89: one sec - Frederik Riedel

Frederik Riedel:

I built the first prototype on a weekend, put it on my own phone. I used it myself two weeks and my screen time was reduced by 50% after that. And I was like, okay, this is really effective. Actually, when I installed the app on my own phone, 20 seconds afterwards, I accidentally ended up opening Twitter and I ran into my own app and I was like, really okay, I'm onto something here.

Charlie Chapman:

Welcome to Launched. I'm your host, Charlie Chapman. And today I'm excited to bring you the founder of one sec, the app to help you cut down on your screen time, Frederik Riedel. Frederik, welcome to the show.

Frederik Riedel:

Hello. Happy to be back.

Charlie Chapman:

Yes. And we're saying back because as I actually talked about this in the previous episode, but we did a live episode together in Finland at ARCtic Conf.

Frederik Riedel:

Yes. And it was a lot of fun.

Charlie Chapman:

Yes, it was a lot of fun. Somehow I ended up playing the cymbals on stage with a band and you. I think we had a hat of percussion instruments handed to us. It was a very interesting vibe. But as is kind of becoming a common theme here, I'm failing at the live recording thing. And so now we get to do this in a more proper, longer launched setting anyway. So it's probably a better episode. But yeah, we get to talk about one sec in a more traditional launched mode here. So I'm very excited. The story here is really good and there's a bunch of threads I didn't get to pull on while we were on stage. And so I think at the end of the day, this is going to be fun.

Frederik Riedel:

Yeah. I'm really happy we do this.

Charlie Chapman:

So before we get into one sec, your story and everything, let's give people a quick pitch for what one sec is, just kind of your elevator pitch so that we have a baseline for what we're building up to.

Frederik Riedel:

So my elevator pitch is actually always showing the app because it's kind of like a hard thing to explain, but it's super easy to show. So imagine this is your home screen and you have your social media app stair. And whenever you open a social media app like Instagram, instead my app, one sec, comes into foreground. Now I have to put it in the area where it's not blurred. And yeah, it just intercepts you from opening social media apps to help you be more mindful about when you open these apps. This actually comes from like a problem I had myself in 2020 in the first lockdown in Germany where I was just feeling like I was using Instagram way too much, much more than I thought was healthy for me and I didn't feel good about it. But at the same time, I also didn't want to delete it completely because I felt like there is still some value of using social media.

And as of today, I still feel the same way, but I was just feeling like I have to get back in control. I don't want to be the product anymore. I don't want to use social media like people in Silicon Valley want me to use it. I want to use social media as a tool how I want to use it. And my problem was really that I had this goal in mind of using it less, but I failed to accomplish it. I was using all the tools that existed back then, like screen time tools, whatever, and nothing really helped me. And then I was like, yeah, my problem is actually that in the moment when I open the app, my brain does not think about what's going on. It's just like a reflex, muscle memory, an autopilot kind of thing. You just open the app because you're stressed or you're bored or whatever.

And I was just feeling I need some kind of way that interrupts me when I open an app like Instagram or Twitter or whatever. And yeah, give me the chance to think twice and like allow my long-term thinking brain to kick in and override my dopamine seeking short-term brain that just wants fun. And this actually, yeah, this allowed me to do that. It just pauses me and allows me to make an intentional decision. And sometimes it's okay because you're sometimes like, "Yeah, I'm bored. I just want to look what's new on Instagram." But then at least it's like an intentional decision and it's not like you accidentally sit on your couch and scroll for half an hour and then you don't even remember why you opened it and what you did on the app. And yeah, that's one sec in a very short... It's not really an elevator pitch anymore, but that's-

Charlie Chapman:

It's a long elevator. No, that's perfect. And we'll dig into that sort of origin story here in a minute. But first, I want to kick us off with the introduction to who you are. So the three questions I always ask to kick off this conversation is where are you from? Do you have a formal education related to what you do? And then what led you up to one sec more deeply than just what we just talked about?

Frederik Riedel:

So I'm from Stuttgart in Germany, in the south of Germany. Two of the big German car companies come from that are struggling right now, I guess, Mercedes and Porsche. And to be honest, I'm not really a big fan of them. I guess they build really great hardware, but they struggle so much to build great software. They're not really fans of CarPlay, but actually when I'm using a car, all I want is CarPlay. I don't want any of their own navigation software or horrible

Charlie Chapman:

I'm definitely in that category that treats cars as gadgets that get me from place to place. And so yeah, I'm definitely a sucker for CarPlay, good sound system, smooth and quiet is really the most important thing.

Frederik Riedel:

They did a lot of weird things in the last couple of years where I'm like, "Yeah, what is actually your goal? Are you really trying to build a great product that is beneficial for myself? Or why are you trying to push your own software solutions so much?" The best user experience you can provide is if it's kind of invisible, right? You go into the car and CarPlay already has access to my calendar and can show me the navigation address of my next event. It's just the tap of a button and then my podcasts are there and it's perfect like wow. Anyway, we are getting distracted.

So that's where I'm from, but I never had anything to do with them for exactly that reason. I felt like I lost cause because they really think in a very narrow way. They kind of like, "Yeah, we've always done that this way. We will never change that." And I can just hope that this crisis going on right now will wake them up and allow them to finally innovate a little bit again because what they have been doing in the past years is really not very attractive for me as a potential customer. Exactly. What was your second question again?

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah. So then what's your education? Do you have a formal education related to software engineering or what's your background there?

Frederik Riedel:

Yes and no. I would say not necessarily because I have started making apps when I was still in high school. So I started without formal education, but then later on I actually studied software engineering at University of Stuttgart, which was also, I think, very good for me to get more professional at making software because before I was kind of like a cowboy coder, putting everything in all one file, not really knowing anything about object-oriented programming. I just wanted the app to work and the university career really helped me to professionalize that and become better at working together in a team using Git and making nice reusable code. And you don't really need that anymore today with all the LLMs. But at least for the past 10 years, it was very helpful to have these skills to get where I was.

Charlie Chapman:

So you started building apps when you were 16. Why did you start building apps? What were the first apps that you were building?

Frederik Riedel:

I think it was even earlier, maybe it was. It was like a time period where I wanted to build apps, but it was so hard back then. It was kind of like when Xcode and Interface Builder were still two separate apps. I think that must have been like with iOS three or iPhone OS3 or iPhone OS4 in that time. And my problem was that the tutorials, they were all outdated. Whenever I tried to download the new Xcode, which happened, I don't know, twice or three times a year, I was like, "Okay, I'm going to try it again." And then I would have the latest X code and then look at some YouTube video or some book or whatever, and they were all based on a previous version of Xcode. And it was so confusing because everything looked different and the buttons were different positions. And in the end, it was all split across different apps.

And I struggled a lot to get started and to have my first moment where I was like, "Okay, I kind of understand what I'm doing now." And on top of that, it was also kind of expensive for me as a 14-year-old boy, you had to pay in the $99 enrollment fee to even be able to get started. I was delivering newspapers to be able to buy a white plastic MacBook back then for, I think it was like 900 euros. And I even upgraded the Ram to two gigabytes, like a completely different world. I think when I was like 15, it suddenly clicked because then I was able to build an user interface and the interface builder and have like an IB outlet or an IB action that would trigger an alert view pop up. So when I press the button, suddenly an alert pops up and I was like, oh, now I have the connection between a user action and then actually running code and something else happens.

What I did then was hiding and unhiding views, like when you click a button-

Charlie Chapman:

Full view. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Frederik Riedel:

Yeah. So that's how I get started. But yeah, why did I get started? That's a completely different story. I was, back then we got these Texas Instruments, graphics calculators from our school for math classes and they were really amazing calculators where you could also program on. And I was just putting in formulas to make homework easier to solve.

Charlie Chapman:

That's my first programming as well, actually.

Frederik Riedel:

Yeah, exactly. And then I was like, okay, I enjoy doing this and this is kind of like how I think or I guess I was also attracted to building tools that make my life easier. But then at the same time, I had like an iPod touch, which was so much more powerful than my graphics calculator. It was actually kind of slow these Texas Instruments and it has a color screen, a touchscreen, some sensors, like the accelerator and so on internet connection, Wi-Fi. And I was like, yeah, this would be much cooler to actually write software for this. Plus a lot of my friends have an iPod touch as well. So I could like build tools that we use together.

I was just trying for two years, I think, overall to have my first success experience on the iPod Touch making an app for it. And then I did this whole cowboy coding thing where I was just hiding and hiding views and I built an app called iRedstone, which is like a Minecraft guide tutorial app that it just has a bunch of screenshots and videos and texts describing how you can build cool machines and Minecraft with the Redstone System.

Charlie Chapman:

App version of a website basically.

Frederik Riedel:

Yeah, exactly. I guess you could have done the same thing on a website, but of course through the App Store, which it was much easier to monetize. It was a 99 cent app. Plus, I guess also for discovery, it was much easier because back then there was no Minecraft Pocket edition. So when you searched on the App Store for Minecraft, my app would show up. I guess that was a convenient coincidence that I didn't plan that, but I guess a lot of people were like, "Yeah, okay, if at least I can get inspired when I'm on the school bus and look at some cool mechanisms that I can later build on my computer when I'm home." Plus you can put it besides your computer. I think as a website, back then on an iPod Touch, the web was still a little bit slow. And then usually these websites would have a lot of ads and it's just not like a great experience back then. But yeah, with a native app, people were actually really enjoying to use it.

It gained a lot of attention. I guess people were really happy to learn about this Redstone system and build cool machines in Minecraft that difference then didn't know about how to copy them.

Charlie Chapman:

So you're a student, you're making a bunch of little toy apps for fun. You make this one and it kind of catches on and you're actually making money from it. Did that change your mind in terms of were you like, "Oh, this could be like a career?" How did you go from there?

Frederik Riedel:

I think that was not the moment yet where I thought this could be a career because it felt very instable. You never know how much money you make the next month and it was fluctuating a lot, but in general it would go up like 2013. I think the app became one of the top five most purchased apps in Germany. Then I was like, "Okay, this is insane." You can make a lot of money on the App Store apparently, but still I didn't think this could be a job for me because I was like 16, 17 years old, just about to make my high school diploma and I thought I wanted to become an electrical engineer because that's also related to that, but I'm really glad I did not.

And someday I received an email from Apple, I guess they were like, "Oh, this is kind of suspicious that this app is making so much revenue." And then they figured out, "Oh, there's actually a person that's underage making this app. This is not compliant with the developer guidelines."

Charlie Chapman:

Oh no.

Frederik Riedel:

And they were nicely asking me, "Hey, this is not really okay what you're doing." They eventually suggested that we transfer my account to my parents and they were like also at the same time, "Yeah, but actually we like what you're doing. Don't you want to come to Dub Dub DC in San Francisco on a student scholarship?" And I was like, "Okay, this is crazy." I would've never thought that I would sit in a crowd and watch an Apple keynote at some point. And that was actually the moment when I realized when I was in San Francisco at Dub Dub that this is actually like making apps is like a proper job. Before it was all just like, yeah, I do that in my bedroom after school. Yeah, it makes some money, but yeah, I should get a proper job to be sure that in 10 years I still make money from it. Yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

Okay. And then like you said, you eventually got a software engineering degree. Were you building and releasing apps throughout this whole process?

Frederik Riedel:

I never stopped making apps basically. I had times where I was making one app per week and-

Charlie Chapman:

That's crazy.

Frederik Riedel:

-one sec was actually one of them.

Charlie Chapman:

Most people have an idea. They'll sit there and chew on it and work on it and it's not ready, it's not ready. But how do you get into a mode where you're releasing a new app every single week? That's a pretty intensely tight deadline.

Frederik Riedel:

Yeah, especially back then when the tooling was so much more complicated and actually I wasn't even capable of using the tools in the right way. I could have probably made one app per day if I knew how to use a [inaudible 00:16:01] controller back then.

Charlie Chapman:

So yeah, why one a week? Was it just like each one was an idea, you wanted to try it, you put it out there and then you just move on to the next thing?

Frederik Riedel:

I just had time. I was bored. That was my hobby basically. When I came back from school, I was like, "Yeah, I'm just going to make a new app." And usually when I have an idea, I cannot stop thinking about it until I actually do it. Usually it was like I have an idea, I build it and then put it on the App Store and then I have the next idea. And then maybe the app from three weeks ago get some attention and then I go back to that and I'm like, "Okay, I'm going to build an update for it for the highly most requested features." And the apps that never got traction, they were just sitting there until either Apple or myself removed them from sale at some point.

Charlie Chapman:

Do you know how many apps you ultimately have released in the App Store?

Frederik Riedel:

It must be more than 50 because when HALM came out, I broke their first prototype because they did not yet implement the paging API.

Charlie Chapman:

Yes. HALM, we've had them on the show, but that's an app that's, it's a Mac app that lets you use App Store Connect. You logged in with your developer account and their early version didn't have the ability to page because they weren't expecting that many apps.

Frederik Riedel:

Yeah, exactly. I opened it and I was searching for one sec and it did not show up. And then I sent it a message, "Hey, your app is broken. I cannot find one sec. This is the reason why I want to use your app." And then they discovered that eventually, "Oh yeah, you have so many apps on your account that we have to-"

Charlie Chapman:

That's hilarious.

Frederik Riedel:

"-implement the paging API to go to page two or three or whatever." So I think I don't have a count on it, but it's somewhere between, I guess, 50 to 100, more towards a hundred, maybe 80, 90.

Charlie Chapman:

Goodness. Wow. So, okay, but you're not doing that now. You now have one sec, we'll get into it, but it's like a company company. You have employees and all this stuff and it's a big part of your focus. Where does that come into play? Had you already started slowing down and putting more focus on an app to grow it bigger or was this just part of your basically weekly cycle of apps that was coming out and then for some reason you started focusing on it?

Frederik Riedel:

Yeah, that was actually part of my weekly cycle. Well, it was not always weekly, right? But then I guess in that year I released three or four new apps overall. I actually had one big app called Redpoint, which is a climbing fitness tracker for Apple Watch, which was my main project back then because it was like a nice niche app. There's no competition because making a climbing app for Apple Watch only is like, yeah, it can maybe sustain half a developer, but that's it.

Charlie Chapman:

It's not getting VC funded competition.

Frederik Riedel:

Exactly. I was young and I was living in Berlin in a shared apartment, so I was very happy with my situation, but still I was of course exploring new ideas and one of them was one sec. And when I released it was kind of like every other app that I made where I was like, "Okay, maybe this will get, I don't know, a hundred people or so in the first week."

Charlie Chapman:

And the story was what you said earlier. It was basically like you don't like how you're getting sucked into social media, but you don't want to completely get rid of it. A lot of people just try to go cold turkey. So you're like, "Oh, there's APIs that Apple has that lets you jack in basically to when somebody's opening an app and you can sort of interrupt it." And that was the sort of driver for why you made it. But it wasn't like, I'm going to build this big company off this idea. It was just another one of your guys.

Frederik Riedel:

No, not at all. It was kind of like how I made every other app before. It was like a personal interest or personal problem I had. And I was like, "Oh, this could be a nice way to make a new app or explore a new technology." And yeah, one sec was just one of these apps where I never planned to scale it or make something big out of it. And when I released it, it just felt like, "Oh, next week I'm going to work on something else." But yeah, it blew up. When I launched it, I put a screen recording on Twitter and it got a couple of thousand of likes and retreats on the first couple of days and the app had suddenly a couple of thousand users.

Charlie Chapman:

Did it break out of your circle or was it just within your sort of circle on social media, it really resonated with people and then it kind of worked its way out?

Frederik Riedel:

I didn't have a lot of followers back then, maybe 700 or so on Twitter. And I guess it resonated with a lot of people because everyone was like back then in the COVID times scrolling a lot and people were sick of that. And everyone was like, "Yeah, I actually want to do something useful with my time, but I always end up on Twitter or whatever." And then you have a super simple idea of like a clever way to use Apple's APIs. And I guess in my developer friend circle, that resonated a lot from kind of like this technical perspective. But then of course there was like a whole ADHD bubble that got into this and it kind of like evolved from there.

Charlie Chapman:

So it was pretty immediate then that you felt this is different than the other apps that you've been doing.

Frederik Riedel:

Yeah, it hit me really hard. I couldn't sleep because there was so much attention on the app suddenly. So many users trying it and being blown away how well it works for them and how quickly they could gain back control for their social media habits. And I was just overwhelmed by seeing the impact of the app and kind of like having found something that resonates with more than just like a super small niche of people.

Charlie Chapman:

Because you were just releasing things right away, it wasn't like this was in TestFly, it was out there for real people. So when you had this big influx of users, did it immediately start sucking your time because of like people have feature requests or bug reports and that's where all of your energy started naturally going?

Frederik Riedel:

Yeah, yeah, exactly. I built the first prototype on a weekend, put it on my own phone. I used it myself two weeks and my screen time was reduced by 50% after that. And I was like, okay, this is really effective. Actually, when I installed the app on my own phone, 20 seconds afterwards, I accidentally ended up opening Twitter and I ran into my own app. And I was like really, okay, I'm onto something here.

Even I as a developer am kind of like fooled by it or benefit from having it right away. This just shows how addicted we are all to social media and how well a solution like one sec can help to combat that. And yeah, we're using it for two weeks. And then I was like, okay, this works great. I'm going to put it on the App Store and I'm going to see what happens. And then yeah, when I saw the resonance, I really spent two weeks to build a proper, good version of it and make it a lot nicer, a lot more polished. And then after two weeks, the first big update came and basically since then I have never stopped working on it. But it was still a long time until I did it full-time and it stopped more or less working on my other apps.

Charlie Chapman:

So how did you get to that point then? Because initially it sounds like it was pretty successful, but it wasn't like this is sustaining you full-time and definitely not you're hiring employees right away because at this point everything was fully indie, right? It's not like you had any employees or anything.=

Frederik Riedel:

Until today, actually, fully indie.

Charlie Chapman:

Well, but you have employees now, right?

Frederik Riedel:

Yes. Yes.

Charlie Chapman:

Indie in the sense that you haven't taken on funding or anything like that.

Frederik Riedel:

Yes. No, we see money.

Charlie Chapman:

Right, right. So from the point of solo to starting to bring on help, what was the trajectory of its growth? Was a lot of that just organic, the product market fit, you just are watching that thing climb or were you starting to like... I know now you do lots of different marketing things. Were you doing that back then to try and grow it up to this point?

Frederik Riedel:

Back then, I think the initial growth really came from my tweet because that lasted like a long time. There were always like phases where suddenly it would get more-

Charlie Chapman:

The same original tweet.

Frederik Riedel:

Yes, the same original tweet.

Charlie Chapman:

Wow. That's kind of crazy.

Frederik Riedel:

And brought me quite far. And then actually at some point I started to pay for it to be shown to even more people.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah. Yeah, because you know it's effective.

Frederik Riedel:

Exactly. It has proven itself that it works organically and yeah, that really worked well. That was also actually before Elon Musk took over Twitter. So I was more happy to pay money to them. Nowadays, I don't do that anymore.

Charlie Chapman:

Did you try replicating that? Were you making more videos, but it was just that original one that was really working?

Frederik Riedel:

At some point I did a new version of that tweet that was like more polished and it also worked really well, but I kind of like knew that it would work back then because it was like not changing everything about the original tweet. It was just like making it just a bit more polished and making the wording a bit nicer to explain what the app is doing and putting an app store link in there with a campaign parameter that I can actually track the traffic coming from there, like stuff like that. And then I also put it out in a couple of different languages at some point.

Charlie Chapman:

The original was in English, I'm presuming?

Frederik Riedel:

Yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah.

Frederik Riedel:

Exactly.

Charlie Chapman:

Interesting. So, okay. I mean, really it sounds like product market fit is kind of the thing that was driving that early growth then. The tweet itself was really effective, but the reason it was effective was because it's a need people genuinely have and people were downloading and using it. At this point, was it a subscription or was it one-time payment?

Frederik Riedel:

Initially it was a one-time payment, but I quickly switched to a subscription just because it's more sustainable. But actually the people that purchased it back then, therefore, what was it, like 399 or something, they still have access to all the pro features until today. I'm super thankful for their early support, so I'm very happy if they are still using one sec, which a lot of them actually do, they can still use all the pro features that we have added over the years.

Charlie Chapman:

So once you switched over to subscription, once you realized this is going to be taking up your sort of time and you're going to keep investing in it, you're building a bigger and bigger customer base that can fund you. When was the point where you realized I either need to or can bring somebody on to start helping accelerate things more?

Frederik Riedel:

I think that was two years after I launched one sec, and I was spending my whole day just replying to emails, which is a really nice job.

Charlie Chapman:

I had a suspicion that's often the first hire people make.

Frederik Riedel:

Yeah. It was a really nice task for one sec, because most people start their email with something, "Oh, your app has changed my life and I'm so thankful for it." Yeah. It's very positive, but then of course there's always this like, "But I'm having this bug." And it was just too much time and too much energy to put into that and I felt like I want to focus on building the product and I don't want to deal with all this customer support emails anymore or I just can't do it anymore. It was too much. And at the same time, I was making like 10K MRR and I felt like, okay, maybe now is the right time to start thinking about hiring my first person.

Charlie Chapman:

Did it feel like scary?

Frederik Riedel:

It was scary in the sense of like, who am I to tell someone else what they should do with their life? You want to contribute something to one sec, but then I have to give you feedback and tell you my honest opinion and what if I don't like it, I have to tell you that. And I was really anxious to do that because I felt like I'm not entitled to tell someone else what they should do with their time and with their life. But I quickly realized that it's actually a very beneficial relationship for both of us because the person, Lucas, that I hired, he was super happy. He was a student back then. He was super happy to have a job with a very flexible hours. It doesn't matter if he replies to emails at 3:00 AM or at 3:00 PM, he can work on the weekend, he can work-

Charlie Chapman:

It's a lot cooler than working at a factory or fast food or [inaudible 00:28:48].

Frederik Riedel:

And on top of that, he works on a product that he actually cares about. He uses it himself. Everyone in our company uses the app themselves and they're fans of the app, like everyone is affected by it. And so there's like a deeper purpose in the work and took me a while to understand that people are actually grateful to be able to contribute to something to one sec.

Charlie Chapman:

Did you already have somebody in mind or were you like, "I need to hire somebody." And then you had to go through a process of finding somebody who fits your work style and has that same passion.

Frederik Riedel:

The funny thing is I hired almost all my employees or freelancers through social media. So yeah, if you want to get a job at one sec, follow me on Instagram because sometimes I just put a story, "Hey, we need a new person to join our customer support team. Do you know anyone?" And then usually it's like a friend of a friend or directly a friend. And in the end, that just shows that social media is a great tool. And I don't want to stop using it completely because there is still a lot of value in connecting us and allowing things to happen.

Charlie Chapman:

I've always appreciated about one sec and all of your sort of branding around it is that ethos. I feel like oftentimes people in this space treat social media like it's the devil, like it's a vice. Even when they have the same type of feature set where it's like screen time is helping you reduce it, not completely get rid of it, but it's always in this, it's like sugar. It's like, well, you don't need any. It's all bad, but everybody's going to give in a little. And I appreciate that you always highlight how like no, these are beneficial things to creating networks in society. And for me, keeping up with family spread around the world. These are good things. It's just they're weaponized by people who are-

Frederik Riedel:

It depends how you use it, of course.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, exactly.

Frederik Riedel:

You could say the same thing about the iPhone. For me, it's like the best invention humanity has ever done. But of course you could also argue it's kind of like an addiction machine that enables social media to do what they do. But I disagree with that. I think the iPhone is a really great tool and social media is also a great tool, not as great as the iPhone, but still it enables us to stay connected around the world. And maybe we wouldn't have met if social media didn't exist. Almost just enabled so many things and connections. And I think if you think social media is the devil, which I can agree, they do a lot of evil on their apps to keep us hooked. You can also delete it completely, right? You don't have to build complete blockers or something, just delete it and you're fine. Or I don't know, get rid of your phone or whatever.

Charlie Chapman:

You hired somebody to help with customer support. And it sounds like that went really well, presumably did free up your time and the relationship worked out. And then you've done a lot more since then. So where did you kind of move from then?

Frederik Riedel:

Yeah. When I had the time again to focus on building the product, I focused also a lot on marketing. And I quickly realized that Instagram especially is a great channel to acquire new customers. Kind of like previously how I did it on Twitter, I brought that over to Instagram because of course on Instagram, you have a completely different target group of users, at least in Europe or in Germany. Twitter is, or nowadays even less, but back then Twitter was only really used by journalists and some researchers, but like the normal people, they would use Instagram as a social media. And then yeah, I started making content for Instagram as well and was also paying for that content to be shown to more people. And I figure out that works really well because of course on social media, I find my target group of people that spend a lot of time on social media and want to spend less.

Charlie Chapman:

It's kind of an ironic perfect targeting where it's like the exact group of people that you want. It's like advertising to sports fans on your favorite sports teams forum or something. It's like a hundred percent of the people are interested in this topic here. The difference is it's not some niche place. It's the biggest social network in the entire world. But literally every single person there is potentially in your TAM, which is kind of wild.

Frederik Riedel:

Yeah, exactly. I agree. It's like back when I did Redpoint, my climbing fitness tracker for Apple Watch, I was putting posters in climbing gyms because that's where my target group is. And I guess subconsciously I took that learning to one sec as well. And yeah, when I started doing that, I could see that my revenue was like doubling every single month. And I was like, okay, this is insane. And next month it was more again. And then suddenly a lot of famous people discovered one sec and they were putting one sec in their stories because of course, if you're like a famous person with a lot of followers, you are even more likely to have negative effects from social media. The more likes you have, the more views you get, the more attention you get. I guess the more dependent your brain gets on all of these.

And then you are also much more thankful or grateful to find a solution like one sec and to realize, oh, this actually helps me and this is really effective. And then people are just like, "Okay, everyone has to know about this tool. This is so amazing." And they just made a video and put it on a reel or on TikTok. And yeah, it really blew up from there.

Charlie Chapman:

So you were focusing on that marketing. Did you ever hire people to help with the marketing or is that still kind of one of the areas where you're spending a lot of your time?

Frederik Riedel:

I hired someone to help me with marketing, but I would still say that mostly I was in charge. She is supporting me with it. She's also creating content, but we work together on our concepts and on our ideas because I think in the end, marketing is equally as important as the product. And that's also something I had to learn the hard way or the... I didn't know it from the beginning, but yeah, I quickly realized, of course, if you build a product and nobody knows about it can be amazing, but it just doesn't work. And I guess Apple is also a great example of that. They build amazing products, but they are also insane at marketing, letting everyone know how great their products are.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah. They put a ton of wood behind every arrow. Whereas a counter example of just as big of a company with Google, they'll throw so many things at the wall and sometimes they'll make something that you love and you want to succeed, but there's not the marketing push behind it. And even a company of that size, it ends up kind of dying on the vine, which is always depressing. How have you found that transition going from it's mostly just you, but you have some help to now you're like a person that's over a big team where presumably things are happening that you're not even necessarily that involved in sometimes.

Frederik Riedel:

We are 18, not 80, 18, one eight, people right now.

Charlie Chapman:

80 would be, that would be a lot.

Frederik Riedel:

Yeah. I hope that never happens because I'm actually quite happy with the size of the team. I think it's still the size that I don't have to have like a management layer in between. I don't really want that to happen because it just creates so much overhead and...

Charlie Chapman:

You're remote, right? You don't have an office.

Frederik Riedel:

Yeah, not yet. Actually, Leo from Structure, they have an office now in Berlin, which is pretty cool.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah. Well, we were talking about that in Finland.

Frederik Riedel:

Big step.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah. Maybe you need to get him back on just to talk about that. That is a really interesting step is having physical space feels like it kind of creates things.

Frederik Riedel:

And yeah, depending on how that goes, maybe we will do that as well for one sec at some point. But of course it's also super nice to be flexible and fully remote just allows everyone to be super flexible. And I think that's also the kind of people I tend to hire or I was not really looking for these types of people, but whenever I was interviewing someone and they showed very strong independent working skills, I had a good feeling of hiring them because my priority was always that I don't become a manager.

I want to keep working on the product and on the marketing. And I hire you because I think that you are really great or much better at what you do than me. I just trust that you take the right decisions, much better decisions than I could probably take. And of course, we can always disagree about something and argue until we find a good solution, but in the end, I don't want to tell you what your job is. I want you to see the opportunity and execute it and also ask questions about my input, right?

If I say something stupid, don't just implement that. Then tell me that I'm stupid and let's find a better solution together. And like these characters, I accidentally hired people, or not accidentally, but it was not planned from the beginning, but I've had my gut feeling that these people are probably good to have on the team. And it was really valuable for me until today, because yeah, I don't have the feeling that I have to micromanage everyone. We all share the vision. We all use the product. It helps a lot. It's a very simple vision. We want to build the best tools to keep people in control of their digital environment. And yeah, everyone agrees and likes that mission and that makes it very easy to not have this management layer in between.

Charlie Chapman:

Well, obviously I think that's everybody whenever they're in that position's ideal. I think growing to the scale that you have, it's rare to have maintained that, but sounds like the hiring process is part of how you've been able to do that.

Frederik Riedel:

Yes, definitely. And that's also why I don't really want to grow more now, the team, because I feel like we have special skills for everything that we need. And that's so much fun now because I can just execute projects that are much bigger than I would've been able to handle myself and I can execute them in a quality that I would've never been able to do by myself because I just know I have one of the best people here to help me with that problem. And to, for example, we have an amazing browser extension for one sec as well that you can use on your computer.

And this is built and engineered, software engineered in such a beautiful way and it works so, so nicely, I would've never been able to do that by myself. And it just feels amazing that we can now offer these products in our portfolio, but I don't have to be the person who has to learn JavaScript and handle all these new frameworks and so on. Having the financial manners to execute these kinds of larger projects, that is a whole new level of satisfaction for myself. I guess I just love building products, but now having the ability to do that on a more abstract level, to still be able to influence everything and put my approach into it, like how I think a product should work and should look and should be developed, then having someone who executes that vision in a way where they still think about what I told them and reflect on it and disagree with me, that's a lot of fun.

Charlie Chapman:

Speaking of people doing things for one sec outside of your expertise, there's another part of the one sec story that is super unique and wild to me, and that is you basically have a research arm that's doing university-level research on all of this stuff that one sec is part of. Walk me through how that came about.

Frederik Riedel:

Kind of like the same as always, right? It was a person that loved one sec. They used one sec themself and that guy just sent me an email and was like, "Hey, I'm a researcher from the Max Planck Institute here in Berlin and I love what you're doing with your app." And he congratulated me to the practical implementation of his theoretical work and he was just-

Charlie Chapman:

Which you definitely did on purpose.

Frederik Riedel:

Of course. I read his paper and I was studying psychology for 10 years before. Yeah. No, for me, the idea of one sec was really just an impulse and I was like, "This could actually work. Let's give it as a try." He sent me this email quite early after I published the app, like maybe three or four months after it was released on the App Store and I was like, "Okay, this is amazing. This is kind of exactly why I love building apps because it gives me opportunities and things that I couldn't achieve otherwise."

And of course I replied to his email and was like, "Yeah, let's do something together." And then we just had a video call and we were discussing, "Oh yeah, can we maybe have a little experiment in the app where we ask people to donate their data of their first six weeks of using one sec and ask some surveys in the meantime?" And we were really blown away by the results because we could see that on average the social media time was dropping by 57%.

I was hoping to see a statistic significant result, something like, I don't know, 12% or something where I could say, okay, it's statistically significant that one sec works, but seeing that it's cut by more than 50%, that was insane.

Charlie Chapman:

And how do you measure that? Because you don't have a control, right?

Frederik Riedel:

Yes. By now we actually did some experiments where we have a control group, but back then we were looking at how many times you would try to open an app and we would assume that if one sec wasn't there, all of these attempts would actually lead to a session on social media.

Charlie Chapman:

Makes sense. Yeah.

Frederik Riedel:

And then we would look in the sixth week, how many times do you actually open it? And that comparison was 57%, but we were actually able to reproduce that by having... Now we did experiments that had a proper baseline period where we were just recording two weeks of your social media usage and then suddenly the one sec intervention kicks in and we were able to see the same effect. So kind of like our assumptions from back then regarding the baseline, they were true. And all the experiments that we ran, they were always showing numbers around 57% reduction, which is kind of like almost seems like a nature constant of attention that you can steal from someone without noticing it.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, because you did this original experiment, you got that result, probably a very nice thing to put on your website and kind of help with marketing and all of that. But you've continued, like you said, to work with researchers. It's gone pretty big, right? You're working with governments and organizations around the world, right?

Frederik Riedel:

Yes, it has grown a lot. We have shown that one sec as a research tool actually works. And we have published papers in quite big journals, peer-reviewed journals that are well known in the scientific community, especially in human computer interaction psychology and so on. And researchers trust us now because we became kind of like a proxy between social media companies and researchers. Of course, a company like Meta or X or Snapchat, they don't like to share their data with researchers because it's rare that it would be beneficial for them. They know exactly what they're doing, so they have no interest that researchers look at real user data and can say, "Hmm, this is maybe not really good that teenagers open Snapchat 10,000 times per week."

Charlie Chapman:

Or it's just valuable IP, right? Or maybe not IP, but even if it's not nefarious, which often it is, but you don't want to share with the other social networks, the things that are working for you because it's one of your competitive advantages or whatever.

Frederik Riedel:

Exactly. And one sec became kind of like the proxy in between that allows researchers to conduct experiments and to observe real social media usage patterns of target groups. And we are always super happy to help them because we kind of like, in the end, we profit a lot from doing research.

Charlie Chapman:

You have a user base that is both knowledgeable and probably enthusiastic about you doing this, right? Because another company that would have this would be Apple or Google, which Google obviously has their own services, so they wouldn't be incentivized. But Apple would be incentivized to do this, but Apple's can't assume that its users are okay with sharing this data, right? They have to be a lot more cautious with that. Whereas the one sec user base, it's like it's part of your whole onboarding experience. This is a thing that's important to us. They all know exactly what they're agreeing to in that onboarding.

Frederik Riedel:

But that's also not something that we do by default, right? Every research project that we do has like their own content forms. So it's all approved by ethics commissions at a university and it's always anonymous and opt-in. If you ever see a little banner in one sec, "Hey, we are running a new experiment, you can just tap on it and participate in it." And then usually you will donate your usage data for six weeks and answer some surveys in the beginning and the end, sometimes in the middle that kind of like we connect your responses from the survey with the usage data, but it's all anonymous usually. So we don't know who you are. We don't need to know that for our research purposes. But yeah, as you said, nowadays we have worked with the German and the Danish government. We are also currently running something in the UK, a larger project, governmental project, and with a lot of cool universities like Stanford, Cambridge, Oxford, the Max Planck Institute, insane researchers and professors working with us.

And we're all super happy because we as one sec, it's not like more work for us if you're testing an intervention we already have to ask the users to donate their data. And for the researcher, they just get access to a gold mine of data they would never be able to access themselves.

Charlie Chapman:

Putting on the cynical hat, obviously it's worth doing at a personal level because if you feel like you're helping the world, you're getting to work with all these cool institutions, but just going pure business mindset. Obviously the original thing that you did, now you get a big 57% improvement number, you get to put research back to yada yada. But continuing to do the work to work with these people, do you feel like it's still helping the business in some way?

Frederik Riedel:

I would definitely say yes. I mean, I think it's also something that you just have to try. If you always look only for the business numbers and you want to be sure that this helps your MRR, then probably you wouldn't do it. Now in the end, it turned out to be one of the key differentiators because one sec is the only app in the screen time space that has peer-reviewed scientific studies that show that it actually works. There are users that tell me I only downloaded one sec because I know it's not snake oil. There is evidence that it works.

Charlie Chapman:

Their government or a university that they trust is working with you.

Frederik Riedel:

Exactly.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah. It adds this lend of authority like this is trustworthy.

Frederik Riedel:

Yeah, exactly. And even if you have a lot of reviews, then people just think like nowadays on the app store, this is all like fake or I don't know, this is just like a weekly subscription app. And it's really hard to convince people. And at the same time, you have also therapists who recommend one sec to their patients because they tell us, yes, I have used it myself. I know it's a good app, but seeing that it's even like there is scientific evidence behind it makes it much easier for me to recommend it to someone that has problems with anxiety or depression. one sec is not certified to help with that, obviously, but if it helps, it helps.

Charlie Chapman:

Right. Yeah, yeah. And if what it's certified to do is help people reduce screen time with these specific social media apps at some degree of efficacy. And so if the therapist clinically trained, blah, blah, blah, is going for that result, they're trying to reduce screen time because they think that that's helpful, then yeah, it's a tool that is known to work in this way. Yeah, that makes sense.

Frederik Riedel:

Exactly. And at the same time, it's also amazing for us to develop new features, new interventions in collaboration with researchers. They sometimes have ideas of things they want to test and then we sometimes have to change around a little bit how the intervention works in one sec. For example, one thing we did two years ago with the Danish and German government was testing a delayed intervention. So the idea is that the intervention doesn't kick in when you open the app, but it actually gives you something like three minutes per hour of using Instagram. And if these three minutes are over, then it will show the breathing exercise and you have to go through it to unlock more time if you still want it.

And it turned out that this modified version of the intervention was super effective with a target group where one sec was previously struggling to be effective with, which is namely teenagers and like younger people because of course they have a very high pressure to be present on social media with their peers. They just thought that one sec intervention was too frustrating, so they weren't able to use social media to the degree where they were feeling comfortable, that they don't miss anything and they are well-connected with their peers. For them, it was really too much, right? They were just deleting it again after... They would agree that they spend too much time on social media and they want to change something, but the original one sec intervention wasn't not what was helping them the right way.

So we were thinking about how can we make it less frustrating while keeping the effectiveness high and we ended up with this delayed intervention and we tested it and we saw, okay, the effect is a little bit less than our 57%. It was just 42%, but still, of course, a very large reduction. And in the end, if the dropout is lower, the absolute time across the target group that you save is of course much higher than before. We don't have anything if we put an intervention that's super frustrating, you have to wait like one hour to open Instagram and people would just say, "This is too much. I don't want this."

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, exactly. It's all a balancing act.

Frederik Riedel:

And so we would reduce the friction a little bit, but exactly make sure that the user intervention fit is more balanced and suddenly people were very happy to use it and because they could just do whatever they need to do on Instagram, but they would also know that they are kind of protected from scrolling half an hour without even noticing.

Charlie Chapman:

Now, did that idea come from the researchers or was that just an idea that you had and then you were like, "Oh, let's go ahead and do a research project with this idea?"

Frederik Riedel:

Yeah, I think most of our research ideas, they come from us. Usually our product development is years ahead of what researchers want to look at and all the researchers, they tend to be quite bad at product development. If you have ever seen apps they develop purely for research, they are horrible and that's also actually what makes our relationship so attractive for them because they get to test something with an app that people actually use voluntarily. You don't have to pay the money to use one sec or to use your artificial lab app. They use it anyway.

Charlie Chapman:

Which means it's a way more realistic result as well.

Frederik Riedel:

Exactly.

Charlie Chapman:

Last question on the research side. Have you been to any researcher conferences or events? Basically what I'm really asking is that crowd nerdier than the WWDC iOS crowd or are we nerdier?

Frederik Riedel:

I've never really been to a research research conference. I've been to a computer science conference where it's kind of like the same people, but I really want to go at one of these psychology conferences at some point.

Charlie Chapman:

I've been on airplanes with doctors coming to or from conferences and they always seem so cool. And I'm like, "Man, I wish I was at the conference they were just at, surrounded by a bunch of people like them." Because it seems like one of the things I love about our community is like, we're all nerds with computers, but everybody's also nerdy about other things. It would be really cool to go to one of those events with people who are extremely nerdy about these sort of research psychology topics and then see all the things that they're also into.

Frederik Riedel:

I think they're not into much because if you're into psychology, they're all workaholics. They work so much because they-

Charlie Chapman:

That's fair. They aren't all woodworkers like every software engineer eventually becomes.

Frederik Riedel:

They don't have the time for that because there is so much competition in the psychology space that like if you want to become successful, if you want to become a professor or something, one day you really have to work your ass off. Yeah, it's tough.

Charlie Chapman:

That makes sense. Kind of a rare thing in the, well, really in the app space generally, but especially in the indie app space, most people don't apply for or hold patents, but you do. So what's the story behind that?

Frederik Riedel:

When I launched one sec, it was quite clear that I'm onto something, especially seeing the research results. I was like, "Okay, this is actually a really effective way to lower your screen time." And then on one day, I had a friend visiting from the US who has a pretty high position in Silicon Valley or like one of the big tech companies, not a startup, and he really recommended me or he pushed me hard to file a patent for one sec because he knows how big tech companies work internally and kind of like, this is the only way you can protect yourself from getting copied at some point because he saw and I saw the potential in this idea. Of course, we want as many people as possible to use this. And of course it would be a dream if this at some point becomes part of the operating system, but at least I wanted to give the big companies a reason to talk to me first before just copying or stealing my idea.

We actually spent a lot of energy into filing a patent because that is a lot of work actually to get into this like legal...

Charlie Chapman:

Is it just in the US?

Frederik Riedel:

Yes, it's in the US. It would've been way too much or way too expensive and also way too much energy to file it in more languages.

Charlie Chapman:

Well, in the effect you're looking for, that's what you need anyway, right? Protecting against the platform owners, which are all US-based companies.

Frederik Riedel:

Exactly, exactly. Or that's also our biggest user base is in the US. And of course, then it was also super nice that we did the research because we could just quote that in the patent and show this is really a significant idea and this is not a random invention. This actually has an impact. And in the end, the patent attorneys from the United States patent office, they agreed and they approved the patent just half a year ago, I guess. It took a long time, but I was really happy and relieved when they finally sent the letter.

Charlie Chapman:

Do you have it framed on your wall?

Frederik Riedel:

No, they don't actually send the-

Charlie Chapman:

Is it digital?

Frederik Riedel:

-certificate anymore. It's digital, but it looks hilarious. It looks like it's supposed to be like a 3D with fancy certificates printed on it. Yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

I would hire an artist to create a physical rendition of it.

Frederik Riedel:

Yeah. Yeah. No, but I think in the end it's nice to have that, right? It makes us a little bit future-proof. I just hope that it gives these big companies a reason to talk to us first before they just do it.

Charlie Chapman:

That makes sense. All right. Well, I think we've reached the end of the show here. So I'll ask you the question I ask everyone in the show, which is what is a person or people out there that have inspired you in your work that you'd recommend others check out?

Frederik Riedel:

I would say the whole Indie House, which we didn't even get to talk about that. That's just a bunch of friends of mine, all indie developers, and we always spend the week together in San Jose or in Cupertino. We rent a big Airbnb and all indie developers all making cool apps, but I think 90% of them have already been on the podcast. It's like people like Jordi and Leo and Clements and [inaudible 00:59:17], of course, and Paul and the whole Indie House. There are actually two that I would mention or recommend you to bring on the podcast. One of them is Zep, or I don't know how to pronounce his last name, Weidl or Wiedal. He's from the UK.

Charlie Chapman:

Okay.

Frederik Riedel:

He's like this private API guy UI nerd, he knows all about that. And he also has an indie app, Duet, which is also nice. And I guess just for his knowledge on you, I could and private APIs, that would be a fun guy to talk to. And then there is Nils Bernschneider who makes an app called LENGO, which is a language learning app. And we actually also have I have an integration with one sec, with LENGO where you have to learn vocabulary before you can open Instagram.

Charlie Chapman:

Ah, that's pretty clever.

Frederik Riedel:

I would say he's like the prototype for an indie developer because he takes so much advantage of his lifestyle. Every time I see him, he lives in a different country. Right now he lives in Panama and he travels with an Aldi bag. He doesn't have a suitcase, he just has a plastic bag from the supermarket with all his stuff. And that's it. That's all he needs. And he just travels the world.

Charlie Chapman:

The true nomadic lifestyle.

Frederik Riedel:

Yes. Yes. I think he knows what's important about life.

Charlie Chapman:

And that's Aldi.

Frederik Riedel:

Yeah. Yeah, no, exactly. Aldi.

Charlie Chapman:

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

Frederik Riedel:

I think everywhere on the internet, I'm on most social media platforms. I really like Mastodon. I'm a bit sad that it didn't work in the end. I think they were too slow to make it appealing for normal people to use. And I think it still is a bit too technical, too weird. I really like the idea, but I think the train has really left that it gets mass attraction. But for me, this is like how social media should be. I have zero urge to open Mastodon right now because I know there's nothing going on. I have maybe five new posts and I can read the-

Charlie Chapman:

It's quite the endorsement.

Frederik Riedel:

Close the tab again.

Charlie Chapman:

Mastodon has a good community, especially the Mac developer.

Frederik Riedel:

Yeah. But then of course I follow these people. You're not missing anything. You have no algorithm that puts stuff you don't want to see and you just stay connected with the people you care about. And I think that's how it should be. It's like a non-addictive social network. And it's kind of like how social media used to be. But yeah, I still think that they had a lot of opportunities that they didn't use to make it really work for normal people. And yeah, maybe someday it will happen. If you want to get my attention on something, that's probably the best way because you're going to be one of the five people I see when I open the app next time.

Charlie Chapman:

There you go. All right. Sweet. Well, thank you for coming on. This was super fun. I'm glad that we got to do this in our sort of normal setting here, but it was also very fun to do it on stage and to play instruments with you.

Frederik Riedel:

Also, a shout-out to the conference to Yesa, who organized it, and Frank. I would recommend everyone to go there next year. I don't know if they already announced it when it's going to happen, but it's a really lovely, really authentic conference with like... Yeah, you just see the people put a lot of love and attention to detail in it, but in the right things, right? It's not like over polished, but yeah, just that they have this random musician there, like this one man band. It's just super lovely and well organized and putting the priority on the right things. Yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

Highly recommend ARCtic Conf. If you're in Europe, the last couple years it's been in I think February, so probably around that time next year. But yeah, I would very much recommend it. The vibes are, as they say, very, very good. So thank you again for coming on. And for everyone listening, thank you for listening all the way to the end. Launched is part of the RevenueCat Podcast family. If you want to learn more about the growth side of mobile app businesses, you should check out Sub Club, which is the sort of non-indie, more professional side of the house run by my friend and colleague, David Barnard.

And for everything else, RevenueCat, go to revenuecat.com. And for everything Launched, you can go to launchedfm.com and you can find us on all of the social media like we just talked about, and it's usually Launched FM is the handle there.

And we're on YouTube. There's a YouTube podcast now as well. So if you want to see our smiling faces and see that Frederik is in Europe and I'm in America as his background slowly gets darker through the whole recording, you can do that there.

Frederik Riedel:

And you can see me through my beautiful new M5 Pro webcam. I just upgraded.

Charlie Chapman:

Fancy, fancy.

Frederik Riedel:

Last week, my webcam quality was still much, much worse.

Charlie Chapman:

Perfect timing then. Perfect timing. All right. So that's it. I'll see you all in two weeks.

Frederik Riedel:

And don't forget to download one sec!