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Let's get into the show. Hey Christian, thanks so much for being on the podcast today. I'm really excited to be here. It's been a long time coming. Yeah, I think so. I think we've all talked in some capacity over the years, so it's nice to formalize it. I learned from the notes that I was the one that suggested or I talked to you about getting Apollo on subscriptions and I'm vaguely remembering that conversation. There might have been a Twitter DM or something.
I think it was an email back when emails were a big thing. I think there's the subscription thing that's coming out. I don't know if you heard of it. I think back then I was still chicken shit where everyone was getting roasted for it. I don't know what this guy's talking about. You were ahead of your time. Vaguely remember. Vaguely remember. It's pretty cool. We can get more into that in a bit. I did just want to kick things off talking about how you got into the development.
I went to your LinkedIn page before this podcast to be looking for a director bio and stuff. No, and it's the perfect LinkedIn page. You read Apple for a little bit and then you just didn't update it ever again. The perfect indie LinkedIn. I don't even care. I don't know if I've ever logged in since then. I got a DM once in a while that I sent you a message on LinkedIn. I'm like, oh, well. One mutual Christian I think is the same Apple recruiter that must have recruited us.
Was it Mike? No, it's got Joshua. Maybe that sounds familiar. Okay, okay. Fair enough. I went that far off that I was there. I was there a few years before you. So you were at Apple and what happened after that? The trail goes stark. Yeah, I like to be mysterious. I was there for some internship during university and pretty much after that I got that fire in your belly that you often do when you work somewhere really cool.
I was like, okay, I want to build something and Reddit was really big at the time. Still, it was obviously, but it was really, really big, especially where I was in university. There was Alien Blue, but there wasn't really any iOS first app that really I loved. So I was like, you know, screw it. This could be a fun project to get my beak wet with. So I started playing with that and it came along really nicely and I ended up posting it and like the Apple subreddit I think.
And it really took off in a big way and people were really interested in beta testing it. So kind of got to that point where I was like, oh, like this might have some legs. I'm graduating in a few months. Like, should I go get the big boy job, go back to Apple or something or kind of see if this has legs and try to forbid. And I ended up trying it up for a bit burning through all the savings I got at Apple and ended up working out pretty well.
Kind of accidental in a way, but also just kind of happened organically, I suppose. Had you built apps or anything else before a fallen? Yeah, I had like an app called Cillable that was like kind of like a speed reading app. It helped you, like one of those ones that like flashed a word at a time and try to help you learn to read a little faster. And it was great because it made like a few hundred bucks.
And over the course of like a year during university, which like, you know, as a university student is incredible. Yeah, yeah, like that's amazing. And I think that really like that was back when there was like, oh, there's an app for that commercials where everywhere. So there was this big apps were such a like novel new concept. So like I was still like it was so hyped to be working on something like that.
And you get there were a few enough apps at the time still you could like push an app and like get a reasonable amount of traffic just from being on the app store. Oh, yeah, tech crunch would be like, there's a new app out today. Which you don't see a lot of anymore. What year was that? Probably like 2012, 2013. I want to say something like that. And then when did you start work on Apollo? So I finished the Apple in 2014.
So I think it would have been, yeah, like the fall of 2014 is when I started working on it. Yeah, yeah. So it's, yeah. Wow, coming up 10 years. So what were the like frameworks and process you used to build Apollo? Yeah, that not so. Especially like it got a little better as time went on maybe, but like especially at the beginning, like it was, like I was a kid or a university.
So I like, I guess a lot of developers have like, you know, years in the trenches working at like a big startup or a formalized tech company where they developed these like really great practices. And I really had none of that. Like my school was very like computer science theory base. So like apps weren't even taught. So it was kind of a lot of feeling around in the dark. And yeah, Apollo, I was just working on here and there like all the time I had. And just kind of putting it together.
And I remember like it took like, I posted it, I want to say like the January after that fall. And it was like maybe a year and a half or two years later that I actually like fully released it. So it took a long time of just kind of like, fattling around and feeling the dark to even get there. And there was a lot of like, from the beta testers, there was a lot of like, can you just friggin release this thing?
Like it's, it's your, I think I fell into every like developer trope where there was like feature creep and there was working on like too many features instead of bugs. And yeah, it was by some walk, a stroke of luck came together and released. I mean, you kept building, you wrote something, you're writing code. Yeah, yeah, I was. It just wasn't very structured. Like it was like, I need to get to California from New York and I know like it's West.
And that was, that was pretty much like as fire organizers. I was so you're subreddit. It's always been very active. Yeah, where is that where you would get most like customer feedback and stuff like that? For sure. Yeah, it kind of made it easy because you could like the feedback loop was so close by. Like it was like, you know, you were in the app, you can just poke over here and I kind of give some feedback. And that made it really nice because there was no friction.
People always gave really good feedback and especially during the beta process, like that really helped shape the app for the better because I kind of had a core idea. What I wanted, but the feedback people gave over the years really shaped it into something that I think became more than just like my ideal of what a reticline was. It kind of got shaped into this.
What the perfect thing for a community would be and like a lot of voice is kind of shaped it like a drift would go into the ocean where it kind of gets worn down and nice ways. But I think that's how all like most great product. Well, there's very many different ways to make a product. But I think that is one way, right? You have like a lot of feedback and usage and people and a community that cares.
And then I do think you have an outdoor, like you have an editor somewhere who's like making some decisions about like what gets put in and whatnot. That's a jobs thing, right? Like good products are made with friction. Right? He used to say that like wearing things down and like working on it until it's that's very apple, right? Like they would just grind and grind on stuff. No, I think this was uniquely me. The key man theory of history. Yeah, I think I was the first.
When did you like decide or realize or make like at some point it became a commercial thing? Was that always like I mean not that it was like making money maybe wasn't the number one thing. But at some point you were like, well, I have to eat and maybe this like reticlient can be how I eat. Yeah, that was kind of like always like the the goal on the horizon. Like Apple paid pretty well even as an intern and I was living with like six other friends.
So like life was pretty cheap and I was kind of just like solely chewing through that. But I knew like a microcosm of a startup like I kind of had like this fund and I had almost like a burn rate. And I knew by a certain date I had to get this out. Otherwise it would kind of be troublesome. So I kind of had that in the horizon and I knew back then I had this novel idea of just like you know, $2.99 and one time fee economics were a lot simpler back then.
And I figured I'll just put that out and then I'll hopefully take care of itself. The extent of which I thought through the monetization. But it worked out pretty well by the end. Like the first day like it got a ton of downloads because there was a lot of pent up demand from people who saw the beta. But this fallen we're unable to get in. So there are a lot of people who just jumped on the pro version immediately. So pretty it was like financially viable from day one of the actual release.
But it was a lot of burning through funds in order to get there. Yeah, I mean it's financially viable when it's one young person living. Exactly. It was six out of five other people. Right. Like which is fun. Like that's how you should start you know. Yeah, yeah, it definitely helped a lot. Yeah, it's like the you can do a lot of things. Your costs do directly kind of affect like what you can try and the risk you can take and stuff like that. And then you can compound later on right.
You can build more revenue or figure it out later. But yeah, the same Altman talked about used to talk about this more when he wasn't the richest most famous AI person in the world. But like to just say like your personal burn rate is probably like your number one. Can be your number one hindrance to risk taking like is you increase your personal burn rate. It just like lowers the opportunities that you can take because you have you know, there's lots of reasons.
So it's burn rate might not be intentionally chosen that way. But like it is a huge input to the amount of risk and things you can try and stuff like this. And I think we take I mean I'm not saying you're lucky. But I think we're all lucky in some ways. Like you're young, had the skills, had the time, had the like financial runway. And then you know, of course like had the vision to build something for a community. But like I think lowering the denominator on this makes a big difference.
Oh, it's brutal because I'll get like Twitter DMs where people will be like, oh, like how should I get into? How did you get into this? Like would you recommend a similar path? And it's like no like the kind of like you said the stairs aligned people with like you know three kids and a family and like you know 10 hours a week of spare time. Like that's not a formula. I would have really been able to like create what I created within. So I was very fortunate. I guess to have the circumference.
Yeah, it makes a device not super transferable, right? It's not like going indies impossible at that stage. It's just like your baseline is going to be a lot higher, right? And it's going to be harder. It's going to be more challenging maybe to get off the ground. But that is what's great about the indie hacker scene and the ability in software to have site projects and have a full time job.
And you can build something cool in just 10 hours a week. Like you can't follow the Apollo playbook to do that. Yeah, how much how much were you probably working on that Christian like in that time? And on godly because it's like a trans it's like that like hobby slash work barrier. That's like it's really dangerous where you're like Oh like I'm working on this feature and it's a ton of fun and it's like 10 p.m. and you're like I think they call that your life's work.
I think is what that's called. I guess but it like you slowly like don't have like work hours anymore. I guess which is awesome in some ways. But in others like those few hours of night someone like recharging some capacity or like still just plugging away. I think there is this like I won't necessarily like use the indie community of having this myth be bigger in their world. But I think there is sort of generally a myth that you can attain like outsized rewards.
I think David DHH and 37 sexual skies have made this worse. But like to think that you're going to be able to achieve maybe you can. But like most like great outcomes came through at least some period of like intense investment right and it might not have been that bad.
It might have been something you were perfectly happy to do. But you know you had again it was like the time of your life where you didn't have commitments that you had to do like it was fun right and you have this intensity where you build and build and build and build. I feel like there's a movement where that's like shun it's like bad you know like all like you're not being balanced and like all this stuff. And you're like yeah but like I don't know I was and wanted to.
Yeah yeah yeah no no one was holding a gun to my head and it was like a lot of fun but it was just one of like you look back at it and you're like yeah there wasn't inherently like balance wasn't a word I would use for that but it was like just in terms of like trying to replicate that for someone else like it's it's hard to say like oh just work on it for you know 80 hours a week like that's all you got to do.
I mean it might be I will posit that that might be you know maybe it's not the only thing that matters and again like I haven't worked 80 hours a week on revenue cat probably since the first year.
You know maybe there were spits and spurts of it here and there but I definitely think when you're in that like we're in that nucleation phase like when you're going from zero to one I think I think it's hard to think it wouldn't be part of the equation right or at least if it's not necessary it's certainly correlated right I think folks that get things off the ground.
That was the whole setup and joke of me kicking this off with like the framework side of it like Christian what frameworks did you use what process but I think the truth is and Jacob said this earlier it's like. Different products are built in different ways and different people have different temperaments in different time availability and your path is a path if you only have 10 hours a week and you've got three kids you probably do need to like.
Think more and plan more and kind of have more of a process and do some market research and those kind of things but I think a lot of great things come out of exactly what you did even if it is 10 hours a week or 20 hours a week or you get carried away and do.
You spend 40 hours a week on it for a few weeks when you're still working 40 hours a week in your day job you're just passionate about it and you just have to build that thing versus like I do think it can get overly for me like where you're just building this thing because you think it's going to make you money but you don't even care and that that's a grind yeah that's I don't think I would have made it to the end anywhere close if that was the case because I was using the shit out of it so it was like this was something.
I mean that's that's super underrated right being a consumer of your own product right but that that process of having people using it interacting with them and then being the tip of the spear the person who can actually build and deploy that's going to outperform any sort of like framework or process or like whatever in my in my experience I think that's interesting I didn't ever I didn't never thought about it like that yeah that's a just how close the you were to the consumer the user and then you could actually just fix their thing like instantly if you wanted to it's almost a framework.
It's almost a framework in and of itself yeah in absence of framework it's just gasoline and oxygen or whatever it's like just put the two and it will kind of which is kind of like I don't know I think as I've we were talking about founder mode it's founder mode week when we're recording this for people who are terminally online but Christian was asking me about it and I think that's kind of one of my learnings.
Sorry sorry no please it's a lot of synergy in this conversation I know it's really me but I think one of my one of my realizations over the last few years has been that I do think that like the core ingredients being there sort of trumps all process or whatever and that this core
ingredients being like people who can build stuff people who have a need and then just energy right just like talking to them seeing what their problems are and using very basic reasoning to be like okay what's next now I say that with however many years of software building experience behind me and all this stuff that I can like synthesize and like understand what's possible and what's not and all of that so it's maybe an over simplification but I do think that like yeah I think
there's like a desire to over systematize a lot of these things which should just be like organic and and sort of like artistic such a good word for it like like it's like you always see those like old guy billionaires writing the books and like here's how you do what I did when it's like I don't know if those steps are inherently repeatable or it was just kind of you struck
while the iron was hot yeah or there's even any causation at all like I was doing this and this is what I was doing when I like found a gold mine right they say it was such conviction like you read the book and I like dang I can do this too and it's like it scares me so much when someone
asks for advice to kind of accidentally go down that path where you're like this worked for me in this hyper specific case that like I'll prescribe this to you as something that'll work in your case to where it's like I think like you said kind of having the
more organic approach of like having the right ingredients you know in the cauldron I think is a lot more helpful than some inherent formula or framework the tragic part of is is you can have all the ingredients is still not work right like it that's that's and
probably most likely won't if you have enough at bats and if you can keep in the game long enough and you can keep trying like eventually you'll have something I think that will work which is also I think something that people are challenged with people cutting their losses you know on a project that's not going anywhere and deciding wins enough Christian did you ever have something where you worked on and you're just like I think I need to drop this because like it's just not worth this
squeeze anymore not like I don't know like that 100 this guy or bat in a thousand it's less that and it's more so like I don't think I start working on something unless I'm like I'm really confident in it being something I care about which is interesting not it's not something you really come about working is something you really confident that you care about right yeah exactly and to the extent that like if I release this and I'm the only one who likes it like in
some cases that's good enough for me whereas like I almost envy some people are kind of just like like they just got a random idea using the bathroom and they're like I'm going to build out this week and like that sounds like a lot of fun but like to me I kind of I sit on it a little while and I'm like where would I take this like kind of what are what are the what kind of likes would it have and that's kind of when I invest the time in it and
then at that point I feel like I'm confident enough and I put enough time into it that like not releasing it is just kind of feels wasteful to me like I get to a certain extent like cutting your losses but to me at a certain extent it's like I thought this had likes at some point I kind of wanted to see this through to see if that had any basis in reality and I haven't had so many at bats that like I'm sure eventually it's going to be a
terrible formula but like I've only had like three apps or something and it's worked out pretty well so far it's funny to use a word care because that's exactly what I was going to say is that even if it's not a
financial success if it's something you care about it can be incredibly rewarding and if you're building it only to be a financial success maybe you need to and if it has to be a financial success like you're burning your life savings to build it then maybe you do but like I mean even for me my
weather up app it's not been super successful I mean it's made a couple hundred grand over the last like five years and it's done all right this year but like it's super fulfilling to me even though like it's probably never going to pay the bills or David's the most into weather apps that anybody
have ever met like I have one and it came with the phone and I think it offends him a little bit that I'm like that's fine actually that's not sure I have some specialty weather apps but and that's a thing is that I really don't care because like we had a storm come through a couple weeks ago
and we had gotten the beta into this weird state with a data corruption thing where I could not use my own app and then so I went to the app store and I downloaded 20 different weather apps and I did not like them and it was so incredibly personally fulfilling to be like I just want my weather app and so like is it ever going to like make a million bucks I don't know maybe I'm going to keep plugging away at it
but like I get an incredible amount of personal fulfillment in building this thing and I get to build it with my cousin which is a lot of fun like it's so in my case you know I work full-time at revenue cat it's a side project I don't even put 10 hours a week into it most weeks like you know with big updates I do put more time into it but like it's pretty cool that I can tinker on this thing that I really care about and get that fulfillment even if it's not making millions of dollars.
Yeah and I almost think like if the financial aspect is the only thing motivating you like I don't know how sustainable long term that is like I feel like you burn out pretty quickly. Being in YC like just named drop that just make sure that you're like like why common-anter?
Well you have a lot of people in your bash that you saw you see a lot of folks come through and I guess I just run into a lot of people who are like early probably like similar you Christian like you have any hackers like when to get into it I get a lot of people reaching out like early stage venture funded path like trying looking for advice and stuff and I can definitely tell the psychological difference in somebody who's doing it
because it's something that's like burning inside of them versus somebody who like wants to do a startup for like the check box and maybe the money and stuff like that like those are good too. You sniff that out immediately? There's a few tells like if somebody talks about selling the company someday like they're about flipping it
I'm like Matt you've already checked out like I know you're gonna try a lot less hard right? There's certain tells they're minor but yeah I honestly think that if you could know in somebody's heart anything most people don't actually know themselves right at some level but if you can know that like I think if it you'd be the world's most successful angel investor like if you had a perfect sense of that I think you would because it's the it's the people who like are doing it for
the care of the craft like the the personal reasons right the spiritual reasons like whatever those are I think the folks that will try harder they'll push harder they'll they have a little bit of a burning burning the boats mentality right where they go like there's no there's no path back like I'm not turning around right so do you think you have a good enough batting average that you ever get into that angel investing area?
No, no I have done a little bit and I think I'm pretty underperforming oh fair enough. I don't know because we could talk about venture. It's super interesting because I think in Indie in Indie world the only difference the only difference between well not the only there's a lot of like second order differences that come when you're doing a venture about company versus like an Indie but really it's just like it's
funding and and a financial thing like you know we have all the same problems right you have users you need to get product market fit you need to have like a good culture like within your you know if it's a company of one it's easier to maintain that culture right
but like but yeah but I mean your culture just becomes your personal mental state right and your personal behaviors right which matter and so I think I think it's a lot more similar than people think I just think the difference and maybe we you know we've been talking about we talked a little bit before the call about founder mode which is like this thing that say Paul Graham wrote yeah you're a big proponent. I mean I don't know I've never heard someone so gas stuff about it.
I think everybody everybody should just you know I don't believe in isms as my friend Ferris Bueller once said but I think everyone should believe in themselves and so like if it resonates with you I still I mean I still from but like I think it resonates with you you should do it but I think the process of trusting yourself believing in what you're building I think all of these things sort of Trump like how you're funded or if you're not
funded like having a purpose to what you're doing doing stuff that makes sense to you like as the builder of the thing and I think this actually applies to people not even necessarily founders of things or like owners of things like even your own work I think if we we constantly try to like cargo call which I don't know if that does that land on anybody cargo call.
Yeah yeah yeah yeah I think we constantly try to cargo call these like processes from like other successful companies in places and it goes back to your point Christian about like the book from the billionaire and their retirement years it's like there's really like you
can copy that but it's probably not the thing that made that magical I think it's just to for a lot of us in indy land we copy Steve and I think there's some things he said and felt and did that that work order their success and but if you copy Steve Harvey yes Steve Harvey yeah exactly yeah
family if you but if you copied everything apple does I think you might end up with a really broken company right yeah yeah for sure there's a lot of stuff in there that's not actually related to their success but yeah big on big on founder mode and founder number one founder
number one that's me yeah you even changed your shirt except the yeah I have it on right here no it's interesting like human seemed to love like I don't know if it's it's a shortcut or we just seem to love trying to find our process to do something better
and I don't know if that's like an evolutionary technique or something but like it's wild how there's almost we love prescribing like if you do X result while will occur I think we have this like desire to map a system of a predictable system onto like essentially chaotic data
like we're always trying to like find the underlying physics and properties and sometimes it works right and we learn how to swim and jump and like all these like really complicated physical properties and things we've either learned that like evolutionarily or not like why can humans drive how did we figure that out right like we're it's just like we can map to these insane systems but then there are some systems which I just are inherently chaotic and I think most systems in the
world and I think products and how they interact with people and whether not business is big money or not I think are pretty chaotic systems as we're like constantly trying to like oh if you just do OKRs and you just do this and you just do that that's the underlying physics of the system and you'll be able to like manipulate and control that system and I think essentially they're just they're
always going to be very chaotic and I almost think that like just adapting to that chaos kind of organic going back to organic whatever that means like yeah that we're just being like just focused on very basic things right and you can adapt to the chaos and not try to like tame it
necessarily maybe is better but yeah we love we love to try to put complex things in a boxes that don't really map and then we go like why does nothing make sense sounds like chaos is kind of how you built Apollo is like you just followed the
users you followed your own Christian trying to say if that's an insult or compliment no no no no no I'm saying that's a very romantic way to put what didn't feel so it felt like a compliment and I'm sure it's deserved but I appreciate it so I did want to get back to
kind of like building this business that started as this kind of crazy passion project that you hope would make some money and then you launch it you launch it and it's you said 299 up front it might even been 199 for like the first week it was
one of the things where yeah it was in hindsight not great because I don't know like the difference between 199 and 299 or even maybe 399 like it's if you're probably debated that a lot or not actually I'm curious because some people sit and ring their hands
over like a price choice forever and it's I'm always just like just pick a price and then you can change it later is fine I don't think I put that much I think like alien blue is like 299 or something and I was like that kind of seems like maybe at the
time it was like what seemed reasonable to charge for a red it up but in hindsight it's one of those things where I think I did the same thing with like lifetime pricing once I finally followed Jacob's advice and had subscriptions where it was like 1999 for like the first year which was like
bonkers price when I think it was like $10 a year for the actual subscriptions so it's like it pays for it and it was like I ended up increasing it to like 30 or $40 and like the take rate didn't change at all and it's like one of the things were like shit you had surf us uncaptured like a band right there 100% yeah it's a lot of chaos but yeah it was just a lot of chaos over the years I think where it was it was good chaos and like the subreddit
served almost as like a continual North Star like you got too off base it was like you work on the wrong feature for too long and you start to hear from people kind of thing yeah they say on it you this is me in Twitter again anytime where I'm not building when I need to be building I'll know 100 well yeah yeah and it's great because it serves as like that North Star so they were there was kind of like a like a shepherd of the chaos and not capacity so it wasn't I guess
chaotic is working completely alone like you kind of had like I like it to a team almost in some in some ways but I like your community yeah yeah because they managed you in some ways they are always giving feedback if they didn't like something they'd be very vocal about it so it kind of helped in that way but over the years yeah it was a lot of just kind of hearing you know the squeaky us wheel gets the greaser whatever the saying is like whatever they're yelling about that
month is probably something I'll put on the road map work on that and it was kind of like rinse repeat for years and years and years and years and it worked pretty well we maintain road maps here but like I think if it were up to me it would only be the road map would be what we're working on and then maybe the next thing like that's it because like so is that
David thing then whatever he wants to yeah basically oh I fight really hard internally for things wait we finally got our subscription auto renew chart back in revenue cat after like two years of the bitching and mounting about it and it was popular so you know maybe should listen to him more actually that might be a good example of like something where like you know we have our like customer interview process and we kind of trialled some things and whatever
it was didn't seem it was that hot and it kind of got back priority hasn't been a when a tremendous amount of work but like if somebody's yelling at us about it like we should probably just try to build something pretty quickly because like that'll be the best way that we learn if it's really worth it versus like you can put a lot of pre work into like oh is this going to be
people going to you should put a little pre work in but like I've just seen we maintained like a longer more complex road map in the past and I don't know it just more like it would do you feel shackled yeah exactly like it would we just feel like well I did like want to say this thing I'm just like at this at some point you're just like just don't maintain it if it's important enough it will keep coming up like customers will keep complaining about it like we'll keep hearing it
and I think it's been better I think it's been better it's like we're not fully fully reactive but like we can't and trying to push like more reactive yeah there's a sweet spot there yeah I mean you can't just like not have any sort of like sense and you need that like that like editorial right like you have some sort of idea of like what a finished Apollo looks like right or like what the product as a total looks like it's pretty finished now yeah
but whatever you're working on you have like some idea of like where it might go and you can decide even if you're getting yelled at like I say you all that in a loving way but like oh yeah it's an affectionate feedback from customers you can something should be like yeah I hear that
but like that's just not the way we're going to go and you get to make that decision that's still important oh yeah and I think depending on how you articulate that like there's like I remember if a customer had like a or customers even had a relatively popular idea and it wasn't something I kind of jived with like I was always afraid of being like no but like it came to the point where like the first time I did it I
just kind of explain my reasons why like I didn't think this was a great idea because maybe they don't have the full picture and like the responses were like oh shit yeah that's a good point okay and I was like oh shit okay I'm not going to yield that yeah my move would be like let me add to the
roadmap that doesn't exist it's on our radar that's what I tell people that's what I tell people on Twitter when they suggest some wacky it's almost and I'd be curious if you felt the same way like they always there's a real problem like they always have a real issue and then they would suggest something I'd be like that's the maybe the dumbest solution I've ever heard what you're not that you know I'm very facetious but like that's like not going to work for like a number of reasons
and sometimes they I find they just don't have that whole picture like a common one for Apollo was like there'd be these services that like continually scraped reddit which is a whole different story but as a result they kind of have like a cache of every comment so if someone deleted a really juicy comment you could theoretically go back and restore it and that was like a common request like add that to Apollo I want to see what they deleted and it was like I see on the surface why you
think that would be something you'd want but like you get into all these like safety issues that are like maybe they dox themselves and people should probably have the right to delete a comment that they want to rescind and you're kind of getting into this jelly area of like that's kind of sketchy and like as soon as you explain that they be like oh shit like yeah I didn't think about that aspect of it yeah that could kind of get dicey and I think sometimes like as the founder of the creator
you have a lot more you know marbles than everyone else does yeah there you go Christians endorsing founder mode right there yeah I know I've been trying to get you guys on board it's it's I mean I'm not going to bring it back to founder mode again but like I do feel like there's this tension with like VC back companies and I don't think I don't think I don't think I don't think anybody but I don't know I think there's well I don't know part of it I think is like grass is greener
is in both ways I think I look sometimes at indie folks and go like god damn you're just by yourself you don't have like all this debt like debt IE like capital you have to return you know you kind of get just do what you want so you have to return that the capital yeah it's not just I mean you do it we should do a venture capital one on one one on one maybe the well I mean they own part of the company right so like it's not just like free money yeah yeah okay so this is actually
this is like a common misconception I think it goes I think people misconceive this in both directions one direction people go like oh my god the investors don't expect anything whatever you get the money and you just build and then whatever and and there are I think some founders who kind of have that mindset of like whatever stupid money I'll take their money and then you know I'll just build whatever I want and like can't do that you got to have to have some and then I think
if you have the opposite perception of like once you've taken their money like your own didn't like you can't do anything anymore that's also not very far from the truth right but there is an expectation that they're going to give you a dollar and they would very much like something slightly more than a dollar back right and like eventually they expect a lot of their dollars to go to zero right and they make their money when not a dollar goes to a dollar 20 they make money
when a dollar goes to ten dollars oh interesting and that's the misalignment is like you know they invest in 10 companies five of them go to zero four of them return two dollars and then one of them returns 10 that's how they make money they're not like bunting they're swinging for the fences and exactly oh interesting okay exactly and there comes the mismatch because as a founder often a bunch is a pretty good deal for you as personally right like you get
to build what you want to build you know you can make a lot of money on that it's that your motivation and stuff like that and I'll admit like I don't think I fully appreciated it when I walked into it but that's the thing that like before people like totally cast the venture route versus the indie route you have to just have to understand what their business is if you understand their business and you're okay with that like it can be really a good fit
right and this is me justifying now that I'm like permanently committed to this knowing what you know now would you have done anything different you know years and years ago I mean sure there's like branch points where I said like oh no you know of course it's like oh I could have waited to raise that round like if I were starting from scratch would I do revenue cat like indie hacker mode versus not I think the reality is and this is different
depending what you're building I think if you're building an app this is not a hundred percent true but generally my advice is like do not raise money if you're building an app like a subscription app or at least like bootstrap it to a point where like it's working and like it's really working or be ready to shut it down raise very little money and be ready to shut it down expect that it's going to be a hit or not a hit I think apps getting
venture returns is very very difficult I would imagine they're hard to get the money in the first place to yeah well with that's why right because the people have looked at historicals and there have been winners out there but they're very rare it's not like in B2B sass it's like you as long as you have product market fit the way that the pricing works and all of that stuff it you can kind of stumble your way which
is basically my path is just in stumbling my way up the revenue scale to hand to your question like going back I think for a product like revenue cat like it's so broad and there's so much we can build and I think there's a real advantage to reaching some level of complexity very quickly so that we can like service this industry and kind of become a leader and all of that stuff that doing it bootstrapped would have been very challenging
right because you're like you're constantly hand to mouth you're like oh I want to build a thing but like I just all my money's going to pay my people and like maybe there's a little bit time I want to build the next thing
but like I got a wait or whatever and as a chance for us the only real bandwidth or the only real constraint is like can we hire that can we find people that will work well with us and can we scale our team and processes and stuff and like do we have enough mental bandwidth to like take that on
those are our constraints cash is not a constraint you haven't felt that pressure to 10x oh of course yeah yeah I mean I mean you probably have from like from 2017 or whatever yeah I mean I've playing my investors have hit they're in the money as it were right and I think that's also a you talk about like decisions like what I do differently there's some micro choices there where it's like okay I probably took on too much money at too high a number that I wasn't confident enough at the
time and I think that put me under pressure and I felt sort of like oh god I'm not going to be able to make this and so I think there's points there where I would have like this is one of those like non intuitive things where it's like actually saying your company's worth less is very good for you right set your expectations there's a big mismatch like people's egos want the numbers to be as big as possible but like really
being smaller your future self will thank you under promise over deliver right and so there's some some some decisions this shizzens there I will say like I think you can maybe say this is a benefit or a writ or a downside depends on sort of how you look at it but I think it kind of forced me into
being like yeah I've got to build something massive which I think I could say I'm happy about because I think it's working and not gone wood like it's like we're on that path and that's really cool like I'll be able to look back and be like geez I built something there's no way I could
have built this like without taking that path I don't think right and so that's a pretty definitive answer yeah yeah yeah and hindsight it's like yeah I think like if I hadn't there might have been a where world where I would have been like this is really hard maybe I should
like take off the gas a little bit we go a little bit slower and then I don't know where we would be right like maybe we wouldn't be in the position we are so and that's a hard game to play yeah yeah it's it's hard to like go back and just really almost no point there I'll say there was
this one conversation with a family member a few years in when we had like first started seeing some success and raise some money and stuff where he was like oh just expecting me to be like enthusiastically yes he's like oh would you do it all again and I'm just like I don't know I don't
think that's a simple answer right there was a lot there was a lot of sacrifice I'll ask you that question like with a poll it like especially now seeing like how it all wound up and everything like would you knowing what you know about the journey like would you've done it
would you do it again oh my gosh I'm a heartbeat like yeah yeah okay see I've made the wrong choice in life because I go like oh man I don't know it was pretty tough there for you guys well let's give a little context real quick I don't know that everybody listening will know the full context so
so Christian built out Apollo it became very successful I don't know if you ever kind of did the indie hacker like share numbers thing but you know seems like it was very successful I think was the most liked and incredibly loved a lot of very passionate users and then read it basically
shut it down like it was going to charge a ridiculous fee for API access which was untenable and yeah we don't need to get into all of that but you had to like completely pull the plug so yeah would you do it again it's yeah it's one of those things where it's like it's easy to look at it
and be like that last June like there was a lot of strife like that was probably like Apollo was you mentioned a lot of sacrifices and a lot of like you know probably metal hardships over the years but like for Apollo it was pretty smooth like I was how fortunate I was not lost on me it was
very smooth for like the whole time and I think I kind of got the like the black hole dying star of strife all at once and that was rough but it's one of those things where it's like I don't know I kind of think of it like a TV show where if you have a TV show you really like and it gets
like nine seasons you're like holy shit like and it actually has like kind of an exciting ending right right exactly and so it's hard to be like oh man we only got nine seasons like like no that's freaking awesome like it was it was a great run I had a ton of time ton of fun doing it
yeah and it's like yeah I just feel really fortunate that it was lasted as long as it did and I and I got to build something so cool that influenced so many people and I got to meet so many different people like you folks in doing it that it's that it's hard to be grumpy about it would
feel almost like insincere or black and gratitude for you know kind of the carats I was given yeah was there a part of you I sometimes I mean this is very joke I think anybody who works on something for a long time you're just like god damn I wish just like I wish I could go do something
else some days right was there a party that was kind of relieved like okay I got like a good clean out on this thing I don't do right clients my whole life honestly like it's it's a complex answer because I think when I was in the trenches with the Apollo like maybe through the chaos I had
like zero burnout just because like if I didn't want to work on it for a few days and just wanted to screw off like I had no employees like I could just do that and as a result of that freedom I a follow still felt fresh to me like nine years in and I was still having a fun it's a ton of fun doing
it so like I guess if you would ask me when I was still maintaining it I would be like no like I could do this forever like keep it coming but it was kind of one of the things were after it ended I mean I was suddenly able to do some like freed up some time I was able to work on some different
projects that I had kind of had in the back of my head that I was like oh this kind of is nice in some ways like I wasn't like hoping it would end but like when it did it definitely had some some positives and and and to feed some stuff up in a fun way I mean and not to constantly be bringing
back to venture world but like because your basis was like your time and years and whatever and you generally felt like those were well spent and you enjoyed it you were clearly in the money right like the what you're in one investor had returned had a gotten a great return on on the investment
and like so everybody you know it's it sucks for people who use app and maybe whatever but you know everybody made money as they say oh no and it sucks for me too like it was like in financial ways and like it's not how you want to sit spend your time right dealing with
no no no and I was having like I'm trying to be appreciative like it objectively sucked but like it's one of those things where it's like you had such a good run that it's hard to only look at the suck like you had such yeah and there's there's a question I mean like what's the long-term
ownership I think every business founder indie person has to think about this I think you know if your inputs are low and and whatever and it's just you it's like well you can shut it down it's fine and you know or maybe you can sell it to somebody that's fine and some businesses that
gets more complicated right like as he gets bigger I think that's maybe the revenue cat thing and the venture back thing I think probably more generally is like your outcomes become like just shutting it down because like oh we lost our main thing and whatever like probably not an
option yeah there's probably a few more yeah probably like okay we got to figure this out like you got to do something different it maybe you know maybe when the better option for the people would be just to like you know take your chips and go home and I don't think people always make
the rational decision there it's or maybe rational for the investors but not rational for the people involved there's some amount of blessing and a clean ending and uh and uh yeah like the final season season finale was really intense it was yeah on rotten tomatoes it's like strong all the
way through so like that's true yeah no I'll take that I'll take that one of the things I've always I've been curious about since last year and you and I haven't haven't talked about this maybe you've talked about this on another podcast or something but with the subscription model you could
have potentially raised the price to a point and lowered your API call like been more stingy with the API calls to maybe find the right balance like did you go through that process in that whatever it was like two months of kind of back and forth with Reddit of like can I actually
make this thing work under this new paradigm yeah for sure like and I talked to like so many people in the community like giving numbers and kind of being like how do we do you see a path forward here and it was kind of one of those things where like the the biggest thing that I think kind of
put everything in the shitter was that they basically gave 30 days from the day they announced the pricing to when you would start incurring fees and in Apollo's case it was in the realm of like $20 million a year which was like far beyond anything Apollo was making it was very much like uh
like these costs are gonna hit like a brick very very soon so like well what do I do about that and there was the aspect of like I have a certain amount of existing subscribers that have a locked in fee that I can increase because you know inherently how subscriptions work there was a lot
of calculus around that and it ultimately came down to maybe if there was more time something I could have maybe like steered the ship in a different direction and made something work but just the speed at which they forced everything to happen like I think about like how when Apple bought Darksky I
think they gave like 18 months before the API got turned off and I think they extended like six months beyond that so it was like having 30 days and it wasn't only switching out like your weather API source it was like switching out like the API source it was very aggressive but like it's one
of the things where even if I was like hibernated Apollo for like a few months kind of sorted out all the things and then like resurrected it with like a new pricing model it's one of those things were like even playing that back like the math just didn't make sense yeah well I mean you get this $20
you $20 million a year basic expense right like so like you get okay great you get everybody to cover that what's left for Christian like what's left to like invest it was like I would have these astronomical costs that by the way like one of the discussions I was having with red it was like
are you able to like could we sign a contract where like these costs would be fixed at least for a year or two period just so like say I make this work in six months down the road you don't go oh shit like our Klang Desson attempt to kill these apps didn't work let's double the prices again
like so that wouldn't happen they couldn't guarantee anything like that so there was this like the financials this didn't really make sense where I'd be like having to charge fire beyond what I felt a reddit app was worth only to get like pennies back on the dollar for my work there and at
the same time building on this like incredibly scraggly foundation of it really seems like they don't want developers on their platform anymore you're kind of in there in like like a renter squatting where you're like you're legally maybe entitled to it but nobody wants you there and like that feels
like a very shaky foundation to build like a long-term product on where you convinced like that was the the goal was just to shake off all the clients like that they're party clients yeah 100% I don't know anything but I'm just curious why they didn't just say like hey we're just
shutting down all third party clients because it's like is required for our business do you think they would just had a bigger uprising from the greater reddit first like I want to say it was like this big they thought they're a lot better it genuinely did not seem like that because like
one of the things that was the weirdest about it was like this all happened in like May and like the January I had like an annual call with reddit and they were like no everything's great with the API we're hoping to make some changes to like maybe what's available but we're like no really big
changes the API this year that we have like planned in any capacity it was like three months later and they're like actually it's gonna be 20 million dollars a year and it's like well that's like a big change from January sounds like somebody's running founder mode inside that company yeah yeah
exactly in my head they were like we can't just say we're shutting down all the apps because pandemonium will break out so we're gonna have this kind of like maybe if we just wrap it up like we're just choking them to death and maybe that will go over better I hope not if I had to do that
for a business reason and maybe I would maybe this will probably I'll be tested on this at some point I'd hope I would just be like yo this is what we're doing we're gonna IPO this year we don't want anybody view and read it not on reddit so we're gonna be we're gonna be this is why we're
doing this so and I genuinely think myself and everyone else would have kind of appreciated that a little bit more because it would have been more genuine yeah I just like if you're gonna screw somebody just tell him why you just tell him well one okay so I even tell him why just tell
me your screw him yeah yes I'm doing this to screw you okay cool yeah we know you're at least pretty fast we could save a lot of phone calls right right exactly and it was even like the the stringing along throughout the phone calls kind of being like oh no no we got we have your best
interest in mind like this is all as well sorry to keep bringing it back to founder of stuff but I do feel like employees at a company just don't necessarily feel empowered to say that right like they might know maybe there wasn't a directive they might know that that's the strategy whenever
but like it's just hard to say stuff like that when you're not you know the buck doesn't stop with you you know and then when you and then when there's an asymmetry where it's like you're the whole guy you're the whole thing you can say and do you can act as a polo with unanimity but they can't
right so there's like this real like agency asymmetry when you're dealing with folks I don't know if it was that removed though because like like in normal cases sure but the the guy I was talking to was like right below CEO level and was like the CEO was like CC it in a lot of the emails and was
like very privy to the conversation so it wasn't like I don't think there was really any disconnect there like if I had to guess again this is just guessing but like from it seemed like there was like their IPO and there was like kind of like a quick rush at the door to kind of wrap up these
loose ends yeah there's a lot going on at a company when you're getting ready to IPO it's crazy yeah and they were like okay we've got this loose end we need to tie it off like who has an idea and maybe the idea was no no no and you can't fault them for that and I guess it worked are there
any extant like Reddit third party clients I think there's like a few but from I don't hear a lot of about them and I don't think they're necessarily doing well it's one of those things and it's tricky because even if you look at like the revenue numbers of a company it's like when 90% of your
revenues going toward paying the bills it's like yeah it's like it's not a great business right were you like a substantial number of their DA use that they would that it even made a difference Apollo was the biggest third party app I knew that much but I imagine their first party was still
bigger oh 100% like probably like order of meds that was one of the funniest things one of the phone call they were like do you know what percentage of our users you are and I was like no like I I wouldn't know that and I was like yeah and I was like no like what percentage and they were like
oh no we're not sure I was like I have the numerator I do not have the denominator right right and I was like what a weird question ask we're like obviously I don't know but seemingly you don't have that all the venture back companies out there that are worried that you'll never get to IPO Reddit
got there they did it through all of it they figured it out you can do it too you know just a lot of chaos 20 years or whatever it was you know it might take you a few might take you a few but you'll get there there's hope for all of us well I did want to talk about some of your projects post Apollo
starting a farm moving a pair some extra points a lot of wasps because I'm an avid user of one of your current projects which is Juneau on the apple vision pro how is that gone I think a lot of people I'm curious I think I'm especially curious why you didn't make it a subscription after
because like I don't know what I paid with the five bucks up front like in January and it's pretty much the only app I use a vision pro and I use it like you know on a at least a weekly basis I would say most of my ideas don't come from a place of logic inherently I think it was one
of those things where it was like it was very much like I think like the week before the vision pro came out YouTube was like yeah we're not going to do it and I was like oh I have all this like code from Apollo for handling YouTube embeds that I could probably like spin off into an app really
quickly like and again same thing where I'm like if only like I want to watch YouTube on the vision pro I'm the only person that uses this app fine so it's like oh I'll build it and I was like oh like and again it was a very short period of time so it's kind of like I'll just throw
like five bucks on it that seems like if you paid three grand for a headset like you can afford five bucks it wasn't like a grand plan you're under appreciating your grand strategy there but you saw that YouTube wasn't going to take their property like they weren't going to claim their right right and you were like ah great there's a Christian shape hole right here exactly because it was like they have this excellent like full documentation on like this YouTube embedding capability because
like it's so common that you want to do it in like apps for instance like Twitter or something where like someone posted YouTube video and you're like how do I play that without kicking them out to Safari or YouTube like so they have this like it's basically just like an i-frame where you can
just play the YouTube video there and I'm like great I use that in Apollo for years like I'll just play the video there and since it's just an i-frame and they give you some level of controls I can manipulate a little bit to make it look a little bit more vision OS-esque and it's been a lot of fun
like it was it was such a fun rush again to be like oh shit I've got a week to build this or like two weeks or whatever it was and just like what features are important like what can I build and I really went back into that like early Apollo mode of just like scrambling it out the door and I
remember like we didn't get the vision pro in Canada so I ended up like driving down a new hamster to get it and I remember like charging at a supercharger and like seeing on my phone like oh it's been approved I'm like oh sick okay good the whole trip wasn't like worth worthless so it was like
it was like that last minute that it was like launching the following morning and I like finally got that approval it was a lot fun and it was one of the things where it's like yeah even if like the journey was so fun that like I didn't especially if they're being such an expensive headset
I didn't have like oh my god this is gonna be my next appall out like this is gonna make a ton of money it was kind of just like I'm gonna enjoy this hopefully it'll be beneficial other people who want to watch YouTube I think the positioning of the good media app you know experience like
and it might not only always be only YouTube right like you could you could imagine a world and like we're getting that foothold was definitely worth your two weeks and then you'll see it probably depends on mostly how the AVP plays out right I'm curious about that like have sales trickled to like
almost nothing no weirdly like they've it's obviously like it's very much like vision pro came out high point like launch another country's high point but it didn't go to zero it still makes like you know like a hundred bucks a day some days like it's decent for like yeah it's just a core
utility really I mean it should be built in exactly and that's the thing and I'm kind of like I'm looking forward almost the day where like YouTube does come out with something because they can do so many things that I can't as like through the facilities I'm using it would be cool to see like
a full-fledged app that you can get really down to the knit and gritty with do you have any user analytics or I guess maybe even just absorb to like understand what the usage of the vision pro is it kind of is like this weird platform for Apple that's kind of like on the shelf a little bit like
is it gonna like totally flop is it gonna kind of I mean like I said in my very limited time I have to use a vision pro it's pretty much all I use in the vision pro it's like a kickback to the vision pro and watch a little YouTube it's like my wine down time it's honestly like the vision
for like not even my app specifically with the vision pro is a great way to watch video like it really does excel at that so it's like I hear you numbers wise I don't have any like analytics I probably could check like App Store Connect I don't it's really hard because you don't have you
don't know the opt-in rate really so it's like eating absolute numbers is really tricky exactly and it's one of those things where it's like yeah it's done well enough when people seem to be downloading it better it's never it hasn't really mattered too much to me like if I had to guess like
personally I haven't like my vision pro you suggest declined over the months and like I don't use it as much as I used to and it wouldn't surprise me if that's reflected in the numbers where people try it joy it maybe put it in the closet and don't but it's cool that for a lot of people it seems
like when they get the vision pro like it's an app they want to check out yes see we have two big projects now right that you're working on yeah that and pixel files yeah I guess most of your time is spent on pixel pals well or most of your time some paddle boarding would it I'm terrible
paddle boarding that's something I need to work on I'm just trying to pick a stereotypical like Nova Scotia activity I feel like yeah ice skating but no no I can't do that very well either I need a good example but no like it comes back to me not being the best at like logic and
business is like pixel pals does very well and it makes like an order of magnitude more than Juneau does the the YouTube vision pro app but it's like I was so entranced by like the vision pro um for like three or four months and like I just worked on that a ton you got nerds sniped
basically yeah yeah exactly I was just so entranced by like even though the numbers were like made zero sense to focus on that versus the other thing it was it was just a lot of fun to work on so I ended up doing that for months and months and months and I'm working on pixel pals a lot
more this summer but yeah I kind of got lost in the sauce a little there for a few months on what would be the most beneficial work on but it was a lot of fun at least pixel pals is I think it's really interesting as a project because I think most indie devs they usually stay in utilities
or like whatever and it's it's kind of at a intersection of games and utilities maybe right like and games are freaking lucrative like looking at the app store games are still dominating actually actually is it maybe it's apps now are maybe 50 percent it's maybe equal but yeah no point and
it's a lot like it's kind of like the vision pro where it's like yeah we stay in the utilities lane so long that having something that's like not at all in that area is kind of like you're stretching different muscles yeah and then when there's just like more creative surface area like nothing
you don't have to do stuff because people ask for a purpose right you can just like build cool things he's either cute like an instant fully for the art you know it's a lot of fun and you get to work like with Apollo like the extent I'd work with this on is normally to get like custom
app icons done but with pixel pals like you can get a lot of like pixel art done by some like really talented people and I was gonna ask the next is like are you doing the creative fully or no I'd love if I was able to do that because pixel art's like I don't know it's so nostalgic like that
would be a really cool art form to get into it's one of those things where I think I would done and Kruger myself and be like oh yeah just squares right like I could just draw squares then you're like no I absolutely cannot do this no no it's like it's like cross stitching and
all that stuff where it's like it seems simple on the surface but the other is definitely an art to it and it frees up a lot of time where like I don't know with like engineering work you iterate until a point where you like it's fast enough it works well enough you know ship it where it's like
the few times I've attempted pixel art like you ship to pixel right and then left and up and down and they're like I don't like there's no definitive like this is done and you can kind of get lost in the weeds there just it becomes easier to like let the professional stand on that that might
be a hallmark of like good artists is like they can just know when it's done you know like just know like it's good enough you know like I can ship this I've seen enough things I can ship and this is on the level but even that I think peer reviews and stuff like that is helpful I worked on a
iPhone game for a little while and definitely when you had a couple artists versus one like it was a much better process because like the artists could then review and like cross check critique each other's work which is true for programming too I think in a lot of cases have you ever I mean
I've mentioned Apple but have you ever like worked with other programmers like had your code critiqued and stuff not since like university no no thanks to you're like one of this untouched tribes like your code is probably just like oh it's mayhem there's no yeah there was some there
were some files in Apollo that were like I'm sure broke like the Geneva Convention it turns out like what you were allowed to be doing there's a real freedom to it though there's a real freedom to it and I understood it so that's coding founder mode we're gonna keep bringing
him back to founder mode it's like just just just do what you got to do if you could probably move really fast and it's debt you took and you don't care and might not even be debt it's only debt if it prevents you from doing something in the future right otherwise it's just free money right and
a lot of the time it was like debt in terms of like I think this is a good way to do it and then like you know your two goes by and you become a better programmer that's the worst honestly those are the worst debts that you take when you don't even realize it's a debt you're like I'm just
doing this because I think this is like the right architecture you do a half decent job and then you realize later like there's so many things in in revenue cat that Miguel and I made decisions on in 2017 18 where I'm like why are we still having this bug and it's like well sir because in 2017
you decided to make this all one sequel table and I'm like fair enough yeah get blame yeah no but it's like when you're not maybe at such a big company in some ways it is kind of fun to like look back on those things with like new better eyes and be like oh my god like that was such a
dumb way to tackle that like I can do that in half the lines of code with half the bugs like it's like going back to and playing soccer against like your elementary school team it's like yeah this is easy like these kids suck like where there's a certain fun to that sometimes but yeah it becomes
like anything where there's too much of it it kind of bugs down the whole project yeah but you know but you don't necessarily need to address it I think this was one thing Miguel and I I think debated and then I think in in the past I've I've worked in places where we were much more delicate
with like our architecture and all this stuff we never wanted to create debt and I think one of the things we did while revenue cat was being like we are going to consciously create some debt and just know that like some of it's gonna get thrown away would be judicious with where we do it
and that's been huge we take that all the time will your VC funded yeah okay equity and debt David we need to do a 101 because like these are things like equity and debt totally different vehicles and they have different consequences and also people do take debt it's called venture debt
and it's super that's actually the dangerous stuff in some cases but we'll do a whole podcast on it I honestly enjoy that next time I'm having a debate with people on Twitter about it everybody can be informed oh yeah yeah I'm sure that'll make Twitter debates with or enjoy it a little
for you go listen to my podcast aren't changing the world with our podcasts I'm saying your tweets change the world and make your podcasts are kind of like a separate thing yeah you know that's that's what I'm here for so well Christian has been so much fun chatting about all this and we did
kind of wind around but should we talk about founder mode one more time I think maybe a little light on that I think for a lot of folks hopefully this is going to be a freeing conversation of like hey I don't have to have all my shit together to go build something just look at this mess
like how success it's yeah thank you so far at least set it but like ultimately I think the takeaway from this conversation is like users are what matter and like creating value for them and what you did incredibly well without process because you were very passionate and founded
community and what people need to do even if even if they can't you know form a subreddit of passionate people who are going to kind of like what you said like they kind of managed me you know your subreddit kind of managed you even if you don't can't build that kind of community around your
app you need to be talking to you know I mean something we do a ton at revenue cat which I deeply appreciate about kind of our culture is that you can't let the users drive the ship but if you're going to build a ship that people are going to get on you got to make sure that like
they're going to find something valuable it's a trip they want to take I think that's something you've done incredibly well without all the fluff and the process and the like BS it's like you did it your way and you were successful and like I said you're what you know three for four like
three of your apps are incredibly loved I mean again I'm a Juno user even though it's like this side project you just tossed out in a week it like fulfilled a need and like is a genuinely great experience on the Apple Vision Pro that I wouldn't be having in the Safari YouTube experience I
totally agree I feel like our industry like one of the worst like not even like gatekeeping but accidentally gatekeeping things is I think we we make it seem like we're like wizards over here or something and it's like people like oh my god like I could never do programming or I could never
build an app that's like crazy stuff but it's like it's really not like it's you don't need a lot of processes you just need a good idea and like kind of the conviction to want to see it come to fruition but like you look at like free and kernel Sanders like you know you just had a good recipe
and you just wanted to make some chicken and like it works like you just gotta have a good idea and you want it gotta gotta want to see it happen but yeah yeah I just mean it's yeah there's a lot of processes that I think like for for people from the outside looks very intimidating that I think
you can break down a lot of those walls and it's it's not as bad as it looks all right anything you want to share as we wrap up I guess people can follow you on Twitter you've got a burgeoning YouTube career actually freaking loved your YouTube video on building your own keyboard was
incredible watch the whole thing sent it to my son or about like a little bit of keyboard nerds so that's awesome you're my people yeah no it's it's it's like anything it's just you want to do something and you put it out in the world and hope people enjoy it too but yeah I'm Christian
everywhere pretty much that I keep the consistent name so it's easy to ease it to find me all right well thanks so much for joining it says there's really fun conversation oh no the pleasure is on mine I hope there was something valuable in there thanks so much for listening if you have a minute please leave a review in your favorite podcast player you can also stop by chat.subplub.com to join our private community