85: Helm – Hidde van der Ploeg and Pol Piella

Hidde van der Ploeg:

What we noticed quicker than anything before is how much the app has been promoted by our users, not even by ourselves. Every time someone mentions App Store Connect on Twitter, people would just tag Helm and say, "Just use Helm instead," and that's the best feeling you can have, I think.

Charlie Chapman:

Welcome to Launched. I'm Charlie Chapman, and today I'm excited to bring you the developers behind Helm, the outstanding developer tool for accessing App Store Connect, Pol Piella and Hidde van der Ploeg.

Guys, welcome back to the show.

Hidde van der Ploeg:

Hey, thank you.

Pol Piella:

Yeah, thank you for having us.

Charlie Chapman:

Hidde has been a previous guest a long, long time ago talking about... Is it PD?

Hidde van der Ploeg:

It was PD, yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

Your Apple Watch app. And then both of you were on the show. We did a live show at WWDC last year, which we recorded. It was very exciting. Hidde got to launch a T-shirt cannon into the crowd. Both of you ate cake. Is that right?

Pol Piella:

Coffee cake. It was the one-year anniversary of Helm.

Charlie Chapman:

It was the one-year anniversary of Helm. That's right. Yeah. I'm excited to get into this because I think this is the type of app that's directly aimed at exactly all the people listening. On that note, I've been trying to kick off this show now by doing a quick elevator pitch of the app we're talking about. That way we don't get into all the details before we even explain what it is. So, Pol, I'm going to have you do just a quick elevator pitch for what Helm is.

Pol Piella:

Yeah. Helm is macOS and iOS app that basically allows you to do a lot of actions in App Store Connect. I don't like saying that it's just a client for App Store Connect because we do quite a lot more. The mission with Helm is to basically put all the frustrations and pain points that we had when shipping our apps and updates in App Store Connect and basically fix them one at a time, making the best possible experience for every single features that we come up with in the app.

The goal essentially is to make it as easy as possible to launch your app, give you the best chances at success, getting past the review process, giving you the best chance at ASO, auto-translating your content so that you basically don't have to either hire someone or you can do it in just one click. Yeah, there's quite a lot of stuff that we've got in the roadmap, but the long and short of it is basically give you the best experience at shipping your applications so you don't basically have to go through App Store Connect. You just go through Helm.

Charlie Chapman:

Anybody listening who has an app on the App Store knows the pain of using App Store Connect. It's such a strange piece of software, that web app. So yeah, using Helm is like... Especially for Apple developers, it feels like being at home. To start off the conversation like we normally do with the show, I want to introduce everybody to who you are. Hidde, obviously, people can go back and listen to that whole episode if they want to, so we're just going to spend zero time on you. No, I'm kidding. But I will start with Pol. I'll just ask you the three questions that we usually ask.

Pol Piella:

Elevator pitch.

Charlie Chapman:

The elevator pitch.

Pol Piella:

Careful because-

Charlie Chapman:

We'll go make a cup of coffee.

Pol Piella:

... very long elevators in Spain. Remember that. Remember that.

Charlie Chapman:

But no, the three questions I always ask is where are you from? Do you have a formal education related to what you do? And then what were you doing before you started working on Helm with Hidde?

Pol Piella:

Yeah. I am originally from Barcelona in Spain, but I live in the UK. I've lived in the UK for about 11, 12 years now. I don't have formal education. I have a uni degree in electronic engineering, but not in iOS or anything related to programming. I was basically just doing analog circuit trained stuff at uni, so nothing to do with what I do at the moment. What was I doing before? I was a software engineer. I think my background and my career since I left uni has been on software and iOS. Then Hidde I became friends through conferences and stuff. Then he eventually moved to Manchester and we started working together on NowPlaying and one thing led to another and eventually made Helm together.

Charlie Chapman:

So you were working on stuff together. Was that in a contracting role? Because NowPlaying is an app I think of as in Hidde's catalog of apps.

Hidde van der Ploeg:

I started NowPlaying by myself. Then like Pol said, we met at a conference, became friends real quickly. We both had the same nerdy enthusiasm about music. Also, I knew Pol had a lot more technical capability than I have to make things more performative stuff because in the end, I'm still a designer, turn developer. It's fine, but not as trained as Pol. So I was like, "Hey, do you want to just come in and do this together, not as a contracting necessarily, just share cuts, basically, share the pie, I guess?

Charlie Chapman:

That was with NowPlaying. So that one was also a joint effort then?

Hidde van der Ploeg:

Yeah. Yeah, that's how we started working together. Then I was doing full-time indie development at that point. As an indie, you ship a lot of updates. As everyone else, I was no longer wanted... I was like, "I don't want to deal with this website anymore." Then I looked at what was there and there were a few App Store Connect clients, but they weren't really up to what I had in mind or what I wanted from a client. Then I started the project, looked at the App Store Connect API and it was like, "Pol, please help if you want to do this together."

Charlie Chapman:

Okay. I want to pull on that thread a little bit more, but first, I guess really quick, the same questions for you, what's your background education wise and then what were you doing... Oh, where are you from, and then what were you doing before you guys met?

Hidde van der Ploeg:

Yeah. I'm from the Netherlands, lived most of my dog life in Amsterdam, have been trained as a designer originally, like a visual designer. I've worked on a lot of different apps at agencies and then joined a web product for a long time, became the head of design there. That became too big, didn't like it. I also always liked doing mobile apps better than web products. Then at some point I always had all these ideas and I was like, "How hard can it be to build it myself?" Because otherwise I have to make my ideas enthusiastic to owners and I didn't want that because that's quite difficult. I mean, it's called pitching for a reason, I guess. Then it took me quite a long time. Then this was around when Swift came out. It was like, "Oh, finally this is legible," because I tried a few times at Objective-C and that was impossible to me. Then with Swift, I actually write the wave of Swift's development a little bit.

Charlie Chapman:

Were you in on those first really shaky versions?

Hidde van der Ploeg:

Yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

Oh, man.

Hidde van der Ploeg:

Then you think that stuff where you know development, I started doing multiple new app because the project didn't compile anymore.

Charlie Chapman:

Now we're all back to doing the same thing with vibe coding, right? As soon as it breaks, you're just like, "All right. Let's just start over."

Hidde van der Ploeg:

But now you asked AI to fix it for you, I guess.

Charlie Chapman:

That's true. Yeah, that's true. I don't know. I've gotten it where it's far enough along that I'm just like, "Ah, whatever, just start greenfield." So that's how you got into doing your own indie apps. I don't remember what your first one was, but you got into a pattern of you were putting out a bunch of different apps and eventually that took over and that became your full-time gig for a while, right?

Hidde van der Ploeg:

My first one was a simple way tracking app because HealthKit was just launched and I think it was quite cumbersome to put in a new weight measurement. I was like, "Oh, this is maybe a good project to learn work with different Apple APIs." Then I did a whole bunch of different apps. None of them is even remotely the same, I think, because there's a goal tracking app. There's a music app. There's a guide surfing app. I don't even guide surf, but hey, it taught me a lot about core motion and stuff, even machine learning as well. I think PT also happened, which was like a ChatGPT repper for Apple Watch, which took off like crazy. But I think for me it was always just try to do as many different projects and not to stick too much to one topic, just to learn your new things and I learned a lot from all of those, like different things from all of the projects, I guess.

Charlie Chapman:

That became a sustainable job for a while?

Hidde van der Ploeg:

Yeah. Sometimes I filled it up with some client work, like UI engineering, I guess, because I was still a designer that knew how to code, so it was quite easy to help other apps as well to build nice buildings, but I tried to minimize the amount of client work that I took on as much as possible. I only took on clients that I really, really liked.

Charlie Chapman:

So the origin of Helm then was you, like many of us listening, found App Store Connect, painful to use. You were like, "There should be a better way to do this." A Mac app feels like obvious because developers are obviously working on the Mac and it's kind of a big... Lots of different input fields and stuff type function that you need to do, and then like you said-

Hidde van der Ploeg:

It's a professional tool in a way. Yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah. Then like you said, once you started digging into the APIs necessary to create those, you realized this is going to be a little heavy and that's when you reached out to Pol?

Hidde van der Ploeg:

Yeah. Yeah. I think quite quickly, because the API itself... This is my experience. I think Pol has a different look on it, obviously, but I think the API itself is really, really tough to get, like to get the standards. But I think once you get it, it's okay. Still a lot of things are weird, but it's a really opinionated API in how it's structured, I would say. I always thought this is the reason why it's so slow on web as well, but it turns out it's actually not that slow. It's just different.

Pol Piella:

Yeah. I think they have to accommodate a massive number of old apps as well, and they have to power a lot of things that maybe they're not as relevant if you use the API for very, very small things and just to do quick things. But it is incredibly complex to get into and to make sense of it. But once you do and you start understanding how it works and all that stuff, it's very, very powerful. You can pretty much do anything on the... There's some exceptions, but you can basically do anything that App Store Connect does just programmatically with the API.

Charlie Chapman:

It's not really designed for your purposes, right? The idea isn't, "Oh, this is an API where you can build a client that replicates what App Store Connect does," right? The main purpose is all these people doing heavy automations or something like that, right?

Pol Piella:

I think once you start using it for how we use it, you hit certain things where you go like, "Oh, why is this not available?" A lot of the times the answer is it's not how it was initially intended to be used. We've had some conversations as well with the App Store Connect API team and labs and all that stuff, and they're always super open to adding more features. There's been quite a lot of work, but you do eventually get to those points where you think like, "Oh, yeah, maybe this is not what it was built for." You get some hiccups in the API, but the team are incredibly open to this feedback and just building on more endpoints and stuff.

Charlie Chapman:

I think that's an interesting point too. If you aren't already familiar with Helm, you might assume that this is kind of adversarial to App Store Connect and that this would be the type of thing you have to download from some GitHub repo and build yourself or something like that. But you've done all of this completely compliant within Apple's rules and it's available on the Mac App Store.

Hidde van der Ploeg:

Or even being featured.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, and been featured. Right. Exactly. So I feel like that relationship is actually good, and like you just described, they're open to that. Was that one of your driving things from the beginning was like, "We want to do this in a fully compliant way"?

Hidde van der Ploeg:

Yeah. I think we always said that we always really deeply care about setting a good relationship with Apple still. We don't want to make them look bad necessarily. We just want to show them that there's actually a need for this. Also, same practices, we try to keep privacy in mind and stuff and things like that with everything we do, make it as accessible as possible and all those same norms in what app all values and good software should have, we try to apply that to this app. Having said that, I think the first launch was not as easy as it could have been and I guess that makes for a perfect story for podcast called Launched. We had been stuck in review for... What was it? Like two months, three months?

Pol Piella:

Yeah, I think so. Something like that.

Hidde van der Ploeg:

Yeah. There was a test-buy for a while. We always wanted to have this out on the App Store. Of course, there are some doubts because yeah, it is an App Store Connect client. Obviously, we do a bit more, but...

Charlie Chapman:

There's been other attempts at this before.

Hidde van der Ploeg:

Yeah. Yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

People who've been in this racket for a while have seen them come and go. I know me, whenever you said this, I was kind of like, "Well, it'll be fun to watch Hidde sit here and bang his head against the wall." But I will be honest, I did not expect this to actually succeed, not because I didn't think-

Hidde van der Ploeg:

Yeah, thanks.

Charlie Chapman:

... you could build something useful... I'm here for you, man. Not because I didn't think you'd be successful at building it, but because I've seen this play out before and it's like-

Hidde van der Ploeg:

Yeah. Yeah, that's fair.

Charlie Chapman:

There's a lot of things designed to not make this necessarily successful.

Hidde van der Ploeg:

Yeah. I mean, and that's why we were stuck in review for a long time, right? At some point like, "Oh, is this ever going to happen?" Worst case, we would talk that we just distribute it outside of the App Store. We initially wanted to launch it at a conference. I think it was the one in Folkestone.

Pol Piella:

Yeah, Swift Craft, I think it was.

Hidde van der Ploeg:

Swift Craft. Yeah. Then we were stuck in review still. Actually, then we were even stuck in canceling our in-review because it was all weird situation. Then not until WWDC, I think...

Pol Piella:

So for context, Folkestone was early May, I believe.

Hidde van der Ploeg:

Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Pol Piella:

So just for context, we had submitted by then and then it got to WWDC and we were still stuck. So that's at least like one month and over a month. Yeah.

Hidde van der Ploeg:

Yeah. Yeah. So WWDC bulk on makeup, I was there luckily. I went to the App Store lab that they have there in Apple Park. I had contact with one of the people from the App Store Connect API luckily, and she said, "Oh, you need to talk to this person to get it sorted." Then talked to her, she wrote down a number and then she listened and looked at the screen type number, wrote something down. Oh, gosh, she didn't say a word, and I was like, "Give me something."

Then she was like, "Yeah, it takes so long because it's currently stuck in legal." Because they wanted to make sure we didn't sell their product. We didn't sell App Store Connect as a product necessary and we actually did extra things and not just literally be App Store Connect. The name was okay because we have for App Store Connect and as long as you say it's for something instead of trying to be that something, it should be okay. Then I think the next morning, the day after WWDC, we got approved.

Charlie Chapman:

Do you think it was actually going to go through anyway, and then it's like, "Wow"? It may have just been in a giant pile.

Hidde van der Ploeg:

Well, they will never say so, but it definitely helped, of course, and that's why-

Pol Piella:

Oh, yeah, definitely.

Hidde van der Ploeg:

That's why WWDC is such an important week in general, I think, to go to the labs and talk to engineers and talk to people, talk to Apple. This is the one moment here where you can actually talk to these people, which is very powerful.

Charlie Chapman:

What is it? Developer support ticket, is that what it's called? Where Apple developers get two of them a year where you can talk. The idea is that you can talk to an engineer. Is there a mechanism for that for app review or App Store questions?

Hidde van der Ploeg:

I don't know. I have never tried it actually. I've never used a DST before.

Pol Piella:

Yeah, no idea.

Charlie Chapman:

The stereotype with those is that you only get two a year, so developers never use any because they're afraid to waste it, and that's definitely been the case for me.

Hidde van der Ploeg:

I'll use one next week just to ask how they are, how they're doing.

Charlie Chapman:

Because so much of the time it's like just getting a human being inside of the spaceship to acknowledge it and then flag it somewhere because they can Slack or email somebody. But I wonder if you ever get stuck in one of those, if you could use one of those to get ahold of a person, because it just kind of worked for you all that. WWDC happened to be coming up, but if it had been August, what would you have done?

Pol Piella:

I've never used one of them, but it was my first time at WWDC this year and I managed to go to the App Store Connect API lab. I had about 10, 12 questions and they were incredibly kind to just let me stay after my session as well. I basically went through all of the feedback. It was literally like 30, 40 minutes with one person was a lot better than just me filing feedback for about... The feedback was important as well because then I could go and say like, "Look, I filed this radar. This is all of the context," and I basically got answers for absolutely everything. So yeah, it was honestly invaluable just for that.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah. It's crazy how useful... I mean, I guess this sounds really obvious on the surface, but talking to the actual people instead of just filing into a giant anonymous bucket, it can make a really big difference. So you got it. It was approved. I assume in May you had all these plans for exciting launches and especially knowing you all, which we should get into at some point, you do crazy things, and so I assumed you were very excited about it in May. Then by the time it got to June, it's out there now. How did that launch itself go at that point?

Hidde van der Ploeg:

I think it's very much like every other launch. It feels so anticlimactic, anti-climax. It's like, "Okay. I guess this is a thing now." Yeah. Then slowly but steady, first users start to dripping in. It went quite fast, quite quickly. Obviously helped that we both do a lot of public speaking and a lot of conferences, so we always have a room full of potential users in front of us. But I think what we noticed quicker than anything before is how much the app has been promoted by our users, not even by ourselves. Every time someone mentioned App Store Connect on Twitter, people would just tag Helm and say, "Just use Helm instead," and that's the best feeling you can have, I think.

Pol Piella:

From the beginning as well, it was pretty impressive. It was just like we didn't really have to do... Obviously, we've done a lot, but we didn't have to do a lot to just promote it, and I think it probably has to do with... It's probably the first time that we have an app where the target audience is the same as the audience we've got online anyway. Every time we go to conferences, that's the exact audience we want to be hitting. So yeah, I think that's probably part of it. But yeah, it's been surprising that every week you wake up one day and it's like someone talking about Helm or someone complains about App Store Connect and then in the comments it's like, "Oh, just go use Helm." It's like, "Oh, we didn't even have to jump on that thread. Someone else just said it for us," which is-

Charlie Chapman:

Which is worth 10 times more than somebody promoting it for themselves.

Pol Piella:

Exactly. Yeah. It's a great sign.

Charlie Chapman:

So, what other marketing things have you done? Obviously, you go to conferences. Maybe you make some stickers or pens or something, but is there anything unique? I'm laughing and Hidde is already... He's pulling something out here. So for the audience that's just listening, Hidde is holding up a what we in America would call jersey, what I believe everywhere else in the world would call a kit. Is a kit the whole thing or is that also just the top part?

Hidde van der Ploeg:

The whole thing. Yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

What's the top part called?

Pol Piella:

In the UK, they have a thousand words for it here as well. I think some people call it top. Some people call it kit as well, like just the top bit. I don't know. Just call it whatever you want.

Charlie Chapman:

Anyway, it's a-

Hidde van der Ploeg:

Anyway.

Charlie Chapman:

... football, or again, as Americans would call it, soccer, shirt thing that you'd wear while playing the sport and it has a big Helm logo on the front.

Hidde van der Ploeg:

As we launched Helm, it took off quite a bit. Pol was visiting Amsterdam, I think for conference group, maybe just risking. I don't know. Then we were like, "Oh, we need to do something fun marketing wise, do something really crazy." Then Pol was collecting football shirts and it was like, "Oh, maybe we could sponsor a really low tier." As soon as he sent it, I said, "You don't have to tell me more," because I knew in Amsterdam there's an amateur football club called AVV Swift, which means Amsterdam Football Association Swift. So the name, the football, and it was also in white and blue, so it's like on brand.

Charlie Chapman:

It's your colors. It has the word Swift in it, and is there any place where you can find an audience of iOS developers that is more obvious than a low-tier football club in the Netherlands?

Hidde van der Ploeg:

I'm pretty sure we have no downloads from that.

Pol Piella:

Zero, I think. Probably web visits, but not downloads.

Hidde van der Ploeg:

Actually, I had someone on the conference say to me like, "Oh, yeah, I didn't know Helm, but when I heard the story about the jerseys, I went to download it."

Charlie Chapman:

Nice.

Hidde van der Ploeg:

But I think, like I said before, I think I'm pretty sure the team itself thinks we're a boating company.

Charlie Chapman:

You heard him say this, you're like, "Oh, we got to sponsor this team."

Hidde van der Ploeg:

Yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

What then though? Did you call them up?

Hidde van der Ploeg:

Yeah. No, just send an email, "Hey, I want to sponsor one of your teams." It's like, "Okay. Great. Which teams? We have this. We have that. We have this." It's like, "Well, the lowest one, we'll have Swift. We'll have Swift 6," I think, because it was also a point with Swift language that was coming out. I think it was the six or five.

Charlie Chapman:

Oh. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Hidde van der Ploeg:

So it's like, "Yeah, let's do that one." Then the cost was actually quite okay. It was not as high. So if you're listening, great marketing tip, sponsor a local football club or-

Charlie Chapman:

Always.

Hidde van der Ploeg:

... any clubs, any sponsors-

Charlie Chapman:

I will say, obviously this is not a user acquisition strategy, but it does add to the joy and fun around the brand. From the outside, Helm is an app that has I wouldn't necessarily call it a cult following, but it has a dedicated set of users who just love it. It makes their lives easier, but also it's fun to be part of the club. I think that's why you get so much of the other people responding to other people saying, "Hey, you should use Helm." Because it's like, yes, they're saying it because it's a tool they like and enjoy, but also it's like, "Hey, you should join our club. This is a fun thing that I'm also part of."

I don't know. This is really maybe stretching it, but I do think this is a thing that you can do that if you're just vibe coding and playing the MRR maximization game, you're never going to do something like this. But as an indie who's just making something joyful and high craft and trying to build a loyal user base, I think doing fun stuff like this, one, it just makes your life more joyful, but also I think it does have some benefits to the brand. You said the app was taking off. Is the app able to sustain you?

Hidde van der Ploeg:

Well, not fully because it's also where with the two of us, we're splitting it. Although most of it, we just reinvest into marketing things or into another small things like that.

Charlie Chapman:

What does that mean, reinvest in the marketing things? This is just more teams? Do you have-

Hidde van der Ploeg:

Stupid swag. Yeah. Also, bylaw, if OpenAI credits just in advance just to make sure that those feed... Because the AI features are the most important features in our app, so we just want to make sure that there's enough credits on there to last a long time. Also, now we have another person helping us out because as we joined RevenueCat a year ago, we realized we would get less time, but we'll catch on to that story later. But then we're like, "Oh, let's ask another person that we trust and know well to come join the ship."

Charlie Chapman:

Okay. So it's very much in the like this is a product in your lineup category, even if it's kind of the bigger one?

Hidde van der Ploeg:

Yeah. Yeah. For nowadays, we love to make this our full-time thing. We think we can get there within the next few years at least, because it's still growing every month quite a lot. Because that's the thing with these type of tools, the more people use it, the faster you grow, as long as it's a very stable line. It's not a spike, but it's just a very stable linear line almost.

Charlie Chapman:

Well, and I would imagine given the user base that once somebody decides they're going to use it, because it's a tool and it becomes part of how you work, I imagine your churn is actually relatively low compared to a normal consumer app. Has that borne out?

Pol Piella:

I believe so. Yeah. I mean, I have to say, I don't keep an eye on this too much, to be honest. We can say the growth has been steady. I know over this year, we've had less time as well. There are some very complex features that we've been working on as well that we believe are going to make a difference. We get a lot of feedback for features that we don't have as well. So, we get a sense of what people want and what we can do to grow in this sense. So at least from my side, I'm not super obsessed with the analytics of things. I'm more obsessed with just getting value to our users. Sometimes that's quite complicated because of the nature of how it is on all the edge cases that we have. But I try to focus more on that than just trying to look at numbers and stuff. But yeah, we have a very clear vision of what we want, where we want to get, and what we have to do to get there. That's where our focus is.

Charlie Chapman:

Okay. Let's pull on that thread then, because I think we've established the main marketing channel here is product and goofy swag more than... You're not running influencer ads or anything like that, which for developer tool probably is the right call. We're now at a year and a half that it's been in the store, give or take. So from that starting point, the initial version of the app, what are the big features that you've done that have kind of moved the needle a little bit?

Pol Piella:

Obviously, the biggest one is translations, but we basically had that from day one. So our goal is that anywhere in the app or anywhere that you actually have localized content, you are able to translate it very, very easily with one click. So basically this is if you're writing release notes and you're shipping to multiple stores or you're writing keywords and you want to translate them to all of your localizations and all of your product pages in all of the countries that you support, you can basically do it with one click. You don't have to actually hire a service or anything like that to do that. We use AI to do it. You can use your own API key, but we just provide support out of the box without having to do anything. It's just as easy as you can get. Just one tap and then you translate the content. So you've got a better chance of people actually downloading your app in those markets.

Charlie Chapman:

You said this is obviously the biggest thing. So based on what you're hearing from people, this is the biggest like, "If I lost this app today, this is what would make my work harder or take longer,: or whatever.

Hidde van der Ploeg:

This is also the main reason why we still don't have all App Store Connect features in there today is because we really, really try to look at each part of App Store Connect and think what is currently the bottleneck in this workflow. How can we make you do the same with as little as effort as possible? Because in the end, we're all just lazy people. Everyone's lazy. Everyone likes to do as little as possible and as fast as possible, hence the old AI boom now. That's normal, right? I feel like, well, with everyone launching their app, actually putting it on the App Store should not feel as painful as it was, and I think that's how we tackle every feature, just look at it with our developer's eyes and see like, "Okay. How can we make this part better?"

One of them is every single update of Helm is shipped with Helm as well, which is very metaph, but it's also make sure that we stay on top of things. One of the reasons why we got app clip support quite early on, while so little people use app clips is because the iOS app of Helm has app clips and otherwise we can chip Helm with Helm. So that's why we added app clip supports so early on already.

Charlie Chapman:

Speaking of the iOS app, that was the big story when we did our live episode, because you were basically launching it that week. On your one-year anniversary, you're launching the iOS version. My memory is that the iOS version was a highly requested feature, but you didn't just take home and make it to where it works on iOS. You added some stuff that was mobile specific. Can you talk about that process of why you decided to make an iOS app and then what you actually did?

Pol Piella:

Yeah. I think, as you said, it was highly requested, and I think like a lot of people were saying, we even had someone come up at the conference and wanting a watch shows app so that they could just ship their app with one button on the watch, which is still probably somewhere in the roadmap. But yeah, I think people want to do stuff on the go. So for example, if you upload a build and you're about to leave the house and you just want to push something and go to the gym or go for a walk and you just want to submit for review while you're waiting for that to process, you don't have to stay at home. You can do it on the go.

So that was the whole plan. We just wanted to do features that made sense on mobile. We didn't want to bring everything one for one to the iOS app and just do things that make sense while you're on the go. So you can view your screenshots. You can actually submit for review, edit your release notes, translate, all that kind of stuff. Yeah. We also brought a bit of fun to the app as well as always.

Hidde van der Ploeg:

We had a iOS-only feature as well called Hound Passport. Because we were planning to launch it in WWDC and... For everyone who has been to WWDC knows you talk to a lot of developers, but I don't know. I always find it hard to remember names, but I always remember which apps they worked on.

Charlie Chapman:

Yes.

Hidde van der Ploeg:

So it was like, "Oh, it would be cool to have a passport where you can easily share just a QR code with each other and then you get represented in someone else's passport by the app icon of your main app." Just that by itself would feel useless, and so like, "Oh, what if you then can use those temps to invite them to a test-buy-build?" Because it's also the one opportunity where you meet people that will be running the next iOS beta one of their devices, especially if you want to build features that are specific to the new iOS version, 90% of them are your developer friends. Yeah, that's why we decided to add that as a fun little futuristic feature to the app.

Charlie Chapman:

And that was using app clips, right?

Pol Piella:

Yeah. Yeah, that was using app clips. I think one of the things we thought is if everyone... Because these interactions are quite quick with people. If you are talking and you say like, "Oh, I want to save your number or whatever," they're usually quite quick. So if they have to download the app, set up the App Store Connect keys and all that kind of stuff while you're just talking to them, they're likely just not to do it. So that's why we decided to do the app clip so that if you don't have the app installed, you can still save the stamp, share the stamp, all that kind of stuff.

Another cool thing that you can do with the passport as well that's quite good and we wanted to fix is that when you go to these conferences or places and you share your beta group to add the tester, you usually end up with a lot of anonymous users. With the stamps, you always know who is in your betas because you say them by email and name and all that kind of stuff. So you keep track of who you invited, where, and it's quite nice as well.

Charlie Chapman:

Because you guys go to a lot of conferences. Have you been using it regularly at conferences and has it come in handy in that way?

Hidde van der Ploeg:

Yeah. It's also we love to challenge people, so we give a free lifetime subscription or something if they show us a full passport, like the one where the biggest number gets lifetime at the end of the conference, something like that. Actually, also, when someone has your stamp, Charlie's stamp in their passport, you unlock a Launch FM app icon.

Charlie Chapman:

That's right. Yeah. There's a Launched custom icon in Helm. I forgot about that. Yeah. So if you see Hidde or Pol anywhere in the world, next week as we record, although I guess it will be in the past by the time this comes out, Hidde will be in Singapore with me.

Hidde van der Ploeg:

Last week.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah. So if you travel back in time... No, that's really fun. So that was a big really space with a lot of requests. The iOS App Store is a different beast as far as search traffic and the amount of users and everything.

Hidde van der Ploeg:

It's nice.

Charlie Chapman:

Did you see that make a bump in terms of downloads or installs or anything?

Hidde van der Ploeg:

Like Pol said, we're both not really on top of our numbers.

Pol Piella:

Yeah. I do remember the iOS app when it launched. That's one of the only things I remember about numbers. It was a massive spike for the iOS app, but that's just as we launched it, there was a massive, massive strike, but that's literally-

Charlie Chapman:

It was like a news event.

Pol Piella:

... as much as you'll get from me for numbers. Don't really remember anything else.

Hidde van der Ploeg:

Maybe we should-

Pol Piella:

We should.

Hidde van der Ploeg:

... build an analytics.

Pol Piella:

I think we should.

Hidde van der Ploeg:

We should build analytics in Helm to give us insights where our users come from.

Charlie Chapman:

Well, I was more just meaning in terms of the business. Did that accelerate to the point... You had already brought on help, so it was already like you had more people, but did it increase the numbers where you could do more or spend more money or not work on client work as much or anything like that?

Hidde van der Ploeg:

It did give a bit of a boost. I think, yeah, we really don't care about our numbers. Honestly, we should. This is not a business podcast. This is not Sub Club.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah. Yeah.

Hidde van der Ploeg:

We launched recently. We're not in the Sub Club yet. I think that's also says something about how we do our apps. We really just care about quality. We want to do things right. You can always change business logic later on. As you grow, you have more to sell. Obviously, there will be some things later this year that we will sell for more money, probably more focused towards teams because we noticed more and more teams are using it. So people from sport started using Helm to respond on TestFlight feedback and customer reviews. There's got to be some shift to try to make this more of a full-time thing. But I think the last year, so we didn't really feel that need. We just wanted to have fun and build fun things. Obviously, yeah, we were also working at RevenueCat, so we didn't need that push to try to grow the business, and that was perfect for us to do in the past year. And I think this year, 2026, we tried to do it full truckle and bring Helm to the next level, basically.

Charlie Chapman:

I mean, speaking of the app and quality of the app side of things, there's two things I want to talk about. One is the actual technology stack. This is a Mac app and you built it pretty much all in SwiftUI. Is that correct?

Pol Piella:

Mm-hmm. Yep.

Charlie Chapman:

This is not exactly well trodden ground, especially apps that are not... I have some apps that are pretty lightweight that are SwiftUI and that's fine, but this is an app with lots of forms and typing in and there's a lot of windows that can pop up. I guess one, why? Because both of you had experience with UIKit. Well, I guess maybe this is the answer. You had experience with UIKit, but probably not AppKit. So I guess the first question is why? And then the second question is, do you regret that or has it been pretty good?

Pol Piella:

I think SwiftUI, because we're both quite... Hidde is very familiar with SwiftUI anyway, and he's quite good at it. I was more used to work in a job in UIKit, but for my other apps and for any other apps, it's always been SwiftUI anyway. So I think that was a pretty obvious choice from the beginning. We've hit some snags, but it's never been anything that you go like, "Oh, I need to rewrite my whole app in UIKit." It's never been something outrageous that we've been, "It's impossible to do."

Charlie Chapman:

No major roadblocks. I guess to me, the thing that I would've expected is all the text entry or... I don't know. I feel like I run into weird little bugs with those types of controls versus just buttons and styles and stuff, SwiftUI is great.

Hidde van der Ploeg:

I think SwitchUI is great if you get good at it and it's easier to get good at it. But I think what a lot of people forget is that yes, because it looks so easy, they forget that it's all magical, straight out of the box, but there's a difference between writing good SwiftUI code and bad SwiftUI code, right? The way how you use properties and variables and stuff really changed the impact. Then I think this is also where it shows again that we make a good team because sometimes we do it snacks and then Pol jumps in with all the instruments and he's really good at instruments and then he finds that weird little buck. We had one a few weeks ago where if you would scroll really quickly in the TestFlight feedback list, it would just crash the app and it turned out changing a lazy feed stack into a normal feed stack fixed it.

Charlie Chapman:

SwiftUI feels like it's easier to get yourself in trouble in ways that you can't understand, whereas AppKit, or well, UIKit anyway, in my experience, it's harder to get to the end, but you're less likely to end up in a situation where you totally hosed yourself in a way that's impossible to figure out. So it sounds like, Pol, you have quite a bit of experience of diagnosing these types of problems.

Pol Piella:

Mm-hmm. Yeah. I think I used to work in a company where I spent about six months just doing performance work, and I think that changed things a lot. It was a pretty massive app in general, so it was a lot of all devices and stuff from users. You develop a lot of skillsets, and I think that's why we always say we work very well together. We've got very different skillsets and we don't try to get very good at what the other does very well. It's more complimentary. So we go like, "Oh yeah, I'll do this. You do the other part." That allows us to move very fast while still delivering very good quality stuff.

But yeah, I think in general, if you're able to diagnose those issues and if you're able to have the right tool set to look into those performance issues and just try and fix them and get past it, you will also understand a lot of SwiftUI and what you shouldn't do in general a lot more. As I say, we've had a few cases where it's been like, "Oh, this is pretty bad." But then you just diagnose it, you eventually find the root cause and you've learned and you go on the next one, you won't do it the same way and you kind of just go and keep learning the framework. It's never been like, "Oh, we just need to stop using it because it doesn't work for us." Yeah, it's been pretty good.

Charlie Chapman:

Then how you work together actually was kind of the other part of this question, because it seems like everybody I know that has a duo like this, it was like this magical thing that came out of nowhere and they're very simpatico. Was that the case with you? Have you ever worked? Both of you, have you ever worked with another person like this before, not part of a big team, but just two people who kind of worked together well?

Hidde van der Ploeg:

We were lucky that it matched so well and we just tried it. Of course, we had to find our ways of doing things, but I think quite quickly we came to a structure that works well, which is chaos.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah. So that actually, I remember this from our live show, I asked the question expecting to know the answer of how do you guys break up work? I thought it was going to be like, "Pol does most of the backend stuff with the API work and then Hidde does most of the front-end stuff." And it sounded more like either one of you is just as likely to pull a ticket and you'll go really far in the area of your expertise and then the other person might just jump in to help. But you both just do everything. It's not like there's this clear separation of concerns like you might expect.

Hidde van der Ploeg:

No, it really is depending on what feature we're working on or you want to work on. Then sometimes I start a feature and then I make it all flashy and nice and somewhat work or give it actual data, and sometimes Pol makes something and then it looks horrendous and then I jump in to make it bad. Now even we're to a point like Pol is not allowed to work on anything else but in-app purchases and subscriptions. Every time he does, he has to pay a fine. We have good dinner once we launched this.

Charlie Chapman:

But it does seem really healthy that it's not like there's areas that either of you just never look at. You can imagine a lot of times it's like, "Oh, that's his area. I never even touched that." But it sounds like both of you are pretty familiar. You might do a mediocre job at the other person's area and then let the other person come in and kind of clean it up, but it creates a scenario where both of you are familiar with everything, I'm guessing.

Hidde van der Ploeg:

Yeah, I think it's also important because you need to stay familiar with your own app, right? You need to know your app inside out to be able to help with support and stuff and to know how to scale things. So I think we'll never be fully isolated. I think it's part of ownership. We share the ownership, so we actually share the ownership of everything as well, so also the best one words.

Charlie Chapman:

How do you handle support?

Hidde van der Ploeg:

I think for a long time we were dealing like normal. We had diagnostics, great package from Antoine in there to get some logging if needed. What we noticed really quickly is that quite a lot of times we had to ask, "Okay. Please send the diagnostics," and then hope for the best.

Charlie Chapman:

Diagnostics. For those listening, that's an SDK.

Hidde van der Ploeg:

Oh, yeah, that's an SDK. Yeah, it's a Swift package and it basically builds up an HML page and shows all the error logs and stuff that... Well, it depends what you log in there really, anything you want.

Charlie Chapman:

And then users can send that to you through your support?

Hidde van der Ploeg:

Yeah, just amazing profile.

Charlie Chapman:

Usually email or whatever you have set up. Yeah.

Hidde van der Ploeg:

Exactly.

Charlie Chapman:

That's Antoine van der Lee that makes that?

Hidde van der Ploeg:

Yep.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah.

Hidde van der Ploeg:

Then I think at some point I was like, "Ah, you know what? This is quite annoying." I think the whole support experience is also not really nice because it's just an email and hope for the sake of emailing that it turns out nicely. So I think at least you vibe-coded this, I think, in a day or two. I hate the word vibe code, but it wasn't so much vibe going on. It was definitely vibe coding where I built a backend in Superbase quickly with all the fields in there of things that we would want to have in there. Obviously made a flashy, nice UI that just asks you about your name and optional email address even, I think, and then a message and then you can add photos to it and that's it. That's all there is.

Then with that submission, we automatically send the diagnostics file so we can just see what errors that have been thrown and it gives us a bunch of information straight out of the box without having to email back and forth to the person like, "Oh, can you please provide an example? Okay. Please do this." So we can actually see what errors App Store Connect API has been throwing and what their setup is and stuff. It's really just a low bear. We can then create a linear ticket straight from that submission as well. So we can try triage it later, I guess.

Charlie Chapman:

Have you thought about wrapping that into a little SaaS product and selling it? Because that would be interesting.

Hidde van der Ploeg:

No.

Charlie Chapman:

Helm support.

Pol Piella:

No, never.

Charlie Chapman:

Oh, okay. Did I touch on something here?

Hidde van der Ploeg:

Yeah, not this year probably, but yeah, the internal tool is called Harbor and it has a similar app icon as well, but with an anchor instead of a helm. It has been working well for us. We're now adding it to our new app that we're making as well to see how it would scale to other apps. But ideas probably to at some point make this our next developer tool, I think one thing that we learned is that we probably will stick to two teams that we love and that's developer tools and music. I'm no workite server and that's for me-

Charlie Chapman:

Hand in hand, just very big overlapping markets.

Hidde van der Ploeg:

One for the barons and one for the nerdy friends. Yeah. So maybe who knows, but that has been really helpful, I would say.

Charlie Chapman:

Do you get much support that's like App Store Connect issues or do most people understand that line of like, "Oh, this isn't actually the app's fault, this is App Store Connect's."

Pol Piella:

We do get a fair amount of App Store Connect issues, but I think we used to get a lot of weird issues with entities in App Store Connect not being okay or 500s and stuff from the API. We used to get so much of it that we just improved our networking and stuff to retry and that solved a lot of the feedback that we have, but it's always been quite like developers are a great audience and user base to have because all the feedback is so detailed.

I remember someone who could then... They had an issue with the token or something and they just literally... We didn't reply overnight and we had an email chain full of like, "Oh, I've tried this. It didn't work." Then eventually they fixed it themselves. In a way, they were like, "Oh, yeah, it was my VPN or something." I don't even know what it was, to be honest. I don't know how I would even reproduce it. But yeah, we do get a bunch of feedback like that, but it's usually quite... They're quite understanding that sometimes it's an API issue and we respond to it quite quickly as well.

Charlie Chapman:

You're not getting a lot of support tickets that are like, "Why did my app get rejected?"

Pol Piella:

None of that. None of that.

Hidde van der Ploeg:

Also, I think the fact that our user base knows what an API is already says something.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, exactly. That goes a long way.

Pol Piella:

It's a win already. Yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah. Even in my much smaller developer tool, it is funny the difference in support I get there versus my consumer app. I'll get people that'll dig up their Mac activity logs and send those along, and I'm like, "Man, I wouldn't even know how to ask you to send that to me," and that is amazing sometimes. All right. I mean, we're getting close to time, so I'll end this the same way I always end this show, which is by asking you what's a person or people out there that have inspired you that you'd recommend others check out? I'll start with Pol.

Pol Piella:

I would say anyone, I think I mentioned this last time, in the podcast with it live, but I would mention anyone in the house that we stay in during WW every time. It's an incredible group of talented people. But if I have to mention one, I would say Klemens Strasser. I got to know him a lot this year and he's honestly such a source of inspiration, like literally constant, constant inspiration. So I would say that. Outside of development, the one person that has inspired me a lot in my life is my dad. That's someone I always say. Yeah, I've always admired how much he turned... I'm quite bad at dealing with problems and stuff. I get quite overwhelmed and how much he actually just turned problems into nothing within just a conversation. He just went like, "Oh, yeah, that's not an issue," and you felt immediately safe. That's something that I always try to take with me think. But yeah, I think that's the people I would say.

Hidde van der Ploeg:

I think obviously also you're in your house because they're a great bunch of people. But another person that I really admire is Michael Flarup, like an app icon designer, but also generally fun guy. We know each other for a long time. We met at a designer conference over 12 years ago, I think. Every time I see him, we're like absolute fun chaos together, so I can't wait to see him again in Finland. I think last time I said David Attenborough.

Pol Piella:

Oh, you did? You did?

Hidde van der Ploeg:

Okay. That's a good one. [inaudible 00:50:22].

Pol Piella:

Find another one. Another one.

Hidde van der Ploeg:

You know what? You know what? I'm going to say Daniel Steinberg, because I feel like Daniel Steinberg is a bit the David Attenborough of development. He's full of knowledge. Everybody loves him and he's just the nicest guy to everyone. I want to grow up like Daniel Steinberg, I think.

Charlie Chapman:

Oh, man.

Hidde van der Ploeg:

Yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

I haven't had Daniel on the show. I've had Michael on... He's one of those people that... I don't know how to say this. Because he's like a cool designer person who I followed online for so long, I kind of expected him to be a little bit not as nice. Does that make sense? He just seems elevated. He's so cool.

Hidde van der Ploeg:

Not all designers are asshole.

Charlie Chapman:

I've learned this. Sebastiaan de With is also in this category. I thought he was going to be this super cool biker designer dude, and then you meet him and he's like the friendliest person you've ever met and you're like, "Oh my gosh." But yeah, Michael is very much in that category. He's extremely cool. Yeah, I guess he's going to be at ARCtic Conf in Finland. Awesome. Well, thank you both for doing this with me again. So I guess where can people find both of you in your work? We'll start with you, Hidde.

Hidde van der Ploeg:

@Helm_app is our Twitter handle. I think that's the main one. But for myself, it's @hiddevdploeg, which is in the show notes-

Pol Piella:

Good luck.

Hidde van der Ploeg:

... because it's-

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, in the show notes.

Pol Piella:

Good luck.

Hidde van der Ploeg:

Oh, wait, hidde.design is my website. That's the easy one. That's all the links.

Charlie Chapman:

There you go. Yeah. Perfect. How about you, Pol?

Pol Piella:

For me, say @Helm_app and then website is polpiella.dev, and then you'll find all the links there as well.

Charlie Chapman:

Awesome. Well, again, thank you very much. Thank you all for listening. If you want to find more Launched, including episodes with most of the people you mentioned at the end there, you can find that at launchedfm.com. LaunchedFM is our handle basically everywhere. So you can find that there and I'll see you all in two weeks.

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 CharliemChapman pretty much everywhere else. And of course, huge thanks to RevenueCat for making this episode and all future episodes of Launched possible. I'll see you all again in two weeks.