103: touch grass — Rhys Kentish

Rhys Kentish:

The number one comment I got was from Canadians who were very unhappy with me because they were like, "There's no grass outside. It's just snow." Yeah. I kept teasing them being like, "Touch Snow is coming, Touch Snow is coming." But they would always comment on every single one of my posts being like-

Charlie Chapman:

And it was always Canadians?

Rhys Kentish:

... "It's just snow outside."

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah.

Rhys Kentish:

Always Canadians.

Charlie Chapman:

No Fins or Swedes or anybody? It's just like it's all Canadians. That's fantastic.

Rhys Kentish:

From all over the world, but it was Canadians that were the loudest [inaudible 00:00:36].

Charlie Chapman:

Did you eventually add Touch Snow support?

Rhys Kentish:

I did, but image recognition of snow is incredibly difficult.

Charlie Chapman:

Yes.

Rhys Kentish:

It's just white. I don't know how you can sort of differentiate it.

Charlie Chapman:

You just hold up a piece of paper and put your hand over it probably.

Rhys Kentish:

Yeah. Yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

That's so funny.

Rhys Kentish:

But it now has Touch Snow mode, it has Touch Sand mode. It's even got a Touch Anything mode.

Charlie Chapman:

Welcome to Launched. I'm Charlie Chapman, and today I'm excited to bring you the developer behind the creative screen time app, Touch Grass. Rhys Kentish. Rhys, welcome to the show.

Rhys Kentish:

Thank you so much. It's such a pleasure to be here.

Charlie Chapman:

I think the last time we hung out was the day that I dressed up as a squirrel and danced with the naked cowboy on Times Square. Is that right?

Rhys Kentish:

Yeah. What a day that was.

Charlie Chapman:

In our totally normal day jobs.

Rhys Kentish:

Yeah. Maybe we should explain that we now work together.

Charlie Chapman:

Yes, yes. We can just jump right into that. Although that makes it sound even weirder if you just go straight into work and we work together.

Rhys Kentish:

I was going to say I wasn't the naked cowboy for anyone wondering.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah. That's a a good point. Yeah. You haven't gotten to that level of this is the weirdest job ever yet, but it feels like eventually we get there, right?

Rhys Kentish:

Yeah. Maybe.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah. Let's hope not. Let's hope not. But yeah, so for context, as we record this, last week was RevenueCat's App Growth Annual Conference, wearing the sweater right now. We did a whole bunch of things.

It was also the end of the Shipaton hackathon that both of us worked on all summer. And part of that was we did this thing on Times Square and I was dressed up as a mascot for part of it. And if you're familiar with Times Square in New York, there's this guy that walks around in a cowboy hat in his underwear and plays songs and he showed up and it was a very interesting day. We'll just leave it at that.

Rhys Kentish:

It was a fever dream.

Charlie Chapman:

It was a fever dream, but that's not why we're here. We're here to talk about you. So before we get into Touch Grass and your indie developer journey, I want to give everybody an introduction into 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, and then what was your career like that led up to building your own indie apps?

Rhys Kentish:

So I'm Rhys. I have been a mobile engineer for 10 years. I'm Welsh, but now live in London. I do have a formal education in computer science. I went to the University of Manchester, but I'm actually a dropout of med school, which I went to in France, which is interesting maybe.

Yeah, I've always loved tinkering since the age of six or something. I was playing RuneScape and then I was creating RuneScape bots, I was making different Tumblr websites, all that stuff. And that's my introduction to coding and how I realized I wanted to do something creative but technical as well.

Charlie Chapman:

It's interesting how many people's origin stories are... In the software field are modding games or tweaking games or tweaking MySpace pages or something like that, or Tumblr obviously.

I feel like it's easy to look down on. Right now, a lot of people are... Well, there's a lot of reasons why people have strong feelings, but there's all these people using AI to mod games, right? I look at those and I just think of the weird mods that I was trying to install in my PC games in the 2000s or whatever. And I'm, like, those kids are the kids that are learning how to reverse engineer things and build these kind of skill sets that will carry them into whatever it is that software development means in our sort of future AI world.

Rhys Kentish:

Yeah, that's a scary thought, isn't it? What is software engineering anymore?

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah. So you got a degree and then did you go straight into building your own apps or did you go into a normal career, get a job building software somewhere?

Rhys Kentish:

Yeah, so I started at a little app agency down in Brighton. I did that as my placement year, and then I went back after uni and basically stayed there until this job. And then I'd made all my apps on the side with my full-time 9:00 to 5:00.

Charlie Chapman:

And what was the reason for making your own apps? Were you trying to build an indie business or was it just to scratch your own itch or creative expression? What was the deal there?

Rhys Kentish:

A mixture of all the three. I like to think of myself as quite a creative person, but I am absolutely terrible at drawing, at painting. I'm just so messy. I can't even color in between the lines in a coloring book, for example.

So code was my way to express myself and I'd always loved making silly, funny, goofy apps or websites. And that's what I learned, that's what I know best, and it kind of resonates with people, which is amazing.

Charlie Chapman:

And what was the first app that you published on the app store? Is that what you were doing at the agency you were working at, was app work? Or what got you into apps itself, I guess?

Rhys Kentish:

At the agency, we did big e-commerce apps in the UK mostly, some transit ticketing apps and all that. Fun, interesting apps, I'm sure.

So on the side, I wanted to build stuff for myself. So my first ever app that I published under Rhys Kentish was an app called BeatStride. It was like a smart playlist generator. You'd put in your pace and your distance, and then it would just call the Spotify API and build a playlist of the artists that you'd related to the one that you put in at the start.

It doesn't sound like a groundbreaking app, to be honest, but I vlogged the whole process and that was my first ever YouTube video, and I'd wanted to create content and post YouTube videos since literally the age of 15, and I just have all these video ideas. I've got a list of maybe 200, 300 video ideas where it starts out really kind of wholesome pranks because 15 years ago that was the way, the Roman Atwoods, that sort of style.

And then 15 years later I was just like, "Oh, I've built this thing. I might as well document it." So that's what I did. And then I rented out a cinema in London to host a premiere and invited 20 of my closest friends and family to have it. It was a great time, we had popcorn, my wife got us BeatStride-branded cupcakes.

Charlie Chapman:

And you rented out a cinema to premiere the first episode of your YouTube channel?

Rhys Kentish:

Yeah, it was kind of like a premiere for the vlog and a launch party for BeatStride, so two in one.

Charlie Chapman:

That's so fun.

Rhys Kentish:

And the app absolutely flopped. It's still only on a thousand downloads, but that is genuinely one of the fondest memories of my indie career. It is so special to me.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah. My version of that is, I think the first app I ever published myself was a... Do you know Vimeo, the video?

Rhys Kentish:

Yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah. I loved Vimeo because I'm in auteur. That's where all the cool motion graphics people were back then. And so I loved it. And I was the weirdo doing Windows Phone and Windows 8, the tablet development. And so they, of course, didn't have a Vimeo app. And so I was like, "Oh, I should make a Vimeo app." They had an API.

I don't think it made enough money to pay for the developer license, but it was so cool releasing it and the process of... I do this with everything I do. I've learned this about myself and it sounds like you're similar. Where part of the fun is getting to wear all these hats of legitimate roles in the world. The fact that you did a premiere for a YouTube channel obviously doesn't make any sense, but it was more about I get to do this thing and play this role and take it as far as I can. And the thing that's crazy is sometimes it actually super pays off.

Rhys Kentish:

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, Touch Grass, case in point, right? Absolutely stupid idea for an app, but it works.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, and let's get into that. So you had BeatStride and it was more or less just a fun thing that you were doing. It sounds like you kind of had numerous apps over time. Were any apps before Touch Grass, did any of them kind of take off? Did you ever even pay off your developer license with any of these or were they literally all just almost portfolio pieces/fun?

Rhys Kentish:

They were mostly fun, but I think I did pay off the developer license with BeatStride. But I remember the first purchase I got from that was my mother-in-law on the absurdly expensive yearly plan. And I was just like, "You really don't have to buy this." I don't think she's ever used the app, but she still subscribes to it, like, 40 pounds a year. I'm just like, "Okay, thank you."

Charlie Chapman:

That's so fun.

Rhys Kentish:

Yeah. So I guess it kind of paid off the developer license, but I don't know if we can count it properly as a real success. But yeah, my next app after BeatStride was Touch Grass.

Charlie Chapman:

Oh, okay. So that was the second attempt?

Rhys Kentish:

Yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

So what's the story there then? Take us from the beginning into it releasing.

Rhys Kentish:

Absolutely. So Touch Grass isn't actually the first iteration of this idea that I've had. I'm of the generation of people who spend way too much time on their phone and I can feel it. I can feel it in my brain and it feels tired when I've scrolled too much every day.

So back in COVID times, I made an app called Pocket Guard, I think. It was never released to the app store. It was just for me and it connected to my bank account, and every time I tried to go on TikTok, it would debit me five pence or five cents for American viewers, and then the next time it would be 10 cents, so it'd double every time.

Charlie Chapman:

Where did that money go?

Rhys Kentish:

It went into a savings account that I couldn't really access easily. I remember this was pre-AI, right? So there was quite a serious bug where I just accidentally emptied my account one day and I was just like, "Oops."

Charlie Chapman:

Well, that's what I'm curious about. This is a FinTech thing. Are there just APIs you can just use to do that?

Rhys Kentish:

Yeah. So in the UK, we've got these new age banks.

Charlie Chapman:

Modern banking.

Rhys Kentish:

Yeah, like the Monzos and the Starlings, so you can create your own sort of personal API key to automate your finances essentially. Obviously very dangerous. Don't ever publish it anywhere. Ever.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, seriously.

Rhys Kentish:

So that was the first iteration, Pocket Guard, and obviously with the banking stuff, I couldn't put it on any platform.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah.

Rhys Kentish:

That would just be, yeah, a very, very big legal headache.

Charlie Chapman:

And so this is COVID era. So this would've been, is it Opal was, I feel like the one that really kicked off this genre, but it was before it took off. I feel like there was some point post-COVID really where all of a sudden there was all this creativity happening around use of the screen time APIs, but this sounds like it was a little before that kind of took off?

Rhys Kentish:

Yeah, it was quite a bit before. I think it was just when Opal were getting started and it was just as One Sec were getting quite big.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, yeah.

Rhys Kentish:

So One Sec, they built a screen time app before the screen time API was a thing. They used Apple shortcuts, and then when you opened certain app, it would switch to One Sec and you'd have to do a breathing exercise for 10 seconds before you opened the app that you wanted to.

And I just thought that's a fun concept. How far can we push it? I landed on the money thing, but obviously couldn't go out anywhere and it was just for me. So eventually I stopped using it because I stopped building it from Xcode onto my phone and that expired after a while.

And then a couple years later, still scrolling away and the winters in London are very, very dark. The sun will rise at maybe 8:00 AM and it'll set at 3:00 PM. So I was just scrolling way too much on my bed and I was just like, "I actually need to get outside. How can I kill two birds with one stone and stop scrolling and get outside?"

And I remember I'm a big child of internet culture, so Touch Grass is a funny concept to me. I was like, "Ooh, there's something here. I can marry these concepts up." And then I looked into it and I thought, "Yeah, Vision API, take a photo of actually proving that you touch grass to unlock your phone. That's quite good and there's something there."

Charlie Chapman:

And that's Apple's native Vision API that's just baked in.

Rhys Kentish:

It eventually ended up being that, but there is a fun story where I used Google Vision initially and I almost bankrupted myself again. Yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

Okay. So the initial version was using Google Vision?

Rhys Kentish:

It was.

Charlie Chapman:

I'm guessing this is what the initial launch was?

Rhys Kentish:

The very initial launch was Google Vision because the idea was to launch an iOS and then do a follow-up app on Android very, very quickly. I was expecting maybe a couple hundred people to download it in the first couple weeks. I posted it to Hacker News and Reddit one day and I went for lunch actually, and I came back to the computer and I thought there was a glitch with Firebase, the analytics provider I use, and it said 6,000 people were on the website. I was just like, "What? 6,000 people are on this stupid website that I've built?" So I set the app for pre-order.

Charlie Chapman:

So that was before it was released?

Rhys Kentish:

That was before it was released, and I think that was one of the primary things that drove it to be viral because as soon as you hit a paywall, no one will ever want to share it again. So people didn't know you had to pay for the app initially.

But I did some financial calculations and I think it would've ended up costing me about with the number of people that had signed up for the pre-order, which ended up being like 40,000 people, it would've cost something like $20,000 a week to run on the Google Vision API. I was just like, "Oh my days." Basically, yeah, I did not sleep for three days while I rewrote the entire vision detection thing to native on device.

Charlie Chapman:

But you got that before you released it then?

Rhys Kentish:

Yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

Thank goodness.

Rhys Kentish:

Just about. I was like, "Wow, okay." But yeah, the story of it going viral, I've not actually seen an app go that viral since BeReal, I think.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, Widgetsmith is kind of the one I always think of from an indie perspective, which I guess would've been 2020, so I guess that was still earlier. I guess the walkthrough that is you built the app, you made a website. Was there a video with the website?

Rhys Kentish:

Yeah, the website is super simple. I haven't changed it since launch date. It's just a screen recording and then some texts saying reduce your screen time and download Touch Grass, and that's all the website is. It's just one landing page.

Charlie Chapman:

You posted that to Reddit and Hacker News, and that's what blew up initially?

Rhys Kentish:

Initially, it was a very, very, very early prototype of the sort of mechanism, no UI polish or anything onto Reddit, which I don't know if you'd be able to do nowadays with AI because people can just copy you, I suppose.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, they would implement it so fast.

Rhys Kentish:

Yeah, that got top of R/Side Project one day, and that was back in November, and I spent the next two or three months polishing it and getting it to a releasable state.

And then I posted it again on Hacker News and Reddit, which side note for any European devs, I think we've got such an advantage to post on these platforms in the morning because if it does well in Europe, then the East Coast of America wakes up and that's the first thing they'll see, and then it'll likely do well there, and then the West Coast will wake up, then it'll likely do well there.

Charlie Chapman:

I used to do where I would get up super early or even, not set an alarm, but I would try to wake up at 5:00 AM or 3:00 AM or something, have it all ready to go or schedule it if I had a mechanism for that for this exact same reason, because it's like certain platforms work on a daily basis, and so the earlier you get in... I think Product Hunt is still like that.

I think most things are not quite... They're a little more robust now, like Rolling. But yeah, if you get something in early and it can build up steam through the day, then it kind of pushes it forward and then it sits at the top for a lot longer.

Rhys Kentish:

Yeah, exactly. Exactly that. And then that just happened all day. And one of my friends reached out to me. It was the guy who made One Million Checkboxes. He's called Leo or Neo, I think. A great guy. Absolutely love him. He was just like, "You need to tweet this out." So I did, and that tweet ended up getting 1.5 million impressions and reporters commenting underneath it, reaching out.

Charlie Chapman:

This is really fascinating because I feel like most of these indie viral stories are a random, famous TikToker picked up the thing and tweeted about it, or "I posted on this place and it took off."

But here it sounds like the actual hook was so good, whether hyper-intentional or just you happened upon it, it landed and performed excellent on multiple separate platforms at the same time, independent of one another. Is that true?

Rhys Kentish:

Yeah. Yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

That's crazy. I guess it's just the term Touch Grass, plus the fact that this is at the time, or I guess it's still kind of true, but there's a lot more of them now, where people are looking for ways to use their phone less. That combination was just too enticing and it just worked extraordinarily well, I guess.

Rhys Kentish:

Yeah. I think the way I phrased it is very endearing, almost like my tweet. I said, "I built an app to stop me doomscrolling by touching grass." That's it. And then a screen recording of the app, and it just sounds quite authentic because it is, that's literally what I did.

That just went mega viral and I had people from these big media institutions reach out and I'm just like, "Wow, what did I do to deserve to be interviewed by TechCrunch and Fast Company?" Yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

This is still pre-launch then, right, at this point?

Rhys Kentish:

This is still pre-launch, yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

So you're sitting on what feels like a thing, but you're not making any money. It's not converting to anything because there's nothing to convert to yet. You said you had pre-orders up at this point so people could at least hit a button?

Rhys Kentish:

Yeah. So the way pre-orders work on the App Store is you'll get a notification from the App Store being like, "This app is now live." So I think 40,000 people ended up doing that in the end.

Charlie Chapman:

That's crazy.

Rhys Kentish:

Yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

And the app was pay... Or it was free, like freemium, right? Or was it pay up front?

Rhys Kentish:

Yeah, it's freemium. A lot of my friends tried to convince me to hard paywall, but I was just like, "No, that doesn't feel right for this type of app." So yeah, it was a decently generous freemium offer. I think you could block two or three apps and then you'd have to pay to upgrade to block more than that.

And the number one comment I got was from Canadians who were very unhappy with me because they were like, "There's no grass outside. It's just snow." I kept teasing them being like, "Touch Snow is coming, Touch Snow is coming." But it was just like they would always comment on every single one of my posts being like-

Charlie Chapman:

And it was always Canadians?

Rhys Kentish:

"It's just snow outside." Yeah, always Canadians.

Charlie Chapman:

No Fins or Swedes or anything. It's just like it's all Canadians.

Rhys Kentish:

Yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

That's fantastic.

Rhys Kentish:

From all over the world, but it was Canadians that were the loudest [inaudible 00:22:17].

Charlie Chapman:

Did you eventually add Touch Snow support?

Rhys Kentish:

I did, but image recognition of snow is-

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, just white.

Rhys Kentish:

Incredibly difficult. It's just white. I don't know how you can differentiate it.

Charlie Chapman:

You just hold up a piece of paper and put your hand over it probably.

Rhys Kentish:

Yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah. That's so funny.

Rhys Kentish:

But it now has Touch Snow mode, it has Touch Sand mode. It's even got a Touch Anything mode. So if you want to read more, you can scan a book and be like, "Here is a book," sort of thing.

Charlie Chapman:

So it's freemium, you described where your paywall's at. You can have two apps that you can block, which is pretty generous because probably I would guess the majority of people it's like, "Oh, it's just Instagram." Maybe I'm wrong, but I feel like that would be a large percentage of people.

So then you're polishing, you get the app ready. How does the launch go? I mean, it sounds like you didn't need to do a whole bunch of extra marketing because you just have this massive latent demand already. Did you do any other stuff with the launch or was it just get it out there and hit go?

Rhys Kentish:

It was rebuild the entire Vision API thing that cost you a sleepless night.

Charlie Chapman:

Right, right. So you don't lose all of your money.

Rhys Kentish:

Exactly. And then it was hit go and have a party, basically. I'm a big advocate of celebrating everything. So if you've poured your heart into something, celebrate it. Again, I had a lot of family and friends down for this massive party and my wife kept on... We brought an iPad and she kept on refreshing the RevenueCat dashboard for people to see. And I was just like, "Okay." But yeah, I think day one we got something stupid, like, 50,000 unique active people on the app, which-

Charlie Chapman:

That's crazy.

Rhys Kentish:

... is just unheard of for this silly app. But it is an app that is so easy to uninstall. If you want to get on Instagram, the first thing you're going to do is uninstall Touch Grass if it's raining outside or something like that.

Charlie Chapman:

Oh, interesting. You think people uninstall it versus just turning it off?

Rhys Kentish:

So it's actually quite strict and you can't necessarily turn it off, which might have been a product oversight by me at the time.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, like a churn problem?

Rhys Kentish:

Exactly, exactly. It took me a while to realize that, and now I'm going through a big product iteration where I'm trying to build the habit and keep people engaged with the app itself so they don't just delete it when they want to go on Instagram.

Charlie Chapman:

That's really interesting.

Rhys Kentish:

Yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, because if somebody deletes an app, I think iOS now, the way it works is it'll literally say, "Do you want to cancel your subscription?" In that moment, right?

Rhys Kentish:

Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Charlie Chapman:

And probably almost everybody always says yes because it'd be pretty unusual, that's why they ask. So yeah, if somebody's in a situation where they just need to get access to it for whatever reason, there's no override or anything right now?

Rhys Kentish:

Not in Touch Grass. There is in the screen time space and it is coming soon to Touch Grass.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, but then you're diving through a bunch of setting layers and anybody who's ever opened the screen time thing or has kids is probably aware that that is not a fun place to exist at all.

Rhys Kentish:

Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Charlie Chapman:

Interesting. Okay. So that's something that you haven't improved yet, but that's something you're working on, presumably in part for that reason?

Rhys Kentish:

I'm doing a big rebrand of Touch Grass at the moment and taking it... I'm trying to give it more of a life, basically, more delightful UI. There's going to be, I'm calling them guides, and it is the dogs that we dog sit, my wife and I are the guides.

So I've modeled the dogs and they speak to you. And I think in the future, a paid feature of this is going to be like you can take a picture of your pet and that will become your guide in the app. That sounds quite fun to me.

Charlie Chapman:

Oh, interesting. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Rhys Kentish:

I've got no idea how to do it yet, but I'm sure Claude has some idea.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, it's an interesting app because the shtick or some kitschiness is kind of a feature. It's not just a fun thing for you. A lot of times when we add stuff like what you just described, it's almost for the developer more than for people. It's because it's fun and I like putting joy into the world or whatever. But in the case of Touch Grass, part of why it took off like it did is because it was so viscerally understandable and a bit in a way.

Rhys Kentish:

Yeah, yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

And it's a bit that has actual value and people can understand, but it's absolutely a bit in the sense that you chuckle when you hear it immediately and you want to share it. And then if people are sharing it, then X amount of percentage of people are going to go, "Yeah, but I actually would really like that."

Rhys Kentish:

Exactly. I absolutely love a gimmick, a silly gimmick.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah.

Rhys Kentish:

So another of my apps-

Charlie Chapman:

Which is why RevenueCat is a good home for you.

Rhys Kentish:

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. The next app that I made after Touch Grass was a parody on Tinder. It was called Tender, and it was just photos of my wife, and I could only swipe right. And she loved it, but Tinder did not. And they sent me a scary letter saying cease and desist, but it wasn't for the name. It wasn't for the gesture. It was for the word, "Swipe," in the app store was-

Charlie Chapman:

Yes, that's right.

Rhys Kentish:

They trademarked the word, "Swipe," and I was just like, "Okay, this is scary." So it's now called Tender Hand Gesture.

Charlie Chapman:

And for those of you who can't hear the difference in the accent, that's Tinder, the app for dating is T-I-N-D-E-R, and Tender is T-E-N-D-E-R, and that's your app. That's in the store too, right?

Rhys Kentish:

That's still in the store, yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

Obviously, it wasn't Touch Grass, but that one had a little bit of a viral moment as well. Am I remembering that correctly?

Rhys Kentish:

Yeah, I think people love funny, silly things, and Reddit really liked this one. TikTok actually resonated with the story of Tinder sending me a cease and desist, which was interesting. It didn't resonate too well with the actual app itself, but after the story came out, yeah, it was interesting.

Charlie Chapman:

A good marketing moment. What is it? Never waste a crisis, always use-

Rhys Kentish:

Exactly.

Charlie Chapman:

Use one of those moments that is scary, obviously carefully when it comes to legal things, but that can generate its own interesting story that you can then get eyeballs with.

Rhys Kentish:

Exactly. Yeah, I do everything with the story in mind sort of thing.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah. And it seems like for both of these apps, you've managed to find the native way of talking on all these different platforms. So on Twitter and on TikTok, it seems like you do the vertical video thing, and that works pretty well. Obviously on Twitter, you have words that you can put in there.

But Reddit and Hacker News are text, right? I mean, maybe you're linking to... Well, you're linking to a website, it sounds like, but are you treating all of those very differently depending on how you're posting to try and make them feel really native, or are you just kind of blasting the same kind of thing everywhere?

Rhys Kentish:

The way I start marketing is I will distill the app into one sentence. It's just that sentence that I will think about and I will tell people about in real life and I'll gauge their reaction before building something if I want to put a big sort of marketing push behind it.

Charlie Chapman:

So for Touch Grass, that was, "I built an app to help me stop doomscrolling by touching grass." That's the sentence?

Rhys Kentish:

Yeah, essentially. And I remember, I've got a screenshot of this actually. I sent that idea to my wife and she was like, "I hate it. Don't build it." And I was just like, okay. I mean, that's a signal in itself.

But I did build it and I told a bunch of people in real life and they would always have the sort of little chuckle and I was just like, "Okay, there's definitely something here." And then I posted the earliest version of the prototype, which again, I don't think I would recommend doing now, but that's how I knew to carry on basically.

Charlie Chapman:

I'm intrigued by that. People are very concerned about copycats and this is a valid concern, but also distribution is still king, right? So play out the scenario of Touch Grass in today's world.

So you post your video and it had a link to the app store with a pre-order page, right, at that point. So there's a call-to-action ready. You post that, it goes viral. A thousand apps pop up in the next day probably, or well, I guess however long app review takes that do exactly that thing, right? Does that kill the app? I'm not necessarily convinced it does.

Now I don't know that you can spend two months polishing it, but also you wouldn't have needed two months to polish it today either, right?

Rhys Kentish:

Yeah, that's true.

Charlie Chapman:

I still think building up hype around a thing and letting people copy it and that just be a thing that's okay isn't necessarily bad. I could be extraordinarily wrong about this.

Rhys Kentish:

I think I agree with you, but I think it depends on the idea. I think the idea has to have character and those apps or ideas or websites or games or whatever, they're the hardest copy, especially if... I chat a lot about this in my circles here. I think distribution is king, but I also think product is king as well.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, good point. I think they go hand in hand, I guess is what I mean.

Rhys Kentish:

Yeah. And then the other prong of this is your own sort of personal brand. I'm sure everyone who's got a semi-successful app has copycats every single day now, but I have people mention me on Reddit, on Twitter being like, "Oh, Rhys did this first, by the way. You can find his app here." And that's because people have sort of built a relationship with my online persona, which is interesting and really cool.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah. I guess that's what I mean is if you're doing that legwork, the work you're doing isn't necessarily helping copycats. I know it's not necessarily completely true. If you were to do what you did today or what you did then today, but you didn't have a page up on the app store, there would've been 30 apps called Touch Grass.

And if you didn't have a call to action, then people would just go look for the app and then they would find the copycats and then you'd be toast. Because yes, then you would just be funneling people into other apps. They'd play with it. It would probably be bad because they rushed it and then they would be like, "Oh, okay, this is a fun little toy." And then they'd move on and then you would have lost all that.

So I guess there's still thinking that has to happen with regards to how you treat these things. The vibe coding thing is new in terms of how fast people can copy you, but people copying your app idea is a tale as old as the app store. The classic example is Threes! vs., was it 2048? And the 2048 app ate the original app's lunch because they had distribution and they were multi-platform and it was freemium, a bunch of other reasons, but it wasn't as good of game, is the story.

I think this has been happening for a long time and I've always been like, I think there are cases where that's true. I think people are overly scared of it and it causes them to not think the most strategically in terms of brand building. People want to be Apple where it's like, I keep everything secret and then I do this big reveal moment and then everybody's going to pay attention to me and it's going to be a big deal.

And it's like there are a few cases, I mean yours is kind of one of them where that kind of happens, but most of the time you have to just sit there and grind and earn it over and over and over and over again and keep trying things and then maybe one of them will pop. And if you just wait for that one big moment and you do it and then nobody pays attention, it's, like, you feel like you've lost.

Rhys Kentish:

Yeah, exactly.

Charlie Chapman:

But I could be wrong too. Maybe it's because I've never had an original idea and so I don't care as much about my IP being stolen. I think sometimes people are too much on the side of being scared of being copied and it stops them from marketing their app.

Rhys Kentish:

I'm a huge, huge fan of build in public. I love to see what people are building. I love to get feedback on what I'm building. And I think it just goes to show how important personal brand is. Your app is not necessarily the brand, you are your brand.

Charlie Chapman:

I think they're two separate things. I think you can just market the app and treat that as the business and that is completely reasonable. But there is a lever there with personal branding, especially on the smaller side that you can take advantage of and it's a lot harder to replicate than an app because people can't really replicate you.

I mean, you can get closer and closer, but at the end of the day, people are following you because of this persona that you've built over time and that's who they're following. If somebody makes an exact clone of you, it's not really interesting unless they do all the work, in which case, why do it as you?

But yeah, it's interesting. I think we're in this weird transition period where everything's changing anyway, but I just always want to caution people too. I think it's good to have your base assumption be that nobody cares about you and nobody's sitting there copying you. And if people are copying you, that's a signal that you've gotten traction and that's a good sign, not necessarily a sign to be upset. Not necessarily. Obviously there are cases where that is the case though.

So you got that out, went super well, you did Tender, not a smashing success, but had its kind of moments. Since then, are you thinking of these as two apps that are businesses? Are you mostly focused on Touch Grass? And are you thinking of them as businesses that you're nurturing and building over time? And what are you doing for that? It sounds like you are with Touch Grass at the very least?

Rhys Kentish:

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, Touch Grass is my baby, but Tender is the side project of the side project. I've not spent any time updating it and I didn't actually put any serious monetization in it other than a tip jar, which surprisingly people are very generous and that paid for the developer license.

Charlie Chapman:

It's a very wholesome app. So more than most, that makes a little bit of sense, I think.

Rhys Kentish:

Yeah. Yeah, I guess so. But most of my focus at the moment is on Touch Grass and I do love silly ideas, but I got a little bit sidetracked with the Shipaton and trying to submit quite a complex app to that, which is still half finished.

That app is called Chorus and it's a bird song identifier mixed with Strava. So you'd go on a walk and then your phone would tell you, "Oh, you heard a wood pigeon on your walk at this location," sort of thing. And I got really into bird sounds over the summer, so I could just go out and listen and be like, "Oh, I know that sound, it's a magpie," sort of thing.

And that was interesting, but it's a complicated app and it's still not finished. And I don't know if I will finish it because, yeah, in this new sort of age of AI, you can do whatever you want. And I literally have four-

Charlie Chapman:

It's really hard to stop and do one thing.

Rhys Kentish:

Yeah. I've got four or five unfinished apps that could very well be out there now, but I just haven't had the focus to do that. But yeah, Touch Grass is going to always be my primary focus, at the moment anyway.

Charlie Chapman:

So what are you doing to nurture it then? Are you continuing to focus on social media and UGC-style posts to keep driving engagement and understanding of the app, or are you doing paid advertising? What's the deal to keep that momentum going from that initial big salvo?

Rhys Kentish:

Yeah. So interestingly, I've never done paid ads for it, which is a huge testament to how viral it went at the start. But at the moment I'm in the middle of a big rebuild, which gamifies it a lot and it transforms it almost into a game graphics basically and making all the UI eight bit, and gamifying like, "You stayed off your phone for two hours today and for that you get a reward," which is a pack which you get critters and they will come visit your meadow sort of thing.

So I'm just, as I said as before, product is king. So I'm trying to create the sticky loop because at the moment, being candid, Touch Grass's graph is like this mega, mega viral spike and then a very, very long tail. So I'm just trying to rebuild slowly and not necessarily chase the viral moment again and just work on the retention side of things.

Charlie Chapman:

So you're thinking of it from a retention perspective more than a new viral loops perspective, like hooks? Because it sounds like the meadows and all this stuff feel like things that are very visual and could work as their own hooks separate from the Touch Grass element?

Rhys Kentish:

Yeah. Yeah, I think so. I think if I'm building an app that almost shares itself and increase the K-factor from the app itself, I think that is basically half the battle.

And then yeah, I'll carry on doing the founder UGC sort of thing. One of my latest ideas is just going on TikTok and describing the new app idea that I've had. If it gets traction, then I release it rather than me trying to decide, oh, this is good in my head, so I'm going to release it. But it's like, oh, the audience have already said they want this app, so I'm going to put it out there for them sort of thing.

Charlie Chapman:

That makes sense. Have you ever considered leaning into the Touch Grass part to encourage UGC content natively? So some sort of concept of you take a picture of yourself touching grass, but then post that and it has frames around it in some way.

And the idea is it's a accountability thing like, "Hey, post every day that you've touched grass." And then you can imagine lots of people that just being a regular thing they do and it's always in a different location or something like that. And it always has your frames maybe with a bunch of variety or something to make it more lively.

Rhys Kentish:

That is definitely interesting. I just wonder if it goes against the philosophy of the app.

Charlie Chapman:

No, that's a good point. That's a good point.

Rhys Kentish:

Yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

See, this is why you're the expert.

Rhys Kentish:

Yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

Oh, that's interesting.

Rhys Kentish:

I don't know. I do like the social accountability stuff and maybe it's just a text to a friend or something.

Charlie Chapman:

Well, and if you had the posting in the app, which I know is very complicated, that could be... So it just happens there. So it's not like you're opening the app to do anything like that. And you're certainly not reading or doomscrolling.

Rhys Kentish:

One idea that I definitely had, or one of my friends actually suggested to me is, I touch grass and then the app would set you a little mission. So it's like, I touch grass and then I stroked the cutest dog I could find, something like that.

Charlie Chapman:

Oh yeah, like Find a Bench. Find a...

Rhys Kentish:

Or [inaudible 00:42:50] or had a coffee sort of thing.

Charlie Chapman:

It's like a scavenger hunt.

Rhys Kentish:

Exactly. Exactly.

Charlie Chapman:

That would be pretty fun. Yeah, it does feel like there's just a lot of... And you've already built the vision technology side, so there's a lot of things that you could potentially do on top of it to kind of gamify the whole thing. And it's interesting how you can take a bit of an idea and keep growing and expanding on it and then finding ways to grow and expand the business on top of that.

Cool. I think that kind of gets us to today with Touch Grass. So a lot to come. If you're interested in the app, obviously check it out, but it sounds like there's a bunch of new things on the near horizon.

But before we end the show, I have to ask you the question I ask everybody in the show, which is, what's a person or people out there that have inspired you that you'd recommend others check out?

Rhys Kentish:

You mean other than the great Charlie Chapman and his massive vibe-coded GTA world?

Charlie Chapman:

Yes. That'll go on your performance review. Good, good. Glad you got that out there.

Rhys Kentish:

There's someone who actually jumped straight to mind. He's called Edwin, Edwin1 on Twitter, and he is building an app called Levla. It is a habit tracker basically, but it's based on the style of RuneScape and it really sort of fits into the conversation we were having of this app is really, really hard to copy because it has character and he's building in public and I really have loved seeing his journey and he's just one guy and he shares all of his insights.

Charlie Chapman:

I love it. Like I said earlier, we just ended the Shipaton and it's always a nice refueling of my Twitter feed of just people kind of wholesomely building cool stuff. And I don't know, like I said, I think that people maybe overplay the fear of getting copied, but even if that's completely true, I just think it's good for the community and society for people to be putting their creativity out into the world and not just treating it as marketing purely. Although like we said, it can benefit for that. So I love anybody who's building something and then sharing their journey as they go.

Well, thank you, Rhys, for taking time out of your day to come onto the show. That is, I guess this is technically billable hours for both of us, but I do appreciate it. It was fun kind of getting into the history of Touch Grass with you.

Rhys Kentish:

It's been a pleasure. Thank you for having me on.

Charlie Chapman:

So where can people find you and your work?

Rhys Kentish:

I'm basically across all socials, @RhysKentish on most of them. Yeah, that's me. If you're interested in Touch Grass, yeah, follow along. Lots of updates.

Charlie Chapman:

Awesome. All right. Well, thank you all for listening as usual. Launched is part of the RevenueCat podcast family. If you want to learn more about the growth side of the mobile app business, you should check out the Sub Club Podcast, which is hosted by my good friend and colleague, David Barnard.

And you can check out revenuecat.com to learn about the easiest way to grow and monetize your mobile app business. And you can find more Launched, including the YouTube videos at launchedfm.com. And I'll see you all in two weeks.