88: SwiftLee – Antoine van der Lee

Antoine van der Lee:

Well, I remember I was 13 years old and I was playing a game, Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory was called. I'm not sure if you know it.

Charlie Chapman:

Wolfenstein, is that what you said?

Antoine van der Lee:

Yeah, Wolfenstein. Yeah. First person shooter. And we had a clan and ever since my life when I do something, I want to do it as good as possible. I played darts and I wanted to become like a world champion in darts and I played football, and I wanted to become the best defender. And I screwed up. That's why I'm sitting here in this poll costume.

Charlie Chapman:

This is your failure mode.

Antoine van der Lee:

Yeah, this is my failure mode. Yeah. I even got songs on Spotify. So, if you ever find me at a conference...

Charlie Chapman:

Oh. Oh, okay. I need to add that to my-

Antoine van der Lee:

I wanted to become a DJ and I tried.

Charlie Chapman:

... to my to do list. Welcome to Launched. I'm Charlie Chapman, and today I'm excited to bring you the developer behind the popular website, SwiftLee and the outstanding developer tool, RocketSim, Antoine van der Lee. Antoine, welcome to the show.

Antoine van der Lee:

Thank you, Charlie. It's an honor to be here.

Charlie Chapman:

It's kind of funny when I was doing prep. Prep for people I've known for a long time is always weird because it's like, I feel like I know everything, but you're kind of going through the website, refreshing yourself on things. And I realized two very kind of funny points here. I've never thought of you this way, but in a way, we're sort of competitors or have been competitors on two fronts at this point. Have you thought about this before?

Antoine van der Lee:

Yeah, I think I know what you mean.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah. Again, I don't actually think of it this way, but for a little while, you had a interview podcast where you were interviewing people. Yours was significantly more ambitious than mine because yours was recorded in a studio in person, which I've done twice, or maybe more than twice, but as has been cataloged on the show. It's usually a failure and then I have to do it virtually. And how long did that last?

Antoine van der Lee:

Well, I'm honestly jealous on how you do it because it was so hard to get people in Amsterdam into the podcast studio. But I was like, if it fails, it can only fail because it's just not a success. It can't fail because the level of quality was too low. So, that's why I brought people in and it brought the conversation in the way I wanted it to do. The episodes were great, but...

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, it's very good. What is the name of it? Is it the SwiftLee Podcast, or did it have a different name? I'm trying to remember.

Antoine van der Lee:

The Going Indie Podcast.

Charlie Chapman:

Going Indie. That's right.

Antoine van der Lee:

Basically, into the course I was doing at that time, and I want to boost that course with the whole episodes and such. But the return on investment was just, it took so much time. I love doing the interviews, but the after work, and I think you all recognize the editing and the posting on the videos. I mean, I can do it, but it was just not the fun. And yeah, I don't know. Who knows? Maybe someday season two comes back. But I love that you're doing this, Charlie.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah. This is weird. I sort of jumped the gun here, but I just thought this was a funny comparison. But yeah, if you want to see what this show could be, if I put way more effort into it and was better at basically everything, you should go check out Going Indy because yeah, it's pretty good. We'll put a link to, I guess, as a dedicated YouTube channel, or is it your normal YouTube channel? Yeah. But the other one, which we'll get more into the details on this later, but I've noticed in your more recent developments on RocketSim that we're coming at it from different angles, but we're sort of creating a similar app here.

Again, yours being the much better one, in my opinion. But we'll get into that. We'll get into that. So, really quick though, minus what I just was talking about, I'm trying to start the show now with a little bit, a quick explainer of what it is that your app does, just in a quick elevator pitch so that whenever I forget to do the real intro later, people already have it in their head. So, really quickly, what is RocketSim?

Antoine van der Lee:

This is the single most question that I got asked plenty of times, and I always struggle to give the proper answer to it because the thing is, it does 30 different things, right? So, I have teams that bless the location simulation feature that our teams don't even touch or know about, right? So, you could basically see it as a Swiss knife that brings 30 plus features to the Xcode simulator that might exist elsewhere, but are just hard to reach, plus features that don't exist at all in Xcode that really make the life of a developer much easier, testing features like push notifications, accessibility, creating recordings, screenshots out, so on and so on and so on.

I can mention all the 30 features, but I guess it just is really focused on helping increase the productivity of developers that work with Xcode.

Charlie Chapman:

And I'll just say, without even explaining what a single feature actually is, if you are a person listening to this and you use the Xcode simulator for literally any reason at all, I guarantee you that it's worth downloading and using RocketSim because one utility, probably a half of your users, over half of their users, there's a single utility that makes it worth it for them. But there's a whole bunch of those, like you mentioned. And so, we can get into it a little more in a minute, but yeah, this is one where it's like, you should literally just stop listening to this and go download it and then come back and listen to this.

Antoine van der Lee:

Yeah. Don't forget to come back. Yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, don't forget to come back. But yeah, for real, this is one of those tools I've had for forever, way before I knew who you were, I think. So, yeah, definitely recommend it. All right. So, to the regular show, before we get into how RocketSim and your whole website and writing career and all that thing took off, let's give everyone an introduction to who you are. So, the three questions I always ask to kick off this show is, where are you from? Do you have a formal education related to what you do? Let's start with how did you end up getting into SwiftLee, your sort of writing?

Antoine van der Lee:

Yeah, sounds good. So, I'm Antoine van der Lee. I'm from a very small village called Spanbroek. So, if you're listening from Spanbroek, shout out.

Charlie Chapman:

And it's a small village where?

Antoine van der Lee:

If you went to Swift Island, it's a conference on an island in Netherlands. You drive past it, it's from Amsterdam. So, it's like a 30-minute drive up north from Amsterdam. Yeah, my formal education is a communication multimedia design used to be called...

Charlie Chapman:

Oh, really? Okay.

Antoine van der Lee:

Yeah. It used to be called Interactive Media and it basically taught you about how to create products, like digital products. So, it taught me like yellow is the first color a human processes, or you need to get to your end destination within three clicks and all those kind of things, but also history of art.

Charlie Chapman:

Because this is this podcast, I'm going to pull on that thread because I can't not. What do you mean? Yellow is the first color you process? I've never heard this.

Antoine van der Lee:

Yeah. So, there's all kind of psychological things, right? So, if you go to the supermarket, the entry is actually slow on purpose because it slows you down when you enter the supermarket and you will go slower through the whole supermarket, then you'll see more things. And then you'll notice that the things on sale are either yellow to get your attention or they are red, because it creates an impulsive action. Those are all kind of like tricks that you can use. Blue from Launched, blue feels comfortable and it works great with all the people.

Charlie Chapman:

That was definitely what I was going for. Yeah, comfortable and old.

Antoine van der Lee:

Yeah. But I guess the interesting part of it is that I thought myself how to code myself. I didn't really get lessons on it, but at the same time, I got that real big back full of extra experience on how to create great products. And I'm somewhere in the middle. I'm also not a designer, right? I really look up to [inaudible 00:07:37] because it looks so beautiful in all those animations. But at the same time, I have enough to at least make my products look solid enough and make it work in a way that you get things done without realizing in a way.

Charlie Chapman:

Okay. That's interesting because we'll get to it in a second, but at some point, you started writing quite a bit about software development and your writing kind of sits... I wouldn't put it all the way at the sort of Donnie Wall's really deep technical, but it's definitely on the technical side. It's not like all high level. So, something about your writing gave me the impression that you had a computer science background.

Antoine van der Lee:

I think I'm really good at teaching myself how to code. So, I went quite deep on it and eventually, I'm building up since 2009, so I got quite a bag of experience. But still, when I write my articles, I on purpose try to not make it as deep as needed, right? I leave out certain details because I want both junior as well as seniors learn what I think is at least the most important for that topic of the article. And that might result in articles that are not that in depth technical, but they are much more approachable for the wider community. That's the way how I look at articles in a way.

Charlie Chapman:

And so, you already mentioned you've been building apps since 2009. Did you start doing that on your own or did you get into a company and that's how you kind of got into it?

Antoine van der Lee:

Well, I remember I was 13 years old and I was playing a game, Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory was called. I'm not sure if you know it.

Charlie Chapman:

Wolfenstein, is that what you said?

Antoine van der Lee:

Yeah, Wolfenstein, yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

Okay. Yeah, yeah.

Antoine van der Lee:

Like first person shooter. And, yeah, we had a clan and ever since my life when I do something, I want to do it as good as possible. I played darts and I wanted to become like a world champion in darts and I played football, and I wanted to become the best defender and I screwed up. That's why I'm sitting here in this podcast. Oh, thank God.

Charlie Chapman:

This is your failure mode.

Antoine van der Lee:

Yeah, this is my failure mode. Yeah. I even got songs on Spotify. So, if you ever find me at a conference...

Charlie Chapman:

Oh. Oh, okay. I need to add that to my-

Antoine van der Lee:

I wanted to become a DJ and I tried.

Charlie Chapman:

... to my to do list, dig these up.

Antoine van der Lee:

Yeah. But either way, I was 13 years old and I built a website for our clan because we wanted to become the best clan possible. And that's my first start with programming and that evolved in building my first CMS in PHP because that's what you do. And then I bought a phone, which was an Android because I couldn't afford an iPhone. And then I had an internship where I did Android development and Windows phone development, because they needed people for that part.

Charlie Chapman:

You also did Windows phone development? This is in the Windows phone eight live tile era?

Antoine van der Lee:

Yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

Or is this the... Oh, look at that. I didn't realize we had this shared background. It was both of us, basically.

Antoine van der Lee:

Not so good. Honestly, the way you do animations and stuff, oh man.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah. The API was definitely not as mature as Android and iOS, but what was there was actually really nice minus Zamal horrible, like trying to do anything custom. But if you lived within the constraints of their UI system, you could make some really nice feeling apps, I thought.

Antoine van der Lee:

Yeah. But let's not lose your listeners, because I think we will get off track if we...

Charlie Chapman:

No, there's dozens of us. All the Windows phone fans are rejoicing right now in their cars.

Antoine van der Lee:

Yeah. I'm not sure if it's even still alive. But either way, I had a colleague, a neighbor, colleague, so I'd say he was literally two meters next to me and he was doing iOS development and I always looked up to the iPhone. I remember somebody walking with the first iPhone that had a GPS and he could walk us through the city. I was like, "Oh man, I won that." And I think I just tried to push myself into that direction and eventually I was like, "Okay, I want to work here, but I want to do iOS as well because I want to learn that." And yeah, that's where the whole journey kind of kicked off.

Charlie Chapman:

Okay. So, you eventually worked your way into an iOS job and you have typical iOS career going on. Where did the writing start then?

Antoine van der Lee:

Yeah, I think I was at an agency, a fantastic agency here in my neighborhood, so to say, a city nearby. And I wanted to speak at conferences because I was like, "Well, travel to cities and for free and meet people from the community." So, I did talk proposals and did another one and did another one.

Charlie Chapman:

These are proposals, not actual talks?

Antoine van der Lee:

I didn't get invited. That was pretty much the problem. And I never gave up, right? I wanted to become the best speaker possible, right? That was kind of my personality. So, I always look at like, okay, what can I improve? And if you looked at the conferences and it's still a bit like that today, which makes sense, you always see the same familiar faces because those sell tickets and you kind of know like, okay, they know what they're speaking about. So, I want to go to that conference. So, I was like, "Okay, I need to become that person that is you want him to be at your conference because tickets will be sold." And that's when I started to join...

I joined with Transfer at that time and I remember, okay, now I work at a company that everybody knows. So, if I now do a talk proposal, I'll get accepted. And I didn't get accepted, right? So, quite fast after that, I decided to just write about anything and I figured like, okay, consistency is key. If I just write an article every week and just do my best possible version, visitors will follow, growth will follow and my first conference talk will follow as well. And that basically happened really quickly. I got a proof of the numbers growing and my blog went really rapidly towards like a hundred thousand visitors per month or something like that.

And then that was search engine optimization times, where you could still really have an impact in that sense.

Charlie Chapman:

Were you doing a bunch of intentional SEO then?

Antoine van der Lee:

I mostly wrote about the things that I knew people would search for either way, not so much really. I didn't have a tool to look up for keywords other than search console, for example.

Charlie Chapman:

It was kind of your gut/the Google Search Console?

Antoine van der Lee:

Yeah, as well as that I didn't want to spend like a day writing an article. So, I wrote about things that I learned that we transfer and that resulted in many authentic articles that people could relate to. Yeah, that got me quite rapidly into the whole system of conferences. And my first conference talk was at Duis where they knew I did a talk at the local meetup, I had the talk ready and somebody couldn't make it. And I think I certainly remember that person that couldn't make it told me that he was the person, but I now don't remember who that person was. Well, it doesn't matter. Either way, 24 hours before that conference started, I was called whether I could do that.

Charlie Chapman:

Wow, look at that. That's like a call-up in a major sports situation, like this is your chance, your big break.

Antoine van der Lee:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which was quite, I was nervous like crazy and I could still see my hand shaking. My first DJ gig, I had the same kind of issue.

Charlie Chapman:

Because even back then, that was a pretty decent sized audience, right?

Antoine van der Lee:

Yeah, yeah. I was sitting at the speaker dinner, I remember, and I think there were people like Daniel Steinberg and the prompt overflow with a lot of points. I don't know his last name. People you look up to. And that felt great. And at that point, I had a reference. I spoke at a conference and that already adds up if you want to speak to another conference. And that's where the ball started rolling, I think. And that's where I'm at now, fast-forward, right? Now I'm able to speak at more conferences.

Charlie Chapman:

Okay. So, your initial idea behind writing was you had this sort of goal of speaking at conferences, but that was a while ago. You're still writing. And as far as I can tell you, you're still writing at least one article every week, right?

Antoine van der Lee:

Every week. Yeah. It's just a habit. Yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

Which is a significant commitment. So, why are you still doing it now that you've already achieved that original stated goal? What's the purpose of it now?

Antoine van der Lee:

Yeah, yeah. So, what I never realized at that point is that eventually, I got at a point that I could ask money for sponsorships and that started with small numbers, but eventually that grew and we will talk about it. But eventually, I created RocketSim and I realized, okay, I basically have my audience right here. I just have to send an email to them. So, I started the newsletter and slowly but surely and eventually, it allowed me to really build up a side business that really became serious. And I managed... I'm almost like, we call it artist.

I'm so structured, almost like crazy structured, and I think my close friends can confirm, but it also made me... That's why I can deliver an article every week because I'm so structured. And I had a full-time job at WeTransfer and I could still do it every week. And yeah, in 2024, that's two years ago after WeTransfer became more corporate and wasn't so nice in my progression reviews, I will save you the details. I decided to work one day a week on my website, my newsletter, everything. And the impact of one day a week was so crazy. The numbers went up so rapidly because you can work on more larger features, right? So, that rapid impulse...

Charlie Chapman:

And I think an important piece of that is, I'm going to guess, is being structured because I know a lot of people that they quit their full-time job or they negotiate less, not a full 5-day work week so they can dedicate a day to their job and they'll find like, "Oh, I don't actually get that much more done than I was before." But it sounds like that wasn't the case for you. And I imagine part of that is the structure you're building around it.

Antoine van der Lee:

Yeah, yeah. I mean, so many people were asking me like, "How do you manage all those things that you do?" But it was really like a compound effect of all the things that I had in place, automations, doing repetitive tasks into something that I could do in minutes, creating my own tools, which nowadays AI is a blessing for me because all the things that I already did, I can now do 10 times faster. But yeah, that's also why I created my Going Indie course, right? So, if you want to know how I did it, everything is in there. I literally wrote down all the tricks that I used and discipline, planning, whenever I had 10 minutes a day, I knew exactly what I was working on.

So, those 10 minutes were spent so well that in a week, I could still make a lot of progress even though I had family, I played golf and I had a full-time job and so on and so on.

Charlie Chapman:

And it's called Going Indie because you did eventually go full-time indie. And I promise we'll get into RocketSim, but at the time that you went indie, and correct me if I'm wrong, because this is just from my memory of us talking, your primary income was SwiftLee, the website newsletter, right? More than RocketSim?

Antoine van der Lee:

I was in a situation where I matched my WeTransfer salary, which was above standards in the Netherlands for obviously stuff iOS engineers. So, the risk was pretty much zero in terms of income. And at that moment that I went full indie, we just had our second son a week ago. I was kind of like, "Okay, that delivery needs to go well. And if that's all good, then I'll just go for it."

Charlie Chapman:

Then you're clear.

Antoine van der Lee:

Paternity leave. I had some extra time to work on the kickstart of my indie journey, but yeah, the newsletter, the sponsorships, but RocketSim was doing pretty well. I think it was close to 100K recurring revenue a year as well at that point.

Charlie Chapman:

Okay, okay. I mean, it was properly taking off by that point. I mean, it was on that curve. I just didn't remember where it was at that time.

Antoine van der Lee:

It was pretty far. And on top of that, I knew the impact of the single day a week, but I also knew that I had so many ideas that I didn't step into yet because of the time constrained. That was another thing that I really did, right? I couldn't work on new apps. I couldn't work on new projects because I do everything on the side. I need to keep my focus, but now, and that was also a risk that I realized afterwards. I suddenly had five days a week and I let loose of all the things that I learned as a side hustle. So, I didn't prioritize anymore. I didn't plan anymore.

Charlie Chapman:

Oh, so when you suddenly had more time, you did run into that problem I was describing?

Antoine van der Lee:

Yeah, greatly enough.

Charlie Chapman:

Oh, interesting. Okay.

Antoine van der Lee:

Yeah. So, I went starting on my own course because now I had the time to do courses, right? So, I figured, okay, let's go with Going Indie because that's knowledge I have in my head. I could basically create the course without thinking. And then I realized what I'm now explaining, I'm no longer doing. I should get back on track. It's stupid, right?

Charlie Chapman:

Oh, that's really funny. Okay.

Antoine van der Lee:

Yeah, you don't think about it. You're like, well, you have so much time. So, I kind of ended up in a situation where I felt like, okay, I have so much time, I can do everything that I started doing everything, which made me less focused on the things that I should actually do. So, the impact of what I did was still big and impactful because I did more things, but I could do so much more if I really focused. So, I really had to level up myself again.

Charlie Chapman:

Interesting. And really focus in that case was limiting the scope of what you're doing and instead spending more time on a smaller amount of things.

Antoine van der Lee:

It's a bit of both. And honestly, I had the same situation like November, December last year. Because of AI, you kind of have the same thing. You can now do much more at the same time, right? And it's kind of like the same thing as what happened back then, because you gain more, not necessarily more time with AI, but you gain more possibilities, right? There are basically no limitations on your creativity anymore. So, I'm constantly kind of getting back to my own course and on my own fundamentals to really put myself back on track. And there's a television show that I love watching, which is Dragons Den.

I think every country has a different name for it, but you basically have four investors sitting watching...

Charlie Chapman:

Oh, yeah, yeah. It's a Shark Tank in America.

Antoine van der Lee:

That's what I mean. And I remember one of the Dutch sharks, I think I have to say that...

Charlie Chapman:

You can say Dragons.

Antoine van der Lee:

Dragons. Okay, one of the Dutch Dragons...

Charlie Chapman:

That actually sounds more fun.

Antoine van der Lee:

Okay, let's do it. So, one of the Dutch Dragons, I always think about it, but he said like, okay, to somebody that did a pitch, you do too much things. You have a pitch right here for a company, but at the same time, you have a full-time job. I'm not going to invest in you. But the real point is that focus, right? And if I focus on RocketSim, RocketSim goes super well. If I start a new app, I can clearly see RocketSim doing less. And it's because I don't talk much about it at that point. I don't post social posts about it, right? It's not a living thing at that point. So, it all makes sense.

Charlie Chapman:

Especially in your case or anybody who's an indie more or less on their own, it doesn't go on without you because you're pretty much entirely the driving force behind the thing. And then one more thing about the writing, and then we'll go backwards, roll back in time and get to RocketSim. I'm really curious about, we talked about AI already, but I've definitely been hearing across the board the squeeze on coding educational content in particular. And now your writing does kind of stretch the gamut between like there is a bunch of technical coding stuff, but then there's a lot of business and indie development stuff.

But are you feeling that same squeeze where there's less people coming in, especially on the search side of things?

Antoine van der Lee:

Yeah, 100%. So, this is also a relationship to November, December, right? When I started to realize like, okay, I need to reinvent myself. I was part of a growth accelerator program from the platform that I host a course at and that brought me one coaching session every month. And the person at a certain point asked me like, "Where do you want to be next year?" And I told her like, "Well, I'm not thinking about next year. I'm thinking more about two, three years from now, because the actions I do today kind of create that path towards me in three years." And I told her my business now has evolved around my blog and my newsletter and the blog is dying clearly, right?

Charlie Chapman:

So, you're seeing that same trend then?

Antoine van der Lee:

100%. I think it's not a surprise, right? Instead of going to a SwiftLee article, having to read through the details and you can now just ask AI to do the thing for you and...

Charlie Chapman:

Probably trained on the details you wrote.

Antoine van der Lee:

Yeah. Well, honestly, I started creating my own agent skills with my own content because I was like, well, if AI grabs it either way, I might as well-

Charlie Chapman:

Take advantage of yourself. Yeah.

Antoine van der Lee:

... do the job myself. Yeah, take advantage and help the community with an agent skill that I believe is the best for their purpose, right? But at the same time, I also realized the companies that sponsored me still have the need to reach the audience and my newsletter might become even more valuable to them because nobody visits websites anymore, right?

So, the focus was kind of like moved a little bit more to watch the newsletter and the articles are still being read, but you might also notice if you're a frequent reader of my articles that I focus much more on practical AI, much less on coding details, because the coding details, you'll learn, but how to pick the right agent skill out of many, or how to use an MCP to load RevenueCat data and optimize your onboarding to watch the paywall, right? Those are, I think, much more practical things that you'll receive. And as soon as I made that shift, I think my followers on Twitter, for example, grew from 63,000 to 69,000 in two months or something.

Charlie Chapman:

And you think a lot of that is kind of the sort of AI hype, you're sort of jumping on this big movement that's happening and you can kind of grow with it?

Antoine van der Lee:

Kind of, yeah. Also, because I'm fully in it, right? There's founders of companies that worry because there are small people like me that suddenly can do what they do with 200 people, right? I'm on the good side, I would say. I'm an any developer and I just hired 20 agents that do work for me every day. And while I'm on that journey, I'm keeping a diary of all the things that I learn because I'm also working on a new course on AI fundamentals. I really want to make that kind of like my new journey in a way, because I feel like the blog is dying.

Sponsorships will stay because I have a newsletter, but the newsletter needs to keep growing. And I don't think it will keep growing if I start writing about how to use Guard in Swift, for example, right?

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah. Well, and there's kind of like, if you're thinking of it that you're competing with the LLMs, it's just almost impossible to imagine competing with LLMs on technical content like that. But where you can compete is it doesn't matter if every LLM has the exact same information that you wrote about your personal experience, what they don't have and literally can't have is the fact that the personal experience happened to you. They can't write it from personal perspective. And so, that is almost the one kind of differentiating thing that no matter how good these things get, you always have at least that human element by definition.

Antoine van der Lee:

Yeah. But it is ironic anyway, because the AI agents we have today are trained on the data from bloggers like me, but at the same time, they kill the bloggers that train their data.

Charlie Chapman:

Okay, this is another little tangent. I was just talking to somebody about this same phenomenon and I'm like, "I think if I were to project out where this goes, I think the only path I can imagine is the incentives are going to have to lie in the language and platform creators to fund this." So, either that means they have to pump a lot more money into their own documentation, which they assume is not going to actually be read by anybody, but it's basically for LMs to consume, or they are the ones who fund external writers and bloggers and stuff. But that almost feels like the only path that this could eventually lead to in terms of the technical content kind of thing.

Antoine van der Lee:

Yeah, true. No, well, I've been involved in some, I think it's Cloudflare. They are working paper crawl. There's a HTTP status code that has never been used, but now it will be used again that returns... I'm not sure which one it is, but then it basically says to the agent, "Well, you're happy to read Antoine's article, but you need to pay for this crawl." And it's about 00001 cent or something. But with a lot of crawls, the authors basically get paid back.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, that's interesting. I didn't really think through that. That specific thing feels like maybe, but an evolution of that, maybe it's like Spotify kind of model, which isn't exactly the most appealing maybe to get turned into that being the business model on the artist side, if you will.

Antoine van der Lee:

I mean, honestly, the things that I write are mostly also in the Apple documentation, right? So, I'm fine if they use it. And it's also, I wrote the articles for my own learning process as well, personal knowledge base that I could revisit myself. And if I can continue with my newsletter and teach the practical stuff that I learn every day, if I are my articles, then I'm really in a happy ground for the future I had, I would say.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah. And I think that's the right way to think about it. I mean, there's probably people that maybe it's good that there's people that are fighting the good fight or trying to build these big systems, but if you're a creator, really you should just be thinking about, okay, how can I differentiate? How can I provide value that people I can still build a business on and continue forward? And it sounds like that's kind of what you've got going with.

And the newsletter world seems like it's this kind of crazy exploding market right now in terms of journalists moving to personal newsletters, that idea of paying for that kind of content, or in your case, it being sponsored, it seems like it's a growing field, sort of funny enough, as the blog side of things is shriveling.

Antoine van der Lee:

Yeah. I mean, the tools improve, right? It's so much easier to now launch a newsletter and you don't have to pay crazy amounts for a thousand subscribers anymore because the competition is just higher. So, I think it becomes all much more approachable. And I think they also realize if you retain your audience, if you have a way to repetitively talk with your audience via an email, you are much more likely to surface them the course that you have or the products that you sell. And I think that's something that many artists see as well in a way.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, I guess it is. It's sort of like the influencer economy in a way where most of them aren't really making that much money on the actual creator payments from the platforms. It's more the figuring out other ways to sort of monetize that audience-

Antoine van der Lee:

Yeah, what if they don't own the audience?

Charlie Chapman:

... while also maintaining integrity and all that. What's that?

Antoine van der Lee:

They don't own the audience. I think that's the biggest problem, right? If you're on Instagram or on Twitter or anything, you can have so many followers, but the platform decides whether those followers will see your link to the course and they don't like linking to external places, right? So, the best way is to really focus on getting those emails and staying connected with your audience via platform. Yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

Directly. Yeah. But the other way that you can build a foundation for your financial security is doing something that's not writing at all and would never be disrupted by AI and that's coding your own app. Yeah. So, RocketSim has been around for quite a while, but let's roll back to where did it start?

Antoine van der Lee:

Yeah. Well, I kind of told it a little bit before, but I love creating my own apps, right? RocketSim happens to be an app that I shared in the App Store, but I also have an app for my newsletter for my website, right? I have all those kind of internal tools, but it was 2019. I worked on WeTransfer and WeTransfer was a file transferring app. You basically upload files, you get a link, you share the link with another person and that person can use the same app to receive it. So, we had all kinds of transfers that we needed to test in the simulator. And the one thing that I did was avanderlee.com/html page with deep links to easily open those deep links on the simulator.

But every time I had to open Safari, open that URL and after the simulator is reset, I need to remember that domain name. And it was just repetitive and I wanted to improve my productivity. So, I started working on RocketSim, status bar app. The only thing it could do is storing deep links and open that in the active simulator and that's a start.

Charlie Chapman:

So, it was a status bar app. It lived in the menu bar. And what? It was just a dropdown with links. And if you clicked on it, it would... I guess there's CLI commands where you can trigger actions inside of the simulator.

Antoine van der Lee:

Exactly. Yeah, yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

Okay. So, that was how it literally started?

Antoine van der Lee:

Yeah, exactly. So, for those that don't know, Xcode ships with SIM control, SIM CTL. And you could basically say RocketSim is a very advanced wrapper nowadays around that simulator tool. But yeah, it already existed back in the days. And there was one command that allowed to execute deep links in the simulator. And I basically allowed you to create groups for a certain bundle identifier so you could launch those deep links in a specific app for your needs.

Charlie Chapman:

And you built that for yourself. Did you start distributing it right away? Was it distributed internally in WeTransfer or did you think, "Hey, maybe people would be interested in this," and you released it kind of publicly?

Antoine van der Lee:

Yeah, it started to grow slowly, but surely. That's the thing with app IDs, you need to get the ball rolling. And at a certain point, I had that app in place. So, whenever I had a new ID that I could automate, I could basically just edit to that same project. And before I knew that app evolved into many more useful features that I could use myself during my day-to-day job at WeTransfer.

Charlie Chapman:

So, you just kept shoving new simulator utilities in there because it was sitting there.

Antoine van der Lee:

Yeah, exactly. And it's still like that today. You don't want to see the roadmap that I have. I have a public repository with 198 open issues, but I also have a private repository with a hundred IDs that I have myself that I keep for myself because I don't want anyone else to build it. It's how it goes. But for the first two years, it didn't make any money. It wasn't really meant for that.

Charlie Chapman:

But you did release it publicly though?

Antoine van der Lee:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think March 2020.

Charlie Chapman:

Was it on the App Store initially, or did you do it externally at first?

Antoine van der Lee:

Yeah, no, no. I once tried, but Sparkle was so difficult to do and nowadays, it's so much easier. But out of the App Store distribution was difficult. Plus, I also wanted to benefit from the context that I had at Apple and I felt like if I go into the App Store, I could probably get featured or... It's also a developer tool. And I still say this today to many clients that ask about security certificates and all those kind of things, RocketSim is in the App Store, it's sent booked, it runs on your local machine and we don't share any data to backend services, right?

It creates a certain feel of security, which is super important if you start asking for permissions about the developer directory and derive data and those kind of things.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, that's a good point.

Antoine van der Lee:

Yeah. So, yeah, it was in the App Store day one, basically, and the first version weren't that serious, right? But eventually, I added screenshots and recordings and the simulator didn't offer that, to be clear. GIF support. You couldn't upload videos to get a pull request yet. So, having a way to really quickly create a recording into a GIFY was quite unique back in the day. So, that wasn't pictured.

Charlie Chapman:

I can personally attest to the number of copies that me using it and then pushing it on people because I was putting it into GitHub PRs, yeah, that was definitely a feature that people jumped onto, especially when you added in the ability for it to show touches. So, as you're recording in the simulator, as you're clicking around, when you export it out in RocketSim, it can put a little circle that represents where the person's finger was touching. And that, man, is that amazing for communicating what is actually happening? Just rapid, massive difference.

And putting that in your PRs, especially if it's one that you're trying to convince people is worth doing, that little extra polish, it sits inside of a frame, it's got these touches that can go a long way.

Antoine van der Lee:

You only realize once you used it once, right? Then suddenly, you can follow along what the person is doing without even hearing any voice or whatsoever. Yeah, especially so it's not only showing touches, right? It's constantly showing where your mouse is at. So, it's kind of like touch attention mode, I like to call it, but you can really pull along.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, similar to if you're recording a tutorial on a Mac or whatever, and you use the mouse to kind of circle around something. It's a little different than that, but yeah, it's that idea. It's like before they tap on a button, you see it move up to that button and it kind of draws their eye to like, "I'm about to take an action in this area, pay attention here."

Antoine van der Lee:

Exactly. Yeah, you can just easily follow along. And there were things in the simulator, like if you recorded landscape, it would still come out of this portrait. The recording feature was really bad in the build-in simulator. And they improved later, which also improved RocketSim directly because I was relying on the same underlying structure, but this kind of shows how I was thinking, right? I wanted to have those recordings myself, how I created it. I wanted to have those screenshots myself, so I created it. I wanted to have location simulation. I wanted to have quick access to the common directories like the cache's directory, or the file storage directory.

Charlie Chapman:

Derived data. Just that also is one that sells people is just a quick way to get to your derived data folder. Weirdly is-

Antoine van der Lee:

Exactly.

Charlie Chapman:

... an annoying thing to get to clear that.

Antoine van der Lee:

And what's a blessing and a curse is that the things that I built are not written on Stack Overflow and AI doesn't know the answer. I really have to find my own answers and I still have to do it. It goes a little faster now with AI, but many of the things like releasing in the App Store was not easy. You can't just access the simulator control terminal command, right? So, I had to figure out a way to do that in the App Store while being sandboxed. All those limitations, it's secure. That's a great selling point, but in terms of being sandboxed as a developer tool.

Charlie Chapman:

It'd be a lot easier if you could just do literally whatever you wanted.

Antoine van der Lee:

Yeah. I still see myself like one of those moments that I give up and then fully January, I tried to build Sparkle and I was like, "Okay, screw the App Store. I'll just go ahead." I needed to be in the App Store, so I kept pushing it. And now I know the tricks and I kind of found my way through. And I'm not getting any exceptions by the way. I really have to deal with the same sandbox limitations everyone has to. But yeah, the fun part of it is that I remember the network speed control. So, that was something I really wanted to build. I hated the network link conditioner because it would also slow down your Mac, right? So, you're working on...

Charlie Chapman:

And just so everyone who's not a developer understands, in your simulator and on your device, in your developer settings, you can go to a setting and turn on what's called network link conditioner, which literally just artificially slows down your internet connection. But if you do that on your Mac while you're building, it also slows down if you're Googling something or whatever. And every developer at some point in their career has had a time when their internet was running really slow and they were annoyed and they realized it was because they just left that turned on.

Antoine van der Lee:

Exactly. Yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

It's very annoying.

Antoine van der Lee:

Those pains. Yeah. And this was also a time where there was no AI, right? So, every single answer you would basically find on Stack Overflow. So, you're working on slow networking support and you go to Stack Overflow, but it's also slow. Well, it's painful. But I remember I created that issue like, okay, I want to create a solution that works just for the simulator. And that issue has been open for two years. I just couldn't find the answer. And every now and then I just revisit that list of issues, right? You grow as an engineer, there are new APIs, you get to talk with people at WDC, you post on the app performance and you hope for an answer. It's much better nowadays, by the way.

But back in the days, it was tricky to get the answers that you needed. And at a certain point, I found a way to do it. And the moment that it worked, it was so amazing because I was literally thinking about it for two years and now I'm able to just slow down exactly like the network link conditioner, just your app in the simulator without affecting your Mac, which in AI days is even better, right? You can just use AI still on rapid fast internet. Yeah. And that's one example. And I have many of those. And like I said, it's a blessing and a curse because it's not easy to copy RocketSim. I see more and more people creating an app for screenshots and videos.

Charlie Chapman:

Hey, no, they're different. They're different.

Antoine van der Lee:

It's totally fine. I love that actually, right? The thing is with competitors or friends that also build a similar app, I don't want to call you a competitor because I don't look at it that way.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah. To be clear, and I don't even know if I've mentioned it much on this podcast, but I have a Mac app that's, it's like a toy app really called Framous. And the point of that app is for me at least, screenshots that you take on your real device, you can just drag into it and it wraps it in a frame and you can export it. But I keep adding more features and I just started adding a feature to where screen recordings that I take, you can artificially add swipe and tap indicators, largely because I find myself wanting what I can do in RocketSim on my real device screen recordings and I can't.

It's not as good as what you can do in RocketSim, but they're really different things. But it was very funny seeing in one of your recent newsletters, and we can maybe talk about this if you want to, but you're building a full-blown video editor for the screen recordings and looking at it, I'm like, "Man, this is a nicely designed version of the sort of hacky thing that I'm building," which is really funny. But again, they are different. They are different things.

Antoine van der Lee:

Yeah. And I mean, the way I look at, there are also many other blog creators and there are many other developer tools and there are plenty of tools for ASO. And the thing is, the restaurants that are combined together in a single place do much better than the restaurants all distributed across the city. And there is a reason because people want to go to a central hub and then have a choice in a way. And the way I look at it with apps is that people might get into your app and they realize like, "Oh, wait a second. I can actually create a video with device vessel and you educate them about the fact that that's possible."

And then they find RocketSim and they see like RocketSim does it as well and they install RocketSim. Could also be the other way around. They are a user of RocketSim and they actually want to have the same feature, but then for a real device and you've been such user and you decide to build that yourself, but there might be another Charlie that decides like, okay, let's see what's out there and they notice your app, right? So, I think embracing competitors is something that might not be the first thing you think about.

But actually if you work together, and I also do that with my newsletter, by the way, I have a content kit or a Comfort Kit creator's iMessage group where many newsletters of the community are in and we promote each other because they might find an audience and they subscribe to their newsletter and they promote my newsletter. But I also bring in people and we help each other grow. And I'm very much like to look at it that way and help the community work together, if that makes sense.

Charlie Chapman:

Oh yeah, definitely. And my favorite, there's a number of these in the iOS sort of indie community of competing developers who are very friendly with each other. And I have that actually a little bit in the sort of white noise space. There's a couple developers that if they run into some sort of bug that's really esoteric, clearly they're using my app to be like, "Is this us or is this a framework thing?" And if they find a solution, I've had people just DM me solutions to problems I didn't even know were problems because they fixed it on their end and they're like, "Hey, just so you know, this is an issue."

And it's like, man, that's a really encouraging environment. And it makes you want to encourage them and help them in any way that you can too. Yeah.

Antoine van der Lee:

And what I also learned over the years is because I had to learn this, right? In the beginning there were some other developer tools and I was like, "Well, I don't want you to build something like that as well." But honestly, people will find out either way. So, you might as well just be the good person there and help each other out and the favor will be returned. Sometimes you have friends that you give input to for years and you feel like, okay, I'm just that solo friend that just gifts and gifts and gifts, but one day, they will come back and give back to you and then it's all worth it in a way.

And that's the same with this, right? So, yeah, it's difficult mindset sometimes for people, but I think together, you will grow much faster.

Charlie Chapman:

I think both of us are in this category too, where it's like we're trading on our goodwill to a degree as well. Part of RocketSim's success is the product marketing itself and you trying all the different things that you've tried in terms of marketing. But a big part of it is you have an audience who trusts you, likes you, knows you as a person and they want... Again, I'm pretty sure I found Rocket. I don't remember the order of operations of whether I found RocketSim or you first, but I didn't know you personally at that point. But since I've gotten into this community, there's so many apps that I've started using because I'm friends with the person or I liked them online or whatever.

And then it becomes part of your workflow. And the reason I like them in the first place is because they're good and they make good stuff. And so, it is to that point, but you can get a lot of mileage out of just not being the jerk in the room.

Antoine van der Lee:

Yeah. And for people listening that think they're afraid to talk with me, please don't be afraid. I'm the most open social person.

Charlie Chapman:

No, Antoine in person is quite a imposing jerk really. He smiles. All of his smiles are only for the camera. As soon as the camera's off, it's just angry.

Antoine van der Lee:

I visit conferences and I once went to a conference and the speakers were afraid to take hostage of my time and were really like, "Well, yeah, just wanted to say hello." And I'm like, "I'm here to drink a beer with you all."

Charlie Chapman:

That's why I'm here. Yeah, yeah.

Antoine van der Lee:

Right? That's why I'm here, right? So, yeah, I don't know. Sometimes, the serious side of being online and just posting serious articles and content, and that's also why I started to post more pictures of my chickens and dog, by the way, to make me... I'm a person. I'm not a robot. I make mistakes. Yeah, I'm real.

Charlie Chapman:

That's funny. So, okay. So, we talked about why you built it. You put it on the store right away and you've been just sort of pouring ideas into it over time based a lot on what you want. But at the time, at least where you left off, it wasn't like a business. So, when did that transition happen? Was it something you did or did something happen that sort of kicked things off and then you started taking it more seriously?

Antoine van der Lee:

Yeah, there were a few phases, right? So, in the Netherlands, you can be an A month sack, which is basically a soul entrepreneurship without having certain tax responsibilities and such. And for a while that was good enough when I was working at WeTransfer, but at a certain point you make more money, you need to pay more taxes. So, you convert it into real company. And that was for everything I earned, right? So, SwiftLee and RocketSim and everything altogether. And everything grows slowly. But when I went working one day a week on mostly RocketSim, that's where I went from 1000 MRR monthly recurring revenue to, I think in one year to 4,000. So, that's four times.

Charlie Chapman:

What was that that caused that? Was it the development you were doing like features or were you doing marketing along with that?

Antoine van der Lee:

I think mostly the features, because I can sell so many more things. I can post a hundred more tweets, but if the value in the product is not there, it will not bring in anything, right? So, the main reason was that I could work on features like the network speed control or the network monitoring and those larger features that you simply have to build with a bit more longer focus, like three, four hours of focus instead of just 10 minutes a day, because that was literally what I did before, right? 10 minutes, 30 minutes. 10 minutes always turn into 30 minutes, by the way. It's all about getting...

Charlie Chapman:

Oh, yeah, yeah. 10 minutes is 30 minutes. Yeah, clearly. I run into the same thing with dark noise stuff. It's like there's these big features that I'm like, hmm, I'm going to need this dedicated four hour coffee work night to do that. And it's like, well, how often does that happen when you have kids and a family and a job where you're traveling a lot? And so, you pick off lots of these little features constantly. So, you're always doing stuff, but it's like the big ones that you know will move the needle take dedicated time.

Antoine van der Lee:

That's exactly what it is. And there's a feature in RocketSim or feature. There's a roadmap view where you can vote on stuff. And I always knew a bit like what people wanted. And the big one on the list was the network monitoring. So, it's basically like a Charles Proxy or Proxyman for the simulator that always runs in the background. So, whenever you have that unexpected failure of a response, it's running in the background, you open up Brock TMA, you'll copy the request to your backend developer and it's fixed right away. That was number one on that roadmap list. And I remember it was June or July or something and I got it working and I released that.

And I think I generally had like 40 running trials or something and then I picked towards 120 at that point, which really just proves if you build what your users want, the real fields will follow, if that makes sense.

Charlie Chapman:

I do think that your, kind of like I said at the beginning, your app is a little unique in that most apps, features you add can make a big difference in terms of how good the app is or how many users will stick with it. But the actual pitch for the app, it can't be that wide, right?

If you build like Strava running tracking, it's like it can have a trillion features and that matters for users staying with it or not leaving for a competitor or whatever, but you can't put all those features in your sort of advertising and it's not really going to draw... Very few features are going to draw people, but your app, because of your audience, you can make this one esoteric feature and that's a new marketable thing that could bring in somebody who does not care about a single other feature of your app, but they will 100% pay for that one feature because it changes their workflow.

They're a performance engineer on a principal engineering team that isn't building features. Their only job is to eke out the best performance they can for users when they have low internet connectivity or whatever. That's a job that lots of people have. If you have a feature that makes their life easier, they're going to pay a subscription just for that. They don't care about screenshot recordings and all that stuff.

Antoine van der Lee:

Exactly. And this still happens as of today. So, I got a running test flight beta now with way too many things, blame AI, but it's good. It's getting there. But one of the features I...

Charlie Chapman:

What was your thing about focus being a big thing you need to be doing?

Antoine van der Lee:

There is focus, but I just have focus on 10 different agents.

Charlie Chapman:

Oh. Oh, I see. Yeah. I'm focusing. I'm completely 100% focused on 10 different things.

Antoine van der Lee:

It's all RocketSim.

Charlie Chapman:

That's fair. That's fair.

Antoine van der Lee:

To be frank, that is something I learned because if you do many things with agents and you want to do a lot of things, then at least make sure it's the same context, the same project that makes things so much easier. No, but I had that breakthrough thing once again, which allowed me to do 120 frames per second recordings with the simulator plus voiceover overlay. And so, it's like showing all the voiceover elements on top of the simulator and you can navigate as if you're using voiceover, but you don't have to use your actual physical device. And the point I want to make is that I got emails from people that used RocketSim one, two years ago, and then kind of not really used it anymore.

That just happens when you need a network monitor, but you're not really working with networking anymore. And there's plenty of reasons for it. But they email me like, "Yeah, when I saw this feature, I'm getting back to it. I want to have access to the test flight." So, it's literally what you just mentioned, that one feature can bring people back or bring new people in. Yeah, it can make a difference in hours per week that people spend building apps.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah. It's a weird, unique thing about, I don't know what you call that, if that's enterprise tooling or if it's developer tooling specific, but it does feel like it's unique compared to typical consumer apps. I do imagine it makes some stuff a little harder. Your marketing can't be as honed in one specific thing, right?

Antoine van der Lee:

What is interesting? So, at a certain point, and I'll share more details on it, but two friends joined me to make it more a mature company. And one of them is head of sales and he just tells me it's so easy to sell RocketSim. And the reason is, and there are more examples of apps like that, RocketSim is focused on reducing time spent and it creates more time to work on actual features, right? There are so many solved problems in the world, but if you manage to solve the one limitation factor, which is time and give more time to people, they will pay you simply.

Charlie Chapman:

I mean, yeah, honestly, that's one of the biggest things with RevenueCat is it's like there's a lot of things we can sell, but one of the easiest ones is exactly that same pitch. Like, Hey, nobody wants to make another subscription management system that everybody else has the same version of or 12 iterations of the same paywall with slight differences. Let's let the engineers get back to engineering cool stuff for users and then we'll build all this tooling or let growth people focus on this other stuff.

Antoine van der Lee:

Totally. And I have conversations like this about RevenueCat with some friends that still don't use it, by the way. You want to buy back...

Charlie Chapman:

No, there is no friends that don't use it.

Antoine van der Lee:

Yeah, sorry. Yeah, I can share the names afterwards. There aren't many actually, but...

Charlie Chapman:

You're perfect.

Antoine van der Lee:

No, but I mean, it's all about buying back time, right? And that's with everything. If you do something repetitive every day, you can solve that and make that an automation ideally so you don't have to think about it anymore. You buy yourself back five minutes a day, which is like multiplied by 365 per year, a lot of time that you can spend on growing your business, making that app successful, right? It can make the difference in a way.

Charlie Chapman:

So, let's dive into that though. So, like we talked about you, basically by spending more time on features, you were able to kind of grow the app. We won't get too deep into it, but you can go read your newsletter if you want to learn more about all the different experiments and things that you've tried over the years to sort of... But I imagine most of those were pretty incremental, but I guess you got to a point where you could hire on help. And so, the first help you hired was on the sales side?

Antoine van der Lee:

Yeah. So, at a certain point, I wanted to offer a way for Teams to buy multiple license at once because the App Store is in that sense limited.

Charlie Chapman:

This was a major point I wanted to bring up because you talked so much about being on the App Store and Sandbox. And I see on your website, I've never consumed it this way, but that you sell to Teams and I can't square those two because for the most part, the App Store is one-to-one. So, yeah, how do you do that?

Antoine van der Lee:

I see it a bit like a Netflix subscription where you might've bought this subscription on the web and yeah, you log in on an iOS app and your subscription still works. It's a little bit like that for RocketSim too, but the biggest point is that we couldn't really offer RocketSim easily to a big team. And at that point, I was like, "Okay, I want to do it." So, I was sitting with a friend from the small fillets as well. He was a frontender and I was like, "Hey, maybe I can use a frontender because I need a backend."

I had the idea of the Teams dashboard that we have today where the build durations of your whole team get together in a nice chart and you can see like, "Hey, Charlie who's at RevenueCat for years, still has an M1 MacBook, but somebody that just joined has an M4 and you can see the build duration being much faster and give insights, until the whole team get an M4. In two months, you earn it back." I needed a website for that, right? So, I was sitting with that frontender, asked him to join. He was like, "Yeah, I want to do something one day a week, but I don't really have a purpose. So, yeah, let me join." And then similarly, I had a salesperson, also a great friend for years.

We wanted to have a side hustle because we always challenge a bit each other like, "How much money do you make?" And sometimes, you do that with friends. And I was like, "You need a side hustle, right? You need to do more things." And that turned out to be join me. It's also a great way to make sure I always make more money than him, by the way. Don't tell him. I hope he's not listening. No, but no, either way, I could use enterprise sales knowledge or team sales, knowledge. And plus, I wanted to cart my own time. I want to focus on features. I don't want to focus on selling. And same for the front end. I could probably build a dashboard myself, but there was no AI, right?

Maybe today, no, no, Nick is doing a great job. Nick, I'm sure you're listening.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah. Well, and I will say your landing page is exquisite. It's very, very nice for showing how... I don't know if that's his work as well, but it is a...

Antoine van der Lee:

It is. Yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah. It's extremely... I was looking because of AI tools. I was like, "Oh, I should spend some time and redo mine." And I was looking at yours the other day like, "Oh, I could maybe use this." And then I started scrolling through and I'm like, "Maybe I could do something a little less ambitious." Because it's very nice.

Antoine van der Lee:

It's not that ambitious. The thing I thought about is my audience are iOS developers, so I need to give it the same feeling of watching the iPhone website.

Charlie Chapman:

That's what it feels like. Yeah.

Antoine van der Lee:

Yeah, right? The smooth animations and things popping in and endless scrolling. And honestly, we want to improve it. So, there will be a new version for it, but I don't think we will throw away that feeling of the homepage. But yeah, anyway, they wanted to join me. And then at that point, I was also like, yeah, how do you do it in terms of dividing the money, right? RocketSim was there for six, seven years already. I don't just want to give them this money that I built up over the years that felt unfair from my side. It felt unfair from their side. So, we decided to start a new venture, basically a venture of the three of us that get a fixed price to buy a RocketSim license from my company and is allowed to resell it for any price.

So, I'm basically getting a fixed cut off that sold license and everything above is divided by us three in a way.

Charlie Chapman:

And the way you are doing bulk sales then is through web payments with license seats basically. And so, if they log in in RocketSim, it'll unlock that based on their current enterprise license.

Antoine van der Lee:

Yeah, pretty much indeed. And it allows us to do direct invoicing. It allows us to sell commercial pricing, which is higher, which at that point... And it's funny enough, my monthly recruiting revenue in the App Store slowed down, but the teams, it's, I think at this point almost equal or even past what we earn in the App Store because we basically sell so much more. And it's difficult to get into companies, but once you're in, we have some really big clients. Once you're in, then they basically just press a button and they add 20 more sheets, right? It goes so fast. And that's the real money for SaaS products.

And it's also fun, right? Ralph and Nick are two friends of mine for years, and now we get to build something together and we can also celebrate things together.

Charlie Chapman:

We've talked about that on this show before with lots of people, but it is one of the weirdest things about fully indie as in solo development is like you can have a big launch or you can have a big... You can get fireballed, end up on John Gruber can write about you. And it's like this extreme moment of elation, and then you're kind of sitting in your office petting your dog like, "All right, well, that was that." And just having a group of friends, you can, at the very least, be in a group chat and celebrate together.

But especially if you're, I don't know if you all are in the same space, but if you can go out, if you can actually celebrate with a person, it makes everything feel a lot more real.

Antoine van der Lee:

Yeah, no, true. Yeah. Nick is nearby, but Ralph lives in Atlanta in the United States, which is also helpful...

Charlie Chapman:

Small commute.

Antoine van der Lee:

Small commute. Well, the funny thing is he joined me to Deep Dish last year and also to adopt DC. And we managed to get some deals signed there because we met with companies in person and that feeling, going out for dinner and drinking a beer and going crazy because you sold, that's unmatched and that's definitely in great addition to being in the mostly of the time. Yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

Oh, that's awesome. And before we wrap up, I'm also curious Yes. What are your thoughts right now in terms of the future of RocketSim in this sort of crazy AI world that's sort of eating all of our lunches, but RocketSim sort of lives inside of this thing that's... I wouldn't say it's being sunk, but it's being rocked around and nobody really knows where it's going to land.

Antoine van der Lee:

I mean, I can clearly see that there are so many more solutions nowadays, right? We have the Xcode built MCP, for example, and I believe it uses AXE behind it to let agents use the simulator and tools like those really challenged me to think through the future of RocketSim as well, right? And I've had moments over the past months where I started to integrate RocketSim with agents. I had a MCP working, but I was like, well, this is not the purpose of RocketSim. I'm sure Codex or Cursor will do this themselves, right? I will fight them and this is probably not my purpose. What I do think is that, and this is always hard to really predict, but I believe how much AI will write.

There's always a moment as a developer that you will test the app and validate the outcome. That's where I'm at at this point and I truly believe in. And if you think about RocketSim today, that's exactly where we are at because I don't help you write code. I don't help you write better features. I help you test the features quicker so you can focus on writing the features. And that took me a bit to go back and forth. And I'm not saying that RocketSim will not integrate with agents because I think there's value in the data that we provide. In fact, we recently allowed you to create prompts outside of RocketSim or inside RocketSim for the network request, for example.

Give agents eyes on what your app is doing in a way that only RocketSim can do because we have that data in a way. But mostly, I think our mode, or how you want to call it, is that we really help developers spend less time validating all the things they need to validate, even though AI writes things. And sure, you can argue like, well, it's a matter of time before AI will also do that for you by automatically gaining feedback visually or whatsoever. But I'm not sure about you. And maybe I'm old-fashioned because I'm on developer for years. I still want to be in control myself and feel how it works and test things out. So, that is my bet at this point.

And if I then combine it with also connecting with agents, then we have the two most powerful fundaments, I think, for a feature ahead. And yeah, like for any app these days, you need to remain flexible and move with the needle and see what's required, what people need, and use AI in your advantage. Don't let it eat you, but make sure you eat with it in a way, if that makes sense.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah. Well, especially in your case, because if you're making a consumer app, you do need to think about the AI world, obviously in terms of development, but in terms of your users, because ChatGPT could be a competitor because it can do everything theoretically. But it hasn't eaten the regular world the same way that it's completely dominated developers' lives, but your customers are those people. And this is where probably you spending the last, how many, what is it, like seven years of your life writing and engaging directly with the developer community is probably super helpful.

But it's like as new needs are constantly coming up for people and using these tools, you're well primed to see those, anticipate them and build a tool that makes it easier. And so, it feels like a wave you could ride just as much as be sunk by it.

Antoine van der Lee:

So, there is an interesting example. I think two newsletter is years ago, I asked my audience and I didn't get many replies, maybe because it's a feature that people just don't realize they need yet. But sometimes you test your app and then you realize like, "Oh damn it, this is a book. I should not forget to chase this button caller from blue to red. I really need to remind myself about it." So, you go to GitHub, you create the issue or something like that. Or it could also be your QA engineer testing your app in the simulator or a designer validating your design. I figured this is where RocketSim can perfectly be fitting, right?

You select an element on the simulator and you write a comment in the simulator and then you prompt it straight ahead into Codex or any AI that you use and there will just be a PR open for review with a screenshot attached for the developers to review it. And they're just a merge away from fixing that color chains. And I was like, "Well, this is something you want," right? But I didn't really get much response, so I'm still...

Charlie Chapman:

Well, that feels like the type of feature where people aren't going to know they want that. You have to-

Antoine van der Lee:

That's what I mean.

Charlie Chapman:

... show them the way in a sense and create that demand.

Antoine van der Lee:

And that's exactly my point, right? We're in such weird situation now with AI and many companies didn't really even adopt AI. We're also sometimes in a bubble where we feel like everybody is using it already, but many don't even know that agent skills exist, for example. That's also something not to forget. And eventually companies will have processes to adopt AI and security wise and so on and so on. And then I think developers tools like RocketSim need to be in a place that fits that perspective at that point.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, exactly. Well, it's cool. It was really fun talking about this. I feel like I've been reading your work and using RocketSim for, I mean, essentially for the entirety of me being an iOS developer. So, a lot of this I knew, but then little gaps I didn't know. So, I don't know, this is pretty cool. Well, honestly, the way you're talking about it sounds like it's more fun to you. I know it can be a little scary at times, but it's been fun watching you navigating the ever-changing world and figuring out where both your writing work and your app work fit into this new world.

But one thing that you've always done really well is articulate your feelings and your strategy very well in a way that's sort of fun to follow and helps you think about your own work in the same way.

Antoine van der Lee:

Well, thanks. I appreciate it. And I love that I can talk about the thing that I love building the most. I don't often get that opportunity to go in so much detail about it. So, I appreciate that a lot.

Charlie Chapman:

Before we wrap up, I'll ask you the question. I ask everybody to end this show, which is, what's a person or people out there that have inspired you and your work that you'd recommend others check out?

Antoine van der Lee:

Yeah. There's one mandatory thing I have to say when you're part of the WDC in the house, you have to say I'm outside or at least shout out to those people. No, but honestly, I sometimes forget how uniquely talented they are and how blessed I am that I get to see what they're building from a nearby iMessage group and sometimes in person. I thought about this question, right? I listened to Lance. I knew that it was coming. And there's one group, those are Yodi, Hida and Neils. Those are indie developers from Amsterdam, from the Netherlands as well. Neils is in Sweden nowadays, but they mean more to me than they might realize, but they are bold and honest. They're like friends that tell you the truth.

And I'm reinventing myself constantly. I'm also reinventing my socials and the work that I do. And sometimes I make mistakes, which I often regret. And sometimes I don't realize I make mistakes. And they are the honest friends that just tell me upfront or they say like, "Hey, you're now writing a little bit too much clickbait on Twitter," for example, right? I wanted to reach five million impressions because they can get paid by Twitter. And I was like, "Okay, let's see if I can get that." And it made me realize like, yeah, you're right. That's not who I am, who I want to be. And I just highly appreciate them, plus the fact that they're amazing developers.

What they built is insane and they just inspire me to constantly keep pushing and deliver amazing products. So, yeah, when I thought about this question, I just can't live without them being on my side, even though it's just why I miss it mostly.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah. I have a really recent example of Hida doing the same thing, pointing out a dumb thing that I was doing and really calling me out on it. People who watched the previous episode or maybe two episodes, I don't remember the order that these will come out, may have noticed my facial hair was getting to Antoine levels maybe, not quite, but it was on its way.

Antoine van der Lee:

So, you're now saying I should have shaved before? Damn it.

Charlie Chapman:

No, no, no, no, no, no. No, I released a video. Actually, it was for RevenueCat, I released a video that you could see a little bit of facial hair going. And it just goes, "Are you doing this for real or is that AI?" And I was like, "No." It was just a short-term thing. I shaved it and then he just goes, "Thank God." And that confirmed to me that I should never let this grow out anymore, anymore.

Antoine van der Lee:

But this is typical, right? I once had a colleague who was really smelling, but will you say nothing and be nice, but that's also not really helping him or will you confront him with the matter, allowing to improve, but it's also not really nice.

Charlie Chapman:

As a deeply insecure person, there's nobody in this world, no colleagues in this world I appreciate more than the ones who are super direct, which is why I like working with Dutch people, not to lean into a stereotype, but having somebody who when you do something dumb immediately tells you, or even when you don't do something dumb, but they think it's dumb, having them tell you right away makes at least me feel a million times more secure around them because I know... If I'm like, "Oh, do they think this is dumb?" Then I'm like, "Oh no, if they thought it was dumb, they would've already told me." That is a weirdly safe environment, at least for a person like me.

Antoine van der Lee:

Oh, man. I wish everybody was like that. People make mistakes, right? We're human and it's definitely not always on purpose. So, just be honest to each other, try to help each other do better. And I'm sure if those are good friends of you, they will accept that and be actually happy that you do so. So, yeah, absolutely. And those are three friends that do that for me. So, super happy with them.

Charlie Chapman:

Awesome. All right. Well, let's go ahead and land this plane. So, where can people find you and your work?

Antoine van der Lee:

Yeah. So, we mostly talked about RocketSim, that's Rocketsim.app. I'm sure there will be links in show notes, but avanderlee.com is my SwiftLee blog where you can also subscribe to my newsletter, if you will. And on socials, it's all kind of handles. I won't bother you listening to that. We'll make sure to put those links in the show notes.

Charlie Chapman:

Yes, definitely.

Antoine van der Lee:

Yeah, make sure to speak to me at conferences. I'll be at a few. I'm really social and I love to meet you all. And if not, then I hope to follow you somewhere else and meet you somewhere else online.

Charlie Chapman:

All right, perfect. Thank you, Antoine, for coming on. And then, I don't know if you can see him, but my dog is showing up to tell me. This is a very Antoine thing to do actually. Wasn't your profile picture basically this for a long time? Yeah.

Antoine van der Lee:

Shoot every dog.

Charlie Chapman:

Your dog's a lot taller than me, but you're a lot taller than me too, so maybe that's fair.

Antoine van der Lee:

Maybe this is a good way to get more people to subscribe to your YouTube channel. I'll get my dog.

Charlie Chapman:

All right. You need to go down so I can wrap this up. Okay, buddy. All right. Right at the end. Oh yeah, here we go.

Antoine van der Lee:

Here we are. Here he is.

Charlie Chapman:

All right, there we go. First ever launched dog segments. Do you have any words, Moose, to say... What's your dog's name again?

Antoine van der Lee:

It's Benny.

Charlie Chapman:

Benny. All right. You want to interview Benny?

Antoine van der Lee:

Benny. Who's that?

Charlie Chapman:

Our editors are going to love dealing with this. Actually, they probably will. Who doesn't love seeing a dog, right?

Antoine van der Lee:

Yeah. We'll do a launched episode with the dogs, Charlie. We should. Let them park with each other.

Charlie Chapman:

Just release an hour and a half episode of it's just them sitting there.

Antoine van der Lee:

People will ask for it now.

Charlie Chapman:

Oh, that'd be so good.

Antoine van der Lee:

Yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

I was so close. I was so close to truly landing this, wasn't I? Literally, the very last thing to do. All right.

Antoine van der Lee:

No, this is great. It shows that we're human. Yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

Exactly.

Antoine van der Lee:

We're not robots. Yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

Exactly. Okay. So, again, thank you for coming on. This was fun. And thank you all for listening. Launched as part of the RevenueCat Podcast family. If you'd like to learn more about the growth side of mobile app businesses, you should check out Sub Club hosted by my friend and colleague, David Barnard. And of course, check out revenuecat.com to learn about the easiest way to grow and monetize your mobile app business. For Launched, you can go to launchedfm.com and like Antoine, I won't read off all of our handles, but for the most part, it's Launched FM, basically everywhere.

And if you want to see the dogs that may or may not have made it into the edit, you should check out our YouTube channel and you might see them or you won't if they didn't make it yet.

Antoine van der Lee:

It's a good upsell.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, yeah. Perfect. Exactly. Awesome. All right. Well, I will see you all in two weeks. Bye.

Antoine van der Lee:

Bye-bye.