90: Teleprompter Pro – Joe Allen

Joe Allen:
To be honest, I struggled justifying it to myself. I'm thinking like, "Well, what are we going to publish every month? What are we going to keep putting out to justify our subscription?" But that's just not how that works, particularly not for these kind of utility products. It took me a while to come round to the idea. We went in with a very low $20 a year subscription price because I just thought that's what sounded fair.

Charlie Chapman:
Welcome to Launched. I'm Charlie Chapman, and today I'm excited to bring you the creator of Teleprompter Pro and the just released app, Captions, Joe Allen.
Joe, welcome to the show.

Joe Allen:
Hello.

Charlie Chapman:
So before we get into Teleprompter Pro and your whole backstory, I always try to start with a really quick elevator pitch of what the app is so that people kind of know where we're going. This one's kind of funny because the app's called Teleprompter Pro. So maybe a little self-explanatory.

Joe Allen:
Yeah. I struggle to do that sort of pitch without using the word teleprompter. So maybe I'll explain that first. It's the thing that you see the news presenters reading on the camera. Right? That's a teleprompter. And Teleprompter Pro is an app that allows creators and studios to have their own teleprompter and produce better content and more engaging things, whether it's a video or a speech, you know wedding speeches, things like that. Yeah, it's a little pocket version of a full-size studio teleprompter.

Charlie Chapman:
And when you say that, because it's on your phone or your iPad as opposed to ... It's not a physical device.

Joe Allen:
Correct. Yeah. Yeah.

Charlie Chapman:
Awesome. All right. So let's kick this off the same way I always kick off this show, which is I have three questions for you, which is where are you from? Do you have a formal education related to what you do? And then what was your career backstory before you started building teleprompter?

Joe Allen:
Okay. I'm from a very boring town near London. So I normally say London if I meet a stranger, but I'm actually from a boring town just outside. But we invented the fiber optic and the blue asthma inhaler. I'm sure I've told you that a million times.

Charlie Chapman:
Oh yeah, that's usually-

Joe Allen:
That's my thing.

Charlie Chapman:
Usually I always say-

Joe Allen:
If you need to know where I am, look that up. Come here, I'll be there. I didn't go to university. I don't have a degree or anything. But I do have some education in media studies and film studies, which doesn't really mean much because it's not a degree. It's like a two-year thing after high school. It's not much. But I suppose it's sort of in the industry, right? That's what I wanted to get into.

Charlie Chapman:
It's very interesting how many people I've talked to on the show have their background is in film or animation or something specifically like that. I think there's something about the sort of indie side of mobile app development or maybe the iOS, Apple's kind of the intersection of science or computer science and liberal arts or whatever that does that. But yeah, it actually seems really relevant in an interesting way.

Joe Allen:
Yeah, especially film and like you say, animation, it's one of those things where you can do it with a hundred million dollars. Right? And that's what you see growing up and you think, "Oh, I want to do that." And you actually can just do that with a pocket camera or I suppose now you can do animation on an iPad and things like that. So it's one of those interesting things where you can aspire to these great iconic works of art and be able to do them at home in your bedroom as well. I wonder if that's a sort of similar thing for particularly app development, but software in general where we have these world changing-

Charlie Chapman:
Well, it's also a blend of art and science, right?

Joe Allen:
Yeah.

Charlie Chapman:
So much of film is actually really technical, not-

Joe Allen:
Yeah. What tripod am I going to use?

Charlie Chapman:
Yeah, right, exactly. Yeah. Obsession with gear. There's a surprising amount of overlap. And I guess also like we're talking about here, there's a thriving indie scene in film as well, which is about how can you get the same level of artistry at a way smaller budget with a small team and do something that's still impactful. Yeah, that's interesting. Okay. So yeah, so you have a background in media then, and then is that what your career took off in then? Was that what you were doing initially?

Joe Allen:
Well, it's interesting actually because immediately after ... We call it college here, but it's not university. Immediately after college, I had sort of started doing freelancy style. Actually, it was while I was still there even camera work, right? I had a $500 DSLR and I thought I was the world's best camera person.

Charlie Chapman:
Oh yeah. This is the age of that sort of thing. The 5D Mark Two, where all of a sudden you could shoot video with real lenses and under $5,000 and it's like, whoa.

Joe Allen:
Yeah. So I put myself out there as video creator person. Right? And that's sort of where Teleprompter Pro was born. But I did actually have a real joby job for, I think, seven or so years. And it was along the same lines. It was a little bit more web design and sort of graphic design-y. It was for an events company. We did their websites and the sort of onstage graphics and things.

Charlie Chapman:
And you just got into the web because you were working with them and you're like, "I can figure out computers." Or-

Joe Allen:
Yeah, it's something I had done at school as well. I was kind of into that idea. So that was a fun job to get as a first job and I enjoyed that. But yeah, so I did have these sort of two things going on where one was more like video production type thing, but it was kind of a hobby that I just enjoyed doing and I liked buying the gear. And then yeah, I had a real job in actual design and a little bit of web development and things like that. And that's the one I had to quit to go full-time with Teleprompter Pro.

Charlie Chapman:
Okay. So in this mode, where did Teleprompter Pro come from then? Were you already doing mobile apps or did it start with this?

Joe Allen:
It's a funny story really. There's kind of two parts to it. I remember while I was at secondary school, high school, I had really supportive teachers, particularly the head teacher. We've just sort of had this relationship where we sort of chatted about just stuff and he kind of knew the things that I was into. And we was on a trip and mobile apps were kind of new. I think this was 2009.

Charlie Chapman:
Oh yeah, that's like-

Joe Allen:
Still kind of new, but it's not this week's news.

Charlie Chapman:
... a year in the app store. Right.

Joe Allen:
Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So people knew and we were just chatting and one of his questions was like, "Are you not interested in these new mobile apps?" And my answer was like, "Well, yeah, but they're kind of difficult to develop for." Especially in 2009. And I didn't even have a Mac. So my 30 minutes of research and like, "Oh, how can I make an iPhone app?" One of the beer drinking apps or what were the others, fart noises.

Charlie Chapman:
Yeah.

Joe Allen:
Yeah. It was just like a dead end, like, "Oh, you need a Mac and you need to know this weird language that's kind of not really ... You can't Google so much." And it kind of came to a dead end there. But when he prompted me on that trip, it kind of put the idea back in my mind, if that makes sense. And for some reason, I've always remembered that as the moment where I was sort of prompted to give it a real go, "Maybe I can do this thing." And that wasn't the week that I made Teleprompter Pro, but I did have a Mac at that point and I downloaded Xcode and just started playing. So I think that was my entry into making a mobile app specifically like iPhone at the time. And then Teleprompter Pro came from that freelance work that I was doing where we kind of needed a teleprompter, but not necessarily a teleprompter, but we just needed someone to read their lines.

Charlie Chapman:
Yeah. Was this like a commercial kind of thing?

Joe Allen:
It was a kind of, yeah, it was this weird guy in my town who thought he could make a television pilot for some idea that he had. It was awful. It was just awful. There's so much more to that story.

Charlie Chapman:
So obviously you knew teleprompters existed.

Joe Allen:
I think so, but it didn't really even come to mind. What happened was I was too cool to write it on a piece of paper and hold it, right? No. So my new first generation iPad, which at the time didn't really have many uses in real life, it had a clock and a calendar. I thought, "Ha, I can type this into Apple Pages and scroll it with my fingers. That's so much better than paper, surely." And it kind of wasn't. Scrolling on Apple Pages on a first gen iPad was kind of not really that great, but it worked. And that's where Teleprompter Pro came from basically. I had a bunch of apps on the store. They were all kind of junk, just projects that I had fun making. And that one just had noticeably more downloads.

Charlie Chapman:
Well, you say that one, but at this stage that you're describing, you're using pages presumably with the font really big and you're scrolling.

Joe Allen:
I did make it into an app on the store.

Charlie Chapman:
What was the impetus for Pages isn't working for me? Was there something you're like, "I wish it did this." And finally you're like, "You know what? I'm just going to make a cheap personal app."

Joe Allen:
Yeah. I remember just struggling to have a black background even.

Charlie Chapman:
I was wondering if that's what it was. Because I don't know if Pages could do that.

Joe Allen:
Yeah. Just stuff like that.

Charlie Chapman:
Maybe now you can with dark mode.

Joe Allen:
I don't know if you remember the iPad launch marketing, but it was kind of similar to the early iPhone marketing where it was just a bunch of cool apps quickly showing on their TV ads. And one of them was that clapperboard, the kind of movie thing. I thought, "Aha, this is cool. Now I'm going to have a clapperboard on my iPad and this teleprompter thing." And I made a clapperboard app as well. Again, without really understanding ... I knew what the primary purpose, the noise and the number of the video, but I didn't know what those numbers meant. I just put a clock there. I just made an app. So yeah, I had this suite of just random project apps. One was a clapperboard and then I'd made a teleprompter, which at the time you couldn't even really adjust the speed or anything. It just sort of moved some text up. But it got downloads.

Charlie Chapman:
[Inaudible 00:11:08].

Joe Allen:
Yeah.

Charlie Chapman:
Okay. So it started getting downloads. So it sounds like you had a bunch of little apps. Did this one immediately jump out as, oh, maybe there's an audience here?

Joe Allen:
Yeah, I think so. I distinctly remember thinking like, this is weird, this one's getting more down. Am I just in a good position on the store or something? Am I not sort of understanding some different keyword and people are accidentally downloading it? But no, it seemed to be the first that I'd hit on that actually had a genuine use in life other than my random games that I'd made or that clapperboard that didn't really do much other than made a noise.

Charlie Chapman:
And probably worth pointing out here that you got the name presumably right off the bat, Teleprompter. Is that right?

Joe Allen:
No.

Charlie Chapman:
No? Oh, what was the original name?

Joe Allen:
Well, back in those days, I think you could have a hundred characters in the app title. It got very short, maybe 10 years ago, but in those days you could have a much longer ... So it was called like Teleprompter Video Professional, Autocue is a brand name in the UK, for video, create ... It was a stupid long title.

Charlie Chapman:
So were you keyword stuffing intentionally for marketing reasons at that point?

Joe Allen:
Yeah, but only in the same way that I sort of knew that was good thing to do. I hadn't-

Charlie Chapman:
Yeah. Yeah. Understanding you're like a kid basically at this point, but you're used to seeing at that point already Amazon products that have just-

Joe Allen:
Yeah. All the other apps had similar things and I think it kind of worked. And even in those days, you would appear alphabetically in a What's New page, so it was beneficial to start your app name with an A.

Charlie Chapman:
Did you start using [inaudible 00:13:01]-

Joe Allen:
And so, I could have even potentially called it A Teleprompter App or something like that. I bet I can find it. I'll message you like the full name.

Charlie Chapman:
Ah, that's great.

Joe Allen:
But no, no, we didn't have a particularly unique or strong keyword name other than it just happened.

Charlie Chapman:
Not to jump ahead too fast, but when did you kind of collapse it down to just Teleprompter?

Joe Allen:
It wasn't very long ago. It was within the last five or six years when that started to matter, App Store's always sort of changing and evolving, but it was around about the time when it became a thing like, oh, a single unique search term name that people are going to type in, right?

Charlie Chapman:
Weighted more.

Joe Allen:
It's a good thing to have. And it was available [inaudible 00:13:46].

Charlie Chapman:
If you go back to the point where it's in the store and you recognize it's starting to kind of tick up, it was good enough, but it wasn't like you were doing a bunch of extracurricular marketing at that time. It was just organically getting a decent amount of downloads and presumably continuing users.

Joe Allen:
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. We've never, ever had a day of zero revenue ever. And it's not to mean it made a whole bunch of money. It was like a 2.99 app for many, many years, but that alone was like, wow, this thing seems to be ... People were paying for it and they're not complaining. It seems to be a worthwhile sort of product that people like. So yeah, it was clear early on that it was a concept that people were looking for at least.

Charlie Chapman:
Yeah. So did you kind of, at that point, take it more seriously as like this is a product and start trying to do either marketing or adding features to make it more worthwhile or playing with the business model or anything at that point? Just pull us out of this and be a little meta here for a second, talking to the audience right now. Joe is one of the most understated people I've ever met. You've probably already picked this up, but he talks as if he's just this random guy who like, there's nothing interesting about him. And then randomly he'll talk about like dealing with bug reports from the International Space Station or something, and you'll be like, "What in the world?" And so I'm prepared for who knows what wild things I'm going to ... So don't let his modesty fool you here. But I can hear it in your voice even there. You're like, "I don't want to make this sound as cool as it actually is."

Joe Allen:
No, I don't know. I want to be careful that I'm not making stories up because I don't know. I know when you think back to like 15 years ago, you think, "Oh yeah, I did that and it went well and that's what I did because I knew what to do." And that's not how it goes.

Charlie Chapman:
Yeah, yeah.

Joe Allen:
But yeah, from what I can remember, I like the idea of having a cool product and being able to release updates and announce things. I don't know, that was cool. So I liked that aspect of it, but I don't know if I'd quite sort of committed to like, okay, this is a thing that I'm going to do for 15 years and this is our big thing, but rather that it had some users, so it was kind of cool that I could do these changes and updates and whatever people were requesting, it was fun to then release that.

Charlie Chapman:
Were you using it yourself?

Joe Allen:
Occasionally, yeah. I didn't do much of that type of work, but I did get opportunities to do that. So that was certainly useful just to have a day actually in the field doing these things.

Charlie Chapman:
So the primary driver of your work then was based on feedback you were getting from users, like requests and stuff like that?

Joe Allen:
Yeah, pretty much. And at the time I was kind of stupid 19-year-old, didn't really know what I was doing in terms of software engineering. For a very, very long time, all of the data in the app was stored in NS user defaults, but in a wild way, the keys just had, it would be like user script one, user script two, user script three, and I would just loop through those.

Charlie Chapman:
Oh, wow.

Joe Allen:
It worked perfectly, but it was just when it came to introducing a new variable or something, it was just a-

Charlie Chapman:
Nightmare.

Joe Allen:
It was just a whole lot of undoing bad work and things. So I kind of struggled with turning into a real piece of software that I could iterate on and make meaningful updates to, but that was my thing. So it was like, yeah, now how can we introduce a video recording option so you could record a selfie video at the same time? That took me a very long time to figure out, but yeah, it certainly hadn't become like, this is our thing, our products and our sort of company now.

Charlie Chapman:
Well, when you're saying our, at this stage it was still just you, right?

Joe Allen:
Yeah. I don't know why I'm saying our. I think it's just because I'm thinking about us now.

Charlie Chapman:
Yeah, as a company.

Joe Allen:
But certainly at the time, no, I was just a sort of 19, 20 year old with this app on the app store.

Charlie Chapman:
At some point then, it reached the point where you did make that jump. What's the path there? How did you get to the point where it was making enough money that you could kind of make that jump?

Joe Allen:
That kind of happened on its own in terms of like it got to a revenue point where it could sustain me at least. It was very, very slow, and I think it probably just happened as the app store grew. And I wonder even if you took that into consideration, the app itself might not have even grown or it might have shrunk and grown at different rates as I was just sort of dipping in and out of working on it and doing other things in my life. So that kind of happened on its own over a few years, but then I was very, very slow to commit to, "Okay, this is what I'm going to do now with my life." And I think it was just that sort of fear of what if it changes or goes wrong or I don't know what I'm doing.

Charlie Chapman:
Yeah, this is like a thing. I think there are different types of people. I think me and you are in the same boat where we assume that literally everything is happening to us and that we're not responsible for any of the success. And when you're in that mode, I think that's actually healthy in the app store in particular because there are a lot of factors that can drive users towards you that ... I know people who, they work on their app all the time, they're always adding features and they're attributing their growth to the features that they're adding.
And that very well might be true, but it's also possible that ... I've talked to many people on the show in fact that were doing that for a long time. They had a business that was growing and then very suddenly the bottom drops out and they have no idea why. And it turns out there was some keyword that they were ranking well for and a small change in the algorithm or a tweak that they made just caused the whole thing to just invert. And then they had to do a bunch of research. It doesn't mean that your business is going to fall apart, but it does mean that you have to be aware of where that's coming from if you want to solve it. And so yeah, I very much understand that.
Also, as somebody who has a side project where sometimes it gets lots of attention from me, sometimes it doesn't, and it's not growing like at your trajectory, but it sustains itself. And some of that is just, I keep it solid and working and I'm taking advantage of the fact that the app store is doing a lot of that work for you. So yeah, I definitely understand. I think that's a really healthy way to look at the app store is it's this sort of river with water running through it and you can kind of tap into it, but the river can move. It's a much bigger thing than you. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Need to understand that things can change out from under you at any time.

Joe Allen:
Yeah, definitely. Yeah. So it took me probably another five years after it would have been enough to sustain me to actually end that full-time job. And I was sort of aware of it, but I certainly was in no rush to put all of my eggs in that basket.

Charlie Chapman:
Were you doing things during this time or maybe immediately afterwards, specifically to make that more sustainable? At some point, I know you switched your business model, where we left off, you weren't really doing much marketing. Did you start playing with those kinds of things? What were the things you were doing to make it a little bit more of a capital B business?

Joe Allen:
A lot of what I did to sort of make that happen was things like price increases and sort of just being a bit more upfront about, okay, this is a paid product. You can use it for free, but that's just so you can try it out and see if it fits in with you. We're a paid product and we're not 299 anymore. We're, I don't know, I think when I quit my job, it was like 17.99, which to me was a lot of money for an app.

Charlie Chapman:
But your industry, you're selling almost B2B in terms of how a lot of people are probably purchasing it. If you're on a production, like the cost of a physical teleprompter, granted they're going to have to use this with other physical items, but yeah, $17 is basically free in terms of a movie budget, even a really low budget production.

Joe Allen:
Yeah. A lot of that was sort of me learning that and being confident enough to put our pricing a little bit more along the lines of what we were actually offering. And I'm just trying to think when we went subscription, but that was quite a while after I went full-time. So yeah, I think a lot of it was just that actually understanding our position in the market. And then sort of that, doing that puts me in a position where I have a little bit more responsibility to create a product that's sort of robust and does the things that people need it to do. So they kind of went hand in hand where I position us as a sort of serious thing as like, "Oh, I've actually got to make it."

Charlie Chapman:
You got to follow that up. Yeah.

Joe Allen:
Yeah. So I think that helped. Yeah. And I think it was about 2018 that I went full-time and then 2020 is when we went subscription.

Charlie Chapman:
So what was the subscription transition like? What drove you to do that? I mean, I can guess. And then how did you do that transition and how did it go?

Joe Allen:
We'd done things in the past where we would release a new app and that was the next version and you have to sort of buy this. You were doing upgrades

Charlie Chapman:
Essentially.

Joe Allen:
Yeah, but it's kind of not possible in the app store, right? We tried it.

Charlie Chapman:
No, it's just a new audience entirely, right? Did you ever successfully move people over? Were you doing in-app things? Were you collecting emails and sending like, "Hey, there's a new version."

Joe Allen:
Yeah, we had an email list of our customers and yeah, we would have it in app prompts and just all those things, but it was just a mess really. I think it can be done. Right? There's a couple of examples where that's kind of their model, but we weren't really at the scale that that would work and I just didn't like it anyway. I avoided it for a long time, but subscription was the right move. And we still have leftovers from pre-subscription. We still have two apps where we used to have a light and a paid. That's kind of a difficult thing for us to work around, but yeah, subscription was the right way for us to go.

Charlie Chapman:
That was why you switched over. The pain of doing upgrade pricing is crazy. How did that go? Did you have users upset? Was it just pretty smooth?

Joe Allen:
Yeah, it kind of doesn't matter what you do, people will get upset. Because what we did was anyone who's purchased, you just access forever, like what you paid for, you full access forever. So all of our customers, they have no difference to them, but we found most of the people that got upset were those customers thinking that they would be charged now and it was just a communication issue really.

Charlie Chapman:
Some of my favorite bad reviews I have on the store are people being upset that it's a subscription app. And the literal first thing is, or it's like subscription, hack, or garbage, or scam, or whatever. And then it says, the very beginning will say, "Great app, even though I'm grandfathered in and they don't charge me, this is evil and I'm against it. One star." And I'm kind of like, I almost see those as positive one star reviews. If somebody's going to sort by one stars and the one stars they see are like, "They treated me very well, I just don't like that this costs money, the app is good." I'm kind of like, "I'm okay if customers see that." But yeah, there's like a holy war kind of aspect to subscriptions.

Joe Allen:
Yeah. So we had that. And I think to be honest, I struggled justifying it to myself. I'm thinking like, "Well, what are we going to publish every month? What are we going to keep putting out to justify our subscription?" But that's just not how that works, particularly not for these kind of utility products. It took me a while to come round to the idea. And again, we went in with a very low $20 a year subscription price because I just thought that's what sounded fair. I really was just picking numbers from the sky. But yeah, otherwise it was quite smooth. We just used that transaction receipt date to grandfather everyone in, and then anybody else just saw the subscription payable. And we still today offer a lifetime price. It's basically three and a bit years price and that seems to please most people. So it was fairly smooth.
It feels like it was kind of rough because you always receive the heat directly, all the complaints come to you and it sounds like you've just sort of done the worst thing in the world. But no, it was certainly a good move and it seemed to go pretty smoothly.

Charlie Chapman:
And then after that, was it pretty immediate like, okay, this is a little more sustainable, now we can kind of expand the business. We can get to the part where you saying we and us and our-

Joe Allen:
Yes, yeah, exactly.

Charlie Chapman:
... is actually more accurate.

Joe Allen:
I think I was comfortable that it was a sustainable thing to be doing for a while by that point. I'm kind of two years into being full-time and maybe seven years into it being my main source of income. So I was quite happy with that at that point, but I suppose, yeah, you're right. It was about then that gave me then the opportunity to expand a little bit and things like customer support were actually impacting my life because I just had so many messages to reply and things. And then I cared a lot about making sure either people got the answer they needed or were corrected about how wrong they were. So that kind of kept me up for too long in the day.

Charlie Chapman:
Well, and it is, like you were saying, if you're charging a premium price, part of the expectation there is that there is support. Right?

Joe Allen:
So a lot of questions we get are just super simple, like two word answers, or it's just like, "Oh, you just need to press this." Or, "You've got your orientation lock on, that's why it's not going landscape." And I sort of feared that that would turn into one star reviews or just someone abandoning the product. And I don't know why I had so much care for individual cases, but it was important to me and that sort of consumed my working day for a long time. So yeah, our first hire was customer support, take care of all of that, and I could go back to trying to build software however I could figure it out.

Charlie Chapman:
Was that a freeing feeling once you got that going?

Joe Allen:
Yeah, I think so. It very quickly became not my problem at all. I would maybe get one or two really weird edge case questions or just decisions like, "Oh, should we just give this person the pro upgrade because of X, Y, Z?" Yes. But yeah, quite quickly, it just took all of that away from me.

Charlie Chapman:
Yeah. Email is a job, but it often isn't the job, but it can be like, "Oh, I got a lot done today." Because you answered 12 emails that each took an hour somehow. Yeah, I get that. But since then, you've expanded the team. What size are you at right now?

Joe Allen:
There's four of us now, including me. So me plus three.

Charlie Chapman:
And how has that changed the trajectory of the company, going from just you to you plus a team of people?

Joe Allen:
It's interesting because from just the inside my experience, it feels like, oh, it's the same. We've got mostly the same product and we're putting out the same amount of updates and things for customers and we're essentially doing the same thing. But now it just for some reason takes four of us, which took me a while to come to terms with. But what I've realized, and certainly if I start looking at actual numbers, is if I look at certain graphs, I can see the points in which I hired people. And it's because like, oh, okay, now I can focus on, "How should we position our upgrade product? When do we show the paywall? What do we think is fair to put behind the paywall? In front?" And we could run experiments on it. I was free to do that because it kind of takes time, right?

Charlie Chapman:
Yeah, yeah.

Joe Allen:
It allowed me to make those product decisions without having to do engineering stuff just to fix a bug that came in iOS 16 or something. So certainly the last two years, which is when we got a Swift engineer to take care of actual software, we've been able to sort of grow in those ways that I always had at the bottom of my priority list. Do I build this core new feature or do I just see where the paywall should appear? And I kind of don't like those things anyway. I have to be very careful and sort of mindful of how we're doing those things. So that was always at the bottom of my list and having an excellent team take care of those things like engineering and features and what are we going to build next lets me spend a lot of time really being considerate about, okay, how do we grow the things that we might be kind of ignoring?

Charlie Chapman:
And what are some of those things that have moved the needle or didn't in a way that you thought they would?

Joe Allen:
Like a nice onboarding for probably 13 years, our onboarding was just a sign-in, login, create an account. And that was it.

Charlie Chapman:
It's like you're speaking directly to me. This has been the top of my should do priority list for probably three years.

Joe Allen:
It is important, right? Because it, as you say, moves the needle for growth and things like revenue and retention and things. But really, yeah, I want to be building the things that people are asking for. They're not asking for a better onboarding.

Charlie Chapman:
Especially with a subscription, but even without, it's like I'm always thinking about the current users And I don't take the time to think about, which quite frankly is the majority of my users are new users, right? Most people try it for a little while and then bounce, whether free or trial or whatever. And so it's not just, especially living in RevenueCat land, it's easy to only be thinking like, "Yeah, that can improve my conversion rate and all this stuff/" which is, I'm not obviously not saying that that's bad, but even from a pure wholesome product level, I get so many customer support emails that are like, "How can I create a custom mix of ambient noises inside of my app?" And it's like, that's a feature in the app. And if I literally just had a quick slide that was just like, "You can do this thing," even if it doesn't really show them how to do it, just the fact that it says that it's something you can do can go a long way to improve the amount of people who find that feature, right?

Joe Allen:
Absolutely.

Charlie Chapman:
So it really is good product work, but it's not satisfying in the same way that I think a lot of product-oriented people want work to be satisfying.

Joe Allen:
I guess it's just one of those things, I struggled with feeling bad about optimizing for those things because it feels like what am I actually doing here? This is for me now, not for users. But ultimately they find features, like you say, and then it's an opportunity to put them on some rails and just like, "Here's where this is. Here's where this is. And you can do these things if you want."

Charlie Chapman:
And onboarding, so that was that one that moved the needle for you business wise?

Joe Allen:
Absolutely. Yeah. I can point to you on a graph where that happened. It was big for us.

Charlie Chapman:
Okay. I'll earn my paycheck here for a second. So literally just this morning, I saw a feature that we are rolling out currently to our charts, which means everybody listening probably it's already out to everybody, but we have a little thing where you can annotate your graphs now. I didn't know that. You could mark, you didn't know because I literally found out this morning.

Joe Allen:
Excellent.

Charlie Chapman:
But you can mark, this is when we hired Greg, or this is when Apple featured us or whatever. And I literally had to then prepare for this interview, but I already have all these ideas in my head of like, "Oh, I need to go in and mark when this podcast feature happened or whatever." And it's funny listening to you say, you keep saying I can point on the graph and I'm like, "That's like an interesting exercise to do." Obviously, whether you use RevenueCat or not, it's nice that you can mark it on the graph, but just to go back and actually have ... I guess this is another one of those,
When you hire people, you have little time to do self-reflection, but it's a good self-reflection exercise to go back and think of the things you thought were important and look for the signals were they actually. And then if you see a weird signal, see if you can pinpoint the real cause of it. Yeah, that's pretty cool. So yeah, so onboarding was one. I know another one that the talk that you're about to give at DeepDish, which I haven't seen yet, so I don't know the answers to what you're going to say, but you're giving a talk that has to do a lot with your sort of email marketing that you did with Teleprompter. So can you talk about what that was and how that's been beneficial for you?

Joe Allen:
Yeah, it's top of mind, so I've got lots of nice sound bites for you. But I'm quite convinced that that is the single most important thing I ever did for my career in this company.

Charlie Chapman:
Wow. More than the ASO?

Joe Allen:
Absolutely, yeah.

Charlie Chapman:
Wow, okay.

Joe Allen:
It's hard for me to know, obviously, if I'd gone a different way, then maybe. But from very early on, I just sort of asked people for an email address in my random apps that I was making.

Charlie Chapman:
As part of onboarding?

Joe Allen:
Oh, I didn't have onboarding.

Charlie Chapman:
That's why, yeah.

Joe Allen:
[inaudible 00:38:11] thing that popped up. But yeah, I think that was just because I liked the idea of being able to announce cool things to lots of people. And it's just like, obviously it was kind of pointless early on with my just total random, barely functional apps that I'd made. But what that meant was even very early versions of Teleprompter Pro, we have this nice customer list that we can speak to. So what that means is when we tried upgrade pricing and doing different versions of [inaudible 00:38:45]-

Charlie Chapman:
It was actually possible at least then.

Joe Allen:
Yeah, it was possible. We could send an email and everyone would know and people would be able to, we'd steer people in the right direction. And I think it's one of those things that allowed me, like how you were saying earlier, to have a bit more confidence that my entire life isn't just balancing on the app store search algorithm, even though it kind of is, if there's kind of some temporary roadblock or something does change, we do have that opportunity to kind of communicate or just like, "Hey, we've had to change our name for some crazy reason." I'm like, "We're not starting from square one." And there's lots of examples of that, but that's been really important for us.

Charlie Chapman:
Do you use that for growth then? Are you re-engaging churned customers and seeing them coming back or more along the lines of retention, I guess?

Joe Allen:
It's a strange one because we don't actually, even though it's a kind of big part of how we've been able to grow, we don't go too deep on, like you say, re-engaging churn subscribers or anything like that. But we do things like when they cancel, we'll ask them why. And it just gives us a lot of nice feedback or we'll ask them-

Charlie Chapman:
You ask them why through an email?

Joe Allen:
Yeah. Yeah.

Charlie Chapman:
Okay. Okay. That makes sense.

Joe Allen:
A couple of days after signing up, we'll just ask them, "Have you got any questions or thumbs up, thumbs down?" And then we will personally come back and just sort of chat to customers who have questions. And that's led to a lot of either great product ideas or just sort of fun partnerships or connections we've been able to make. So that's been good.

Charlie Chapman:
How does that contribute to growth? Wouldn't this all be downstream from user acquisition?

Joe Allen:
Yeah, those things I wouldn't necessarily say our super growth contributors, but they've been very good at guiding us in our general direction, which ultimately I suppose means growth, but specifically for growth, we've been able to, when we have something like a ... I'm just trying to think of a good example. When we went subscription, we could put a bit of a discount and tell everyone, "Hey, if you've been on the fence, try our subscription because it's cheap this week." And that gives us a big, big boost and we still see that bump every year because that's when we sent a bunch of people.

Charlie Chapman:
Do you do discounts often outside of that?

Joe Allen:
About once a year, and not necessarily like Black Friday or anything. We've tried Black Friday and it works. I don't want an email from Joe Allen to just be like, "50% off, 10% off, ends tomorrow, don't lose out. " So we're mindful not to do that.

Charlie Chapman:
And you mentioned it's an email from Joe Allen. And I've noticed this looking through your app reviews recently, a surprising amount of them say, "The creator, Joe." Which is interesting. I never thought of you as much ... You think of Marco Arment or some of these, David Smith, like some of these kind of well known in the IOS because they have podcasts or whatever, and you link those two together. But at least talking to you, I always got the idea that Teleprompter Pro is this sort of industry app, but it sounds like you have made a personal connection in some way. Was that an intentional?

Joe Allen:
I've not really thought about it, but I think you're probably right. And we kind of position ourselves how you describe as an entity rather than a person who has an app. I often think along the lines of Procreate, we are this product. But yeah, a lot of the communications come from me. So I think some of what you've read, the App Store reviews, people are kind of happy to have heard from me or they feel like we've had this sort of connection and we've been able to form a relationship over this thing that they've asked for and I come back and say, "Oh yeah, we can do that." Or, "Have you thought about doing it this way around?" And yeah, a lot of those have come from, we've sent a, "Welcome, thanks for downloading Teleprompter Pro." And people will just reply and it's been great.
Almost everything that we try, we've been able to at least have people see it, not necessarily be successful or make a bunch of revenue, but things that we've tried, we've been able to send lots of people that way and we either get feedback or it's gone well. And I can't think of how we could have got to where we are now without having that in place, a list of customers that we can send a nice message to.

Charlie Chapman:
Another thing I'm interested in is, I think whenever we first met a few years ago, you were kind of starting this, "I want to go out into the field, so to speak." Now, obviously when we met, we were at developer conferences, but I know you go to film industry conferences like NAB and stuff as well. I'm curious, your thinking that drove you to think of this as a strategic thing you should start doing, and then how do you feel it's worked out? It's been a few years of you kind of doing that.

Joe Allen:
Yeah, it's interesting because that kind of lines up with what we mentioned earlier is when we hired a Swift engineer, so I didn't have to be always engineering and just working on=.

Charlie Chapman:
You being gone for a week or a few days or whatever doesn't mean that the business stops.

Joe Allen:
Exactly, right.

Charlie Chapman:
Yeah.

Joe Allen:
Yeah. To be honest, I can't really remember my thought process as to like, "Oh, maybe this will be a good idea." Other than just sort of thinking like, "Oh, WWDC looks cool, maybe I should join in with that." It's been a really good chance to actually appreciate what we've done with Teleprompter Pro. It sort of made me realize, "Oh, this thing has kind of grown and it's done well." My mindset just has realized a little bit more. It's like, "Oh, okay, we do have this sort of position in our industry and on the App Store that works really well for us." But also things like I wouldn't ... We've now been able to have a relationship with Apple and the App Store team because of going along to these conferences and things.

Charlie Chapman:
That one specifically would be WWDC, I presume, right?

Joe Allen:
I've not yet been able to get a ticket, but yes, you're right. It's-

Charlie Chapman:
Being in proximity-

Joe Allen:
... being in town.

Charlie Chapman:
Yeah.

Joe Allen:
I didn't even really know that that was a thing until recently that ... I kind of understood that Apple must work with some developers to do these things, but I didn't necessarily understand that it's not unusual for an app on the store to have a contact with Apple and you just sort of back and forward with some feedback and things. So yeah, that's been really cool. But to be honest, it's just been nice to actually have friends in the industry. I've been doing this for 15 years and I've not known anyone else in the same industry, even really in software engineering because I don't work with anyone else. So it's been nice to have people in exactly the same industry, and in some cases, events like running into people with the same products, it's been really cool.

Charlie Chapman:
Yeah. Do you feel like that's worked its way into the business? Obviously, having some connections within the platform provider, Apple is useful in that one context, but have you found that conversations with fellow industry people, both on the developer, app developer side, and on the sort of film side, have those trips contributed to the product and the business in sort of concrete ways, do you think?

Joe Allen:
Yeah, I think so. I can think of one or two decisions that I was on the fence about and even leaning one way and having had conversations with people, I've fully changed my mind and just sort of ... I want to say they just made me realize what an idiot I was being. I had this wild idea to buy some super expensive domain name because I thought that was a big step in the right direction. Our next big thing will be we'll have this cool dot-com and then we'll grow in that direction. And then it was Curtis Slopes. What's his surname?

Charlie Chapman:
Curtis Herbert.

Joe Allen:
That's it. Yeah. Yeah. I keep wanting to say Curtis Parrots, but that's not-

Charlie Chapman:
Yeah, Parrots, like the bird.

Joe Allen:
And he just said like, "What are you talking about?" Like, "No." I can't remember specifically what he said, but it was, he just said, "What are you talking about? No."

Charlie Chapman:
Yeah.

Joe Allen:
Yeah. And it's like, "Oh yeah, maybe not."

Charlie Chapman:
Yeah. Sometimes you need a mentor who's been in the trenches or who understands, or even thinks exactly the same way you do, but hasn't been sitting and stewing on this idea who can have that clarity of mind to be like, slap, like, "Hey, think about this for more than eight seconds in this other way." And then it becomes crystal clear. Yeah, that's interesting.

Joe Allen:
There's certainly been more things that I just can't necessarily remember them, but yeah, just stuff like that where I've been able to bounce something off of someone for 10 seconds and just like, "Oh yeah, of course."

Charlie Chapman:
Have the film industry events that you've gone to, those are very, very different than developer ones, right? They're a lot less personal. They're way bigger. Have you found those useful to go to at all?

Joe Allen:
They're certainly fun to go to, like this big expo hall with crazy gear and people and things.

Charlie Chapman:
That's on my bucket list. This was before I got into this, DubDub and Google IO were kind of these two conferences I really wanted to go to. But the other side of me that's always been obsessed with gear, NAB has always been at the top and Adobe Max. Those are the two big industry events that I've wanted to go to. So I'm always jealous when you say you've been and I see the pictures.

Joe Allen:
It is good fun. Although I've made less sort of connections there just because of their sheer size, you don't run into the same people ever. You talk like thousands and thousands of people. It's the only place I've ever been recognized. They recognize my T-shirt because I had a Teleprompter Pro T-shirt. So they didn't really recognize me, but they approached me and they're just like, "Oh, we use Teleprompter Pro all the time." That was cool. I felt like a celebrity for about a year after that.

Charlie Chapman:
And you've been running those or you're going as a, "Hey, we'll let you use our stuff for free. Or watch you use it basically to kind of get feedback."

Joe Allen:
It's more so just a genuine actual, they've just hired me like anybody else. There has been one or two where we just come along and just like, "Oh, we'll do that and let us bring our things and we'll take some cool photos and things." But no, it's been fun to actually just be doing that job for the day and people don't necessarily know, they don't know or care that Teleprompter Pro is our product, but it's been really cool to have that hands-on experience and just sort of see ... There's a lot of things that people won't ever say. I had the idea to use Xbox controllers to do the control the scrolling of the text.

Charlie Chapman:
Oh yeah, yeah. Because you have the variable-

Joe Allen:
That's not something anyone's ever going to ask for.

Charlie Chapman:
Right.

Joe Allen:
People tend to ask for what they already know about. It's like, "Oh, how do I do this thing that I've seen before?" And, "Oh, I've seen that you can use these Xbox controllers for those camera robot arms." You seen those, right?

Charlie Chapman:
Yes. Oh yeah.

Joe Allen:
Oh, we'll just use that for the teleprompter. Excellent. And maybe that's not a very good example, but it's just really cool to actually have the time to go and use our product in real ways that's not just on my desk imagining how it might be.

Charlie Chapman:
There's this cool thing whenever I had Clement Strasser on the show like a year ago or so, he talked about going to these big gaming conferences and they would always have these indie sections where it was like booths that indies could sign up for and people could come and play their game. And with a game, it's obviously easier because it's like everybody at a gaming conference is able to play a game, but like watching people just actually use the thing kind of raw in getting their feedback. And it's something that most of us don't really get. Our entire view is us using it and us using it in weird, non-normal ways, right? Or like feedback we get from email or from maybe family and friends if we're lucky. And Adrian Eves, who runs a Community Kit, which is like an alt-

Joe Allen:
Oh yeah.

Charlie Chapman:
... conference alongside WWDC, I think it's free to go to. He's doing it again this year and I think he's doing the same thing again. He took that idea and applied it to app developers. And so he does this indie fair thing at DubDub where people can just set up, there's like a big rectangle of tables and people can just walk through and like play with people's apps. And it was crazy to see. Obviously it makes more sense or less sense depending on the app itself in terms of somebody playing with it live right there. But it's wild how much just having an opportunity to let people come in cold and like play with it and add an event like that.

Joe Allen:
"Oh, they can't find this button. I need to make it bright red."

Charlie Chapman:
Seeing them be confused about things that you would just never guess that they're confused about, it's crazy how much of a difference it makes. And sometimes even using the product yourself outside of the context of developing it can give you that same thing where you're like, "Oh, this make total sense on my desk, but now it's in the teleprompter physical device, which of course I'm sure you have sitting on your desk as well, but you don't have a giant camera hooked up to it and a focus polar and all this gear and stuff. And just seeing it in that context radically can change."

Joe Allen:
Yeah. Actually, one of the things that we've done is we now have a studio like four miles from my house with like three big broadcast cameras set up as if we are doing something and we're not, specifically for that purpose. That's pretty cool. Pretend we're doing some sort of big, important broadcast.

Charlie Chapman:
Have you ever used it for ... I feel like you should do something with that, like marketing or goofy ideas.

Joe Allen:
I think on our user guide, yeah, you could Google it, but if you go to our user guide, we've got like two tutorial videos at about one minute long and those are shot in our studio and like way higher budget than they need to be. But we used our teleprompter and we figured out, okay, how do we set this up and what are we going to do for, I don't know, everything. Yeah, that's been really cool.

Charlie Chapman:
Where my mind's at now is like, "Hmm, when's the next time I'm going to be in London?"

Joe Allen:
Oh, absolutely. That's what I want.

Charlie Chapman:
What crazy scheme can I come up with?

Joe Allen:
If you're going to be here, we'll come and shoot something in that studio. Absolutely.

Charlie Chapman:
Okay, okay. Oh, we need to make that. I need to sit there and chew on that.

Joe Allen:
It's on the train line from London. You'll be perfect.

Charlie Chapman:
Perfect. Good to know. Good to know. This is the most valuable interview Launched episode I've done in a long time. Okay. So we've talked a lot about Teleprompter Pro and you mentioned how you don't have to be sitting and doing the normal engineering day to day yourself and you can think about the product and the product can keep moving along even if you're distracted by other things. And something you've done very recently, as in this week, is you've actually launched an entire new app. And if I'm understanding correctly, it's pretty much your indie app. This is a Joe Allen production. Is that right?

Joe Allen:
Yep. Yeah, absolutely.us had any involvement. To be honest, I think it was just a little bit of kind of missing out on that fun, certainly for when we've gone to these conferences and see these people excited about launching new things. And I sort of missed that fun of building something new or putting something out there that's kind of experimental, I don't know. So it was a bit of a sort of hobby project, but that kind of luckily fits a little bit in with our existing users anyway, so I can get away with putting it on our App Store account and doing all that. But yeah, it's been fun. It wouldn't be possible without Claude Code. We'd done a similar thing in Teleprompter, but that was, again, before LLMs [inaudible 00:57:05]-

Charlie Chapman:
Yeah. Can you explain what the app is?

Joe Allen:
Oh, of course. Yeah, sorry. So captions, it puts word by word captions on your videos, similar to Instagram and TikTok, but the point being you don't have to use Instagram or TikTok to do it. And I'm hoping I can put some sort of fun styles and animations and different unique options in there that might not necessarily be possible on other apps and certainly not worth doing on something like Final Cut Pro. It's just kind of this-

Charlie Chapman:
From personal perspective, this is something I have to do very frequently with the videos I'm doing and-

Joe Allen:
Yeah, I've understood that this is a thing that people like or not necessarily like, but they do a lot and it would be cool to have a fun

Charlie Chapman:
Because it's important so much ... When video content is one of the primary drivers of your marketing stuff, a lot of people, their phones are muted. They're on the subway or whatever and people I certainly will sit and I'll read the captions of a video as opposed to listening to it because I'm still interested, but making them more engaging than kind of the default ones that you maybe get for free, depending on the platform you're posting to, can make a really big difference. And yeah, and honestly, what I was doing, I now use your app. I've been on the test flight for a little while.
But I frequently would sit and try and do it on my phone because there's obviously a lot of apps that can do this. And oftentimes I just would get back to my hotel room or wherever and open up Premier Pro and just do it manually all there because I was a little picky about it. And the thing that stands out to me with captions specifically is that they just look nice out of the box and you support widescreen, which a lot of these tools, like Instagram has an editing app, but it's always, everything wants to be vertical and a lot of my videos, depending on where I'm posting them, are not.
And so, the fact that it's very quick and simple and the correction on ... It never wants to say revenue cap, right? It always wants to say revenue cap or their separate words or that it's not capitalized ready. It's really easy to just go in. People should definitely check it out. It's got a cool ... Instead of a timeline scrubber, you have the words in these pills and you can tap on them to edit them, but that's what you scrub and that actually scrubs the video. I've never seen that before. Was that like your idea of how to do this? Where did that come from?

Joe Allen:
I remember thinking to ourselves like, oh, that's a cool way of just being able to swish through a video. Because really in that context, you only care about the words. Right?

Charlie Chapman:
Exactly. Yep.

Joe Allen:
Yeah. So I certainly had seen it before. I can't take credit for that, but yeah, it's fun. And I think it avoids the issue that I'd seen in other products where they're kind of a, you can do everything product. We don't want to trim the video or add images or do anything. It's just here's the captions.

Charlie Chapman:
It has one job. It does it very quickly. Which honestly for-

Joe Allen:
There's a long way to go. There's lots of things that I would like to add and there's things that I know are missing, but it's been really fun to just give myself that challenge of let's put something fun and new out and try and do the fun new liquor glass things and something fun with foundation models and stuff like that. So yeah, it has been good fun.

Charlie Chapman:
There's two kind of big things I think worth discussing here. The first, just because there might be any of our American listeners may have searched in the app store already for Captions and not seen it. So it's not called Captions in America. What is it called in America? And I'm curious about that.

Joe Allen:
It's Recap.

Charlie Chapman:
Recap. And why is it different names in the US region versus elsewhere to the level that you can kind of get into?

Joe Allen:
We like the name Captions, and I think that's a good name. I wish it could be called Captions in the US. We had a little bit of an issue with an existing trademark, which I think is a non-issue, but I don't really have the ... What's the word? I don't want to say motivation. I don't know. So there was an issue-

Charlie Chapman:
You don't want to spend all of your time in US court systems arguing that, I think is okay.

Joe Allen:
Yeah, exactly.

Charlie Chapman:
I've been there personally with dark noise stuff as well.

Joe Allen:
Yeah. An existing trademark, which it is a non-issue, but it was expensive, both cash and sort of resources and time to sort of put the wheels in motion to just make sure everything was okay with it.

Charlie Chapman:
Are you worried at all about it being different names? Did you consider just changing it everywhere?

Joe Allen:
Yeah, I did. I did consider that. I still don't know how I feel about having a different name, but the sort of nice thing is that because I'm considering this as a little bit of a sort of hobby side project, I can take those sort of risks, not necessarily that it's a risk, but like-

Charlie Chapman:
You can always change it.

Joe Allen:
Okay, let's just try. Let's try doing different names, see what happens there. So yeah, it's called Recap in the US. It's called Captions everywhere else.

Charlie Chapman:
And then the other interesting drama with this app is you were very close to releasing it. When was the first time? I think in January whenever we were talking, but it kind of got hung up in the app store process. What happened there?

Joe Allen:
That was still a little bit bizarre, but I think we got to the bottom of it. So I wasn't actually necessarily going to release it then, but what I wanted to do was release for pre-order.

Charlie Chapman:
Ah, yes.

Joe Allen:
And it released earlier this week for general download. But yeah, it was getting some really strange rejections from App Store Review. I have to assume that App Store Review is kind of different now.

Charlie Chapman:
Certainly now, yes. But I think in January in particular was when the Vibe code app's mass flood kind of started. So now it's a big deal and app store times are slow, but it's an issue that they've been wrestling with for a couple months. I think in January was when they first started getting hit, maybe even unexpectedly with just the amount of apps. Not that vibe coded apps are by nature bad, but many of them are bad. And so there's this kind of, whoa, what are we dealing with here?

Joe Allen:
Yeah. So to just sort of build the story, the app, in my opinion, is not a vibe-coded app. I know what I'm doing to a certain extent for how to build apps and work with Swift. So it's a Xcode project and I created all the files and considered data models and everything like that. But I did use Claude Code to do a lot of the heavy lifting of just typing out a bunch of stuff that I can't be bothered to type out. And it certainly helped with things like the video rendering pipeline and things that are beyond my ability. So in that context, it kind of is a vibe-coded app. Right? So there's that part of it. And on the surface, at least as far as I'm concerned, it doesn't appear to be a vibe-coded app, right? It doesn't have the purple gradients and things like that.

Charlie Chapman:
Well, and to be clear, it being vibe-coded is not a violation [inaudible 01:05:23]-

Joe Allen:
Absolutely not.

Charlie Chapman:
... either.

Joe Allen:
No.

Charlie Chapman:
But yes, using the app, it feels like, honestly, it feels like a Joe Allen app. It's got that level of polish that you'd expect.

Joe Allen:
Yeah. Yeah. I spent lots of time doing nice UI design and Swift UI in a lot of cases and then UI kit where it needs to be. And an awful lot of that was just me doing my thing to the extent that I know how to do it. And yeah, you're right. Vibe-coded apps are absolutely not an issue. It just helps with my story for this rejection. It was otherwise quite normal and it had one or two rejections for the standard thing that a new app will be rejected for. So I think it was along the lines of specifically how the privacy policy was linked and things like that.

Charlie Chapman:
Yeah, the typical.

Joe Allen:
I bundled them into privacy and terms and they wanted them as separate links. So fine, fine. It's totally to be expected, especially for a new app, they seem to get a bit more scrutiny. And then we got this rejection for under the broad category of spam, which in itself was a bit of a problem because it was a very broad rejection.

Charlie Chapman:
Right. It's like, okay, if you read those guidelines, there's a lot that it covers.

Joe Allen:
Yeah. It encompasses copycat apps and apps that we don't need any more of. And then importantly, it was template apps, low effort. You've not really put any effort into this. You've just put some code that you've found up on the store.

Charlie Chapman:
I was about to say, a lot of times these are GitHub repos that people-

Joe Allen:
Exactly. Yeah.

Charlie Chapman:
People make a tutorial and they just download it, give it a different name.

Joe Allen:
Exactly. Yeah. That's the thing that it was rejected for. And that's not the case, right?

Charlie Chapman:
Yeah. As someone who's gone through a lot of caption apps, I can assure you, your app does not look like other caption apps.

Joe Allen:
Exactly. So I had a lot of back and forward just sort of saying that. And it's like, no, no, look, I've done these foundation model things and we spent a lot of time on the UI here and we're following guidelines here and it's not a template app. And it was just the same rejection coming back. Spam, copycat, don't need any more template apps. Yeah. So we had a lot of trouble with that. Weirdly, it sort of prompted me to make the app a little bit better. I was trying to sort of, okay, maybe-

Charlie Chapman:
Trying to [inaudible 01:07:59].

Joe Allen:
Yeah, I'll make it a bit more unique, even though I think it should be this way, whatever. And essentially it came down to a couple of things, but we found out because we arranged the telephone call, you can request a telephone call from App Store Review. Have you ever done that?

Charlie Chapman:
I haven't. And I think most people don't even really realize that that's a thing you can do.

Joe Allen:
Yeah. It's like a tiny line at the bottom of your rejection. And I think you have to have ... I don't know, but I don't think it's always there. Under certain circumstances, a line will be added to the bottom of your rejection email. It says like, "If you want to talk more about it, you can request a call here." And it's just a little hyperlink to a thing. So I did that and it was great. I got a call from a real person and it was surprisingly human, even for what you'd expect from Apple.
So what happened was he called and just said, "Yeah, I'm calling about this Captions app." And he said, "We've spotted ... It's a code issue. We've spotted code somewhere in your package that's just automatically flagging up as ..." He described it as sort of downloaded code or he didn't really use the word template, but I think that's what he was trying to describe, which again was kind of strange for me. I didn't really know why that would happen, but it was good to at least know that it was a code issue and not just this blanket, "Oh, it's a copycat." Or, "We don't want anymore." Or, "It might be downloaded." So it was good to know that. I get the impression that this person genuinely didn't know exactly what's triggering it other than he just could see a code trigger happened.

Charlie Chapman:
Right.

Joe Allen:
I did clarify, is it going to be something like RevenueCat or some animation library that we're using for the ... You can do a little confetti effect, right? Yeah. And he specifically said, "No, it won't be Revenue Cat. We know about them. It's fine. It's not that. " And he just said, "Just have a look, see if you can find anything that looks like that. " And I really couldn't, but what I did do was I removed a couple of the agents.md and other [inaudible 01:10:28] that I had, I had just dropped them into the package, even though they should just kind of be in the directory. Right?

Charlie Chapman:
Right. So this is for using with Claude, so it has nothing to do really with your source code.

Joe Allen:
Yeah, just something where I'd clarified the data model and make sure you do this and we're doing it this way and don't forget whatever, standard sort of instructions, MD files. So I just unchecked those from the package so that they're not in the delivered bundle and that got the approval.

Charlie Chapman:
That's interesting. Something flagged because of one of these ...

Joe Allen:
Yeah. And I'm still on the fence as to whether the changes I made were effective or just having communicated with me and me requesting that call was a good flag.

Charlie Chapman:
Yeah.

Joe Allen:
Yeah. So it was an interesting ride, but for a long time, it was getting to the point where I think I might have to just abandon the idea.

Charlie Chapman:
Yeah, that's crazy. It's a good lesson though that there is a mechanism for talking to someone.

Joe Allen:
Yeah. I was just worried that, because one of the reasons that comes under this spam rejection is like a saturated market. We don't need any more captions apps.

Charlie Chapman:
Yeah.

Joe Allen:
And it was just an interesting thought which is like, is the app store now closed to captions apps? And will it eventually close for every type of app? And obviously I was going way down the wrong road, but it was an interesting thought to think like, wow, maybe we can't, no one can do this anymore.

Charlie Chapman:
It is interesting because I do feel like that was obvious, that rule is obviously in relation to like we don't need any more fart apps, right? Yes. We don't need anymore like this makes four sounds and does the exact same thing as everything else. But you can imagine, especially if the ability to make an app becomes so easy

Joe Allen:
Yeah, that was Being saturated. After I'd sort of ruled everything else out, I thought maybe that's it then. But luckily I had this phone call and it was fine. Yeah. So that occupied my life for about two weeks.

Charlie Chapman:
It was a happy day on the internet when you finally got into the store and your pre-order was up. Obviously, it's out in the store now. It's been what, three days, two days since?

Joe Allen:
Not long. Yeah.

Charlie Chapman:
So we can't get into details on how it went. Other than, do you think the pre-order concept worked? Was it worth doing?

Joe Allen:
It's an interesting question. And the reason it's interesting is because I offered the entire full pro upgrade, everything unlocked to everyone who pre-ordered. So if you pre-ordered, you will never see a paywall, you just get this great app.

Charlie Chapman:
Did you market that? Because I knew that because you told me at one point, but did you utilize your email list for Teleprompter Pro?

Joe Allen:
Yeah. So I sent an email to our customers who I thought would be interested. So we sort of segment by whether or not they record videos in the app. And I thought that's a reasonable group of our customers. And yeah, I used that as a bit of, please pre-order it because you'll get this thing for free. I think it's nice to give a bit of an incentive and reward people for supporting my new thing. I think the first version, it's going to be the worst version of this product, right? So you can have it for free. So it's actually, it's kind of difficult to know whether that was a good move to do the whole pre-order thing because everyone who pre-ordered got it for free anyway.

Charlie Chapman:
True.

Joe Allen:
Actually we did [inaudible 01:14:03].

Charlie Chapman:
Theoretically the benefits come in when reviews come in and it ranking better because there's more users, that kind of thing.

Joe Allen:
So yeah, we got about, I think about 10,000 pre-orders, which is great, right? So we got a 10,000 download day. And from what I understand, on launch day, so once it went from pre-order to general availability, we did have a noticeable boost in our search position. I don't know if that was down to downloads or like the ratings and reviews.

Charlie Chapman:
That's a whole black magic voodoo thing to figure out what's actually going on there.

Joe Allen:
So I think it was a good move. I don't know if it's going to be right for everything, but it was certainly fun to have that sort of big wave of initial customers. And it was fun to watch us sort of briefly jump above Final Cut Pro on iPad in the top free chart.

Charlie Chapman:
Yeah, grab your screenshots.

Joe Allen:
Really doesn't mean anything, but it's great to show off. I'm certainly happy if that's a good measure as to whether or not it was a good move. And I'm hoping that's a good sort of jumping off point to start growing from. And just it's nice to just have that project that I can sort of have a bit of fun with. And now that it's on the store, it's great to actually have people using it. Yeah. Yeah. I'm excited to see how that goes over the next year or so.

Charlie Chapman:
That's awesome. Yeah. Maybe I'll have to have you on in a couple years as like a follow-up for this massive session.

Joe Allen:
Yeah. I've got some pins as well. In fact, they'll be rare in America because they say Captions and it's called Recap. But I've got some exclusive pins. If you find me in the wild, developers listening, I have pins for you and I don't know, you can give me a nice review on the store and I'll give you a pin.

Charlie Chapman:
Perfect. All right. Well, I'm going to go ahead and start landing this plane, which means-

Joe Allen:
Excellent.

Charlie Chapman:
I need to ask you the question I ask everybody in the 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?

Joe Allen:
I'm going to talk about a well-known Austrian artist called Klemens.

Charlie Chapman:
Ah, yes. So good.

Joe Allen:
He might be my favorite person. I want his products and his sort of life and all of his friends. So I don't know. Is that a good enough answer?

Charlie Chapman:
I think that's ... I mean, honestly, Clemons is such a great ... This is Klemens Strasser. There was this sort of era of the indie developer scene that feels like it's kind of lost with the great splitting up of all the social networks, everybody kind of has moved into their little hovels. And I was fortunate enough to kind of make a lot of these friends early on when everything was still kind of more centralized. So I'm in a lot of these groups, but it doesn't feel like there's as many people just publicly sharing their wins in a way where you feel like you're going along for the ride.
Most people, outside of kind of it being sort of scammy feeling, most people, I feel like once they have a decent success, they're almost embarrassed of it and they kind of shut off a little bit. And I feel like Klemens, I don't know, like he's one of those people that every new milestone he hits, I feel like I got to take part in, even though I have literally nothing to do with it. He's very good at that. And then yeah, if you've met him in person, he's just one of the nicest, most fun to talk to people.

Joe Allen:
Yeah.

Charlie Chapman:
Yeah. I think that's a good pick. And if you want to learn more about Klemens, there's an episode of Launched from, I don't know, last year or something like that, that you can go to. But no, for real, he's great.

Joe Allen:
Have you played Art of Flora with volume on max?

Charlie Chapman:
With volume on max?

Joe Allen:
Well, just like-

Charlie Chapman:
With the volume on, certainly.

Joe Allen:
Just going for it. Yeah.

Charlie Chapman:
The sound design in all of his stuff is so good.

Joe Allen:
Yeah.

Charlie Chapman:
Yeah. He has a very calming, chill, like aesthetic that I find. Also, some of the best merch in the-

Joe Allen:
Oh, I know. I want a merch store.

Charlie Chapman:
Have you seen his hoodies that just look cool?

Joe Allen:
Yeah.

Charlie Chapman:
Very good. Awesome. Well, I think that's a great answer. So I guess we'll go ahead and wrap this up. So where can people find you and your apps?

Joe Allen:
So you can go to teleprompterpro.com, find out about Teleprompter Pro. Or you can go to captions.app to find out about Captions, or if you're in the US, it'll be called Recap, but captions.app.

Charlie Chapman:
Perfect. Awesome. All right. Well, that's what we got. So thank you all for listening. Launched is part of the Revenue Podcast family now. If you want to learn more about the growth side of mobile app business, you should check out our sister podcast. I don't know if that's the right phrase. Subclub, which is hosted by my good pal, David Barnard. And to learn about the easiest way to grow and monetize your mobile app business, check out revenuecat.com and you can find more Launched over at launchedfm.com. Yeah, that's what I got for you. I'll see you all in two weeks. Bye.