made it the front-facing camera, and then got rid of all the kaleidoscope features, and now it was all of a sudden we had a mirror, and we launched that as a free app. The other thing is that iAd launched that same year, and so it was a two-pronged experiment for me.

Charlie Chapman:

This Apple's ad platform?

David Barnard:

Yeah. I've long since wished they did it again because it was Apple's take on ads. They were much more nice and polished and you didn't have another SDK in your app and all the privacy concerns and all the gambling ads and gun ads and stuff that you have in today's world that you have to constantly be vigilant fighting against, and scams and all that. So anyways, it was like a two-prong experiment around the iAd, which was insane. When it came out of the gate, they were paying 30 and $60 CPMs, which is just crazy.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, they were trying to get people using it. Clearly, they were losing money on it, Apple.

David Barnard:

Yeah. And it was an experiment in front-facing camera. And so it did fairly well. I don't think it got much press, maybe got a little bit of press just like, "Hey, if you've got your front-facing camera, here's something you could do with it." I will say to this day, I'm a little embarrassed of having done so well. Spoiler, I ended up making over a million dollars on that app, and we'll get to how that came about, but I'm almost embarrassed of it. But honestly, it was a fantastic app. And I really thought about the user experience and everybody's like, "Well, can't you just use the camera?" Well, yeah, you can use the camera, but you have all the camera chrome and buttons and everything around.

This was full screen. It launched right to the front-facing camera. You don't have to switch the camera around. It had a Zoom feature where you could actually zoom in. It had a light feature where it would turn the screen to full brightness and then surround the screen with a white border. So if you were in low light, it would actually brighten up so you could actually see what was going on. You could tap the screen to pause, to take a selfie. There was all these fun little features that we put around it.

Charlie Chapman:

People underestimate the conveniences you can add by turning a utility that's kind of built in that people use already, turning that into something like actually custom, the UX actually being made for that purpose. Honestly, I did something similar with, I have an app called Overviewer, which is-

David Barnard:

[inaudible 00:57:08].

Charlie Chapman:

No, with Overviewer, which is for teachers.

David Barnard:

Right, right, right.

Charlie Chapman:

And a lot of teachers would just airplay the camera app to their Mac. This is during COVID especially whenever they're trying to share their desk. And so I just quickly hacked together for my wife basically the same thing. It's like show the camera. And then she kept bringing up little things that would be nice, and then I just added those. And then you end up with an app that's like, "Yeah, it's just showing the camera, but there's all these little features that make life a little better if you're using it in this way." And yeah, it's like quality of life things can go a long way, especially when it's something you use all the time, which a clamshell mirror is the prototypical thing that you'd carry around in a purse or whatever. So it turns your iPhone into something a little more convenient.

David Barnard:

So what ended up happening with Mirror is it did fairly well, and I think people did start searching the term mirror, and so it would show up in search. I think it maybe even got featured at some point, just as somewhere buried in the utility feature, whatever. But I watched the industry super closely, and this is one interesting thing about my career is that because I wasn't coding, I did kind of have a lot more free time, if you will, in that I was so focused on how do I make money and how do I turn this into a business? So I'm scouring the top 100 every day. I'm reading all blog posts about other apps and their successes. I'm talking to other developers on Twitter. I spent a ton of my time very focused on the business side of things. And so one of the things I was watching was these apps that really took off, and Camera Plus was by the team Tap Tap Tap that had done some other big apps. And so the launch was really hyped and all this kind of stuff.

And the app they launched was called Camera+, and it was just Camera with a plus symbol. I was looking at that, I was like, "That's so dumb. That's not a brand. Camera+ is not a brand. People are going to type camera and then spell the word plus. If you tell somebody Camera+..." This is violating all the proper marketing terms.

Charlie Chapman:

You're thinking in terms of you did earned marketing and then people go to the store to search for it.

David Barnard:

So I'm there thinking, "Okay, these guys are obviously really smart. They've done really well, but what the hell are they thinking? Camera+ is such a dumb brand." But I was so fascinated because I was like, "These are smart guys. I know they're not idiots, so why did they do this?" And then what I figured out pretty soon after that, that they had very intelligently figured out before I figured it out, is that Apple at that time, and still to this day to a certain extent, though they've watered it down quite a bit, gave a very, very, very high boost in search to exact word matches. So if somebody goes into the App Store and types in camera, Camera+, because a plus gets ignored because it's a symbol, not a word or a letter, they were an exact string match for the search camera.

And that app, I mean, must have made 10, $20 million, maybe even more than that over the course of its life early in the App Store. And it was just perpetually the top result for camera. It was perpetually, I think, in the top 10 or 50 for years because of that. So then it dawned on me pretty quickly afterward. It's like, "Oh." And so I had seen Scanner+, like, "What? Scanner+? Why?" Again, they had noticed this before I did, same thing, Scanner+, PDF documents, and all these kind of keywords that are commonly searched weather. I mean, if you go look at the weather category, still to this day, there's Weather+, Weather Plus Plus Plus, Weather Percent, Weather Degree, weather this, that, and the other, all kind of taking advantage of that.

And almost embarrassed to admit this, but I was kind of trying that with the Weather Up name, hoping that up was such a short and inconsequential word that I would still get matched as being an exact string match for weather. I don't think that actually worked, but that was part of why I called my app Weather Up, because I thought maybe that they would just ignore those two letter words the way they ignore symbols. So when I switched Mirror to unicode symbol for mirror, and this is an interesting hack-

Charlie Chapman:

What was the name of the app before?

David Barnard:

It was branded. It was Mirror by App Cubby, because App Cubby was a brand that people recognized-

Charlie Chapman:

But it had the word mirror in it.

David Barnard:

... from Trip Cubby. It was Mirror by App Cubby. Yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

Okay. So the insight wasn't using the keyword or stuffing the keyword. It was literally like only make it the one word that you care about and then some sort of character that you know is going to get trimmed off when it comes to ranking.

David Barnard:

To this day, there's a subset of unicode symbols that are allowed inside app names, and it's a bizarre... If I were smarter, I could probably ask ChatGPT to figure it out at this point, but there's some subset of Unicode that works and some subset that doesn't. Emojis won't work, so you can't do emoji, weather, smiley face, weather, cloud emoji. But yeah, so I found this little symbol that looked kind of like a mirror. It was like a circle with another circle inside of it. And so it was Mirror-

Charlie Chapman:

Oh, so it was just a random unicode. It wasn't plus or something?

David Barnard:

Random unicode. No.

Charlie Chapman:

Wow. Okay.

David Barnard:

Because there already was, I think at the time, a Mirror+ and a Mirror++, and I also didn't want it to be quite so obvious and lame. And so it was Mirror, space, unicode symbol. And I mean, pretty much to the day That released with that name, downloads just shot up. And for years, years, it was the... And still is actually to this day, I sold the app in 2017, but to this day, it's the top result for Mirror. It won that ASO battle and has maintained that position. And one of the things that most surprised me and still looking back surprises me is how consistent it was. It wasn't like one day 20,000 downloads and the next day five. It was always within a pretty tight range. I should go back and look at my App Figures charts because I still have all that data still in App Figures. I can go back and look. But it was a pretty tight range between I think seven and 10,000 downloads a day, every single day, [inaudible 01:03:51].

Charlie Chapman:

I think the metaphor I always think about with ASO stuff is search traffic is just this raging river. And if you can successfully put a tube in that river, you just start siphoning this incredible amount of traffic that heads in. Now, you have to make a page that converts people and then you have to make an app that people stay with or convert by paying or whatever too. But that initial stream is just like this crazy amount of traffic that you can get if you are intentional or lucky or whatever, and you can end up highly ranked in those search results. High intent search results in particular. If somebody searches mirror, that is exactly what they're looking for 99% of the time.

David Barnard:

Exactly. And I've always said, and you and I have talked about this, so many of the indie app developers that have stood the test of time either lucked into it or did it very intentionally. And I don't think enough of them fully credit those kinds of things for that long-term staying power. For example, David Smith to me is one of the most famous examples of this. I don't think a lot of people even know some of the backstory before Widgetsmith blew up, but he had an app called Audiobooks and he had the keyword audiobooks and that was his salary.

I mean, I've never talked to him in detail, so I'm speculating here, but from what I could see from the outside, it looked like that app was kind of the foundation of his whole business where it was paying the bills while he went off and tried all these other experiments. He had a weather app. I mean, he's one of those launched similar to me. I've launched 30 different apps over the years and Mirror was kind of my foundation that allowed me to launch InterPro and Weather Up because I had that steady stream of income.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah. He obviously knew this too because he kind of had a brand and still has Pedometer++ and there is a lineage from that era living on to this day for sure.

David Barnard:

I think Slopes is another good example that he was one of the early skiing and snowboarding apps. And so-

PART 2 OF 5 ENDS [01:06:04]

David Barnard:

... early skiing and snowboarding apps. And there's this weird thing about app store search that there is a weighting to the history. I don't know exactly how you would quantify that or how Apple's algorithms quantify that, but there is something to momentum there, where once you get to number one it's really hard to unthrone you and there's just this staying power. And so, there's so many apps that even if it's not super obvious, like Curtis didn't launch Snowboard+++ or Snowboard degree sign or whatever, he launched Slopes, and a fantastic app, and he's built a great business and everything like that. There was a foundation of traffic for him over the years by being one of the top results for those skiing and snowboarding terms that laid that foundation that then he was able to build the business on top of, that probably just wouldn't have happened had that search traffic not kept him above water long enough to continue building upon that momentum.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah. And just to keep the navel-gazing, bringing it back to me as we should be doing more often in the show. Curtis and David both launched guests, I think episode 14 and episode 24 I just looked up. So if you want to hear their stories, they've been on here.

David Barnard:

Curtis and David are also Sub Club guests.

Charlie Chapman:

That's true, that's true.

David Barnard:

I don't know the number off the top of my head, but you can, back to back, go listen to the Sub Club episode and the Launched episode and you get very different stories because we focus on very different things.

Charlie Chapman:

So, we talked about early days making these lots of smaller apps and making good relationships with the press. Then you had this kind of breakthrough with understanding the nascent field of ASO and building mirror and creating, like you said, a foundation for you to try things. But I think people that have followed you for a while and don't think of you as David the Sub Club guy, they probably think of you as David the Launch Center Pro guy. In fact, literally yesterday I was listening to the Connected podcast, love that podcast, and they were talking about old apps and one of them started talking about Launch Center Pro. Still, it's one of these foundational apps that people think about a lot. And that was, I think certainly when I got into the field, that's who you were. You were the Launch Center Pro guy to me. So, what is the story of that app and its wild history?

David Barnard:

Oh, man. Well, funny story here before I dig into the broader story. We hosted a party at WWDC this year, just a couple months ago, the mansion party at WWDC this year, and several OpenAI employees attended. And we're all standing around in a group as things are wrapping up, and I forget how we even got on the subject but Launch Center Pro came up. I think I was saying, "Back in the day I worked on Launch Center Pro," and then all the guys in the circle were like, "Wait, you're the Launch Center Pro guy?" And I was like, "What? Okay."

Charlie Chapman:

It's funny, because yeah, it was such a massive thing. And somebody who got in in the last three or four years maybe hasn't even heard of it because of what we're about to talk about. How did that come about?

David Barnard:

I was just spending a ton of time looking at API docs, and references, and new things, and opportunities and stumbled upon URL schemes. And I forget, I don't remember looking at Drafts and some of these other apps that took advantage, and I don't remember if Drafts launched before Launch Center Pro or after Launch Center Pro, but that's certainly another app that took a lot of advantage of URL schemes. I think Instapaper was actually one of the inspirations. And I forget if it was Marco or somebody else, or some other group of people had created this thing called X-Callback-URL.

Charlie Chapman:

Yes. Was that Drafts? We should say also, again, keeping it back to me, Greg Pierce from Drafts has been on the show as well as Marco Arment. I don't know the numbers off the top of my head. I'm just going to keep interrupting you as you talk-

David Barnard:

Neither of them have been on Sub Club. Well, this is fun. I guess maybe this is appropriate as the 100th episode since we could be-

Charlie Chapman:

That's what I mean, exactly.

David Barnard:

... ending up randomly talking about 30 of your episodes.

Charlie Chapman:

Love it.

David Barnard:

So, X-Callback-URL, and again, working in iOS today, if you hadn't been around the past decade you wouldn't even know why this exists or how this could exist or anything. But URL schemes are a way to launch an app, but you can launch it with some amount of context or whatever. And so, the easiest example that still works today, and this is really the origin of it, is that on the web, if you have an email address and you want to hyperlink an email address, you don't use http:// whatever, the link is actually mailto, just M-A-I-L-T-O, colon, and then the email address. And so, that is a valid URL scheme in most operating systems and probably has been for 30 years, and maybe even part of the HTML spec or something, so that when you click the link it knows to open your native mail app and fill out the to form with that email address.

Charlie Chapman:

Your browser will look at that. It'll tell the operating system, "Hey, somebody wants to open the mail app," whatever that is, "and here's the email address." And then the operating system knows, "I know what the default mail app is. I'm going to send it to the mail app with that information." And that carried over importantly into iOS, probably more or less for mail actually.

David Barnard:

Yeah, it probably started just for mail. And then, all your audience will probably be nerdy enough to understand how URL schemes work is that in addition to being able to put in mailto and then the address, even the mailto URL scheme accepts additional parameters. So you can put, and I'm going to not get this right, although I should, but I believe you can type out mailto:david@revenuecat.com, and then you put the question mark to then break the URL into now you're going to add parameters and then you'd have subject equals feedback, and then ampersand, body equals write some feedback. And then when you tap that link, it opens a mail app, it prefills the subject and then it prefills the body. So, what had just started happening around the time that I picked up on was ... And Drafts must have been before Launch Center Pro, because I think you're right.

I think Greg was one of the originators of X-Callback-URL, but it was a really smart way to allow apps to interact in a way that was just never possible before and still to this day isn't great. Apple now has actions, but they're kind of buried in the share menu and nobody actually uses them, and it's just always been a bit of a mess. And so, X-Callback-URL allows you to use these URL schemes to get to an app, give it a little bit of context, and then return you back to the app. So, Craig Hockenberry must have been involved. He's been involved in so many. If he hasn't been on the podcast, you should-

Charlie Chapman:

I actually haven't had Craig or anybody from Iconfactory, which feels ... Yeah. I've reached out a long time ago, but I need to try that again because that would be big.

David Barnard:

So the perfect example of this is, and this is why Marco Arment comes into the story, he was working on Instapaper at the time. And so, what you could do is in Twitterific, if you wanted to save a link, you would tap to share the link and it provides a better user experience, is that you would share to Instapaper and it would use this X-Callback-URL. So, it launched to Instapaper. And then one of the parameters was the URL for the app that it had come from. And so, Instapaper would have a URL scheme, Instapaper:, and then add parameters of the link you wanted to save, the title you wanted to save it under or whatever, all those kind of things. And then an additional parameter would be take me back to Twitterific, because Twitterific is what sent me. And so, I don't remember if all of this was happening before I launched or if it happened around the time I launched that it got that sophisticated, but it was around that time that a lot of people were kind of recognizing the potential power of URL schemes.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah. Essentially at the high level, and even now it's almost worse, like you said, but there was no way in the system for an app to invoke another app and send it information. But because of that technology that we talked about existing for a long time, there was a way to sort of backdoor your way into that. So you could be like, "My app gets opened by this URL scheme and it receives information, and I can publish what I'm expecting that information to look like. And then other apps can invoke me, and I can look at what those apps do and I can invoke them." And so, it wasn't like this standard that Apple set. And importantly, it wasn't super standardized. So like you said, developers had to work together to make it work to a degree. But because Instapaper had created this, any app can add a link inside of themselves that will go into Instapaper once Marco published this information.

And so, it kind of started creating this standard that was very loose, and people like yourself could build apps that take advantage of this thing that a bunch of people are trying out at the same time.

David Barnard:

So the very first version of Launch Center, well, it was Launch Center, not Launch Center Pro. Launch Center Pro was the second app in the series, but the very first iteration was actually another kind of hack that I was paying attention to was that you could do persistent notifications that stayed, and this was when you would slide over to your notification center. It was very much intended to be a text message that you could miss and then it wouldn't just pass out. You would send a parameter to the notification saying, "This should stay permanently on there," until they open the app and then clear it. So, this was like a notification center hack to be a quick launcher. And so, we initially tried to get approved just as basically a quick launcher. And we tried to make the URL scheme stuff a lot easier to do.

So we had this, what we call a URL composer or something like that. So, if you wanted to be able to quickly call your wife, there's a T-E-L telephone URL scheme. And so, you would select your wife from the contacts, her number would populate in there, and then that would become a shortcut that would then be in your notification center. So, anytime you want to just call your wife, instead of going to the phone app, going to the favorites and all these tap, tap, tap, tap, taps, you would just swipe over and tap it.

Charlie Chapman:

It gave you a way to make deep links into your own apps that invoke an action just instantly. Remember, this is pre-Shortcuts, pre-Workflows I think even existing.

David Barnard:

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

Very, very, very early days-

David Barnard:

Well, that's a fun story. We can get to that.

Charlie Chapman:

None of this stuff existed.

David Barnard:

So, Apple rejected it. And another thing to this day I'm pretty salty about, because the ideas from Launch Center Pro did become Workflows. The Workflow guys actually were building something else at the time and asked us to integrate. And then I responded to them saying, "Well, we're maybe going to even compete with you on your core product." And they were like, "Okay, screw that. We're going to compete with you on your core product." And so, I genuinely think Workflow existed in part because of that single email where I was like, "Ah, we could integrate more deeply with them." But I mean, gosh, what a different history of-

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah. And for those of you who don't know, Workflows, third party app that eventually was bought by Apple and is the foundation for Shortcuts, the app Shortcuts built into iPhones today.

David Barnard:

So anyways, going back, they rejected it. I'm still salty because eventually, before Apple even allowed third parties to have launcher widgets, Shortcuts, once Apple acquired them, had their own widget that was a launcher widget.

Charlie Chapman:

Yep. Yep.

David Barnard:

It's like five years ago, Apple, you told me this was a bad experience, a misappropriation of our SDK. And then, what happens five years later? They build that feature into the system app.

Charlie Chapman:

Well, and you haven't gotten to that. So yeah, you made Launch Center, the plain Launch Center, and it was just that, but they came back and said-

David Barnard:

And it was rejected.

Charlie Chapman:

... no.

David Barnard:

They said no. And so, we had already put all this work into it and we're like, "Well, let's just launch it without the notification center thing," because there's still some value where you could ... Because we kind of had built a little bit of a launcher view in the main app where you could also just tap from inside the app. So, you could launch the app and then tap, and you could create this whole list of shortcuts where it wasn't just ... So, you could put it in your doc and have the top 10 things that you do on a daily basis right there in your dock, and then you tap once and then you tap into it to go do something specific. And again, it wasn't an app launcher. And this is what we eventually was our tagline, "Launch actions, not apps," was our tagline because it wasn't just an app launcher. It was like you would launch an app with context.

One of the examples we gave at the time was like, don't just open Instagram and then have to go around and find the camera button and all that. And most of these apps have made these kind of primary use cases way easier to get to these days, but at the time it was like you had to wait for Instagram to launch, and then once it launched it was on the feed, and then you had to go into a menu and then go to camera. It was the whole thing and you had to wait for it to load-

Charlie Chapman:

Does that mean Instagram supported X-Callback-URLs?

David Barnard:

Not X-Callback, because X-Callback was its own kind of branch of ... It was just a spec for a specific kind of URL scheme to be able to do the launch back thing. But URL schemes themselves were actually pretty common, and they were used by apps for other purposes as well. So, I don't know why Instagram would've had it in there other than ... I mean, some apps use it on launch internally, or if it's launched from a notification you open to that specific thing. There were reasons. It's all a bit fuzzy now, it was more than a decade ago that we were doing all this. But yeah, so Instagram and a bunch of big apps did support rudimentary URL schemes, they didn't support more sophisticated stuff. So we launched it, and then massive credit to Federico Viticci, he's the one who really latched onto it and kind of helped popularize it.

And we didn't think it was that exciting because I thought the notification thing was what was so exciting, but they didn't know that that was what the app was intended to do. And he latched onto it as like, "Oh wow, this is a really cool power thing. I can put these 10 deep links with context all right here and easily get them accessible-"

Charlie Chapman:

That's like MacStories' bait right there. Even anybody who knows him to this day, it's like you give him a new way to make automations and he's going to go crazy.

David Barnard:

I mean, what's funny though is, I mean, in some ways this was the start because there were no automations before this. This was the start. So Launch Center came out, and it did fairly well in part because of Viticci. And I mean, plenty of other people picked it up in the press but he was definitely a huge kind of champion of it, talked a lot about it, and it started showing up in more and more docs because that was the best place to have it. It was right in your doc so you could easily access it anytime. And then we realized, okay, we can't do the notification center hack. We need to make a better launcher experience. And so, we built Launch Center Pro as the like, okay, this is really a launcher.

Charlie Chapman:

Breaking news here on Launched.

David Barnard:

Breaking NDAs. I heard from an Apple employee who will go unnamed that Launch Center Pro getting accepted on the App Store went all the way to Phil Schiller because there was a specific rule against mimicking the home screen. And that rule still exists in the-

Charlie Chapman:

Yes. I've seen apps get denied for this before. It's like you're not allowed to build an app launcher is usually how ... Or mimicking the home screen is how it's always phrased.

David Barnard:

Yeah. And I think what allowed us to slip through, and I am eternally grateful to Phil Schiller for allowing it, although I'm also very frustrated the way things are set up, that building this innovative app that ended up helping launch Workflows, which then got acquired and became Shortcuts, and now is such a deep part of the operating system. The fact that the app that really kicked all of this off had to go all the way to a senior VP to get approved is in some ways kind of ridiculous. We were just trying to do something fun and innovative, and the fact that it had to go all the way to him is problematic, but I am grateful that he did say yes. And I think what got us over the line is that we were not an app launcher, we weren't mimicking the home screen in the sense of just launching apps.

The whole value of Launch Center Pro was launching actions, and that's not what the home screen did.

Charlie Chapman:

And Launch Center didn't have this? It was the Launch Center Pro update that had to go through all these approvals?

David Barnard:

Right. So Launch Center, because it was just a list, it was like a list view-

Charlie Chapman:

It didn't look like the home screen.

David Barnard:

It didn't look like the home screen.

Charlie Chapman:

Ah, okay.

David Barnard:

And so, Launch Center Pro was tiles. We actually did kind of intentionally try and make it look-

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, it made it familiar.

David Barnard:

Well, no, no. Well, we made it somewhat familiar, but we actually very intentionally made these blocky grids, and it didn't look like a home screen. You couldn't set a background. We had two or three default backgrounds that you could select from. There was another thing that to this day I think it was a fantastic interaction. I believe Justin, my business partner on that is the one who came up with this, but when you tap on the ... So, you could create actions that were immediately tappable, but you could also create kind of folders. But with the folders, instead of tapping and then pulling your finger off and then going and tapping something else, you could tap and then drag and release. And so, because we were thinking this is a productivity tool, this is for nerds, this is for people who are going to ... The whole point-

Charlie Chapman:

Was that before or after Path? Do you remember Path?

David Barnard:

I do remember Path with the little spray out thing.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, it was kind of a similar ... Different than the way Launch Center Pro felt, to my memory. But oh man, you're making me nostalgic for that era where there was so much more exploration of not just UX, because I feel like we are in one of those periods now with all the AI tools of what's the user experience for this, but specifically touch interactions. It's like everything was new and everybody was experimenting constantly, and it was so much fun. Anyway, sorry I interrupted.

David Barnard:

Yeah, I mean, great example of that. And another potential Launched guest is Loren Brichter with pull-to-refresh. That still exists to this day, and as a paradigm that was an experimentation in a third party app that then became a thing that Apple adopted, and now so many apps adopt that pull-to-refresh paradigm. That was exactly what you're saying was like an exploration of multi-touch UI originated with a third party developer that ended up becoming a system thing. So, when Launch Center Pro launched, we had already kind of had that momentum going from Launch Center, and Launch Center Pro got a ton of press and attention right out of the gate.

Charlie Chapman:

So, what was the reason for making Launch Center Pro as a separate app versus just updating it like nowadays is how you generally do that?

David Barnard:

I'm actually struggling with the same decision with Weather Up and landing on the other side of it. It's that when you make a massive change to the UI, are you kind of pulling the rug out from people who have muscle memory really like what you're doing? It wasn't obvious to us at the time, but then everybody complained after the fact that it should have just been an update. But to us it was like, okay, people who like Launch Center can keep using it. It's fine. I have a whole blog post around the thinking around this, but it was like it's a great app just the way it is and we'll keep adding URL schemes and making it more powerful over time. But Launch Center Pro is going to be that ... Even that interaction we just discussed, that was a little experimental, a little nerdy. It wasn't just open the app and tap and then move on. It was like there's folders and complex gestures and things like that.

So our thinking was we're going to have Launch Center, it's kind of like the training wheels, easy to use, 10 shortcuts. It's a list, everything. And then Launch Center Pro was going to be the nerdier, more sophisticated pro version. And so, that was the thinking behind it.

Charlie Chapman:

And at the time this was paid up front, right? This is before you could do subscription apps, at least for productivity apps.

David Barnard:

Right. And so, that was part of the complaint was the hardcore ... But I still think we made the right choice. I mean, I think I did apologize for it, but it was really, it was so much a different app that I think if we'd have made that choice for people, then we would've gotten the other 10% of people complaining like, "Why'd you take away my Launch Center? I really liked it. And now I don't like the gestures and I don't like the home screen layout, and you messed it all up." And so, I think we were just kind of like either way, we were kind of screwed. With Weather Up, we're actually about to launch a massive revamp of the user experience of it. And I am a little nervous if we're going to get that 10% that's just like, "Why'd you take away? I liked it the way it was." It's like ...

Charlie Chapman:

Can you add a setting to revert the UI? Or can you add a setting to turn on the old UI? Every time one of my friends releases a big update and it starts getting praise, the first thing I'll send them is, "Hey, can you add a setting to turn on the old UI?" Because it's just like death. I think Reddit has done all of us a disservice by creating and maintaining ... I'm not saying that they shouldn't have done that, but it creates this idea in people's heads that's like, "Why don't you just have a setting to keep the old one around?" Kind of ignoring how hard that is. But anyway, so Launch Center Pro released and got to acclaim, right? People were very excited about it. It added a lot of new power features and the UI was much nicer.

David Barnard:

Yeah, it was featured. Apple did actually end up featuring it, even though they barely approved it.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, it's funny how about facing those can go sometimes.

David Barnard:

Yeah, it got covered in TechCrunch and The Verge and all the big publications at the time. Everybody on Twitter was talking about it. And then one of the interesting things that happened over time was that because it was in people's docs and because sharing a screenshot of your home screen was kind of a bigger deal, there was even an app. It was an app that got investment or acquired or something even that was a share your home screen and keep your home screens updated, and keep a history of your home screens and how they've changed over time, because people were still excited like, "What's the new thing? What do people have in their docs? What's an app that I should ..." There was so much more of the fun hobbyist side of iPhone that I feel like there are still pockets of, but it's maybe kind of disappeared in some extent.

And so, it had this nice kind of floor, but it was paid up front. And so, that floor would start to trickle off and we were constantly in this cycle of needing to make the news again. And with a $5 paid upfront, and actually a lot of the life of Launch Center Pro was $3 paid up front, that's all a lot of people ever paid us was-

Charlie Chapman:

You need a lot of inbound. Yeah.

David Barnard:

And then it was on sale for 99 cents a few times. So, there were plenty of people who only ever paid us a dollar for something that they put in their doc and used every single day, multiple times a day.

Charlie Chapman:

Wanted constant updates. I think that's an important piece too, is because this system, it wasn't a standard. It's not like, "Oh, I support Apple's blah," and everybody who releases an app that supports this you just get for free. You kind of had to keep updating and keep up with all the different things going on for all these different apps, right?

David Barnard:

Yep, yep. URL scheme. And then one of the things we did do that ... I mean, we kind of helped perpetuate URL schemes, because as it became popular people would bug the developers of apps saying, "You need to put in a URL scheme." And then they would point people to our docs that would explain how to do it and why to do it. And then we had a submission form where they could then submit those URL schemes to us to include in our directory. And there were so many things over the years. And we got approached for investment because it was like, "Hey, you're in all these people's docs."

Charlie Chapman:

You're kind of a platform in some degree, right?

David Barnard:

Yeah. We got approached I think by, if I remember correctly, it was Google or somebody like that who wanted the data on what apps were being used and how frequently they're being launched. They were like, "Ah, that's not really a good alignment with how we do things." But it did become this kind of hub of that whole URL scheme movement. And Drafts did a lot, but Drafts was more about notes and the kind of bouncing text around back and forth from apps, and storing texts in URLs, and all that kind of stuff. And so, its utility was different enough that he's done very well over the years and great app and everything, but because we were just such a ... And it's a good example, to this day there are niches within niches, and it's like we were in this broader productivity niche that was a little more accessible to a random person.

And I've been surprised over the years by people who tell me like, "Oh yeah, I used Launch Center Pro back in the day." And I'm thinking you're not nerdy enough. You're people in the press and I think people like that-

Charlie Chapman:

I think that's where people like Federico who have this audience of people who are nerdy and want to do these productivity things, or they run a business or whatever and want to automate stuff. And he is good at making that kind of accessible by giving recipes or shortcuts or whatever it is now to kind of help people. And because Launch Center Pro was kind of at the maelstrom of all this, but there was a massive community. Actually, the equivalent now would probably be the Notion community. You go to YouTube, you're going to see all these people who make content to help people understand how to do this pretty nerdy stuff, and it's to help them automate a spreadsheet because they're setting up a manufacturing line or whatever. It is crazy how broad brush these things can be used for.

David Barnard:

So, you would think with all that attention and all that groundswell, and we were getting ... Viticci was probably writing about us once a month as a new app would come out, and he'd use Launch Center Pro to do cool stuff with it. You think we were just rolling in cash, but it was, again, 99 cents when it was on sale a few times and 2.99 a pop. We did all right, but we weren't making great money.

Charlie Chapman:

It's not Mirror money.

David Barnard:

Wasn't Mirror. Mirror was like this slow build, and that was actually a little bit of ... During that time I was making 50% of Launch Center Pro money, my partner Justin was making 50% of Launch Center Pro money, but then I had Mirror on the side. So I think we're only making 120, maybe 150 a ... I think at the peak it was maybe one year we did 150K each. So, we were not making millions off of this thing, but Mirror was that other base, although so much of that money was continually reinvested in other experiments and apps and hiring contractors. I had two separate projects that I got $50,000 into with contractors that I just had to pull the plug on. I realized I was throwing good money after bad. So yeah, just kissed 100 grand worth of projects goodbye because I didn't see a path to recouping the money I'd already invested, much less the additional 50 or 100,000 it would've taken to launch.

But to your point about investing money, I was always very open to spending money to make money and reinvesting what I made back into it. But Launch Center Pro never made a ton of money. I mean, over the years it ended up grossing over a million dollars, but that was over the course of years and that was gross, and Apple took 30% at that time. There was no small business program. I mean, over the course of the 18 years, I need to go back and calculate, but I know I've paid them well over a million dollars. So me, little indie app developer who has never really made enough to pay me more than a good tech job, I never made more as an indie developer than I have at Revenue Cat as an employee.

Charlie Chapman:

That's good context for people to hear too, that are listening, because I think a lot of people think because you hear about those, there's a very wide variance on the amount of money people are making and it's not connected to how well known they are in the community. Those are deeply disconnected things.

David Barnard:

It's not even connected to the utility of the app or how well known it is. It boils down to things around size of the audience, like the ASO, people weren't searching for launcher, and it wasn't something you think you need and then you go search. So, we didn't have that kind of SEO base that a lot of apps have where I'm going to go snowboarding so I search for a snowboarding app and I find Slopes. Those kind of obvious connections weren't there for Launch Center Pro. And I think that's one of the reasons, even though it was so well-loved and so popular, it still was a very kind of productivity niche. And then we weren't charging very much, subscriptions weren't a thing at the time. And so I will say looking back, one of my big regrets, and another thing I remember very vividly was sitting at this restaurant in Wimberley with Justin and my cousin Brock, who was working with us at the time and now works with me on Weather Up.

We're sitting around having lunch talking about, it must have been like iOS 10, I think. And there were kind of a couple of new things that we could do with Launch Center Pro, but there wasn't any big marquee feature, but we're like, "Should we make this a paid update?" Because that was the only way back then to take your existing user base and actually make another 3, oh my gosh, $3. But it was super controversial. It was like people would get really pissed that, "Oh, I already paid you $3-"

Charlie Chapman:

Every new Tweetbot version would make people so mad.

David Barnard:

And then, the other problem was a technical problem is that you have to create a new SKU. So, it'd be like Launch Center Pro 2, and then you would lose all your ratings, you would lose all the whatever search momentum you did have. And so, that summer and then that specific lunch, Justin was actually lobbying for we need to make more money, and in order to make more money we really need to do a paid update. And I argued against it because I just didn't feel like we had enough to justify a paid update. Looking back we probably just should have done it, taken it on the chin and maybe we'd still be working on Launch Center Pro today. But that was that kind of pivotal moment, pivotal business decision where looking back I probably would've done it differently. But those are such hard decisions to make in the moment, especially when at that time there was just so much backlash.

I mean, in the era of 2026 when you have $10 a week subscriptions, the fact that we were charging upfront one time and people got all this utility for a buck or three bucks, and then would bitch and moan, and bitch and moan if we charged them another three bucks, just crazy to think back how different the app store was at that time.

Charlie Chapman:

And especially so if you were known in the community, because your reputation is also part of this.

David Barnard:

Yeah, for sure.

Charlie Chapman:

And in Launch Center Pro's case, that mattered. You were kind of trading on that. Whereas Mirror, it's like most of those people didn't know who you were and didn't care. So, it kind of depends on which type of business you're running. But you kind of mentioned you could have been working on Launch Center Pro today. So, implying you are not currently working on Launch Center-

David Barnard:

No.

Charlie Chapman:

... Pro today-

PART 3 OF 5 ENDS [01:39:04]

Charlie Chapman:

So implying you are not currently working on Launch Center Pro today. So yeah, what's the rest of the Launch Center Pro story then?

David Barnard:

So part of the Launch Center Pro story is what I already said, is that Workflows came out and they were four super sharp young San Francisco guys who were I think living in a hacker house at the time. And here Justin and I, I think at the time we both had already had three kids. We're just in a very different life stage and different kind of ability to grind on these things. And so part of the story is that Workflow came out and started to eat our lunch to a certain extent. Now we integrated with them, they integrated with us and we did have a somewhat friendly relationship with them over the years, but they did so much. They really went nuts on it. And so a lot of the more and more of... Viticci's post and more and more of the community was more focused on Workflow because they were just moving so fast and adding so much and being so innovative.

I believe that actually, I talked to Ari before Workflow came out. It was stuck in App Review for like three months. And I think they eventually let it in for a similar reason that they let-

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, same kind of deal.

David Barnard:

... Launcher Pro in. But he was sweating it for a while there. And again, absolutely, and I don't know if you cuss on Launch, you can bleep it if not.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, it'll be cut out.

David Barnard:

Batshit crazy that Apple was on the fence about Workflow and then three years later ends up acquiring it. So part of the story is Workflow competing and kind of sucking some of the air out of the room for those productivity nerds. And the funny story I have to tell since we're here and I have a mic to tell it with. They did.

Charlie Chapman:

I should interrupt here. If you're looking at your podcast player and you see, "Wait a minute, it's how long and it still has this much left?" You're getting essentially an insight into what me and David's weekly one-on-ones that are ostensibly about work look like. We both were blessed with the gift of gab, as they say, so we have no problem talking and selfishly-

David Barnard:

We could do podcasts of our podcast.

Charlie Chapman:

... episode 100 is perfect. We're recording this on a Friday. We can pull on threads and go a little crazy, but thank you all for still listening if those of you who are still here.

David Barnard:

So with that disclaimer, a little self-serving side tangent here, because Launch Center Pro was kind of the hub of URL schemes for a long time, even after Workflow was released, so many people were still requesting URL schemes for Launch Center Pro. We were still kind of a little bit more of the mainstream and Workflow was a little bit more the kind of nerdy. I believe they were charging like 10 bucks and we were charging three and five at that time. I think-

Charlie Chapman:

Also, all of your users you had had for five years or three years or whatever at that point, they could all go buy Workflow and then Workflow is getting new money while you were not. They had the advantage of starting over like you were kind of talking about wanting to do.

David Barnard:

Yeah. And most people use both because Workflow was never really a... They never really did a whole Launcher UI. And I don't even know, I didn't hear from Ari on this ever, but they may have tried a more Launch Center Pro UI and got rejected by Apple.

Charlie Chapman:

That could be, yeah.

David Barnard:

I did hear from other people, there are other launchers that were released eventually. And so there are other launchers still on the App Store to this day, but I did hear from people who said that Apple specifically told them that Launch Center Pro was grandfathered in and that they weren't going to allow any more launcher apps that broke the rule about mimicking the home screen. So that may have actually been part of it. I've never asked Ari that, is that they may have tried to go down that road and Apple said no, but they were never quite that kind of quick launcher that we were. Justin did incredible engineering around launch time. And so at a time when app launching might take two or three seconds, we forget how constrained the ARM chip was back in those days. I mean, some of these were even pre-Apple Silicon and even the early days of Apple Silicon, they were just getting started.

Workflow was never quite that. So we did still kind of have... Most people would use both, not just one and those kinds of things. But because we were kind of that hub for URL schemes, we had so many URL schemes that were directly submitted to us via our form that had a very detailed explanation. And then developers would send us these really complex URL schemes and the parameters and how they work and all that kind of stuff. So we could then build our URL composer to make it easy for people so they didn't have to type out these long URLs. We actually put fields and then the fields would combine into... It would eventually resolve down to a URL because it had to in order to launch the app, but we would take care of a lot of that and the URL encoding and special characters and all that needs to be encoded.

So we built up this database of URL schemes that was proprietary. People were submitting it to us. There's not a way to decompile an app and find this. A lot of these developers would submit them to us and not go document them or whatever. So at some point I figured out that not only did Workflow borrow from our list of URL schemes, they actually copied our data. We had a JSON file with all our URL schemes and we'd update it remotely. So it sat on a Amazon S3 bucket. We left it in public and open. You could get it from the documents folder and everything like that. And so they either grabbed it from the app or grabbed it from our S3 bucket and the actual file with all of our structure and all of our URL schemes and all of that was in the workflow app binary. Not only that, but that survived the acquisition from Apple.

Charlie Chapman:

I was going to ask, is that in Shortcuts somewhere you think?

David Barnard:

I think I brought it to Ari's attention at some point and I don't know if that triggered alarm bells and I don't know what clauses he had in his contract with Apple when they acquired Shortcut. I don't know how sweaty I made him when I brought this up in a Twitter DM a couple of years after he got acquired, but I found it in the Shortcuts binary and I believe it was removed very shortly after.

Charlie Chapman:

So you've contributed to at least versions of iOS?

David Barnard:

Yeah. Things that I typed into a JSON file were part of what Apple shipped in one of their system apps.

Charlie Chapman:

That's amazing.

David Barnard:

I've thought back over the years like, should I have sued them? Because technically that was copyrighted material, but then it just would've been a nasty thing. And then I think you could argue that it wasn't copyrightable because it was somewhat discoverable and it was code from other people. There was enough ambiguity, and I'm not super salty, but I almost wear it more as a badge of honor.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah. Especially now it's probably easier. I'm sure there was a time, especially when it felt like one of your businesses was and was kind of slowly dying. It's probably hard emotionally.

David Barnard:

I think the more frustrating thing was that we had put literally hundreds of hours into this. And so it was a bit of a, pardon the pun, but it was a bit of a shortcut for them to take to grab our database instead of having to compile that themselves and reach out to the developers and build this ecosystem that people are submitting it to you. And one of the other-

Charlie Chapman:

Imagine building a business on top of just sucking down somebody else's data and then using that to build a model of some kind for your own product that then... But you would never be worth that much probably if you were to ever do that.

David Barnard:

Different thing though, because-

Charlie Chapman:

Oh, I know. I know, I know.

David Barnard:

... people were willingly submitting to us, but it was proprietary information that wasn't... And that was the whole point is if we had just been scraping the web or... There was at the time, this is a whole nother tangent. Apple at the time did not limit the number of URL schemes that you could query. So inside an app, you could basically run a loop that says, "Is this URL scheme accessible? Yes, no. Is this accessible? Is this accessible? Is this accessible? Is this accessible?" And so what some enterprising, I believe it was ad and attribution companies did was they would scan every binary because in the binary you could get the basic URL scheme, you could get the equivalent of the mail too. So Instagram colon, that was viewable in the binary. The additional parameters and all of that was encoded in a way that you couldn't just decompile and figure out.

But the URL scheme for an app was in the binary in an easy to access JSON file. And so they would scan hundreds of thousands of apps. They built up these databases of hundreds of thousands of apps and it was used for fingerprinting.

Charlie Chapman:

That's what I was going to say. If you know literally every single app somebody has, and then you're trying to map person A on this app to person B on this map, which is very valuable for somebody running an advertising company and you need to know between apps who the same person is, if you're like, "This is 100% match and a bunch of other information."

David Barnard:

And you also learn things about people like, "Oh, they use Evernote instead of Apple's Notes apps." It's like you could also almost profile them based on the games and apps that they had installed. But anyways, my point on that was we weren't just scanning binaries. And that's why this took us hundreds of hours. It wasn't hundreds of hours of scraping the web and finding all this. It was hundreds of hours of... Some of it we would find, some of it we would reach out. When people would ask us, we would email that developer and say, "Hey, can you document your URL scheme?" When people would submit to us, we still had to take their submission and translate it into exactly how everything worked and how to build the URL schemes and all that kind of stuff. And so it was a lot of manual labor.

It wasn't just scraping the web for data. And that's why I think we could have had a strong copyright argument because there was so much work behind it and because it was non-public information, but it's a road I'm glad I never went down. That's not one of the things I look back and regret.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah. Yeah. You'd be in a very different place. Yeah, exactly. So like we said an hour and a half ago or something, Launch Center Pro is no longer a thing that you're working on. So what led to-

David Barnard:

It kills me. I just-

Charlie Chapman:

What was the moment that it-

David Barnard:

... pulled it from the app store six months ago.

Charlie Chapman:

Okay. Because I thought it was still in the store and when I was prepping for this, I looked it up and I'm like, "Oh, it's not in the store." So you did have it staying around for a really long time.

David Barnard:

We weren't making great money. We didn't release that paid update that I do to this day regret. And eventually with three kids of his own and being a very talented programmer, Justin, my business partner, who I still... I saw him at the open house, the high school open house two nights ago and we have lunch and we're still friends to this day, but he ended up joining a startup and then this Launch Center Pro became his side project versus for a long time it was his full-time job. 100% think that was absolutely the right thing for him to do. It was hard for me at the time to have him abandon me as it were. And then that part did get tricky, and I'll say this as an admonition to folks who are partnering with other people on an app. If you're a developer and partnering with a influencer or a developer and a designer pairing up and things like that, you don't think about it until you have to, but the unwinding of those relationships is where it gets very tricky.

And so what ended up happening was Justin was really enjoying working at this startup and making thousands of dollars a month, had three kids, but he was working 60, 80 hours a week at this new startup and very well-intentioned. He's like, "Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. We should do this feature next weekend. I'm going to work on it on Saturday." Well, he'd already worked 60 hours that week for a startup and then he's got kids and life and everything. And so it just kept getting pushed back and pushed back and pushed back. And so when you don't update an app, and as we discussed, part of what we were dependent on was making the news and doing interesting things in order to stay ahead of things. It did start to just trickle off, which for Justin, it was like, "Oh, well, my eight or 10,000 dollars a month passive income is now six or 7,000."

And meanwhile, I'm like, "Okay, my income is taking a hit." Thankfully, I still had Mirror at the time, and so bills were paid and everything, but it was a pretty stressful time. This is another thing, I don't say this to embarrass Justin or anything, but it's something if you're working with somebody in some kind of a partnership or a co-ownership, there are certain things you probably should define at the outset about what each person is responsible for. And then if they're not fulfilling their duties, what happens? So my argument to Justin was, "Hey, your half of the partnership is that you do the coding and I do everything else, like product and marketing and everything else." I paid for a lot of other things as well because it did feel like he, in some ways, his time was maybe more valuable than mine or whatever. So we didn't always split expenses down the middle even when we were fifty fifty partners.

But anyways, so my argument to him at some point was, "Hey, realistically, you're just not going to code anymore on this app. We just need to face the facts. So let's take your $6,000 a month, find a contractor and pay them to keep up the app and you can help manage that and we'll keep things going." And he really liked his passive income and was like, "No, my 50% was like, I built this thing and now I'm getting the rewards and working with you making barely over a hundred K a year for a few years, this is kind of making up for the lost time that I could have had a better programming job. This is an asset I built and now the asset's paying me back. Why does my income..." So we did eventually settle on, "Okay, we'll hire a contractor, we'll split it fifty fifty." I was like, "Okay, fine. I don't think that's fair, but I just don't want to see this die." So we hired a guy and it didn't work out.

He was overseas and Justin had worked with him before, and so we thought he was... It just didn't work out. But we got a couple updates in and it did all right. And so eventually, we're going super deep on all this stuff, but-

Charlie Chapman:

That's what this show is for.

David Barnard:

... all that just is a word of caution for folks, because I think it is very instructive and I certainly learned a lot and do things differently now in those kinds of partnerships.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, it's like decisions you make at the beginning can help you avoid both parties being in a situation where what they want makes sense, but they're no longer aligned, right?

David Barnard:

Right.

Charlie Chapman:

And so yeah, you can't do everything to avoid that. Sometimes that's just the nature of living life and business partnerships. But yeah, there's definitely lessons you can learn or clauses or things you can put in the contracts to keep incentives aligned or at least have something happen based on that. But then at the end of the day, you need trust, which it sounds like you did have, and that's really the most important thing.

David Barnard:

Yeah. Eventually Justin was like, "Okay." It had been, I don't know, two years or something. I was like, "I need to go find another partner." I forget. I think I agreed to keep paying him 10% or something just to keep some money, and it had dwindled so much that it's like he wasn't losing as much. I found a new developer, and that's part of this whole thread too, is that I didn't ever learn to code, and so I was always dependent on either a partner or a contractor. So either I was investing $50,000 and not getting a return, or I was partnering with somebody and then ending up with conflicting interests or... Hard things to work out.

I found a new guy that I worked with for several years, and we shipped some good stuff, but we just never recaptured the glory and momentum. We tried to shift it to subscriptions, but when we did that, we only updated the iPhone app because that was 95% of the usage was the iPhone app and we're like, "Okay, we'll update the iPhone app and then we'll get back to the iPad app and make it universal and all this stuff." That was not well received by the nerd community. Again, looking back, understandably, the iPad was a big thing, and for people who were deep into it, they were using it on iPhone and iPad, and so it was kind of ridiculous that we didn't make it universal and didn't update.

But for us as a cutthroat business decision, if 95% of our revenue and 95% of our usage is on iPhone, we need to make the smart business decision and focus on making a really killer iPhone update. And that was the change over to subscription. So we really wanted it to be a great new update with a lot of cool new stuff, but in part, because the community that would've otherwise shouted it out and been excited about it, they instead-

Charlie Chapman:

That was the specific community that was upset.

David Barnard:

Exactly. And so I said earlier, I regretted not doing a paid update, but that may have ended the same way, that the exact community that was otherwise excited about the app and talking about it would've then switched to criticizing us for charging again. That switch to subscriptions just bombed. It bombed so bad. It was probably too little too late. People had moved on, shortcuts had been released. There just wasn't enough that we could do to rekindle the fire. When Widget Smith blew up, we did take another crack at it with home screen customization. Having had a few months that were like 60 and $80,000, it was very spiky. But when that has happened in the past, even making 10 grand and knowing that that's the peak and then it's going to settle back down, you're not peaking and then going to continue going up. I think each of those updates probably did make 10 to 20 grand, which amazing if it's a side hustle, not amazing if you're trying to-

Charlie Chapman:

It's your main job.

David Barnard:

Yeah. And so it was sometime in that intervening time that I was like, "I got to get a job or some kind of a job." Oh, funny story too, that was kind of going on in the background of all this. Justin and I almost sold Launch Center Pro to Zapier.

Charlie Chapman:

Oh, interesting.

David Barnard:

Yeah. We got pretty deep in talks with them, actually multiple times. The first time it fizzled out was because it was so early with Zapier. They were like, "We think your price is really fair, but we just don't have that much. We can't invest that much cash. So we will give you stock in Zapier for the app, but we can't give you very much cash and we want to hire both of you." And this, I will throw Justin under the bus. He was like, "Nah, I don't want stock in some Silicon Valley company."

Charlie Chapman:

They're going nowhere.

David Barnard:

"I want cold, hard cash." But this was maybe 20-

Charlie Chapman:

Oh, I understand. I'm very-

David Barnard:

... 13 or something like that. They were still pretty under the radar at the time. And famously now, they only ever raised, I think, a series A and never ever raised again. They were able to get profitable pretty... And this is why they didn't just throw money at us. But that's a crazy one because doing back of the napkin math on what the price they were willing to pay and the value of their stock at the time, that would probably be 50 to $100 million today had we sold the app for stock. Looking back, Justin and I thought, "Oh, we're hot shots. We've done Launch Center Pro. We can do it again." This is another lesson for entrepreneurs out there that we though, "Oh, Launch Center Pro is going to keep going and we're going to build other apps." I think we were kicking around multiple other app concepts at the time.

And Justin was like, "Yeah, the opportunity cost of getting a job at Zapier, who are they? Are they going anywhere? Whatever." I was even more so... He was like, "Yeah, I could do that. Maybe we'll just work on stuff on the side." I was like, "You're going to hire Justin and buy the app and I'm just going to ride off into the sunset." And that was maybe even part of it too, but that fizzled out. And then there were actually two other times where I almost sold it to them because I mean, to this day, they don't have anything on iOS.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, it's kind of surprising.

David Barnard:

And I think it's just been a focus thing for them where they've explored it multiple times and we've had many conversations about all the cool stuff they could build tying into... But they're way more B2B and background automation versus more active stuff. But I think there's just so much cool stuff they could still do. So there were multiple times that I almost sold Launch Center Pro. And then the very last time was that spring when I was like, "All right, I probably should get a job. I should reach back out," and had dinner with the three co-founders. I had dinner with the three Zapier co-founders at WWDC in 2019 to talk about them buying Launch Center Pro.

That's another funny one because they were super gung-ho. And then the developer I was working with at the time, he went through some interviews because they were thinking about it as a package deal. They would acquire the app.

Charlie Chapman:

Right. It's kind of an acquihire.

David Barnard:

And then that guy and I would join as full-time employees and be the mobile division at Zapier. But people can probably look him up, so I don't want to throw him too under the bus. I haven't mentioned his name for a reason. He's incredibly talented and honestly, one of the sharper developers I've ever worked with. And he's one of those kind of 10X developers that just gets so much done and works crazy hours and will just grind. But he kind of failed on the... What do you call it? The...

Charlie Chapman:

Technical interview?

David Barnard:

No. Not technical, the-

Charlie Chapman:

Or culture?

David Barnard:

Culture. So he kind of failed on the culture piece. And so that fell apart in July of 2019. Meanwhile, I had been talking to Jacob about joining RevenueCat. So to come full circle, it was right after that all fell apart. And again, that's not something I regret. I think it's been amazing joining RevenueCat. It's been a fun seven years here. And I joined part-time. That's another thing. For almost two years, I was only part-time at RevenueCat, and then part-time I was still working on Launch Center Pro and other apps.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah. And just to roll back a little bit, you had led up to as Launch Center Pro was going down, and I know you had other apps and stuff, you started thinking, "I should look at getting a job." You had never had a tech job before at a company, right?

David Barnard:

No.

Charlie Chapman:

Were you just like, "I want some stability?"

David Barnard:

I never had a job. I was like, "I need money to put food on the table."

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, that's fair. Okay. That's fair. Okay. And then why RevenueCat specifically? Why were you talking with them?

David Barnard:

Well, and just a side tangent here. I mean, the dreamy indie developer path that a lot of people idealize and think, "Oh, wow." I mean, I don't think I had an especially storied indie developer career, though I'm very flattered at the people who do recognize me for Launch Center Pro. I never made great tech money. I made decent enough money living in Texas, having a small family, being pretty frugal enough, but I was not bringing in hundreds of thousands of dollars. I think the peak I ever made as an indie was 150K, and I did sell a few apps, so I had a few big influxes, but then when I sold Mirror, that sold for over $400,000. And that's actually kind of nice when you sell an app. I don't know if the tax rules are the same today, but at the time I was able to pay long-term capital gains on it. And so I paid 15% tax, not employment tax that I was getting, but that was my paycheck that I sold my paycheck for $400,000. And so that was another-

Charlie Chapman:

Right. You quit a job in a way.

David Barnard:

Yeah. And so yeah, it's like I quit my job. Now I've got all this money in the bank and now I got to make something happen. And so I reinvested a lot of that. I lived on that. And so that was actually... I was burning through that money trying to make something happen throughout this time. And then toward the end, it was like, "Okay, I don't want it to go to zero next year. I got pretty close."

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah. It's like when you're learning to drive, the main rule is don't let the cars touch. When you're learning to live life, the main rule is don't let the money get to zero. That's the goal.

David Barnard:

Yeah. So then to get back to your question, why RevenueCat, I was working on switching or I had launched WeatherUp as a subscription app in the intervening time. We haven't even talked about WeatherUp.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, I know. We haven't talked about the app that you have that's active still today, so I'm great at this job. But yeah, WeatherUp, it was like your third run at a weather app, or was it your second and a half because you'd rebranded?

David Barnard:

Yes, it was WeatherUp was second and a half because I had Perfect Weather and then the second shot was Weather Atlas, and then Weather Atlas got rebranded to WeatherUp.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah. For SEO reasons, as we kind of talked about earlier.

David Barnard:

Yes. Well, Weather Atlas was great at the time because it is a very map focused weather app, and that was what we were trying to pitch it as was if you care about weather maps, this is the app for you. And so we launched that as a subscription and had all sorts of problems. We didn't want to go through all-

Charlie Chapman:

Because you were not using RevenueCat, right?

David Barnard:

Well, RevenueCat didn't exist when we did it. That's the thing. We launched it in 2016, right when subscriptions started to become a thing. I mean, funny enough, I think our price was 50 cents a month or $10 a year, which is just crazy in the day of $10 a week weather apps. But yeah, it was so much work and maintenance and headache to build out a whole server to manage receipts and validate receipts and all that stuff. So we were doing client side receipt validation, which was kind of a no-no, but a lot of apps were doing it. So there was some libraries to do it, but they weren't very well maintained and Apple wasn't officially supporting it, so things would break. And so much engineering time went into the subscription. And honestly, had RevenueCat existed before WeatherUp and we used RevenueCat, I might not have ever joined RevenueCat because I think one of the big failures of WeatherUp is that we spent so much time troubleshooting subscriptions, building that stuff out that.

I mean, had we executed on the list of things that we wanted to do with the app, I think it would have been successful. But instead of being able to execute on all of the features... And there's still things that, looking back again, the sequencing of things is also very important. We kind of felt like we needed to have a... And you and I have talked about this a lot. It's like, should you focus on covering your bases? There were certain expectations of what a weather app should be, and we felt like we needed to kind of cover the bases of what a weather app could be, and then we'd layer these innovative features on top.

What we should have done was do the bare minimum possible of what a weather app could or should be and very much focus on the differentiation. And we kind of got that backward. And so it launched and the reason to exist was that it was a more map focused weather app, but that wasn't super exciting and super differentiating. Maps were always a tap away and the storm app was a thing where it launched right into an even more sophisticated mapping feature. And so it was a great app, but it just didn't have that differentiation. Well, I can show you pictures of the whiteboard of all the innovative features that Carrot Weather has since launched.

And we eventually got to some of them with WeatherUp, but I think the sequencing of how we built and when we built was actually part of the failure mode of WeatherUp. But an even bigger one was just so much engineering time went into stuff that didn't matter, that wasn't product that was window dressing. And I mean, that's even a failure mode...

In some ways it's actually partly a failure mode of AI today, just like it has been a failure mode of programmers in the past. But there was also a lot of time spent making everything reusable. And I was not a good product leader in helping to drive the technical side. And then some of the folks I've worked with over the years are a little bit more the kind of code perfectionist where they were thinking about reusability and beauty of the code and things like that. That's actually, I mean, if I look back on my career, one of the things that I wished could have gone differently is I do feel like paired up with the right programmer who had more of that mindset and moved quickly and everything like that, I feel like WeatherUp could have been more success.

There were a bunch of other apps I wanted to build over the years that I didn't, that I think could have done well, but I never quite had that simpatico is what they say in Spanish of just the right part. Justin and I got close, I think. That's the closest I've ever had and I really enjoyed working with him. But that's a tricky thing about being an app developer who doesn't actually code is that I was always having to either pay contractors or work with partners and having to navigate that aspect of the relationship and just genuinely and in hindsight, not ever being especially good at that side of things where I could have gotten better at.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah. And we are already so significantly over time that we won't get to pull on this thread as much, but might as well bring it up here is you kind of are playing the, not playing the role, you are doing the role of developer now. You have an app out there now that you built completely on your own, right?

David Barnard:

I did.

Charlie Chapman:

Do you feel like you're getting a taste of having an engineer who's mind melded with you a little bit more now that you're building with these AI tools?

David Barnard:

It's been really fun to be able to just YOLO prompts and...

PART 4 OF 5 ENDS [02:12:04]

David Barnard:

Really fun to be able to just YOLOE prompts and get a build minutes later instead of days later. One of the toughest things over the years for me has been we've never really done much experimentation. I don't think I've ever done an onboarding AB test.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah. Anybody who listens to us as RevenueCat employees is like, "What?" It's like, yeah, we work with people and help them set theirs up all the time. But I've done some experiments on that with mine, but yeah, not as much as I've done with other bigger companies.

David Barnard:

Yeah. And even paywall tests, the only paywall test I've done is because RevenueCat made it so easy to do that. One of the tensions has always been if I ask the contractor to do something, am I going to get a dollar for dollar return on that time investment that they put in? And that's a really tough question to answer. And again, that's something I feel like I probably failed at more than I would ever want to admit.

But these are the things at a bigger company, at a funded company, it's like you have more opportunity to fail at those things. Whereas an indie developer, you focus on the wrong things, you burn a bunch of cash on the wrong project, that's your paycheck that you just ate. And it's just a very different life. And so it has been a ton of fun working with AI in that I can actually YOLOE some of the things that I wouldn't have paid a contractor to do, and I wouldn't have kind of burdened a partner with because it felt inconsequential.

So the app I launched is called Grit Method, and I'm almost embarrassed to have launched it, kind of like the Mirror app, but for very different reasons, talking to so many successful apps on the podcast. And I mean I've had Duolingo on the podcast, everything from people making 10 million a year to people making billions a year. And so Grit Method is an incredibly niche app. It was never intended to make a lot of money or anything. It was really just like I wanted to do something fun.

And because AI does let you do these explorations, I wanted to like, okay, if I can just tinker and build, what will I build? What can I build? And that was genuinely a blast. I mean, it wasn't a blast working nights and weekends, and my wife was not super happy with me the three months that I was working on the app because I did get pretty obsessed.

But if you go look at the app, I'm very proud of how it turned out. I didn't work with the designer. I forced myself to just figure it out. And I worked with design MCPs and figured out color schemes and everything like that. Even all the promotional art, everything like that is me and AI together, put them together, Claude Design, and prototyping the designs in ChatGPT image and stuff like that.

But even the app itself, there's animations and onboarding and things stagger in in a nice way. And even when you hit the back animation, it slides back nicely. I was able to do all those little fun touches that you just don't get to do if you're thinking is this a dollar for dollar return of a programmer's time to implement this thing when time and money are two of the biggest constraints on building. So that part of it was a ton of fun, but I never expected Grit Method to make much money and it didn't make much money.

Charlie Chapman:

And real quick, what's the app itself? What does it do?

David Barnard:

So gosh, six or seven years ago, I was doing this thing with my kids, just thinking through what are the values I want to instill in them, and what matters and how do I want to bring them up and stuff. And I boiled it down to these four daily kind of questions that I thought would help them be thinking about character. And so it was like, do hard things, write something down that you're intentionally going to challenge yourself today to do. What are you going to avoid? Recognizing traps. I'm going to avoid video games today because my hard thing is do the whole week's of homework in a day or whatever. And then be grateful. So just gratitude is such a great thing to be mindful of and to force yourself to think, what am I grateful for?

And then the last one is, funny enough for the kids, it was what will I do to help around the house? Because we were really struggling to get them to do chores and stuff. So it was a way to kind of built in. And in Grit Method, it's like help others. So what can I do to help somebody else, either in my life immediately or surrounding?

So I did this as a paper journal for the kids. And it never really took off internally, which maybe is a good sign that it wasn't going to take off as an app either, which again, I fully expected. I wasn't expecting this to take off or make money. But it was just one of those things I've always had in the back of my mind that I loved the idea and it was fun to do with my kids. And I feel like it did. We did it enough that it did help instill some character and make them think about those things, and it opened conversations with them about how to challenge yourself and to be thinking of others and to be grateful and things like that.

And so I've always had in the back of my mind that it'd be fun to build this, but no way am I going to pay somebody 50K to do it, and no way am I going to ask a programmer whose time is valuable to YOLOE $50,000 worth of time to build it. And so when I was thinking around in the spring of what would be just a fun, easy project to just explore vibe coding as my first vibe coding app. And so I was like, oh, that's perfect. And so I ended up calling it a habit tracker for character. And yeah, it's a really fun app. I mean, I've been using it. And I've kept my streak ever since it launched on the App Store. And it was a ton of fun to build. And I mean, for an indie app, it's closing in on like $2,000 of revenue, which isn't terrible, but I did spend $2,000 in marketing.

Charlie Chapman:

You don't want to calculate the ROA on your time.

David Barnard:

So I'm not broken even on the money I spent on ads yet. I worked with a UGC platform to do UGC. But I mean, I just fell into all the same traps that I preach against on Twitter is that, by the time I launched the app, I was so burnt out on it that I didn't do all the things I had planned for marketing.

Because my hope for the app wasn't to make a ton of money, but I was like, hey, if this could make a grand a month. I still haven't even submitted it to Apple for being featured. Maybe if I could get it featured, it could make 500 bucks a month or something. But as soon as I finished, I was so burnt out that, even though I spent that 2,000 on UGC platform, I wasn't even paying enough attention to it and dialing in script. All the things you're supposed to do after you launch an app, I did nothing. I did none of it.

Charlie Chapman:

I think that's a familiar story to lots of people listening. You burn yourself out building and then you just kind of dribble it out into the world.

David Barnard:

And then even worse was that, pretty much immediately after that, I came up with an idea for another app where I was like, okay, this one actually probably could make money. And that's what I'm actually working on now as my Shipaton app. By the time I had enough energy to start vibe coding again, or that I should have been putting into marketing, I just started vibe coding a new app. Just falling into all the same traps.

Charlie Chapman:

You're truly a developer then.

David Barnard:

I am. You should see all the Xcode projects. I now have three new Xcode because there's another app I'd like to vibe code that I think is really fun. Probably not as much revenue potential as this one, but it's actually a fun spin on screen time apps, which are a huge category right now. And so I have two separate open Xcode projects that are partially finished at this very moment. So I am a true developer now, even if AI is the one writing the code.

Charlie Chapman:

All right. Well, let's see if I can land this plane, although it's going to be a long descent. So the last tangent we left off, you decided to join RevenueCat. The reason you heard about RevenueCat is you started building Weather Up to launch as a subscription app. You did launch it as a subscription app, presumably in the pain of subscription app stuff, you came across RevenueCat as it was being sort of launched and built and built up.

David Barnard:

No, that's actually, quick interruption to your story. Jacob cold DM-ed me and made me aware of RevenueCat. So I became aware of RevenueCat through, I mean, full circle to this whole-

Charlie Chapman:

So going back to 16 hours ago when you talked about you cold DM-ing people, it works in the reverse too.

David Barnard:

Jacob put himself out there.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, Jacob put himself out there.

David Barnard:

Cold DM-ed me and/or emailed me. I think it was both, like, "Hey, I saw you on Twitter complaining about subscription issues. I'm building this platform. You should check it out and use it." So that was actually the start of RevenueCat for me.

Charlie Chapman:

Okay. And so you joined initially as a contractor, eventually came on as a full-time, I think your initial title was developer advocate, but what you were really doing and what you eventually changed your title to was growth advocate, like marketing, but specifically knowing and being able to talk to the audience of people who build apps and are trying to market their apps and build subscription apps.

And you kind of already touched on the origin of your podcast Sub Club, but it was basically people asking you to start a podcast for RevenueCat, and you built it as very similar in a way to this show. It's an interview style podcast, but you're talking to people usually at larger companies, but you've talked to plenty of indies. We have a lot of overlap, as we've already talked about. About the stories of building and growing more in particular their app and the methods they've used, things that they've tried.

We've talked a lot about how jealous you are that, I like to say that Launched, now that we're both part of the RevenueCat podcast family, Launched is your dessert. It's fun. It's more easy listening maybe in a ways, but Sub Club is like your vegetables. It's like when I listen to Sub Club, I have notes opened a lot of times and I'm writing things down, ideas. It's way more dense. It's much, much more buttoned up. But it's really, really, really dense and high quality information for people that are trying to take the business of an app more seriously.

David Barnard:

Yeah. I've joked with you many times, although it is 100% true that I'm jealous that you get to do Launched and I have to do Sub Club. I love Sub Club and I love my job. But I do put a ton of work into... I don't think Rik, our mutual boss, even realizes how much effort I put into thinking through... It's so much more fun and easy in some ways to do this kind of a show. No offense. I think we agree on this.

Charlie Chapman:

No, I'm agreeing with you.

David Barnard:

Okay. But it's so much easier to tell stories and ask people questions about their life story and the story of their app. And all of that stuff is really fun and intertweaved in there, and even in this podcast, I've tried to intertweave and call out some specific lessons that I think people can learn from my mistakes and learn from the successes and failures of my career.

I have put a ton of effort into both guest selection and topic selection for Sub Club to make it very tactical. My goal with every episode is you should leave each episode with three AB tests or two new strategies you're going to try. If you're listening to a Sub Club episode, and you're not walking away with your mind spinning about how lessons from that episode could help you very concretely specifically improve your app, I haven't done my job. And so that not only takes a lot more effort in prepping, like last night, or no, this morning, I was hassling you because it's like, "Where's my doc?"

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah. I'm very intentional about I don't want people coming in prepared other than the question I always end with because I'm pulling on the threads. Although this one, we did not maintain a coherent story in this one really at all, but I also already knew you, although I've learned a ton already with us talking. But yeah, compared to Sub Club where it's like you're preparing guests and you want them coming in with the knowledge of what you're going to ask so that they're prepared for, again, high density answers, not them live remembering and thinking about things.

David Barnard:

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

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

And I love it, and I love hosting Sub Club and everything, but it is a ton of work. And so I do joke about how jealous I am of Launched and how much easier it would be if I just were hosting a chill kickback talk show. It's just a very different type of podcast and it serves very different needs. And that's why we have two podcasts in the burgeoning RevenueCat Media Network is because they serve two very different purposes and both are valuable. They're just aimed at different intent and different audiences.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah. Anybody listening to this, especially if you have an app in the store and you're trying to grow it, you need to listen to it, honestly. I would recommend just going through the back catalog and seeing what kind of catches your eye. The thing about Sub Club too is the show notes are nice and detailed, and the titles will give you an idea of what the kind of topic will be. Obviously, again, there's lots of threads that you pull on for each one, but you can kind of get a good idea.

And quite frankly, it's a major source for me to do the job that I do. I'm a developer advocate and I talk to engineers, but I talk to CEOs of companies, lots of people who are building apps, and it's kind of the foundation for me for a lot of the kind of industry knowledge of what does work, what doesn't work, what's popular right now, what's not popular right now.

So highly, highly recommend it, especially in an era where a lot of these sort of good industry download shows, there's not as many of them as there used to be, I feel like. Even when I got started six years ago, there was a bunch of podcasts that I could just mainline and feel like I got a good history of what the App Store is like nowadays. Sub Club is kind of one of those really good foundation kind of shows. So obviously I'm also paid to say that, so don't give me too much thanks, but I also do mean it.

David Barnard:

While you're praising Sub Club, let me pitch Sub Club Live, as if I weren't busy enough and putting enough effort into educational content for subscription app developers. I am now hosting a weekly live show every Thursday, 9:00 AM Pacific, 18:00 Central European time, where I bring some of those same experts on.

And one of the things I've experimented with is actually having a guest from the podcast on the live stream where it's almost like a part two, but in the live stream we actually take audience questions as well. And so it's a really fun, interactive. So we have talking points similar to the podcast where we will kind of discuss different topics, but then we'll take questions about those topics and then we'll open it up to a full Q&A at the end.

And so that every single week, again, it's a lot to manage, and I'm doing two guests a month on the podcast and four guests a month on the live stream now. A lot of emails, a lot of talking points, docs, a lot of all of that. But I think it's been really fun and I've had some really great guests. And the main podcast, I have kind of been focused a little more on bigger and bigger apps where I almost think the floor now is I'm generally inviting people on who are making over a million dollars a month in revenue, up to the Duolingos of the world and Life360, publicly traded, executives at publicly traded companies are coming on the show now.

And so I'm kind of orienting the main podcast more on that. And so for this audience, they actually might even be more interested in the live stream because I'm bringing more on the live stream, I'm bringing on more consultants. And it's a little more kind of David's choice, just whatever interesting topic or interesting guest I think that can be on.

Charlie Chapman:

I love whenever you have somebody on who's an expert at running ads on Meta or whatever. And people's questions, even if I wouldn't have had that question, hearing him talk through like, "Yeah, yeah, sometimes I've done this, sometimes I've done that." It's like that's super valuable because I've never... It's almost like having a coworker who's done all this stuff before. So yeah, those are really great.

Cool. Well, I think we kind of made it to the end here. So I'll end by asking the question I ask everyone to end this show, which is what's a person or people out there that have inspired you and your work that you'd recommend others check out?

David Barnard:

I didn't think about this very much because you just sent it to me an hour before the podcast.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, but that was eight hours ago, David. You've had our long, long, full day of conversation-

David Barnard:

I was supposed to be thinking-

Charlie Chapman:

... to think about it.

David Barnard:

... about this the whole time?

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, yeah.

David Barnard:

The first name that popped into my head, because I just had another conversation about him recently, is Donald Norman. And most of you won't know who that is, but he wrote a book called The Design of Everyday Things.

Charlie Chapman:

Oh, yes, yes.

David Barnard:

And I actually read that book, I believe in those first few months of starting App Cubby. So back full circle, when I was starting the company, I read the Aaron Hillegass book, and I believe it was around that time or just before that I read Design of Everyday Things. And he had a follow-up book that I read. I forget the name of the follow-up book, but it's just, I don't know, it's almost 20 years later, so I don't know how much it holds up today, it gives you that foundation of understanding usability and user experience in a deep way that just gives you the mental tools to reason through why something may work better as a UI paradigm than something else or think through user experience in a really detailed way.

And funny enough, I feel like that's almost affected my day-to-day life as much as it has impacted my career because it has changed, and maybe in some ways poorly, because there's so many things in our everyday life that have such terrible user experience. And it's just so baffling to me, having read that book and thought about user experience for 20 years now, the stupid little things.

And one of the things that bugs me the most is companies that think they're being Apple, because the iPod had the click wheel and then the iPod shuffle where you had to learn these magic incantations. And those were never even that great from Apple. Multi-Touch was Apple at its best. So many of the removing buttons and simplicity for the sake of simplicity was actually not good Apple, but people copy that. And so when you have a device that has a single button where you got to click the button twice to get into this mode and then you toggle through four different modes, it's like those little things, it's like that could just be a dial and a switch.

But it has made me way more discerning in the things I buy because I recognize those kind of things. And then the things that are designed really well, shout out to Kia. Not everybody may love this as much as I do, but I bought a Kia EV9. I never thought I'd be... I was a diehard Honda guy, and Kia, ooh, that's like off brand, Walmart brand, whatever. I had a very negative brand perception.

But we bought an EV9, incredible vehicle. They are killing it over there at the Hyundai Group. But the thing I absolutely love about my Kia is that the cup holder is not your standard two cup holders, and maybe if you're lucky, it's two different sizes of cup holder. Instead, it's a rectangular box. And inside that rectangular box, there are two buttons on the side. You almost have to see it. But you press a button and a little cup holder ring slides out. And there's two different sizes. There's a large cup holder ring and a small cup holder ring. And so no matter what size drink you have, if you sit down in the car and you've got a ceramic coffee mug, like a big old handle and a big round ceramic coffee mug-

Charlie Chapman:

Your Stanley.

David Barnard:

No, well, Stanley's are designed for it, right? Stanley has actually specifically, a lot of those water bottles are specifically designed around a diameter, that's why they're small at the bottom and they get bigger at the top, they design the Stanley around fitting cup holders. Instead of designing the water bottle to be a great water bottle, they have to design the water bottle around cup holders. You see some that are tiny at the bottom and they have this big lump that ridges out. It's like in order to get a 36 ounce and then have the base be small enough to fit in every cup holder.

Charlie Chapman:

All of our European listeners are just horrified at the American drink sizes right now.

David Barnard:

No, but this is what's so great is you make your fantastic espresso or cappuccino, and you've got your big cappuccino mug. And you go sit down in the car and then you just push that little ring out of the way, and you have this giant square thing that you can put any kind of giant mug or anything. I think it's an absolute genius idea. It is one of my favorite things. And every time I get in the car and I'm fiddling with those, and my drinks are perfectly. And then you don't have to think like, oh, I need to transfer from my coffee mug into one of those to-go mugs so that it fits in my cup holder so it's not falling around in the car. Freaking love it.

And that's the kind of thing you'll get out of Design of Everyday Things is that those little subtle things that you interact with every single day, there are ways to make them better. So now when I get in my, we inherited a Ford Bronco and freaking drives me nuts. It has two little cup holders. They're both exactly the same size. There's no accommodation. It's just like here's a cup holder, whatever. It's like you have to adapt to the cup holder instead of the cup holder adapting to you. Perfect analogy of great user experience and thinking about the user.

Charlie Chapman:

All right. Well, that is the perfect story to end on here for the podcast about apps. So thank you so much, David, for coming on. Honestly, genuinely, I don't do a lot of special episodes, and as 100 was coming up, I kind of was just thinking I should do something. And when I realized, I've talked about this on the show a bunch of times with different guests, but I have a selection of people and I still have a decent list of people that I know I won't be embarrassed asking more last minute questions of. And so you have been one of those, obviously, David should be on Launched. It's like all of the things that the show has always been about, you cut across all of them.

David Barnard:

I know pretty much every one of your guests.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, exactly. But it was like, even if I do embarrass myself in front of you, it's like we're coworkers, you have no choice. And so all of a sudden it clicked like, oh, that's perfect. And I know us, we will go long. We'll go on lots of tangents. And this feels very appropriate for the 100th episode. So this was super, super fun.

David Barnard:

18 years of the App Store.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, 18 years. Yeah, the classic nice round number 18 of the App Store. Yeah, it's crazy that that's only two years away. That should be really fun when we get there. But yeah, so thank you again for coming on. Where can people find you and your work?

David Barnard:

Well, subclub.com.

Charlie Chapman:

There it is.

David Barnard:

Sub Club Podcast on YouTube, drbarnard on Twitter. Those are all the best places to find me at. I've been trying to blog more on the RevenueCat blog. But yeah, I ramble a lot on Twitter, so that's probably the best place to catch my ramblings.

Charlie Chapman:

Perfect. And thank you all for listening all these years. Those of you who have been, I really appreciate that I get to do this. Like I said, this is a selfish show that I get to trick people like David to come hang out with me, although he's contractually obligated to hang out with me every week. But yeah, it's genuinely been an incredibly fun project all these years and hopefully many years to come.

David Barnard:

And to the five of you who made it all the way through, whatever this ends up getting edited down to, two hours and 30 minutes, we're at three hours of recording.

Charlie Chapman:

We've crossed three. We've crossed three. Yeah.

David Barnard:

Thank you. If anybody does make it to the end, it's incredibly flattering to have you listening this long, so thank you.

Charlie Chapman:

I think Malin and Kai, who make a bunch of different apps and who've been on here, I think they're the ones who made this joke when I guested on their podcast a long time ago. They were like, "You should come up with a code word that you put at the end of episodes, and just ask people to reply to the episode with just that word to prove that they made it." And I've never done that, but what is a random word that you can think of that people should respond with if they made it this far?

David Barnard:

Usability?

Charlie Chapman:

Usability. All right.

David Barnard:

Usability.

Charlie Chapman:

Usability with an exclamation point. That's what people should respond with. So reply to the Tweet or Toot or Blue Sky, or whatever all of our words for all of our places that we post to with the word usability with an exclamation point, and no other context. And we'll see if literally anybody does that. Anyway, all right.

David Barnard:

I love that. That's great.

Charlie Chapman:

Like we've talked about a bunch, Launched is a part of the RevenueCat podcast family now, and you should go listen to Sub Club. That's David's podcast that he does. And for everything else Launched, you can go to launchedfm.com, and I'll see you all again in two weeks. Bye.