99: Quick Reviews — Matt Birchler

Matt Birchler:
One of the things I really appreciate about building iOS apps versus things on the web is user account management. Oh, it is so much easier. I don't worry about payments. I don't worry about syncing my payment system with my app. Actually selling software on the app store has made me appreciate Apple's cut more than I had previously. I get it now. I do think there's some real value there.

Charlie Chapman:
Welcome to Launched. I'm Charlie Chapman. And today, I'm excited to bring you the blogger behind Birchtree, YouTuber behind A Better Computer, podcaster with Comfort Zone, and indie app developer behind a growing catalog of delightful apps, Matt Birchler. Matt, welcome to the show.

Matt Birchler:
Oh, thank you. Thank you for having me. I'm very excited to be here. Longtime listener, first-time caller, all those things. Very excited.

Charlie Chapman:
I was starting to say before we recorded, and then I was like, "Wait, we need to hit the record button." Your intro was very challenging to write because I've always thought of you as Matt, the blogger guy. But then as I'm writing up my notes, I'm like, "My goodness, the things that I identify you with at this point is just ever growing." It's like every form of media I consume, I feel like, you've kind of worked your way into.

Matt Birchler:
Yeah. It's probably something I should interrogate about myself a little bit of why so many things? Why not just focus?

Charlie Chapman:
Well, this is the perfect place to do that.

Matt Birchler:
Yeah, thank you for the kind intro. Yeah.

Charlie Chapman:
So before we get into, I guess, all of your projects, although this is going to be one continuum, I think, but I want to introduce everybody to who you are. So the three questions I always ask to start this show is where are you from? Do you have a formal education related to all the things you do? And then what was your career like? We'll say before you started blogging, because at least I think that was kind of the start of your maybe public creation process, but maybe I'll learn that that's not true.

Matt Birchler:
I am from the suburbs of Chicago. I actually still live there now. Moved away and then came back. And I do not have a formal education of any kind in any of the stuff that I do, honestly, especially with development. I've taken one class in my entire life around development, and it was in high school, which was a distressing number of years ago and was a QBasic class. And I hated it so much that I swore I'd never do it again. And then I came crawling back a decade or two later. Before I started blogging, I didn't go to school for, again, any of the stuff that I do. I went to school for actually with the goal of getting into TV production. I wanted to just-

Charlie Chapman:
Oh, man, this is a running theme on this show, so much so that people are starting to make fun of my reactions, my face whenever somebody says that they were in visual effects or film or TV. But it is interesting. And I wonder if you want to do some self-interrogation. I wonder if that field, in particular, lends itself towards people who do a hundred different things.

Matt Birchler:
I don't know, because I loved it. I did it in college, I interned, I did it for five years and really enjoyed it, and then I graduated college.

Charlie Chapman:
What was it in this case? Is that-

Matt Birchler:
So I focused on doing sports stuff. So I was a cameraman on the field on a football game. I was the jumbotron replay guy. I was just doing those at basketball games. Just did a whole bunch of college sports, and it was just a lot of fun.

Charlie Chapman:
Does it ruin sports for you now where you're analyzing the playback controls of the jumbotron guy?

Matt Birchler:
No. It blows me away how good they are, because if you play sports and you watch professional athletes and you're like, "Oh, I can appreciate how hard that was for them to do and for them to make it look easy," that's I feel like how I feel when I see a really good just football game presentation, is like, "Oh, they are making this look so easy, yet they do this 16 games a week all year long." It's super impressive. So it's actually probably made it better for me.

Charlie Chapman:
I have a little bit of experience doing a micro version of that at the church I grew up in where we had a three-camera system. And it was very simple in terms of what we were doing, but I would direct and you'd have one person running the board and the person running Iris and then three camera people. And the one that always gets me is, I guess, most sports trucks have a replay person and their whole job is cuing up replays.
But when I think about managing that, that seems complicated to me, is knowing when to do that. And then they always seem to cue it up at a really good time. And you especially notice it in sports that are a little less polished, I'll say. MLS, in particular, is one. It's one that I follow very heavily and you can tell they're not as polished as the MLB people, for example. But yeah, that is very interesting. Okay. So that's what you were doing as your career then.

Matt Birchler:
That's what I was trying to do as my career. I should note, I graduated in 2008, not a great time to graduate from college.

Charlie Chapman:
Yes, same.

Matt Birchler:
Yeah, the job market was challenging. And I got married right after college, so a lot of the TV jobs that were even remotely available, if I could beat the 30 other people interviewing for them were like, "Oh, you're going to be doing 2:00 AM to 8:00 AM and you're going to be chasing tornadoes." And it's like, "That's not the life for me. I'm so sorry."
And so I did retail management, nothing exciting, nothing that I enjoyed, but it sort of paid the bills, and then I got my foothold in... And so I guess how that led to me blogging and doing that was, it was so mind-numbing and unexciting, my daily job, that I needed this creative outlet. And I always liked software. I thought I had a good eye for what good looked like. And so I just started writing about it. And so I started my blog in 2010 and have been doing it ever since.

Charlie Chapman:
And was that Birchtree, was that the original name of the blog?

Matt Birchler:
Yes, it was. It was.

Charlie Chapman:
And was it basically just a lot of blogs of that era, the things I'm interested in, which I assume was new software, kind of Mac-ey maybe or iOS stuff at that time?

Matt Birchler:
Yeah. I mean, in the early days, it was very much emulate John Gruber, emulate Shawn Blanc, and just try to get viral hits and try to get people to pay any attention to you, and looking at your daily metrics on Mint or whatever the weird analytics thing of the day was and be like, "I got over 10 today. That was awesome." Or like, "Oh, no, I didn't get over 10 because I visited the site three times and I always have to remove mine." And it's like when you're at that level, it is tough. But yeah, that was it for several years and then things eventually got a little traction.

Charlie Chapman:
And yeah, I'm curious how that happened because before, I think I remember when you started the YouTube channel. Certainly, I started following very early, but before that, my memory is you were one of the prolific bloggers. You mentioned Gruber and Shawn, but I remember them having the kind of classic blog conversation where people are blogging as responses to each other. I remember you having that with Gruber and with Federico Viticci around that era. So you obviously kind of got to that point. What was the path there? Were you just kind of grinding or was there strategies?

Matt Birchler:
In every single topic we talk about today, strategy will not be my strong suit. It's always just been flying by the seat of my pants and figuring out just what was I interested in writing about, I would write about it. And I really liked, again, these other people in the space. And this was in the earlier days of Twitter and stuff, and you had a chance to get on their radar and get them to follow you.
And I just did it a lot. I don't know, I would definitely do the thing where you would just write something and you're like, "Oh, I bet this famous blogger would like this." And then you add them on Twitter and be like, "Hey, thought you might like this." And you do that enough times and eventually they click the link and maybe they follow.

Charlie Chapman:
Well, and you make something quality or something that they would be interested in, right?

Matt Birchler:
That's the goal. Yeah. Yeah.

Charlie Chapman:
That's a button that you can hit that backfires relatively quickly if you overhit it.

Matt Birchler:
This is true. And I'm horrible at self-promotion. So I would do it once and then run away and almost pray they don't see it. This is one of the things I learned early on as well is you want to go viral. You want a lot of people to see what you write on your blog or write on social media or whatever. And then they do, and then you're like, "I don't know if I wanted that. Maybe it was actually nice when only a few people saw it." Because then you get all this feedback and when it escapes your bubble, that's when you know if you've done something actually good, I feel like, or if it escapes your bubble and people are still relatively nice. Yeah.

Charlie Chapman:
I feel like posts on Threads, in particular, just exit my bubble very quickly. And often in my bubble, nobody sees it. I don't know what it is about that platform, but it's the same experience as you get on the other platforms when something gets out of your bubble, where you start getting all these replies that are like, they don't know the context that you were talking about or they don't even know at all what you're talking about, but they think you were saying something totally different. And yeah, that can be overwhelming when it's a lot.

Matt Birchler:
This burned me many times, especially in my earlier years of not understanding that I am the only one who has read everything that I've written and that other people have... The vast majority of people who would see my site were seeing me for the very first time, and this was all the context they had. And so I've tried to be very mindful when I write things, especially things that are a little opinionated that I try to, if someone's reading this for the first time, they have no idea what I've said in the past or what I've done in the past, how would they see this? Can I just make sure they understand a little bit? That's a useful skill I think to develop.

Charlie Chapman:
Do you find that you've been able to develop some thicker skin to deal with when that happens and people getting upset? Or have you changed how you word things and that just doesn't happen as often as it used to?

Matt Birchler:
I think I definitely have a thicker skin. I think in the earlier days of doing this, I definitely wanted everyone to like me and I didn't have the confidence necessarily to, if I thought something and published it and some disagreed with it and said, "It's wrong, here's why you're wrong," I would assume they knew better. And I feel I'm more confident in the things that I write these days. And I think one of the things is also I write a lot of things that I never publish, which I never used to do.
It was a volume game. You had to get stuff out there. And so I have a lot of drafts that I just never end up publishing because I'm like, "There wasn't a really good point there." I heard somewhere someone say that when you're making a YouTube video or a blog post or something, you're trying to, what's the person consuming this going to get out of it? And you're usually entertaining them, you're teaching them something, or you're trying to convince them of something.
And if you're not doing one of those three things, you can still post it, but those are the three things that you want to do. Oh, they really enjoyed reading this. It was funny. It was a novel story or something. Or you've moved them closer to your position or just like, "Hey, here's a thing you didn't know. Now you know it. Don't you feel great?" If it's not falling into those, I tend not to end up publishing it.

Charlie Chapman:
And so you think of at least Birchtree, but maybe this applies to all of your things, as those are the three things that you can fall into. You're happy to entertain someone. You're happy to move them closer to your position or you're happy to just teach them something.

Matt Birchler:
I think so. I think at this point in my life, I am definitely leaning more towards the convince you of something, which is a really challenging skill.

Charlie Chapman:
I feel like you do a lot, especially on the YouTube channel, it's a lot of educational content though, right?

Matt Birchler:
That's true. That's true.

Charlie Chapman:
Here's something that's happening in the world. Here's software I like, but I want you to know more about. And what differentiates your videos from a lot of other tech videos, I feel like, I know we're getting a little ahead, but is that it's almost tutorial-like. I wouldn't call them tutorials, but it almost gets more into that realm versus a MacStories, which is very much more like a review kind of thing.

Matt Birchler:
Yes. If you want to get into my head, Birchtree and A Better Computer are completely separate things, which is why I didn't call my YouTube channel Birchtree. Birchtree is more for me to complain and to be like, "This is how things should be. The world should be better. Tech should be better. This should work this way. Or look this person, they get it. Go read them." So Birchtree is more like me working out whatever I'm thinking about, which is again, usually, I like this thing, I don't like this thing.
But A Better Computer, especially in the early days, was even more just, "Here's a feature in this app. Here's how you use it." And then I'm done in two minutes. It got a little bit more YouTubery at a certain point, but the goal from that one was, I don't think people understand how much their computers can do for them. And I wanted to show like, "Here's a cool app and here's what you can do with it." And I wanted to show it in a way that was like, I'm not trying to be a hype man, necessarily, but I want to show here's a thing that maybe that I'm getting value from. I think other people could as well, and here's a real use case for how you use it. And so I try to only talk about things that I like on that channel. It's very rare that I'll talk about something I don't like.
That'll pretty much only be if it's a huge thing that everyone is talking about. I did that with a couple of the AI browsers that came out last year. I did one about Opera's AI browser, which was the worst software I used that year. But it was so notably bad and I was trying all these agentic browser things and it was notably bad. But yeah, so A Better Computer is really supposed to be like, I would love it if every video that comes out, which is less and less these days because I have no time, it shows you something new, gives you a cool new app that you can try out. And Birchtree is just literally whatever's on my mind that day.

Charlie Chapman:
Okay. Actually, now that you say that out loud, I'm seeing it in a way that I hadn't really thought through before as a consumer of all your content. So we've talked about A Better Computer a bunch. So let's rewind a little bit. You were doing blogging, you were working a job that was not the most exciting, and at some point you decided to start a YouTube channel. And I'm curious what the reasoning was for that and what led up to A Better Computer.

Matt Birchler:
So I started the channel in June of 2020. So obviously, a pandemic project. I kind of oversold it where I said I have zero background. I had been doing videos showing how to use software for a couple years at work. So I was doing training videos internally. I was doing on our YouTube channel way back in the day, we posted like, "Here's how to use this feature." And we had a hundred of these and I just cranked through them and they were like, "Oh, these are great."

Charlie Chapman:
And this is at the point you moved at that point into, is it project management at a software company, right?

Matt Birchler:
Because I didn't have an education in it. I had no work history that was relevant. I got in through the support team, actually. So when I started doing these videos, I was just a support team member, like email and phone support.

Charlie Chapman:
Actually, I do want to pull on that thread a little bit because for a portion of our audience. And certainly, a lot of people I talk to in the world who want to career switch into some sort of software role, whether it be a QA type role or project management, or whatever, I often talk to people who I'm like you would do really well at this role that I do a lot, work with a lot at my software company, but I have no idea how people get started.
All the software engineers pretty much had computer science degrees or went to a bootcamp or just did it on their own and kind of got a job doing it or whatever, but I never know how people get into that field. So I am really curious, the support role is sometimes the answer I hear, but was that an intentional thing where you wanted to get into something in software and that was your way in? Or how did you think about that?

Matt Birchler:
I wanted to get out of where I was, and so I was looking around and I did want to get into software because again, this was in 2015 that I switched over to the place I'm still actually working today. And so this is the height, or maybe close to the height of tech optimism.

Charlie Chapman:
Right before Cambridge Analytica, we'll just say that.

Matt Birchler:
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And beanbag chairs and pool tables in the office, and we didn't necessarily have that, but yeah. It was like, "Oh, I would really love to work in tech. I write about tech all day." It's like, "My hobby could become my job and I'll just be happy every day." And it's a little more complicated than that, but it is a good thing on the whole. But anyway, so I was looking generally and through uninteresting details, basically I knew someone who worked there and they were a reference for me and they were like, "You should talk to this guy. He doesn't have a history, but he's worked in, again, retail management. He's worked with people. He understands how to do that stuff." And I put my blog on my resume and I was like, "Let's just..." Who knows?

Charlie Chapman:
I think that, genuinely, obviously the hiring I'm doing is different than that, but I do think showing self-motivated work like that can go a long way as long as the work is quality of some degree.

Matt Birchler:
Yeah. But they were like, "Oh, so you understand tech. Okay. This is great." And so that kind of got me in the door. And I mean, it truly was for the first year or so I was there, it was answering emails and talking on the phone with people who had forgotten their password and who didn't know how to do whatever. But I worked my way into our integration team. So I was working with developers who were doing API stuff. And then I was like, "Hey, I do videos. Do you want some training videos?"
And they're like, "I don't know. Can you just do it in not too much time?" And I was like, "Yeah, sure." And so made the videos, and then that just got attention of some of the other people in the org. And it was a small company at the time, so everybody knew everybody. And eventually, we were growing and needed new roles and it's much easier to hire from within. So they're like, "Hey."

Charlie Chapman:
Exactly. And somebody you already know you can trust to be reliable.

Matt Birchler:
Exactly. So yes, I like to say I've had every job at the company. I was in support, then I was a product owner, moved into full-time design, and then now I'm a product manager. And that's a role that's changing quite a bit now with all the AI stuff. But yeah.

Charlie Chapman:
No. That's perfect though. I feel like those stories are less, unless you happen to know somebody who went through them, it's less known how you can kind of wiggle your way in, because I feel like everybody in many of these roles has a totally different way that they got into it. It's challenging to get started. Then once you're in, you obviously build experience and then you can continue that from one place to another.

Matt Birchler:
This is a lot of professional life I'm learning.

Charlie Chapman:
Yeah, that's true.

Matt Birchler:
Once you get a toe in, then things get a lot easier, but you need to get in. And once you're in, you can do it.

Charlie Chapman:
I think that's the majority of jobs in the world, probably. But I am a software developer, my wife is a teacher, and those are both careers that are very on rails in terms of you go to school. They don't have to be on, well, teaching you do, but for both of us at least, it's very on rails and you go to school, you do this thing, then you get a job in this thing, and you're a junior, and then you move up. It's a very linear path or known branches. But most jobs are much more made up and less cookie cutter and everybody has a unique path in there.

Matt Birchler:
Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I definitely feel that, but it's interesting. Yeah, I don't know. When it comes to career stuff, I'm a very play it safe, conservative, standard, just down the middle sort of guy. I've been at the same company for 11 years, for example. And yeah, it is a little interesting that, "Oh, I didn't plan for this at all. I should have gone to school for this. I should have planned ahead." Yeah.

Charlie Chapman:
But it can still work out.

Matt Birchler:
It worked out.

Charlie Chapman:
Yeah. Maybe for the kids in school listening, you don't have to decide your entire life immediately now. It can be helpful, but-

Matt Birchler:
It can be helpful, but it's-

Charlie Chapman:
... you can change your mind. But getting back to the YouTube channel then, so at this point you are in a tech job. You had done some video tutorial type work with this support role, it sounds like. And so was it just like this is fun and so I like the idea of doing this? Or why start a YouTube channel? And then maybe more pressing, why do so much of it? Because it's pretty prolific. Just scrolling through your list, I'm like, "My goodness." I didn't realize how much you posted.

Matt Birchler:
As I get more successful in my professional life, my YouTube goes down, which is the unfortunate situation. So it goes. In the early days, it made me realize how not stressful my job job was because I was able to work before work and right after work, and just crank them out. And now, I'm just exhausted. I just really liked it. I really enjoyed making them. I thought YouTube would be a new and interesting venue. And at the time, I was concerned about money. I've never made a living off my creative work, but I made some money from the blog and the ad market was crashing. Literally, I was making 5% per month what I was a couple-

Charlie Chapman:
This was in 2020.

Matt Birchler:
In 2020, yes.

Charlie Chapman:
All that stuff.

Matt Birchler:
It was atrocious. And so my blog went from a nice little boost at the end of the month to effectively zero, which was tough. And I was like, well, also blogs were cool when I started in 2010, but people don't really blog like they used to. Some people do. There's definitely blogs out there, but it's not the thing that you would necessarily do. And I was like, "Well, if I was starting today and I wanted to have this one-man show just creating stuff for people, what would I do?" And YouTube seemed like the thing that worked for me. So I was like, "Yeah, I can do this YouTube thing."
I planned on never being on video. I planned on doing just very short, literally just tutorials. And so that grew a little bit, that changed a little bit. But yeah, it seemed like a new outlet to connect with more people. And truthfully, I kind of wanted to see if I could get some sponsorships and if I could review products. And the dream for me, even when I started blogging was like, "If I get this big enough, people will just send me things. Apple will send me iPhones." And it turns out no, Apple will never acknowledge my existence at all.

Charlie Chapman:
Yeah, because the channel's decently large at this point, but I don't recall you doing a lot of sponsored review kind of stuff.

Matt Birchler:
No. The thing I learned is that as soon as... Because if you have a YouTube channel that has a remotely decent number of subscribers, you will start getting pitches. You will start getting emails from people. And the vast majority of them are from garbage products. I started in 2020. Soon after that, a lot of NFT projects were like, "Hey, would you do a video about us?" And I was like, "No, I don't want to do that." And just a lot of stuff like, you will get a lot of offers and they'll be for things you do not care about. And on rare occasion that you get one that you do are like, "Oh, this is cool. This is great. Yeah, of course. I'd love to. Yeah, send me the product."
There's restrictions or there's expectations and it's like, "Well, you're definitely going to do a review, right? And it's going to be by this time. Right?" Or even if it's a sponsor break or something and they're like, "Well, we need to approve the script, then we need to approve the ad." And it's just all this back and forth. And I'm like, "I hate this."

Charlie Chapman:
I went through the exact same thing with this show. I found it was less challenging than I expected to find sponsors, and it was more work than expected to manage them. And I never had a problem one either, which if I would've kept doing it, I inevitably would have. It was literally just the emails and the getting copy figured out and recording ads and making sure I had ones booked for the right ones.
In my case, I was using it to try and pay for an editor, which was really helpful because I couldn't keep up with the editing part. And then it was just like, "This is worse. I would rather be editing." And it's not that different in time. So yeah, I think some people probably enjoy it. Probably most people don't, but unless you're so big that the returns are really big, it almost is not worth the work.

Matt Birchler:
If it was my job, I'd put up with it. The YouTube stuff at its peak, which has dropped a little bit because I just don't do it as much anymore, but even at its peak, it could disappear and my personal finances would've stayed the same. And when I thought about that, I was like, "Why am I spending all this time?" And one of the things for my YouTube videos is I never have a script. At best, I have an outline where I just start talking and then I just edit it down to whatever.
And so the idea that, "Oh, now I need to write a script for this thing," yeah, it's just annoying. So also, this was a weird thing, I somehow got into the mechanical keyboard world and was reviewing mechanical keyboards for a while there because I was looking for the best mechanical keyboard. And then I was just like, "I'll find the perfect one. I'll finally be done." And I got-

Charlie Chapman:
I'll finally be happy.

Matt Birchler:
I'll finally be happy. And somehow, I just was on all these lists and everybody was sending me keyboards. And every couple days when I was showing up and we'd see a long box on the front step and my wife would be like, "Another one?" But it actually made me kind of numb to them. I was getting so many of the thing that I loved and I was like, "Here's another one." And then it's like, "Now I got to use it and I got to test it. And I know this one's not going to be as good as the one I'm already using, so I'm going to, whatever."

Charlie Chapman:
I guess that's like your taste of the big tech YouTubers doing reviews of phones and all of that, the MKBHDs of the world. I feel like it must be incredibly difficult to keep your brain in the head space of a real user when you get to the point where these are just piles of objects that are all very similar and you're honing in on the most minute of details. And you probably appreciate this more than others having that taste, but I have to imagine part of what makes the people who are so good at it so good is their ability to drill down and understand some nuance that is easy to no longer think about when in your head you see it in a way that no normal human ever sees these objects because most people aren't comparing thousands of them.

Matt Birchler:
Yeah. That is the big thing with critics in any space. I saw this thing about on Rotten Tomatoes, they have the critic score and then they have the audience score. And sometimes they're very different. And usually, the audience score is much higher and they're like, "Oh, these critics just hate good movies," or whatever. And I heard someone say like, "Well, if you think about it, a critic is watching basically every movie, whether they want to see it or not." And so they're inherently watching movies that they have no interest in. It has to be really, really great for them to even come around on it.
Whereas people tend to just go to the movies they want to see. And so they're self-selecting to like most of the movies that they're going to watch because if they have no interest in a movie, they're just not going to watch it. But a critic, that's the job. And so, yeah, for someone like Marques Brownlee, I'm sure he's getting every single phone that's released. He's picking and choosing which ones he wants to even review. But yeah, I mean, especially at this point, they're all so similar.

Charlie Chapman:
And if you're a reviewer, novelty would be the thing that matters. And with your movie example, that's the perfect avant-garde, Oscar bait type film, a lot of times, or maybe not Oscar bait, but stuff bait for critics themselves. A lot of times it's like a normal person watching. It's like, "This is just so weird or bizarre." And it's like for the people who watch movies all day long, it's like they're just craving something to make them feel something again.
And on the phone side, that's where your Nothing phone or whatever, that's like maybe impractical in certain ways. And I shouldn't say Nothing because I don't know that much about it, but at least early on, I feel like they were just trying weird stuff. That to a reviewer is such a big deal. Whereas to a normal user, it's a small checkbox, but it's like they care more about normal life and living with it.

Matt Birchler:
Yeah. No. 100%. I think that's probably why, I'm guessing, phone reviewers are folding phones more than the average person. I bet they like those phones that have the cameras that flip, physically rotate around. Those things, you just don't see those all the time. It's a new thing and yeah, it's 100% a thing. I watch a hundred movies a year. That's one of my things. And so, yeah, I totally get the novelty thing. If it's just like bleh, I don't know, I'm going to watch another one in three days.

Charlie Chapman:
And actually, that's a good segue to your next phase of your media empire, so to speak here, which is at least to my perspective, and this is another one where I'm curious if you'll correct me if I'm wrong, but you talked about you weren't an engineer, this isn't your background, but if you go and you search Birchler on the App Store, you're going to see a bunch of apps. And the first one I remember from you is directly related to your love of movies, which is Quick Reviews, which is an app, I adore this app because I adore this style of app. It's a thing I think more developers, I wish they focused more on, which is the app is basically designed around being essentially screenshottable.
I know you have an export, but the idea is that it's giving you images that you can then share on social media in the very native format of a JPEG, bitmap images. And they're perfect for every social media platform and it's a way for... I'll let you actually describe the whole thing. I'm already waxing poetically, but this style of app and this feature within existing apps I think is a really cool thing. So I'll let you explain the history behind this app, how you even got into deciding you were going to try making an app.

Matt Birchler:
This is my favorite app. It was my first app that I... It's my second app I've officially released. In 2017, I released an app. It was a weather app, shocker. It was horrible, but I did technically release that. But my first actual app was early 2025, Quick Reviews. It is an app where you can review things, movies, TV shows. It's optimized around movies, TV shows, and video games, but you can also do books and anything else you want. And the idea is that you have a image of the thing you're reviewing, you have the review on the other side, and you just give it a score of one through five, and it exports an image and you can post it wherever you want.
And I had been doing this for several years before I made the app. It was originally a sketch document that I had that I put together. And so I would just open up the sketch file. I had to duplicate the art board and just change everything around to review whatever I was doing next. And that was okay, but I needed to be with my Mac. It was only I could do it. People would always ask like, "Oh, what app are you using to make those?" And I was like, "It's not an app. It's sketch." I got the bug to figure out, this is before LLMs, so this is all just stack overflowing everything. I figured out how to make a very simple one-page JavaScript app, and I made a website, Quick Reviews.

Charlie Chapman:
Had you ever done HTML JavaScript development before that?

Matt Birchler:
Sort of. Because I'd been blogging and I'd used WordPress for a lot of my early days, I'm very good at HTML and CSS. I think I am better than some of the developers that work at CSS. I love CSS. It's my favorite.

Charlie Chapman:
Yeah. Well, and we'll get into it in a second, but I forgot to bring it up during the YouTube thing, but you also, I think you even described yourself as a designer now, and you had that role you mentioned earlier at your company.

Matt Birchler:
I did. Yeah, yeah.

Charlie Chapman:
And that's all just self-taught as well?

Matt Birchler:
That's self-taught as well. Yes.

Charlie Chapman:
Okay. I'll stop pulling on that thread and let you keep going with Quick Reviews.

Matt Birchler:
That's okay. That's okay. So I made a little website, very simple, jQuery, everything. I didn't know how to do anything else, but I could figure out jQuery. It was very simple.

Charlie Chapman:
Oh, jQuery. That's a name I haven't heard in a while.

Matt Birchler:
I know. Yeah. That's what a lot of people said when they saw the source code.

Charlie Chapman:
It worked.

Matt Birchler:
It worked.

Charlie Chapman:
Hey, that's all that matters.

Matt Birchler:
So I did that and got a little bit of usage, but it really only worked on the desktop and I couldn't figure out for a long time how to export an image. So the use case I gave people was like, just screenshot it. Just take a screenshot. And that worked all right. But again, it was only on my computer. I didn't have any history because I couldn't figure out how to do auth and I didn't want to do database stuff. It was literally just like-

Charlie Chapman:
Your history was essentially Twitter or Mastodon or whatever it was at that time.

Matt Birchler:
Exactly, exactly. Wherever you were posting these. And so then I was like, I'd love to make an iOS app, but I don't know how I would do it, because I did the weather app years before and it was so-

Charlie Chapman:
How did you build that one?

Matt Birchler:
My brain just didn't click.

Charlie Chapman:
Was that Objective-C? Or I guess that would've been Swift?

Matt Birchler:
It was in the early days of Swift. I think it's when Swift was announced where I was less intimidated and I was like, "Oh, this is a good time to jump on board and give it a try." Pre-Swift UI, Auto Layout existed, but it was confusing. I couldn't really figure it out.

Charlie Chapman:
Well, that sentence was true from the point Auto Layout came out until today, I think.

Matt Birchler:
Okay. Okay.

Charlie Chapman:
And that's coming from somebody who likes Auto Layout, but yes, it's definitely confusing.

Matt Birchler:
Yeah. I was trying to plant, I was like, "I don't CSS. I can lay out HTML beautifully. I know exactly what I'm doing there." And I was trying to make it work and it just wasn't getting there. Yeah, that weather app was effectively the equivalent of laying out your HTML in tables. That was the equivalent of what I was doing. It was rough.

Charlie Chapman:
It's a feat to get an app in the store though, even a bad app, especially with no software engineering background at all. But even for somebody who's been doing web development for a long time, there's something about writing something in a language you're not familiar with and then getting it through all those processes is alone a feat. And I have to imagine that was still helpful even if in some ways you felt like you were starting over from scratch.

Matt Birchler:
Yeah, I think so. At the bottom of my list in App Store Connect of all my apps right now, right at the bottom there's Today's Weather, no longer or developer removed from sale. So I'm always reminded of it.

Charlie Chapman:
But at this point, you had SwiftUI at this point?

Matt Birchler:
SwiftUI was a thing. I think it was a little young, but it was in its second year or something maybe.

Charlie Chapman:
Okay. Yeah.

Matt Birchler:
I forget exactly. But SwiftUI, I know people hate it. Some people hate it. It has saved me. It is so easy for me as a newbie to get going.

Charlie Chapman:
Well, and as a web person, it's so much more familiar to use a declarative UI framework like that.

Matt Birchler:
100%. So I knew that existed. I wanted to give it a go. And there was this new thing called the Cursor that was like, "Hey, AI can help you." And I was like, "Okay, we'll see." And the very first thing I made was just an app that let me enter my weight connected to HealthKit and would log it just like, "Can I do anything?" And I got that working. I was like, "Okay. Okay." And I started working through it and it took me a month and a half, I think, of pretty hardcore focus on it. But it's actually remarkable how much more rudimentary AI coding was a year and a half ago.
It was so hard. It was like you had to tell it to do one small thing, it would screw it up, you'd have to do it again, and it would do everything in one Swift file. The entire app would be in one Swift file, and you'd have to remind it like, "You might want to do a second file." And it's like, "Oh, I never thought about that." But I figured it out, and I'm actually really happy I had that experience of doing this first app with AI, but very rudimentary AI.

Charlie Chapman:
You had to get in there in a way that now-

Matt Birchler:
I was in there. I was writing a lot of code still.

Charlie Chapman:
Even as an iOS developer, if I'm working on something relatively new, especially, I kind of just don't even look at the code. And then I'm uncomfortable with how much I just pushed out.

Matt Birchler:
I know. Yeah.

Charlie Chapman:
But you couldn't really get away with that back then.

Matt Birchler:
Absolutely not. Yeah, because it would do crazy things.

Charlie Chapman:
Yeah, exactly.

Matt Birchler:
But I had to understand. I definitely understood how that app worked at a very core level that I think helps me going forward because not only does it help me with that app because I know what the data structure is, I know how the views work and everything, and how they interact with each other. It helps me on these newer apps where I'm using immensely better tools to generate the stuff for me. I understand what to ask it to do and how I will know if it's doing the right thing. Because yeah, it's not like it was at the beginning where you would tell it to make a simple function, it would screw it up. You can do incredible things where it'll just go and grind for an hour for you. And that's very scary.

Charlie Chapman:
And it actually understands Xcode projects and stuff in a way that those early versions, it did not know. It knew Swift okay, but it did not understand what the project itself was.

Matt Birchler:
Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, basically, that was the thing that got me over the hump, is like, okay, because I liked Stack Overflow, but learning from Stack Overflow is really hard. Again, I wasn't going through courses or anything. The way I learn code stuff best is through just having a problem to solve and figuring out how to solve it. And so you can copy, paste from Stack Overflow, but their problem is always slightly different from yours. And they maybe assume that you know something that you don't or you have something set up already that you don't. And so you do what they did and then it doesn't work and you can't figure out why.

Charlie Chapman:
LLMs are remarkably good at, even if literally all they did was exactly what Stack Overflow did in terms of the output, they can contextualize it where you are at, at any given point. And that to me was one of the biggest things. And probably with Cursor, even in those early days, it was good at that.

Matt Birchler:
Yeah, because I could be like, "This is what I'm trying to do. This is the error message I'm getting." Or like this is-

Charlie Chapman:
And you're using the wrong words because you don't know all the words yet.

Matt Birchler:
Exactly. And it's like figuring it out and, again, like you said, in the context of my app, this is how you do a curl request. It was very basic stuff. How do I make a request to this API endpoint? It was very, very simple stuff, but it knew the API I was trying to hit. It knew what data I needed to pull. Yeah.

Charlie Chapman:
Talking about the app specifically, I mean, you're mentioning API requests, but the original version of this was a sketch file where you're presumably just changing text and stuff. So what API requests was it even needing to make?

Matt Birchler:
Yeah. So that was the big thing, is with the sketch version and the web version, you would have to bring your own BYO poster image, movie title, metadata, like what year to come out, who's the director.

Charlie Chapman:
You probably had to set the colors yourself then to match that poster.

Matt Birchler:
Had to set the colors yourself. And now like, "Oh, it's so cool." I'm genuinely, so it makes me very happy to use it now because it's powered by the movie database, TMDB, which is an incredible resource. Really, really cool that they exist at all and are very generous with what they let you do with it. But basically, when you type something into the app, it's searching that and it's returning a list of whatever and you say it's this one. And that API has everything it has. Here's all the movie posters for it. Here's all the cast. It has an enormous amount of information about everything.
And so, yeah, Quick Reviews just pulls all those in. I figured out how to do color detection. So it figures out the primary color of the movie poster and automatically themes the review to that. I figured out how to do complementary colors so there's a review background and then there's the score, and the score has a little background color on it, but that needs to pop. So I figured out how to make that a complementary color that'll always pop. The text is white or black depending on contrast ratios. And there's just a lot of cool stuff, and you used to have to do all that manually.
And so now in the new app, you just type in a movie and it works. The way I actually use the app myself is I have it hooked up to my Letterboxd account where I do the social stuff as well. And so I review it on Letterboxd actually. So I actually never even type anything into the app really. I just post to Letterboxd and then I open quick reviews and there's a way to hook up your Letterboxd account because Letterboxd does not have a public API, but they do have an RSS feed. And so I'm using the RSS feed to pull in your recent reviews and it automatically syncs those in and does all that same logic on it. It's like pulling all the metadata and stuff that you wouldn't necessarily get from Letterboxd.

Charlie Chapman:
Do you have word count limits for Quick Reviews? Because it has to fit in that frame, right? Or can it grow?

Matt Birchler:
It does have to fit. I don't have any limits. When you do the review, there's a slider, so you can make it fit.

Charlie Chapman:
Okay. Okay. That makes sense.

Matt Birchler:
Nice. That is one of my white whales, is if you write a really long review, have it automatically make the text exactly the right size or whatever. I have not figured out how to do this yet. This is one of the hardest things.

Charlie Chapman:
You got to get Fable on that.

Matt Birchler:
Maybe as we're recording, I think I have two days of Fable left unless they extend another week.

Charlie Chapman:
There you go.

Matt Birchler:
As they always do.

Charlie Chapman:
I mean, we kind of already described it, but it's like the reason for doing this as an app is because you could just... Well, it sounded like the reason for doing it on the app initially was because you wanted it on your phone and you couldn't really do the web version, but then-

Matt Birchler:
I wanted it on my phone, yes.

Charlie Chapman:
Then there was just a ton of convenient features you could add because now it's a native app that's just easier to build all this stuff into.

Matt Birchler:
Yeah. One of the things I really appreciate about building iOS apps versus things on the web, which I've also done since then, is user account management. Oh, it is so much easier.

Charlie Chapman:
Because you don't have to have it. If you don't want an online account, then everything can just be local and you don't have to hold user's information.

Matt Birchler:
Yeah. I don't worry about payments. I don't worry about syncing my payment system with my app and understanding if a payment fails, what do I do now? Actually selling software on the app store has made me appreciate Apple's cut more than I had previously. I think 15% is probably a good number. I don't want to go back to 30. I'm definitely not arguing for that, but I get it now. I do think there's some real value there that they're bringing.

Charlie Chapman:
And speaking of that, also your web version was just a free app sitting on the store, right?

Matt Birchler:
Yes.

Charlie Chapman:
Or sitting on the web.

Matt Birchler:
Yeah.

Charlie Chapman:
And this one, while it is a free app, there are purchases inside of it. Was that part of the initial release or is that something you added at a later point?

Matt Birchler:
That was one of the things with the initial release. These APIs, there's a few other APIs I'm using there. They aren't necessarily free or may not always be free. And so I wanted to make sure all of these projects do not lose me money, so I'm trying to break even on them. So there was a subscription all the way from day one, all the stuff with pulling things from the movie database and Letterboxd. That's all behind the paywall. So basically, from day one, it was if you liked the web experience and just wanted it on your phone, all that is here and you get history and you get just a nicer experience on mobile. But if you want these added features, it's 10 bucks a year, which I thought was effectively nothing if you're doing a lot of this.

Charlie Chapman:
Is it similar to YouTube and the blog in terms of this is now part of your mix of not your full-time gig, but your side hustle money? Or has it really not done anything and it doesn't even necessarily feel worth it?

Matt Birchler:
It definitely feels worth it. I would say at this point, if my reputation was based on the revenue, the things made, the software would definitely be the number one thing. A pretty big margin actually at this point. My development stuff is definitely the biggest moneymaker at this point compared to-

Charlie Chapman:
Oh, it's bringing you more revenue than YouTube or the blog?

Matt Birchler:
Yeah. Yes.

Charlie Chapman:
Did you expect that?

Matt Birchler:
I hoped for that, I guess. I don't know if I expected it.

Charlie Chapman:
Well, that's fair. I guess it was the latest one you did. So you always hope the newest one's going to be bigger than the later ones, I suppose.

Matt Birchler:
You do, yeah. Yeah. I mean, that was always the hope, but it was never... Yeah. As with most of my things, I did them because I wanted it, because I was walking out of a movie theater and I was like, "I'd like to write that review right now, but I have to wait until I get home." And so, "Okay, I'll just write an app and we'll solve the problem."

Charlie Chapman:
Easy-peasy.

Matt Birchler:
Exactly. And I was like, "Well, maybe someone will buy this and then we'll just throw an app purchase there and see what happens."

Charlie Chapman:
It sounds like that's still kind of your biggest app. But since then, as I alluded to at the beginning of this, you've released a whole bunch of different apps of different degrees, I'd say, of what feel like you had an idea of something you wanted and you made it and you went ahead and released it to more robust things. Did you catch the bug and you just kept making apps? Or what was the story behind all the apps you've been building since then?

Matt Birchler:
I would say the development bug has bit me hard. I've talked with Chris Lawley, one of my co-hosts on the Comfort Zone Podcast, big YouTuber. He's got into development recently as well. And the thing I keep telling him is, once you can solve your own problems, any problem, it is so liberating. It's just incredible. So I'm kind of shipping my own productivity system in a way. For my podcast workflow, it uses, I have an app called Quick Subtitles that generates high quality subtitles. For files, I have one called Chapterize, which is writing chapters and metadata to your podcast episodes.
And I use those two to three times a week. And every time I'm like, "Oh, this is a friction point," or, "That's annoying." I don't have to just hope that it gets fixed one day. I just open up Xcode and I fix it and it's done and I have the thing that I want. And the more I feel that, the more just like... It's just an unbelievable feeling.

Charlie Chapman:
When you get in that loop of you run into a problem with software and it's annoying, and then you realize that you can make this little tweak and fix it, and then forevermore it will be easier for you, once you have a hammer, everything's a nail kind of thing gets into your brain. And then it definitely can be very, very addicting, especially if you have the infrastructure in place to be able to just keep doing that.

Matt Birchler:
Yeah, that's literally it. I'm on my App Store Connect right now and I'm slightly overwhelmed, but yeah.

Charlie Chapman:
Yeah. Well, I wrote down, I think I have all of them listed. I'll just say it. So Quick Reviews is the one we talked about. You have a lot of quick apps here.

Matt Birchler:
I do.

Charlie Chapman:
So there's Quick Reads, which is like a save articles, read it later app. Quick Notes, which is a dictation app. Quick Subtitles, which is doing transcription and giving you SRT files. I'm assuming you use that for your YouTube and videos and stuff. And then Chapterize, you already talked about. Weave, which I don't know how I missed you releasing this, but I am a Typefully user. And Typefully is an app for posting to lots of different accounts, but it's a web app. Yeah, there's no mobile. I don't know if it's a religious thing for them because it seems crazy to me that they wouldn't have one, especially for social media posting, which is what it's for. But Weave is a client for Typefully, like an iOS client, which I didn't even know was a thing you could do.

Matt Birchler:
As far as I know, it's the only one on iOS. They have an API. They have a very powerful API that lets you do most of the things you can do on the web client. And like you, I was like, "I love Typefully, but I'm not always at my Mac." And so I was like, "Yeah, let's see what we can do with this." And this is easily my smallest app because it is for people who... It's just for Typefully users. It's not for all social media users. But it's very nice and I use it on a regular basis. Anytime I'm cross-posted, I'm using my own app. And again, it's the same deal.

Charlie Chapman:
It immediately replaced the Typefully progressive web app icon on my home screen. But I'm a new user.

Matt Birchler:
Nice.

Charlie Chapman:
So if you start getting bug requests, sorry about that.

Matt Birchler:
Please do. Please do.

Charlie Chapman:
Or bug. Not requests. I won't be requesting bugs.

Matt Birchler:
Bug requests.

Charlie Chapman:
Yeah. Yeah. I could really use some more bugs. You also have Best-o-Masto, which is essentially giving you an algorithmic timeline for Mastodon, which two Mastodon people who really love Mastodon might seem crazy, but for people who find Mastodon infuriating in a lot of ways, and one of those ways being discovery, in particular, is actually a really clever app, I feel like. And I wish there was more things like that in the Mastoverse, I guess. And I think that's all of them. That's all the ones I have written down, but maybe there was one I missed.

Matt Birchler:
There's one more. You missed one more. That's fine.

Charlie Chapman:
So close.

Matt Birchler:
It's called Yearly Run Goals. I have one called Yearly Run Goals because at the start of this year, I was like, "I'd like to run 365 miles. I want to run an average of one mile a day." And I didn't know how to track that. And I downloaded a bunch of workout apps and none of them really had this feature of running towards a goal and showing you a graph as you go. And I was like, "I can make that."

Charlie Chapman:
I have a hammer.

Matt Birchler:
And so I made it and it's great. It's what I use. I've got it on my phone. And again, it's the same thing. I will pull it up and I'll have a question, it's right here. It's showing me my progress for the year. And I'm like, "Oh, what am I on pace for? I'm ahead of pace, but what am I actually on pace for?" And I'm like, "Okay, added pace." But yeah, literally, this is all of my apps, is I have a problem, I want to solve it.

Charlie Chapman:
I tend to do the same kind of thing, but what I've found is I have an app that solves my problem and I use it and I get into that flow just like you're talking about. From that stage to the release on the App Store is a big hurdle, because at least to me, there's this feeling of now I have to support it forever. Getting support emails is a burden to me and it feels weighty. So I usually sit on most of those unless it's this thing that I think this is going to hit for whatever reason.
What's been your experience? Because it seems like you tend to release once it has value, which is what I would advise people to do, but you seem to like you do that. Have you found the weight of having these apps around has been something that feels like a burden? Or is there a way you've worked through that or just not at all?

Matt Birchler:
I don't know if it's a burden yet. If we go back to YouTube, I know a lot of people who will do a YouTube video, finish it up, and then they'll schedule it for next week because they post on Mondays. When I finish a YouTube video, I publish it immediately. Once I'm done with something, I like to get it out in the world and that's it. It's out. I don't like having a backlog or a queue or whatever. And so I think once I feel like it's useful to more than just me, and a lot of these, like you mentioned, I named a lot of these Quick. Especially early on, I was definitely naming things to make it very clear this is a simple app. This is not a big thing.

Charlie Chapman:
That does make sense now that you say that. It kind of signals like this is a get-in, get-out type app.

Matt Birchler:
Yeah, this was the idea. And so they're utility apps. These were big in the early App Store in a way that we talk about super apps now.

Charlie Chapman:
All the things that slowly got Sherlocked, it was like if you saw an opportunity in the iOS ecosystem for something that the system probably should do, people would just make utility apps that kind of filled that role for a long time.

Matt Birchler:
Exactly. So I like to get them out. I have been doing, to my credit, I don't release everything, I've been doing a series of posts on my blog this year about micro apps because early this year I was like, again, this is after Claude Opus 4.5 came out in November last year, and that was the AI model that cleared a hurdle where we're like, "Oh, the code is actually very good now." And so I was like, "I think 2026 is going to be the year of people just building these micro apps and figuring out I want to solve this problem. I'm just going to stick an AI bot on it."
And so I'll make these tiny little things. I made a tiny little obsidian plugin to format my blog posts. These teeny, tiny things, and I just don't release them. Maybe I'll use them on my computer, maybe I'll stop using them after a couple days, but there are some things that I don't release. And actually, I have a folder on my computer in my home directory just called Apps that's at 99 folders right now. So there's a lot of stuff here. They aren't all things that I've built, but there's a bunch of weird stuff in here that I've played around with that never went anywhere.
Someone built an API or a thing for processing F1 race data in a cool way. And I was like, "Oh, I'll make a visualizer for that." And then I just failed miserably. So that one's not there. And so there's a whole bunch of stuff here that never really turned into anything. Yeah, I don't know. It's definitely that bug of I see a problem, I see a friction point, and I just, "Hmm, can I fix this?" And sometimes I think I can, sometimes I think someone else can do it.

Charlie Chapman:
We've talked about your plethora of your media empire as it were. But so far your blog, your YouTube channel and your apps are all solo endeavors. So the last big totem piece of your media empire, from at least my outside perspective, is not a single one person thing. It's a partnership. And you alluded to it earlier, but you have a podcast. Do you want to talk about the origins of where that came from?

Matt Birchler:
Yeah. So the podcast is Comfort Zone. It's hosted by me, Christopher Lawley and Nileane. Nileane wrote for MacStories. She's big on Mastodon. Two great people, some of my favorite people in the world. And we just talk about tech. And the idea of the show is that we want to get out of our comfort zone of tech. And this one started because Chris and I had kind of known each other for a long time, just in the same world, but never really together. Never really talked to each other outside of like, "Love what you do. Okay, bye."
And we talked about doing something for a long time and we eventually got this idea and we were like, "We will only do it if Nileane will do it with us." We were like, "Nileane would be the perfect third person on this." And she said, "Yes." So we did it and yeah, we're recording episode 110 shortly. So we've been doing it for a little over two years. It's a lot of fun. It is definitely the most just pure fun of the projects that I get to work on.
And it is cool to have a team on that one because that is definitely the grind of the iOS app stuff, especially, because you can't just release an app. You have to have a marketing page. You have to have a privacy policy. You need to have terms of use. You need to have all these things that Apple demands you do to deploy them. And then you need to market it and you have to do all those things. So you're the developer, you're the marketer, you're the administrator, you're the support person, you're everything.
So it is nice to have a team in this case where Nileane is the social person. She makes sure people know about the show and she posts all that stuff. Chris is the editor after we record. He's the one who does all the editing. And then I, based on the apps that I've made, and I don't even know what the role would be, but the producer. I get an MP3 file from Chris and then I turn into subtitles and the nice file that shows with chapters and your podcast player. So it's a lot of fun.

Charlie Chapman:
I'm always jealous. I obviously love doing this show. That's why I've done it for getting dangerously close to a hundred episodes at this point. Actually, this might be episode 99 whenever it comes out, which is kind of wild. But the weird thing about this show is, while it's serving the purpose of my original goal, which was to trick people that I want to be friends with into talking to me for an hour and a half, it's different people every single time. And there's a lot more, I wouldn't say there's a lot more work, but it's just a different thing to get into it.
And starting the show is almost like at the beginning of our show, was us building a little bit of rapport. And then usually very quickly you're just kind of hanging out and it's super fun. But then I don't get to do that again with you in a week or two weeks. It's a new person. And I love doing that, but I'm always jealous of the camaraderie and then the growth over the lifespan of a show, which you've been doing for, is it getting close to two years or is it a year?

Matt Birchler:
A little over two years.

Charlie Chapman:
It's over two years. My goodness.

Matt Birchler:
Yeah.

Charlie Chapman:
So doing a show with the same two people for two years, it's like it becomes home in a way. Right? You have inside jokes and the audience is actually part of those inside jokes. And you know what you're getting into when you start an episode, or at least I assume you do. I don't actually run one of these. So maybe this is all just me looking over the hill and thinking it works that way.

Matt Birchler:
No. I don't mean to make you feel jealous, but very often we will sign on. My time, we started recording at 10:00 AM. I will often sign on at 10:00 AM on the dot and before 10:01, not even a minute passes and Chris is saying, "Welcome to Comfort Zone." We just really do get into it. That is definitely a nice thing. There's running jokes. It's very fun. That part is easy because we use Notion to write show notes for ourselves and we kind of know what everyone's going to talk about, but it's pretty simple. All things considered.

Charlie Chapman:
And how does that compare, do you feel, to your other work, all three of them, which is extremely, you're pushing the boulder up the hill until release point and then it goes over versus a show that it's more like you're on a treadmill or I don't know what the metaphor is, but it's like pulling you along. You have to stay on, but it's a machine that you're a part of. Even with this show, I just described it as if this is all this work that I'm doing, but really I'm just hanging out and I do a little bit of show prep.
But that is one of the things I love about this show compared to most of my other creative endeavors, which is like there's going to be an episode that comes out, I'm going to get on this train or I'm going to miss it, and that's just going to happen. Whereas everything else I do, I'm dictating the terms the whole time and I have to push to keep it moving. Even though technically that's true with the podcast and, well, a little less so now that it's part of a network and I have editors and stuff, but for a long time I was doing literally all the work.
But it felt like I was being pulled through that work in a way that's very different than even YouTube, except for the people like you described who are on this schedule. I think YouTube might feel similarly, but the way you do YouTube is it's like when you have an idea, you do the thing and you push the thing through, which means every single piece of work you're doing, you're making it happen the whole time versus it kind of sucking you through the process.

Matt Birchler:
Okay. We've gotten deep. Yes.

Charlie Chapman:
You said you wanted to get into your internal psyche.

Matt Birchler:
Yeah.

Charlie Chapman:
Self-examination.

Matt Birchler:
Oh, boy. I guess what I would say, which I don't know if this is fully answering, but is kind of where my head's going, is I definitely have a tendency to want to do things on my own and control things on my own, especially when I am doing things with a good team. It is really nice. It is very nice not to have to worry about everything and not have to do it all yourself. Yeah. I mean, for example, Chris and Nileane are much funnier than I am, and it's very nice to have them on the show. Thank you for agreeing. It's very nice to have them on the show and they will vamp and they will find the funny bits that I may have just walked by as I'm trying to tell them about how a network-attached storage thing works.

Charlie Chapman:
That's very naturally funny.

Matt Birchler:
Naturally funny. So it is nice, not just like on the, "Oh, it's great that someone else edits the show." But it is nice to just have the mental, being able to offload some of the effort of like, "Yeah, I don't have to be every part of this." With the software, I need to do all the things, but it's great to have someone behind you sometimes as well. So I think a mix is good for me because I wouldn't want someone telling me how to necessarily make these apps, for example. I like having the control of that and when are we releasing? And, "Oh, did you communicate this?" That's very annoying for me. Yes, communication is very annoying to me.

Charlie Chapman:
Which is interesting because you do a lot of it as side hustle/hobbies.

Matt Birchler:
I do. I do. Yeah. When communication is the job, that's when I get like, "Ugh." But anyway, I think a mix is probably good, but it is definitely less of a mental load when it's multiple of you. Maybe it changes if it becomes a huge, if this was our job, this was all three of our careers, and it actually really mattered that we got sponsors and held on to audience and we're consistently growing the audience. It might be a little bit more stressful, but kind of like what you described. It is just a guaranteed hour of the week where I get to talk to two of my friends and that's great on its own.

Charlie Chapman:
Ah, that's great. All right. Well, I think speaking of trains that we're getting off and onto, our train is about to reach an end here. So before I let you go, I have to ask you the question I ask everybody to end this show, which is, what's a person or people out there that have inspired you and your work that you'd recommend others check out?

Matt Birchler:
The first name that came to mind for some reason is David Smith.

Charlie Chapman:
Oh, yes.

Matt Birchler:
And I think it's because he is also someone overflowing with ideas and is going to put them out there. I feel a connection to him. I've also followed him for a million years. Yeah, he's done a bunch of podcasts and stuff that I've really enjoyed too.

Charlie Chapman:
Such a great feel-good story too, of somebody who, if you followed him for a long time, he never lost that one-of-us feelings because even through the mega success of Widgetsmith, once that blew up, I don't feel like he lost that personality or edge. He still shares his thoughts pretty raw, not in podcast form anymore, but in blog form. Yeah. And he's just a kind person, which is the community can always use more people like that.

Matt Birchler:
Yes. So that's who my brain went to. There's plenty of people, I'm sure. I already said I definitely straight up copied Daring Fireball style blog posts. I think Shawn Blanc was the first person who made me realize, oh, your side hustle could be a career, which I've never done. But it was a really eye-opening thing of like, oh, there's a whole new thing you can do if you really put your mind to it. And so that was really inspiring years ago when I was getting going.

Charlie Chapman:
Ah, perfect. All right. Well, where can people find you and your massive plethora of projects?

Matt Birchler:
You can find me at birchtree.me. It's my blog. It is the oldest thing that I do. It's also probably the thing I'll be doing after everything else goes away. So that's where I post about everything. So birchtree.me.

Charlie Chapman:
Nice and easy. All right. Perfect. All right. Well, thank you all for listening or watching if you're watching on the YouTube channel. So Launched is part of the RevenueCat podcast family. If you want to learn more about the growth side of the mobile app business, you should check out the Sub Club Podcast, hosted by my good friend and colleague, David Barnard. And you can check out revenuecat.com to learn about the easiest way to grow and monetize your mobile app business. And of course, learn more about Launched at launchedfm.com. That's all we got for you this time. I'll see you all in two weeks. Bye.