The Advantages of Working On an App You Care About — Christian Selig, Apollo

David Barnard:

Hey, Christian, thanks so much for being on the podcast today.

Christian Selig:

I'm really excited to be here.

David Barnard:

Yeah, it's been a long time coming.

Christian Selig:

Yeah, I think so. I think we've all talked in some capacity over the years, so it's nice to formalize it.

Jacob Eiting:

I learned from the notes that I was the one that suggested, or I talked to you about getting Apollo on subscriptions, and I'm vaguely remembering that conversation. There might've been a Twitter DM or something.

Christian Selig:

I think it was an email back when emails were a big thing. Yeah, yeah, I think you were like, "There's the subscription thing that's coming out. I don't know if you've heard of it." And I think back then I was still kind like chicken shit where everyone was getting roasted for it and I was like, I don't know what this guy's talking about. But you were ahead of your time.

Jacob Eiting:

Vaguely remember. Vaguely remember. It's pretty cool. It's pretty cool.

David Barnard:

Well, we can get more into that in a bit. I did just want to kick things off talking about how you got into indie development. Actually, I went to your LinkedIn page before this podcast to be looking to write your bio and stuff. No, and it's the perfect kind of LinkedIn page. It was like you were at Apple for a little bit and then you just didn't update it ever again. The perfect indie LinkedIn, I don't even care. I

Christian Selig:

I don't know if I've ever logged in since then. Yeah, I get a DM once in a while that they're like, "I sent you a message on LinkedIn," and I'm like, "Oh, well."

Jacob Eiting:

Well, our one mutual Christian I think is the same Apple recruiter that must've recruited us.

Christian Selig:

Oh, was it Mike?

Jacob Eiting:

No, this guy Joshua.

Christian Selig:

Oh, maybe that sounds familiar. Okay. Okay. Fair enough.

Jacob Eiting:

I wasn't that far off that I was there. I was there a few years before you, but-

David Barnard:

So you were at Apple and what happened after that, because the trail goes dark?

Christian Selig:

Yeah, I like to be mysterious. I was there for a summer internship during university, and pretty much after that I got that fire in your belly that you often do when you work somewhere really cool. And I was like, okay, I want to build something. And Reddit was really big at the time, still is obviously, but it was really, really big, especially where I was in university. And there was Alien Blue, but there wasn't really any really iOS first app that really I loved. So I was like, screw it. This could be a fun project to get my beak wet with.

So I started playing with that and it came along really nicely and I ended up posting it in the Apple sub Reddit, I think. And it really took off in a big way and people were really interested in beta testing it. So it kind of got to that point where I was like, oh, this might have some legs. I'm graduating in a few months. Should I go get the big boy job, go back to Apple or something, or kind of see if this has legs and try it out for a bit. And I ended up trying it out for a bit, burning through all the savings I got at Apple and ended up working out pretty well. So it kind of accidental in a way, but also just kind of happened organically, I suppose.

Jacob Eiting:

Had you built apps or anything else before Apollo?

Christian Selig:

Yeah, I had an app called Syllable that was kind of like a speed reading app. One of those ones that flashed a word at a time and tried how to help you learn to read a little faster. And it was great because it made a few 100 bucks over the course of a year during university, which as a university student is incredible. Yeah, yeah, that's amazing. And I think that really, that was back when there was like, oh, there's an app for that, commercials were everywhere. Apps were such a novel new concept, so it was so hype to be working on something like that.

Jacob Eiting:

And there were a few enough apps at the time still you could push an app and get a reasonable amount of traffic just from being on the App Store.

Christian Selig:

Oh yeah. TechCrunch would be like, "There's a new app out today. Check this thing out," which you don't see a lot of anymore.

David Barnard:

What year was that?

Christian Selig:

Probably like 2012, 2013, I want to say something like that.

David Barnard:

And then when did you start working on Apollo?

Christian Selig:

So I finished at Apple in 2014, so I think it would've been the fall of 2014 is when I started working on it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So yeah. Wow. Coming up 10 years.

David Barnard:

So what were the frameworks and process you used to build Apollo?

Christian Selig:

Yeah, it got a little better as time went on maybe, but especially at the beginning. I was a kid at a university, so I guess a lot of developers have years in the trenches working at a big startup or a formalized tech company where they developed these really great practices and I really had none of that. My school was very computer science theory based, so apps weren't even taught, so it was kind of a lot of feeling around in the dark. And Apollo, I was just working on here and there all the time I had and just kind of putting it together.

And I remember it took, I posted it, I want to say the January after that fall, and it was maybe a year and a half or two years later that I actually fully released it. So it took a long time of just kind of fuddling around and feeling the dark to even get there. From the beta testers there was a lot of, can you just friggin release this thing? I think I fell into every developer trope where there was feature creep and there was working on too many features instead of bugs. And by some circle of luck it came together and released.

Jacob Eiting:

I mean, you kept building, you wrote something, you were writing code.

Christian Selig:

Yeah. Yeah. I was, it just wasn't very structured. It was like, I need to get to California from New York and I know it's west, and that was pretty much as far organized as I was.

Jacob Eiting:

So your subreddit's always been very active, so is that where you would get most customer feedback and stuff like that?

Christian Selig:

For sure. Yeah. It kind of made it easy because the feedback loop was so close by, it was like you were in the app, you can just poke over here to give some feedback, and that made it really nice because there was no friction. People always gave really good feedback, and especially during the beta process. That really helped shape the app for the better, because I had a core idea of what I wanted, but the feedback people gave over the years really shaped it into something that I think became more than just my ideal of what a Reddit client was. It kind of got shaped into this what the perfect thing for a community would be, and a lot of voices kind of shaped it like a driftwood going through the ocean where it gets worn down in nice ways.

Jacob Eiting:

But I think that's how all like most great product, well, there's very many different ways to make a product, but I think that is one way. You have a lot of feedback and usage and people and a community that cares. And then I do think you have an auteur, you have an editor somewhere who's making some decisions about what gets put in and what not. That's a jobs thing. Good products are made with friction. He used to say that wearing things down and working on it until it's... That's very Apple. They would just grind and grind on stuff.

Christian Selig:

No, I think this was uniquely me.

Jacob Eiting:

The key man theory of history.

Christian Selig:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I think I was the first.

Jacob Eiting:

When did you decide or realize or at some point it became a commercial thing? Was that always like, not that it was making money, maybe it wasn't the number one thing, but at some point you were like, "Well, I have to eat and maybe this Reddit client can be how I eat?"

Christian Selig:

That was kind of always the goal on the horizon. Apple paid pretty well even as an intern, and I was living with six other friends, so life was pretty cheap and I was kind of just slowly chewing through that. But I knew a microcosm of a startup. I kind of had this fund and I had almost like a burn rate, and I knew by a certain date I had to get this out, otherwise it would kind of be troublesome. So I kind of had that in the horizon, and I knew back then I had this novel idea of just 2.99, one time fee. Economics were a lot simpler back then, and I figured I'll just put that out and then it'll hopefully take care of itself.

That was the extent of which I thought through the monetization, but it worked out pretty well by the end. The first day it got a ton of downloads because there was a lot of pent-up demand from people who saw the beta, but [inaudible 00:07:06] and weren't able to get in. So there were a lot of people who just jumped on the pro version immediately. So it was financially viable from day one of the actual release, but it was a lot of burning through funds in order to get there.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah. I mean, it's financially viable when it's one young person living with five other people, which is fine. That's how you should start.

Christian Selig:

Yeah. Yeah, it definitely helped a lot.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah, it's like you can do a lot of things. Your costs do directly kind of affect what you can try and the risk you can take and stuff like that. And then you can compound later on, you can build more revenue or figure it out later. But yeah, Sam Altman used to talk about this more when he wasn't the richest, most famous AI person in the world, but to just say your personal burn rate is probably can be your number one hindrance to risk taking as you increase your personal burn rate.

It just lowers the opportunities that you can take, because you have... There's lots of reasons that somebody's burn rate, it might not be intentionally chosen that way, but it is a huge input to the amount of risk and things you can try and stuff like this. And I think we take, not to say you were lucky, but I think we're all lucky in some ways. You were young, had the skills, had the time, had the financial runway, and then of course had the vision to build something for a community. But I think lowering the denominator on this makes a big difference.

Christian Selig:

Oh, it's brutal, because I'll get Twitter DMs where people will be like, "How did you get into this? Would you recommend a similar path?" And it's like, "No." Like you said, the stairs aligned. People with three kids and a family and 10 hours a week of spare time, that's not a formula I would've really been able to create what I created within, so I was very fortunate, I guess, to have the-

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah, it makes the advice not super transferable. It's not like going into these impossible at that stage. It's just like your baseline is going to be a lot higher and it's going to be harder. It's going to be more challenging maybe to get off the ground.

David Barnard:

But that is what's great about the indie hacker scene and the ability in software to have side projects and have a full-time job and you can build something cool in just 10 hours a week. You can't follow the Apollo playbook to do that.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah. How much were you probably working on that, Christian, in that time?

Christian Selig:

Oh, an ungodly, because it's that hobby/work barrier that gets really dangerous where you're like, "Oh, I'm working on this feature," and it's a ton of fun and it's like 10:00 PM and you were like-

Jacob Eiting:

I think they call that your life's work, I think is what that's called, right?

Christian Selig:

I guess. But you slowly don't have work hours anymore, I guess, which is awesome in some ways, but in others, those few hours a night, someone might recharge in some capacity or still just plugging away.

Jacob Eiting:

I think there is this, I won't necessarily accuse the indie community of having this myth be bigger in their world, but I think there's sort of generally a myth that you can attain outsized rewards. I think David DHH and 37signals guys have made this worse, but to think that you're going to be able to achieve, maybe you can, but most great outcomes came through at least some period of intense investment, and it might not have been that bad. It might have been something you were perfectly happy to do, but you had, again, it was like a time of your life where you didn't have commitments that you had to do. It was fun, and you have this intensity where you build and build and build and build. I feel like there's a movement where that's bad. Like, oh, you're not being balanced and all this stuff, and you're like, yeah, but I don't know, I wanted to.

Christian Selig:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No. No one was holding a gun to my head and it was a lot of fun, but it was just like you look back at it and you're like, yeah, there was inherently balance wasn't a word I would use for that. But it was just in terms of trying to replicate that for someone else, it's hard to say, "Oh, just work on it for 80 hours a week. That's all you got to do." And they're like, "Okay."

Jacob Eiting:

I mean, it might be, I will posit that that might be, maybe it's not the only thing that matters. And again, I haven't worked 80 hours a week on revenue cap probably since the first year. Maybe there were spits and spurts of it here and there, but I definitely think when you're in that nucleation phase, when you're going from zero to one, I think it's hard to think it wouldn't be part of the equation, or at least if it's not necessary, it's certainly correlated. I think folks that get things off the ground.

David Barnard:

That was the whole setup and joke of me kicking this off with the framework side of it. Christian, what frameworks did you use? What process? But I think the truth is, and Jacob said this earlier, it's different products are built in different ways and different people have different temperaments and different time availability and your path is a path. If you only have 10 hours a week and you've got three kids, you probably do need to think more and plan more and have more of a process and do some market research and those kind of things.

But I think a lot of great things come out of exactly what you did, even if it is 10 hours a week or 20 hours a week or you get carried away and do spend 40 hours a week on it for a few weeks when you're still working 40 hours a week in your day job. You're just passionate about it and you just have to build that thing versus I do think it can get overly formulaic where you're just building this thing because you think it's going to make you money, but you don't even care, and that's a grind.

Christian Selig:

Yeah. I don't think I would've made it to the end anywhere close if that was the case, because I was using the shit out of it. So it was like this was something [inaudible 00:12:16].

Jacob Eiting:

That's super underrated being a consumer of your own product, but that process of having people using it, interacting with them, and then being the tip of the spear, the person who can actually build and deploy, that's going to outperform any sort of framework or process or whatever, in my experience, I think.

Christian Selig:

That's interesting. I never thought about it like that. Yeah, that's a-

Jacob Eiting:

Just how close you were to the consumer, the user, and then you could actually just fix their thing instantly if you wanted to.

Christian Selig:

It's almost a framework in and of itself.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah, I mean in absence of framework, it's just gasoline and oxygen or whatever. It's just put the two and it will kind of... Which is kind of like, I don't know. We were talking about founder mode, it's founder mode week when we're recording this for people who are terminally online, but Christian was asking me about it, and I think that's kind of one of my learnings. Sorry, sorry.

Christian Selig:

No, no, please.

David Barnard:

It's a lot of synergy in this conversation.

Jacob Eiting:

Oh, shut up, David. I know. It's ruined me. But I think one of my realizations over the last few years has been that I do think that the core ingredients being there trumps all process or whatever, and those core ingredients being people who can build stuff, people who have a need, and then just energy. Just talking to them, seeing what their problems are and using very basic reasoning to be like, "Okay, what's next?" Now I say that with however many years of software building experience behind me and all this stuff that I can synthesize and understand what's possible and what's not and all of that. So it's maybe an oversimplification. But I do think that, yeah, I think there's a desire to over systematize a lot of these things, which should just be organic and sort of artistic.

Christian Selig:

Such a good word for it. You always see those old guy billionaires writing the books, and here's how you do what I did. When it's like, I don't know if those steps are inherently repeatable or it was just kind of you struck while the iron was hot.

Jacob Eiting:

Or there's even any causation at all. I was doing this and this is what I was doing when I found a gold mine, which is making it obviously that-

Christian Selig:

Right, and they say it with such conviction. You read the book and you're like, "Dang, I can do this too." And it scares me so much when someone asks for advice to accidentally go down that path where you're like, "This worked for me in this hyperspecific case that I'll prescribe this to you as something that'll work in your case too." Whereas I think, like you said, having the more organic approach of having the right ingredients in the cauldron I think is a lot more helpful than some inherent formula or framework.

Jacob Eiting:

The tragic part of it is you can have all the ingredients, it still not work, and it probably most likely won't. If you have enough at bats, and if you can keep in the game long enough and you can keep trying, eventually you'll have something I think that will work, which is also I think something that people are challenged with. People a lot of time cutting their losses on a project that's not going anywhere and deciding when's enough. Christian, did you ever have something where you worked on and you were just like, "Ah, I think I need to drop this, because it's just not worth the squeeze anymore?"

Christian Selig:

I don't know.

Jacob Eiting:

Batting 100 this guy or batting 1000.

Christian Selig:

It's less that, and it's more so I don't think I start working on something unless I'm really confident in it being something I care about.

Jacob Eiting:

Which is interesting. It's not something you're really confident about working. It's something you're really confident that you care about, right?

Christian Selig:

Yeah, exactly. And to the extent that if I release this and I'm the only one who likes it, in some cases, that's good enough for me. Whereas I almost envy some people are kind of just like, they just got a random idea using the bathroom and they're like, "I'm going to build that this week." And that sounds like a lot of fun, but to me, I sit on it a little while and I'm like, "Where would I take this? What kind of legs would it have?" And that's kind of when I invest the time in it.

And then at that point I feel like I'm confident enough and I've put enough time into it that not releasing it, it kind of feels wasteful to me. I get to a certain extent cutting your losses, but to me, at a certain extent, it's like I thought this had legs at some point. I kind of wanted to see this through to see if that had any basis in reality. And I haven't had so many at bats that I'm sure eventually it's going to be a terrible formula, but I've only had three apps or something, and it's worked out pretty well so far.

David Barnard:

It's funny you use the word care, because that's exactly what I was going to say is that even if it's not a financial success, if it's something you care about, it can be incredibly rewarding. And if you're building it only to be a financial success, maybe you need to... And if it has to be a financial success, like you're burning your life savings to build it, then maybe you do. But I mean, even for me, my Weather Up app, it's not been super successful. I mean, it's made a couple 100 grand over the last five years and it's done all right this year, but it's super fulfilling to me, even though it's probably never going to pay the bills.

Jacob Eiting:

David's the most into weather apps of anybody I've ever met. I have one, and it came with the phone and I think it offends him a little bit that I'm like, "That's fine." Actually, that's not true. I have some specialty weather apps.

David Barnard:

And that's the thing is that I really don't care, because we had a storm come through a couple weeks ago and we had gotten the beta into this weird state with a data corruption thing where I could not use my own app. So I went to the App Store and I downloaded 20 different weather apps, and I did not like them, and it was so incredibly personally fulfilling to be like, "I just want my weather app."

And so is it ever going to make a million bucks? I don't know, maybe I'm going to keep plugging away at it, but I get an incredible amount of personal fulfillment in building this thing and I get to build it with my cousin, which is a lot of fun. So in my case, I work full-time at RevenueCat. It's a side project. I don't even put 10 hours a week into it most weeks. With big updates I do put more time into it, but it's pretty cool that I can tinker on this thing that I really care about and get that fulfillment, even if it's not making millions of dollars.

Christian Selig:

Yeah. And I almost think if the financial aspect is the only thing motivating you, I don't know how sustainable long-term that is. I feel like you'd burn out pretty quickly.

Jacob Eiting:

Being in YC, just name-drop that just to make sure [inaudible 00:18:22], but-

Christian Selig:

Y Combinator?

Jacob Eiting:

Well, yeah, a lot of people in your bash that you saw, you see a lot of folks come through, and I guess I just run into a lot of people who are early. It's probably similar to you, Christian, you have indie hackers wanting to get into it. I get a lot of people reaching out early stage venture-funded path looking for advice and stuff, and I can definitely tell the psychological difference in somebody who's doing it because it's something that's burning inside of them versus somebody who wants to do a startup for the checkbox and maybe the money and stuff like that. Those are good too.

Christian Selig:

You sniff that out immediately?

Jacob Eiting:

There's a few tells. If somebody talks about selling the company some day while about flipping it, I'm like, "You've already checked out. I know you're going to try less hard, right?" There's certain tells that are minor. But yeah, I honestly think that if you could know in somebody's heart, and I think most people don't actually know themselves at some level, but if you could know that, I think you'd be the world's most successful angel investor. If you had a perfect sense of that, I think you would. Because it's the people who are doing it for the care of the craft, the personal reasons, the spiritual reasons, whatever, those are I think the folks that will try harder, they'll push harder. They have a little bit of a burning the boats mentality where they go, there's no path back. I'm not turning around.

Christian Selig:

Do you think you have a good enough batting average that you'd ever get into that angel investing area?

Jacob Eiting:

No, I have done a little bit. I think I'm pretty underperforming.

Christian Selig:

Fair enough.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah. I don't know. We could talk about venture. It's super interesting, because I think in indie world, the only difference between, well, not the only, there's a lot of second order differences that come when you're doing a venture-backed company versus an indie. But really it's just, it's funding and a financial thing. We have all the same problems. You have users, you need to get product market fit. You need to have a good culture within. If it's a company of one, it's easier to maintain that culture. But I mean, your culture just becomes your personal mental state and your personal behaviors which matter. And so I think it's a lot more similar than people think. I just think the difference, and we talked a little bit before the call about founder mode, which is this thing that Essay, Paul Graham, wrote.

Christian Selig:

Yeah, you're a big proponent.

Jacob Eiting:

I mean, I don't know.

Christian Selig:

I've never heard someone so gassed up about it.

Jacob Eiting:

I don't believe in isms, as my friend Ferris Bueller once said, but I think everyone should believe in themselves. And so if it resonates with you, I mean, I still love [inaudible 00:20:58] movie, but I think if it resonates with you, you should do it. But I think the process of trusting yourself, believing in what you're building, I think all of these things sort of trump how you're funded or if you're not funded, having a purpose to what you're doing, stuff that makes sense to you as the builder of a thing. And I think this actually applies to people, not even necessarily founders of things or owners of things, even in your own work.

I think if we constantly try to cargo cult, which I don't know if, does that land on anybody? Cargo culting?

David Barnard:

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Christian Selig:

Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah. I think we constantly try to cargo cult these processes from other successful companies and places. And it goes back to your point, Christian, about the book from the billionaire in their retirement years. You can copy that, but it's probably not the thing that made that magical, I think this is true for a lot of us in Indieland. We copy Steve and I think there's some things he said and felt and did that were core to their success. But if you copied it-

Christian Selig:

Steve Harvey?

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah, Steve Harvey. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Family Feud. But if you copied everything Apple does, I think you might end up with a really broken company, right?

Christian Selig:

Yeah. Oh yeah, yeah, for sure.

Jacob Eiting:

There's a lot of stuff in there that's not actually related to their success. But yeah, I'm big on founder mode. I'm founder mode number one. Founder number one. That's me.

Christian Selig:

Yeah, you even changed your shirt. Is that the-

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah, yeah, I have it on right here.

Christian Selig:

No, it's interesting. Humans seem to love, I don't know if it's a shortcut or we just seem to love trying to find our process to do something better. And I don't know if that's an evolutionary technique or something, but it's wild how there's almost... We love prescribing if you do X, result Y will occur.

Jacob Eiting:

I think we have this desire to map a system of a predictable system onto essentially chaotic data. We're always trying to find the underlying physics and properties, and sometimes it works and we learn how to swim and jump and all these really complicated physical properties and things, and we've either learned that evolutionarily or not, why can humans drive? How did we figure that out? It's just like we can map to these insane systems. But then there are some systems which I just are inherently chaotic. And I think most systems in the world, and I think products and how they interact with people and whether or not businesses make money or not, I think are pretty chaotic systems.

And so we're constantly trying to like, oh, if you just do OKRs and you just do this and you just do that, that's the underlying physics of the system and you'll be able to manipulate and control that system. And I think essentially they're always going to be very chaotic. And I almost think that just adapting to that chaos, kind of organic, going back to organic, whatever that means, that word of just focus on very basic things and you can adapt to the chaos and not try to tame it necessarily maybe is better. But we love to try to put complex things into boxes that don't really map. And then we go, "Why does nothing make sense?"

David Barnard:

Sounds like chaos is kind of how you built Apollo. It is like you just followed the users, you followed your own-

Jacob Eiting:

Christian trying to decide if that's an insult or a compliment.

David Barnard:

No, no, no, no.

Christian Selig:

I am saying that's a very romantic way to put what didn't feel so... It felt like a compliment, and I'm not sure it's deserved, but I appreciate it.

David Barnard:

So I did want to get back to building this business that started as this kind of crazy passion project that you hope would make some money. And then you launch it and it's, you said 2.99 upfront?

Christian Selig:

It might even have been 1.99 for the first week. It was one of those things where it was in hindsight, not great, because I don't know the difference between 1.99 and 2.99 or even maybe 3.99, it's if you're-

Jacob Eiting:

You probably debated that a lot or not. Actually, I'm curious because some people sit and wring their hands over a price choice forever, and I'm always just like, "Just pick a price and then you can change it later. It's fine."

Christian Selig:

I don't think I put that much. I think Alien Blue was like 2.99 or something, and I was like, that kind of seems maybe at the time that was what seemed reasonable to charge for a Reddit app. But in hindsight, it's one of those things where I think I did the same thing with lifetime pricing once I finally followed Jacob's advice and had subscriptions where it was 19.99 for the first year. Which was bonkers price when I think it was $10 a year for the actual subscription. So it's like it pays and it was like I ended up increasing it to 30 or $40 and the take rate didn't change at all. And it's one of those things where you're like shit.

Jacob Eiting:

So you had surplus, uncaptured demand right there with your-

Christian Selig:

100%.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah.

Christian Selig:

Yeah. It's a lot of chaos. But yeah, it was just a lot of chaos over the years, I think, where it was good chaos and the subreddit served almost as a continual north star. You got too off base. It was like you work on the wrong feature for too long and you start to hear from people, kind of thing.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah, they start yelling at you. This is me and Twitter. Anytime where I'm not building what I need to be building, I'll know.

Christian Selig:

Oh, 100%. Well, yeah. Yeah. And it's great because it serves as that north star. So there was kind of a shepherd of the chaos in that capacity. So it wasn't, I guess, as chaotic as working completely alone. You kind of had, I likened it to a team almost in some ways.

Jacob Eiting:

Or like your community.

Christian Selig:

Yeah, yeah, because they managed you in some ways. They're always giving feedback. If they didn't like something, they'd be very vocal about it. So it kind of helped in that way. But over the years, yeah, it was a lot of just hearing the squeakiest wheel gets the grease or whatever the saying is, whatever they're yelling about that month is probably something I'll put on the roadmap, work on that. And it was kind of rinse, repeat for years and years and years, and it worked out pretty well.

Jacob Eiting:

We maintain roadmaps here, but I think if it were up to me, it would only be the roadmap would be what we're working on, and then maybe the next thing, that's it, because-

Christian Selig:

So is that David's thing then?

Jacob Eiting:

Whatever he wants? Yeah, basically.

David Barnard:

Oh, I fight really hard internally for things. We finally got our subscription auto-renew chart back in RevenueCat after two years of me bitching and moaning about it.

Jacob Eiting:

And it was popular.

Christian Selig:

Maybe you should listen to him more.

Jacob Eiting:

Actually, that might be a good example of something where we have our customer interview process and we kind of trialed some things and whatever, and it didn't seem it was that hot and it kind of got back prioritized and blah, blah, blah. Went a tremendous amount of work. But if somebody's yelling at us about it, we should probably just try to build something pretty quickly because that'll be the best way that we learn if it's really worth it versus you can put a lot of pre-work into like, oh, is this people going to use... You should put a little pre-work in. But I've just seen, we maintained a longer, more complex roadmap in the past, and I don't know, it just always felt demoralizing. It would-

Christian Selig:

Do you feel shackled?

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah, exactly. We would just feel like, well, I did want to say this thing. At some point you're just like, just don't maintain it. If it's important enough, it will keep coming up. Customers will keep complaining about it. We'll keep hearing it. And I think it's been better. I think it's been better. We're not fully, fully reactive, but we have been trying to push more reactive.

Christian Selig:

Yeah, there's a sweet spot there.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah. I mean, you can't just not have any sort of sense, and you need that editorial. You have some sort of idea of what a finished Apollo looks like or what the product as a total looks like.

Christian Selig:

Well, it's pretty finished now. Pretty good.

Jacob Eiting:

But whatever you're working on, you have some idea of where it might go and you can decide, even if you're getting yelled at by... I say yelled at in a loving way, but-

Christian Selig:

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. It's an affectionate.

Jacob Eiting:

Feedback from customers. Some things you'll be like, "Yeah, I hear that, but that's just not the way we're going to go," and you get to make that decision. That's still important.

Christian Selig:

Oh, yeah. I think depending on how you articulate that, I remember if a customer had, or customers even had a relatively popular idea, and it wasn't something I kind of jived with. I was always afraid of being like, "No." But it came to the point where the first time I did it, I think I just kind of explained my reasons why I didn't think this was a great idea, because maybe they don't have the full picture. And the responses were like, "Oh, shit. Yeah, that's a good point. Okay." And I was like, "Oh, shit. Okay. I'm not getting yelled at." Yeah.

Jacob Eiting:

My move would be let me add it to the roadmap. That doesn't exist.

Christian Selig:

That's fair.

Jacob Eiting:

It's on our radar. That's what I tell people. That's what tell people on Twitter when they suggest some wacky thing. And I'd be curious if you felt the same way. There's a real problem. They always have a real issue. And then they would suggest something. I'd be like, that's maybe the dumbest solution I've ever heard. I'm being facetious, but that's not going to work for a number of reasons.

Christian Selig:

And sometimes I find they just don't have that whole picture. A common one for Apollo is there'd be these services that continually scraped Reddit, which is a whole different story, but as a result, they kind have a cache of every comment. So if someone deleted a really juicy comment, you could theoretically go back and restore it, and that was a common request. Add that to Apollo, I want to see what they deleted. And it was like, I see on the surface why you think that would be something you'd want, but you into all these safety issues there. Maybe they doxed themselves and people should probably have the right to delete a comment that they want to rescind. And you're kind of getting into this jelly area of that's kind of sketchy. And as soon as you explain that, they'd be like, "Oh, shit. Yeah, I didn't think about that aspect of it. Yeah. That could kind of get dicey." And I think sometimes as the founder or the creator, you have a lot more marbles than everyone else does.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah, there you go. Christian's endorsing founder mode right there.

Christian Selig:

Yeah, yeah, I know. I've been trying to get you guys on board.

Jacob Eiting:

I'm now going to bring it back to founder mode again, but I do feel like there's this tension with VC backed companies, and I don't think won't use anybody, but I don't know, I think there's... Well, I don't know. Part of it I think is grass is greenerism both ways. I think I look sometimes at indie folks and go like, "Goddamn, you're just by yourself. You don't have all this debt." Debt i.e. like capital you have to return. You kind of get just to do what you want.

Christian Selig:

So you have to return that?

Jacob Eiting:

The capital?

Christian Selig:

Yeah. It's not just-

Jacob Eiting:

I mean, we should do a venture capital 101 maybe episode, David. Well, I mean, they own part of the company.

Christian Selig:

It's not just free money?

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah. Okay. So actually this is a common misconception. I people misconceive this in both directions. One direction people go like, "Oh my God, the investors don't expect anything, whatever." You get the money and you just build and then whatever. And there are, I think some founders who kind of have that mindset of, "Whatever, it's stupid money, I'll take their check and then I'll just build whatever I want." And you can't do that, you got to have to have some... And then I think people have the opposite perception of once you've taken their money, you're owned and you can't do anything anymore. That's also very far from the truth, right? But there is an expectation that they're going to give you a dollar, and they would very much like something slightly more than a dollar back.

David Barnard:

Eventually.

Jacob Eiting:

They expect a lot of their dollars to go to zero, and they make their money when not $1 goes to a $1.20. They make money when $1 goes to $10.

Christian Selig:

Oh, interesting.

Jacob Eiting:

And that's the misalignment is they invest in 10 companies, five of them go to zero, four of them return $2, and then one of them returns 10. That's how they make money.

Christian Selig:

They're not like bunting. They're swinging for the fences and they [inaudible 00:31:51]-

Jacob Eiting:

No, exactly.

Christian Selig:

Oh, interesting. Okay.

Jacob Eiting:

Exactly. And there comes the mismatch because as a founder, often a bunt is a pretty good deal for you personally, right? You get to build what you want to build. You can make a lot of money on that if that's your motivation and stuff like that. And I'll admit, I don't think I fully appreciated it when I walked into it, but that's the thing that before people totally cast the venture route versus the indie route, you just have to understand what their business is. If you understand their business and you're okay with that, it can be really a good fit. And this is me justifying now that I'm permanently committed to this.

Christian Selig:

Knowing what you know now, would you have done anything different years and years ago?

Jacob Eiting:

I mean, I'm sure there's branch points where I said like, "Oh, no, of course it's like, oh, I could have waited to raise that round." If I were starting from scratch, would I do RevenueCat indie hacker mode versus not? I think the reality is, and this is different depending on what you're building, I think if you're building an app, this is not 100% true, but generally my advice is do not raise money if you're building an app like a subscription app or at least bootstrap it to a point where it's working and it's really working or be ready to shut it down, raise very little money and be ready to shut it down and expect that it's going to be a hit or not a hit. I think apps getting venture returns is very, very difficult.

Christian Selig:

I would imagine they're hired to get the money in the first place too.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah. Well, and that's why, because people have looked at historicals and there have been winners out there, but they're very rare. It's not like in B2B SaaS it's like as long as you have product market fit, the way that the pricing works and all of that stuff, you can kind of stumble your way, which has been basically my path. It's just been stumbling my way up the revenue scale. To answer your question, going back, I think for a product like RevenueCat, it's so broad and there's so much we can build, and I think there's a real advantage to reaching some level of complexity very quickly so that we can service this industry and kind of become a leader and all of that stuff.

That doing it bootstrapped would've been very challenging, because you're constantly hand to mouth. You're like, "Oh, I want to build a thing, but all my money's going to pay my people, and maybe there's a little bit... I want to build the next thing, but I got to wait or whatever." And as it stands for us, the only real bandwidth, the only real constraint is can we find people that will work well with us and can we scale our team and processes and stuff, and do we have enough mental bandwidth to take that on? Those are our constraints. Cash is not a constraint.

Christian Selig:

You haven't felt that pressure to 10X?

Jacob Eiting:

Oh, of course. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Christian Selig:

I mean, you probably have from 2017 or whatever.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah. I mean, plenty of my investors have hit, they're in the money as it were, right. And I think that's also a, you talk about decisions, what I do differently. There's some micro choices there where it's like, okay, I probably took on too much money at too high a number that I wasn't confident enough at the time, and I think that put me under pressure and I felt sort of like, "Oh God, am I not going to be able to make this?" And so I think there's points there where I would've like... And this is one of those non-intuitive things where it's actually saying your company's worth less is very good for you. Set your expectations. There's a big mismatch. People's egos want the numbers to be as big as possible, but really them being smaller, your future self will thank you, under promise, over deliver.

And so there's some decisions there. I will say, I think you can maybe say, this is a benefit or a downside. It depends on how you look at it, but I think it kind of forced me into being like, "Yeah, I've got to build something massive," which I think I could say I'm happy about because I think it's working. And knock on wood, we're on that path and that's really cool. I'll be able to look back and be like, "Geez, I built something." There's no way I could have built this without taking that path, I don't think, right.

Christian Selig:

That's a pretty definitive answer then, yeah.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah. In hindsight, it's like, yeah, I think if I hadn't, there might've been a world where I would've been like, "Oh, this is really hard. Maybe I should take off the gas a little bit, maybe go a little bit slower," and then I don't know where we would be, right? Maybe we wouldn't be in the position we are.

Christian Selig:

And that's a hard game to play. Yeah.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah. It's hard to go back and there's really almost no point. I'll say there was this one conversation with a family member a few years in when we had first started seeing some success and raised some money and stuff where he was like, just expecting me to be enthusiastically, he's like, "Oh, would you do it all again?" And I'm just like, "I don't know. I don't think that's a simple answer. There was a lot of sacrifice." I'll ask you that question with Apollo, especially now seeing how it all wound up and everything. Knowing what you know about the journey, would you do it again?

Christian Selig:

Oh my gosh, in a heartbeat. Yeah. Yeah.

Jacob Eiting:

Okay. See, I've made the wrong choice then in life because I go like, "Oh man, I don't know. It was pretty tough there for a few years."

David Barnard:

Well, let's give a little context real quick. I don't know that everybody listening will know the full context. So Christian built out Apollo. It became very successful. I don't know if you ever kind of did the indie hacker share numbers thing, but it seems like it was very successful.

Jacob Eiting:

I think it was the most liked.

David Barnard:

And incredibly loved, a lot of very passionate users. And then Reddit basically shut it down. Was going to charge a ridiculous fee for API access, which was untenable. And we don't need to get into all of that, but you had to completely pull the plug. So yeah, would you do it again?

Christian Selig:

Yeah. It's one of those things where it's like it's easy to look at it and be like that last June, there was a lot of strife. Apollo was, you mentioned a lot of sacrifices and a lot of probably mental hardships over the years, but for Apollo, it was pretty smooth. How fortunate I was was not lost on me. It was very smooth for the whole time and I think I kind of got the black hole dying star of strife all at once, and that was rough. But it's one of those things where it's like, I don't know, I kind of think of it like a TV show where if you have a TV show you really and it gets nine seasons, you're like, "Holy shit."

Jacob Eiting:

And it actually has kind of an exciting ending.

Christian Selig:

Right. Right, exactly. So it's hard to be like, "Oh man, we only got nine seasons." No, that's friggin awesome. It was a great run. I had a ton of fun doing it. And it's like, yeah, I just feel really fortunate that it lasted as long as it did, and I got to build something so cool that influenced so many people, and I got to meet so many different people like you folks in doing it. That it's hard to be grumpy about... It would feel almost like insincere or lacking gratitude for the cards I was given.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah. Was there a part of you sometimes, I mean, this is very joke, I think anybody who works on something for a long time, you're just like, it's like, "I wish I could go do something else some days." Was there a part of you that was kind of relieved, like, "Oh, okay, I got a good clean out on this thing. I don't do Reddit clients my whole life?"

Christian Selig:

Honestly, it's a complex answer because I think when I was in the trenches with Apollo, maybe through the chaos I had zero burnout just because if I didn't want to work on it for a few days and just wanted to screw off... I had no employees. I could just do that. And as a result of that freedom, Apollo still felt fresh to me nine years in. And I was still having a ton of fun doing it. So I guess if you would ask me when I was still maintaining it, I would've been like, "No, I could do this forever. Keep it coming." But it was one of those things where after it ended, and I was suddenly able to do some, freed up some time, I was able to work on some different projects that I had kind of had in the back of my head that I was like, "Oh, this kind of is nice in some ways." I wasn't hoping it would end, but when it did, it definitely had some positives and freed some stuff up in a fun way.

Jacob Eiting:

I mean, not to constantly be bringing it back to venture world, but because your basis was your time and years and whatever, and you generally felt like those were well spent and you enjoyed it. You were clearly in the money, right? [inaudible 00:39:19] investor hadn't gotten a great return on the investment. And so it sucks for people who use the app and maybe whatever, but everybody made money as they say.

Christian Selig:

No. And it sucked for me too. It was in financial ways.

Jacob Eiting:

It's not how you want to spend your time, right? Dealing with-

Christian Selig:

No, no, no. And I'm trying to be appreciative. It objectively sucked, but it's one of those things where it's like you had such a good run that it's hard to only look at the suck. You had such-

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah, and there is a question. I mean, what's the long-term ownership? I think every business founder, indie person has to think about this. I think if your inputs are low and whatever, and it's just you, it's like, well, you can just shut it down. It's fine. Or maybe you can sell it to somebody. That's fine. In some businesses though, that gets more complicated as it gets bigger. I think that's maybe the RevenueCat thing. And the venture back thing, I think probably more generally is your outcomes become... Just shutting it down because like, "Oh, we lost our main thing and whatever," probably not an option.

Christian Selig:

Yeah, there's probably a few more-

Jacob Eiting:

Probably like, okay, we got to figure this out. You got to do something different, that maybe when the better option for the people would be just to take your chips and go home. I don't think people always make the rational decision there. Or maybe rational for the investors, but not rational for the people involved. There's some amount of blessing and a clean ending. And yeah, the final season, season finale was really intense.

Christian Selig:

It was, yeah, yeah.

Jacob Eiting:

On Rotten Tomatoes, it's strong all the way through.

Christian Selig:

That's true. Yeah. No, I'll take that. I'll take that.

David Barnard:

One of the things I've been curious about since last year, and you and I haven't talked about this, maybe you've talked about this on another podcast or something, but with the subscription model, you could have potentially raised the price to a point and lowered your API call, been more stingy with the API calls to maybe find the right balance. Did you go through that process in that, whatever it was two months of back and forth with Reddit of like, can I actually make this thing work under this new paradigm?

Christian Selig:

Yeah, for sure. And I talked to so many people in the community giving numbers and being like, "Do you see a path forward here?" And it was one of those things where the biggest thing that I think kind of put everything in the shitter was that they basically gave 30 days from the day they announced the pricing to when you would start incurring fees. And in Apollo's case, it was in the realm of $20 million a year, which was far beyond anything Apollo was making. It was very much like, these costs are going to hit like a brick very, very soon, so what do I do about that? And there was the aspect of, I have a certain amount of existing subscribers that have a locked-in fee that I can increase, because inherently how subscriptions work, there was a lot of calculus around that.

And it ultimately came down to maybe if there was more time, I could have maybe steered the ship in a different direction and made something work, but just the speed at which they forced everything to happen. I think about how when Apple bought Dark Sky, I think they gave 18 months before the API got turned off, and I think they extended it like six months beyond that. So it was having 30 days, and it wasn't only switching out your weather API source, it was switching out like the API source. It was very aggressive. But it's one of those things where even if I was hibernated Apollo for a few months, kind of sorted out all the things and then resurrected it with a new pricing model, it's one of those things where even playing that back, the math just didn't make sense.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah. Well, I mean, you got this $20 million a year base expense. Okay, great, you get everybody to cover that. What's left for Christian? What's left to invest?

Christian Selig:

It was like I would have these astronomical costs, that, by the way, one of the discussions I was having with Reddit was like, could we sign a contract where these costs would be fixed at least for a year or two period, just so say I make this work and six months down the road you don't go, "Oh, shit, our clandestine attempt to kill these apps didn't work. Let's double the prices again." So that wouldn't happen. They couldn't guarantee anything like that. So there was this, the financials just didn't really make sense where I'd be having to charge far beyond what I felt a Reddit app was worth only to get pennies back on the dollar for my work there. And at the same time, building on this incredibly scraggly foundation of it really seems like they don't want developers on their platform anymore. You're kind of in there in a renter squatting where you're like, you're legally maybe entitled to it, but nobody wants you there. That feels like a very shaky foundation to build a long-term product on.

Jacob Eiting:

Were you convinced that was the goal was just to shake off all the clients, like the third party clients?

Christian Selig:

Yeah, 100%.

Jacob Eiting:

I don't know anything, but I'm just curious why they didn't just say like, "Hey, we're just shutting down all third party clients, because it is required for our business." Do you think they would just had a bigger uprising from the greater Reddit first?

Christian Selig:

I want to say it was this big. They thought there through a lot, but it genuinely did not seem like that. Because one of the things that was the weirdest about it was this all happened in May. And January I had an annual call with Reddit and they were like, "No, everything's great with the API. We're hoping to make some changes to maybe what's available, but no really big changes to the API this year that we have planned in any capacity." And it was like three months later, and they're like, "Actually, it's going to be $20 million a year." And I was like, "Whoa, that's a big change from January."

Jacob Eiting:

Sounds like somebody's running founder mode inside that company.

Christian Selig:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. In my head, they were like, we can't just say we're shutting down all the apps because pandemonium will break out, so we're going to have this kind of, maybe if we just wrap it up like we're just choking them to death. Maybe that will go over better.

Jacob Eiting:

I hope not. If I had to do that for a business reason, and maybe this will probably, I'll be tested on this at some point, I'd hope I would just be like, "Yo, this is what we're doing. We're going to IPO this year. We don't want anybody viewing Reddit not on Reddit. This is why we're doing this."

Christian Selig:

And I genuinely think myself and everyone else would've kind of appreciated that a little bit more, because it would've been more genuine.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah. If you're going to screw somebody, just tell them why. You just tell them. Okay. So I even tell them why. Just tell them you're screwing them. Yeah, yes I'm doing this to screw you. Great. Cool. Now we know.

Christian Selig:

You're at least being straightforward.

Jacob Eiting:

We can save a lot of phone calls.

Christian Selig:

Right. Right. Exactly. And it was even like the stringing along throughout the phone calls kind of being like, "Oh, no, no, no. We have your best interest in mind. All is well."

Jacob Eiting:

Sorry to keep bringing it back to founder mode stuff, but I do feel like employees at a company just don't necessarily feel empowered to say that, right? Maybe there wasn't a directive, they might know that that's the strategy and whatever, but it's just hard to say stuff like that when you're not, and the buck doesn't stop with you. And then when there's an asymmetry where it's like you're the whole guy, you're the whole thing you can say and do, you can act as Apollo with unanimity, but they can't, right. So there's this real agency asymmetry when you're dealing with folks sometimes.

Christian Selig:

I don't know if it was that removed though, because in normal cases sure, but the guy I was talking to was right below CEO level. And was like the CEO was CC'd in a lot of the emails and was very privy to the conversation. So it wasn't like, I don't think there was really any disconnect there. If I had to guess, again, this is just guessing, but it seemed like they were IPOing, and there was kind of a quick rush out the door to kind of wrap up these loose ends.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah, there's a lot going on at a company when you're getting ready to IPO. It's crazy.

Christian Selig:

And they were like, "Okay, we've got this loose end. We need to tie it up. Who has an idea?" And maybe the idea was-

Jacob Eiting:

They can't all be hits.

Christian Selig:

No, no, no. And you can't fault them for that.

Jacob Eiting:

And I guess it worked. Are there any extant Reddit third-party clients?

Christian Selig:

I think there's a few, but I don't hear a lot about them, and I don't think they're necessarily doing well. It's one of those things where, and it's tricky, because even if you look at the revenue numbers of a company, it's like when 90% of your revenue is going toward paying the bills, it's like-

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah, it's not a great business. Were you a substantial number of their DA use that it even made a difference?

Christian Selig:

Apollo was the biggest third-party app, I knew that much.

Jacob Eiting:

But I imagine their first party was still bigger.

Christian Selig:

Oh, 100%. That was one of the funniest things in one of the phone calls, they were like, "Do you know what percentage of our users you are?" And I was like, "No, I wouldn't know that." Yeah. And I was like, "No, what percentage?" And they were like, "Oh no, we're not sure."

Jacob Eiting:

It was like, "I have the numerator. I do not have the denominator."

Christian Selig:

Right, right, right. And I was like, "What a weird question to ask where obviously I don't know, but seemingly you don't have that-

Jacob Eiting:

And for all the venture-backed companies out there that are worried that you'll never get to IPO, Reddit got there. They did it through all of it. They figured it out. You can do it too, which is a lot of chaos.

David Barnard:

20 years or whatever it was.

Jacob Eiting:

It might take you a few. It might take you a few, but you'll get there. There's hope for all of us.

David Barnard:

Well, I did want to talk about some of your projects post Apollo.

Jacob Eiting:

Starting a farm, moving-

Christian Selig:

I've heard some mixed reports about that. A lot of wasps.

David Barnard:

Because I'm a user of one of your current projects, which is Juno on the Apple Vision Pro. How has that gone? I'm curious, I think I'm especially curious why you didn't make it a subscription after... Because I don't know what I paid what the five bucks up front in January, and it's pretty much the only app I use on Vision Pro, and I use it on at least a weekly basis.

Christian Selig:

I would say most of my ideas don't come from a place of logic inherently. I think it was one of those things where it very much, I think the week before the Vision Pro came out, YouTube was like, "Eh, we're not going to do it." And I was like, "Oh, I have all this code from Apollo for handling YouTube embeds that I could probably spin off into an app really quickly." And again, same thing where I'm like, I want to watch YouTube on the Vision Pro. I'm the only person that uses this app. Fine. So I was like, "Oh, I'll build it." And again, it was a very short period of time, so I was kind of like, I'll just throw five bucks on it. That seems like if you paid three grand for a headset, you can afford five bucks. It wasn't like a grand plan.

Jacob Eiting:

You're under appreciating your grand strategy there. But you saw that YouTube wasn't going to take their property, they weren't going to claim their right, and you were like, "Ah, great. There's a Christian shape hole right here."

Christian Selig:

Exactly. Because it was like they have this excellent full documentation on this YouTube embedding capability because it's so common that you want to do it in apps. For instance, Twitter or something where someone posts a YouTube video and you're like, "How do I play that without kicking them out to Safari or YouTube?" So they have this basically just an iframe where you can just play the YouTube video there. And I'm like, "Great." I used that in Apollo for years. I'll just play the video there. And since it's just an iframe and they give you some level of controls, I can manipulate a little bit to make it look a little bit more visionOS-esque. And it's been a lot of fun. It was such a fun rush again to be like, "Oh, shit, I've got a week to build this or two weeks or whatever it was," and just what features are important?

What can I build? And I really went back into that early Apollo mode of just scrambling it out the door. And I remember we didn't get the Vision Pro in Canada, so I ended up driving down to New Hampshire to get it, and I remember charging at a supercharger and seeing on my phone like, "Oh, it's been approved." I'm like, "Oh, sick. Okay, good." The whole trip wasn't worthless. So it was like that last minute that it was launching the following morning and I finally got that approval. And it was one of those things where it's like, yeah, even if the journey was so fun that I didn't, especially with it being such an expensive headset, I didn't have, oh my God, this is going to be my next Apollo. This is going to make a ton of money. It was kind of just like, I'm going to enjoy this and hopefully it'll be beneficial to other people who wanted to watch YouTube.

Jacob Eiting:

I think the positioning of the good media app experience, and it might not only always be only YouTube, you could imagine a world and where getting that foothold was definitely worth your two weeks. And then you'll see it probably depends on mostly how the ABP plays out, right?

David Barnard:

I'm curious about that. Have sales trickled to almost nothing?

Christian Selig:

No, weirdly. It's very much like Vision Pro came out high point, launched in other countries high point, but it didn't go to zero. It still makes 100 bucks a day some days. It's decent for-

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah, this is a core utility really. I mean it should be built in.

Christian Selig:

Exactly. And that's the thing, and I'm looking forward almost the day where YouTube does come out with something because they can do so many things that I can't as through the facilities I'm using. It would be cool to see a full-fledged app that you can get really down to the nit and gritty with.

David Barnard:

Do you have any user analytics or I guess maybe even just App Store to understand what the usage of the Vision Pro is? It kind of is this weird platform for Apple that's kind of like on the shelf a little bit? Is it going to totally flop? I mean, like I said, in my very limited time I have to use the Vision Pro, it's pretty much all I use on the Vision Pro. It's like I kickback, throw the Vision Pro on, watch a little YouTube. It's like my wind down time.

Christian Selig:

It's honestly, not even my app specifically, but the Vision Pro is a great way to watch video. It really does excel at that. So I hear you. Numbers wise, I don't have any analytics. I probably could check App Store Connect. I don't.

Jacob Eiting:

It's really hard, because you don't know the opt-in rate really. So it's like getting absolute numbers is really tricky.

Christian Selig:

Exactly. And it's one of those things where it's like, yeah, it's done well enough and people seem to be downloading it, but it hasn't really mattered too much to me. If I had to guess personally, my Vision Pro usage has declined over the months and I don't use it as much as I used to. And it wouldn't surprise me if that's reflected in the numbers where people try it, enjoy it, maybe put it in the closet. But it's cool that for a lot of people it seems like when they get the Vision Pro, it's an app they want to check out.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah. You have two big projects now, right, that you're working on?

Christian Selig:

Yeah, that and Pixel Pals, yeah.

Jacob Eiting:

I guess most of your time is spent on Pixel Pals? Well, or most of your time's in paddleboarding.

Christian Selig:

Oh man, I'm terrible at paddleboarding. That's something I need to work on.

Jacob Eiting:

I'm just trying to pick a stereotypical Nova Scotia activity I feel like.

Christian Selig:

Ice skating I think. But no, no, no, I can't do that very well either. I need a good example. But no, it comes back to me not being the best at logic and business. Pixel Pals does very well and it makes an order of magnitude more than Juno does the YouTube Vision Pro app, but it's like I was so entranced by the Vision Pro for three or four months of, I just worked on that a ton.

Jacob Eiting:

You got nerd sniped is what they call it.

Christian Selig:

Basically. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I was just so entranced by, even though the numbers made zero sense to focus on that versus the other thing, it was just a lot of fun to work on. So I ended up doing that for months and months and months, and I'm working on Pixel Pals a lot more this summer. But yeah, I kind of got lost in the sauce a little there for a few months on what would be the most beneficial to work on. But it was a lot of fun at least.

Jacob Eiting:

Pixel Pals I think is really interesting as a project, because I think most indie devs, they usually stay in utilities or whatever, and it's kind of at an intersection of games and utilities maybe, right? And games are freaking lucrative. Look, the App Store games are still dominating. Actually maybe it's apps now are maybe 50%. It's maybe equal.

Christian Selig:

But yeah, and it's kind of like the Vision Pro where it's like, yeah, we stay in the utility's lane so long that having something that's not at all in that area is kind of like you're stretching different muscles.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah. There's just more creative surface area. You don't have to do stuff because people ask for a purpose. You can just build cool things because they're cute and it's fully for the art.

Christian Selig:

It's a lot of fun. With Apollo, the extent I'd work with the designers normally is to get custom app icons done, but with Pixel Pals you can get a lot of pixel art done by some really talented people. And you kind of-

Jacob Eiting:

And I was going to ask, the next is are you doing the creative fully or-

Christian Selig:

No, I'd love if I was able to do that because pixel art, I don't know, it's so nostalgic. That would be a really cool art form to get into.

Jacob Eiting:

It's one of those things where I think I would Dunning Krueger myself and be like, oh yeah, it's just squares, right? I could just draw squares. And then you're like, no, I absolutely cannot do this. It's impossible.

Christian Selig:

No, no. It's like cross stitching and all that stuff where it seems simple on the surface. But yeah, there's definitely an art to it and it frees up a lot of time where, I don't know, with engineering work you iterate until a point where you're like, it's fast enough, it works well enough, ship it. Where with the few times I've attempted pixel art, you shift a pixel right and then left and up and down and you're like, there's no definitive, this is done. And you can get lost in the weeds there. It becomes easier to let the professionals handle that.

Jacob Eiting:

That might be a hallmark of good artists is like they can just know when it's done. Just know, "It's good enough. I can ship this. I've seen enough things I can ship and this is on the level." But even that, I think peer reviews and stuff like that is helpful. I worked on a iPhone game for a little while and definitely when you had a couple artists versus one, it was a much better process, because the artists could then review and cross check, critique each other's work. Which is true for programming too, I think in a lot of cases. I mean I mentioned Apple, but have you ever worked with other programmers, had your code critiqued and stuff?

Christian Selig:

Not since university, no, I don't think so.

Jacob Eiting:

You're one of the untouched tribes. Your code is probably just-

Christian Selig:

Oh, it's mayhem. Oh, yeah. There were some files in Apollo that were like, I'm sure broke the Geneva convention in terms of what you were allowed to be doing.

Jacob Eiting:

There's a real freedom to it though. There's a real freedom to it.

Christian Selig:

And I understood it.

Jacob Eiting:

That's coding founder mode. We're going to keep bringing it back to founder mode. It's like, just do what you got to do. You could probably move really fast and it's debt you took and you don't care. And it might not even be debt. It's only debt if it prevents you from doing something in the future, otherwise it's just free money, right?

Christian Selig:

And a lot of the time it was debt in terms of I think this is a good way to do it. And then a year or two goes by and you become a better programmer.

Jacob Eiting:

That's the worst. Honestly, those are the worst debts that you take when you don't even realize it's a debt. You're like, "I'm just doing this because I think this is the right architecture," and you do a half decent job. And then you realize later, there's so many things in RevenueCat that Miguel and I made decisions on in 2017, '18 where I'm like, "Why are we still having this bug?" And it's like, "Well, sir, because in 2017 you decided to make this all one SQL table." And I'm like, "Fair enough."

Christian Selig:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, get blame. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No. But when you're not maybe at such a big company, in some ways it is kind of fun to look back on those things with new better eyes and be like, "Oh my God, that was such a dumb way to tackle that. I can do that in half a lines of code with half the bugs." It's like going back to and playing soccer against your elementary school team. It's like, this is easy. These kids suck. Where there's a certain fun to that sometimes. But yeah, it becomes anything where if there's too much of it kind of bogs down the whole project,

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah, yeah, but you don't necessarily need to address it. I think this was one thing Miguel and I, I think debated, and then I think in the past I've worked in places where we were much more delicate with our architecture and all this stuff. We never wanted to create debt. And I think one of the things we did well at RevenueCat was being like, we are going to consciously create some debt and just know that some of it's going to get thrown away. Be judicious with where we do it. And that's been huge. We take that all the time.

Christian Selig:

Well, you're VC funded.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah. Okay. Equity and debt. David, we need to do a 101, because these are things like equity and debt, totally different vehicles and they have different consequences. And also people do take debt. It's called venture debt and it's super, that's actually the dangerous stuff in some cases, but we'll do a whole podcast on it.

Christian Selig:

I'd honestly enjoy that.

Jacob Eiting:

Next time I'm having a debate with people on Twitter about it, everybody can be informed.

Christian Selig:

Oh yeah. Yeah. I'm sure that'll make Twitter debates much more enjoyable for you.

David Barnard:

Go listen to my podcast.

Jacob Eiting:

Aren't changing the world with our podcast.

Christian Selig:

I'm saying your tweets change the world. Your podcasts are kind of like a separate thing.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah, that's what I'm here for.

David Barnard:

Well, Christian, it's been so much fun chatting about all this and we did kind of wind around, but-

Jacob Eiting:

Should we talk about founder mode one more time? I think maybe hit that topic?

Christian Selig:

A little light on that.

David Barnard:

I think for a lot of folks, hopefully this is going to be a freeing conversation of like, "Hey, I don't have to have all my shit together to go build something."

Jacob Eiting:

Just look at this mess. Look how successful he's been.

Christian Selig:

Thank you. Someone finally said it.

David Barnard:

But ultimately I think the takeaway from this conversation is users are what matter and creating value for them and what you did incredibly well without process because you were very passionate and found a community and what people need to do, even if they can't form a subreddit of passionate people who are going to kind of... I like what you said, they kind of managed me. Your subreddit kind of managed you.

Even if you can't build that kind of community around your app, you need to be talking to users. I mean, it's something we do a ton at RevenueCat, which I deeply appreciate about our culture, is that you can't let the users drive the ship, but if you're going to build a ship that people are going to get on, you got to make sure that they're going to find something valuable. It's a trip they want to take. I think that's something you've done incredibly well without all the fluff and the process and the BS. It's like you did it your way and you were successful at it. And like I said, you're what, three for four. Three of your apps are incredibly loved. I mean, again, I'm a Juno user. Even though it was like this side project you just tossed out in a week, it fulfilled a need and is a genuinely great experience on the Apple Vision Pro that I wouldn't be having in the Safari YouTube experience.

Christian Selig:

I totally agree. I feel like our industry, one of the worst, not even gatekeepie, but accidentally gatekeepie things is I think we make it seem like we're like wizards over here or something. And it's like people are like, "Oh my God, I could never do programming or I could never build an app that's like crazy stuff." But it's really not. You don't need a lot of processes. You just need a good idea and the conviction to want to see it come to fruition. But you look at fricking Colonel Sanders, he just had a good recipe and he just wanted to make some chicken and it works. You just got to have a good idea and you got to want to see it happen. But yeah, yeah, I just mean there's a lot of processes that I think for people from the outside looks very intimidating that I think you can break down a lot of those walls and it's not as bad as it looks.

David Barnard:

All right, anything you want to share as we wrap up? I guess people can follow you on Twitter. You've got a burgeoning YouTube career. I actually freaking loved your YouTube video on building your own keyboard. It was incredible. Watched the whole thing, sent it to my son. We're both a little bit of keyboard nerds, so that's fantastic.

Christian Selig:

Oh, that's awesome. You're my people. Yeah, no, it's like anything, it's just you want to do something and you put it out in the world and hope people enjoy it too. But yeah, I'm Christian everywhere pretty much that I keep the consistent name so it's easy to find me.

David Barnard:

All right, well thanks so much for joining us. This was really fun conversation.

Christian Selig:

Oh no, the pleasure's all mine. I hope there was something valuable in there.

David Barnard:

Thanks so much for listening. If you have a minute, please leave a review in your favorite podcast player. You can also stop by chat.subclub.com to join our private community.