96: Plinky — Joe Fabisevich

Joe Fabisevich:

Ultimately getting to production was coming up with the bare minimum feature set that I could charge money for. So it ultimately was you could save unlimited links, save unlimited folders, limited tags, and over time it's been unlimited reminders and pins and other features that are paywall gated. And again, in the spirit of like, "I should just listen to my wife," it was Save-50 links for free. And then she was like, "Yeah, that needs to be lower." And I was like, "But I want them to have a good experience and I don't want them to feel like they're not getting enough value." And she's like, "They're going to churn." And shockingly, they churned.

Charlie Chapman:

Welcome to Launched. I'm Charlie Chapman and today I'm excited to bring you the developer behind the link saving app, Plinky, Joe Fabisevich. Joe, welcome to the show.

Joe Fabisevich:

Happy to have you as a longtime listener and I suppose, longtime friend?

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's funny, I mean, we just went through this, but a little behind the scenes. I have a giant thing at the top of my notes that's like, "Ask how to pronounce name," just because I want to make sure I say it correctly. And our very first meeting in person story, I think you probably remember this, but it was at a deep dish pizza place in Chicago at Pequad's and I got there before you, I thought a decent amount before you, or I wasn't sure if you were already there or not. And so they said, "How many people?" And I said, "I'm here with Joe." And I was like, "There's two ways I could pronounce this name and I don't know which one it is, but he's not here." And I must have said, "Fabisevich," because the very first thing I heard is your voice behind me telling me the correct way to pronounce your name. And you were very nice about it, but it was the most embarrassing way to be like, "Oh, hey, there you are," the very first interaction is me just saying your name wrong.

Joe Fabisevich:

No, it's fine. I remember the weirdest thing about me when I was a kid, not the weirdest, but one of, was we had to practice cursive and spelling and all that stuff in second grade, and I managed to learn my last name as a six-year-old, seven-year-old, whatever, and I totally flubbed my own first name. I was just like J-O-E-S-E-P-H and stuff like that, because I had fixated so hard on my last name.

Charlie Chapman:

That's me. My middle name is Michael and to this day, when I do the A and the E in the very middle of that, I always actively think about how I'm supposed to spell it, like I'm not 100% sure. And it's been a long time, but it still hasn't fully set in and I'm still not that confident, I feel like.

Joe Fabisevich:

Yeah. I mean, I feel pretty confident in my last name by this point, but there were some doubts.

Charlie Chapman:

All right. Well, yeah, so like we kind of established here, we've known each other for quite a while, we've had a lot of pizzas together, but this is the first time you've been on the show. So I'm very excited, you've been doing iOS development for a very long time and then you've been doing the indie thing for quite a while at this point, and so I'm pretty pumped to get into that. And then anybody who knows you knows that this conversation is going to probably be pretty heavy on the AI conversation. I kind of have it in my notes. It'll probably end up falling into that very quickly, but in my notes, it's like a section at the end.

So if that's a thing you don't want to listen to, prepare yourself. But I'm excited about it because you're somebody who's thought about this and how it impacts our careers and indie development in general for a very long time and you're very actively engaged in that community on top of the iOS and the indie sphere. So this will be super fun. But before we get into all of that, I have two things. The first, before I forget, is I want you to give a quick elevator pitch for what Plinky is so people know what we're getting into. And then we'll get into the standard start of the show.

Joe Fabisevich:

Yeah. So Plinky, I always say it's the easiest way to save links for later. The first app that I fell in love with was Pocket and at one point I was reading by word count, I read 150 books worth of articles in Pocket, so I spent thousands of hours of my life just trying to collect things from the web and then have them somewhere that I can digest them later. Plinky makes that easy, so it's got the ability to save links from iOS, from your browser, from Android, from anywhere, and then you have one place for all your links.

Charlie Chapman:

Perfect. All right. So before we get into the story behind where Plinky came from, I want everyone to get to know you, Joe, the way that I do. So the three questions I always ask everyone to start the show is where are you from? Do you have a formal education related to what you do? And then what was your career like that led up to the start of Plinky?

Joe Fabisevich:

I am a born and raised New Yorker, so I grew up in Queens and I now live in Queens in a different part of Queens. But yeah, just a Nixon five, as you can see from my hat.

Charlie Chapman:

And a big Yankees fan, famously. I love these.

Joe Fabisevich:

Okay. I thought we were friends, but...

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, shut it down. This is over.

Joe Fabisevich:

Correcting the record, I'm a Mets fan, and I do have a formal education what I do, but I guess it depends on your definition of formal and education. I would say that I don't really pay much attention through a lot of high school and college and so I do have a computer science degree and it started when my mom, I was in high school and my high school had majors, and she was like, "Your GPA is not very good. If you do this, I will help you with your homework," Because she was a mainframe programmer. And about two weeks into the class, she was like, "This is not the same thing that I do. You're kind of on your own kid." And in the immediate, she tried to find people at, she worked at Citibank at the time, she tried to find people to help me.

And it turns out that they knew as much Java as she did. What she though was like, "This guy's a genius," was like, "Okay, this guy can't do the homework for a high school kid three weeks into the curriculum." And so I was just kind of on my own, but it turned out that the reason that I didn't have good grades was I need to be interested in the thing that I'm doing, and when I do, I'm hyper fixated on it. I'm like, "Oh, I'm going to be not necessarily the best, but try and learn the ins and outs of it." And programming was just the first thing that I had really found besides baseball. I thought my life would be, I don't know, working as a producer on a sports talk radio show or something like that. Not good enough to be a host, but good enough to have a five-minute blip where they're like, "So Joe, what do you think?"

And so yeah, I really got into programming in high school. And then I think the truth is that I wasn't too intrigued, like I didn't know what it was going to do for me. I knew I can get a good job, but I was still kind of a little bored of it. And then as I was majoring in computer science, freshman year, the iPhone came out. Sophomore year, the SDK came out and I was like, "Wait, this is what I want to do. I want to make actual things, not chase.com at some bank." Turns out product is a real thing, I didn't really put two and two together. And I think the truth is that at that time, maybe 2008, 2009, product development, product design, weren't really these crafts that people went down the path for their career.

Charlie Chapman:

Certainly not within the education system at most places anyway.

Joe Fabisevich:

Yeah. Or even in corporate environments. It was kind of like you had a project manager and technical people and you had someone who was thinking about how those two relate, but it wasn't product design in the sense that we have now. And so when I discovered that, I think I knew from the very beginning that at some point I would be in Indie. And I didn't know what that meant, I just knew that I would be making things that people wanted to use. And I did actually make a few apps in college, I turned one half of a completed app, I made an app called Batting Goggles, which generated heat maps for all the players in baseball based off of some data that my friend, I don't know how he acquired it, but he worked at Bloomberg Sports, and were are we allowed to use it? Who knows? But the data fell off a truck.

And so we used it to generate these heat maps and I built two-thirds of the app and then had an interview with a local company that built firewalls for schools and libraries, this is all while I was in college. So if you can imagine, I'm building stuff on the side and I have a 25-hour a week internship building a browser. You can just imagine how much classwork I'm actually doing or how many classes I'm actual attending.

Charlie Chapman:

You're building a browser?

Joe Fabisevich:

Yeah, so it was a browser for schools and libraries, so they don't want kids going on sites like gambling or pornography or illicit things. And so what you do is you route the traffic that goes through the browser through a firewall that connects at the school, and each school can set their own rules and permissions, or libraries can do the same thing.

And so that was the company, they wanted an iOS app, it was called Bascom. They no longer exist. They wanted an iOS app that they could be really forward-thinking with their firewalls that they were selling, like physical hardware devices. And so that's what they hired me, like a 20-year-old kid to do. And the truth, my school had something where you can auto enter your resume for jobs that match your criteria in the area, and I went to school out on Long Island. So I was the only person probably in 2008 who was like, "I'm an iOS developer." So they matched immediately and I think they knew they were taking on some kid, but I think I did a good job, proved myself. And I still remember that when I graduated and gave my two weeks notice, I was really shaking and nervous and the CTO goes, "Joe, you're an intern, you don't have to give two weeks notice. We like you, but you're an intern."

So I took it really seriously. I took the Indie thing seriously. I did a contract with one of the 50 largest financial institutions in the world, and because I was charging $25 an hour at my internship, I was like, "I'm going to charge $25 an hour there too, and I'm going to make so much money." And they didn't scoff at it at all because it's $25 an hour. And so when I was doing Batting Goggles and I was doing the browser and then I was doing this, that right there is over 40 hours a week while also trying to do the bare minimum amount of schoolwork to get a degree. I was under a lot of stress and so that's why I'm like, "Yeah, technically I have a formal education," but how much did I pay attention is definitely a question.

Charlie Chapman:

But you have a degree and then after that degree, you went into the workforce. It's not like you went... Or did you have a beat in the indie world?

Joe Fabisevich:

No, I always was making apps on the side. I continued Batting Goggles, I made a couple apps with friends. But then five days out of college, because I had two or three years of iOS experience, I got a job offer in the City, in New York, to build an app full-time. And I worked on this, I won't name it, very weird, lots of shady stuff happened there that, well, it's on my resume, so you can figure it out. But it was started by a guy who did some shady stuff to make the billions of dollars that he made, and so I got a really quick intro into what is the industry like? And there were lots of companies that were much better, but it was definitely weird when he had to do an all-hands meeting to explain why he was in the New York Post for salacious things.

And he did not do himself any favors in that all-hands. He said some really weird stuff. So after 10 months, I left. I was like, "Huh. Yeah, and you can do other things," it turns out.

Charlie Chapman:

And luckily you got out of that and never again worked for any billionaires who do shady things.

Joe Fabisevich:

Yep. Never once did I work for another billionaire who did shady things.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah. Yeah. So how was your time at Twitter?

Joe Fabisevich:

My time was great because I left the day before Elon Musk.

Charlie Chapman:

That's true. Yeah, that's a good point.

Joe Fabisevich:

Yeah. It was honestly some combination of delightful, insightful. I worked with some of the best people I know, not just as developers or people in tech, but I was working on misinformation, disinformation, abuse, harassment, things like civic integrity, government affairs, and I worked with people who genuinely cared so deeply. And it's a lesson in life that find people who care deeply and surround yourself with them. I loved my time at Twitter. I can't say it was the easiest work to do, it was very heavy. The hardest challenges of society in that moment, the dissemination of information across the internet and I learned an inordinate amount, and at the same time, I feel like the people around me really liked me and I liked them, so I can't really complain. I think there were individual things I would definitely complain about, but on the whole, I loved it.

Charlie Chapman:

So your time at Twitter was, obviously it was pre-Elon, if that is a good timeline for people to think about when that was. So there was a lot of things happening on the platform, worldwide political things and you were in that because you're in the safety, misinformation side of the house. But looking at your time there through the lens of, now you're an indie developer, most of the people listening are either indie developers or aspiring indie developers, what were some of the lessons you learned working at a pretty big, pretty chaotic and different type of company than typical? What kind of lessons do you think you got out of that that still apply to how you think about your work today?

Joe Fabisevich:

I think the easiest one is, if I could do it at the scale of Twitter, I can definitely do it as an indie. So some of the challenges were truly unique challenges that you will only see at 10 to 20 companies, just because of scale. And so thankfully as an indie, none of those apply to me. And so I thank myself every, I'm in the good graces of not having to do that as an indie, and that's really great.

Charlie Chapman:

You were also on your own though. A lot of the scale was somebody else's problem to some degree at a large company, right?

Joe Fabisevich:

Yeah. So I would say that my role at Twitter, because it was so unique, it was actually very multidisciplinary. By the time that I left Twitter, I was on the health review committee, health is what we called that misinformation, disinformation grouping, for like societal health. And by the end of my time there, I was involved in health product review, I was the person reviewing every PRD or almost every PRD to product document to make sure this complies. But also I'm kind of nosy about product, so I was just like, "Hey, what if we did it this way?" You know that feature in Twitter, or maybe you don't, but if you long press on the share button, it pulls up the iOS share sheet instead of-

Charlie Chapman:

Yes, directly pulls the share sheet up, yes.

Joe Fabisevich:

That was me because I was like-

Charlie Chapman:

Oh, I didn't know that.

Joe Fabisevich:

Yeah, it was my hack week project and then I convinced some engineer to do it. The lessons apply still where you have to learn how to, you have to have good eye for product, good thoughts about design, but then at the same time try to get people to work with you, not work against you. So I think all of that still applies. Every once in a while I'll work with a contractor and I have to be empathetic and understanding, but also still get what I need from a person in the role of a contractor, and so I tend to just believe that no matter what scenario you're in, there's something to learn. Even if it doesn't feel directly applicable to what you're about to do, it will come back around. And so I maximize every opportunity for learning and growth and knowledge, I just think that's a core principle.

And so many things at Twitter happened, even though that share sheet example was, "I want something delightful. I want something simple and easy." And Plinky as a rule is not just meant to be easy, but I'm the person who uses it most in the same way that I was a Twitter obsessive, so how do I make my life better every time that I have a chance to do so? And so that's why every time that you save a link, it's delightful, there's animations. People often will reach out to me and say, "I've never seen an app that does it this way. I've never thought of doing it that way." And so small things scale up and big things scale down, so that's kind of my time at Twitter where I feel that lesson was heavily applied.

Charlie Chapman:

And then I think you kind of mentioned it, but you either announced or put in your two weeks the day before all of the crazy takeover stuff happened, right? Wasn't it immediately before that happened?

Joe Fabisevich:

So it was Friday, April Fool's Day, and I had been at Twitter for four and change years and I was very involved in a lot of stuff, so a lot of people thought, it is also very much my style to make an April Fools joke that's like, "By the way, I'm leaving Twitter." But then on Saturday I confirmed to people that I was actually leaving Twitter because a lot of people really didn't believe me. And then Monday on April 4th, I guess, Elon Musk bought a whole bunch of shares of Twitter and that kicked off the acquisition. So I woke up to frantic texts, people being like, "What's happening?" I'm like, "I don't work there. Did you know I don't work there?" Reporters reaching out in my DMs being like, "Do you want to talk about it?" I was like, "Absolutely not. I'm going to sleep."

Charlie Chapman:

But what was the thinking behind leaving? You hadn't already started working on Plinky at that time, right?

Joe Fabisevich:

It was kind of a side project and so the reason that I built Plinky was when I was working at Twitter, I started dating my now wife, Colleen, and I asked her if I could send her tweets throughout the day, exchanging memes as a love language for millennials kind of thing. And she said, "Yes," and I think she didn't really consider the volume of relatable content I would come across on Twitter at Twitter. So she very politely asked me like, "Hey, do you mind if we set aside some dedicated time at night where we can look at these together and then instead of a ha-ha tap back, we can look at them together and then we can ha-ha in real life?" And so I started leaving open a bunch of tabs and then that system did not work because I already had hundreds of tabs.

And then I started throwing stuff in the Notes app, but I couldn't really make heads or tails of what a link was, like in Plinky, it renders this nice rich link and notes, that was just like a tweet. And so then I was like, "You know what? Let me throw in a reminder so I have this dedicated subsection of things for Colleen." And then my reminders' app stopped, ceased to be a good to-do list because it was full of links. And so I just woke up one morning, literally I woke up and told my wife, I said, "I have an idea for an app." And she's like, "Okay." And so I just kind of prototyped it out, built something in 17 days, and then I started showing people. I started showing my friends. First of all, we started using it and then a month or two later, I started showing my friends.

This was probably about a year before I left Twitter and they were just like, "Yeah, wait, I have the same problem with my wife and I have the stuff I want to show friends. It's just a really relatable problem." It's not the craziest challenge in the world, but it was very different than a read-it-later app like Pocket or InstaPaper. It was just this inbox for the links.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah. The actual at least initial value prop, so to speak, was, "I want to share memes with my friends, but I don't necessarily want to hit them with it immediately. So where can I throw them so I can share it later?"

Joe Fabisevich:

Yeah. And I think the way that I've always talked about it is, "It's your home for links." It's part of the reason that Plinky is so customizable is, your home means your home. So in my house, my living room looks one way, your living room might look another way and so some people save infinity links, some people save 10 links, that's like a hundred square foot bedroom versus 300 square feet. And so I kind of set out to build something that was made for everyone. Specifically one that came to mind was it had to be easy enough for my mom to use. I knew I had something on my hands when my mom asked me to buy her an Amazon phone case and she was like, "Why don't you take my phone and just text me from myself the links to the phone cases that seem like they would be good and I'll review them later." And I told my mom, I was like, "Do you know what I'm working on right now?"

Instead of texting yourself, it turns out everyone has a system for managing links and all of them are bad. And it's not to say that Plinky is good for everyone, but the idea should be that anyone can make it their home for links. And so when I showed her, she actually said, "Wow, this is the first app of yours I might use." So I knew it was good.

Charlie Chapman:

At this point, you're sharing it with people and presumably you have a test flight and you're just sharing it out. But it sounds like at least initially it wasn't like, "Hey, this is an app that I'm going to polish and release as a product to sell." It was more of a thing you were making for yourself and then for friends. When did it transition into this could be a full-fledged business app, so to speak?

Joe Fabisevich:

Yeah. So I think chronologically I started working on it about a year before I left Twitter and I had been telling people, "I'm going to leave at some point, probably in the next year or so." And so I was working out on the side and I just thought to myself, "I'm going to go indie. I don't know what yet, but this feels like the most promising idea that I have." And so I was initially just showing people, it wasn't even a test flight. It was just, "Oh man, look at this thing that I made." And everyone just kept telling me, "I want this." So I decided to turn it into a test flight. And I don't remember how long it took because for this app, it's not just an app, it's like a server and there's the browser extension, there's a whole little ecosystem around it to make sure that it works.

Charlie Chapman:

This is pre-Claude, right?

Joe Fabisevich:

Pre-Claude, yeah. I wrote this with my bare hands, which also admittedly was a great learning experience because anything that I go forward, I'm like, "I actually know how to do this." And yeah, then I started getting people on the test flight. I got a couple hundred people on immediately, which was kind of beyond what I was expecting. But having a meaningfully sized Twitter audience plus people who seem to just... Oh, actually the thing that I did was I created a wait list because my wife, the one who I sent tweets to, she's a product marketer and she's very smart. She was like, "Get these people's emails." And so I did and then she was 100% right. She's actually been right about everything related to launching and shipping this. So I started collecting emails and putting people on the wait list and also just tweeting out the things I was doing, the traditional build and public route. I think right now it's almost a little saturated, but it's still the best way forward.

Charlie Chapman:

Well, and I feel like it's a double whammy, it's a way to get interest. In your case, interest that actually overlaps with your user base too because who are terminally online are also people who care about links, which might not be the case if you're making a train spotting app or something.

Joe Fabisevich:

Train spotting people are terminally online.

Charlie Chapman:

That's true. Yeah. Okay, bad example. But the other side is, I've talked about this a lot before, but it's like the self-motivator of sharing your progress. I feel, maybe this doesn't apply to everybody, but at least for me, it's so big. When you get in that cycle of you share a thing, you get a dopamine hit from a couple of people responding, or I find bug reports to be dopamine hits too, because it's like, "A human being is using it and is annoyed." It's like, "Oh my God, they're using it."

Joe Fabisevich:

I find that to be the opposite of a dopamine hit where I'm just like, "I'm letting a human down."

Charlie Chapman:

I mean there's the stress level that goes with it too, especially on a test flight though. But getting in that cycle really helps propel you forward, especially pre-release when it's still a thing that you could theoretically indefinitely put off, which is an easy thing to do.

Joe Fabisevich:

I think the funny thing is it wasn't the dopamine hit of people are using it, it was the anxiety of, "If I don't do this, I'm going to let a whole bunch of people down." I'm not giving mental health advice to be clear, but people would ask me like, "Oh, how's it going?" Or, "When are you launching?" Stuff like that. The better way of putting it is it kept me accountable more than it gave me a dopamine hit. But I can't say that I hated when I launched and everyone came out of the woodwork to just say, "Oh my God, I've been using this. I love it." Or just I think it was really the thing that touched me was how many people were like, "Go support Joe," not Plinky, just me as a person. Not only that they've been following my journey, but for open source work I'd done in the past or writing I've done that helped them or something.

I feel like we glossed over a lot of my career for reasonable reasons, but all the things that I did that led up to Plinky were as important when I was launching Plinky. So it's not just you build in public with this one product and then you suddenly have success. It was success in that moment built on years of work that then came back to roost and manifest. And I think that's why I said it feels a little saturated when you can vibe code, "I made this screen in Claude and now here's the 1000th health tracker I've seen this week." It's not bad, there's nothing wrong with it, but I do think that it sometimes misses a little bit of depth of the story or the person or like your work. I followed your work for a long time, and so when you do something, it has extra meaning to me in a way that I might see a really pretty UI and then I download the app and I'm like, "This is jank and I don't really have positive feelings about this person anymore." I mean in the sense of product.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, right. Yeah, exactly. I guess this is really just touching on the whole personal brand building concept, but as much as that's like I roll your eyes to a lot of people, that is the reality. It's like when you build a reputation and a story that people are interested in, then every one of your updates carries the weight of all the stuff you did before, which can go both ways. Like if you treat people online like a jerk, you're going to carry that with you forever too.

Joe Fabisevich:

I think the more holistic way that I look at it is you live a life and what you leave behind are the artifacts. The artifacts are tangible or they are the impressions that you left on people. So instead of thinking about building a brand, it's like, "What can I do that leaves a mark?" And ultimately you want that mark to be positive, not negative, so hence the jerk doesn't succeed even though they leave quite a mark. People can look back and say, "I want to support this person because of the things that they've done," without having to use the branding of personal brand, which I feel just leads to AI slop, LinkedIn posts or the only kind of update you give is, "Look at this amazing thing that I've done." I think just you can't replicate human connection online, but you can get pretty close if the person on the other end is being real, that's why I think we feel like we're internet friends, not just this guy I follow.

Charlie Chapman:

Sharing the struggle I think is part of that, you touched on. It's like if you're only sharing the thing you made, again, I've talked about this a lot, but a lot of us who are in the iOS side of things, I think we fall into the trap of mimicking Apple's PR strategy a lot of times, which is, "Don't say anything until it's ready and everything's out and then you can make this giant splash." Not that you can't do that and obviously that can succeed, but most of us people aren't waiting on bated breath to hear your words.

Joe Fabisevich:

Also, if the only thing that you tweet is it like, "Here is my product," I'm probably just not going to follow you. I want you to tweet your dumb jokes or your stupid thoughts and this is super Twitter brain because I worked at Twitter, but I just got used to sharing my life a little bit. And so I became a person, it humanized me. And I think that's just who I am in general is I want to share who I am as a person, and I think that resonates online much more than you sharing only updates or only the positive stuff.

Charlie Chapman:

Right. But okay, so this is funny. Also talking about the first time we met, it took approximately an hour of us knowing each other to end up deep in existential land in a back of a cab or something like that, and I'm realizing we were basically podcasting in real life the first time we met, I think.

Joe Fabisevich:

Yeah. Thankfully for everyone, there was no mic around.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, nobody had to listen to that, but now they do have to listen to it, so you can't turn this off. But anyway, so yes. So you had a test flight going, you had some reputation as we just talked a lot about, which is part of how you got the word out about the test flight. But at this point you're building it while still working a full-time job and you were ready to leave and you decided, "I think this thing that I've been building might be the vehicle by which I could try this indie thing out." Is that an accurate way to describe where we're at?

Joe Fabisevich:

Yeah. So I actually, the test flight came out a few months after I left. And being a developer, I of course took a diversion as I started building an offline database that I opensourced, it's called Boutique as I was building it for Plinky. And then of course I was like, "You know what? If I take just six weeks of my life, I can share this with the world." And by six weeks, I initially thought six days. But then it actually took off on its own. People were like, "Wait, this is amazing." So the pitch is, "Your app offline, three lines of code, don't change any of the structure of your app. You don't have to make a core data app. You don't have to make a GRDB app. It's just you replace app state with app stored and then it works." And people loved it.

And so my initial launch was delayed because I spent three months of my life doing this, but to be fair, it's now actually the underpinning of every single product that I make, so I don't really regret it, but I think I launched the test flight around November when I left in April, so it took a little while to get there.

Charlie Chapman:

Just to pull on that thread a little bit. So yeah, Boutique is an open source project that as far as I can tell, is still pretty popular. At least in my friend groups, people bring it up frequently when there's new iOS version, they're like-

Joe Fabisevich:

You have good friends.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, exactly. I'm curious, obviously it took a decent time out of what you could have been moving your app forward with, but one, it's good for the community, I'm sure there's a lot of good feelings that come out of that. But do you think outside of that, it was kind of worth your while to open source it?

Joe Fabisevich:

Oh, yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

Are other people contributing to it and it's helping you out or is it just more or less part of your imprint on the world or making the iOS community a better place?

Joe Fabisevich:

Yeah, I think I just have a streak of being a do-gooder where I'm like, "If I can make this that helps people, I'll do it." I'll set aside time for people pretty much always. I don't think it's a good indie development business strategy, but it is a good way to live in my opinion, and so I will take diversions and tangents and help people whenever I can. But I don't know, it still makes some money. People had donated to me as an open source project, I've made a couple, if not more, thousands of dollars just from people being like, "Wait, I use this." Some people started building on top of it. A lot of people fixed some bugs, especially as you can imagine, it's not technically a database product, but something akin to a database product, has a lot of concurrency questions around it.

So getting support, getting other sets of eyes, that really helped. And yeah, I just think people like it and I like making things that people like, that's kind of my strategy with Plinky too, is 90% of my support emails are people saying, "I love this and..." Not, "I love this, but..."

Charlie Chapman:

So then you launched the test flight of Plinky and you treated that, if my memory's correct, as a kind of launch. You did promotion and marketed the test flight itself. What was your thinking about that and do you think that that kind of worked?

Joe Fabisevich:

You need feedback from real people and I think especially building such a product that's so highly customizable and it has a really unique perspective, it really is like no other link saving app out there. I'm not stating that as a positive or a negative per se, but it's just my take on what link saving could be. And every time that I build something, I get a lot of feedback from people being like, "I just never would've done it this way and I never thought of that and I like it." And so I wanted that to be out there for a while. It was valuable to get hundreds of people using it as well and even to the point of treating it like a production launch, I didn't spend any money marketing it because it didn't make any money, so that seems like a waste.

For example, at some point during the beta, I had to change the underlying data structure once I built the server out, and so I had to do a big migration that kept people's links and the feedback I got from people after I did the migration was, "Oh, you could have just deleted my links. I wasn't really thinking about it this way." But there was probably like 5% of people who were pretty attached, so I had to build an export system, an import system. I started to have to handle in the API being able to upload a bunch of links at once and it was not worth it in the sense of the value of the time that I spent on it, but then it did end up paying dividends when I built an import and export system that I had done it already, and so that's kind of what I mean where I'm like, there's no wrong opportunity to learn.

You should always be treating everything as if it's a production system or as if you're building production. That's part of the reason that I open source things too, is when I take something out of Plinky, I have to build a really good API contract that only then benefits Plinky further. And the act of open sourcing it, the act of treating something like it's production pays dividends down the road.

Charlie Chapman:

From there, what was the sort of path to the actual launch of the app as a production, full scale business?

Joe Fabisevich:

Well, I'd done a lot of research. I read a couple books on content organization systems, so the elements of search, tagging, folders, there's a real science behind it and so I wanted to make sure that I-

Charlie Chapman:

Sounds like some fun books.

Joe Fabisevich:

Sure. No, I mean it was fine. I think I'm like a nerd in that regard, but I wouldn't say it was fun.

Charlie Chapman:

I think that's safe to say, Joe.

Joe Fabisevich:

Yeah. I thought of it as an investment in myself and the product I was building, let's go with that. And so I wanted to make sure that I hit on the primitives that matter, what does tagging look like? For example, when I first wanted to build Plinky, I had this idea in my head of everything is a tag, folders don't exist. And why would you do it this way? And then I started using that and I was like, "Oh, I hate this." And so it turns out that I thought I had reinvented the whole world, and then it turns out that it doesn't exist this way for a reason. And so there's a lot of iteration on the primitives and I would say that none of it has really changed since launch, so I did a pretty good job of making sure that things were forward-looking and flexible without overdoing it.

Of course, that added time to getting to production, so it's not traditional indie advice and I think it helps that I knew I would be safe for a while runway-wise. And so I was able to make these trade-offs and choices that I don't necessarily think if you are an indie or you are VC funded, if you're VC funded, don't do what I did. And yeah, I mean, ultimately getting to production was coming up with the bare minimum feature set that I could charge money for, so it ultimately was you could save unlimited links, save unlimited folders, limited tags, and over time it's been unlimited reminders and pins and other features that are paywall gated. And again, in the spirit of, "I should just listen to my wife," it was, "Save-50 links for free." And then she was like, "That needs to be lower." And I was like, "But I want them to have a good experience and I don't want them to feel like they're not getting enough value." And she's like, "They're going to churn." And shockingly, they churned.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah. Well, yeah, they're not getting enough value, but it's like if they're not paying for the value-

Joe Fabisevich:

Exactly.

Charlie Chapman:

... that's the whole point. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Joe Fabisevich:

But it's hard to do, that's very hard to do.

Joe Fabisevich:

There's like 90 other episodes where people cover this better than I can, but you should charge people and you should make them pay money. So there was a lot of iteration with that after launch to really figure it out and I think I held onto my laurels. And going back to what you said about the Apple community, the smartest thing I did was forced sign in with Apple and collect email addresses so I had a way to reach people after. And my wife positioned this really clearly. She said, "You launch V2 and the only people who see it are the people who update the app and read the release notes. Is that what you want? How do you actually tell someone that you don't have their email, that something is better now?" And I was like, "Yep, consider me sold. That's smart."

I would say that getting to launch was listening to my wife more. And I also have to give her 100% credit. She came up with the go-to-market strategy and the product roadmap, not the roadmap, the rollout and how I should do this, and it's professional grade work from a staff product marketer.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah. So what was that? What was the plan? How did you do that?

Joe Fabisevich:

Yeah, I mean, first of all, it was like, create a look back calendar. You have three weeks to launch. What do you do in that time every day? There's social media, there's emailing people who have been on the beta.

Charlie Chapman:

What is a look back calendar? I mean, I think I can guess based on the name, but I don't know that I've heard that term.

Joe Fabisevich:

Yeah. So you plan to launch on, let's call it May 31st and it's May 10th, every day has something that you're doing to get yourself to launch, and it's strategically done. So it doesn't make sense to post a social media post two weeks before. Like I posted a teaser, I remember that. So that was a smart thing to do, but it wouldn't make sense to post a teaser the day before. That's when you're like, "I'm launching tomorrow." Or on launch day you're like, "Here's the reasons why this is so good." So I guess just being strategic with how you work through the launch.

Charlie Chapman:

It's kind of similar to what I did with Dark Noise where I've just forced myself to pick a date before I was comfortable with the date. And then it's like everything sort of happened from there. I was a lot less strategic about the calendar and more about like, I have a list of must-do before this date and not-must-do. And of course things kept moving down to the not-must-do as I got closer and it got scarier. But that's an interesting idea to actually work backwards from that date and be like this... I guess I sort of did that because I was like, "It had to be released on this day or submitted to the app store on this day because it's probably going to go through some rejections." And so there was some degree of that, but yeah, formalizing that is an interesting approach.

Joe Fabisevich:

Yeah, and I learned a valuable lesson, the date can move and it can move multiple times and it did move multiple times because I was never happy. And then eventually I was like, "Oh, snap, I got to release this thing." And so the three weeks, app store submission was like, give myself two weeks just in case. If I'm so hellbent on something getting in, I can throw it in there at 1.01, just keep working on it while you're doing on things. And in terms of having a calendar, you can imagine her job as organizing, engineering, marketing, product, resources, to figure out how we do this in a way that it's not just one person normally for her. It's not, "Joe has to do this and then he does this and does this." It's like, "This asset won't be ready because engineering won't have built the thing that design made until this day."

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, that makes sense. So you had a whole plan. It sounds like social media marketing combined with email marketing with your... Would you call it? It wasn't a newsletter, but you had a mailing list essentially.

Joe Fabisevich:

Yeah, I just had people who had signed up for the beta and then people who had signed up for the wait list, and I just sent them an email said, "Hey, this is launched today." And I broke it down, I don't remember. It was two or three batches just to make sure the first batch, everything works. For example like deep links, I hadn't really gotten to test them perfectly well because coming from email, I don't remember what it was, but there was some hiccup there and I was like, "Oh, I had to set up a universal links because deep links don't work in emails on iOS." Because most mail providers need to do an HBS link. So it's a thing I discovered when I finally started thinking about email and that's why you need a lookback calendar.

Charlie Chapman:

Interesting. Okay. So you had that. Did you do any other specific promotional things or was that how you launched it on its launch day?

Joe Fabisevich:

I think pre-orders also. I mean, now it's considered a tried and true thing, but two and a half years ago there was less written about making sure that you do pre-orders. And then yeah, I think on launch day I was very active, the algorithm rewards posts that get engagement, including you just replying to people. And I didn't do the thing on LinkedIn where you're replying for boost. I also truly, I was touched by people to say that they're using this and I wanted their feedback. And then actually I did one more thing for strategically, which was reach out to press and I cast a pretty wide net and the ones that really hit were the Mac Stories Newsletter, I got Installer, so being able to very quickly throw on my website-

Charlie Chapman:

Installer from The Verge, David's?

Joe Fabisevich:

From The Verge, yeah. And TechCrunch, I have a good relationship with one reporter there, and even though it was a small indie app, he was like, "I'll cover this. Yeah." And so being able to slap Mac Stories, TechCrunch and The Verge on my website immediately, was definitely really good validation. And then about, I want to say a month in, the App Store reached out and then featured Plinky. I'm very confident that it's built upon that strategy of making sure you cast a wide net, but also with Installer, I was like, "David Pierce, I love your newsletter." Not just like, "Hey, I'm a random guy who made a link saving app and I once read that you like link saving apps." I was like, "No, I want to be one of those link saving apps that you use and here's why." And then also toning that down a little bit because my wife is like, "They're pressed. They don't care." Still, making sure that it's personalized and truly it meant something to me to hear back from these people whose work I love.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah. That is one of the really cool things about a launch is when you can get people that you've respected for a long time, when you get their words written not to you, but to their audience where it's a little bit more like you're actually, I don't know, somebody saying something nice to you is nice, but somebody saying nice to you to somebody else has a extra layer of like, "It feels real," if that makes any sense.

Joe Fabisevich:

Yeah. And actually, you know how sometimes in life you do so many things that you forget the things that you've done?

Charlie Chapman:

I know. My memory's perfect.

Joe Fabisevich:

Well, I'm not like that, so let me extrapolate. I forgot that in between launching Plinky and leaving, I also launched another app, which is called Short Circuit, and it was one of the first GPT API, so ChatGPT apps on the app store.

Charlie Chapman:

Ah, ring the bell. This is my next thing to talk about, but we hadn't gotten into the AI topic yet. So please tell that story because that was such a wild era of indie apps and I feel like Short Circuit was one of the big ones, at least in my circles, that rode that wave.

Joe Fabisevich:

The thing that reminded me about it was talking about press and so my friend Sarush and I reached out to him the day that the API launched. So GPT 3.5-

Charlie Chapman:

The GPT 3.5 API?

Joe Fabisevich:

Yeah. Everything's still terrible, but everyone's hyped and excited. So I think it was six months after the launch of ChatGPT and so I reached out to them, I was like, "I bet if I do the front end, like the client, the app, and you do the backend, we can ship this thing real fast and there's an opportunity here." And this is the first thing that I made that kind of went semi-viral or actually reasonably viral, I guess, reasonably.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, I would say it was legitimately viral. And do you want to explain what it was really quick to me?

Joe Fabisevich:

Yes. So if you've ever used ChatGPT, it was that, but worse.

Charlie Chapman:

But this was before there was a ChatGPT app?

Joe Fabisevich:

Yes, it was before there was a ChatGPT app. So it was one of the first apps that was like, "You can talk to AI for real, the real stuff that everyone wants to use." And we built it in 19 days, I did 19 days from scratch, again, before AI could be used to code, so handwritten like an animal. We launched it and then a couple days later it got Fireballed, it got posted on Daring Fireball by John Gruber. And we had reached out to a bunch of people in press, and once he did that, my friend Sarush was at a conference in New York and I went to a bar to hang out with him. And then we start getting alerts from Revenue Cat in our pocket and we're just like, "What's going on? Oh my God, are you kidding me?" And we made like $5,000 in the first two hours or something like that.

And it's in the scale, I didn't make a million dollars, but we made $10,000 in a day or something like that or a day and a half. And that was the moment where I was like, "Yeah, definitely reach out to press, you idiot." Because we're shooting off one email to John Gruber to be like, "Hey, here's this app I made." And I think John Gruber and Sarush know each other and so that helped. But I think also, I don't remember if he'd been following me or I'd been following him, but we talked on the internet at some point. And so yeah, in between launching Plinky, I had a three-month sidetrack where I was building this AI app and we had tons of ideas. And then once the ChatGPT app came out, Sarush was like, "Hey, I think we should go in this esoteric direction." I was like, "Hey, I think I should go back to working on Plinky instead because there's no way that we're going to be able to keep up with this."

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, I think it was a moment of arbitrage where there was no app, and they gave you the tool to solve the problem of making an app for their service and so you could fill that hole until the moment they had made the app and then that wasn't really needed anymore unless you went in a direction very different then.

Joe Fabisevich:

Exactly. Yeah, I had ideas like, "This should be your thing that you use." It connects to HealthKit, it connects to calendar and it connects to reminders, which now with MCP is a thing that all these apps are doing, but back then it wasn't. And then funny enough though, two weeks ago, I have stocked up a bunch of Codex resets, so I gave it a goal where I was like, "I want you to rewrite Plinky completely using everything, use the Short Circuit completely, using the Plinky code base as your understanding of what good code that I would write looks like, and then make it compatible with Liquid Glass, make it do this." I haven't touched this code base in two years and three and a half hours later, I set it off on a goal to do all this. Three and a half hours later, it spit out a working version of a Liquid Glass, great looking new revamp of Short Circuit.

And I've had some ideas of how I would differentiate it if I did relaunch it, but that just goes to show you that how much things have changed in the world of AI where I was making this bare bones way to talk to ChatGPT and now I'm like, "Yeah, I think I can have AI rewrite my whole app in three hours and actually be better than it was before."

Charlie Chapman:

So that was a fun diversion. It got you some experience talking to the press, but then Plinky has kind of stayed the main course the whole time. And so you did launch it, you got some press out of it. How was the reception generally for it?

Joe Fabisevich:

It was really positive. I mean, people like it. So one of the first things, you know the story I told you where I was like, "I made this app for my wife as a way for us to save links for later." When you first launched the app, Plinky has a little video. People have now since taken that idea of a little skit that tells you about why Plinky exists, but it was just a little thing my wife and I did, I think it humanizes me in the sense that people don't reach out being mad. I remember some emails from Short Circuit where people were real mad and then they were like, "Oh my God, I can't believe you replied." My support strategy is be really thoughtful and spend the time. And so when I replied from Short Circuit, they were like, "I was expecting AI to reply. I'm so sorry for the mean things that I said."

And especially because I had explained the problem like, "Oh, here's why, here's how. Here's why I can't do the thing that you're suggesting." And yeah, I don't have a better way of putting except people really like it. They seem to take to it in a way that when people have a, I'm not saying it is their favorite app, but you know that feeling you have when you use an app like Things or something and you're just like, "Wow, there's care and I'm going to treat the person who made this with care." That's the kind of response I get all the time and I take that as a sign of the work that I put in to make sure that it expresses that. And so Plinky is a very detail-oriented app and so anytime that someone is using it, they're engaging with something that really just came from me as a person who cares a lot, and I feel you can see it in that.

Charlie Chapman:

And as far as financial success out of that, the monetization strategy, it is a subscription app, full stop, right?

Joe Fabisevich:

It is a subscription. You can save 10 links for free. I'm actually about to launch some free trial instead of freemium.

Charlie Chapman:

Instead of freemium. So do a hard paywall?

Joe Fabisevich:

As an optional upgrade. Like, "Why don't you try this to start?" And I might do the hard paywall as well. If there's one thing I learned at Twitter, it's you have to test your changes, run experiments.

Charlie Chapman:

Well, so I mean PSA on hard paywalls, that is one that we don't recommend AB testing.

Joe Fabisevich:

That's fair.

Charlie Chapman:

Because it's not a huge deal if your default paywall is a hard paywall and you test a soft paywall, although that can still make them upset. But if you have an AB test where some people see like the original version was a soft paywall and then you test a hard paywall, that can get you banned, like your account banned. They sometimes come down very, App Review sometimes comes down really hard on that because they see it as you're trying to get around App Review. They want to review the hard paywall differently than a soft paywall. And so if you don't show it to them, they can get very upset. Once you flip between either of those, you can test all sorts of things and that's usually fine, but the hard paywall specifically is kind of a danger, danger, careful mode. You might deal with more rejections than you would otherwise, but that's an area where App Review can get a little testy, so it's worth being careful. So it's a subscription model. It was that from the beginning, right? Was that always your plan or did you go back and forth on that?

Joe Fabisevich:

I went back and forth on freemium versus trial and I settled on freemium because of the kind of like, "I want to be generous," and now I regret it. Not to say that you shouldn't be generous, but it does make scaling the business actually harder because you also just get less shots on goal of figuring out when will this person convert, why are they converting? They just drop in a way that's much more invisible. It was, you could save 50 links for free, now you can save 10 links for free with the trial, which now thanks to your guidance will be a soft option for a trial in just the way it's like, "Hey, why don't you try seven days free?"

Charlie Chapman:

Well, to be clear, not that hard paywalls are bad-

Joe Fabisevich:

No, if you're going to AB test.

Charlie Chapman:

Experimenting side, yeah, yeah.

Joe Fabisevich:

Yes. Yeah, yeah. Well, to be fair, I was probably going to do the soft paywall anyway, and now you've scared me.

Charlie Chapman:

It's my job.

Joe Fabisevich:

That's right. So yeah, I think there's lots of lessons to be learned by actually figuring out when you ask people to pay, asking people to pay quicker, what do you get out of it?

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah. And you get an idea of what type of user they are a lot faster in terms of are they serious or are they just kind of kicking the tires?

Joe Fabisevich:

Yeah. And especially because I built a link saving app that is not your traditional read-it-later app. It can be used as a read-it-later app, and that's how a lot of people use it, but I was able to organically discover many use cases besides saving links for reading later, and so the archetype of a person who's going to pay is different than the archetype of the person that I am or built this for initially. And so figuring out how to fine-tune that, I would've rather had those lessons to understand faster.

Charlie Chapman:

So since launch then, has it continued to grow? Are there specific things that you've done that have moved the needle since then, or I guess just generally speaking, what's been the trajectory?

Joe Fabisevich:

Yeah, so it's grown. It does not pay a full-time salary yet, but it does continue to grow and it's one of those slowly but surely. I think the main thing is I love working on it and so I continue to add value. Not only do I love working on it, but there is a multi-year roadmap of things that I specifically want and users have told me they want. Every time that I add value, I get more users and every time that I run a sale, I get more users. And so Plinky is priced at 39.99 a year or 3.99 a month, and it's also PPP pricing with some different levers in there. It's like I don't charge as much in some countries, I charge more than price power parity in other countries and I have found that running sales, having people's emails, this is like marketing 101 is the best way to get people in the door to pay you money.

And so I would've missed out on that whole opportunity if again, I hadn't listened to my wife. I think really the moral of the story is marry well and then you will have to be success.

Charlie Chapman:

There you go. If there's one lesson to get out of this.

Joe Fabisevich:

Yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

What kind of sales have worked for you?

Joe Fabisevich:

The funny thing is my wife has basically said, and I just trust her on this, she's like, "Nobody bats an eye if it's not 50% or more, so that's it. Do 50% off." And that's it. I'm just like, "Get that money, make them savings." I always pair it with some value add or, "Hey, it's a summer sale. It's a quarterly sale, out-of-school sale." Try and pair it with some message around this time of year where, "You're a student going back to school," that kind of thing.

Charlie Chapman:

Are there certain ones that work better than others, like Black Friday or back to school or something?

Joe Fabisevich:

Black Friday always works better than anything else. I think Black Friday is your excuse to make a million sales. And everyone knows that the game, they're like, "I'm going to wait this out and get it on Black Friday." I think that's the best usually, when I launched the-

Charlie Chapman:

And how do you do that? Because I've always, Sunday night before the beginning of that week or whatever, I'm like, "I should probably do something with this." And so I'll just half-heartedly make a graphic and I'll tweet about it and set up a discount. But it's like I've never really given it a real try at all, and surprise, surprise, it's not like I ever see a big return on it other than maybe once when the right person retweeted it or something. What is your approach to running those sales?

Joe Fabisevich:

I think that's the difference between treating this as a business and a side project or treating this as a business and a thing that I make because I love. I always treat this as a business because the goal is for me to continue being able to do this, and so I think at the beginning of the year, again, good advice from my wife, but make a calendar of all the sales that you're going to do so that way you know they're coming up. For example, when you do, what are they called, the app store banners, the artwork that-

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, the in events.

Joe Fabisevich:

Events. Yeah, In-app-events. Just plan out all the in-app-events you're going to do for the year and then you make them and then you have them for the rest of the year. Plan out all the sales you're going to make, just make the email templates, make some graphics. Instead of treating this as a thing that you do the Sunday before the Monday sale, and you treat this as, "I'm just going to take six hours and I'm going to do all of the sale graphics for the year," then you never have to think about it again and you can actually do this with, you're in the mindset of being a marketer at that moment.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah. I guess my question though is what are the things that you're doing other than tweeting out and sending out an email?

Joe Fabisevich:

It's mostly email. Yeah, I mean email is the best way to connect to the people that I have. I haven't done any paid marketing, it's all organic. And so if I were doing paid, then I would tailor messages that meet some sort of specific audience that I have or that I'm imagining that I want to have. I would be much more nimbler about running tests on Meta with certain copy and certain graphics, but in this case, email, I really want to just emphasize email's great. It's every single person who ever gets that.

Charlie Chapman:

Does that mean that most of those sales you're getting are from people who signed up for your newsletter? Who's signing up for that now?

Joe Fabisevich:

Oh no, not for the newsletter.

Charlie Chapman:

It was testified since. So it's people who downloaded the app but didn't convert?

Joe Fabisevich:

Yeah, exactly. Or they downloaded the app and they are using the app, but they haven't converted to subscribing yet. Part of signing with Apple is I have the email for every user, this is part of running the services, I require their email and so I can use that email for marketing purposes. They're obviously free to unsubscribe if they want, I'm not going to hold anyone's email hostage, but people tend to get a lot of value. And also don't run one email. You run an email when you launch the sale. You run an email with a few days to go. You run an email 24 hours. The last email usually drives the most people through the door, so if you're not seeing conversions immediately, that's okay. Target people who have, for example, you run three emails, first email, send it to everyone who is a free customer, not a paid customer.

Second email, target the people who didn't open the first email just as a reminder. And then third email, you can blast it at everyone who maybe opened the email, didn't think about it. And so there are tried and true marketing strategies for how to leverage email and I find it to be the most effective path for making money with Plinky.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, it's really interesting. I guess you have to have a decent enough sized user base that... Or well, it doesn't have to be user-based, but people who've downloaded the app and haven't converted.

Joe Fabisevich:

Yeah. If you have a hundred users, I can't imagine it's going to scale very well. But once you start reaching the low thousands, or even actually I think when I had, I don't know, 1,000 people, the amount of money, I would make 20 bucks from converting a person, so sending an email is cheap, there's no real cost to it. You might as well try. And if it means 20 bucks in the door, that's 20 bucks that is going to build your business.

Charlie Chapman:

Okay. So I can't believe we made it this far and we really didn't get too much into AI. So really quickly, I do want to bring that up. So you mentioned this isn't your full-time salary and so you also run a business related to, I guess, is it still teaching people how to use AI or teaching people how to get better at taking advantage of AI for software development? I'll let you pitch it because I'm doing a horrible job here.

Joe Fabisevich:

Yeah, no, I mean you did an okay job. So first of all, I just ran my last workshop. I'm starting a full-time job in a week.

Charlie Chapman:

Oh, wow. Well, congratulations.

Joe Fabisevich:

Yes, it will also be doing AI. So the workshop, the concepts of it is, you build something real. I had a friend who came over one day, he was using Claude with projects and he was like, "I have this project that has all my health data and I just take a picture of a menu and say, what can I eat?" And he's like, "I want to make this more seamless." And I said, "Great, why don't we just build that?" And he was a product manager at Twitter. He's not an engineer by any means, but he was technically minded. And within three hours we had built this thing and there was a bit of, I was guiding him through the process, but he was doing the work and I was telling him, "Okay, now go read this and think about this." So I kind of realized if I help people get out of their own way, then people can actually start building things with AI on their own.

And it evolved into a three-hour workshop where you build something real. You bring an idea that you want to build, and I promise you that you'll walk out with an app, a prototype, a real tangible thing that you can continue working on, but along the way, you will learn the fundamentals of AI. So I won't just say, "Okay, go do this and then go do that." If you don't know what a skill is, if you don't know what MCP is, if you don't know how to prompt, actually the first hour is basically just taking your idea and turning into a really good prompt, because a lot of people think they're really good at prompting, and then I ask them, "All right, write a prompt to build this thing," and they give me two sentences. And I'm like, "Okay, if you would've handed this to an engineer, do you think they'd be able to build it?"

And they say, "No." And I say, "Then why do you think AI will be able to build it? It's superhuman, but it's not a mind reader." And so that's what it evolved into is I ran about 35 of these workshops. Some of them were group workshops, some of them were individuals, but out of every one of them, I think there's only one person who left who was like, "Yeah, I learned stuff, but I don't really feel like I learned a huge amount." Every other person, leaps and bounds just grew. And we talked about it earlier, learning is just such a core principle of who I am, and then teaching became that. So my next role is actually a combination of AI, engineering, and teaching. But I realized that people are one or two light bulb moments away from actually unlocking a whole bunch of potential, that they are just blocked on something and something that they'll never get on their own because they're not sure what they don't know.

And so if I can assess that as we're going, I have a background in mentorship and teaching and helping people through all this, if I can do that, we've unlocked a whole bunch of potential. And I get people who reach out to me a day later to say, "I just built an app my wife has wanted for four years. She's been bugging me for it, and I was able to do this." Or people who reach out weeks later, they say, "I went through a job interview where they wanted AI and I never would've been able to do it without this course. I never would've been able to level up my skills enough that quickly." And so the premise became, "You don't know what you don't know and I'm happy to help get you there." And it works. I think everyone wants a good teacher in their life sometimes.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, that's awesome. And it's been kind of fun watching and talking to you the last, you've been doing that for what, two, three years at this point?

Joe Fabisevich:

No, just over a year actually. I started the last April.

Charlie Chapman:

I thought it's been a while. Okay. Well, I guess it's just in you have been knee-deep in the AI world. Not that lots of people aren't, obviously lots of people are, but the crossover between the kind of traditional indie iOS developer and the AI world, I think a lot of us follow both, but you were kind of living truly in both for a long time. I guess it's kind of consumed everybody by this point.

Joe Fabisevich:

Yeah. I think it started with, I was afraid of this thing. Like, "What's it going to do to software engineering," was my immediate thought. Five days after ChatGPT came out, I put out some tweet that was like, "I don't think this thing is very good now, but look where it was six months ago. And I suspect that within five years we're all going to be doing software different." And that was like a guttural thing. I couldn't tell you why or how, I just kind of felt it. And so I decided, first, it was like the five stages of grief. I was just angry and scared and then depressed and eventually got to bargaining and then was like, "I accept this."

Once I got to acceptance, I think the truth is we all kind of go through that, but once I got to that, I said, "Hell, why don't I just learn everything I can about this thing? If I really think it's going to be that impactful and that important, I might as well learn as opposed to getting stuck on one of the stages of grief and never being able to see it with a clear mind."

Charlie Chapman:

And I mean it's paid off, right? You sort of built a little separate career and now full-time career on the back of all the learning and stuff that you've done. Obviously your whole engineering background before that, but then all of this stuff in part was because you were open to playing with and learning a technology that is/was a little scary for what it means for us.

Joe Fabisevich:

I think also we're all going through this kind of together. There's nobody who has 10 years of experience working with a generative AI, with transformer technology, and to build software. I have a website built.ms, and I started sharing my writing there as I was exploring these things, both from an engineering perspective, a social perspective, conceptual, what does this mean? And that's where I got a lot of positive feedback, built up a separate email newsletter list that then ended up driving more business on that side as well, so I guess I like email. And I thought it was really important to capture this moment in the same way that I said artifacts are really important earlier, but it also helped me establish my own presence as a person who is not just... None of my blog posts are, "Claude Fable got released, what does this mean for you?"

It's taking a step back and thinking, what does this actually mean for us in some specific capacity? And then that led to me, I've built a lot of open source projects, I've given away a lot of resources around AI, so I just launched an open source project called Broadcast, which is a logger built for humans and agents. And the thing that I realized was every time that you build something and there are bugs, Claude or Codex will just say, "Okay, let me add a bunch of logs and try and debug what this is." And I said, "What if I just turned this up to a hundred? What if I had thousands of logs in my app logging every single action, every piece of state that changes in the app, could I then debug the hardest of problems that I have?" And I started debugging race conditions that Plinky has had for over a year.

And I realized that I was onto something, so I built an open source library that basically integrates logging into your app, but structured logging, not just like, "Got here, did this," et cetera. It takes all the data for all the state and every action and it littered Plinky's code base with thousands of logs. But then I started to be able to solve these problems and that's when I realized, "Well, I should open source this." And then it is this virtuous cycle of you do something that provides value to others and then they want to give you business. If I had to sum up my indie story in one sentence, it's, "Do things that people get value from, not just in your product, but just give value and then reap minimal," like you said arbitrage earlier, it's like, "Yeah, if you get 1% of that value back in the future, you may have a business."

Charlie Chapman:

Awesome. And I'm looking at my notes here, and before I get to the last question, I realized I didn't ask maybe the most important question, which is related to, you keep saying your business, but the name of your business, your business is called what?

Joe Fabisevich:

Red Panda Club.

Charlie Chapman:

And what's the story behind that? I know you're obsessed with red pandas, but I don't actually know why.

Joe Fabisevich:

I thought red pandas were really cute. I just always thought that and Turning Red came out and now everyone loves red pandas. I don't want to sound like a hipster, but I really love that company.

Charlie Chapman:

You were into red pandas before it was cool.

Joe Fabisevich:

I've been into red pandas for over a decade. I just though they were cute and this is so dumb, but I think that red pandas are fun and playful and silly and that's exactly the kind of motif I wanted for my company. Now, when I'm billing consulting hours, I realize it sounds really stupid, but I still at the same time am like, "Who cares? It's my business."

Charlie Chapman:

I work at a VC-funded big boy company that's called Revenue Cat.

Joe Fabisevich:

That's true. Yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

I think you're okay.

Joe Fabisevich:

That's fair. Yeah, I just thought red pandas were cute and I thought the idea of a club of them, I had a whole bunch of artwork in mind for when I eventually make enough money to pay a graphic designer to make some artwork. I was like, "Oh, I just have this dream. In settings, you'll open it and there's a jungle at the bottom. It's got red pandas." I haven't made enough money to manifest that, but yeah, so that's how the name came to be.

Charlie Chapman:

All right, great. Well, I think that brings us to the end here. So I'll ask you the question I ask everyone in the show, which is, what is a person or people out there that have inspired you and your work that you'd recommend to others check out?

Joe Fabisevich:

So she was the keynote speaker at Deep Dish Swift, and that was the first time that I got to meet her, Cassidy Williams. I really respect her for all those things that I just said. She's so smart, she's so creative, goofy. She just is full of life. And I feel in, we had a conversation for 30 minutes, if even, I don't think it was even that. And just got me to rethink a whole bunch of stuff about my career, like what should I be doing? When I was thinking about going back to work, I'm still going to be working on Plinky, but full-time, what should I be doing? It occurred to me that I really miss people and I really want to be on this mission with people together, all facing the same direction kind of. I kind of had put that into words, but she was like, "This didn't pan out. I'm not going to be a DevRel person."

But she was like, "You seem perfect for DevRel." And I was like, "Oh wait, now that you mention it, yeah." And it's the kind of thing where you talk to someone for a few minutes and you're like, "Huh, yeah, this person gets it." And then of course her online persona is just hilarious and she's always sharing knowledge. She's exemplifying the things that I say I want to be and so I just have a tremendous amount of respect for her.

Charlie Chapman:

Ah, that's a fantastic one. Yeah. Cool. Well, that brings us to the end. So thank you very much for coming on. This was super fun. It's always fun when it's like a friend I've had for a really long time and then I kind of forget that we're recording and we're just hanging out. I enjoy those. I think other people enjoy those too, but either way, as long as we had a good time, then this is all worth it, I think.

Joe Fabisevich:

It's really about the friends you make along the way.

Charlie Chapman:

It's about the friends you make along the way. Exactly. All right. So where can people find you and your work?

Joe Fabisevich:

Yeah, so I'm MergeSort everywhere. On BlueSky, it's mergeSort.me. On Mastodon, it's mergesort@mccall.social. All this stuff will change. Just search MergeSort. I'm me, you'll recognize me probably as the person who has that same profile across every network. And I do a lot of technical writing at build.ms and personal writing at Febisevi.ch. So you'll have to learn how to spell my last name or I'm sure it'll be in the show notes. You don't have to learn how to pronounce it though.

Charlie Chapman:

Perfect. All right. Well, thank you all for listening. Launched is a part of the Revenuecat's podcast family now, so if you want to learn more about the growth side of the mobile app business, you should check out the subclub podcast hosted by my good friend and colleague, David Barnard. And then of course, check out revenuecat.com to learn about the easiest way to grow and monetize your mobile app business. And for everything else Launched, go to launchedfm.com. I'll see you all in two weeks. Bye.