92: Cascable Studio - Daniel Kennett

Daniel Kennett:

We have an app called Cascable Pro Webcam, which was our COVID panic pivot that actually saved the company.

Charlie Chapman:

Whoa. Well, we have to dive into that.

Daniel Kennett:

Yeah. So thankfully an accidental excellent business decision many years ago I pulled out the camera connection logic and stuff into its own framework. That is another revenue stream for the company. We license that out. We went, "Oh, oh, we could use the SDK to make a virtual webcam on the Mac so you can connect your camera and then it's a webcam." So from idea to money was three weeks and I'm very proud of that and that filled in the revenue haul.

Charlie Chapman:

Welcome to Launched. I'm Charlie Chapman and today I'm excited to bring you the developer behind the excellent photography app, Cascable, Daniel Kennett. Daniel, welcome to the show.

Daniel Kennett:

Thank you. Nice to be here.

Charlie Chapman:

We got to hang out a little bit a couple weeks ago in Chicago for Deep Dish Swift and you were a speaker there and for a while there, you were top tier the funniest by a significant margin talk. Also guest of the show a long time ago, Chad Etzel. He came in towards the last minute and he's competing with you. Those were both some of the funniest talks I think I've ever seen.

Daniel Kennett:

That was my favorite talk at that conference. It was so good.

Charlie Chapman:

Highly recommend people watch that. So yeah, I'm super excited to have you on. As soon as I saw that and honestly, as soon as I saw or listened to the podcast that you did leading up to that conference that they do, I was like, all right, it's time. You've been on my list for a very long time and we need to make this happen. And so I'm glad you're finally here.

Daniel Kennett:

Thank you. It's nice to be here. Yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

So before we get into your backstory and how you ended up making Cascable, I want you to explain what Cascable is. Give the quick elevator pitch so that we know what we're leading up to here.

Daniel Kennett:

We have a few apps, but the main app Cascable Studio is for photographers with cameras that aren't iPhones. So we support Canon, Nikon, Sony, Fujifilm, like a few others. And it connects to your camera and you can remote control it, transfer files across, but we also have more advanced features like automation and all the way up to a shortcuts like visual scripting language for photographers to automate doing this and that. So it's like a more professional advanced amateur photographers use it as well, especially for astrophotography and stuff like that, but it's a tool in that realm for advanced damages and professional photographers to do more with their camera than they can with what it comes with.

Charlie Chapman:

Perfect. And all right, let's get into how you ended up building these apps. And so the questions I always ask to kind of kick off this conversation is where are you from? Do you have a formal education related to what you do? And then what was your career like that kind of led you into the sort of indie app world?

Daniel Kennett:

I grew up in England, I live in Sweden. So now I'm from Sweden, but I'm from England, I guess. I have had formal computing education in the form of a computer science degree. I shipped my first indie app and started earning money from it before that degree started.

Charlie Chapman:

Man, you really pitched this as a really complicated story and then you just bing, bang, bong, answered them very cleanly.

Daniel Kennett:

Well, yeah, that's true. Yeah. But everything's kind of all over the place and stuff.

Charlie Chapman:

So you have a computer science degree, but you started doing the indie thing before that. So yeah, what's the story there? Why did you start doing that?

Daniel Kennett:

All right. The whole thing started. Do you as an American know what a car boot sale is?

Charlie Chapman:

I know what a car boot is because I've seen Harry Potter. So I know that that is, that is what we call a trunk of the car, right?

Daniel Kennett:

Yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

The part that you can open in the back.

Daniel Kennett:

Maybe a flea market is closed. A bunch of people put all of their crap they want to get rid of and everybody drives to a field somewhere and it's all in the boots of their cars. They open the car boot, people come, they wander around and they buy secondhand stuff.

Charlie Chapman:

Oh, wow. Okay. So we have garage sales.

Daniel Kennett:

Yeah. It's like that, but everybody goes-

Charlie Chapman:

It's like that garage sale that everybody comes together into one place.

Daniel Kennett:

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Charlie Chapman:

It feels like something that should be an American thing. Given our obsession with cars and big old deals.

Daniel Kennett:

You do like your cars.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah.

Daniel Kennett:

Yeah. Anyway, so when I was a kid, we bought a ZX Spectrum computer from that. It was like the era where it had a tape drive, like Atari, Commodore kind of thing. It was way obsolete by the time we got it, but you could still buy games on tape from secondhand stores at that time and you could buy magazines. And it was the kind of era where there'd be a program in the magazine and you type, it was basic. And that kind of got me into, "Ooh, programming. Cool."

And then my family, my dad was a journalist and that industry was Mac, but then so they had a Mac in the office. When that Mac became obsolete, it came to my bedroom. So that was a Mac LC II. So system seven era, kind of '90s. And I really wanted to learn how to program it. And I did several failed attempts to do that. I tried Java from a local bookstore, bought a Java book.

Charlie Chapman:

The first sweet solution, right?

Daniel Kennett:

Yeah, didn't really get on with it. Because back then it was all C and C++, right? So I tried that, didn't really get on with it. After a few years, few failed attempts, I found a thing called REALbasic, which is like a cross-platform Visual Basic kind of language. So it was quite simple. And I did manage to get on with it and actually learn programming with it, and I started making apps and shipping them.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah. What does shipping apps mean in this era?

Daniel Kennett:

Yeah. So that would be uploading it to a website in a sit file, stuff at Expander and it'd list it on versiontracker.com, which is just a list of things that were released basically.

Charlie Chapman:

Okay, interesting. So it's like sort of Shareware minus the sending money.

Daniel Kennett:

Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's exactly Shareware. Yeah, yeah. And back then people would pay the payment provider called Kaji, K-A-J-I, not the search engine. And then I remember my first check from them in dollars came when I was 15. So it's kind of that era.

Charlie Chapman:

In dollars. So people were able to pay you cross country even then? Was that complicated?

Daniel Kennett:

Well, it probably should have been. They paid the payment provider and then they would just send me a check for everything, but it was an American company. So literally I'd just get in the mail a month after they sent a check, whatever dollars.

Charlie Chapman:

That's pretty cool.

Daniel Kennett:

Yeah, it was cool. And I remember 15 because we went to the bank and the bank would not let me open a business account because I wasn't 16 yet. And I kind of did this mostly on my own volition because where it might have been the time, it might have been the location, it might have been both, but schools where I grew up and when I grew up didn't really have computing courses.

There was a computer on a cart that would get wheeled in once a week and we'd go on the computer. And even when I got to secondary school, which is ages 11 till 16, then even there it was a huge school and there was a computer room and once a week we'd all file into the computer room and learn how to use Word and mail merging and all that kind of stuff. So that degree was the first actual programming education I got.

Charlie Chapman:

And what kind of app were you making?

Daniel Kennett:

It was a Word processor. It was a very simple, kind of like text edit, but a bit more fancy. If I'm honest, it was just like dragging controls onto a screen and like you type text here and you can change the font and stuff. That kind of earned pocket money. I saved up and bought my iPod with that, biked over to the local Apple reseller as before Apple sales, I think, especially in the UK. Bought my iPod with my app money, and then the iPod actually unlocked my first indie business.

Charlie Chapman:

Oh, really? Okay.

Daniel Kennett:

At the kind of tail end of my pre-university education, I had an iBook and I had music on my iPod and I wanted to share it with my friends, but iTunes wouldn't let you copy music from the iPod back to a computer. I guess it was a copyright thing.

Charlie Chapman:

So wait, because you had to buy the music on your computer and share it to your iPad. What's the story for why you're then sharing from the iPad to a computer? It's because it's your friend's computer?

Daniel Kennett:

This is the height of the Napster era, all that kind of stuff. So it's like, "Oh, I've got this cool new album. You should listen to it. I've got it on my iPod. I'll give you a copy."

Charlie Chapman:

And they have their computer with them?

Daniel Kennett:

Yeah. If I go around to their house, they've got a computer there.

Charlie Chapman:

Okay, that makes sense.

Daniel Kennett:

So I started figuring out how the iPod worked and reverse engineering it a bit and figuring out how to get the music back off of it.

Charlie Chapman:

This is feeling like origin stories already for Cascable, but ...

Daniel Kennett:

Oh, 100%.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah.

Daniel Kennett:

So I did that in the back of physics. So my physics screw is just wonderful in the last few minutes.

Charlie Chapman:

When you said on the back of physics, I thought you meant you were using physics. I'm like, "What?"

Daniel Kennett:

Literally sitting in the back of the classroom, tapping away on my computer rather than paying attention to my physics lesson. And physics was the science I was good at as well. It was really stupid. I ended up shipping it again, similar thing, uploaded to a website, very, very basic license key system. Thankfully, thankfully, even though my grades at school tanked, I think because I did computer sciencey stuff and I put the fact I was making apps and shipping them on my application to uni, they still let me in for my computer science degree, even though I missed the grades required by quite a margin.

Charlie Chapman:

And you said real business. So was this one making actual, not just pocket money, but a real amount of money?

Daniel Kennett:

Not then, but it did. I was doing uni, learning how to program properly with proper programming. And then I was still doing this app, this iPod app in the background while doing that. And it was just very slowly ticking upwards. And that course was supposed to have a work placement in the third year. I was like, "I should do my app in that instead." And the university wouldn't let me work for myself for my work placement.

Charlie Chapman:

Because they want what they're really wanting is learn how to work with people, learn how to write a BRD or Agile or whatever was popular at the time.

Daniel Kennett:

Exactly. And the rule that they dinged me on was that you can't have the report given back to the university on your progress be written by a member of your family. And I am a member of my own family. Yeah, it's hard to argue my way out of that one. But what they did instead let me do is change my degree to a computer science degree without a work placement and then just take a gap year. So I did that. And in that year, I worked on it full-time because I was still in the umbrella of education and living in my parent's house is cheap, all that kind of stuff. And by the end of that year, it was like properly a business.

Charlie Chapman:

So I'm curious, you said it was ticking up and up and then by giving it full-time, it grew more. Why do you think it was starting to ... It's not just features. Were you marketing it or was it being shared around?

Daniel Kennett:

What happened was I was kind of following the rise of the iPod if you like.

Charlie Chapman:

Oh, that's interesting. You're sort of doing the same thing that a lot of people do with the iPhone, right?

Daniel Kennett:

Yeah, exactly. And I think I never really did any proper marketing for it, but by that time there were a ton of competitors. A lot of them were free. Mine wasn't, but I tried to do a really good job of making it a very friendly app. So it would auto-detect the color of your iPod and the icon in the app was the same color as your app. Little details like that.

Charlie Chapman:

Which the Mac community, especially in that time highly appreciated. Yeah.

Daniel Kennett:

And it was also across platform. It was real basic and that would compile from Windows for me, so I shipped it on Mac and Windows. And what really, really gave it this break I think was there was a popular website at the time called iPod Lounge that became iLounge when the phone came out and that did a tutorial on how to copy music from your iPod to your Mac.

The business kind of sales pitch was that it's for backups. If your Mac fails, your hard drive fails, you have a backup of all of your music and the playlists and the smartplays, everything, your iPod is basically mirror of it. So the app would recover all that. The playlists, the smartplay, the lot, so it just mirror it back basically.

Charlie Chapman:

Was that how you marketed it as well?

Daniel Kennett:

Yeah, yeah. And it was genuinely used for that. By the end, we were getting people referred to us by Apple support saying, "Hey, Apple said, I need you to get my stuff back." I was like, "Yeah, sure." But this iPod Lounge website did a tutorial on how to do that and they used my app, Music Rescue, it was called to do that. So suddenly they had really high SEO. They were like a proper SEO place. If you Alta Vista how to recover music from my iPod, they would get that article which would get my app.

Charlie Chapman:

And that is an argument for why spending a bunch of time on features and polish and everything matters because the reason they chose that, I'm imagining, is because it was the easiest one to do an article on because it's more straightforward. They're going to get way less people asking them questions than if they had picked some free really janky thing. So yeah, that's a case where doing the feature work, even if it doesn't immediately lead to marketing actually can have that impact down the road.

Daniel Kennett:

Exactly. Yeah. I always find it funny when people these days are like, "Well, you have to use X programming language or X framework to build an app." Come on, I bought a house with REALBasic. Users don't care. If it's a good app and it fits well in the platform, it's polished, then the underlying technology isn't really super important. Obviously the technology helps you do that.

Charlie Chapman:

And depending on this specific audience, maybe they care, but very likely that's not the case.

Daniel Kennett:

Your average end user doesn't care between UIKit and SwiftUI or whatever. So yeah, that breeze past the next few years. Finished uni, was earning enough money to pay a mortgage all that stuff, the lot. Next two, three years, completely screwed it up, completely screwed it up, ended up with ... I avoided bankruptcy like this, on the skin of my teeth. How did I screw it up or how did I avoid bankruptcy?

Charlie Chapman:

How'd you screw it up?

Daniel Kennett:

What happened was is two real things is a kid basically with no financial education in maybe two years went from working in a hardware store part-time to pay for food at uni to earning a senior developer salary.

Charlie Chapman:

This is like the football player-

Daniel Kennett:

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

Story, right? Yeah.

Daniel Kennett:

Saving. Nah. I just buy stuff, credit card, credit card. Oh, credit card's maxed out, pay it all off, whole thing and do that. So then separately we also, I hired a friend, had an idea for a new thing, like another app, which we were both excited about and we started building that and we kind of spread everything too thin. The revenue from Music Rescue just started to drop a bit, not a lot. The iPod, the phone was out by this time.

The industry had changed how music was consumed was changing, like Spotify is coming out. So our revenue started to do that a bit. But because I was basically just spending without thought on kind of a delay as well because of credit cards and stuff, by the time I realized it was kind of too late. So between this, just being crap with money basically and not saving and not doing sensible, smart things together.

Charlie Chapman:

Not really anticipating the fact that this wasn't just the way it was going to be forever.

Daniel Kennett:

Exactly. Yeah. So because I had no idea. Yeah. And then everything just kind of came crashing down basically.

Charlie Chapman:

Did that just upend your sort of mental model for your self-worth? Were you very tied up in this as that was your thing or was it like you did this other stuff and you had this cool little side hobby that happened to be making money?

Daniel Kennett:

No, no, that was my thing. It was the worst time in my life. It really was.

Charlie Chapman:

I imagine not just the money, but also that identity thing.

Daniel Kennett:

Yeah, exactly the whole thing. I struggled with this since then, but my identity was always developer programmer rather than business person. So failing that way didn't really shape my confidence as a developer.

Charlie Chapman:

Oh, okay. That makes sense.

Daniel Kennett:

It just really sucked. So we lost a car, just suddenly came and took the car one day fighting to keep the house and eventually sold it to avoid it being taken basically, lost friends, everything, my entire life was kind of destroyed. So what we did in a very sensible move was to ... I know we should move to Sweden.

Charlie Chapman:

That's the go to move, right?

Daniel Kennett:

Famously cheap place to live.

Charlie Chapman:

Right.

Daniel Kennett:

Because the thing is that the company was, the app was still selling. It was earning some money. So in theory, there was a universe where I could have kind of sorted it all out and carried on. And the way I work is it's very hard for me to ... I deal better with troubleshooting looking in from the outside. So if I'm inside the problem, especially literally my house is ... I'm in the house and they're threatening to take it away.

Charlie Chapman:

Was this a little bit of sort of running away from your problems to a degree?

Daniel Kennett:

At the time I was like, "No, no, no. We planned this for quite a while if we had. It's all sensible, blah-blah-blah." But yeah, I was basically fleeing the country. It was within the EU at the time. So obviously I wasn't fleeing crap really because-

Charlie Chapman:

More like mentally, right? You needed a reset.

Daniel Kennett:

Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's just outside of the physical space I was in. Yeah. And I tried and eventually I just ended up folding the company. I just went, "This isn't going to come back, I don't think." So folded it, still had a ton of personal debt, ended up working at Spotify.

Charlie Chapman:

That's what I was going to ask. Why Sweden? And Spotify feels like, was it because of Spotify or was it like you just liked Sweden?

Daniel Kennett:

The actual story is Obama got elected.

Charlie Chapman:

Oh, okay. You don't need to explain anymore. That's why you end up in Sweden.

Daniel Kennett:

Yeah, obviously. Yeah. There's this whole thing in the media, I think in American media, how Obama was going to turn America into a socialist hellhole and The Daily Show did a bit on like, oh, America's going to turn out like horrible, crappy Sweden. And they did a documentary on how terrible Sweden won. And the bit was it's actually a really nice place.

Charlie Chapman:

So they accidentally did an ad campaign for move to Sweden. Pretty much.

Daniel Kennett:

Yeah. Yeah. And I was like, "Oh, we should move to Sweden." Yeah. And it was a joke and then just over a year it just kind of snowballed into like, because my wife and I were fairly young at the time and we were like, "Okay, well, if we're going to experience living in a foreign country, it's either now or when we're retired." So I was like, "We'll move to Sweden for a year. We can rent, figure out this whole cashflow situation with my previous company." So we moved without Spotify at all.

We've been there six months or so, maybe a bit less. It's not important. And when we made the decision to fold the company, it's like, "Okay, well, I did still have all this debt that I needed to deal with." So I was like, "Okay, well, I need to get a job then." And a friend of mine on Twitter when it was good, worked at Spotify and we were Twitter friends and he was like, "You should come work for Spotify." And then I went for a chat one day and it was an interview. I didn't realize it was an interview.

Charlie Chapman:

That's the best way to go into an interview.

Daniel Kennett:

Yeah, yeah, I think so. And then I ended up getting the job at Spotify.

Charlie Chapman:

Oh, that's cool. That's a fun time to be at Spotify too, right?

Daniel Kennett:

It was. Yeah, yeah. So I joined before they were launched in the US.

Charlie Chapman:

Wow. Okay.

Daniel Kennett:

It was very small. We went to WWDC and nobody had any clue who we were, never heard of it.

Charlie Chapman:

I was a Grooveshark user who was just constantly pouring over screenshots of Spotify, waiting for it to come to the US. Maybe I even got the Mac app before, because I think you could download the app, you just couldn't create account.

Daniel Kennett:

Yeah, you could download the app.

Charlie Chapman:

Maybe I created an account with a VPN. I'm trying to remember. I remember very excited about Spotify specifically.

Daniel Kennett:

Yeah. It was really cool and it was really early. The company was really small.

Charlie Chapman:

Oh, that's pretty cool.

Daniel Kennett:

And yeah, the time I was there was a really huge growth period. I was employed number 100 and something and it was many thousand, many thousand by the time I left four years later. So that was a bonkers time. It was fun. I learned a bunch of stuff that you don't learn being an indie developer, like how to work with people.

Charlie Chapman:

And were you doing indie stuff at all during this time or were you like, "I'm a company man now?"

Daniel Kennett:

No, I was just like, right, "No, that's done. Just need to concentrate on sorting out all the debt, paying off, getting that all sorted out." And it was a really fun job. So I didn't really want to. The itch wasn't there as it were. I was having a great time doing what I was doing at Spotify. I was sorting everything out. It was good.

And then once everything was sorted out, all the previous bad stuff was done, everything settled, I bought a camera and it was the first Canon camera that had WiFi and I was like, "Ooh, WiFi." And the app was terrible, like really terrible. And I was like, "I could make a better app than this. I shouldn't reverse engineer this camera." And then 12 years later, here I am talking to you.

Charlie Chapman:

And bang, boom. All right, roll the credits.

Daniel Kennett:

Pretty much. Yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

So when you say app, you mean the desktop app for letting you ... Or is this a phone app?

Daniel Kennett:

No, it was a phone app.

Charlie Chapman:

This is a phone app. Right, right. That's the point of the wifi.

Daniel Kennett:

The wifi was slow. It wasn't terrible because all it did was take the USB kind of interface and just pipe it over TCP/IP basically. So you had access to everything even though Canon's app didn't give you everything.

Charlie Chapman:

Oh, so you weren't using any APIs, fancy APIs or anything. You could just connect to it because it was just the, I guess USB protocol over WiFi? Is that a thing? I don't know much about that.

Daniel Kennett:

Yeah. There's like a standard protocol for cameras called PTP, which is picture transfer protocol. And then there is a standard for funneling that over IP, which is-

Charlie Chapman:

And you had-

Daniel Kennett:

TCP/IP.

Charlie Chapman:

... experience with this kind of thing because of all this time you spent ... Well, but you were-

Daniel Kennett:

Reverse engineering, yes.

Charlie Chapman:

Not just reverse engineering, but piping files over USB protocols.

Daniel Kennett:

Yeah, exactly. The iPod was mostly disc-based, so that was okay. But there was some funny stuff that to figure out the color, the iPod had a plist embedded like, you heard of SCSI?

Charlie Chapman:

Yes. I know the word SCSI. It's a cable, right? Or like a protocol.

Daniel Kennett:

Yeah, yeah, like a protocol. So it turns out a USB is kind of sort of SCSI over a different cable. So you could issue some SCSI commands to the iPod to get a plist out of it.

Charlie Chapman:

That's the most Apple-

Daniel Kennett:

Contained. Right?

Charlie Chapman:

I imagine none of this existed with Canon.

Daniel Kennett:

No, no, no, no, no. Yeah, so I kind of learned reverse engineering through that really.

Charlie Chapman:

And so you built this for yourself then, or was it immediately like, "Oh, I'm going to make an app and kind of sell it somewhere."

Daniel Kennett:

No, we were still kind of reeling from what had happened.

Charlie Chapman:

You were like never again.

Daniel Kennett:

Yeah. So this is just a side project. It scratched the itch of doing a reverse engineering stupid ... I love doing stupid stuff with computers. It's the best. It was just kind of like a fun side project to learn how this works and stuff. And then just over time as Spotify grew, it became a massive corporation, like any massive corporation. I was never that good at the corporate career game, filling out the boxes to check to do this thing. I don't know. So the company-

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, promotion projects and ...

Daniel Kennett:

Yeah, the company kind of grew around me if you like. So I was just kind of in the middle with way more people above and way more people below. Just picking out Jira tickets and fixing the Jira ticket. I did some amazing, amazing things at Spotify, but by the end, I was just kind of like bored of it, not bored of the work I was doing, but just being in a big corporation and not kind of sucking it at the promotion game and just watching people join way after me and get promoted ahead of me, that kind of thing.

Charlie Chapman:

And so the side project is during this period of like you're starting to get bored, it's a fun tinkering thing.

Daniel Kennett:

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And it got to a point and it's like, "Oh, this could be enough. I could sell this. We could do it." My wife and I talked when all this was happening with my previous company, she was my girlfriend. We weren't even engaged at the time and she saw it.

Charlie Chapman:

She saw.

Daniel Kennett:

She lived it. Yeah. We hadn't been together that long as well, but she stayed, which is kind of crazy, but she saw it. So she had also kind of lived it and she'd seen the worst of it and she very understandably was also not super enthusiastic about like, "Let's do it again. Perfect." But she supported me and we set some sensible goals. So I had some savings by then and in Sweden, the law is, once the company is a big enough size, they're obliged to give an employee six months off unpaid and guarantee their job is still there at the end just for any kind of sabbatical. So I took that and the idea was, okay, at the six months, if the app isn't selling, you cut and go back.

Charlie Chapman:

And you hadn't released it already by this point?

Daniel Kennett:

No, it was getting there. So I spent a month or so after I started my sabbatical from Spotify, working on it full-time, finishing it up, polishing it, making it an app rather than just a side project. So then it shipped a month or so into that sabbatical. And then the most annoying thing happened was it was nowhere near replacing my salary, but the line, it was very consistently sort of growing.

Charlie Chapman:

You released it, just for context, it was on the Mac App Store or was this just through your website?

Daniel Kennett:

iOS, it was iOS.

Charlie Chapman:

Oh, right.

Daniel Kennett:

It was iOS app store. Yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

So it was on the iOS App Store. Okay. And it was a paid upfront or subscription? What was the business model?

Daniel Kennett:

It was going to be a paid upfront iPad on the app, which is stupid. Nobody would've bought it.

Charlie Chapman:

You say that, but there's some major successes that are paid over.

Daniel Kennett:

There are, yay.

Charlie Chapman:

But those are more broad appeal than connecting here.

Daniel Kennett:

Yeah, just some random guy making an app that worked with three cameras. A friend of mine did convince me to make it work on the iPhone as well, so thank you to him, but it was still paid upfront with 1.0, which was stupid, like nobody bought it because you wouldn't, right? So that was part of it and quite quickly it went free within app purchase to unlock anything interesting and-

Charlie Chapman:

But like a one-time purchase kind of thing?

Daniel Kennett:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

Charlie Chapman:

Okay, cool.

Daniel Kennett:

Yeah. So then my wife and I sat down and we had discussions and then we kind of set rolling goals to make sure it was still going the right way and to basically avoid what happened last time, which was being caught by surprise by anything. So we were paying close attention to how it was doing, making sure that everything was going in the right direction, picked up contracting part-time to fill in the gap.

Charlie Chapman:

This is relevant I think for the future part of the story, but your wife is a product manager or?

Daniel Kennett:

Yeah. So at that time, my wife also worked at Spotify and she was in the business development team for Spotify.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, okay. Which part of these conversations you can already feel even though she's not an employee of the company. She's bringing a little bit of business rigor that maybe you didn't have the first time.

Daniel Kennett:

Yes. Yep, yep, yep. So yeah, so we did that and then slowly the app developed over a number of years and did part-time contracting to fill in the gap of salary.

Charlie Chapman:

Did it continue that same kind of steady growth the whole time?

Daniel Kennett:

Mostly, yes. It gets frustratingly flat at times but we've never had a serious backsliding income, but we have had periods where it's just like no matter what we do, it's just like a flat line, which is great in its, you can rely on it, but if you need it to be more to hit a goal of quitting, contracting or whatever, it's very frustrating because you're doing new features, marketing, all this stuff is just like flat line.

Charlie Chapman:

Through all of this time, it was like a one-time net purchase?

Daniel Kennett:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. We experiment with a few things because I always, and it's kind of gone away now I feel, but there's this race to the bottom for a while where apps are expected to be cheap, like super cheap. And I was like, "Nah, no, no, no, no. If you can afford $4,000 for a camera, you can pay more than $2 for my app." So it was always not super cheap, but for a while we did feature packs where if you only wanted the remote control automation stuff, you could just buy that part of the app for $10 or whatever and all this and that, and then you could buy the whole lot for 30 I think at the time. Eventually I got rid of that because it doesn't scale.

Charlie Chapman:

And the point of the app is that it's a lot simpler to use than these other tools, right?

Daniel Kennett:

Yeah, exactly. So we didn't really get any backlash at all for that. Nobody cared because most people bought the full feature pack anyway.

Charlie Chapman:

What do you think the main driver for that continued growth was then? Because you were late enough that it wasn't like you were just riding the iOS or the iPhone growth, right? Because for a long time apps were growing just because of that, kind of like you were with the iPad initially and then you're paid upfront so it's only new users who are coming in and from what we've talked about in the past and what you're saying here, it doesn't sound like you were doing these big marketing campaigns or paid acquisition or whatever. So what do you think was causing it to go up? Because I would expect it to be relatively flat.

Daniel Kennett:

Here's the fact for you that I learned recently B&H, which is a photo store in New York, I believe they only have the on store. The photography market is huge. It's absolutely ginormous. So I think we're just reaching more people. I think a lot of it, especially with how it was word of mouth, we'd post on social media and what we'd try and post on Social media, like Reddit, things like that. Every time we do a big update, we try and get in photography, publications, websites and stuff. We'd get covered sometimes. So I think just very slowly we just got to more people.

Charlie Chapman:

That's pretty cool. Okay.

Daniel Kennett:

It's very interesting to me because a highlight of my career is there's a smaller camera manufacturer here in Scandinavia that makes very, very large cameras, big huge chunky things, and they didn't have a mobile app.

Charlie Chapman:

These are large format kind of cameras?

Daniel Kennett:

Yeah. It's called medium format, even though it's absolutely enormous. And they came to us and said, "Hey, can your app be our app?" We're like, "Yeah, cool." So we worked out an agreement and they sent us hardware and they paid for the development costs.

Charlie Chapman:

Was this like a white label thing or is it literally they're going to-

Daniel Kennett:

No. So basically if you download our app from the app store, connect one of their cameras, the app just like ta-da, it's for you now.

Charlie Chapman:

Oh, that's pretty cool.

Daniel Kennett:

Yeah. We talked about white labeling, but I was like, "I mean, we could, we can. It will be simpler and cheaper if we just did it this way instead." And they kind of like that as well.

Charlie Chapman:

Well, and it helps with probably ASO or whatever. There's more users using the app regularly and probably giving better reviews because it's free. Yeah, that makes sense.

Daniel Kennett:

And then so we launched an update with that in some other features for everyone else and we got like a drink. So just everything lifted with that. Even though for those folks it was free. So the income wasn't coming from this new camera manufacturer.

Charlie Chapman:

So it's not just users. Your income did go up?

Daniel Kennett:

Yeah. Our income went up. And I think people good at marketing probably know there's an actual word for it, but I think it added legitimacy to our name almost because if you search for our app and there's like, "Oh, this camera manufacturer has announced using Cascable Studio as their app, as their first party kind of app." And it kind of adds legitimacy to the name and I think that helped.

Charlie Chapman:

I imagine also just like ASO, if there's suddenly way more people using it and it's ranking higher and the app store is seeing those usage analytics going up, I think all that stuff goes into how highly you are ranked for certain words.

Daniel Kennett:

I think so. Yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

And that probably benefits everything else in terms of acquisition through the store.

Daniel Kennett:

Yeah, I think so. And then from that bump, the company or I have not had to do any kind of consulting for other people since then. So since then, the app and its products like support the salary and things like that. And that was 2020. So that would've been like five or six years after the app launched it actually earned me a salary on its own. So it took a long, long, long, long time.

Charlie Chapman:

Now we haven't really talked a lot about the app itself. So initially you built it as a way to do wifi pulling pictures off of your Canon camera, but obviously it's a lot more than that. So what did it kind of grow up to be when you were in that period of like, "Let's make this for everybody?"

Daniel Kennett:

So there are two avenues for growth of this. It's adding more cameras and then adding more features. And for a while we're just kind of threw features at the wall. I can't attribute any single feature to it growing up. I joke that the app has been done for about four years now because it's a fully featured solid app.

Charlie Chapman:

And what are the features? Because it's not just pulling pictures off of your camera now, right?

Daniel Kennett:

The app is split into almost modules. So there's a remote control module. So you can connect to the camera, see what it sees, change the camera settings, take pictures, record video, and automate taking pictures and recording video basically. And the automations are fairly advanced in that they take a picture, record a video, whatever, change settings, do the same. And we've seen people ... It's a really nice spike in the analytics every time something happens in space. So if there's an eclipse or a meteor shower or something like that, we just see wing or all our automations just go through the roof on the analytics.

Charlie Chapman:

Oh, that's kind of funny because yeah, I imagine that is not only is it a big spike in people taking more advanced kind of photos, but it's also specifically the group of people that don't have custom hardware for it who just want to do it for this one event or whatever. They're going to be like, "Ah, what's the best way to do a time-lapse? I have a tripod." Or a focus puller or I don't know, whatever random thing you need for different types of events. Do you think about those at this point as, "Oh, this event is coming up. Let's do a push leading up to it."

Daniel Kennett:

All right. A year ago, my wife joined the company and that's one of the things she's working on. Yeah, we've been talking about it for years because it makes total sense, but I just never did it.

Charlie Chapman:

I mean, it is a job. It's almost like you have to build out a calendar of like, here's all the events we think could happen and then work backwards in terms of how do you promote leading up to it. Oh, it'll be interesting to see how that plays out because it does feel like what we in marketing world, we always call compelling events. It's like this is an event that other people are seeking out a solution suddenly and so you should be there ready.

Daniel Kennett:

So yeah, our marketing things we're going to try and work on is that and actually making video content and not just instructional videos, but just making a compelling set of content for people just to discover us through. Again, you'd think photography video company would do that, but I don't know.

Charlie Chapman:

So you said you'd make lots of features and you felt like you were kind of throwing those all at the wall, but the other side of the coin was adding new cameras. And my guess, you can tell me if I'm wrong, but I would imagine that each camera and especially each manufacturer that you added was a sudden, you could probably see that change the metrics because that opens up the TAM for your business now?

Daniel Kennett:

Yeah. Manufacturers in particular, yeah, because we tend to release ... Our big releases are a new manufacturer because they tend to, but not always have a common stack for all their cameras. Canon was first, then we added Nikon and that was just like, we now support every Nikon camera in the past 10 years or something, off you go. And that brings in a swath of new users. We haven't done that in a while and all the camera manufacturers that are left are small manufacturers. So I don't know if ... Our next one to do is Leica for instance.

Charlie Chapman:

That was the one I actually, my brain went to. I didn't know if you supported them or not, but they feel like while they're small, it's also an audience that is, well, one, willing to spend money and two, it does feel like weirdly Leica is a little bit more prosumer.

Daniel Kennett:

Yes. So people who buy Leicas are people who really care about photography. So I think that will be a good one to add, but I'm not sure.

Charlie Chapman:

But it also feels like a tinkery crowd, right?

Daniel Kennett:

Yeah, yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

There's probably lots of professional photographers obviously that shoot with Leica, obviously, but it almost feels like there is this subgenre of just if you have a Leica camera, you're the type of person who has lots of gear and plays with lots of things and tries lots of things, but it is obviously smaller than Nikon or Canon or something.

Daniel Kennett:

Exactly. Yeah. And they're very expensive and we have to buy the cameras to do it.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah. I want to touch on that because it was funny whenever I was talking to you in Chicago a couple weeks ago, I think I made some joke about like, "Man, it must be nice to have to use your business expense for buying all these cameras." And you sort of lamented it because yes, you have to buy lots of camera bodies, but that also means you don't have a lot of cameras you can actually really functionally use for the business.

Daniel Kennett:

Yes. Yeah. There's two reasons why it's kind of sad. So the first one is if you want to start an indie app business, choosing a thing where you need to buy lots of very expensive hardware to get going is a really bad idea just objectively. And secondly, if you care about photography, we have cameras that people would love ... I know people that would love to own this. It's a really high end, very, very good camera and it sits in our cupboard with a really crappy lens on it because it's just used for testing and validation. And it's kind of sad from that point of view. Occasionally, I'll take it out and let it see outside at least, but yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

You just have a spot on your desk for today is your day.

Daniel Kennett:

Today's your day. Yeah. I think my funniest one is like that phase one camera that they sent us, that medium format camera, that thing is worth more than my car. It's just a stupid bonkers kind of system, this thing. And it's 150 megapixels and I used it to take my passport photo. So in my passport is a really, really grainy step down image that was originally from a very, very, very high end 150 megapixel camera. And I don't know, that makes me smile. The person at immigration at the border doesn't care.

Charlie Chapman:

Maybe they do. You never know. Maybe like, man, the warmth. Medium format would be, that is like ... I would love to play with that. I don't have the budgetary means to have one as a toy, obviously.

Daniel Kennett:

I did say to the folks that phase one's like, right, so this camera, because they lent it us, it's not mine, it's not ours. So this is your camera. We want to go out and record some marketing shots for our release with you. Do we insurance like what? And they're like, "No, no, no, no, no. We don't care. Take it out. If you smash it, you smash it. It's fine. We want you to use the camera." So they're very, very cool about it. So maybe I should bring it to a conference one day just so the people that are interested could try it because this is great.

Charlie Chapman:

That would be a fun almost marketing kind of thing, right? Yeah. You're shooting shots, like medium format shots. When I think of medium format, I know there's Hasselblad and all these, people use them for street photography and stuff. But in my head, my only real experience with people I know is people who use them for commercial photography where it's like in a studio with ... And honestly, shooting a passport is almost more what I think of. Is it that kind where it's like it's big, it's meant to be mounted on something, or is this a take it out and shoot landscapes or something with it?

Daniel Kennett:

I believe the three main use cases for these things are landscape photography because it stays still, you can take very high resolution, very beautiful landscapes. Studio photography, like high-end fashion magazines and things, they tend to use those big cameras and also a big market for them is aerial photography. So the satellite view on a Google Maps or Apple Maps-

Charlie Chapman:

So again, mounted to something? Right?

Daniel Kennett:

Isn't always satellite. It's quite often an array of these things or things like it bolted to a plane and they use it to ... Very high megapixels, all that is good.

Charlie Chapman:

But the studio version of this extremely ... There's not a person standing behind it hitting the shutter, right? It's almost always probably there's monitors set up and ...

Daniel Kennett:

There are multiple movies that parodied this, but the one that comes to mind is Austin Powers, where there's like a fashion shoot happening and there's a very, very flamboyant character with a camera saying all sorts of stupid stuff and not ... That isn't that far from the truth in some situations. I've seen actual photo shoots like that. They do tend to be connected to a monitor as well so clients and people can just see what's being taken.

Charlie Chapman:

And is that where Cascable comes in?

Daniel Kennett:

Yeah, yeah. So Cascable can be that for any camera if you wanted to. You can connect it from your phone or iPad or whatever to a screen. There's a special full screen external display mode where it can be that as well.

Charlie Chapman:

So actually that makes me think I had an episode actually just came out a couple days ago as we record with Joe from Teleprompter Pro and he's talked about how that's similar where they're working a lot with these sort of broadcast industry type users and he's talked about going into the field and shooting or at least watching people do that and that kind of coming into features and things that they add to the app. Have you spent time in studios seeing how people are using this and has that informed stuff you've done in the app?

Daniel Kennett:

A little bit, yeah. I'd like to do it more actually. I just need to figure out a way to reach out to the right people. But yeah, we've done it a few times with, especially we've worked with lighting manufacturers like studio lighting and that has allowed us to go into actual studios to see both the app and lighting being used, which is very interesting.

Charlie Chapman:

Does the app do stuff with lighting as well?

Daniel Kennett:

It doesn't. I'd like it to, it's a time thing, again, because I need to reverse engineer a bunch more things and figure out how it works. But yeah, no, I definitely think there's a cool thing of being able to script and automate lighting alongside your camera in the same app knowing. I think that would be pretty cool.

Charlie Chapman:

We've been talking this whole time about, we'd call it Cascable, but the app at this current time is called Cascable Studio. And if you go to your website, you'll see there's actually a number of different apps. So yeah, what's the story there? Why have you sort of split out into different apps versus just shoving a bunch of different features into the one mega app?

Daniel Kennett:

So Cascable Studio is already too big. It's got a geotagging thing in it, for instance, for applying location to photos and barely anybody uses it.

Charlie Chapman:

They probably don't know it's there and you can't market that as its own unique feature.

Daniel Kennett:

I want to do a really good geotagging app because there isn't one. That's not fair. There are lots of geotagging apps. I want to do my geotagging app. There we go. That's a separate app. So I'm kind of now in a position where I'm almost wanting to pull features from the app and I'm kind of scared to do so because it's going to really upset a very small number of people.

Maybe we can give them a free copy of the new geotagging app once that comes out, but I don't know. So it's kind of that. Cascable Studio is a fully featured app. It's a decade old at this point, 11. Well, it's been shipping 11 years actually, so it's well over a decade old. The feature set it has is an app. It's a full app. And we add features more advanced and we refine the features that are there, but your whole new category almost.

Charlie Chapman:

And is it still one time purchase?

Daniel Kennett:

Yes, if you want it to be. So we have subscription and one time.

Charlie Chapman:

Ah, okay. Yeah.

Daniel Kennett:

The non-subscription purchase is now $100 or 99, which is expensive.

Charlie Chapman:

Well, but reflecting the fact that it's a professional piece of software.

Daniel Kennett:

Yeah, I don't think it's an unfair price at all. It's very rare we get complaints about the price actually. So maybe it's not expensive enough. I don't know. But we did add subscriptions a few years ago and it was as a way to get in at a lower cost or try the app out for a month for a lower cost. And soon after Adobe went subscription only for their photography tools and that off basically the entire photography industry in one day.

So I didn't want to go subscription only because our market is already very upset about subscriptions basically. So these are can choose. The payroll comes up and there's the non-subscription and the subscription and I very specifically don't use the word lifetime because we do have started charging for updates in the traditional-ish major update fashion.

Charlie Chapman:

But you gave new features.

Daniel Kennett:

Yeah, exactly. After a certain amount of time, it's not like an automated, like if you have it for X years, it doesn't get it. We make the decision, "Okay, well, this feels like a big update and these features are big new features."

Charlie Chapman:

Is the product that they're purchasing instead of lifetime, do you call it like Cascable Studio 3.0 or whatever? How do you message the fact that you're not buying everything forever, you're buying this current set of features?

Daniel Kennett:

So this is interesting. So we never use the word lifetime anywhere. We call it the non-subscription option and there's an article on the website, a help article that's like, why is it not called lifetime? And we explicitly say because you're not ... It starts with, this question gets very difficult when you ask whose lifetime? Is it mine? Is it yours? Is it your app time?

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, but all that makes sense, but most people on mobile aren't going to probably open the website, right?

Daniel Kennett:

No, no, no, exactly. I need to put that in the app actually, but we'll occasionally have somebody email in saying, "Hey, I see there's a subscription and a lifetime option." And ask the question and then I'll answer the question and also say, "You said lifetime, it's not lifetime. Look at this article." So yeah, that's how we-

Charlie Chapman:

But it hasn't been the source of a lot of pain or strife or anything?

Daniel Kennett:

No, we occasionally get a question, "Hey, why isn't it lifetime? I want it lifetime." And when I send them out article, the answer is like, "Oh, okay."

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, right. That makes sense.

Daniel Kennett:

Because we have enough history of not screwing people over that we can ... Look, you can see people who bought the app when it first came out in 2015 were first asked for an upgrade in 2022 or something like that. You get many years, and we make the promise that it's always the cheapest. So if you buy the non-subscription and then you do the upgrades over time, that will always be cheaper than subscribing over the same kind of time period. And that kind of makes people like, "Okay."

Charlie Chapman:

It is subscription in lifetime, but there is a free mode as well, right?

Daniel Kennett:

So the free mode right now is effectively equivalent to what you get for free with your camera if you download the manufacturer's own app.

Charlie Chapman:

Oh, interesting. Okay.

Daniel Kennett:

So you can use our app instead, but it doesn't do anything more. To get more, you pay. Our ratio of paid to non-paid is about 25% paid, which I think is pretty high in general. We've considered just getting rid of the free tier entirely and just making it a trial. I don't know if that would actually convert anybody in the free tier though.

Charlie Chapman:

My guess not knowing literally anything about your market really would be it would and you would probably see higher conversions, but there is this sort of, especially given how you've described where you think your growth is coming from, your free tier is probably providing a significant amount of the word of mouth.

Daniel Kennett:

Yeah, exactly.

Charlie Chapman:

That's all me guessing. Every industry is a little different, but especially since you have essentially zero per user costs, right? It's not like you're using AI tokens for something or whatever. Your free users aren't really a drag at all. So you would be trading potentially word of mouth marketing, which in a studio setting maybe is bigger than a lot of other apps, non-social apps. You'd be trading that for a higher conversion, most likely.

We wrote about this in our state of subscriptions report thing this year, but a lot of people jumped on it this year as a story of like, I should know the number off the top of my head, but switching to a hard paywall can make your chart look silly almost in terms of your conversions go up, which makes sense. But long-term, a lot of people will subscribe for a week and instantly cancel so they use it or whatever. So I don't know, it's a trade-off, I guess.

Daniel Kennett:

Yeah. I personally, I am an indie developer and not one that's had an overnight success or anything. I'm extremely understanding and empathetic to the life of the indie developer. And even then, if I open an app and it forces me to do a subscription with a free trial, I'm out. I won't complete the onboarding. It just like, yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

Well, it depends, I guess. If it's funny enough, if there's a meme happening, I'll do that. I need to generate the whatever. What do I look like as an old man?

Daniel Kennett:

I understand that weather apps, there's an ongoing cost there so short, but in general, I don't really like it. So yeah, we've wondered about putting ads in, but then ads are often horrid.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah. And again, because it's a professional app, right? It can degrade that.

Daniel Kennett:

Yeah, exactly. One thing we've thought is were you aware of how Twitterrific did apps? So the icon factory is Twitter.

Charlie Chapman:

I remember they did upgrades where they had ...

Daniel Kennett:

They had their own private ad network basically, and you could spend, I think it was $100 a week, month, oh no, something, to be in the app. And then they did it. There was none of the horrid tracking and stuff that the larger advertising network has.

Charlie Chapman:

There's actually a fellow again at Deep Dish person.

Daniel Kennett:

Yes, Tyler, right?

Charlie Chapman:

Yes. He started, is it guildads.com? I think that's the website. And it's essentially taking Marco Arment's method that he uses for overcast, which is also similar and making it cross in the apps.

Daniel Kennett:

Yeah, exactly. So for a little while, I've been oddly thinking about doing a similar thing to Twitterrific, but trying to sell spots to photography things so you can advertise your tripod in there or your camera or whatever. So that at least relevant to the people using the app. I don't really want to become an ad networker. So when Tyler started talking about his thing, I was like, "Ooh, so I actually have quite a to do this week to contact him and actually try it."

Charlie Chapman:

I just want to make sure I got that right. Yeah, it's Guild Ads, which makes me laugh because it looks like Guild Dads, which makes me laugh because I'm in a group chat with him that was, it started as Missouri Dads because he's also from Missouri.

Daniel Kennett:

Oh, really?

Charlie Chapman:

And so I can't not see that every time, but yeah, guildads.com is what it is. Yeah. I'm very curious to see how that works out because yeah, it's basically-

Daniel Kennett:

Yeah, me too. I know.

Charlie Chapman:

Try ads but not as gross.

Daniel Kennett:

Yeah, exactly. So if we do ads, it will be with that or something like it very soon, I think. So just as an experiment to see if it, because he himself said one of the reasons to have it is to push people to get rid of them almost, because he can have a-

Charlie Chapman:

Well, get Ryan Miller who does Carrot Weather. I don't know if you've seen his ads that he has, but he-

Daniel Kennett:

I haven't, no.

Charlie Chapman:

It's amazing. And selfishly, it's very beneficial to me. He basically added them into his free tier as a way to basically as a perk for upgrading, but they're all fake ads that he made.

Daniel Kennett:

Oh, interesting.

Charlie Chapman:

But most of them are random indie apps. So there is a dark noise ad in there that he made. I forgot how it's phrased, but it's something in his carrot weather voice. So it's like, make all this stupid sound stop. It's funny in that because he's a lot funnier than me, but it's like all these sort of goofy ads that a lot of them are just made up or they're random other indie apps and he literally has it in there just as another reason to kind of upgrade is to just get rid of that banner that takes up some space.

Daniel Kennett:

Yeah, I do think we'll do that next because I don't think really getting rid of the free tier is going to be that beneficial because we don't get a ton of support load from free users. It's not like, like you say, the app isn't costing us any money to run other than fixed dish costs for this and that. So it's not like say hypothetically we just dumped that 75% so we only have the paid users we have, wouldn't see any increased revenue from that or reduced costs, so yeah, I think we'll leave it and just try other ways to get people to upgrade.

Charlie Chapman:

So we mentioned earlier this spinning off other apps and you mentioned an app that you're wanting to build for GPS tagging, but you have a number of other apps. There's like Photo Scout, you have a webcam app.

Daniel Kennett:

We have Cascable Studio, which is the app we've been talking about now. We have an app called Cascable Pro Webcam, which was our COVID panic pivot that actually saved the company.

Charlie Chapman:

Whoa. Oh, well, we have to dive into that.

Daniel Kennett:

Yeah. So thankfully as an accidental excellent business decision many years ago, I pulled out the camera connection logic and stuff into its own framework. That is another revenue stream for the company. We license that out.

Charlie Chapman:

Really? Oh, wow. Okay.

Daniel Kennett:

Yeah. So we have an SDK product that it's the same API no matter the camera. So you import this thing and you can just connect to every camera that Cascable Studio supports. It's like 250 cameras now.

Charlie Chapman:

Interesting. Okay.

Daniel Kennett:

And then you can just build your app and build the app and not have to care that like, "Oh, Sony in this firmware update changed this and blah-blah-blah-blah-blah." We deal with it. You have a very consistent API. That's the sales pitch before it. So when coronavirus happened, people stopped going outside. So all of the events got canceled. So all of the event photographers lost their jobs. So all of the event photographers stopped buying photography apps.

Charlie Chapman:

Basically.

Daniel Kennett:

We were kind of down the chain from that. We were like, "Okay." And what started happening was people were trying to use the real cameras that they had as webcams because everybody went remote work, right?

Charlie Chapman:

Well, and like reporters and all these people, yeah, everybody was trying to figure it out.

Daniel Kennett:

And there were shortages of actual normal webcams, you couldn't buy them. So it was like, "Oh, well, we've got this SDK. We saw ourselves just kind of go boo." So we went, "Oh, oh, we could use the SDK to make a virtual webcam on the Mac so you can connect your camera and then it's a webcam." So from like idea to money was three weeks and I'm very proud of that.

Charlie Chapman:

And to money means a consumer app that you built?

Daniel Kennett:

Yeah, yeah. Selling copies to consumers. So had the SDK, so very simple Mac app. The main complexity was working out like the virtual webcam kind of architecture of macOS, but we could just like ship that real quick and then that saved the day basically that filled in the revenue haul.

Charlie Chapman:

And so yeah, it really did. It leveled off your aggregate revenue. Has that continued to be kind of an important piece or when the world kind of went back to more normal, did that slowly level off to a smaller amount and Cascable obviously picked back up?

Daniel Kennett:

That started off fairly significantly. The camera manufacturers also kind of eventually caught on and now often if you buy a new camera, it has a webcam mode in it. So what we need to do now, I think the future for that app is actually making it pro so you can support multiple cameras connected and other features like that.

Charlie Chapman:

Learn what the more advanced users are trying to do.

Daniel Kennett:

Yeah, exactly. And make it an advanced product. Yeah, it still sells, okay, but it's on a maintenance schedule right now. So I do believe in having multiple revenue streams.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, and in those cases too, those are, while they feel similar, it's actually, like you just said, it's very different audiences actually.

Daniel Kennett:

Yes.

Charlie Chapman:

It uses a camera durable to market changes or whatever.

Daniel Kennett:

Yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

And then your other app is, or the other big one that I know about is Photo Scout. What's the story there?

Daniel Kennett:

It was an idea for a feature for Cascable Studio from years ago, years and years and years ago. Thankfully, I didn't try to put in the app because it was already full. And the tagline for it is, you say where we say when. So the idea is like, man, just work on the elevator pitch for that. You want to take a school photo. You're at the beach, you want a really beautiful sunset say.

You can say, "Okay, well, I want to be here. I want the sunset to be particularly vibrant. I want there to be not a lot of cloud cover so you can actually see it. I don't want it to be too windy because I want my hair to look good." Add it in, you put the app away and you'll get a push notification that says, "Okay, if you go back there at this time, you'll get the photo you want." And we have modules for the northern lights and we have ... So if the northern lights are happening and the sky is clear so you can actually see it, you'll get identified.

Charlie Chapman:

So it's looking at, what is that, KPI? Is that what that's called for the northern lights?

Daniel Kennett:

Yes. So we're kind of hooked into the NORA, is it the American Weather Association thing forecast for that? We do position of the sun and the moon and things in the sky. So if you want a comedy photo of a statue pointing at the sun or whatever, you can do that. It has all-

Charlie Chapman:

Imagine, is this one that you also see spikes during solar events?

Daniel Kennett:

Yeah, exactly.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah.

Daniel Kennett:

Funny about the statue thing because we were trying to pitch it for marketing and to Apple folks to get featured and all that kind of stuff. I went around Stockholm and did the example of having a statue pointing at the sun. So the screenshot would be the statue with the box in the sky saying, "All right, I want the sun to be here, please." So I did all that and I got back and I was looking through the photos and I realized, thankfully in time that a lot of the statues in Stockholm are of guys with no clothing. And I couldn't really send to Apple.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, it is kind of in that weird, it's art generally speaking. Obviously it's in a public setting, but with Apple, you feel like you want to be extra, extra, extra careful with everything. Yeah.

Daniel Kennett:

Exactly. So then we went on vacation, we connected through Paris and we had a day in Paris. Oh, the Eiffel Tower. So our examples are now the sun sitting on top of the Eiffel Tower or-

Charlie Chapman:

Which is probably a more common ...

Daniel Kennett:

Or the sun setting through the Arc de Triomphe. So the sun is in the arch, the king.

Charlie Chapman:

Oh, that's pretty true.

Daniel Kennett:

And we got those photos as well. So we've actually got real examples of the app and yes. Yeah. So that's the other app. Cascable Studio is our breadwinner. And I think our main problem with Photo Scout is that it's very easy to show. If you show it to someone, "Oh, that's really cool. I get it." But describing it in an advert is really difficult and we haven't cracked that yet. So one of our tasks this year is to figure that out and get it marketed properly, because I think it's a great app. I love it. It's really cool.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah. Well, and I mean, it's a thing I do frequently. I've used some different ones that are just focused on sun before, but I knew the name of it and I had never tried it until we started talking, or maybe you mentioned it during the podcast you did before. But it is now on my phone as a ... Because I do all these weird little videos all the time and do I want this during golden hour or do I ... Sometimes I want it to be raining because it's funnier or whatever. And so understanding those weird combinations of things is actually a kind of somewhat frequent thing.

Daniel Kennett:

Yeah. One thing I wanted to add, it's on our list is to do it has been raining, but it is no longer raining.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah. Yeah.

Daniel Kennett:

So a city is beautiful in that. If it's dark and it's wet, but it isn't raining, the reflection is everywhere. You can get some really cool shots there. So that's something to add in, stuff like that. Yeah, it's just figuring out how to market it because it's tricky.

Charlie Chapman:

Awesome. Well, we are at the end here, but I can't let you go without asking the question I ask everyone to end the show, which is what's a person or people out there that inspire you and your work that you'd recommend others check out?

Daniel Kennett:

I'm actually going to give two then. If one's developing related and one isn't, if that's okay.

Charlie Chapman:

Fine, I guess.

Daniel Kennett:

Fine. Okay. So the first one.

Charlie Chapman:

I run really tight ship here normally.

Daniel Kennett:

Yeah, yeah. First one is my father. He's passed away. He's also not a developer, but he did, as I said earlier, run his own business doing journalism. Growing up with that kind of just put into me that, well, that's just a perfectly normal thing to do is to have your own business. And that is why it's not why I'm an indie developer, but it's why I considered that I could be, because it's just completely normal. It's like, "Well, yeah, I'll just do my own business like dad did." Whatever. So that's just kind of ingrained into me that it's completely possible for anybody to do with-

Charlie Chapman:

It's much less scary. It's a thing you see.

Daniel Kennett:

And it is hard work. Yeah, exactly.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah.

Daniel Kennett:

Because it's just what dad did. So that's one. And the other one developer-wise is Wil Shipley. So he now works for Apple. The big thing he was famous for is an app called Delicious Library. That was a Mac app that came out in mid 2000s, I want to say. It was a Mac OS X app, but it was fairly early in Mac OS X.

And it was basically a library for managing ... Well, it was an app for managing your media library, like your DVDs and your Blu-Rays and your books and stuff. So it had like a barcode scanner so you could scan your thing and it would look up all the metadata for the thing you scanned and it'd put it on the shelf and you could ... It was very beautiful. It was very, very, very, very skeuomorphic. It was that area of apps.

Charlie Chapman:

The delicious era.

Daniel Kennett:

The delicious era, it started the delicious era of apps that were like that. Very, very beautiful, very, very, very polished, ton of work going into that. So that always inspired me a lot, just what he was putting out. It was like what you could do on the Mac. But also I'd never saw him in ... I don't think I've ever met him, but I've never seen him speak in person, but I've seen him recordings of talks he's given here and there. And it's clear he's a very smart developer and also a very smart business person and that inspired me.

And there was one talk I heard, I think it was just an audio recording of him give, he was talking about how I did coupon codes for something. I can't remember the context of it, but he had a coupon code that gave somebody a discount and suddenly put the hand up and asked like, "Yeah, but your app is $50. What happens if somebody shares the code and then they get your app for $20?" His answer was like, "Well, I take the $20."

Charlie Chapman:

"Yes, yes. Oh man, I think about this a lot."

Daniel Kennett:

I love that answer and I think about it still when I'm thinking about stuff like that. It's like, "Well, if we're doing a promo and somebody gets it that they shouldn't, it's like, well, we'll just take their money. It's fine." His whole attitude in running the business and he was somebody I kind of aspired to be, if you like, the products he put out and just the way you run the business as well.

Panic, Cabel Sasser and that lot of Panic is also kind of in that thing. Independent Mac shop, they're a lot bigger than I think I aspire to be now, but still. I use their apps back in Mac OS 8 and 9, their MP3 player and their file transfer thing. I don't know. They've always been another indie company that I've kind of aspired to be. So yeah, try and get the Panic folks on.

Charlie Chapman:

You know what? They're in that category that from day one they have been on my list and I've had some heroes, many heroes of mine on this show, but I still have never been brave enough to reach out. I've met cable once or twice at an event, but in one of those like, "I love your work." And then he moves on to the next handshake kind of thing. But yes, I definitely should one of these days.

Daniel Kennett:

Photo Scout has a theme song because of panic. It has music in the onboarding. If you open Photo Scout and you unmute your phone and you sit on the onboarding so nobody will see it here, there's a song that plays and if you stay on the onboarding, the song has like weather elements in the sound and the weather on the onboarding in the graphics will change based on the music.

Charlie Chapman:

That's fantastic.

Daniel Kennett:

So that storm comes in.

Charlie Chapman:

Breaking news here. Yeah. Everybody go download it and find it.

Daniel Kennett:

Yeah, yeah. I loved it. And I did that because Panic had an app on the iPad. I think it's called Status Board.

Charlie Chapman:

Yes. Yeah.

Daniel Kennett:

And their onboarding had some elevator music like playing in the background when you went through the onboarding and I really like that. So I kind of copied that.

Charlie Chapman:

So good.

Daniel Kennett:

Yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

Oh, fantastic. Those are very, very good. All right. So where can people find you on the internet if they can and Cascable?

Daniel Kennett:

Yeah. So Cascable is at cascable.se, so C-A-S-C-A-B-L-E.S-E. That's where all my apps are. I'm iKenndac on everywhere. So I-K-E-N-N-D-A-C. So I'm on Mastodon. I'm on Bluesky sometimes. My website is iKennd.ac. Again, in the history of having names and things that people can't pronounce or remember, I make it really hard to find me. Honestly, if you search my name on Google and stuff, it will come up. So I have a blog there where I write very long blog posts very occasionally. iKenndac everywhere basically.

Charlie Chapman:

Perfect. And of course we'll have links in the show notes for that. All right. Well, thank you again for coming and thank you all for listening this far. Launched is a part of the RevenueCat podcast family now. If you're interested in learning more about the growth side of the mobile app business, you should check out Sub Club, which is run by my much more professional and adult colleague, David Barnard. And then of course you can check out revenuecat.com to learn about the easiest way to grow and monetize your mobile app business.

And for everything Launched, go to launchedfm.com, which is also pretty much our handle everywhere on the internet. And if you don't already, you should check out our YouTube channel because this is a video podcast now and we put a lot of work into our faces for this. So yeah, you should check that out. It's a lot of fun and I'll see you all in two weeks. Bye.