86: Swipe the cat – Adam Lyttle

Adam Lyttle:

That company ended up collapsing. I was personally in debt over $200,000. No income, no ability to actually pay that off. Went through a complete the absolute lowest point in my life and I'd never ever wanted to touch computers again. I never ever wanted to do programming again.

Charlie Chapman:

Welcome to Launched. I'm Charlie Chapman, and today I'm excited to bring you the YouTuber and prolific indie app developer behind over 30 active iOS apps, including the brand new, very cute Swipe the Cat game. Adam Lyttle. Adam, welcome to the show.

Adam Lyttle:

Thanks for having me on, Charlie. I'm quite excited to chat about apps and find out what it's all about on the podcast.

Charlie Chapman:

This will be really fun. You've been on my list for a very long time. We met, I think for the first time last year in California. Is that right?

Adam Lyttle:

Yeah, yeah. At Worldwide Developer Conference last year. And you were on the cool table with all the cool developers.

Charlie Chapman:

The cool table. We were sitting together, we had a Korean barbecue or something.

Adam Lyttle:

And you invited me along. I was like, "This is cool. I get to sit at the cool table with..." It was the developer of Apollo as well, he was there.

Charlie Chapman:

Yes, Christian Selig.

Adam Lyttle:

Christian. So I was a bit of, these are people that I've read about, that I've seen online, but never sat down. And I was a bit starstruck and a bit like, "Oh, this is a pretty cool experience."

Charlie Chapman:

WWDC is wild, how you get all these journalists that you read their stuff all the time, or app developers that you've looked up for a while, and everybody's just crammed in this random suburb in California.

Adam Lyttle:

And being in Australia, we're just so far removed from everything. I'm just sitting in my office on my own, doing my own thing, and I don't really see the impact that I have in the real world. I have a pretty normal life and then I go to Worldwide Developer Conference, and then the people that I chat with online are real people.

Charlie Chapman:

And speaking of being in Australia, normally whenever I have an Australian on this show, it's really dark because I'm in my office. I'm drinking a bunch of tea, trying to stay awake. But actually right now it is daylight, and yet we're talking here together. And that's because we're in Singapore, we're here for iOS Conf, which is iOS conference that's happening starting tomorrow, I think. Actually starting today, I think.

Adam Lyttle:

Starts today, yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so I was like, "Hey, we should get together and try and do this in person." And of course, I couldn't just do the easy thing and find a meeting room, I was like, "We got to have the Marina Bay Sands in the background." And so I built this crazy little mobile podcasting set up. And so hopefully this sounds okay, but if you're listening and it sounds a little different than normal, that's why. But you should check out the YouTube channel and then you can see us in beautiful Singapore.

Adam Lyttle:

It's not a green screen. It's a real background. It's not like we're on Zoom with the background added in, this is the real deal.

Charlie Chapman:

Exactly. All right. So before we get into all of your apps that you make, I want to introduce you to the audience the way I normally do, which is, I ask three questions to kick things off, which is, where are you from? Do you have a formal education related to what you do? And then what did you do before you started making indie mobile apps?

Adam Lyttle:

So I'm from Australia, lived there my whole life, and it wasn't until last year that I've actually left the country. And since then I've been traveling all over the place to conferences and checking out the world. No formal education in anything. From the age of 19, I loved tinkering around with computers. I loved just building my own PCs and getting really stuck into it. And I think I found a passion and a love for computers because I understood computers more than people. So you can program a computer to do something and it will do it, whereas with a person, it can be complicated.

Charlie Chapman:

I feel like that line is getting blurrier with AI. It's increasingly, I'm trying to talk to it like an adult talking to a child or I'm manipulating it or something. It's very odd.

Adam Lyttle:

And then when it doesn't do something, you sit there, "Wait, thinking a bit," like it's a human.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, yeah.

Adam Lyttle:

But it's not.

Charlie Chapman:

Right. You find yourself asking, "Please." Okay. So you didn't have a formal education, but you liked doing stuff with computers. How did that eventually end up with you making iOS apps?

Adam Lyttle:

It's a bit of a long journey, but I was doing shareware at the beginning. At 19 years old, I was building shareware apps.

Charlie Chapman:

Oh, shareware.

Adam Lyttle:

That's showing my age a bit there.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah. Was this on the Mac? Was this on PCs, Windows?

Adam Lyttle:

On PC.

Charlie Chapman:

Okay, okay.

Adam Lyttle:

Yeah. So this is the age of Doom and Doom 2, when they would come out and you could play the first few levels for free, and then you could send money off to id Software and they would post you out a copy of the floppy drive with the game.

Charlie Chapman:

So were you doing games or was there a big shareware scene on Windows? Because I haven't personally heard as many of those stories before.

Adam Lyttle:

There was a huge Windows shareware scene. So you ranked on Google, you found... Well, it wasn't Google at the time, but you got found on-

Charlie Chapman:

Ask Jeeves.

Adam Lyttle:

... AltaVista and Ask Jeeves.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, AltaVista.

Adam Lyttle:

People find your software, they download it, they get it free for seven days and then they can unlock it. So there was a big scene developing software. I had a passion for building pretty simple games and also some shareware software. Basically just trying different things, playing around with it, seeing what worked, seeing what didn't work. But ultimately what happened in that scene was BitTorrent came out, LimeWire came out, and nobody was downloading share anymore and paying for it. Now all of a sudden they could just get it for free on any of these-

Charlie Chapman:

Torrents.

Adam Lyttle:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I then moved into setting up my own agency, doing web development design and software. Wasn't quite sure what I was going to do, but I knew that I have a passion for building and creating. It was all self-taught, self-taught the whole way, and I just landed myself... One of the people that were using my software, my shareware product, was working for the education system in the UK, and I announced on my website, "I'm no longer doing shareware, I'm going to be doing software. If you know anyone that wants software built or you need a software developer, chat to me." And the first contract I landed was for a big rollout of a learning platform for preschoolers' schools in the UK, which was pretty exciting. Kept me busy and paid for quite a bit of... Yeah, it paid the way from there.

Charlie Chapman:

And that was web at the time?

Adam Lyttle:

It was Visual Basic.

Charlie Chapman:

Oh, wow.

Adam Lyttle:

6.0.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah. Actually, I was going to ask too, what were the games that you were building in?

Adam Lyttle:

Everything was Visual Basic 6.0. That was my first real learning of development. It was a nice way to ease into it because you could just drop a button onto the visual field, you double click it, and then you could, say, put the code behind it, what that would actually do. There are some limitations, and I was reaching the limitations in it, and just move your way to different programming languages after that. There wasn't a lot of demand for bricks and mortar store needing software, actual executable software. So my skills transformed into doing web development as well, doing PHP, Vanilla JavaScript, and just creating platforms or creating services or websites, whatever work would come my way.

Charlie Chapman:

This whole time, you've always been running your own agency or making your own shareware. It's always been you or your own boss situation?

Adam Lyttle:

Yeah. The last time I held a real job, I was 15 years old working in a video store.

Charlie Chapman:

Oh, wow.

Adam Lyttle:

Showing my age again.

Charlie Chapman:

Okay, so you're doing web development and then a new platform opens up that lets you distribute software in a new way, with the App Store. Did you jump on that right away, or no?

Adam Lyttle:

There's a bit of a decline. My web agency went under. I was pretty silly enough to go personal guarantor on company cars, I took out these loans. I was thinking that the business is making so much money and it's doing so well that I'll be able to pay back all these loans and just live for now, without worrying about future.

Charlie Chapman:

You're spending tomorrow's dollars.

Adam Lyttle:

And good times are going to keep rolling. The good times stopped. My bread and butter were making websites for brick and mortar stores. This is back just after the dot-com boom, and you could make a website for 5,000, $10,000. And that was the going rate to make a website. So every time I got a new website signed up and it was $10,000 coming into the bank account. And then a little product called Squarespace and Wix and everything released their version of what I was doing. But instead of being like $10,000 to make a website, now it's $30 a month, and pretty much overnight the company started to just not get any revenue. But I still had a lot of debt to pay off and that company ended up collapsing.

I was personally in debt over $200,000, no income and no ability to actually pay it off. Went through the absolute lowest point in my life, and I'd never ever wanted to touch computers again. I never ever wanted to do programming again. I became so burnt out that I couldn't even concentrate on doing it, which at the time was bad because I still had clients that I was servicing, but a business that wasn't running. So I had lots of people calling me, telling me how upset they were-

Charlie Chapman:

That it's like a self spiraling thing.

Adam Lyttle:

Yeah, for sure. So I completely gave it up. My coping mechanism was going for long, long, long walks. I went through quite a few pairs of shoes, just going for walks. And I realized if I put a lawn mower in front of me, I could do long walks and get paid to do it. So I set up a lawn mowing business and started mowing lawns.

Charlie Chapman:

Wow.

Adam Lyttle:

Far away from computers, far away from anything in my previous life. The fittest I've ever been in my life, all the sunshine in the world, and it was actually really nice to get away from computers, get away from the office, get away from clients, get away from everything. But the money wasn't as good as software. And I was finding myself waking up at six o'clock in the morning and going to bed at six o'clock at night. That whole day in, I don't know what the weather's like where you are, but like 40 degree weather, a hundred degrees Fahrenheit.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, that's intense.

Adam Lyttle:

And then, yeah, doing that 12 hours a day and then coming home, body was absolutely aching. And I loved it, but it was hard.

Charlie Chapman:

So the same thing as asking Claude to update my website and then sitting there and drinking coffee in my air-conditioned house.

Adam Lyttle:

Yeah. Yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

Okay. So you had your office space moment where you escaped the software world and you got a real job in the real world.

Adam Lyttle:

Yeah, and you see it all the time. So many developers say, "I just want to disappear. I want to own a farm and do it." It's always a coffee shop around where I'm at, which sounds like one of the hardest jobs in the world. Well, that's what I realized. Whenever people say it, I'm like, "It's actually really hard." People out in the field would prefer to be in air-

Charlie Chapman:

Sitting in air conditioning and having a relatively stable job. Yeah, yeah. Okay. So then, yeah, how'd you get back in it? We're at an iOS conference, you're giving a talk tomorrow, so obviously you got back into computer somewhere.

Adam Lyttle:

I got back into... It pulled me back in. So I was managing my lawn mowing job and I applied everything that I knew about the agency I ran, everything I knew about running a business, and that is to basically do a job, but then over promise, under deliver. And basically that got people coming back, got me referrals, and within six months I had 90 clients on my books, which I found out later is quite an amazing achievement.

Charlie Chapman:

That seems like a significant amount of people. This is just you or did you have employees?

Adam Lyttle:

Just me doing it.

Charlie Chapman:

Oh, my goodness.

Adam Lyttle:

Then the issue became managing my clients, managing where I need to mow, how I need to invoice, how I need to quote, keeping track of all the things I'm doing.

Charlie Chapman:

So what city are you in at this time anyway?

Adam Lyttle:

Melbourne. In Melbourne.

Charlie Chapman:

Melbourne. So what is the rain situation? The struggle where I'm at is just keeping up with my one very small lawn. It's like the night I want to do it, I feel like it always ends up raining, and then now it's too long and it takes way longer. Was rain a thing that would blow up your whole schedule if you were that saturated?

Adam Lyttle:

Yeah, that's quite insightful to think. I didn't realize that until I'm actually in the field and you have, "Okay, I'm going to do 30 jobs in the next couple of days," and you look out in it rains, you're like, "Okay, I'm not doing 30 jobs." But they still need their lawns mowed.

Charlie Chapman:

It's like when a weather event messes up the airlines, it's like the downstream impacts. Because you still have lawns you have to mow the next day, right?

Adam Lyttle:

Yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

Goodness.

Adam Lyttle:

And they're constant maintenance, so you can't just let it slide for a few weeks because they won't get you back because the lawn's overgrown.

Charlie Chapman:

Right. So I think I know where this is going. You're looking for a solution to this management problem.

Adam Lyttle:

Well, I was looking for a solution. And I didn't want to be the one creating the solution, so I was asking other people in the industry, I'm like, "Surely there's a solution that can show my route, the best route I could possibly take? It can schedule all of my mowing tasks?"

Charlie Chapman:

Oh, you have the delivery man problem already.

Adam Lyttle:

Yeah, but then also do the quotes, automatically follow up on the quotes, when they accept the quote, books it in. Just stuff that I would do in my day-to-day job as a developer, automate, that sort of stuff. And I was like, "Who?"

Charlie Chapman:

Because you have that mindset.

Adam Lyttle:

Well, exactly. And then I'd ask people in this industry, "How are you managing it?" And the way that they were managing it, everyone I talked to, they had a piece of paper. They had it in their truck, on one side was all the jobs they had to get through this week, which, they crossed them off, next week they flip it over and they cross off all the jobs again. So the only way that you could manage client load, your whole inventory, everything, was to do it on pen and paper.

Charlie Chapman:

Goodness.

Adam Lyttle:

And I said, "Why isn't there a solution for this?" And one guy turned around to me and he says, "Well, if you know someone that could build it, they'd make a lot of money building it." I was like, "Well, I guess I have to build it."

Charlie Chapman:

So that's how you got sucked back into computers.

Adam Lyttle:

That's how I got sucked back in. And I had no experience developing apps, my experience was PHP.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah. What time period are we talking about? Is this post iPhone in the app world now?

Adam Lyttle:

Yes, this is post.

Charlie Chapman:

Okay, fine.

Adam Lyttle:

So we're talking 2020. So in January 2020, I decided to teach myself app development. And the only way I know how isn't to do what any normal person would do and do a course or go get some formal training, no, I decided that every month from now on I'm going to build an app and release it to the App Store and to Google Play. And then that started a trend of every single month I would build a new app. There was no intention to actually generate any revenue from it, I was just putting it onto the App Store. And just in my mind, I'd created so much damage and made people so upset, and I was causing so much...

When my company collapsed, I hurt quite a few people and I just wanted to make a mark and make an impact that was a bit more positive than a legacy of a failed company in debt, and a lot of people upset with him. And I was like, "Well, the one thing I know is development and coding." But more as a creative outlet, more as an art form. And then that was how I got back into developing apps and then doing it on a scale. And that's the other thing about me, I think, I just do things on a scale that is a bit silly sometimes.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, I'm already picking up on that, number of lines, number of apps. It's like once you do a thing, you're like, "What if I do it times a hundred?"

Adam Lyttle:

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

Okay. So this was an educational goal of, you said once a month?

Adam Lyttle:

Once a month. This was before AI. I was learning as I was releasing on a monthly cadence.

Charlie Chapman:

How do you manage that? Did you have a process where you're like, "All right, I just released an app, now I need to come up with an idea for a new app."? Did you have a list of ideas you would pull from all the time? It seems like it would have to be almost like a conveyor belt system to do it that frequently.

Adam Lyttle:

Pretty much. I did have some ideas, like a pipeline of ideas, and then as I was building, more ideas came to mind. So when I started off, I think I had about four or five different ideas to do just apps that I wanted to use in my daily life. And then basically it would work out to be a week of planning, a week of development, a week of trying to get it through the App Store and then a week of overflow of any-

Charlie Chapman:

I like a week of trying to get to the App Store. I'm like, "Yes, that makes sense." I worked at a consulting job a long time ago. It was actually Windows phone, but it was the same deal. We would always tell people, "We need a full week to get it into the store." And they're like, "What?" This is a different thing than the web.

Adam Lyttle:

You don't own your app, you just have the privilege of getting it onto the App Store, basically.

Charlie Chapman:

Okay, so then you were getting apps out there. Were you pretty much just like, you put an app out there and then you move on? Or did any of them catch on and you actually started building a... Actually, I guess the first question, were you even monetizing them at all or were they totally free?

Adam Lyttle:

They weren't monetized at all, so just run through personal accounts on the App Store, and they weren't monetized. My only distribution was posting it onto Facebook to just my friends and family, saying, "This is what I'm doing, this is what I'm building. Come check it out." And I had one of my most successful apps, pretty much the second app that I ever built, and it did really well. It got a lot of downloads, and in my mind I thought, "Oh, this is just normal and this will happen every single time." It kept the motivation, and kept going. And this is six years ago now, so the App Store was a lot less saturated than it is now, so it didn't take a lot. But if I knew what I know now, then, you could have cleaned up. But back then I didn't know what I was doing and I stumbled across one that worked. And then-

Charlie Chapman:

What do you think made it work? Well, which app was it?

Adam Lyttle:

In my darkest time, I was going through trying to find deep meaning in life and I was like an atheist, and then I was like, "Well, I think there's something out there." And then I was going down the path, the new age path. And at this stage in my life, I was going down the new age path and I wanted to learn about things like tarot cards and have a tarot card reference. And I was like, "I'm going to make that into an app." So I made an app. It was a tarot card reference app and released it to the App Store. And what made it successful was it was called Tarot Card.

Charlie Chapman:

It was an ASL thing.

Adam Lyttle:

Yeah, it was the name of what people were searching for. I didn't do it on purpose, it was just what happened. And it just got a lot of downloads and I thought, "Yeah, well, this is going to happen every time I release an app." But it didn't. I ended up selling that app, thinking that I'm going to have another hit again in the future, but it took me four years to get another hit in the App Store quite like that one again. And if I had realized what I was on then and if I realized how to monetize it, because I wasn't monetizing anything at the time, I would've realized that it was a lot more valuable than I thought it was or even understood it was. But you learn.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah. So how did you transition from, you're making these for free and not necessarily trying to make a business out of it, to now you make a bunch of apps. As far as I know, your main business isn't a lawn mowing tracking app. What was the transition to where you ended up?

Adam Lyttle:

So I'd built the lawn mowing tracking app. It took about six to nine months to actually build it. I released it thinking that this is what the world needs. Market validation. People that I talked to said that this is what they need. Released it.

Charlie Chapman:

And people will just find it on their own.

Adam Lyttle:

They'll find it on their own. I released it and nothing really happened with it. No influencer marketing, but because I was part of community groups, I was posting in Facebook community groups and also mowing associations that I was part of, putting into the forum saying, "Hey, look at this app that I've found that I'm using for my mowing business." Because I don't think in those industries that they're assuming that I'm self-promoting, because I don't think many people mowing lawns are building software.

Charlie Chapman:

I'll just sniff test that. Redditors generally have where they can smell it a mile away.

Adam Lyttle:

So it was getting downloads, but clearly not enough downloads to generate meaningful revenue.

Charlie Chapman:

And no one had a subscription, I'm assuming?

Adam Lyttle:

Subscription, yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

Oh, sorry.

Adam Lyttle:

It started out for free, in a beta form, and then as I built it, I started to monetize that one. But the realization that I had was I spent six to nine months building this thing, it got no traction, but this other app over here that I built in a week got more traction. Why did that happen? And how can I replicate that and not waste another six months on-

Charlie Chapman:

It's when you realize that the App Store, and maybe this is just broadly, the business world, values value more than they value time spent. And they don't have to be related at all. Obviously you can generally create more value by spending more time on something, but you can also not do that at all and just waste a bunch of time not creating something that's valuable to real people.

Adam Lyttle:

Yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, yeah.

Adam Lyttle:

Yeah. Well, I thought I was creating something valuable. It just turned out the market size wasn't as big as a consumer app.

Charlie Chapman:

Or you didn't know how to reach it.

Adam Lyttle:

Or didn't know how to reach it, yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

Oh, that's interesting. Okay, so that's out there and you're like... But I guess because of the Tarot Card app, you were like, "I think I can still make a business on this platform." And so then you dedicated yourself to figuring that out?

Adam Lyttle:

So I dedicated myself to figuring it out. I started to monetize apps, and I was getting some good revenue coming through. And I was on Google Play and I was on the App Store and I was creating hybrid apps. I don't know if you've heard of these, like a platform called Cordova at the time?

Charlie Chapman:

Oh, Cordova. Okay.

Adam Lyttle:

So I was building in HTML and JavaScript and the backend was PHP.

Charlie Chapman:

That makes sense, because that's the world you came from.

Adam Lyttle:

That's where I came from. And I was looking at the numbers and I was getting a lot of downloads from Google Play. Not a lot of downloads from the App Store, but the App Store was making, per download, more than what Google Play was. So I was left at a crossroad that this building apps in HTML and JavaScript, they don't look all that great, they don't function all that well. I have to learn native development. Do I go down the Android path or do I go down the iOS path?

Charlie Chapman:

Did you consider React native or Flutter or some of the other hybrids that are a little closer to native feeling?

Adam Lyttle:

I played around with React Native and I didn't like it. I didn't like it all that much. I think I want to just throw myself into something a bit more... Like I've been from doing Visual Basic and all of these fringe technologies my whole career, I was like, "This time maybe if I'm going to learn something, I'm going to learn something that's a bit more... Probably going to get..." I'm not comparing React Native to a Fringe.

Charlie Chapman:

You heard it here first.

Adam Lyttle:

But I was thinking I want to do something native. At the end of the day, I can always learn both platforms, or like you said, Flutter or something like that. I can be on both platforms. But when I looked at the stats and I looked at the downloads and the market, I was like, "If I can work out how to scale up on the App Store, revenue would scale up quicker than on Google Play." Because Google Play, at the time I was getting a hundred downloads per dollar generating, or whatever it is, a few years ago now. Whereas the App Store, it's got to a stage now, for every download I get, it's about 50 cents in revenue. So two downloads, I get a dollar in revenue. So if I could scale up the App Store side of it, I knew that I would be able to generate much more revenue than Google Play. So I went to SwiftUI and really never looked back.

Charlie Chapman:

So that would've been, what, like 2021, 2022?

Adam Lyttle:

I think it was later. I think it was 2023.

Charlie Chapman:

Okay, okay, so it's-

Adam Lyttle:

I've only been with SwiftUI now for only a couple of years.

Charlie Chapman:

Just out of curiosity, as somebody who's been doing this for a very long time but had never done, really, you hadn't done Apple world development, what was that transition like?

Adam Lyttle:

Difficult. Because I've already played around with React Native, I understood how SwiftUI works with the flow.

Charlie Chapman:

In terms of a declarative UI framework.

Adam Lyttle:

Yeah, so I don't really know the technical name for it.

Charlie Chapman:

Visual Basic was like UIKit was, in the sense of you put a button on a... Actually both of them had a visual editor, and then it's like you write a line of code to decide every single thing that happens, and you say, "This is this many pixels." SwiftUI you have that markup in HTML. You're just declaring what it should generally look at, and then the system itself decides what that actually means.

Adam Lyttle:

Yeah, and then the other difference is, if you set a variable over here, it pushes it through all of the-

Charlie Chapman:

Views, yeah.

Adam Lyttle:

Whereas in HTML and JavaScript, you would have to physically, manually push it in every single-

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, yeah.

Adam Lyttle:

So it made life easier, but it was really hard getting my head around it. And I got quite frustrated with Xcode and I got very frustrated with how slow it was running on... At the time, the only way I could build on iPhone was to build on a MacBook. I was a Windows person, so I had to buy, on Marketplace, a broken MacBook with no screen, and I plugged that into an HDMI port and I was coding on that. And it was slow. It didn't work for it. I didn't like Xcode, nothing seemed to flow with it. And I found myself with JavaScript, HTML, with PHP, I got into a stage where I can think of the solution in my head as I'm wanting to build it, but SwiftUI, coming to a brand new language that had different framework, I could no longer visualize what I was actually coding. I was just-

Charlie Chapman:

You have to translate it. It's like speaking a foreign language. You think in your native language, and then you have to translate it into the new thing.

Adam Lyttle:

Yeah, yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

Interesting. Okay.

Adam Lyttle:

So it was challenging in that respect. But then a few years ago, one of the first apps that I built in SwiftUI was a learn piano app. And this is an app that I've been trying to mold, and this is where my real passion is. And what made me fall in love with SwiftUI was, I wanted to be able to just detect notes through the audio. So you can play a note and the app would know what note you're playing. And if I wanted to do that in React Native or any of those other ones, I don't know how I would ever do it.

Charlie Chapman:

You'd have to bridge it to Native code anyway to do that, I think. Yeah.

Adam Lyttle:

And when I fell in love with SwiftUI, it was like, "Oh, there's an API for that, and you just do this." I'm like, "I like that."

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah. Well, I'm curious, what's the name of it? It's Piano... It's like a one word combined, right?

Adam Lyttle:

It started out as, it was called Learn Piano Notes and Music, just keywords. It started to get some attention and started to get downloads. And that's the strategy that I do, I release it for free, get some attention, get some downloads on it, and if it syncs, I don't come back to it. If it rises to the top, then I start to monetize it and I start to add new things to it. I wanted to gamify it, and in my mind, that meant turning it into a game for some reason. So I turned it into a game and it's called Piano Run.

Charlie Chapman:

Piano Run. Okay. Yeah. And this was, at least initially, this was an iPad-oriented app, and the idea was to learn how to play piano. And it wasn't gamified at the beginning, right? Is that correct?

Adam Lyttle:

Had lives and you'd lose lives, but that was about it.

Charlie Chapman:

It was an app game, okay.

Adam Lyttle:

Yeah, so there's some gaming. The vision for it was to always be a game. So in version 1.0, there was some game elements to it, but the vision that I wanted was a Candy Crush, almost like you're going through a progression of a quest with different level progressions. You unlock stars, you unlock different things, very ambitious. So version 1.0 was a pretty basic version.

Charlie Chapman:

You have a YouTube video that's called How I Ruined My App By Listening To Users. That's about this story that I find really fascinating. So I'll let you tell the gist of it, but it has to do with going from the iPad more learning focused app to this gamified thing. What's the deal behind that?

Adam Lyttle:

You plug it into the iPad, you plug it into your piano, like the MIDI port, and you play the notes on the screen and it teaches you how to learn the piano while you're playing a game. It's really aimed for my kids to play and get them involved in the piano and get them actually really excited about it. There's different levels. There's a level with a car where you drive a car. So the idea is that instead of plugging in a game controller that has 12 buttons, you plug in a piano which has over a hundred buttons. And so the kids will sit there playing the piano, playing a game. And it works well on the piano, but 90% of people downloading it don't use it on an iPad, and only a very small percentage of people using it on the iPad actually plug it into the piano.

So the feedback was that if you're playing it on the touch screen, you're not really learning anything or doing anything, you're just touching buttons on the screen. So I've been working for the last few months on getting the feedback from users, which was, "On the iPhone, it's a pretty crap game," turning it into an iPhone game, and then ended up having this weird Frankenstein app that now no longer works as I envisioned on the piano, but also doesn't really translate well to an iPhone app. And it confused everyone.

Charlie Chapman:

Is that where you landed or have you course corrected since then?

Adam Lyttle:

That's where it's landed. And then like I said, so I know in my mind there's something there with learning the piano in a gamified way. I know Duolingo is going down that path now, and there's actually Duolingo for piano. I was going around saying I'm-

Charlie Chapman:

I didn't see that.

Adam Lyttle:

... I'm making the Duolingo for piano learning. And people are like, "Yeah, you know Duolingo have made a piano learning?"

Charlie Chapman:

I didn't know. I knew they have the chess one. Oh, that's interesting.

Adam Lyttle:

So it's not necessarily in that way, it's more in terms of unlocking stars, and trying to beat your top score and coming back to it. I went back to the drawing board and I've realized what had happened with the app is the DNA of it was just wrong. So if it was based on being an app for the piano, I can't translate that to an iPhone app because it just doesn't translate well. Maybe I should have just stuck with the iPad version of it. You plug it in, and not ever released it as a iPhone app. I've been trying to really personally learn piano and also learn sheet music, and sheet music is where I really struggle with it. So what I've been leaning down the path of is a gamified app, instead of learning songs in a drop-down arcade fashion, now you're learning the placement of the notes on the actual sheet music.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, I can't remember.

Adam Lyttle:

Yeah, yeah. So basically instead of... There's apps out there that can teach you how to read sheet music, but they're all very black and white. They're all very, very theory-based looking.

Charlie Chapman:

It's more like school, yeah.

Adam Lyttle:

And that doesn't appeal to me, I find that really boring. I want to play something that I can get a top score, go back, try again, go back, try again, and I don't need a piano to plug it into, I can just do it anywhere. So that's the basis of where the app's going now. And then the crossroads, I mean now is this a completely different app? Can I now change the app all over again and confuse people even more, or is this it's own app? And that's where it's landed at the moment, but I'll get to the conclusion of that by the time I've finished building it.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, okay. Is that one of your core apps as far as the business or is the money coming from a really spread out group of apps?

Adam Lyttle:

It's pretty much coming out from a spread out group of apps. So the-

Charlie Chapman:

Oh, that's nice actually.

Adam Lyttle:

Every time I build an app, I put it onto the App Store, it generates a bit of revenue. And over time, I think it's over 50 apps that I've developed and I've culled a lot from my portfolio, or sold a lot. But those apps mostly are generating revenue spread out across the apps, which means that I've never actually monetized any of the piano apps. This is really just a passion project.

Charlie Chapman:

Oh, that's just one of your... Okay, interesting.

Adam Lyttle:

That's why I'm so passionate about it, I'm building it. And even on my YouTube channel, I preach a lot about, which is what we're talking about before, don't spend six months on an app when you can do it in a week. As I'm talking, I'm sitting there thinking, "I really should take my own advice because I am spending a lot of time on this piano app."

Charlie Chapman:

But I think there's an element of, you have a successful business that can allow you to indulge yourself a little bit. But it's not just indulging yourself, it's like you're building skills, you're focusing on the craft. Because sometimes you just need to spin up an app that's based on an idea, monetize it, do all the standard tricks and make some money from it. But also, you want to have something you're passionate about, to feed, bringing new ideas or UX design patterns, or whatever, that then you probably carry into all of your apps that you do. So now I'm curious, because your most recent app, the Swipe the Cat game is one of the most delightful things ever. And we'll explain what it is in a second. But I am very curious where that's going to land on. I don't actually know, is this one of your passion apps or is this one of your money-making apps? But before we get to that, just describe what this app is and how it came about.

Adam Lyttle:

As the name suggests, you swipe the cat. Basically it's a gamified game where a cat pops up on the screen and you have to swipe it off the screen. And it's based on those TikTok trends where you swipe the screen without putting your finger on it. And the whole objective was that I want to build an app that could potentially go viral. That was the objective, build something that could go viral. This is a viral trend happening on TikTok at the moment, if I hook into the viral trend, that could equate to a viral app.

Charlie Chapman:

For those that don't know, this is on TikTok reels, whatever. There's a bunch of these videos that have popped up everywhere where there's a transparent thumb that goes up, down, up, down, up, down, and then whatever's on the screen reacts in time to that. And so as you're sitting there watching it, it's just a video, if you start moving your thumb, it legitimately does feel like you're moving the person or the character on screen, or whatever. I find them very delightful on social media. So whenever I saw you say, "I'm trying to turn this into an actual real thing," I thought that was a genius idea. One, because they're cool, and two, because I've seen that approach taken for games, where people will literally market as, "You know those fake ads for games that everybody knows aren't real games? We made that real game." And it seems like those... At least that's a pattern I've seen people try. So I'm curious to hear the answer, did that work, I guess?

Adam Lyttle:

In terms of download, yes. In terms of revenue, no. The lesson I learned from that is, games are very difficult to monetize. And you have to go down the path of advertising, and that path to make it. That generally seems to be what people want from the game, unless you have Candy Crush or something where you can unlock extra abilities within the game that you need to actually finish the level. The monetization strategy that I used for it was, you could unlock different scenes. And you could play the game and unlock coins to unlock the scenes yourself, or you could shortcut it and unlock scenes. It turns out people don't really care enough to use real money to unlock scenes.

Charlie Chapman:

I think it comes down to having not done the game element myself, I think a lot of it comes down to, does your game build a habit or is your game a fun core experience? That is, you do it, it was fun, and then you move on.

Adam Lyttle:

Yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

For the experience one, I feel like you have to monetize it very differently than the come back to this every single day type app. And this one feels more like an experience type thing, for the most part.

Adam Lyttle:

Yeah, it was the in-game currency model that I went with. And I'm very happy with the end product and I love the direction that I took with it. And every single frame on the game I have actually hand sketched.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, you've talked about this on YouTube. But if you haven't tried it, you should just stop this video and go try it because it legitimately is delightful. And especially having liked the TikTok style things, it's very fun to do it for real. But it is a exquisite feeling app, and there's a couple of different elements, but the biggest one is, I think, the hand-drawn feel of the animation. You have an interesting approach to how you generated all those assets.

Adam Lyttle:

The idea was generated through ChatGPT and through Nano Banana. And then I hand-draw over it a few times, and then I used Sora to animate just the five frames between each of the scenes. So I animated by hand three frames, either side of the animation, and then Sora did the rest in the middle. Which turned out to be a very time-consuming thing to do, to sketch out each of the cats one by one. Well, three at a time. So the whole business model was to put as many assets in there as possible that people can purchase and unlock, but it was very tiring and very time-consuming, so I don't have as many assets in there as I wanted to put in there, which also might be one of the reasons why monetization doesn't necessarily work on it. If you are going down a business model where you need to keep producing content for the game, then you've created a job for yourself.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah. Well, and that is a whole model for games, right? That is most of what you're spending your time on is creating new assets. But it feels like with this one... Are there people clamoring for more assets or is it going through the initial set of the game, you get the fun of it and then you move on, do you think?

Adam Lyttle:

I don't get many people asking for new assets, so I don't think there is a demand for new assets in there. So it's a fun game, it's nice to play. And I've learned a lot from it, which I'm building into the next step as well. But at the end of the day, I think when it comes to monetizing games, I've talked about this in the past, I'll never make a game again. And I said that a few years ago, that I've made a game.

Charlie Chapman:

You'll never do computers again. You'll never make a game again. We know how this plays out. But a big thing you talk about online, and on your YouTube channel, is monetization and distribution. We've talked a lot on this episode about you building your skills in software and all of that, but there's this whole marketing and business side that you spend a lot of time on too. How has that evolved since you started doing this, to now? In terms of, I know initially you were just throwing it into the App Store and hoping, what now is your primary method for distribution, getting people to find and download your app?

Adam Lyttle:

The primary method for distribution is App Store optimization. Getting it ranked on the App Store, finding keywords that you could actually rank for in the beginning, building an app around it and then getting it ranked on the App Store. So coming up with an app idea is part of the App Store optimization process. So when I come up with an idea, I will assess whether people are actually looking for this, and how many people are actually targeting this keyword already?

Charlie Chapman:

What do you use to do that?

Adam Lyttle:

I use Astro.

Charlie Chapman:

Astro. Okay. Yeah.

Adam Lyttle:

It's made by Mateo. He's another indie app developer.

Charlie Chapman:

Mateo, if you're listening, I want you on the show. Yeah, Astro, beautiful, like Mac app too. It's a cool app. But yeah, great way to see if there are keywords related to the idea that you've already had.

Adam Lyttle:

To validate the idea. So come up with an idea, look to see if there's keywords. What I would type in to find that app, and then look to see if those keywords are popular. If they're not very popular, the app, I never build it, if they are popular, I'd look at how much competition there is. If there's too much competition, I never build it. But there's a nice sweet spot where you can find a keyword... And it's getting harder and harder these days, but there's still keywords out there that if you come up with an idea, you can build it, you can rank for it and you can generate revenue.

And I think that was the part that I really nailed right at the beginning, which was getting it onto the App Store, getting it optimized, getting people using the app. What I always failed with was the monetization side of it. And then it wasn't until just recently, just over a year ago, I upgraded all my paywalls and tried an experiment, and it worked. In that moment, I realized I was already getting people downloading my app, people were already using my apps, they were finding it on the App Store. It wasn't an issue of trying to get more people using my app, it was actually finding a way to monetize that more effectively. And that went from the business generating $10,000 a month to $70,000 a month. Just that.

Charlie Chapman:

Oh, wow. Yeah, yeah.

Adam Lyttle:

Very stark difference. You look at the stats and you can see, before I put the paywall in, after I put the paywall in.

Charlie Chapman:

It sounds like you had gotten really good and built up the skill set of the very top of funnel, like pouring people in, but you were losing people at the monetization step, I guess, the conversion step in your paywall. And so if you have all these people coming in and then you lose everybody right there, it's like, well, if you just sit and spend time focusing on that, you can widen that funnel, and all of a sudden it changes everything.

Adam Lyttle:

But then what is a normal conversion rate? I was thinking, I've monetized, I've done this experiment, that experiment, and you get fractional little tiny changes. So in my mind, I was thinking any change is just going to be a steady, steady flow. I didn't understand that it was the paywall issue. I just thought it was a slow incremental process, and then making that change.

Charlie Chapman:

It's hard to know what those numbers are. At Revenue Cat have a status subscriptions report that will show you what are, based on our customers, what averages are for a lot of these. But obviously it's very different for different types of apps. I think the more important thing is paywall optimization can make a really, really big difference if you have a big bucket of users coming in. But a lot of people will start focusing on paywall optimization before they get distribution, and then it's like, yeah, making a 10% change or a 5% change, that's a big paywall conversion change, but if you don't have that many users coming in, it doesn't really matter.

Adam Lyttle:

But if you don't have many users coming in, you don't actually get to see the results of that change until later on anyway.

Charlie Chapman:

Distribution is step one, which is why I think your approach of, before you even start building the app, validating that there's users that want this, makes a lot of sense. In your Swipe the Cat game, I wouldn't think that would've been a search optimization play because people aren't like, "Oh, I want to go find an app that does this," and searching for it. So you said it did pop and get users, how'd you do that?

Adam Lyttle:

So the whole objective of that one was to learn about getting a game to go viral. So I think I've pretty much worked out how to do App Store optimization and I want to expand my skill set and learn something else instead of just doing the same thing over and over and over. I think I've looked at it and I've reached a stage in my own career, in my own development cycle, that doing the same thing over and over and over doesn't really appeal to me, it's learning something new. Doing something new and expanding my skills.

So I was really challenging myself to work out how to make an app go viral, and the best way to do that is to base it on a viral trend. So the objective that I set for myself was, "I'm building an app that will go viral that people..." It has to be so good in terms of the visuals that when people record the screen and put it onto TikTok, it looks like one of those TikTok videos already, and people just assume that someone's animated it by hand. And then they find out it's a game, and then they go back into that feedback loop and then download the game.

Charlie Chapman:

Most people, when they're playing a game, don't record it and throw it on TikTok. So how did you create the viral mechanic?

Adam Lyttle:

Through my socials mostly, to creating the viral mechanic, and then get people use it. In the Game Over screen there's the ability to share it with a friend, share your top score. And also later on in the release cycle, I actually put leaderboards in there, and achievements and things. So I've been learning a lot about the Apple games app that they have.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, Game Center.

Adam Lyttle:

Yeah, so that has been a good way to... If your friend's playing a game, it pops up in their Apple Game Center app, and that's a good way to get the app out there and get a bit more exposure.

Charlie Chapman:

Has that moved the needle? I wouldn't think that many people actually look at that.

Adam Lyttle:

I think when I look at it, I think it's mostly a very specific demographic that would be on there. The people that are on the game center is actually, from my observation, more so like mums, mums that are on Farmville and things like that, doing a lot of those sorts of achievement based games.

Charlie Chapman:

That is an interesting observation. Maybe that's like a neglected big user base that most people aren't thinking about. Possibly.

Adam Lyttle:

Yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

Interesting. Okay, so then what is the thing that... You said you learned and tried a bunch of different things to try and make it go viral, but what made it work, do you think?

Adam Lyttle:

The novelty. I reckon just the novelty. So putting it onto socials, people shared it. I ran some competitions, tried to drum up some interest with some competition, so get the top score, get an Apple gift card. So it was just trying to get some viral growth from it, in terms of that. Threw anything and everything I could at it, and then also put some TikTok videos out there of the actual animation, and that continues to get downloads for it to this day. The lesson that I've learned with that is you don't base it on keywords or anything that's evergreen, then you have to continually be marketing it to get people using it. And my philosophy with building apps is, I do it because I love the act of creating it, I don't necessarily want to create a job for myself doing something.

So I move on to the next one, then I'm building the next one with the lessons that I learned from that one, which was, go for a viral trend, go for something that will do well on TikTok, with good visuals, but then always have the App Store optimization as the evergreen. And then that way you have the opportunity to have that amazing growth that reinforces the App Store optimization. And then as that growth disappears, as the viral trend disappears, then people can go to the App Store and they can search it and find it in the App Store.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, that's a good observation. Because yeah, it's a very different strategy to build something quick based on a viral sensation and then monetize it as efficiently as possible for the short window you have to make it worth it, right? Yeah, no, I didn't think about it. Everything else you've done has been this tweak and optimize over time, and make it work, but this one, it's like it all has to happen during this moment. Oh, interesting. Yeah.

Adam Lyttle:

But I like to look at it as the experiment was to go viral with it. The optimization isn't optimized the way that I would've loved it to be optimized.

Charlie Chapman:

Sure.

Adam Lyttle:

Maybe it could be optimized better, but it was the test, can you get something to go viral? Yes, you can get something to go viral. I need to learn lessons for the next time that happens, have everything in place so when it does go viral, you have the optimization of the paywall in there or the monetization strategy in there. And it's just a constant progression of learning the craft.

Charlie Chapman:

And speaking of craft, I think the other thing with this, we're talking a lot about it as a business and optimizing monetization and all that, but it's also a nice portfolio piece. It is a fun, cool, very easy to look at and immediately grok app. And for that, I think you should be proud of it as just an achievement.

Adam Lyttle:

I'm very proud of it.

Charlie Chapman:

Especially in this age of most people playing this game, of making lots of apps and monetizing them, there's not a quality there.

Adam Lyttle:

Oo, you're touching on something that is the deep motivator for that one, and the piano game that I'm making, which is, people ask me, "What do you do?" Not people that I interact with online, but people in my real life, "What do you do?" "I build apps." "Oh, do you build apps for a company?" "No, I build my own apps. I put them on the App Store and people subscribe to them." "Oh, any that I would know?" I go, "Well, no, unless you are looking for a pregnancy tracker or counting your steps," or all these little keywords that I've targeted in the portfolio in the past. And I realized there's nothing that I'm proud of that I could show someone on the street, because they don't care, "Oh, you've optimized that paywall well." They don't don't care. I wanted to be proud of something that I could show people.

Charlie Chapman:

It's like they're providing value to people who are searching the app to solve a problem, and they solve the problem. It's not that it's not valuable, but there's an element of like, this is you and your craft and you're expressing yourself, and having those little portfolio pieces to be able to show off. But also just to be able to be proud of and improve your craftsmanship that way. Yeah, I think that's really cool. And I feel like the current indie scene is in a weird state right now, and it feels like there's almost a strict bifurcation between growth hacking and craft people. Almost like they don't like each... Well, I don't think the growth hacking people really even care, think about the craft people. But the crafts focus on the craft people. They seem to look down on all this stuff because a lot of those people are just, it's like the app doesn't matter, it's more about distribution and marketing and all this stuff. And so I wish there was more people that straddled the line a little bit.

Adam Lyttle:

Well, I think the trend that I'm seeing quite heavily in the whole indie space is now just churning out apps built with AI and getting them onto the App Stores. Now there's an onslaught of samey type apps going up on there. And yes, you can monetize them, yes, you can generate revenue, and I've done that in my earlier stages of my career, which was to build an app per month, get onto the App Store and go through that process. So there is a time and a place for building those types of apps.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, but part of what you're doing is learning through that process, right? Each one should be better than the last one.

Adam Lyttle:

Incrementally.

Charlie Chapman:

And it almost feels like sometimes there's an inversion on that with the AI tools of like, it's all about how fast can you make it with the least amount of effort. I'm guilty of this too. I'm enjoying the whole vibe coding era, but there's very much a place for making quality things for people.

Adam Lyttle:

I think it's just the thought process. If you break it down to what you want to achieve with the app, then that guides how you build the app. You can build it with AI or you can build it yourself, but if you have a very clear understanding of what you want to do with the app, AI is just a tool, coding is just a tool. But I think what I'm seeing is people are just outsourcing the entire process to AI. They're seeing a keyword and they're saying, "Build me an app that counts steps," and then puts it out in the App Store. I really think the benefit of building your own stuff and creating your own stuff is to hone that craft and to understand the psychology of why someone would actually care about another habit tracker, care about another step tracker, and then go down that path and try to understand what makes your app different.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, I think there is actually an interesting parallel to what you said at the beginning of this, which was, you were building bespoke websites. Squarespace and Wix come along, and it takes a thing that would take a long time and was expensive, and you can get 90% there very quickly. And everything becomes a little samey, but it changes the whole landscape. But it didn't get rid of making software as a career, it just changed what the expectations are. And we're going through that right now and obviously everybody's either overly excited or overly scared or somewhere in the middle. But yeah, I hope people don't lose sight of, building good things for people is a thing to aspire to.

Adam Lyttle:

I think the people that don't lose sight of it are the ones that are going to succeed. So I think we're going to have an influx of people outsourcing their thought process to AI, but the people that use it as a tool and to leverage their own creativity, now's the time to be building apps. So it's an exciting time, but at the same time, at the end of the day, it's only a tool used as well as the person building with it.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Before I let you go, I want to ask you the question I always ask everybody in the show, which is, what's a person or people out there that have inspired you that you'd like other people to check out?

Adam Lyttle:

There's this guy on Twitter, on X, Victor Seraleev. So his story is, he had an App Store, had a business making apps, Apple shut his account down and then he sued Apple for shutting his account down while also setting up another account building apps. So he's gone through this whole court process with Apple about his app being shut down. And he lost the court case, and he was very worried of the repercussions of that. But in the meantime, he's gone from zero again to building a successful app business. And now I think he's generating like $60,000 a month from his app business, which is more than what it was when they shut down his previous business. So I find his philosophy and also his craft with building the apps really insightful and really nice to check out. So I recommend checking him out.

Charlie Chapman:

Okay. What are some of the apps, or what's one of the big apps?

Adam Lyttle:

There's like an auto captions app where you can put videos in there and it does captions. He's got a paywall that is beautiful, that has video in there. His onboarding process with the captions app is him explaining what the app does with captions, just really nice polished look to the apps. So he's really quite an inspiration. And the other inspiration is Jack Fricks.

Charlie Chapman:

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Adam Lyttle:

He started off building a tool to release to TikTok Reels and YouTube, and then he's just started to fumble his way around and play around with App Store optimization.

Charlie Chapman:

Very humble person.

Adam Lyttle:

Yeah, that's what I really like about him is that he's another one of these people that are doing it for the craft. And then the side effect of doing it for the craft is, hang on a second, this is making really good revenue and now it allows me to continue doing what I love and reinvesting my time and energy into doing what I love. So they're the types of people that I really am inspired by online.

Charlie Chapman:

Oh, that's great. Awesome. All right, well, thank you so much. I think both of us need to go back to our hotels and work on our slides for tomorrow. So this was super fun. Where can people find you and all of your apps?

Adam Lyttle:

So it's adamlyttleapps.com. It's adamalyttleapps on all of the socials, Instagram, X and YouTube. Yeah, check it out.

Charlie Chapman:

Awesome. Thank you again.

Adam Lyttle:

No worries. Thanks for having me on.

Charlie Chapman:

You can find more Launched at launchedfm.com. And we're on all the social medias at launchedfm. 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.