82: Annual Christmas Special – Jordan Morgan

Charlie Chapman:

What I discovered is Elite Hoops during basketball season, the beginning of October to the end of March, that's when I'll make 80% of the revenue, give or take. And what I discovered is it's getting so much on its own. Apple search ads do really, really well for it. I wish I could even spend more, like I up the spend on it all the time and I've hit the ceiling of what people search for in a day and I'm pretty confident I capture most of that. Welcome to Launched. I'm Charlie Chapman and this is the annual Christmas special with one and only Jordan Morgan. Jordan?

Jordan Morgan:

Hello, hello.

Charlie Chapman:

Welcome back.

Jordan Morgan:

It's that time of year.

Charlie Chapman:

Yes, this is becoming one of my favorite traditions. So, for those of you who don't know, every year since I started this podcast, I think, so it's been like four or five years, we've done a Christmas special where we get together and a normal episode of Launched, as you hopefully know, is I'm interviewing somebody about a new app or something that they've released and the story behind it. And this episode is basically my chance to naval gaze with one of my best indie app friends, Jordan, who we've had these, I don't want to say parallel indie lives, but they've been crisscrossing.

You were doing this longer than me, you released an app before me and then you got out of the app game and you became an author for a while. And so, this is our chance to talk about our feelings for an hour and hang out. It's therapeutic. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, lots of overlap. I mean, everyone in Southwest Missouri is just waiting to hear the indie dev tales between us. So, we got to give people what they want.

Jordan Morgan:

Yes, that's another piece of lore here is that we are both from Missouri in the United States, which this might surprise anybody who knows a lot about Missouri, but it's not the land filled with indie iOS developers. We like to joke that there's a unwritten rule here that you're only allowed to have one indie app developer per major city, because we have a little group of us, but there's literally only one of us in each city, it feels like.

Charlie Chapman:

It's true. Yeah. There's not very many, and that hasn't changed in the five years we've been doing this.

Jordan Morgan:

We've had some move out. Yeah. Columbia, I think, still is looking for one. I don't know of any there right now. No, no. We're sparse.

Charlie Chapman:

I figured it's been long enough. And hopefully, now that this podcast has been rebirthed as a revenue cap podcast, hopefully there's a new audience maybe who doesn't already know our full backstory. If you don't, I'd recommend just go through the back catalog. And well, really, you should just listen to every episode of Launched.

Jordan Morgan:

Set aside a Tinder five hours and yourself right there.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah. You should go through, find all the Christmas specials and listen to them. Actually, it's become a tradition of mine to listen to our previous episodes, which is always very fascinating. It's like a weird way to reflect on your year to listen to yourself from past years recollect that year.

Jordan Morgan:

Like a time capsule.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, yeah. It's funny. If you don't already know our story, I wanted to give just a quick recap of how we got to where we are, and then we can jump into the last year's things that we've been trying and how we're feeling on those. It was right after I launched my indie app, Dark Noise, white noise app. And right before, like a month or two before I launched my app was when you launched Spend Stack, which was your indie app that you had been working on for too long.

Jordan Morgan:

A very long time.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, yeah. Much longer than I had been wearing on Dark Noise. But since that time, you sold Spend Stack, so that was sold. Then you have reacquired the open source rights to Spend Stack. I don't remember how that was.

Jordan Morgan:

I have the whole app now. Yeah. That was this year. It's back in my Apple developer.

Charlie Chapman:

Oh, that was this year?

Jordan Morgan:

Yeah, I think it was this year. They gave me open source rights to it, I think last year. And then this year I was like, "Hey, can I just have it back?" And they're like, "Yeah, sure." So, yeah, it's back in my developer account.

Charlie Chapman:

Maybe we can get into that because that's a whole interesting thing is a very long recollection of selling your baby in a way, in that case for you.

Jordan Morgan:

They gave it back for free, so bad baby.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah. Yes, exactly. If we did episode titles, that would be the title of the episode, Bad Baby. So, after you sold your app though, you didn't immediately jump back into the indie app developer game. You became an author. So, you wrote the best in class iOS app book series, which took a few years off of your life, both literally and in the color of your hair probably. Now it's an achievement. You have this big book and you keep that updated over time. I've released a couple little apps. None of them were major big deals. I had an app that was free for teachers that got some press coverage and stuff, but it wasn't even paid, so it wasn't a big one.

And then I switched over from a paid upfront app to subscriptions. And then very quickly after that, joined RevenueCat where I talk about doing that all day long. And then actually before you also joined me in the developer advocate game, you also jumped back into the indie app developer game with Elite Hoops, right? That was before you switched jobs. And can you remind us what the main pitch is for Elite Hoops?

Jordan Morgan:

Yeah, I call it a toolkit for basketball coaches. You can share plays, run practices, and save drills. Those are the main core tint poles of it.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah. Aimed at basketball, coaches specifically, not players.

Jordan Morgan:

Yep. Yeah, absolutely.

Charlie Chapman:

We've talked a lot about that in previous Christmas specials. And then both of us have released Vision Pro versions of that app. Probably won't talk about that here, but that was a thing that happened. You joined Superwall, a great partner of RevenueCat.

Jordan Morgan:

Is that the corporate byline before the show?

Charlie Chapman:

It's not a core... No, no, no, no. I love Superwall. I like Jake. I like Brian. Superwall is great.

Jordan Morgan:

I was trying to think of some good burns to give the internet some drama of it. I don't know. I didn't have time.

Charlie Chapman:

I do wonder how many people who watch our companies online will think that this is like a, "I can't believe they're together."

Jordan Morgan:

Nature is healing. Look at them.

Charlie Chapman:

Nature's healing. Yeah. No, me and Jordan, we go way back, but also-

Jordan Morgan:

For sure.

Charlie Chapman:

... the Superwall team's great. We have a good relationship, I feel like. But yeah, so now you're a developer advocate, I'm a developer advocate. We both have side apps on the side. And then over the last year, we've actually both released new apps, which I do want to get into. But first, I want to catch up on what the latest is with Elite Hoops. The last episode, I was just listening to it. You talked a lot about your paid advertising that you've been doing with that.

Jordan Morgan:

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

And you were like, "We'll check in next year to see how that's gone," because you had recently been ramping it up. And so, I guess now I get to ask you, how has that gone?

Jordan Morgan:

That's actually a really good thing to talk about because I have a lot of new news there. So, yeah, at TriSwift, my talk there, I mentioned paid ads as well. And the ironic funny thing about that is I've never been doing paid ads right or correctly.

Charlie Chapman:

I think I said that to you a lot during this episode.

Jordan Morgan:

Yeah. Oh, no. Everyone I talk to that does actual marketing has told me that. So, when they ask, "Hey, what's your CPI? What's your LTV, cost to acquire customer?" All these things. I'm like, "Well, actually I don't even have the Facebook SDK installed. So, I just know what my installs normally look like when I turn ads off and on." And there's two reactions. Some of them are nice like, "Oh, okay, I get it. I know what you mean." And other people are like, "Dude, what are you doing? You're wasting money. You have to be able to know what's working." So, I think, because I'm pretty transparent with the numbers. I think this year I've spent 16K on ads. I only spend $30 a day right now because two reasons.

One, I hired a marketing agency this past month to show me how to do this right, to teach me how to actually do paid ads correctly. And two, what I discovered is Elite Hoops during basketball season, because it's like 90% of the paid user bases, they're American, probably higher than that, probably like 95. Over the few years it's been out, I know it's seasonal. So, the beginning of October to the end of March, that's when I'll make 80% of the revenue, give or take, if I had to guess off the top of my head. I'll make most of the revenue in these next four or five months. And what I discovered is it's getting so much on its own. Apple search ads do really, really well for it. I wish I could even spend more.

I up the spend on it all the time and I've hit the ceiling of what people search for in a day, and I'm pretty confident I capture most of that.

Charlie Chapman:

You're saying Apple search ads are doing well. Do you know that now? Are you looking at your cost acquisition and your LTV and is the math mathing?

Jordan Morgan:

The math is mathing and this is where I have to put the big ironic asterisk. So, yes, I started this app 2023 before I joined Superwall. So, my app doing really well is on RevenueCat, which I always have to laugh at the irony. But I do tell people, I want apps on every platform because I want to know what the pain points are, how things... Yeah. So, I have apps on RevenueCat, on Super Wall, with the mix, with neither one. When you guys first launched the Apple search ads attribution thing, I turned that on the day that I saw your video about it. So, yeah, I can go and look in the charts and see where actual paid conversions are coming from and segment it by the Apple search ad stuff.

So, yeah, I can see that does really well, but it caps at like 500 bucks a week. That's the most I can spend on it. I would spend more if I could.

Charlie Chapman:

That's a limit like Apple just has for everybody?

Jordan Morgan:

No, no, no. It's just like that's the search volume. So, yeah, but I don't know how much you want to dive into paid ads at the moment, but the preview is from my learnings with the marketing agency is, I think the term they said was like, turn that off right now. You're burning money. Turn off Apple search ads? Turn off the ads that I've made on my own, like the way that I have it. They're like, turn that off right now. The money that you're making right now is not because of this, basically is what they were saying. You're making money because it's in season your search, you have good ASO for it, your Apple search ads are working. This is not making a difference. What the setup that you have currently

Charlie Chapman:

So, they're saying to turn off your non-Apple search ads?

Jordan Morgan:

Correct. My Meta ads.

Charlie Chapman:

So, the Meta ads specifically.

Jordan Morgan:

Yeah, yeah. Gotcha. Yeah. The ads as I have them today are pointless basically is what they're saying. The biggest reason they gave is, one, they're like, "Yes, you need attribution. You have to figure out how to do it." I think I may have even put this in our group chat. I was like, "You either die the righteous indie or live long enough to have to finally install the Facebook SDK or something like that." So, the biggest reason they said is, so I made one, and this might've been this year, so we may not have even talked about it. I can't remember if we chatted about it last year, but I made one video that went semi-viral and hit, I don't know, say 200,000 organic views. And then I pumped ad spin behind it.

And whether it's correlation or causation, because I don't have the SDK, revenue did super well in that time for me. And I'm pretty confident that's where it came from. But what the marketing agents, and they're called Evo Consulting, E-V-O. They're a great bunch, just finished up with them, learned a ton that I'm sure we'll chat about, but they were pretty much saying, "You're just milking the same creative. You've been using the same creative all year. That's not going to work. You need to refresh their creatives and you need to do that fairly often." So, this one that you have, it's done. It served its purpose. It's time to move on and you got to use something else. So, yeah, that's what they gave me.

But yeah, so the TLDR, I'm the big believer in paid ads. I've used them a lot. I've spent a lot of money on them and now I know how to do them correctly, because I never have had the setup exactly how it's supposed to be.

Charlie Chapman:

So, you do have that set up now?

Jordan Morgan:

That's next on the list. So, what I have right now from the marketing agency are how to correctly run a paid ads campaign. They taught me how that looks. I have to get the Facebook SDK installed, which that doesn't take long. So, that's like my next technical thing I have to do before I turn these on. And as part of the consulting package, I have 20 creatives to use, which to me was the biggest value add because I don't like making creatives. It's like, I just don't like it. So, I have a very good game plan, a professional that knows what they're doing, set everything up for me. They gave me the playbook. Now I just have to execute on it is where it's at.

Charlie Chapman:

And your idea is that you're going to do your own creatives and then run them as ads, basically. This isn't using influencers.

Jordan Morgan:

This is using their creatives. So, yeah, so the videos themselves, there's different formats, but they made them all for me. So, they have their own creators that they contract with. And the thing that really impressed me is the first thing that they did is they came up with this massive notion doc of who my ICP is, my ideal customer persona, what the strengths of Elite Hoops are, why people would download it, how to talk about it. And it was almost surreal seeing that because it's like this thing that I've worked on for two and a half years, they knew it better than me. I was like, "Oh dude, this makes so much sense. Okay. Yeah, this is how I should talk about it."

Charlie Chapman:

They come out from a very different angle than you came.

Jordan Morgan:

A pure marketing one. Yeah. And it just reinforced me how people have that talent. They have that bone in their body to dig through. And if you told me I had to make a Notion doc like that, I would put it off for months because it just sounds like that kind of thing is so mentally taxing to me. Okay, my ideal customer persona.

Charlie Chapman:

That's what ChatGPT is for.

Jordan Morgan:

Yeah, absolutely. Chat it up.

Charlie Chapman:

I don't know they would do a good job, although it's a good way to get started.

Jordan Morgan:

It is a good way to get started. So, yeah, so what they've delivered to me is basically a lot of information on how to market Elite Hoops, the people that I'm trying to reach, how I should talk to those people, and most importantly, how to correctly set up an ad campaign with Meta, and here's a good starting point of creatives you can use to get going on that. So, really I've had paid ads and they've never been done correctly, and I want to see what happens when I do set them up correctly because it does so well just with Apple search ads and organic search right now, that maybe this is that last little bit of gasoline I need to make it go to the next step and grow faster than it is right now.

Charlie Chapman:

So, I guess that gives us our first follow-up item for 2026 Christmas special.

Jordan Morgan:

Yeah. And it'll be like, "Oh, I never installed the SDK." I just like, "Hey, I'll do it later."

Charlie Chapman:

Oh yeah, that's going to start next week.

Jordan Morgan:

Yeah. Oops.

Charlie Chapman:

What about over the last year though? Has it been growing? I know the ad agency was saying the creatives aren't the reason that it's doing whatever it's doing, but has the needle been moving basically?

Jordan Morgan:

Yeah. So, the start of the year, this is what it's done the last two years. Then it goes up and to the right until about the end of March, beginning of April. And then it'll stay basically straight the whole way through until I get back to October and then it'll go up again.

Charlie Chapman:

What are we saying goes up though? Is that revenue or is that your MRR or something?

Jordan Morgan:

You could pretty much say every healthy business metric.

Charlie Chapman:

I get that it's seasonal in the sense that that's when the money starts coming in. But is it growing, flat lining and then growing on top of that? Or is it like goes up, goes down, goes up, but then the baseline stays the same?

Jordan Morgan:

Let's look at some charts and find out.

Charlie Chapman:

Here we go.

Jordan Morgan:

Why don't we? Yeah. No, it's grown every single year. It's never stayed stagnant. So, ARR is going climbing, climbing, climbing until we get to about May. And then from May all the way to September, it barely moves. It doesn't really go up, doesn't really go down, just stays where it's at.

Charlie Chapman:

So, you're not getting new subscribers at that point?

Jordan Morgan:

No, not really. Not during that time, which surprised me because I thought I could really hit the summer ball circuit, like AAU teams because that's their time. And since I ask people their demographics during onboarding, a lot of them are AAU coaches. So, I don't know if they've already subscribed or what, but what the data is telling me is it correlates to the basketball season, which is not surprising, but I am surprised I can't hit that growth year round because people are looking for a solution still during the summertime. It is funny because I'm looking at like, I split it out by 12 months and it looks like if you started at the top right of the graph, you'd be going down the ski slope.

And then you have this nice settling period where you can coast and then it goes down again. So, it's weird. I have this thing that seems to grow, is in a spot where it's somewhat mature. It hasn't been out in the grand scheme of things very long, but I know when it's going to start growing a bit more.

Charlie Chapman:

But your churn once annuals started hitting did not overcome the new subscribers you brought in?

Jordan Morgan:

It stayed straight. So, during what I call the off season, I'll get like one or two conversions a day and then because churn is depressing, I don't ever look at it. But obviously, what that chart is showing is like they pretty much cancel each other out, which is one reason why I have the luxury, I guess, of being able to really try paid ads even more because the revenue is good for me day in and day out now to where I know it's going to make at least 500 to 1,000 pretty much every day. I've never been shy about just putting money back into the business. What would happen if I got to the point where I could spend 500 a day on ads? What does it look like?

Charlie Chapman:

I think that's the description of us too is that you will reinvest and I am five years in still scared of the tax ban suddenly showing up. And so, it just sits in a couch-

Jordan Morgan:

But you could buy like a Lamborghini.

Charlie Chapman:

... and a mansion. I could buy like a McDonald's happy value meal, so don't feel bad.

Jordan Morgan:

No, that's good though. Yeah, because my story is definitely different. Dark Noise is coasting more or less. It's not really going down. A big part of my user acquisition is press and Apple features, right? So, that's my big waves anyway. So, like September, October, I'll get a lot from either Apple features when a new version of iOS comes out or mentions on podcasts, especially like end of the year, like what's your favorite whatever, what apps are on your home screen. Those always give me some big spikes.

But those subscribers I've found, I don't know the raw numbers, but at least based on the shape of the graphs, it seems like those tend to have a higher churn, which makes sense because it's more people like kicking the tires. They have disposable income because they're the type of people who listen to productivity apps, but they're not necessarily fully invested. They weren't searching for it. They heard about it on something. And so, that churn is higher. So, depending on how that year goes, some years, I'll lose more subscribers than I gained because I had a really big year of the year before, not as big. Some years, it goes the inverse, but more or less it's like...

But I haven't been investing heavily into Dark Noise like I would like to be. It's more or less I'm keeping it up to date every year with the latest iOS features and it's plugging along. So, it's not like a growing thing, but I did release a new app, which listening to our last episode, I actually talked about it. It had a different name. It was called Screenframes initially, which was just my... I guess to back up, I had decided I wanted to try just building an app fast because I've always been like you.

I would sit there and just obsess over something for forever. And I'm not a person who lets projects die very often, but I will work on them for a very long time before I release them. And so, I was like, I'm going to try this... Jordi Bruin had this method called the 222 method that was popular or maybe still is popular where it's like, you work on something for two days and get a working version and then you give it two weeks and you should have a version on test flight and then two months you should have it out in the store. Or maybe his is two hours, two days and two weeks. His is really compressed.

Charlie Chapman:

It's very quick. It gave me anxiety. It was like...

Jordan Morgan:

Yeah, yeah. But either way, I made mine a alternated version of that, but it was the same thing where I was like, all right, I'm going to get a working version as fast as I can. And I did. And the idea that I had was I wanted a Mac app that let me add device frames around screenshots. So, like app developers, probably a lot of people listening, you frequently use an Apple Shortcut or Figma or something where it's like you take a screenshot of your app in a certain phase and you want to share it in some marketing assets. So, you need to put the frame of the phone around it so it looks like it's in a phone. And this was just to automate that basically. And so, I had a very particular way I wanted it to work.

I wanted to be able to copy and paste pictures into it and then copy and paste pictures out of it and just do everything immediately like that. And so, I built a really, really quick, really, really dirty version that I never would've even built it that way in the first place. And then I got that version cleaned up enough to get on test flight. Even where it was slow, like it was very slow because of architecturally, the way I did it was insane. It was literally, I guess this is the Christmas special. We can go into stupid details. The way I built it originally was you can rasterize a Bitmap image out of a SwiftUI view, right?

Charlie Chapman:

UI graphics render, image renderer or...

Jordan Morgan:

I don't remember actually anymore. Yeah, it's going through UI kit, I think. But either way, it's a SwiftUI view. I'm rendering it into an image, but the screenshots are decent sized, obviously. And then the frames that you get them in are a decent sized image. And so, the way I built it all originally was like you need to be able to preview what the image is going to look like. The way I did it was I literally would render the Bitmap and then put that Bitmap in the Canvas. So, what you had in the Canvas was not SwiftUI views being rendered there. It was the BitMap, which meant if you changed literally anything, it re-rendered the whole image and that's fine. And this is why I did it. It was fine.

It got the job done, but especially if you had a Mac screenshot, well, that's a 5K image depending on your screen. And then you have the ability to add Dragon three or four images to have the phones lined up, which is pretty popular, but that's a big image, even if you don't need it eventually that big. Anyway, I built that version, got it on TestFlight really fast, and then life got in the way. And so, when we recorded last year, I was in that phase where I had released it to TestFlight, but I hadn't gotten it fully released. Anyway, this is a lot of context to say I did release that app in, I think, March of this year. It's now called Framous, which our mutual friend, Josh Holtz.

I just gave him my name and said, "You need to give me a real name that's good." Although here's a fun little...

Charlie Chapman:

Better than ChatGPT at those names.

Jordan Morgan:

Yeah, yes and...

Charlie Chapman:

He's got the best ones.

Jordan Morgan:

ChatGPT is bad at naming still. That is one thing it is just not good at. But this is another fun little tidbit, and maybe you have an answer for me here. Well, no, you don't because I've asked you this before over the years.

Charlie Chapman:

It's spoiler.

Jordan Morgan:

But the Mac App Store sucks. Did you know this?

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah.

Jordan Morgan:

It's very bad.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah. It's depressing every time I go to it.

Jordan Morgan:

Yeah. But as a product, it's very frustrating. And the reason I say this is my app is called Framous, like a pun on Frame and Famous. And what I have determined is that the Mac App Store just auto-corrects behind the scenes the word Framous into Famous, which means my app never ranks to the top of the word Framous. It's always like fifth. And it's fifth behind random apps, but they have the word famous whatever, and they have nothing to do obviously with anything my app has to do with.

Charlie Chapman:

Would you like to give me a live demo of what you're behind right now when I switch to Framous?

Jordan Morgan:

Okay, yes.

Charlie Chapman:

So, you're seven. Okay, this is great. Number one...

Jordan Morgan:

I'm seven, yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah. Art for you-famous paintings. Okay. Number two, famous quotes. All right. Number three, famous cities. Now, we're really going to go off the rails on four through six here. Four, currency converter calculator!

Jordan Morgan:

What's in the subtitle? How did the word famous?

Charlie Chapman:

Exchange rates USD is the subtitle. And then this might be my favorite. Number seven before Framous is Kingdom Rush HD, the most famous... Oh, there we go. The most famous strategy TD. Okay. So, of those currency calculator has famous nowhere in it at all.

Jordan Morgan:

And to be clear, you searched Framous with an R, right?

Charlie Chapman:

I'm getting ready to send you the screenshot.

Jordan Morgan:

Oh my gosh. Yeah. So, I thought I fixed this. So, the app came out, did pretty well, got press in a lot of the big podcasts and stuff, and I was very excited. And then I noticed this problem. And it's like I'm doing all this earned press. And so, people are going to the store and typing in Framous and they don't see my app. And it's like, this is insane. Totally insane. I'm asking around and everybody, all the usual experts are like, to be fair, I don't think most people know as much or care as much about the Mac App Store. They're like, "This doesn't seem right. I bet it'll fix itself in a few days." And lo and behold, in a few days, I was ranking up at the top and I thought, "Okay, this is great."

And I didn't pay much attention to it for a while. And then I go back a few months in and I'm back down again. I'm like, "What the heck?" And then after a couple more of these little press cycles, I realized I'm pretty sure I'm just ranking higher for the word famous because when I get a bunch of earned media, it's like, "Oh yeah, lots of people are downloading it here." But then it falls back down. I don't know that that's the case, but that's my only guess because it does seem like when there's a bunch of activity, it fixes itself.

And I thought it was like the algorithm fixing itself or some engineer heard me complaining and fixed whatever hard coded, not probably not hard coded, but whatever thing in there is making it say, they may have typed Framous and we might be showing that they typed Framous, but let's just assume they actually meant Famous because that seems to be what's happening. Very aggravating.

Charlie Chapman:

Just put Famous in it, but it looks like you did that. So, that was my big amazing idea.

Jordan Morgan:

Well, I have it in the subtitle, right? I literally was thinking, do I do the... You have it open. I have something in the title, right? It's like screenshot sharing or screenshot frame or something.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, let's see. It says Framous: screenshot frames and then your subtitle is Famous Device Bezzles Framer, which I love. Yeah. I mean, you just got to lean into it at that point.

Jordan Morgan:

Yeah. Very aggravating. But anyway, I don't think that's a big deal because it's not like my ASO on the word Framous matters. What it has to be hurting though is it's showing up on the app store or somebody hearing about it on a podcast or whatever, searching for it on the app store. And then it's like if you don't see it in the top five result, the top three results, that surely hurts the amount of people who actually convert. And even if you do see it at that point, it's below a bunch of apps that give you this vibe of like, "This doesn't seem very legitimate." Yeah, I don't love it. But anyway, all that to say, that app has been doing really well for me actually. It's a meaningful amount. It's a noticeable bump.

Charlie Chapman:

Your SEO is fantastic. If you just type Framous, it's the top result on Google. So, I mean, you got the web presence.

Jordan Morgan:

Yeah. And honestly, that's probably what more people do on the Mac anyway. So, yeah, that app has been doing pretty well. And there's a couple interesting things I did with that app that might be worth talking about. I made it a subscription, but then I tried a slightly different monetization method that I don't know yet if I've decided if I regret it or not, but basically it's a subscription for like $10 a year or you can do a lifetime purchase for like 20 or something, but that lifetime purchase only unlocks the frames that came out in the year that you purchased it and all the previous years. So, I'm selling the 2025 frames and anything that came up before.

Actually, I'm in the process right now. The idea was I would run a Black Friday sale and then after the Black Friday sale's over, then I switch over and I'll start selling the 2026 frames, which I'm literally like this weekend is what I'll switch over to. And so, it's annoying because it means I have to make sure I go in and do that, but it's actually not too complicated. And so, we'll see, I'll find out next year what that looks like. Because if I convert 30% or 40% of the people who did that, which I probably won't, maybe 10% of the people, it might still even out to being similar because it costs more than the regular auto-renewing subscription would. So, it'll be interesting to see how that goes.

Charlie Chapman:

I like that model because I remember, I don't know how I remember this. Years ago, Apple Design Award winner agenda, they called it what, the cash cow, which I think ironically, it was like an ironic name, but that was their thing. I don't think they actually had a subscription. Maybe it was just an in app purchase or non-consumable, but it's like if you bought the date that you bought the tier entitled you in perpetuity to the pro stuff up to that date. But if they released another thing after a year or whatever, then you had to buy it again or whatever, with the idea being like you never lost the pro features that you paid for, which I thought was interesting.

Jordan Morgan:

They were trying to do the sketch model because Sketch at that time was really popular with the whole, you just get updates up to a year after you bought it or whatever. But on the Mac, that's an easier thing to do. But on iPhones, it's like you can't really do that because you can't really give them access to old versions of the software. And so, yeah, Agenda's way of doing that was... I don't actually know anybody there, so I don't know technically how they did it, but they would've had to have built a system into the app where every single feature had to have a year gate on it. But then the crazy part about that to me is just the QA. It's like you have to be able to QA every year's version of it.

So, somebody who bought it and didn't pay for the upgrade and had had it for 10 years, you need to be able to run it in that mode to see is this version that we're releasing this year totally broken in that mode?

And I feel like every single year, that would just get more and more and more complicated, right?

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah. I mean, I found a blog post about it from seven years ago. So, yeah, gosh, time flies. But yeah, it looks like they're still doing it.

Jordan Morgan:

I should get them on the show because that would be very interesting to talk to.

Charlie Chapman:

I think the developer was someone that was pretty... He had a presence on Twitter and then I think the great social media divide happened. And I don't know, maybe he's on Mastodon or somewhere. But Drew, I think was his name. But yeah, I always thought that model was really... It felt sustainable, but it felt technically like the implementation of it would be difficult to do.

Jordan Morgan:

I feel like the implementation's pretty straightforward. It's the QA that's hard because I'm essentially doing the same thing in Framous, but it's not complicated because it's just the content that changes. So, it's like if I release a new feature, it's like you'll have the new feature, you just might not be able to use it with a current frame or whatever like that. So, testing wise, it doesn't really matter. It's not like I need to test every single piece of content that my app can show. But if you're doing it around features, it's like I just feel like it would get really complicated. But I'm sure if they've been doing it for this long, I'm sure they have all sorts of interesting ways to deal with all those.

Charlie Chapman:

I think Framous, when I Googled it, is a perfect time to talk about the great press power of Charlie Chapman that I constantly always give you half joking digs about on when we chat throughout the year, because I try to get pressed all the time and it never works. But I just Googled Framous and man, we got Mac Stories, Tech Crunch, nine to five Max, six colors, daring Fireball. You just crushed the press game.

Jordan Morgan:

That was my first Fireball, which that felt very, very good.

Charlie Chapman:

Was it your first one? For some reason, I thought there was another one.

Jordan Morgan:

Yeah, yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

But, yeah, yeah., I'm the only loser at our friends that hasn't been Fireball. So, John, if you're listening, come on man, hook me up. It's funny, your app portfolio is almost like the iOS power user guide. If Apple was to do, you'll love these power apps by any developers, almost all of yours could fit in that. Dark Noise and Framous and all those things.

Jordan Morgan:

It's luck that I landed in it to a degree in a lot of different ways. But also when I joined an iOS team for the very first time and I'd been doing web development and I was like, I need a side project and I need to build an app or else, I'm not going to be helpful on this team. I have a list of app ideas because I'm a nerd and picked this one because it doesn't have a backend. The very first thing I did wasn't start coding, which was...

Charlie Chapman:

I love that that's usually our starting point. Do we have to deal with the backend? Nope. Let's build.

Jordan Morgan:

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Well, and in my case, it was because I was doing backend development. It's like I don't want to spend time doing the thing I already know how to do. The first thing I did was I wrote down, all right, I'm going to treat this like a product because I want to wear this hat. This is really fun. And I was like, I need three guiding principles for why this exists because there's a million white noise apps out there and I could... Actually, I'm just going to pull it up because we can do that. All right. So, this is literally the first doc, last updated August 4th, 2019. So, apparently I moved off of this doc into something else. So, yeah, this is truly the original words.

So, I actually had three, and here's what they are. So, the first one is configurability, targeting pro users who want to use as many options and hooks to work the app into the workflow as possible. So, that was literally the first thing, because that was what I felt like was the least served. And it was an area I knew. So, if you're asking why do I get press among that crowd? Well, that was literally my guiding principle, number one, when I built it. The next thing is speed, which is the same thing. Open the app and playing a sound should be as fast as possible.

Charlie Chapman:

But still really speaks to that same demographic though.

Jordan Morgan:

That's what I mean. Yeah, yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

Because what are they? Hey, electron apps, something slow, something not efficient.

Jordan Morgan:

That's why I didn't have onboarding at first, which I should change. But the idea was it should get you to a sound as fast as possible. When you first open the app, you don't even see other sounds. You literally see a big play button. And that was part of my overly thinking it idea.

Charlie Chapman:

I think that's part of it strengths, honestly.

Jordan Morgan:

I don't disagree I should try it because it's one of those things where it's like if it helps with conversion, it's worth... And as I've added more features behind the scenes, I still get emails about adding the ability to create mixes, which is a feature I've had in there for like three years. It's like if I had a simple, you can mix sounds here, then people might hit the button that literally is on the main page to create a mix.

Charlie Chapman:

Tip kit that bad boy, man. Throw one of them back.

Jordan Morgan:

Or I tip kit it. That's true. That's true.

Charlie Chapman:

So, yeah, speed was the second one. And then the third one was keep it dark (expect fat fingers). That's where the name Dark Noise comes from is the apps that me and my wife were using were bright. And when you use it at night, it was annoying. And I wear glasses and that's why I said expect fat fingers. The very first design, which is really, really ugly, was literally like a circle that it was as wide as the screen was because the idea was it should just be the easiest thing to hit in the world. And then I, for looks, reasons, I shrunk it, but then I made it white and everything else is very, very black and dark.

Like the alarm, the alarm has the big orange snooze or whatever. I think that's a big part of the press thing. There's a lot of things I do obviously to try and make that work, but a big part of it is because it's aimed squarely at that group. And what came along with the Target Pro users, that wasn't part of my original thinking, but immediately a couple months after releasing, because iOS 13 came out a month after I released it, I learned very quickly, aiming for pro users means implementing whatever features Apple gives you right away, which was fine by me because I was one of those dorks who was into it and wanted to do all that, but that also makes people...

I say it makes Apple very happy, but Apple is obviously a big cloud of lots of people. So, that's people on App Store Editorial are hunting around for apps that utilize their new frameworks. Engineers inside of the spaceship are hunting around for apps that utilize their features because they're testing, did we break this? Did we mess this up? And if they find an app that a lot of the standard apps that you hear about or whatever, it's like they listen to a lot of the same podcasts. Not all of them do, but a lot of them do. And those apps that always take advantage of the latest features, those are going to be the easiest apps for them to test out and see like, did I break this?

Does this run on Vision Pro whenever Vision Pro Auto will run your iPad app? They're going to use the usual suspects, as well as obviously the YouTubes and the Netflixes and the big apps that everybody uses. But if they're trying to test like, did my esoteric widget feature, does that work over here? Well, they're going to go to one of the indie apps that they know implemented it. Those are the things that have really helped on that press.

Jordan Morgan:

It's funny because I've almost, part of me is like, man, I just give up on press, but it can be so powerful. And I know I'm skipping ahead here, but when it came to Alex, that was the one where I was like, "I think this one can do it." For a lot of reasons, because it's like that Power User app, it's built all around iOS features. And I don't want to give away names, but I had a few people on Apple using it throughout the summer, engineer, a few in human interface and the app store editorial team. So, I'm like, "This is it. The stars are getting out of line."

And then when the launch day came out, and actually I feel like press was weird with this cycle. There wasn't the usual, here are the apps for iOS 26, which I feel like that wasn't day in day. Didn't that happen a week or so after?

Charlie Chapman:

No, most of them never happened at all. Talking about the press, not Apple.

Jordan Morgan:

Like the press usually, because there was always like every year there was that kind of article on all the big sides.

Charlie Chapman:

Definitely took a hit across all of them. I think Tech Crunch eventually did and nine to five like a month later or something did, but it was way less impactful.

Jordan Morgan:

Yeah, it was all about liquid glass.

Charlie Chapman:

I was surprised. I really expected this year, and this is the other side to the coin of what I just said is, I don't know what the right phrase is. You're throwing your lot in with something you can't really control, right? And that is a risk. And this year was an example of that because I thought for sure that there would be a big focus on who's using the Apple Foundation models in interesting ways.

Jordan Morgan:

Dude, I totally forgot that even came out.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah. And it was like the press didn't lean into it, but honestly, Apple didn't really lean that hard into it, if I remember correctly.

Jordan Morgan:

Yeah. I don't remember a bunch of lists about it, which is this year I felt like was massive. There was so many things that you could angle an app launch towards that, I don't know. I felt like I lucked out because this was a good year to release a new app because there was so much you could show off, like new stuff with App Intents, foundation models, the new design language, like all these things. And I don't know, I guess one thing in retrospect that may have happened was the launch was so big for Apple that I think the focus was just on Apple's ecosystem at large instead of like the third party apps that we're building for them.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, that's true. Let's talk about Alex. So, I talked about the app that I released, but yeah, you've released, I think two really briefly, Elite Football, which is your soccer app.

Jordan Morgan:

That was last year.

Charlie Chapman:

Oh, that was last year.

Jordan Morgan:

It's been out for a bit. Yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

And I know that's not a huge app for you, so we don't have to get into details on that. But yeah, you released Alex, which to me felt like this isn't the diss on Elite Hoops because Elite Hoops is like a capital app still, but Alex felt like a return to form in the sense of like, this is a Jordan Morgan TM app. It felt like a you app in that sense, not as big of a market, not as big of a business. And you knew that going in and that was not your thinking, but it was an app that scratched a niche, which I'll let you explain what it actually does. But importantly, it just felt like you.

It had that level of delight and polish and all of that stuff that I think of as a Jordan Morgan app. And that was really fun to watch. But yeah, what's the story behind that? Where did that come from? You nailed it.

Jordan Morgan:

Ever since Spend Stack, because Spend Stack was a lot like that. It was more like polish and form over the actual function of what problem does it solve? Who is it for? Yeah. But it's pretty. I wanted to have that again, because like you're right, Elite Hoops, I think of much more as a business. I integrate new iOS features because I can't help myself and I always will. And one that I was really proud of actually last year was like the custom pencil kit. You can customize the toolbar and I added all the Elite Hoops glyphs that coaches you to draw up plays like squiggly arrows and boxes, all this stuff. And it had the custom haptics.

So, I still do stuff for it, but Alex was just like, "I want another Spend Stack." That's what it was. I don't really care if it makes tons of money. It'll be nice if it can, but I'm at least unlike Spend Stack, I'm at least going to have a very clear market for it and who would use it and why they would use it. So, all that to say, I annoyingly track so much data about my life to where it's getting to the point where it even annoys me like sleep, I track my food, I track water intake, I've tracked my food almost like ever since Apple Health came out, like whenever it launched. What do you use for that? I use Foodnoms. And I joked with Ryan for a long time when I'd se him at Deep Dish Swift.

I'm like, "I'm still not a pro user, dude. You give way too much for free. You got to do something." And then he finally...

Charlie Chapman:

You don't use all the new AI input stuff?

Jordan Morgan:

He finally got me last year and it was funny because it was like a fun moment for him and he's doing really well with Foodnoms, but I was like, "This is the year, man. I finally converted." So, that's a good lesson in product development at large. He needs to get on here, man. He's got a great story.

Charlie Chapman:

Well, no, he's been on the show quite a while ago. Yeah, uh-huh. The show's getting old enough now. I used to have a rule that the only person who's ever allowed to return is you, and it was a running joke.

Jordan Morgan:

The famed Christmas special.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, yeah, exactly. I already broke that once I started, RevenueCat's already tearing down all the foundations of the show. But the Launched episode was our live episode we did at our conference.

Jordan Morgan:

Oh, yeah. So, he's been on twice technically then.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, with Ryan Jones with Flighty. And it was really fun, even though that episode was great, legitimately-

Jordan Morgan:

It was. Yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

... it was very fun, but it was also like, God, I wish I had another hour. It was death to only have 30 minutes, but that was a good signal to me that I can have on people who have had on before...

Jordan Morgan:

You should.

Charlie Chapman:

If there's been a long break.

Jordan Morgan:

You need both the Ryan's back, actually. You need to get Ryan Jones back and...

Charlie Chapman:

Well, but Ryan Jones... Oh, you mean like do a normal episode with him too?

Jordan Morgan:

Yeah. I mean, Flighty is an interesting one because it launched the same time that Spend Stack did, but it's been around...

Charlie Chapman:

As did Foodnoms, as did Dark Noise.

Jordan Morgan:

Did Foodnom's launch around that same time too?

Charlie Chapman:

I believe it was 2019. Yeah. It may have been 2020, but it was in that same... We've talked about it. There was a post SwiftUI boom. And it's ironic because I don't think any of the apps we just labeled are SwiftUI apps. But it was right around the time that SwiftUI came out and maybe it's really more attributed to SWIFT matured by that point. I don't know the details because my story has nothing to do with the lay of the land, I don't think, but it feels like there was this boom from maybe 2018, 2019 through 2020, 2021. It didn't feel like it died with the pandemic, but there was all these India apps.

When I started the show, it felt like there was just constantly these new apps coming out and everybody was referring to it as a resurgence because there had been this lull for a while and I feel like we're back in one of those lulls lately.

Jordan Morgan:

I was just about to say that same thing. And I don't know if it's because it's our jobs. We're so focused on helping people grow revenue, but my whole feed is growth hacking. If you ask me to just list like, "Hey, what's that indie app that just came out recently?" I don't have one off the top of my head.

Charlie Chapman:

Here's my theory, because I've thought a lot about this, and it's actually one of the reasons why I was very excited to try and get the show back going again. I think that in whatever year it was, 2022, 2023, whenever Twitter became untwittered And all that drama happened, there was a big lift and move away from the internet of a significant portion of the legacy of craftsmanship, app developer, influencer type people. A lot of them went to Mastodon, but then once they got there, it's an interesting platform and I'm a supporter, yada, yada, but it's not a place where you find new people and new voices and it doesn't really foster this growing community.

It's a place where people go and hang out with some of their friends to a degree, but it's very different. It was almost just like a specific type of influencer group, which is the... I don't know how you describe it. It's not just indie app developers. It's specifically the legacy of the old delicious Mac app generation. You can draw a straight line and you can find people and connect these dots through tap bots and all these people who transitioned into iOS and did really, really well. And I think that connected to that group that we're talking about in 2019, 2018, and there's this continuity of people. And then in this one moment, it was decapitated and there was nobody there.

And so, if you're coming out of college and you're wanting to make stuff, there's two factors that are true. You got a job at a company, but you're wanting to do stuff on your own or whatever, and you're on Twitter because that's the platform where you go if you want to find people in our space. The people you're going to see are either going to be all AI oriented, which is where all the exciting action is happening. But that's happened before with web, so that's not new. But then on the app developer side, there isn't anybody on this craftsmanship thing advocating for that anymore.

It's pretty much all, I don't want to say all vibe coders because that's not really true, but it's people who are talking about their MRR or how they've ran these big influencer campaigns and put, "I put $30,000 into this thing and I got $100,000 out." And I'm not saying those are bad, but it's very different.

Jordan Morgan:

It's funny because as you were saying that, I realize that it's almost like that with me more personally too. I don't talk as much any more about like, "Hey, here's this new API...

Charlie Chapman:

Because it doesn't feel like that's the conversation, right?

Jordan Morgan:

Yeah. And I know we've reminisced about this before, probably on one of the previous Christmas specials, but the time back when NS Hipster had a new post every week or you had just good friends, Becky from YarnBuddy, I don't think she really is on social as much anymore. There were just all these internet friends that were all in the same spot for a short period of time and those were the days.

Charlie Chapman:

There's still people doing it. Klemens Strasser, he's one who I see very actively talking on social media and posting about things he's doing, things he's trying and pushing the medium. Now his is more game oriented.

Jordan Morgan:

Sure.

Charlie Chapman:

But I feel like he's doing that. I feel like Andy Allen, who, if you're listening, Andy, I would love to have you on the show. He's definitely somebody who is still actively constantly talking about the craft of iOS development. You know what I mean? I only say that to say that it does still exist. It's not just completely moved into the business side. And it's funny because I feel like the majority of my time running this show, I would have all these conversations and talk to people who were like, "I was embarrassed to care about the business or to try subscriptions or to try this."

And it was all about trying to get people to be a little more open to the idea of like, it's okay to not let your business die and to actually treat it like a business and not just as a piece of art. And then all this, it was like it violently switched to now I'm like, "Whoa, like I love the business." Obviously, I work for both of us. We work for companies that are all about making money and making sustainable businesses, whatever, but there's a little bit of a like, "But software's cool too. Let's make cool, crafted, well done things."

One of the things that doing this podcast has helped already with in the recordings I've been doing, I've done maybe five or six of these recordings at this point, is I come out of them and I'm just like, people make cool stuff. It feels good to talk about that again, not because the other stuff is bad, but because I think I at least was getting a little oversaturated with just the money, money, money side. And so, yeah, I definitely think there's a balance there. But anyway, very long aside to say, you apparently agreed because you wanted to make an app that was about the craftsman side. And so, yeah, what is that app?

Jordan Morgan:

Okay. So, after our 30-minute aside, it's a caffeine tracker. Someone has been waiting 30 minutes to just be like, "What is the app? What does it do?" So, yeah, I mean, we were chatting about this before you started recording, but we're both coffee drinkers and like I said, I track so much data about my life because I just think it's nerdy and fun and interesting. I've always tracked caffeine and I had, let's see, two dub dubs ago when Luca Bernardi, he did a session over the interactive widgets and his...

Charlie Chapman:

Oh, and it was a caffeine?

It was a caffeine...

Jordan Morgan:

It was a caffeine tracking widget?

Yeah, yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, I forgot that.

Jordan Morgan:

It was. And I was like, "That's perfect." I use a shortcut all the time, this is the use case. And so, Elite Hoops had been out for a couple months by that point and I was like, "Oh, this is a great time to do a Spend Stacky project where I'm not going to really worry too much about the revenue. I'm just going to make sure there's a defined target thing that it does and just go off the rails." So, I had the loose design of it done over that summer just for kicks and giggles and it just sat on my phone for years unchanged and I used it all the time.

Charlie Chapman:

This is not a unique thing for Jordan.

Jordan Morgan:

No.

Charlie Chapman:

I feel like Jordan randomly pulls out a screenshot and we're like, "Whoa, what app is that?" And he's like, "Oh yes, this is a little app I built for myself a long time, like an entire to do app or something."

Jordan Morgan:

Side quests. I go on a lot of side quests and sometimes they're useful, sometimes not so much, but I didn't have the app done. If you opened the app, it was pretty much like placeholder stuff. I had an idea of what I wanted...

Charlie Chapman:

Because you were just dumping it into HealthKit?

Jordan Morgan:

Yeah, yeah. And that's one of the great things about the app is I don't own the data model, which is great for me because it just goes to HealthKit. It's all through HealthKit. So, yeah, I would use the widget and I would use the shortcut to just log the same things like Espresso. I'm so boring. I drink the same coffees all the time, but I don't even remember what pushed me over the edge to do it. I don't know if this was like a... I know over the years I've brought up the group chat. We've chatted for years and I don't know if like... And you guys are my indie through line. If one of you finally just convinced me to make it into an app or how it happened in my life. You don't remember. I don't either, but...

Charlie Chapman:

He's probably the Shipaton.

Jordan Morgan:

That's what it was. That'd be ironic. And this year I was just like, I'm going to do it. I'm very nerdy with lists and goals. I have a reminder to make my goals for next year I saw coming up in like a week.

Charlie Chapman:

Don't you have an app for that too? Am I remembering that correctly?

Jordan Morgan:

I did. I finally sunset that one, but the blog post for that was very popular a lot. And people always say like, "Oh, ship it,", but you never know if they're actually going to use it. It was very like, yeah, everyone wants the mock-up, but my goal for this year, I'm looking at my indie goals and I've always wanted to ship a new app with a new version of iOS because I'd never done that. So, that was like my goal this year is like, I'm not going to really worry about Elite Hoops and iOS 26. I want it to look good. I want it to work, but I'm not going to worry about as long as it works with Liquid Glass...

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, because that audience doesn't...

Jordan Morgan:

No, they don't care.

Charlie Chapman:

They're already going to be upset that the OS changed.

Jordan Morgan:

Exactly. Why is this all bubbly and soapy now? And it was a crazy summer and it was actually one of the most fun times I've had building and I really needed that because like that joy of building I just hadn't had in a while and I spent that whole summer just going nuts on it. And it was crazy because with the advent of like AI assistants, I got to a point where I had Claude Code almost perfectly make an app intent for me because I made how I wanted it and I had my patterns and I had like the entities, I had just the way I wanted it all in one file and then from there I could pretty much just dream up what shortcut I wanted to make or what action I wanted and Claude Code could do it almost perfectly the first time.

So, I ended up having like, I don't know, I think there's like 50 to 70 App Intents in the app.

Charlie Chapman:

It's an interesting side effect. This is a little technical, but they changed the App Intents, what, two years ago from this insane UI thing where, and it was not saved in a plain text file. It was in some sort of XML or something, weird format. And they changed it to code. And obviously at that time, I'm almost certain that the reason they did that was not because of AI coding tools becoming popular, but they very quickly became popular. And I guess now that actually would make that way easier to do.

Jordan Morgan:

It is because the API is simple to get started with, but hard to master, but I found the sweet spot with Claude where it could just spit them out. And so, I went crazy with that. And then I had so many powerful shortcuts. I was having so much fun with it. I would just think of something like, I don't know, when's caffeine going to be out of my body and how many shots of espresso is that equivalent to? Just crazy stuff. I'm like, why not? It takes me five minutes because now I have the baseline down. And I had already written the plumbing for it years ago, like the health kit stuff to retrieve the data. So, the hard critical paths were already finished.

Yeah. I mean, the whole point of the app was I wanted that nice, pretty indie app. That's what I wanted to make. And if we link to the Press Kit, if you go to alexcaffeinetracker.com and look at Press Kit at the top, you'll see all of the iOS centric features that I shipped for it. And I marketed it that way. I'm like, "This is like a iOS playground for caffeine tracking." And it turned out really fun. I'm really proud of it. I think it's one of the prettiest apps that I've made. And it's funny because one of the biggest compliment it gets is the onboarding. I'm like, "Yeah, but do you like the app?" But just everything.

There's a visual lookup, you can scan to log drinks, there's the interactive shortcuts, it has the foundation models, all of the liquid glass stuff, alarm kit, widgets. So, I hit every single box that I could. It was on purpose because I wanted to make an insanely good iOS app that shows all the features and it was playful. And that was really freeing for me because Elite Hoops is more like they have a job to get done. They don't really want the nice cool animation. Whereas from the start, I came up with the idea to have Alex be a mascot a long time ago. I could just riff on that and just be goofy and sarcastic in a lot of places.

And I forget one big inspiration for the design was at the time, remember two years ago, photos went through that big redesign where they went all in on this single long scrolling content view where they shifted away from tab views, which that's since reversed. But I liked the idea on a smaller scale. I was like, "What if I can make Alex just be one just sheet of stuff about caffeine?" There's no toggling tabs, there's no other places to go. It's just one view and everything is there. And so, that's where I ended up and it turned out really nice. It turned out really pretty and it's always going to be my little thing to tinker with every summer.

Charlie Chapman:

Muse. Yeah.

Jordan Morgan:

Yeah, it's my muse. Absolutely. And again, I'm really thankful that Elite Hoops is growing and is like doing stable growth, whatever you want to call it, because it gives me an excuse to have this little thing to just play around with. Now don't get me wrong, I would love for it to grow and make as much as Elite Hoops does. And I think there's paths to get there and a little realization that I had is when I was looking into this genre of health apps, I think, I can't prove this, I think what's happening is if you go to the health app and you look at some metric like water intake and you scroll down or wait or steps, it'll say recommended apps and it'll list like four or five third party apps.

So, if you look at weight, you'll see happy scales on there. If you look at step counts, pedometer plus pluses on there, if you look at water intake, water reminders on there, water lamas on there. And in my head, I'm like, "Dude, these have to be driving crazy amounts of downloads because so many people look at the health app and my hope is that eventually they'll do the same thing for caffeine and I was shocked.

Charlie Chapman:

So, caffeine doesn't have one right now?

Jordan Morgan:

Caffeine has no like use these apps to track your caffeine.

Charlie Chapman:

Oh my gosh. It would be so cool if you suddenly saw a stream of users. Surely they must expose that in App Store Connect.

Jordan Morgan:

I don't know. And I've even tried to get business-y. Let me put my suit and tie on. I got on LinkedIn and tried to find health kit engineers or anyone that worked at HealthKit and I don't think anyone accepted my request because it's LinkedIn and they're like, "Who is this weirdo?" But I'm just like, "Guys, if anyone, you should put caffeine apps in," because I'm not the only one. HiCoffee's been around for several years. It's a great app. It has a lot more Or knobs and stuff you can turn than Alex does. And then there's a few other ones. And then WaterMinder and WaterLlama actually and Water Lama, they both allow you to put caffeine. It's not the sole focus water intake obviously is.

So, that's my pie in the sky wish. If the health app does that, this thing could really grow quick and for air quotes for free, because it's like the health app is on at every iPhone.

Charlie Chapman:

Obviously, Elite Hoops has a much clearer TAM. You know you can target coaches and that coaches are going to be willing to spend because it saves on their time for their job. It's a tool. This feels like more like Dark Noise in the sense that it's way more just ubiquitous.

Jordan Morgan:

It is. Yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

It's still a lot less than I guess like a white noise app or something. A smaller percentage of users would use it, but it's very widely applicable. It feels like the type of thing that if you handed it to one of these people that knows how to play the influencer campaign game, they could go out and find health influencer people who are already recommending people track their caffeine because there's got to be just massive markets of people that do that. And like, hey, maybe recommend this app as a nice one or run some deal or something with them. It does feel like there's a little bit more consumer app playbooks that you could run with this than Elite Hoops, which it's obviously not B2C, but it's almost more like that.

Jordan Morgan:

It's much more a consumer app than Elite Hoops would be.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, yeah.

Jordan Morgan:

Yeah. And I almost, when I contracted with Evo for this month, I almost did it for Alex because I'm like, there's so many angles of the UGC playbook that you could run with it. But I was like, I'm just going to be a big boy and focus on Elite Hoops.

Charlie Chapman:

Well, and in reality, the value and the amount people who are willing to spend is going to be very different between those two.

Jordan Morgan:

I mean, I guess cheap is very, very subjective to whoever you're talking to. But for this to make significant money, for me, it would be a volume thing. The downloads would have to be extremely high and it may never be. But the other angle to this is the prestige play too. Of course, everybody wants a Apple Design Award recognition with Apple. So, it's like this is almost like my Apple reward bait app too. If one was going to get any recognition, it would be this one.

Charlie Chapman:

The sports coach oriented, this changes my actual life apps. They often win stuff because the design award is just as much about innovation in some capacity as it is about it looking beautiful or whatever.

Jordan Morgan:

For sure, for sure. It really is. I'm glad that it's out because I have my cake and eat it too now. If I just want to do Fun, pretty iOS stuff, then I'll open up Alex. And it doesn't even support the last version of iOS. I didn't even bother with iOS 18. It's just like, this is for iOS 26, I'm building it for iOS 26. I'm just going all in on it. And when we were laughing about the press stuff earlier, Apple, they did ask for the promo art and I was really psyched about that. But remember, I think this is on the archives too. When they asked for the promo art for Spend Stack, they didn't use it for a full calendar year. So, it's like they haven't used it as of this recording that I know of.

I mean, I have app figures and they ping you now from App Store Connect too. I think if you get a major feature. So, it hasn't been used that I know of. But the promo art is so bananas that if it gets used, I'm going to be so excited. Yeah, I think I sent it to you. It's like I had a designer just go nuts with all the little Alex glyphs and it had Siri orb glows pulsing through the top of the espresso cup. So, it was wild. Maybe they saw it and they're like, "Yeah, we're not using that." So, we'll see. So, the goals are like make a pretty app and it's the app I use most on my phone. So, that's like a fun thing. I'll never get tired of working on it.

And I have a laundry list of ideas like we all do for the stuff that we make. But yeah, I mean, I'm proud that it's out. It was just a personal achievement. I just won a ship with a new version of iOS. I've never done it so I can mark that off the list. It's been done and I'll soup it up every year for sure.

Charlie Chapman:

Awesome. Well, I think we're getting short on time, so I guess we should probably go ahead and wrap this up. Another year in the books, as they say. It was super fun doing this. It's always super fun doing this. I'm glad Launched survived, because this is the only time we're allowed to talk.

Jordan Morgan:

Absolutely. Yeah, we are bound by our contracts at both jobs to not speak formally outside of these walls.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, exactly. No, this is great. So, I guess where can people find you and I guess your work. No, I'm just kidding.

Jordan Morgan:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. X@jordanmorganton or my blog swiftjectivec.com. And I think I list all the apps out on there too if you ever want to check them out. So, I am actually unlike Framous blessed by the ASO gods. So, if you search for Alex or you search for Elite Hoops, you'll find them up there pretty high. RIP for Framous and it's ASO.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah. It's all good, it's all good. But if you're listening and you haven't downloaded it yet, you should go search Framous and scroll-

Jordan Morgan:

Absolutely you should. Yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

... scroll, scroll, find it, download it.

Jordan Morgan:

Or look at any of the 10 major press outlets that have covered it as well. Hashtag.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, there you go. There you go. Thank you so much for listening. You can find more Launched at launchedfm.com, and you can find me on pretty much all the social medias. I'm @_chuckyc on Twitter or Charlie M. Chapman pretty much everywhere else. And of course, huge thanks to RevenueCat for making this episode and all future episodes have Launched possible. I'll see you all again in two weeks.