Indie panel discussion

It is King's Day tomorrow in the Netherlands. So national holidays, time for something completely different. A panel discussion. 6 people on a recording. What could possibly go wrong right?

I'm with

• Malin and Kai. Their company is called Triple Glazed Studios. Their main product is called Orbit.
• Josh Holtz, maintainer of FastLane.tools and a couple OTTER great apps.
• Chris Vasselli, creator of Nihongo app, a modern Japanese dictionary and study tool
• Lybron who responded to my shoutout on Twitter and was willing to join without any idea what he was getting himself into. He creates a HealthKit related app called Health Auto Export.

Malin, Kai, Josh and Chris have been previous guests on my podcast.

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Transcript

Jeroen Leenarts: 0:46

So before we get started, I wanted to share something with you. I was sitting here with the recording, I just it finished it took two hours. And we had a lot of fun. And I was thinking, how am I ever going to edit this? It's a, it's a six track recording. And if I want to edit it properly, it'll probably take me a whole lot of time. And I think the basics of the recording are good or solid, and had some feedback by one of the participants. If I could make one specific cut on some content, I did that. And I reckon I will just do a Josh Holtz on this recording, and just put it out there. I hope you like it, and joy, and talk to you next week. Hi, and welcome to something new on my podcast, I am sitting here with not myself but with five other people. So that six in total. I'm sitting here with Josh, Chris, Marlin, Lebrun, and Kai. And we're just going to talk a little bit about indie development, lifestyle, lifestyle, and what it is like to actually try and bring your own product to market and what the effects are, and why they start doing this and all kinds of things that are related to that topic. And what's interesting is that we have a very diverse group, both in backgrounds, and in the level of indie goodness that they actually are doing. Because we have some somebody in here who is like full time doing that's, that's the only professional thing that's doing. We have somebody who does open source and some indie apps. And that's, that's the whole spectrum really, I think. So we're just going to dig in and talk with everybody and try and gain some insights. Whether or not it's a good idea to be an indie developer. Well, according to this crowd, it's obviously going to be, but maybe there's some arguments in there that can help you think about your own journey. And maybe indie lifestyle is something that you should investigate. recording stopped itself, but it is still recording, I think. Yeah, but yeah, that's all. Okay. This is so much fun. Okay, um, so yeah. Let's just begin with with one person. LeBron, can you tell a little bit about your product? Just like a few words?

Lybron: 3:18

Yeah. So I created health auto exports as a means of quickly exporting Apple Health Data, because I realized that there's a demand for that type of application. Something that I going to expand it on was to allow syncing data to the iPad and the Mac. And so then you can perform exports from there as well. I think one of the biggest complaints about Apple Health is that you can't access that data on the Mac and the iPad. So that's the gap that I'm trying to bridge.

Jeroen Leenarts: 3:50

And and how much of your time are you spending on this product? Is it full time part time? Just the occasional few hours?

Lybron: 3:59

Right? No, it's part time. And the aim is to really ramp up and try to make it a full time thing. Yeah, I mean, up until now, it's really been a hobby project, but not really investing the time. So I would say, yeah, like maybe an extra three hours per day or so like on weekdays. But I do have a full time job. So but yeah, hopefully this kind of takes me to the other end of the spectrum, where then I can just do this full time.

Jeroen Leenarts: 4:29

Okay. And then Marlene and Kai, you have your own company, and your own products. You're working full time on this company, but I prefer working full time on your product.

Kai: 4:43

I'd say we're probably working about 40 hours a week on orbits and the other 40 hours a week on all the other things.

Jeroen Leenarts: 4:51

Okay. And the other things is just consulting freelancing, and just making some extra income and the product orbit. What is it about?

Malin: 5:01

Yeah, so over this time tracking and invoicing app for both Mac OS, iPad OS and iOS, and soon was so much was it's a super exciting. Yeah, we brought it in, started writing it in Swift UI started with Mac OS. And yeah, yeah, came out. June last year, I think we released the first the Mac app and then released iOS app in October, like one week after iOS 14 was released. Couldn't make it for day one, because we were given 24 hours. No.

Jeroen Leenarts: 5:31

That's a bit short.

Malin: 5:33

But yeah, so Yeah, time tracking the invoicing app for people who do freelance work or other type of jobs where they want to invoice for the time. Okay.

Jeroen Leenarts: 5:43

And Chris You work on knee hongo. And I think that's something you do full time. It's the only professional thing that you do besides doing things at home for your child.

Chris Vasselli: 5:56

That's right. It's, it's been full time. Or like you say, kind of my only professional project for last two years now. And probably doing it about half time that and half time to stay at home dad. Right now.

Jeroen Leenarts: 6:09

Okay. And can you tell a little bit about the new hongo? Product?

Chris Vasselli: 6:13

Yeah, sure. You hongo is a Japanese dictionary app, and also flashcards and various sort of study tools, bunch of things for people that are trying to learn Japanese. So the idea behind it was, it was sort of the tool that I wish existed when I started. Actually, when I went and lived in Japan, I was kind of the tool I wanted to try and help me study things that I was actually encountering in the real world. So a lot of the features in the app are built around ways to get words that you're encountering, in your day to day life, or in some sort of anything media, you're consuming books, you're reading animais, or TV shows you're watching, get those words into your flashcards really easily and be able to study those instead of trying to study from some sort of pre made decks, things like that. So that's sort of the core focus of it. Plus, I'm just trying to make a really great iOS app that's just sort of a first in class. You know, good iOS experience.

Jeroen Leenarts: 7:10

Okay, cool. And, Josh, you're also an interesting person, in how you spend your time I really. Yep. Yeah, cuz you do some open source, I guess. And you also have some products, which you also have part of your income is due to a sponsorship by Google. But you also make some income by I don't know how many small indie products. So what's the what's the story there.

Josh Holtz: 7:40

So I started a software consulting company about 10 years ago, and I did a lot of mobile dev, all the other things. But mobile automation kind of found my heart along the way. So I maintain that tool 40 hours a week now starting end of last year. But along the way, last year, I also kind of found indie dev and the community, I kind of want to, I spent a lot of time doing dev tools, but I kind of wanted to get back in touch with like, doing iOS apps and community cuz I kind of felt disconnected for a while. And indie dev kind of felt like the right direction to go. So I create a, I have two small apps in the App Store right now. A third one coming soon, that are mainly like side projects for me to kind of learn new different iOS areas, while also kind of having fun along the way with the apps I create.

Jeroen Leenarts: 8:47

So that's, that's Fastlane tools. That's another another RSS. Correct? And what is that kid? Connect kids? Yeah, yeah. So you keep busy. And you already told a little bit about your third products, which I'm really curious about one of the launch and how I like the product, because it's it's very interesting, as

Josh Holtz: 9:11

almost no use case, but also kind of a use case. So it'll be it'll be a classic Josh project.

Jeroen Leenarts: 9:20

Okay. So what you see here is we have five people who are very different in the level of indie developer lifestyle that they're living, because we have somebody who's like, really full time, that's the only thing they're doing somebody part time next to a day job. And then two people who are in single company, but to have a sort of an indie product, but also have to, like, do consulting stuff next to that. So that's sort of like paid income, but then on your own. And we have Josh, who's, who's the who's the wildcard. Really?

Kai: 9:54

Because all the different options. Yeah, I'll do one.

Jeroen Leenarts: 9:58

Right. So so just just to get things started. Can Can one of you really tell us a little bit about why you want to be an indie iOS software developer and and why it is so important for you to actually run the risk of having your own product and having to market it and having to do all the development and everything else on your own.

Lybron: 10:26

I can go with somebody yesterday. Yeah, just yeah, I'll go for it. I don't want to take too much time on my story, but I mean, I'm a self taught developer. My goal in life growing up was to be an airline pilots. That didn't really work out like that. I graduated from university just around when the financial crisis happened. So then your alliances were pretty much like what they're doing now. And they're like, we're not going to fly. So that was bad timing, then I was looking for something else to do. So that's when the iPad came along. And I was like, That's really interesting. I could think I could learn how to make apps. So yeah, I became a self taught developer. Around that time. As time went on, I tried some startups, stuff like that, which kind of took me outside the realm of iOS development. So it was like doing back in development with Ruby, or no JS, that kind of stuff. A web development, but that's the stuff you get paid to do, right. Like, that's kind of the easiest, or the low hanging fruit in terms of jobs. Also, by the way, I'm from Barbados originally. So you know, a tiny island where there's not really much of a tech ecosystem or anything. So yeah, I mean, in terms of passion, then iOS development is where it is, when it comes to programming. I do this stuff I can get paid to do. But for iOS development, like for indie development, then this is like, being able to do something that I truly enjoy. And it the time goes by and I don't feel like you know, you just get in the zone, and you're coding or creating good stuff. And of course, I love Apple products. So in a nutshell, that's kind of why that's why I do this.

Jeroen Leenarts: 12:16

Okay, and melanin chi. Yeah. And anything you can add to that?

Malin: 12:21

Yeah. So I mean, for me, I always enjoy it, like creating products and being part of like, the parts that are surrounding the development, I always been like, anything that I work on, I always been quite involved in like the direction of the product in general, even if I am working on the coding part, mostly. But that's why I was so like, when Kai and I were like, I think we've been needing to track our time in one way or another for such a long time. And after like trying probably like a dozen different apps that to like both to do time tracking and to do invoicing. That sort of felt like a perfect sort of fit where we could where I could, like actually do everything related to it. So with Orbitz, I really like that I'm not just doing the not just developing the app, I'm also designing it, and I'm also doing their back end development. And I'm involved in like, the marketing part, which we're planning on pushing a bit more quite soon. But like marketing, material, making making banners and those things, making the website and like the product page. And I think those things are just so much fun. I think if you like I think development is fun, but I just really like having the opportunity to like, decide the entire direction of of something and building and being involved in all those parts. And I think that just fits all those areas fits quite well together as well.

Kai: 13:38

Yeah, I think that's also, for me, at least, when I was getting kind of entering my career as a software developer, I, there were often situations where we needed something designed, and I was someone who was like, cool, then I guess I designed that. And then everyone else in the company was surprised. It's like, Wait, who designed this? So I did that because I needed this thing to look nicer. And so I kind of whip something up that we can kind of have as a placeholder at least, and people really liked it. It's like Alright, cool. So now for the next project I both designed and developed. And then we needed at that time, I was kind of doing back end and and web stuff. And then we need an iris app. So cool. I really like Apple stuff. So I guess I know, make the back end, the front end and the iOS app. And then we need a design for that. Cool, I guess I make that and we need an app icon. Cool, then I'm maybe make that as well. So for me, it was always feeling pretty natural to just if there was a roadblock somewhere where I needed something done, I and no one else was available, I just do it myself and indie development kind of feels like that way just constantly, you're always having, you're always the only one that can do it. So you're kind of forced to do it. And it's it's kind of fun. And it's kind of It feels different if you work on a product. But you know, you wrote every single line of code you you drew every single line of pixel or on the app icon or in the design. And I always find it very satisfying and especially with tech, it really enables you to do things completely by yourself. You start with nothing you start with a computer and a few weeks later you have a product that you can use yourself and shortly after that other people can use it might actually find useful and I think that's super cool kind of journey to go through. And I think that's kind of almost addicting.

Malin: 15:38

Yeah, I agree with Guy and I think one thing I also like is like, I think if I was Similar to Ky, if I need something, I just want to try making it myself. And I think that is the thing with anything the same when I do the same when I'm developing something, I might find like a framework to do something. But I indeed ideally like to make things from scratch rather than relying on third party frameworks the first time I do it. So I try to always like, experiment with things and learn the things along the way. So I think that's the same with the design. I think if you pick up the sign and try that out, you might end up really liking it as well. And I think that's sort of the case for me, I've been the sort of dipping my neck needing to do all those things. And then, rather than asking, like, waiting for someone else to finish something for me, I wanted to like learn it myself. So I could do it. And then I just ended up really liking all parts of it. Okay. Yeah.

Jeroen Leenarts: 16:29

And, Chris, you you took a little bit of a different journey, actually. Because what it feels like is that the bronze and Marlin really, were doing something like either a full time job or a full time consulting, freelancing. And then when looking for products, and you did it a little bit different, I think you you just ended up with a product. For some reason, can you calculate? Can you take that into account when you tell your story?

Chris Vasselli: 16:56

Yeah, sure. I mean, my story was that I went to like I like I mentioned earlier, I went and lived in Japan for a while, and I went there. When I left, I was actually planning on going and getting into video game development, I really wanted to be an indie game developer. And that was had been like a dream of mine since I was a kid was to go do this. So I went and quit my job. And my husband got a job teaching English Japan. So I took this as an opportunity to go start doing indie game development, I ended up not really liking it all that much. Once I got there and actually got started doing it, I liked the software part of it, but not as much the like game design part of it. So I ended up sort of shifting goals and ended up finding this product, but basically was just the product that I wish existed out there and started building that. And then from there, once I started building a tool that I wanted to be using every day, that was huge, like, that was something I had never really experienced before where I think it was that that workflow of I go, and I'm out in the world, you know, living in Japan, I go and study my flashcards or whatever. And I can go and say, I wish this work this a little bit different, you know, I wish I could just tweak it this different way. And so I go to a cafe and sit down and make the code changes and, and change it and having that total control over the experience. And that workflow of being working on something that you're using and really caring about every day is just really, really satisfying. I definitely agree with Kai and Marlon about the role of design in it, that I feel like in my full time jobs I had, because I did continue to do full time jobs while I hadn't hung on the side for a long time. And I always tried to find the opportunities to design in those jobs as well. But there was also always, you know, professional designers that were on the team too. And you sort of felt like you were stepping on their toes if you were trying to do pieces yourself. So I kind of sometimes maybe found some opportunities to do that. But it was never, you know, I never felt like I had the kind of control I do with ni hongo or with indie projects. And I really enjoy the design aspect as well. So so that was a huge part of it for me as well.

Malin: 19:16

Yeah, I think like touching on that with like being in a different job and you working as a developer and like feeling like you might step on people's toes, I heard that as well. And I just felt like for one, one way I found was easy to like, get into those, like, get more in touch with the design part was try to be in meetings and like try to try to talk about things that you might know, because you're very familiar with the Apple platform. So like, if you know that Apple's human interface guidelines really well, I think many designers really appreciate that because they are across so many different platforms. If you are a mobile developer, and you know your platform, the ins and outs of it, and you know that look, if we, if we make this button differently, it's going to save us three weeks development time. That's something everyone's gonna appreciate. So I think that's a good starting point to like, show people that you interest in the design of the product and that you provide value at the same time as well. That's different from what the designers are doing. And I think that's a good entry point. And then you can sort of take it from there. That's what I found.

Jeroen Leenarts: 20:13

Okay. And Josh, are you able to talk? Yeah, yeah, he's

Josh Holtz: 20:18

starting to fall asleep, which is? Yes,

Jeroen Leenarts: 20:20

it's really cool to see you dancing around with Hudson. So you wrote into indie development and you had broken cats. Are you still have that company? Yeah, yes. Yep. That started in 2011. And was it a product company or more a people for hire kind of gig.

Josh Holtz: 20:39

So going, before we started that we actually had a startup That was like a travel based startup me and three friends and we were young I never traveled so we actually didn't really have a passion for it. But we we made stuff and we made it quickly and made it cool. So we determined we just like making cool things. And rockin cat started off as kind of a an umbrella for freelance. But we ended up turning into a consulting firm now that has 10 people. So it is not the path we started off. But it is kind of a fun path. But we kind of allowed ourselves to keep working on side things during the whole time. And wasn't strictly like 100% Consulting. So kind of had the like, indie dev kind of, well, not, I guess, startup spirit from the beginning. But startups are kind of a whole thing. We're apps, you can start off just kind of making stuff for fun on the side and see if it grows.

Jeroen Leenarts: 21:47

Okay. And since you also have a couple of products on your own, and you are working on Fastlane tools. So in that sense, how much do you consider yourself to be an indie developer?

Josh Holtz: 22:03

Not a huge amount. I don't think I'm more of an indie dev fan, I think. I mean, I do have apps out there, I don't cuz I don't have as much time as I would like to give to them. But I do I do like creating apps. And I think the App Store kind of helps me feel that indie dev eveness a little bit more, because it is so easy to have like a distribution channel. I've been creating stuff since I started doing development 1618 years ago, I don't even know. But like those were like web apps and things that like you couldn't really distribute. But like, I loved creating all aspects of it. But I think like the whole Apple Apple ecosystem just kind of helps the indie dev a lot, a lot more than what I think I've thought in the past, because you can just easily push an app to the App Store that you create in a weekend and have people buy it slash download it hopefully.

Jeroen Leenarts: 23:08

Okay, cool. And Josh actually mentioned something interesting there, because the iOS App Store is one of the avenues that you have on the Apple platform to actually monetize the work that you're doing. Thank you, Siri. So that's the iOS App Store gives you an avenue to actually monetize the products that you're creating. Now, of course, there are other channels that you can use, but the fact of monetization is an important one. Because if you're doing any development, then the biggest challenge I think you're always looking at is making sure that things remain viable. And if you're getting or thinking about going into indie development, what are your what's your advice on how you can actually make sure that the financial security is is good enough to not run unresponsive in responsible risks?

Kai: 24:06

My my number one advice is don't do on Monday. And I do do what everyone else tells you to do, which is, don't quit your job. Don't stop all your freelance stuff, build your indies thing on the side. And once it takes over a significant chunk of your income, then spend more time on it. We kind of did the reverse. Like, what if we stop everything else and just build over it for for a few months? Doesn't that sound smart? was a bit more stressful than necessary? We should have totally just done a hybrid from the start.

Josh Holtz: 24:34

I think I think both ways can actually work though. I mean, like definitely. If you have that, like secure income, then you're just kind of like, Yeah, I'll just do this a little bit. Do this here. You don't really like have that like fire under your butt to kind of keep going hard. But I don't think it's for everyone. I think it really depends on like, who you are. So I think both are good. But don't listen to me on financial advice.

Chris Vasselli: 25:04

Yeah, I think I think you got to find the fire under your butt some other way. Right? Like because I think you're right. So cuz that's, that's the path that I did was the more traditional way of like, I had a full time job. I you know, talked to my spouse and we made a plan for you know what, what it would look like when we were ready for me to leave and try to focus on you hongo full time and we didn't quite get there but we got close enough to kind of hand wavy say it was we're ready to do it. But but you know, you just have to kind of like make sure you have that passion outside because I see what you're saying. Like if you don't you don't have the financial incentive. It can be hard to try to keep up with it. But you got to find like other reasons to be passionate about what you're doing.

Josh Holtz: 25:43

Yeah, definitely not the best incentive but um, I mean, it does it does kind of help a little bit.

Jeroen Leenarts: 25:47

So But Chris, as you mentioned, it was like, kind of Yeah, kind of weird there. It's, how was that period that you were like, Okay, you made the switch from having a salary job and being relying full time on your products. And then actually, the point in time that you actually reached enough income from your product to actually say, Okay, I made it.

Chris Vasselli: 26:13

Yeah, I mean, I was lucky enough to be part of two different startups that got acquired. So I had a good financial buffer. And that was, you know, definitely huge for just peace of mind about it. But, yeah, I mean, it's a big leap of faith. And I think my initial thought was all, you know, I've got enough, you know, money and enough buffer here to do this for about a year, and see if I can make it work. And then if it didn't work in a year, I'd be going back to, you know, another another job. And, and that was a lot of pressure, especially because I had taken the whole my whole project, very casually on the side for a long time, not being really focused on how much money it was making, but more just enjoying the product for itself. And being kind of proud of that, to have just that sense that like, this is not, I'm not trying to make a ton of money off of this is just something I want to do for fun on the side, having to make that mental switch into like, wait a second, this actually really has to work for like us to put food on the table. You know, that was a tough transition. And it continues to be tough, because it's it's hard to, I don't really have like the entrepreneurial sort of drive in the way I see a lot of sort of startup founders and things. I feel like I'm definitely more of a developer and more interested in building the product. So trying to like really focus on the marketing side and really focus on like, how do I grow? This was a big transition for sure.

Jeroen Leenarts: 27:47

Okay, and you, you mentioned a financial runway there. I reckon that Marlin and Kai, when you made the pretty much the leap to orbit that you actually had some buffer there as well, from previous work that you did, or was it like, really, down and dirty, and every week, you could work on orbit was another one.

Kai: 28:11

No, we definitely had a little bit of a buffer, we, before we moved to Canada, we worked in a company in Australia, and my name was de Iris lead there. And I was kind of the tech lead for the entire country digital efforts they had. So we were almost an embarrassing amount of money there from those jobs that just gave us. But we knew that that's not what we wanted to do forever. So we, when we moved to Canada fairly quickly, we decided, alright, let's just start our own thing and work together because we always like working together. And we didn't quite find the job opportunities here that we we enjoyed. So we thought i Seems like there are multiple things now that pushes in this direction, let's just give it a shot. We had enough of a buffer to be like, alright, if this first one failed, we're not going to lose our apartment, we're not going to, you know, we can still afford to live in Vancouver. So that was that was a good baseline to be on. But towards the end, we we did definitely feel more and more stressed with our like, Let's go all in approach, it was definitely even even if you have a little bit of a buffer, if you see that buffer shrinking from four months, it still adds more pressure every day, even if you're like realistically still months away from from running dry. And knowing realistically, in our industry, most in most situations we can probably believe find a job or income again, it's still pretty stressful, like more stressful than I had anticipated when we started.

Jeroen Leenarts: 29:42

Okay, and LeBron if you if you hear these stories on this entire scale. Where are you currently?

Lybron: 29:50

Yeah, I was trying to formulate my thoughts while everyone was talking. It's I'm not sure how much everyone's moved around. Because thinking about my case, then like when I started out, then there wasn't that safety buffer or kind of over the years as well. I mean, right now then, yeah, there's there's enough of a buffer, but then there's like, we're now I live in Sweden. So now there's like, legal reasons why I quit my job he was otherwise have to leave. So that's a complicated but, I mean, yeah, I would say that right now I'm in a more comfortable position where like, if I were to make that leap and go full time, then then that's a possibility. But also thinking about those stories then, like the amount of money I make, from like the hobby from my project now, in Barbados, that would pretty much be enough. To survive but then in country like Sweden that is more expensive. So like the the level of income you need to reach them to be sustainable then matters are depends upon, you know where you live. So it's, it's it's a bit of a challenge. Can we say? Yeah. So

Jeroen Leenarts: 31:02

just as a little sidestep, how did you end up in Sweden from Barbados?

Lybron: 31:07

Yeah. Yeah, that's the question. Everyone asked him. And they say, No, I'm crazy. So it's a really interesting story of, I met the guy who was my boss in Barbados, he was surfing. And he was just on vacation with his family. And this was, like, in 2013. Yeah, we became friends. And then he would come back every year to go surfing stuff. So he would always ask, you know, how was it going with development? What am I up to now? And that kind of stuff. And then in 2018, he said, I want to come to Sweden and work in this company. I was like, yeah. And of course, everyone thinks I'm crazy. But it's like, you know, and Barbados, it's a great place to live. Don't get me wrong. I actually preferred the cold weather for what

Malin: 31:59

I do. By the way.

Jeroen Leenarts: 32:06

The two of you moved from Sweden, to Australia, to the web.

Malin: 32:11

Yeah, but I can imagine many people you meet you personally would meet this waiter would think that you're slightly crazy.

Josh Holtz: 32:18

Back in Vancouver, so you went, You hated the coal the move to nice Australia. And then back to somewhat cold Canada.

Kai: 32:26

Yeah, it's a warmer city in Canada. That's what we keep telling ourselves. Okay.

Jeroen Leenarts: 32:30

It's it's a pretty involved story, you should listen to the episode. I did. It's crazy. So yeah, okay. That's like the financial aspect. And just short term, if you're getting into indie development, you either you have an ID or you already have products. What are the things to look out for? How do you know that whether or not what you are creating is something that is worthwhile to spend your time on if it is something that you want to be able to live on, not because you just enjoyed but also you have to make some income from it. What are things you need to look out for when you're doing that?

Josh Holtz: 33:12

I think one of the biggest things is not building your entire app application website, whatever it is around a platform that might disappear.

Kai: 33:26

Sounds like there's a story behind that.

Josh Holtz: 33:29

I feel like I've had products that did that I don't have one that comes to mind, I might have had friends, I don't know. But for some reason this came to it. Like, for some reason, if you're building like a Twitter specific only app, and then Twitter somehow goes under, that's a terrible example. Then your your app product or whatever, it's kind of no longer a thing. So not saying that you can't build an app or something for that, but at least know that you're kind of relying on on that platform to always be there and also behave the same. If they're API changes, some terms, something like, make sure you have a little bit of flexibility in what you're trying to create. My

Kai: 34:12

first app was a parcel tracker. And I spent essentially the entire year just updating because I was like, Cool. That's at DHL, UPS, USPS and I just kept adding different carriers. And at some point, I spent, essentially all day just updating because they changed API's they broke stuff was like, it's like building against one API is sometimes already challenging because you have this dependency, I decided to build a product that that points at 30 different API's that all worked super differently. And that never give you notice when you change anything. And some of them were semi not documented. So that didn't help my case. Yes.

Jeroen Leenarts: 34:50

So and but Chris ended up with his product today, because he was really scratching his own itch. It's like, he created the product that he was missing when he was learning Japanese. How did that work for for you, LeBron? Because it's kind of an interesting product that you have there exporting healthcare data from the device to some form that is transferable. How do you come up with that idea?

Lybron: 35:16

Yeah, like I had mentioned, like through the years, there was actually a startup that I tried to work it on. When I was back in Barbados. The idea was sort of a telemedicine connection between the doctor and the patient because there's a high incidence of diseases like hypertension and diabetes in Barbados. So we were kind of trying to monitor modernize the system because a lot of stuff is still paper based. little bit sort of been back in 2014 or so I think we ended up being way too early because it would have been perfect for now with the pandemic where no one can actually go to the doctor's office and stuff. But then also, you know, healthcare came along pretty soon after that. And I just thought that that was about being an Apple fanboy, then I was like, Yeah, I want to tap into healthcare and all that stuff. And there are a lot of Quantified Self, there's a lot of people who are very interested in having their data. You know, like, they either want to analyze it themselves, or they just want to know that they have it themselves, and that it's not just locked into a specific platform. So that's, that's really where it started. But again, it was very much like a hobby, there was a point where I didn't even update it for three years. Yeah, I just got serious about it again. But I think just to the point of like, how you choose something, I think, yeah, I think for a lot of us, it's you know, that you want to solve a problem that you have on your own. But maybe when we talk about things that might disappear, then it's kind of like the thing that came to mind. For me, if you make an iOS specific, it's like, with 3d touch, you know, like now, in the apps that were kind of going into that niche, like put something on your phone, and you can wait, that's kind of broken. So even like within the Apple ecosystem, stuff can disappear. But I think you can always kind of tell were the things that Apple really wants to go all in on. So stuff like health, core ml, these days, air kit, that kind of stuff, I I don't think that's going to go away. So like if you kind of go to the heart of what Apple is aiming for, I think, I mean, of course, there are other tools that you can use, but if you want to be very Apple specific, then going to their heart is kind of an avenue to get there.

Jeroen Leenarts: 37:43

Okay, and Melinda, you created a product that was also scratching your own itch. Yeah, but like financial software, it doesn't sound like the most exciting thing to create. Every time that I see the two of you talk about the product to start smiling. So what's going on there? Water, Vancouver weather.

Kai: 38:12

It's just, I think for us, they're they're kind of multiple facets, right? Because we kind of needed something for time tracking and invoicing. And we didn't like anything we've come across before. So it was always invoicing always felt like a dread for us. Because for most of the jobs we're doing, we are, we work a certain amount of like, for freelance side of things that we're doing, right, we work a certain amount of hours, and then you put it somewhere in a spreadsheet or use some kind of different time tracking app. And then you have to figure out alright, how do I create it into an invoice? How many nodes do does the client want? Do I have to add all the all the nodes to have to add certain nodes? Do they want to know which person worked on it right? Because for multiple people. So we just always found that tedious. And we thought how hard can be to just have something where you're like hit the start button stop button and you say which blinders and then the end you hit one button to generate invoice. So that's kind of how how it started. For us. We're like, this is really not that it's not rocket science. That's why we used to rocket for icon. So it was more, we were more excited by reducing the tedious amount of time it took us to kind of coordinate all the other apps that we used before. And don't get me wrong, I think there are a lot of nice time tracking apps, and I think there are fewer, but some decent invoice creating apps, we just didn't have anything we were like, alright, this actually works well together and something where people care about the platforms that we use, right. So a lot of cool Mac software out there. That does time tracking invoicing. There are some that kind of seem to not update them for many years. And there's some damage just kind of clunky, and they look like I don't know, those those old Java, Java apps that kind of still run on your Mac's to some extent, but we just wanted something where it's like, it feels nice has a, you know, something in your menu bars so you can see where you're at with your time. And we just thought that would be a fun thing to do. And also, from a technology perspective, just matched the kind of time in Apple's kind of development tool chain because swift UI was fairly new. And we thought all right, Swift UI, one UI framework to use across all of Apple's platforms. Challenge accepted. Let's try that. Let's build this thing and build for macros first because it's If we can do it on macros, we knew virus will probably be a piece of cake in comparison. And then we thought, Alright, that's that's actually really, really stress tested across all of Apple's platforms. And now we haven't right on a Mac was the iPhone, the iPad, now the watch Apple released in a couple of weeks. And all of it isn't swift UI it's are also it's from kind of developer, semi academic experimental perspective was also just a fun thing to try if we can't do. And we also thought it's a good ish way of getting a little bit of attention from people that might care about Swift UI and indie kind of developer community because I always like things where we can run into challenges that most people haven't run into yet, because you framework, right, and we're kind of pushing the limits, especially on macros, which gives us a good opportunity to share the pains that we went through, and the solutions we came up with, with other people. So it's also good thing where you can actually talk about what you're doing, while at the same time helping other people who might run into that problem, or might run into a problem in the future. So that's kind of another thing that I liked where it's it, because we also struggled with marketing, and being able to talk about a while while trying to help people get through their own issues with such joy also seemed like a very genuine and nice way of of talking about your product.

Jeroen Leenarts: 42:09

Okay, go ahead, Melinda. Oh, Chris, sorry.

Chris Vasselli: 42:14

That's okay. No, I was just gonna say I think, you know, I was trying to think about what you were saying about how, what your your question you're in about the how you kind of know if you have a product that's worth pursuing, right. And I think what I was saying about looking at those competitors is kind of a big part of what happened with Diablo two was just like, I see, you can kind of go on the app store and see everything else that's out there and see, yeah, there's just not a lot of effort being put into what's out there. Right now, there's definitely room for something new, I see features X, Y, and Z that I really wish existed in this and see if you can, you know, find your niche with that. I think the other thing was just finding a market that you think that people will pay money for. So and that's one thing that I think I kind of lucked into that the thing that I this app that I really wanted to build for myself happened to be an education, and people are willing to spend money on education apps, and I think I was able to look at the competitors that were already in that space that had at the time, you know, paid up front apps that I saw had, you know, 10,000 reviews or something. And you can see oh, okay, people are actually you know, buying this you can tell they have a lot of sales so, so that was a big part of it. For me, it was just looking at the space, looking at the competitors that were there already and seeing that people were willing to bet spend money on it.

Jeroen Leenarts: 43:35

Okay, cool. And Josh, your products, that's another RSS how's it doing financially.

Josh Holtz: 43:45

I mean, it's, it's nothing, I can quit my job over. But it's been kind of a fun, a fun process. It was kind of my first first app that I kind of went like, I'm gonna go hardcore marketing on at least hardcore from what I usually do, which is release something and not tell anyone. So like, I got, like, website press kit, did it like different like social media teases about it, and kind of like designed it in a way that I thought will kind of grab people's attention. And the name and the app icon, I think we're like, the best parts of, of what I created. And I think marketing as just an okay app, kind of also struck some, some people's hearts. Because like, I didn't go out there to try and create the best RSS app. And I knew that I created for me, and that's the story that kind of, I wanted to tell. And it seems like what I ended up creating, like people enjoyed that. And I think that's why I have like the number of downloads I have, but it's also not a great market for, for making money. Since the RSS, RSS apps are just, there's so many of them. And there are ones that are better and free. NetNewsWire but like mine does have like a little bit different, different twist to it. So I knew I wasn't gonna make something there that, that I could really quit my job over. But that wasn't really the goal. Anyway, it was more of a challenge of having an app that I like, created from, from nothing I learned along the way, multi-platform and marketing for and something that I still, I still use and like I'm passionate about supporting.

Jeroen Leenarts: 45:39

Right, and another RSS is a swift UI app, right? Correct. Yes. So also doing the cross platform thing that orbit is also doing. And let's see ConnectKey that's also product that you work on. Is this something that's also in a similar trend? Or?

Josh Holtz: 45:59

Yeah, yeah. So that one, I actually created that in the first place to learn how to do iOS shortcuts. I, I saw like, I started using shortcuts mid last summer. But I didn't really like have any good reasons to like use shortcuts. I didn't really understand how people use them how to connect things. So I felt the best way to learn was to actually make a shortcut app. Which I, I learned a lot. And now shortcuts I use way too often. But when I was building this app, I wanted to build it in domain that I was comfortable with, which was the App Store connect API. So I really didn't have to learn anything, I didn't have to learn what like API was hitting, I just had to learn, like just how to do intense or whatever they're called. And like that's, that's all it was, it was a simple app. It's a very, very niche app, I guess. It's for iOS for app developers who like using shortcuts and have access to an app store connect API key. And there's like dozens of us. But like it was, it was a fun app to make. And it's something I'm very passionate about, which is development tools. So that was a kind of where a lot of my apps that I create come from, like a development tool, developer kind of viewpoint.

Jeroen Leenarts: 47:27

Okay. And then the third thing that you're working on this is indie dev Monday. Yes. Is that Is that really a passion product? Or is it also something that that gives you some sort of income?

Josh Holtz: 47:42

No. So that is a huge passion project. Now, that wasn't really the intent when I started off. Since when I started this newsletter back in July of 2020. I knew almost nothing about indie devs. I knew like three of them. Christian, Charlie, and then Greg Pierce. So like, super big names. And it's really, like, the only thing I really thought of when it came to like indie devs was like, those like, big names, big apps that like you kind of see here everywhere. But I want to know, like, where, where they all came from. So indie dev Monday is kind of my like, personal journey into exploring this whole indie dev community. And I've discovered like 1000s of other devs. And kind of just want to like talk about their stories. Since the indie dev stories always the most fun story, we all don't start from like the same spot like here, like I started doing, like development years ago. And I'm like, the bronze start off as a pilot, which is like the opposite software engineering path. So like, we all started somewhere, but we all ended up doing this. Like, we like to create apps that that solve issues for us. And because we just love, like, marketing, creating things and just enjoy. Enjoy the whole thing.

Jeroen Leenarts: 49:04

Okay. Just to switch gears a little bit. Who here is not using subscriptions? Oh, me. You have a tip jar, right?

Josh Holtz: 49:18

I have a tip jar? Yeah, I don't. I feel bad. Having subscriptions on things because I don't have the most consistent time to give to everything. If I was updating an app, like regularly, and actually had one that provided some value, yeah, I would probably go towards subscriptions. But I just want people like to pay if they want to pay if not enjoy what I create.

Jeroen Leenarts: 49:42

Okay, and Melinda can orbit is of course, like a true service product. So subscriptions is a really natural fit. We're the other sales strategies that that the two of you considered when launching orbit.

Malin: 50:00

Not really, like we were the one thing we consider was maybe having a cap pay up front undock, like a lifetime type of plan. But even that was something we sort of struggled knowing how to even price in the first place. And the reason why we'd like subscription for this is because we knew that it was an app that we wanted to continue iterating on. And we an agenda. That's why I think it's quite nice with subscription. It's so you. It's sort of enables this workflow where you continuously provide more and more features to your user. You don't have to worry about like, necessarily having a big marketing push in order to make more money from it. You can do it sort of simultaneously. But I think just having that value, like having people who pay you and then give them the value on a frequent basis. Don't worry about like stacking up lot of features in order to like release it all in a big 2.0 or 3.0 version, I think rather like subscription really sort of aligns well that you can just continue iterating and shipping new things as you go along. And also, of course, like, you have to look at, like what type of service it is, as well, I think our app just makes a lot of sense, because it is something that has, like you will use on an ongoing basis, and there will be more and more things added to it.

Kai: 51:11

Yeah, but I think there's, it's also our industry or, or building things for Apple's platforms now is old enough. It's been around for long enough that we've seen repeatedly, that if you have something that you pay up front, especially on iOS, right, if you pay something upfront for the dollar, you probably unless you have crazy growth for ever, it's probably not going to be long term sustainable, right? It was pretty good in the beginning early days of the iPhone, not a lot of apps around and the platform was growing like crazy. That's pretty good. Now we're in a point where there's way more competition in almost anything, right? Not a lot of apps that you could start today where you're like, look, I'm the only one in this field, and people just flooding in, right, there's usually a lot more competition. And the platform isn't growing to the same extent anymore, because everyone already has iOS devices now. And people are not as eager to try every new app. Right? Early days of the iPhone, I don't know if all of you had iPhones. But when I when I get my iPhone, I checked the list, I scroll through the entire top free and top paid app list almost every day to see if there's something new I could try. Today, that's that is not. And that was often people's only marketing plan, right? The marketing plan was launched on the iPhone. That was that was it. And we're no longer in that in that period. So I think subscription really enabled a lot more people now to have continuous revenue, without having to worry to acquire new customers all the time as well, I find it quite comforting that we have a good amount of users now that that are paying us monthly. Some of them reached out and always feels like yeah, of course, we want to support our existing users and never feel like oh, I should really not reply to support requests, because what really matters is getting new users, right? I never want to be in that situation. So I do like subscription for that reason a lot. And also it kind of forces you to keep up to date. And be honest, because people can at any any time any month, any year, whatever plan people want, they can decide, You know what, it's no longer worth the money for me. And then they can stop, they can cancel a subscription. And I think that's I know, a lot of people don't like subscription. But I think it's actually a very sustainable way for people, especially in the sport in general for software. Because software isn't something you just buy ones, right, you would be disappointed even if you were buying them for $1. And it would never be updated, you would be disappointed, I would not be expectation. And it's also, if you think of it as like, if you buy a car, your expectation is if something's broken, you can fix it yourself. But software, you can do that if you buy something, it's broken, you need the developer to fix it. So having something where you're paying monthly or whatever interval to support that development just totally makes sense to me. Again, I think it's coming up. So I still problem. And that is a whole bunch of it's a different area of problem that the App Store has to solve. But as far as like Honest, honest apps that are being continuously supported, I think subscriptions are really, really good model.

Jeroen Leenarts: 54:24

Okay, Chris, I think you can add something to this as well, because I think you quite recently made a big switch in the monetization strategy of your product, right?

Chris Vasselli: 54:36

Yeah, I mean, it was now man, I think it's now about three years ago, but I switched from a single in app purchase, to upgrade to the new home Go Pro sort of feature set to a subscription model. And I've been really happy with the switch. And for a lot of the reasons that Kai and Ellen just said, I mean, I think the I think it's that it aligns What I enjoy about the job the most with what's the sort of financial incentives. And what I mean by that is, when I had an single enough purchase, I felt a lot of pressure to spend a lot of my time on Marketing a lot of my time on trying to get new users and get people to pay that initial one time purchase. And once they made that purchase, like there was no way they could give me any more money. So the financial incentive wasn't really there to really make those users who would purchase the app are really really happy, you know, beyond just word of mouth and and you know, good ratings and all that of course, but when I have a subscription, literally the best thing I can do financially is to try and make those people happy and you Get them to continue subscribing. So I get to work I find I just and more incentivized to improve the product more and especially all the pro features. Instead of focusing on the free part of the app, I focus a lot more on the pro part of the app now, which kind of contains all of the, I think, the most exciting and interesting and unique features about the app anyway. So I really enjoyed the switch to subscriptions, even though I do sort of understand why there's subscription fatigue, and why a lot of people don't like paying subscriptions. But as a developer, you know, it's, it's been great.

Jeroen Leenarts: 56:18

Okay. And bronze. Is your product, also subscription based?

Lybron: 56:25

Yeah, if you had asked this question two weeks ago, it would have been no. Yeah. So I just pretty much just literally switched to subscriptions from a pay up front model. I think the interesting thing for me was that I had people emailing me, and they were saying, I would actually pay more money for this, you should charge me more. So I mean, like, when that's happening, that's a good indication. Right? Yeah. So it was something that I had wanted to do for a long time. But you know, the the Amaze around, setting up your receipt validation can be a thing, if you're unfamiliar with it. So yeah, it actually turns out to be really easy now. But when I've read the documentation, I wasn't really sure if I understood. But But yeah, I think like, you know, like everyone said, there's the whole issue of subscription fatigue. So like, Thank you, from a user standpoint. I mean, I have to say, even I don't like subscriptions that much. But you know, if I'm going to be sustainable, and that's the thing I'm aiming to do, then that's what I need to do. But again, like, then it was, it's thinking about, you know, the people that I actually want to target with this are the people who are most engaged. So I have a thing where like, when I get a support email I, I try to answer within 24 hours. And then usually, it's even less than that. And then people are like, Oh, wow, I wasn't expected response that quickly. So I think that, you know, it's like the little things, especially, I think that technically, the typical thing for developers is we just want to develop, but you know, throughout the years, you learn that different side of it. Because then if you really want to be an indie developer, and make them your source of income, then you can really just be a developer, you have to be everything. And you need to step outside that zone of just writing code. So, yeah, I mean, the whole subscription thing, I think it's a good learning journey. It's been a good learning journey for me. And I think I've learned who to focus on and like, even thinking about which features to tailor towards certain people, or which things to charge premium for, and which things to make free. Like that's the whole analysis you have to do, and it makes you think about your product differently.

Jeroen Leenarts: 58:40

Okay. And if you if you look at these subscriptions, you're already mentioned receipt validation. Because Malankara are using a product that has like a surf component, they have less of an issue with that, I guess, also more complexity, because they have a back end. But what is the complexity of this receipt validation? And how did you solve this LeBron?

Lybron: 59:05

I mean, like they said, it actually turns out to be not that difficult. I think it's that I'm not even sure what the barrier was for me, because then it's more like, I found the documentation, kind of amazing. But then I was able to talk to someone in developer Technical Services, DTS, so then I got this essentially a canned response that outlined it a bit more step by step. And in that way, it was able to understand it better, because maybe like, I can do back end development as well, it was, it was just I wasn't sure about, like parsing it and what exactly had to do. But it turned out to be really easy. It's kind of like you just read the, the receipt data that's stored locally, inside the app bundle, then you can send that to your server, pass it on to, to the iTunes receive validation endpoint, you get back a response, and you just parse that, it really turned out to be really easy. And like, I'm actually not really storing, I'm not storing any of the receipt data as well. So I don't, because the main thing for me is I just need to validate what level of access they should have. But I don't need to actually keep track of, you know, I don't need to keep track of that data on my server, which they do recommend you can do, but for my case, I feel like it's not necessary.

Jeroen Leenarts: 1:00:28

Okay. And let's see. You also mentioned a little bit of backend development there. How much backend code you actually have.

Lybron: 1:00:42

From my app, not a lot actually The only backend is really the receipt validation, then iCloud takes care of everything in terms of sending across devices. Which I decided to go that route again, because well, when it comes to health stuff, there's also a lot of concern there as well. So, you know, like, I don't want to store people's health data on my own server, and then get lawsuits and stuff. So, yeah, I do some magic with that using Cloud kit. And I mean, like, that seems a lot of time in terms of development for me. Because cloud kit takes it takes care of like, remote notifications, and all that stuff. So makes everything really responsive in terms of pushing data from one device to another. Yeah, so in terms of my app, there's not a whole lot when it comes to the back end, I mean, mainly just the receipt stuff, which is new.

Jeroen Leenarts: 1:01:44

And if you look at the orbit product by Milan, and Kai, how big is the backend components? In your case?

Malin: 1:01:54

Yeah, it's quite a big piece. So we do everything, we store everything on our own back end that are related to like everything that you're doing, right. And the reason why we went with our back end is because we, we have team plants, so people who share one team can are able to actually see the same like track time for so if Kyle and I are in the team, we can track time for the same clients and the same projects. And so that is something that we couldn't do with something like iCloud data, we had to have our own back end for that. And yeah, that also obviously helped sort of map in nicely once it came to the subscription, that once it came to the server to server notifications, part of that as well, which we're using to like detect the renewal and the cancellation events. Another thing I think, which we can do in the future now when we have our own back end is we can also roll it like make an app for Android or a web app and those things as well, if we want to.

Kai: 1:02:50

Yeah. Just in general, it allows us for a lot more flexibility, because for us, it's not a just one to one connection between your data and end user, right because of the team plans. But also, there are clients involved, right, we want to have a feature where you can actually send an invoice to a client and they can pay it like you can add like your payment information, or PayPal link or whatever in the future. So you can just hit that. So your data kind of obviously selected, like if you generate an invoice for the time that Martin I worked and we sent, we can automatically send that invoice to a client and then they can pay through data as a lot more data flowing in different directions that I mean, I can do more and more of those kind of things. But it's definitely more designed for your user data being stored somewhere rather than sharing it across different kind of boundaries.

Jeroen Leenarts: 1:03:44

And one other thing that I'm very interested in is that rebound? Sure, LeBron specifically mentions that he does not want to basically touch the the user's health data, which I can understand because privacy sensitive information is by some people considered to be sort of like the toxic waste of, of software development, that the less you own, the less you have, the better this. But of course with your product, having this sensitive information is what the product is all about. Really. So how do you make sure that as an indie development team to people, how do you make sure that the security is is is up to spec and that if people actually query you about that you can give an answer that is like, satisfactory to your potential or current clients? Yeah, I

Kai: 1:04:35

think a multiple parts of that one of them is because we did write everything ourselves, we know exactly where we think they is, what it lives on how it's being secured, so that I always liked that. I always worry a little bit when I see people having a lot of third party frameworks that are, you know, it's really easy to pull in a whole bunch of random code from all over the Internet into apps. And for us, we don't have a single third party library in our client apps. We don't have any kind of third party code. That's not the core like web framework on our back end. So one, one really easy way for us to know exactly what happens is that we went through the effort of writing into ourselves, obviously, building on top of existing technology, like we're not, we didn't write a database engine ourselves. We're using Postgres for that. So we're not completely crazy. But we're we just decided that we thought I mean, first of all we've done is we've done backend development for for long enough now in security, relevant areas before so we've just put in the years of experience to know what what should do what we shouldn't do. But then also building on top of very, very solid and old technology as far as like the kind of decor layer, like our servers run, run very, very broadly used operating systems, or we're not doing anything too crazy there, we're running on boring databases, we're not doing anything crazy there. It's mostly the API layer on top of that, where we decided, alright, let's, let's do some something more interesting there. But as far as STL, stuff goes, we just rely on very solid renowned, like, renowned technology to to handle what we need to do.

Jeroen Leenarts: 1:06:29

Okay. So is it difficult to actually run your own backends as an indie developer?

Kai: 1:06:37

I, I don't think so. It's kind of like, I mean, you always have to, you're probably sleeping a bit lighter. Because you know, there's a server running, but we've not had a single incident, we do have all the kind of standard uptime tracking. So we get notifications, if something goes down, we have specific routes on our back end, that we're kind of hitting that hit all the subsystems that we know need to be up. So it hits like the database and return something from the database and those kind of things. So it kind of goes through, it goes through through the network to our API server data and talks to the API to the database, and returns it and checker we have, make sure that the response is getting as to what we're expecting. And once that no longer happens, or once it hits a certain threshold of how long did that response take, we get notifications. on all my devices, I get notifications in the form of text messages and phone calls and push notifications. So I feel like we have a really good monitoring system. Which means in my first like, many years ago, my first products, I was kind of doing everything myself, and I just, I thought, hey, if I just check every every now and then that everything is still up, that should be good. We're we're past that point. Now we just have really good monitoring in place. And that way, we don't really have to worry too much if there's so far, and hope it stays that way. But so far, we've not had a single outage of of at all. So I hope we keep it that way. But having really good monitoring in place just kind of helps you a lot of not not worrying too much on it, about it, day to day.

Jeroen Leenarts: 1:08:15

Okay. And just to switch gears a little bit again. Let's see, Josh. If you look at if you look at your products, you have like a tip jar, and you have like the work that you can do on Fastlane tools, which is also compensated. What are your plans for indie development? Are you like really, actively or not? So actively looking for some kinds of products and actually make somewhat of a transition into a place that that Chris currently already is? Or maybe the way that Kai and Marlon are already doing? Just like LeBron is trying to find a product that has a market fit, and gains enough revenue to take somewhat of a leap of faith?

Josh Holtz: 1:09:07

I'm, I think we call a serial new Xcode project clicker? I have, I have a problem, right? I enjoy starting new projects, mainly because I love, I just love problem solving. And I like the like the thrill of the initial problem. Of course, there are problems while you're maintaining. But those are kind of less, less thrilling, to some extent, not that I'm going to stop supporting when I create, but I am really cautious of what I create and what I actually release. I don't I don't plan on making like indie dev transition full on the dev kind of lifestyle. Since Fastlane is like, also a passion. I have a lot of passions. But like I can't, I can't leave that one like that. One is kind of also part of me. So the the apps I create, I'm mainly looking for like small, small things that are pretty self sufficient, that don't need a lot of maintaining that they're just kind of fun to create an app that I also will use every every day every month, just to kind of like Don't forget about them, and they kind of like start just like deteriorating, since that's what software does.

Kai: 1:10:35

She's saying an overnight API change on App Store Connect is not thrilling enough for you, Josh.

Josh Holtz: 1:10:40

It's so good. Like I actually actually enjoy those. I don't like how it takes people out. I mean, there are other ways that you can upload your app to the App Store. Fastlane is not not the only way. But that is I do get weird excitement, fixing those kinds of things.

Jeroen Leenarts: 1:11:00

So you're probably very good at inspecting API's, right?

Josh Holtz: 1:11:04

Ah, I would say so yeah. I use Chrome Inspector decently often, but proxy tool, I use a proxy man. Yeah. So good. Sounds really good. And that is a indie dev, as well. It's like the best tool that's out there. It's it feels super high class, like, super enterprise level. But also, even though it's like, it's not, it's just him. But like, it looks like a native app. It feels like a native app. It's so good. And the devs are amazing.

Jeroen Leenarts: 1:11:45

You had him on your newsletter already. Right?

Josh Holtz: 1:11:47

Yeah. He was like, it was like week three, I think.

Jeroen Leenarts: 1:11:51

Yeah. Yeah. And also like, it's way better than the other proxy tool that you have available on Charles Proxy. Yeah. Which, which is, which is a Java app? Actually, still, no one feels bad.

Kai: 1:12:04

So still support also? Both? Still, it's

Jeroen Leenarts: 1:12:07

still an amazing product, but

Josh Holtz: 1:12:08

support both? Yeah. But yeah, like I, I'm, I create apps that also like are that don't have an API to them that I have to support? Mainly for that reason, like, I challenged myself, beginning of last year, if I'm going to create an app, create one that doesn't need anything custom, which was actually like a pretty hard boundary. Because a lot of my ideas in the past have were like, Oh, I can do this, like, and then like, but it was the whole service that I had to create around it. And I'm like, I don't I don't have time for that. I don't enjoy that. So I kind of boxed myself into only like standalone iOS apps, which was really weird at first. But now it's kind of fun problem solving technique. I

Jeroen Leenarts: 1:12:57

guess we're now getting onto the topic of backends. A bit more. And I know that we have two or three extremes here, I think, because LeBrons app only has like a back end to receipt, to do receipt validation. That's the only thing it does, right. And Chris has something that is fully cloudkit. Backed, if I'm correct. And Marlin and Ky have something that is completely custom outside of the Apple ecosystem. And you raise an interesting point that's having your own backends. It gives you a lot of flexibility and sort of like superpower. But you also have to maintain it. So So are there any thoughts on that topic that we can share? Because I know Chris had a lot of challenges in getting data in and out of cloud kits. Yeah, at a level that was like performance enough. So So what are the drawbacks to using Cloud kit, so or something else

Josh Holtz: 1:13:58

in Otter, RSS is a an RSS app that that does use cloudkit. Because the problem was, I wanted an RSS app that synced across all my devices. And I didn't want to like have a third party subscription, similar or anything like that I want to have to just sync like across, which should totally be a thing. And I was like, I'm going to use iCloud with the with Cloud kit, persistent storage that Apple has built in. It'll be great because there's no issues with that at all. And it'll work fine. It it was it was it was fine for development. But I definitely lacked a lot of control. And there are some syncing issues and like duplication issues that come up. Because I am using like the built in Core Data Cloud kit syncing. So I do have regrets going that I will be migrating away from that into more manual cloud kit integration, still using cloudkit. Because I do want more control. But I don't want full control and responsibility for a back end.

Kai: 1:15:05

It's, I can count amount of times that hitting the deploy schema to production button a second time match. So fix issues.

Josh Holtz: 1:15:12

Fastlane is great for this. Because I actually have a stamp in my Fastlane script when I upload a build to remind myself to do that. Yeah, because I always forget to do that step and it's caused so many issues.

Jeroen Leenarts: 1:15:24

So what step are we specifically talking about do Oh, wait, is it or is it t d transitioning from like the development to production

Josh Holtz: 1:15:34

to production? I always forget that step. So I Okay. I have a step in my deploy that actually like reminds me to do that like, because I I forgotten twice now and it's kind of Bit Me. So

Jeroen Leenarts: 1:15:46

and but isn't it easy to break stuff in your production app if you deploy from development to production? Or how fragile? Can you deploying the

Kai: 1:15:56

schema? So yeah, just all the new model changes. And that's just a step you have to do with Cloud kit. And it's it's unnecessarily, I find it unnecessarily difficult sometimes to see what has changed and add, like a nicer way of just seeing, alright, this is my development schema that I don't even have in any kind of build, I just have an index, I would like to deploy it from there, rather than having a model that actually hits that attribute to then have it show up in cloudkit. For then, being able to be deployed. I always found

Josh Holtz: 1:16:27

websites also always down every time I wanted to pay.

Kai: 1:16:32

Me. Yeah, yeah.

Josh Holtz: 1:16:34

Like, the first time I wanted to do it. I was like, Alright, let's go to app store to do it. And then I was like, Nope, can't do it right now, because of some weird error. I'm like, Okay, well, I guess I'll wait push to production until tomorrow.

Chris Vasselli: 1:16:49

So I started knee hung up on the core data with Cloud kit, and ended up I got like really far down that path, and ended up just bailing on it. And what I'm actually using is actually ensembles, which is made by another indie, Drew McCormick. And you still use Cloud kit as the back end. But it's basically just using Cloud cat cloud kit as a file system. They basically like the whole thing is built around this abstraction of, of every everything being a backhand, just as files. And so you never have to worry about the schema changing because the schema is just a bunch of files. And it supports a whole bunch of stuff that the cloudkit core data doesn't. So

Josh Holtz: 1:17:29

after the show, yeah, of course, you don't know how to change because I'm using core data pretty heavily within within the app.

Chris Vasselli: 1:17:37

But I mean, its core data. So I still just use port Oh,

Josh Holtz: 1:17:40

oh, okay. Oh, I'm done.

Chris Vasselli: 1:17:42

I'll I'll send you like. The other thing that I wanted to talk about with this, though. About like backends. And the fact that, like, nilanga, doesn't have a back end. I think a big part of my experience as an indie developer is managing the surface area of my product. And because I only have so much, you know, bandwidth to, you know, handle bugs coming up and things like that, I spent a lot of time trying to manage exactly like how much surface surface area there is for for bugs to show up too much. So a lot of that is like, every time I think about a new feature, I'm thinking about how can I manage my ability to monitor all this and my ability to make sure it doesn't break something else. So that's one thing where like, adding a back end adds a whole new dimension, a whole huge surface area for bugs. Whenever I think about adding, when I first added iPad support, you know, that's a whole nother dimension of, you know, issues where things can come up. When you add localization support, when you add support for dynamic type, when you add support for dark mode, all of these things like are just like multiplicative in the amount of like different configurations that can cause issues. And I find a lot of a lot of my experience now developing what's you know, and nearly, I mean, I started at nine years ago, and I think released it coming up on seven years ago. So like, continuing to grow it for that long, it's just really trying to find those ways to minimize the extra complexity you're adding into the app. And when you do need to add that complexity, having in place the testing and everything to really make sure that you're not relying on your users to discover the issues with it and things like that. But I find that a little different than my experience as a full time developer, where there's a whole team of people, we have a QA team, there's all these processes in place for, you know, the expectation being there, that there's this huge app that no one's gonna have their entire head around. I feel like I always need to have my head around the entire app and my eyes kind of in every part of the app. So that's been really different. And a big part of like, how I choose to develop the home go.

Jeroen Leenarts: 1:19:50

Okay, and the surface area topic that you're mentioning is it's probably a skill or a challenge that all of us are dealing with, at least the indie developers here because I'm just like a corporate slave. But this surface area thing it's it's it's probably an acquired skill for you right, Chris?

Chris Vasselli: 1:20:19

Yeah, yeah, I think so. It's something I've definitely gotten better at over time. So

Kai: 1:20:23

what are we don't have any impulse control. It's like, cool. I better as next iOS. All right. Let's do watch. TV. Does anyone do that? Let's try that next.

Jeroen Leenarts: 1:20:33

Visualization. Right. But with with this whole skills thing, it's interesting because Chris mentioned, mentioned skill that he really needs to have to Make sure that he doesn't, doesn't overburdened himself. And Marlon actually went into quite a lot of detail actually, that she really enjoys, like doing all the things related to, to running the product. So all the design things, the marketing, the financial aspects, the planning, support, the sound like a lot. So what's what were the biggest skills that each few had to learn? When, like, trying to create and supports an indie product? Molyneux first? Yeah,

Malin: 1:21:17

I think you mentioned support, I actually have to give a lot of credit to Kai for that, because he is definitely better at me than me that support so he's doing quite a lot of that. I think in terms of the biggest thing for me has, like, the biggest thing, too, that's different from what I've done in the past has been the marketing aspect. Because I think I think many of us are probably uncomfortable, just like, trying to, like trying to tell people that like your product is the best one, then people should go ahead and like download that and like, try it, like pay your money for something. And I think that's, that's always tricky, but I think I really have tried to like see it differently. I think marketing has sort of been this. I think many people associate marketing as being like the spammy thing that you see on the internet, like those ads popping up all the time. But I think you have to see, like, I really learned to like, look at it differently. I think marketing is more like letting the right people know that your product exists. And I think once those people know about it, you can actually really help them. And that can actually provide a lot of value. And I think in our case with orbit, I, I honestly think that we can save people a lot of time, if they are using the software, because they don't have to do a lot of manual things, they don't have to move things from one system to another. So I'm trying to look at it in that way. Rather than like being this like, big corporation, that's like putting ads up everywhere. Like I think I really tried to see that, like, what is the value that we provide, and then try to see the fun parts of marketing, which I think are touching, touching more into the areas that I didn't feel comfortable with before. So for example, a part of marketing that I really like is creating the artwork for it or creating the copy and making sure that it's like, it looks nice and the same with a website. And the same with the press kit and those type of things like doing that sort of personal touch of marketing, like making sure that you have the brand that you're happy with and that you're sort of conveying the message that you are proud of. And also like it comes to like just trying to be more personal, I think in if we are trying to like, let people know about our app, we try to do it in a very personal way. Like we have our newsletter where we like put some personality in there both like caffeine case, and my personality is bleeding through a lot in the marketing material. But we also try to make sure that we don't send like if we send an email out to users, we don't want it to be sent to people who it's not applicable to. So we really try to sort of figure out like, who would benefit from which part of the marketing material that we have. So if we have an email we want to send out make sure that we only send it to people who it actually makes sense for. So I tried to sort of look at it differently from just like this big word of marketing.

Jeroen Leenarts: 1:23:54

But that that really sounds like that you were on a journey of discovery, like discovering that marketing is a thing and that you actually enjoy certain aspects of it. But what were some of the art things that you have to learn skills you needed to acquire that you were like, oh, boy, how am I going to do this? And once you acquire the skill, that's not too hard.

Kai: 1:24:16

I think, for us, we can split marketing into kind of three areas. Now in hindsight, when we went into we're like, cool, and now we do the marketing part or like, so what do we do? Now in hindsight, we kind of split it into three areas, we're kind of seeing it as the PR, essentially right? Reaching out to press reaching out to Apple developer, people like to, to potentially like the App Store and those kind of promotion things. And I think that one we felt fairly comfortable with because that feels more like talking to your, to your friends or your developer friends and those kind of things. Because you're like, look, I met this cool thing. I used just technology. Isn't that fun? And I think that was really easy for us. And we felt very comfortable. And it worked really well to like we got a lot of press coverage. And like all the things that we read everyday, like nine to five Mac and Mac rumors, and we were featured on the App Store. So we're like cool, we nailed marketing. And then then a week later, we're like, oh, now downloads back to where they were before. Alright, I guess there's more to marketing. So the second part is kind of the I guess user acquisition component like that. That's the one that we we struggled with the most it's like, Alright, what do we actually do? We can just reach out to press every day. What else is there to marketing? And then we kind of get into this entire area of like, alright, well, a lot of people seem to do ads, should we do ads, and then we get into rabbit hole of but then they want us to integrate the Facebook SDK into our app. We don't want to integrate the face If we get stuck into our app, and then we started looking to Can we reverse engineer the kind of triggers that the Facebook SDK tries to send? When when it conversion happens? Because you still want all the benefits of Facebook knowing who actually converts apps that are like yours, right? Do you actually want people that are willing to spend money on apps. So we kind of wrote that, that is still the area that we're we're struggling with a lot and trying to figure out things because we really do not want to add creepy third party SDK into our apps. And I mean, now the entire discussion with the ATT, stuff that Apple pushed today, actually, it was, I think, Iris 14.5 came out an hour before we started recording. So that will probably change. Everyone panicking, that will probably change a lot in that realm. So we decided, alright, let's let's focus on the third pillar, which is like product development is also a form of marketing, right? Like for us, for example, the watch app, I think it's useful, we using it already as we testing it. But it's also a good way, again, to get some amount of people to talk about your product to to potentially get Apple interested again, in what you're doing. So I think it was kind of three things into one way or the app component. That's the one that I think most of us struggle the most. And where we're trying to hardest to kind of work against existing advertisement systems. Because we don't really like what what that area is, but we also know, it's like if you if you run an ad without any of the kind of SDK stuff, and without any of the kind of targeting optimization, you paid 10x 50x more than your competitors, which also sucks. So we decided, alright, let's hold off on that part for a little bit. until at least the kind of app tracking transparency stuff settled a little bit. So we can see, maybe we'll have more privacy conscious ways of advertising in the future. That would be nice. But that was that was tricky.

Jeroen Leenarts: 1:27:42

Okay, so that's two distinct topics that we already touched upon. So that's marketing in the broader sense. And the other one that was mentioned by Chris, that's how to focus your energy, and make sure that you create new material that doesn't cause you to be overburdened by the support loads and maintenance loads. But what are other things that you need to learn on your journey? Can you can you add something on that LeBron?

Lybron: 1:28:16

Thinking, because throughout that I was thinking about the marketing as well, I'm not sure if this is necessarily a bit of a different, but it's more when it came to search optimization for me, when it comes to marketing. Like, you know, being more visible on the web, how do you do that? So for me, it was the thing that I kind of found as a hack was to put blog articles, you know, about when I do feature releases, didn't have to be 500 words, or anything, it was, you know, just a paragraph or two or something. But that eventually gets ranked. So then when people search for like, export Apple Health Data, then that pops up. And not only does it get traffic to the site, but then it also the ones that get the most hits, then kind of indicate what people are looking for the most so that I know what features to work on. So you know, when I talk about seeing Apple Health Data on iPad, and Mac, that link is the one that actually gets the most hits by far on my, on my website. So I kind of know that that's the thing people are really searching for are willing, I guess, really to pay for, you know, kind of look at that in the conversions. And then with with the support emails as well, that's backed up by various other data points when it comes to advertising than I do Apple Search Ads. But I you know, it took some experimentation. It can be really expensive if you kind of go with the default settings or the App Store. But then I saw which which keywords, were giving the highest conversions. So like, I really just trimmed out all the fat. And yeah, I set also a low target cost for acquisition. I don't break the bike, it needs to be sustainable. But yeah, I mean, like, playing with all those different tools. That was definitely a learning experience. And yeah, because I mean, you always hear about, you know, you know, usually the typical things like if you launch a website, integrate Google Analytics or like Facebook SDK, like everyone else here. I don't want any third party stuff in my in my app, especially when it's a health app. So yeah, you know, all the codes written by me as well. I don't integrate any third party SDKs and I just use Apple Search Ads for that's the only advertising I do and it's very targeted as well. In terms of other stuff, I learned that it was I still feel like I've struggled with design. So that's still a learning process.

Jeroen Leenarts: 1:30:51

Okay, so that's the third topic that you're actually touching upon the design aspects. We've already learned that chi is somewhat of a natural on design. And you're struggling with it, LeBron. So Josh, how you doing the design of your crazy ideas? Maybe?

Josh Holtz: 1:31:12

Yes, that was actually like, the point I was gonna bring up was is the part that I struggled on is like, adding that like last little sparkle to the app. Like, I'm, I can make an app like that's functionally functionally usable. And like, in my eyes, the best. UX is a CLI. So I don't really, I don't really have like a great, great taste when it comes to apps to like, kind of what, what design should be. So luckily, I kind of surround myself with people who are good in the design area, that I can be like, Hey, here's a screenshot of what I'm working on. How is this bad? Because I know it's not great. And like, I, I have some instincts that like, I think I could do it this way. But it's really hard to commit down those, those final paths of like, this is what I want the app to, like, be on its release day. But having people that that they can help help you grow. In those kind of spots that you don't know, are really key, I think to like the whole indie success. My hat's off to those who like, do everything themselves and learn everything, like by the book or whatever, like I, I don't work that way, I am more of like a trial experiment fail kind of person. And so I, I tend to find people that can kind of help me in, in those spots. So I don't fail as as often or hard, which is like the last design sparkle kind of part of an app.

Jeroen Leenarts: 1:32:58

Okay. And and, Chris, if you look at your product and hongo it's actually a very concise design that it has, I think, and also some of the more unique features of the app have a very unique design, design experience, I think, especially if you're like scanning real worlds, texts, and just presenting that on screen. What's your process? How did you get into design? Was it something that you did previously? Or is it something that you had to acquire or

Chris Vasselli: 1:33:32

definitely something acquired, but not through any formal process or anything, mostly just a lot of looking at other apps I liked and see what they did, and then try and emulate that. For something like what you're talking about, with the the OCR the like, look, taking a picture and looking up the words, you know, as they are in real life, I mean, I think I looked at other apps and didn't like anything that I saw basically, and, and tried to kind of have that that was more just kind of having an idea of what I wanted it to look like, and then spending months trying to make the technology work to make that happen. But But yeah, I mean, I think that's something that I just enjoy so much the learning process of design and exploring that and playing around. And then I also I occasionally go on some Slack channels, there's some Slack channels for iOS developers that have like design channels, where people will just like, take a look at your, your work and suggest things. So I've done that some as well. Just getting feedback from other people. So yeah, I think trying not to do it in a void is good. And getting feedback. Also, my husband, I like talk to like almost every single design project I have, I end up like making a ton of different mock ups and then showing to showing to him and getting feedback and then iterating and then showing and he's really, you know, honest and in and not afraid to be critical. So that helps a lot here.

Jeroen Leenarts: 1:35:02

Cool. I think I'm sitting really still right? Yeah, you're

Chris Vasselli: 1:35:06

frozen. You're frozen. Yeah, I

Jeroen Leenarts: 1:35:09

thought so much. Um, let's see. So what I notice here is a little bit of a trend really, because having a great idea or having a great idea for a product. It's It's It's hard because you then have to execute on a product and make sure that it is something that is functional and that is something that's not crashing and that it's working. But then making sure that it looks good and that you actually acquire customers for that's basically the hardest part of being an any developer it seems so weird. You reckon that's for all of us, the finding customers is the most difficult thing that you have to face. If you're creating a product.

Josh Holtz: 1:35:58

I'm going to go a little more broad here and say the hardest thing is like, being okay, with not knowing everything, and not knowing a lot of stuff. Like, that's definitely the hardest part about it, because we are doing all aspects. Turns out that a lot of us here are developers and love developing. But there are others out there who like developing the hardest part. And like, they want to, like, they can do the design, sell it, but they can't create themselves. And that's where they struggle. So for us in this chat marketing is probably the hardest. But in general, it's really just being okay with not knowing stuff, and kind of learning, learning how to learn about the things that you don't know.

Jeroen Leenarts: 1:36:45

Okay, so and what are ways that you can actually acquire the knowledge or practical tips or things that you need to actually be able to continue? Because Josh already mentioned that he just really likes to experiment a lot. And LeBron is a is a self taught developer, which is also a very long and difficult path, I think. So he had to learn like, a lot on his own as well. So what are ways to actually acquire these skills that that are not that obvious to get at raising? Because

Kai: 1:37:23

Josh mentioned already that you're comfortable not knowing everything, when you get started, and you still get started? I think you're already 90% there. Because when when we started, we had no idea of how to design something we had, I at least want to think of myself as someone who has taste like I often design something, I looked at it as like, that is horrific. Why is it so so horrific, but I think if you look at your thing, and you're like, No, that is terrible, this is a really good state to be in, because that means you you know, it's not right. And you iterate. Or if you can't figure it out, you ask someone who's like, Look, you also agreed this is sort of a fake, right? What do you have an idea? And often it is like small tweaks and to kind of get to something where like, All right, now it's possible. And if you do this for long enough, I think I mean, I assume all of us started off being pretty terrible developers, I think we're all pretty decent by now. Right? And we achieved that by just not giving up on it. When we, when we were terrible developers, I think it's the same with design. Start off as a terrible designer, probably if you're lucky, you have some taste. If not, you'll acquire that over time as well. Or you're still more from other examples. And I think that is that is applying to so much of I mean, indie development, but life to just be comfortable not knowing something and realizing that you're not where we would like to be and just be on your path to get better at it every time you do it.

Malin: 1:38:49

Yeah, and I think to touch on that being comfortable, but I think it's also important to be just comfortable, like trying things and then not getting there in the, in the first try or comfortable throwing things away. Even I think that's especially something I've seen with the sign of increase, you talked a bit about how you show multiple design versions to your husband. And I think that is the thing, you have to sort of, like try different things and you shouldn't expect like, if you're new to something that you will nail it on the first try or even if you're designing a new app, that it will be perfect at first try, you have to sort of experiment with those different approaches, and just be comfortable that you might spend some time on things that are not gonna see the like, are not actually going to be released in the end, or that might not be the end product, but you learn a lot on the way and you know a lot about what you like and what you don't like and then you there to help you afford it like and product towards towards that. And I think you have that all the time. And not just with design, but also with development and with the product in general, I think you will pivot a lot as you're creating your own thing.

Jeroen Leenarts: 1:39:49

Okay. And on the whole learning journey that you're really on as a as a software developer, and especially if you're an indie developer. What was it like for you LeBron to actually ever dream of being an airline pilot and then having to pivot somewhat into like software development? That must have been a big leap? I reckon, but you managed. So yeah, what are some of the tips that you can share on learning things and basically just teaching yourself new skills?

Lybron: 1:40:27

Having the time definitely helps. I was just out of college. I didn't have a job. So I had a lot of time to just read books, but I mean, Curiosity is always the maybe the biggest factor there and wanting to get that results. But I talked to people about this How I started, they say, Well, yeah, I could never do that. For me, it didn't. It did feel like that. It didn't feel like such a burden. But it's also because I really wanted to do it. Even though it was not something that I had a background, and it was just something I was passionate about. So yeah, I would easily sit for hours and hours every day just trying to learn something, and not giving up. Maybe that's the I think maybe that's just the biggest factor. Because I've been I've stuck with it all this time. And there obviously challenges along the way, and I still feel the imposter syndrome, I still feel like there are things that I don't know, or that I could do better. There's always that in the back of my head. But you know, I also still keep learning, there's something that's the other exciting part, because then there's always something you're learning, I never feel like I'm the best, which can be some kind of comfort as well, it's kind of like, I know that I need to put the effort in to keep going, because I'm not the best. But you know, I am doing my best. So I think that's how I think about it.

Jeroen Leenarts: 1:41:50

I think what you mentioned there is actually quite interesting that being the best is not the most important thing. But being able to tell that you are good enough. I think that's like the most important thing that you can teach yourself in anything that you do, really, because who take take, for example, the marketing or the acquiring users, it doesn't have to be that you're the best at it. Because then you would be like a millionaire and maybe even a billionaire, which would be great, of course. But if you're good enough, then you can sustain yourself, and you can keep doing what you're doing. And you can slowly get better at it. And maybe who knows, something crazy happens. And you might end up being the best at some specific skill. Most

Kai: 1:42:35

people that are the best at something didn't start off being the best at something

Jeroen Leenarts: 1:42:41

cool. Just to really, really change it up a little bit. What would be reasons for somebody to definitely not get into indie development. So what can you think up? For? If this is something you do not like, then you should not try to be an indie developer if you're

Kai: 1:43:00

in it purely for the money.

Jeroen Leenarts: 1:43:03

That's a good one. Yeah. 100% Okay. Okay. I Joshua, you have anything to add?

Josh Holtz: 1:43:09

Give me like, a few minutes here. Everybody. Let's continue.

Jeroen Leenarts: 1:43:13

Chris, anything you can add to that?

Chris Vasselli: 1:43:17

I mean, I think I definitely agree with that. Like, it's it's not a quick way to become a millionaire for sure. I mean, and I think exactly what we were just talking about, you really have to be comfortable doing things that are new to you and holding a lot of different hats and being okay, with, yeah, with failing a lot and, and having things not working and being able to bounce back. Those are all really important things. But if you enjoy what you're doing, and you you know, if you find your project you're passionate about, I think that's kind of the most important thing. I think I wouldn't do it just for Yeah, I mean, I guess I wouldn't do it just for the money, I wouldn't, you know, you need to start from something that you're you're passionate about, you're gonna be able to spend a lot of your time doing and not not something that's just purely like thinking you're gonna make a quick buck.

Jeroen Leenarts: 1:44:15

So you're saying that you should be able to follow your passion instead of the money?

Kai: 1:44:22

Yeah. I mean, ideally, you get to a point, right? I think what we're all striving for, is to combine those things at some point, right? You want to be able to do exactly what you want to do and make exactly as much money as you as you would like to on it by then.

Malin: 1:44:39

Yeah. And I think you can still sort of think about when you're looking at the areas that you want to build an app for, you can still try to look, is there a market here in the first place? And if that's something that you're excited about building, then that's that's an even better fit. But I think, yeah, like it's, it's also of course, like you should strive for, like, being able to make money off it. But I think you should also be, it's like someone who wants to be come like, if you create like a YouTube channel, your number one hope with that should not be that you will become famous. And I think that is just, it should gain something else out of the process. And like you should be enjoying the creation part of it as well. I think I think it's just important to have fun underway.

Jeroen Leenarts: 1:45:23

And what is what is the best thing about being an indie developer then

Kai: 1:45:30

that we can record a podcast in the middle of today, and no one cannot can tell us not to do it.

Chris Vasselli: 1:45:37

That's I think it's having having kids and having an indie dev job is pretty awesome. Just the flexible ability you get is pretty great. Like, the fact that I get to sort of, you know, be home for my kid every day and be able to, you know, take days off whenever I want for that is pretty awesome. That's a huge part for me.

Jeroen Leenarts: 1:45:58

I think I think Josh can really agree to that.

Josh Holtz: 1:46:01

I think I'm back now. Did you hear what I forgot?

Jeroen Leenarts: 1:46:09

What's the best thing about being an indie developer? You think?

Josh Holtz: 1:46:12

There was a question before that too?

Jeroen Leenarts: 1:46:14

I thought, what's the worst thing about being an indie developer? You think? Oh,

Josh Holtz: 1:46:17

um, I think one thing is, you don't? Well, you don't necessarily need to have thick skin. But be be prepared for what people are going to say about whatever you're doing. There's always going to be haters. So the dog, some, some haters aren't aren't worth, like trying to listen to, some might have some actually good opinions. And it's really kind of like, deciding which ones to actually care about, and which ones to actually like, take action on. So I think that's probably one of the hardest things and one, one thing that you have to really prepare for. So like, for me, open source is also kind of the same way. So I've been doing open source for a while. And so I was kind of prepared for that. And the indie world is actually I think, a little bit nicer. Not not necessarily in my open source community, my open source community is, is also pretty friendly. But there is some that are pretty rough. So like, it's really like, you have to be strong and kind of not care and also know when to care at the same time.

Jeroen Leenarts: 1:47:25

And what's the best part, you think about being an indie developer,

Josh Holtz: 1:47:28

I can do stupid things. People don't care. Like, if I was doing what I do at like, an enterprise job, or somewhere like that, like, I, I probably wouldn't have a job. But like, the things I also I'm not a full time indie dev. So I mean, it's my answers a little bit easier. But like, I can just, I can just create the things I want to create, because I enjoy creating them. And I think people will also hopefully, maybe like them, and if they don't, well, their problem.

Jeroen Leenarts: 1:48:01

Cool. Um, so yeah, LeBron, anything you want to add?

Lybron: 1:48:07

Yeah. Or maybe a few things. I'll follow on from where Josh was saying, it's like, well, sometimes you get those emails, the good thing is that sometimes you can turn a bad email into a really good conversation. So I can remember a couple where like, some people emailed really angry. And I was like, Oh, well, you know, there's this thing, whatever. But I explained the situation, and then they're like, Oh, well, now we get it, or it just turned into, I don't know, like a quick bug fix or something. And then you get really good feedback, or, in other cases, with stuff like someone that was saying, they got diagnosed with atrial fibrillation or something, and they wanted to get their heart readings to show to their doctor. And it was like, yeah, thank you for creating this because I could get exactly the data that I wanted, and I could show it to the doctor. And that could help with the treatment that I'm getting, stuff like that. So yeah, usually, I would say like customer emails are part kind of the best thing about it, or part of it, you know, helping people creating something that's useful to people. When you look at it like that, you don't really need to be rich, because you're really helping some people with some difficult things they're going through. But also, like Chris said, you know, like the flexibility and being able to, you know, work when it's best for you, or like everyone else that said, working on something that you're actually really passionate about, and facing the different challenges and touching on different aspects of the product and brain altogether, did something that's valuable. Cool.

Jeroen Leenarts: 1:49:46

Thanks for that. Now, with that, looking at the clock, I think we're pretty much out of time.

Josh Holtz: 1:49:55

We were only halfway done.

Jeroen Leenarts: 1:49:59

Oh, in principle, I think we are. I hope based on this recording that I can do some follow up recordings on specific topics that we've discussed. And who knows, maybe it's going to be something of a series. It's this is something related to this podcast pivot that I talked about a while back already. And yeah, basically, if there is anything that we currently forgot, or some topic that we've neglected, or I think we covered it pretty much across the board, I think, but just want to make sure that I'm not doing a wrong interpretation of things.

Josh Holtz: 1:50:45

I can't, I can't really think of anything. I think we hit a lot of the aspects of being an indie developer. I mean, there probably things we could have gone into more detail about, but I guess we're almost done here. So next episode.

Chris Vasselli: 1:51:03

We didn't banter about last week's Apple event. Yeah.

Jeroen Leenarts: 1:51:06

Yeah, that's a good thing, right? Because now the content is evergreen.

Chris Vasselli: 1:51:10

Yeah, that's true.

Kai: 1:51:11

If we had another two hours, we could also talk about the kind of working by yourself challenges because there are very different challenges to come up when you're not having Nick just even being in by yourself on a small team kind of changed a lot of dynamics and, and yeah, maybe more of a result of that being more involved in community efforts to seek other people to talk to, but we we can have that separately. That's,

Jeroen Leenarts: 1:51:40

that's, that's a good addition. So just to wrap things up, we were here with Josh with another RSS, and the Connect kits app. And he's working on a secret third little project that he hasn't launched yet. But it's gonna be fun, I think, find it useful. We had Chris with the neon go Japanese translation app. And we had Marlin and Kai with orbits, invoicing. And they're basically time tracking two. That's like really cross platform if you're in the Apple ecosystem. And we have LeBron with health auto export, which allows you to export your health kit information out of the healthcare API, and then make sure that you can actually hang on to it if you switch devices or that you actually share it or do some analytics on it on your own. So that you can really own the health information that your device caption you

Kai: 1:52:45

LeBron your your Twitter handle is just your first name. That is pretty cool. Well, lucky guy. Yeah.

Jeroen Leenarts: 1:52:53

So yeah, with that, I really want to thank all of you five, because it's it's been two hours that we've been sitting here and I really enjoyed hearing your stories. And yeah, maybe sometime we can do this again. Yeah. Thanks for having us.

Unknown: 1:53:11

Here. Thank you so much.