The RIZZ Problem

Right now my son is down for a nap so my schedule we've got a newborn in the house and a toddler and I've also got three other kids so we have a pretty busy household. The great thing about running a business that generates residual income is that I have revenue coming in for the newborn so I've taken a bit of time off, I've taken Mondays and Tuesdays off coding. I just wanted to be coding on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. The reality is living with a four week old and not getting a whole lot of sleep trying to also juggle a toddler. I haven't got a lot of work done in terms of building apps. I've got ideas and I've been slowly trickling out what I'm working on but by most part just sitting down to do that high level concentration work, the problem solving work. It's been quite challenging. I feel a bit anxious doing this one. I think because the last podcast I was just talking into the void and not really understanding that you're going to have feedback and you're going to have people actually looking and listening to this thing. Yeah so we've got a toddler and it's difficult at the moment to separate from him. He's just gone down for a nap now which is the only chance that I've had to actually do another episode, another podcast and I haven't got a lot of work in. So a lot of my work has been around kids and around just being there for my partner. It's been great in the respect that I've got a business that generates residual income so the apps continue to produce an income regardless if I put in work today or I don't put in work today but the result means that I like I don't feel the impact of not putting in the work today until six months to 12 months down the path. So if I'm building an app and I wanted to sell the app in six months or 12 months time for me to grow it then I need to put the work in now. It takes six to 12 months for an app to take off in the app store. What I've seen with apps and it just seems to be the app store specifically. So I'm going to focus specifically on the app store not Google Play. What I found happens is you release your app and it goes through Apple does an amazing thing where it tries to show your app to potential users and lots of users will download your app. You get an initial window of five to seven days where your stats are officially inflated. The recommended search seems to be the most important part. So if your keyword is primarily at the beginning of your app so let's say it's a run tracker. If you name your app runner and then you name the runner run tracker then it's not going to come up in that initial search recommendation as high but if you name it run tracker runner and put your product name afterwards so put your keyword first then it's going to come up in the recommended search in that first five to seven days and you're going to get a big chunk of downloads happening in that time. So a successful app or a app that's targeting the right keywords you might find you get like a few hundred downloads in the first week. After that you will drop down to three, four, five downloads every week for the next six months and then over time you'll start to see after six months climb in downloads again. This is pretty important to for me this is something that I learned of the hard way, the long way. I would release an app, get that endorphin rush and that hit that I've done an amazing job, everyone loves it. Then all of a sudden no one's downloading it for six months. What I've used that time for is just to focus on their next app, wait for the app store to do whatever it needs to do to work out what your apps about, what keywords you're targeting and your reputation on the app. I think the age of the app has something to do with the way it's ranked. All those downloads those prioritized downloads make sure that you're getting reviews during that time. You need those reviews. If you get mostly good apps, mostly good reviews, you should see in six months time that apps start to increase in the rankings. I've based my whole independent app building career on releasing the app, getting on the app store, focusing on that original, that initial week launch to get the reviews, mothballing the project, when I get suggestions for updates or changes, unless it's a critical bug that I need to fix, I don't touch it. It sits in the app store for six months, after six months, I review. If it hasn't taken off, let it sit there, mothball it. If it has taken off, then start adding those features into it that people are requesting, or some of those things that you want it to add into version one, but you just ran out of time. So what I was getting at is we've got a newborn in the house and a toddler. I'm having to find myself justify why I need to be working at the moment, why I need to be building apps. If I build an app today, or I start working on a feature, I'm not going to see any benefit from that app for six to nine months. So I don't feel those how important that is right at this exact moment. But in six to nine months time, I'll feel it because all of a sudden my pipeline of apps that I've built and their trajectory that my apps are on will be impacted considerably. So I have a big hole where things just aren't growing and there's no new revenue models being implemented. If I do decide to sell the next lot of apps, then I've got this big hole where I don't have any apps in the pipeline. I don't have anything to monetize and I'm just based on my existing apps. All fine and good at their generating revenue, they're helping us live quite comfortably at the moment. But it is dependent on if one of those apps disappear at the app store or lose some of their rankings, it's going to have a knock on effect of household incomes going to dramatically drop. So I've been finding myself trying to justify sitting down to get work done while also trying to manage or not manage, but juggle home life as another having another child in the house as a father of five like the house gets very busy. But I've been reflecting quite a lot on what I'm doing during that time. And I think what I'm doing during that time is exactly this. Working on my apps when I can, putting the time and effort in when I can, the Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, I think I'll get into a routine where I can start working to that level. At the moment, I'm trying not to put so much pressure on myself and focusing a bit more on this side of things, the podcast and the YouTube side of the channel. But instead of focusing primarily on my business model being growing apps and building apps, I'm going to also be focusing on sharing my knowledge and basically giving a whole master class for free on YouTube during this time. I am fantastic at getting an app from $0 to $500 per month. I'm not so good at going $500 to $1,000 to $1,000 to $3,000 a month. I'm trying to grow that skill set and I'm in that process of trying to work out how to scale things. And I keep hearing everyone in the industry saying it's harder to go from $0 to $1 to $100. It's easier to go from $100 to $1,000. And this just isn't my experience. I'm my headspace and my skill set seems to be getting off the ground and getting it to that level where it's generating a bit of revenue. I've created a bit of a run sheet because I've been putting ideas and the run sheet is massive. I didn't realize how many things I wanted to say until I just sat down and did one episode and then all of a sudden the fear of starting disappeared and there's a lot like coding, it's a lot like creating an app and it's a lot like anything in life. The first step is the hardest. So I've got the run sheet and then I'm looking at the run sheet. I'm not quite sure if this is a good idea because now I'm looking at the run sheet and it's not flowing as well because I've got here and unpolished, it's better especially in the age of AI. Talk about it. And now I feel like I'm interviewing myself. So yes Adam, unpolished is better especially in the age of AI. So I'm not quite sure run sheet works. I think it's a good idea to sort of have something to fall back on or to draft those ideas. Putting my face on it on my Twitter feed every day is making me much more comfortable with the process. Thanks Adam. That's fantastic news there. But basically my whole journey so far has been just trying everything that all the other indie hackers have done. Let's set up a newsletter. Okay, I'll set up a newsletter. Wait a minute, I have to write an article every week for this. I'm not very good at long form writing articles. It takes a lot of time and a lot of mental bandwidth that it could be putting into something else. So I've got a newsletter. If you want to subscribe to it, go ahead subscribe to it. I have neglected my newsletter. It's sitting around about 800. 900 subscribers, I don't know what to do with it. My strength really seems to be that short form content, especially on Twitter, on Twitter, X, on X. You have an idea or thought and you put it out into the universe. It's taken a few years to build up, be part of the community and build up a community. And that has been a really fun process for me, because as you probably do, if you're watching this and you're in the app building industry making apps independently, I mean, who do you talk to? We're not sitting in an office where we get to chat with coworkers and we get to chat with, go to the water cooler and just chat about our day or chat about the problems that we're having or get advice or just those incidental relationships that are developed through working in an office. So when I started treating Twitter and I'm just, I'm not going to call it X. I'm going to call it Twitter. I don't know, it's hard to say X. It sounds like I'm talking about an X partner. I don't like it. But when we're on Twitter and we're chatting, it feels like we're in a shared office. It makes it feel a lot less alone, a lot less lonely. This whole process can be really, really, really lonely and the DMs that I get, because I'm quite, I'm quite open with some things in my life and I'm quite open with my journey. So I do attract in my DMs, people that are hitting those same hard times in their life or really struggling with their, their business or even just wanting to get into at building, being able to work for themselves and express themselves creatively. So I get these DMs and I chat with people extensively who are going through these similar situations because I've been there. I know what it's like. I know how hard it can get. You hear about burnout a lot in this industry and there's people that don't think burnout exists in this industry, but burnout exists. And the reason why burnout exists is because we're locking ourselves in front of a computer, not seeing the daylight, not seeing other people. We're building things that fail over and over and over again. And if you constantly have negative reinforcement, negative results, it takes a toll. And then who can you talk to? You can't talk to your family because your family's like, get a real job and I hate that expression, get a real job until it works. And then when it works, they're, "Oh yes, we always believed in you. We always knew you were going to make success out of it. Did you? Did you really?" Because I seem to recall, I'm going down a bit of a, that was a bit of a therapy session. It wasn't, I think I better stop that dead in its tracks. So it's hard to talk with the people around you. They really don't understand what we're trying to achieve. And sometimes to be honest, like I don't even know what I'm trying to achieve. I just know there's something, it's a creative spark that's inside me that I just want to release. And I just, I just want to create things and have some sort of meaningful impact through my work. I'll talk about the app I'm building at the moment. So the app that I'm building is, it's called, well, it started out as an app like a screenshot mockup generator. I started development on it about a year ago. It's just another screenshot mockup generator like a screenshot app. I've really had to assess whether I'm, whether I was building this thing because I had just like, I have that problem as an indie developer where instead of buying something, I'll just make my own. And I really had to pull myself away from that. And I ended up just purchasing shnapper, snapper, said in APP, to do what I was trying to build. So I abandoned the mockup generator. But one of the features that are having the mockup generator was being out to create these little pop up animations, like a feature zoom that popped out of the screenshot of the phone. The way I accomplished that was just with SwiftUI views and the view would pop out. And then I'd have a confetti that would explode around the view. I would then screen capture the screen. And any time I wanted to promote like an achievement on social media, I'd screen capture it. I'd make the animation SwiftUI animation happen. And it was really engaging. Everyone would ask, like, how did you do that? How did you make a pop out? How do you do the features in how do you do the thing? And I was like, well, this, there maybe this is an app in itself. It does something a bit different and has a bit more of a user, a use case. That's not just another screenshot capture app. But I put it on the back burner. I also saw Wall-Eid was building an app called app Uly. And app Uly turned out to just do what I was aiming to do a million times better and up reaching out to him. And I was like, I'm building a similar app. But look, I think you're doing a better job at it. I'm going to put mine on hold for a bit just to find my feet with it. He was so graceful and he's like, no, no, no, you should release it. But I didn't release it. It just sat on the shelf. I didn't want to step on the toes of other indie builders who are building apps that do similar things because it just seems to be one of those tropes that every indie builder builds another screenshot capturing app. So I'm building a screenshot capturing app. But this time, I wanted to focus on those animations, those that quick animation. And I thought that should be easy. I should just be able to convert the views into an MP4 file like you would when you just capture. There's some code to capture a view as an image. And I thought, well, maybe I can capture like 24 frames of the view. And then save it as a gift. Gif, Gif, I call a GIF. Don't cancel me. So if you have 24 frames of the view with the animation of the confetti, then that should show, like, make the animation. So I gave it a shot. Didn't work. What I discovered was when you do with animation and you have like moving from point A to point B, that process doesn't seem to capture it properly. It was a year ago that I did it so I can't remember exactly, but it just didn't work at all. It went back on the bench. I've been thinking more and more about creating the screenshot animator app. And I even put it out there as a poll. I registered the domain names, which is the worst thing you never ever leave you go daddy account open when you've got an idea at three o'clock in the morning. So I wanted to put the poll out there. Should I go with screenshot animator.com or screen animator.com? And of course, I have to register those names because there's going to be a few people that see the results. And someone's going to jump on the domain name before I jump on the domain name. Animatally, it was pretty much split 50 50. The consensus was they're both not that great of a name. And I was like great. Now I've just registered two domain names that I don't even like. This app now has turned into I asked chat GPT to show me how to turn a series of images into an MP4 file animating the actual creating a whole class that lets me put layers down, put backgrounds down and animate it with keyframes. Basically, like what any photo, any video editing software does like after effects. I'm creating that from scratch because why not? I'm creating the screenshot animator app. I don't like the name and I don't really know what this app is. The more I'm delving into creating creating video editing app, the more I'm like, oh, that's a cool feature. I could add that in there. This app could be to generate TikTok videos from scratch. This app could be like you see those Minecraft videos where I like someone's talking or there's something happening on screen. There's a Minecraft overlay to capture the next generation, the generation coming up. What are they called? Alpha generation alpha. The generation alpha, they end millennials. I'm not a millennial. I think I'm a millennial. I don't know. I'm 40 years old. Who knows what I am? I'm me. So I'm building an app and it's really going out of control and I'm finding all these cool features you can do with the SwiftUI and video editing and all the ideas of flooding. The app is a mockup generator. The app is an app store preview generator. The app is to generate ads on Facebook. The ad is to generate TikTok videos. It is to create content for Twitter. The app is to do silly things with the screen like for engagement, bait, having a screenshot and then the picture like the little notification from Mum pops up and says, um, you're adopted or something like that or just or pop up that pops up saying battery low and nine times out of 10, you get someone saying, "Woo, did you see the. your mum thinks you're a dog." it like just engagement bait staff. So all of this, all of these features I'm thinking it's 10,000 apps in one. It's no longer a screenshot animator and what is a screenshot animator? And who on TikTok and who on Instagram is gonna bother with a screenshot animator? Am I in a bubble where we send screenshots all the time because I make apps that I want to show the screenshots on? Who in their right mind wants to actually animate screenshots? So while all of this is going on, my head spiraling and then I just have to go stop. Focus on what the app is. It's not a app store video preview generator. It's not a silly little app that shows like your stripe notification that you've got a million dollars in your bank account. It's none of these things. All it is is take a screenshot and put it onto TikTok or put it onto Reels or put it onto Twitter. Like I said, I'm not calling it X. I'm calling it Twitter. Get your screenshot and do something interesting with it where it demands attention in the feed. Okay, there is a target marker for generation. The generation coming up to have screenshots that do really obnoxious things and really and just something to grab your attention. I try and think of what word sums up the upcoming generation and what words. I know for us it was like lit and fire. So it's gonna be screen fire and screen lit but they're taken. So I end up being called screen Riz R.I. ZZ. And when I came up with a name, I tell you it was so free. All of a sudden everything was clicking into place and I knew I know what this app is. It's just it's a bit of fun and it's a bit silly and it's a bit engaging and you can put your own video in there. You can have some backgrounds or do some pretty cool things. Put it out there building in public. I haven't been building in public for a few months. I've been building quite privately and the reason for that is I was getting copycats. Every single time I build something, every time single time I announce something, someone would copy it, screen for screen. And if you look in the app store, pretty much all of my apps that I've talked about in the last couple of months have copies. I can get to that in a bit. It feels great to be working in public again. I have to say I really love it because it comes back down to that conversation where I come to the the water cool and like, hey, check out this cool thing I'm working on. People are like, that's cool. We should do this. That's cool. We should do that. So immediately, I had so much feedback on the app. It's turned into like the animations and the direction of it. The trajectory changed immediately just by saying, look at this cool thing I'm building. And then people are like, you should add this cool thing. You should do that cool thing. Am I actually I should? And then I build those cool things and it's a cooler thing. Anyway, I could go to message from Nick Sheriff. He's big into trademarks and he's big into, he's got his finger on the pulse of what's happening in all the legal side of things. I really neglect the legal side and I was like screen reads cool idea cool name. And he was like, Hey, he might want to think about the name Riz because it someone has actually trademarked the name Riz for use on apps. So I go trademark here. Riz by trend. I T L L C live slash pending. And the trademark was applied for downloadable mobile application software, namely a mobile application enabling users to upload screenshots and receive personalized text recommendations generated by artificial intelligence in the field of dating. Okay, so screen Riz I'm working with screenshots. I feel like there's some problems there. But then it makes you question like, can you register a trademark like Riz quickly? You can see it's live and pending, but there's a opposition pending. I have no idea how trademarks work. But on the second of April, someone has said like you can't trademark the name Riz. Okay, so you type Riz into the app store and straight away you see their app and you see 10,000 other clones. So immediately, I know they're registering the trademark because they're onto something special or something's happening within their business where they they've discovered they've hit a home run is what it suggests. People are copying it and they want to protect their brand or at least kick other people off the app store they're using the name Riz. There's a cool tool, someone recommended on Twitter and I have to find out who did that. You can quickly see how much apps are generating per month and this thing is insane. Okay, so in the last month, according to this app, they got 300,000 downloads and they generated $300,000 in revenue, $300,000 in revenue and number 20 in lifestyle and $300,000 in revenue. That's that blows my mind and you can see why they're protecting there. They want to protect their trademark. So then all of a sudden my screen res app, I'm like, well, if I get this trademark, they can pull this app off the app store. Should I be really pursuing this name, start with? I feel like it's going to be a hard one for them to get to register a trademark like Riz because it's become it was word of the year just a couple of years ago in one of those dictionaries. This screen res thing, I shouldn't be working on this right. This app is generating $300,000 last month. Maybe I should be making an app that you use AI to do something with the screenshot, right? And then I'm on the wrong path. That $300,000 is more than I'm making in a whole year from all my apps combined and then making that and then I have to stop. Once again, I have to tell myself, what are you actually building at them? Stop getting distracted. This is one of the hardest things with having a blank canvas and a blank slate, just being able to build whatever you want, whatever inspiration comes to you. I made it a general rule that when I start something, I release it. I mean, I just started the beginning of this show by saying this app mockup generator. I didn't release it after starting it. That's one of the exceptions, all right? Let me off the hook with this one. Just hear me out. Hear me out, right? I get distracted. So I need to make sure that the app stays on track. I have a million different features I want to put in the app and I end up to hit it and to get it out and released as version 1.0. I have to strip it back and go, what is the core functionality of the core feature of this app? Just a test if it's going to work in six months time or nine months time. Like I said, let's pull back to take six months for it to generate any sort of meaningful impact in the app store. So there's no point spending the next three months building something for it to be released in six months time for it to build momentum in six months time, only to find out in nine to twelve months. That is a flop. So I'd rather spend a couple of weeks, build the app, get it out there and see if that core functionality actually works and not get too carried away with it. As it turns out, this particular app, if you include the original version, the mock-up generator, like I've rebuilt it three times, I got chat GPT to generate all of the conversion of the frames into an MP4 file and the phone was running red hot. You could physically see the battery go from 100% to 60% by the time it finished encoding. I just thought that's the way things are. I had never really done video editing on the iPhone and then I was doing a FaceTime call with the kids and they put a silly filter on. And the filter was framing at 30 frames per second. The phone wasn't getting hot. My battery wasn't depleting. Like how can Facebook Messenger generate 30 frames per second in real time? Mine takes an hour to generate a 10 second clip. The phone gets hot. I have to do multiple threading. It lowers the battery. What's going on? I quickly find out that chat GPT has decided to use CG image, which is really fast and powerful from my understanding and from my learning. And it converted it to UI image, back to CG image, back to UI image, back to CG image. So every time it was converting, it had this massive overhead that it just didn't need for rendering images. I went to check the phone and I just realized my phone got filled up with space. I wasn't quite sure how much I've lost. I had to go in and start deleting some apps to get it to work. But we made it to the end of episode two. Sometimes the first step is the hardest and the second step. Not so hard, but still like I said, I had a bit of the nerves at the beginning of this episode. I've upgraded some of the equipment. I've played around with the lighting. I've discovered that my phone doesn't have enough space to run to record two hours worth of content. I like the idea of this conversational format. What do you guys think and girls? What do you think of this conversation format? What I also like to do is put some put your app in the comments. I'm going to have a look at some of the apps that you're making. So share your app in the comments. I'll have a look at it and we'll share some of the journey together. So, be cliche, like, subscribe and hit that notification bell. All my son is awake. That's good timing. So that's a wrap.