Jordan Morgan: What I discovered is Elite Hoops during basketball season. The beginning of October to the end of March, that's when I'll make 80% of the revenue, give or take. And what I discovered is it's getting so much on its own. Apple search ads do really, really well for it. I wish I could even spend more. I upped the spend on it all the time, and I've kind of hit the ceiling of what people search for in a day, and I'm pretty confident I capture most of that. Charlie Chapman: Welcome to Launched. I'm Charlie Chapman, and this is the annual Christmas Charlie Chapman: Special with the one and only Jordan Martin. Jordan. Hello. Hello. Welcome back s time of year. Yes. This is becoming one of my favorite traditions. So for those of you who don't know every year since I started this podcast, I think so it's been like four or five years, we've done a Christmas special where we get together and a normal episode of Launched, as you hopefully know, is I'm interviewing somebody about a new app or something that they've released and the story behind it. And this episode is basically my chance to navel gaze with one of my best indie app friends, Jordan, who we've sort of had these, I don't want to say parallel indie lives, but they've been crisscrossing. You were doing this longer than me. You released an app before me and then you got out of the app game and you became an author for a while. And so this is our chance to sort of talk about our feelings for an hour and hang out. Jordan Morgan: It's therapeutic. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, lots of overlap. I mean, everyone in southwest Missouri is just waiting to hear the indie dev Charlie Chapman: Dovetails Jordan Morgan: Between us, Charlie Chapman: So Jordan Morgan: We got to get people want. That's another Charlie Chapman: Piece of lore here is that we are both from Missouri in the United States, which this might surprise anybody who knows a lot about Missouri, but it's not the land filled with in D iOS developers. We like to joke that there's a rule, unwritten rule here that you're only allowed to have one indie app developer per major city because we have a little group of us, but there's literally only one of us in each city. It feels like Jordan Morgan: It's true. Yeah, there's not very many, and that hasn't changed in the five years Charlie Chapman: We've been doing this. We've had some move out. Yeah, Columbia, I think still is looking for one. I don't know of any there right now. No, no. We're sparse. I figured it's been long enough and hopefully now that this podcast has been rebirthed as a revenue cap podcast, hopefully there's a new audience maybe who doesn't already know our full backstory. If you don't, I'd recommend just go through the back catalog and well, really, you should just listen to every episode of Launch Jordan Morgan: Set Aside a Tinder five hours and you're Charlie Chapman: Sick. Yeah, you should go through, find all the Christmas specials and listen to 'em. Actually, it's become kind of a tradition of mine to listen to our previous episodes, which is always very fascinating. It's like a weird way to reflect on your year, to listen to yourself from past years. Recollect. It's like a time capsule that year. Yeah. Yeah. It's kind of funny if you don't already know our story, I wanted to give just a quick recap of how we got to where we are, and then we can kind of jump into the last year's things that we've been trying and how we're feeling on those. So it was right after I launched my indie app, dark Noise, white Noise App, and right before a month or two before I launched my app was when you launched Spint Stack, which was your indie app that you had been working on for a very long time. Yeah, much longer than I had been working on Dark Noise, but since that time, you sold Spins Stack, so that was sold. Then you have reacquired, the open source rights to Spins Stack. I don't remember how that Jordan Morgan: Was. I have the whole app now. Yeah, that was this year. It's back in my Apple developer. Charlie Chapman: Oh, that was this year. Jordan Morgan: Yeah, I think it was this year. They gave me open source rights to it, I think last year, and then this year I was like, Hey, can I just have it back? And they're like, yeah, sure. So yeah, it's back in my developer account. Maybe we can get into that. Charlie Chapman: A whole interesting thing is a very long recollection of selling your baby in a way. In that case for you, they gave it back Jordan Morgan: For free so bad baby. Charlie Chapman: Yes, exactly. If we did episode titles, that would be the title of the episode. Bad baby. So after you sold your app though, you didn't immediately jump back into the indie app developer game. You became an author. So you wrote the Best in Class iOS app book series, which took a few years off of your life, both literally and in the color of your hair. Probably now it's an achievement. You have this big book and you keep that updated over time. I've released a couple little apps. None of 'em were major big deals. I had a app that was free for teachers that got some press coverage and stuff, but it wasn't even paid, so it wasn't a big one. And then I switched over from a paid upfront app to subscriptions, and then very quickly after that joined Revenue Cat where I talk about doing that all day long. And then actually before you also joined me in this sort of developer advocate game, you also jumped back into the indie app developer game with Elite hoops, right? That was before you switched jobs. And can you remind us what the main pitch is for Elite Hoops? Jordan Morgan: Yeah, I call it a toolkit for basketball coaches. You can share plays, run practices, and save drills. Those are the main core tint poles of it. Charlie Chapman: Yeah, aimed at basketball coaches specifically, not players. Jordan Morgan: Yep. Charlie Chapman: Yeah, absolutely. We've talked a lot about that in previous Christmas specials, and then both of us have released Vision Pro versions of that app. Probably won't talk about that here, but that was the thing that happened. You joined Super Wall, a great partner of Revenue Cat. Is that the corporate byline before the show? It's not a no, no, no. I love Super Wall. I like Jake, Jordan Morgan: I like Brian, Charlie Chapman: I like the whole team. Jordan Morgan: Super Bowl is great. I was trying to think of some good burns to give the internet some drama, but I don't know. I didn't have time. Charlie Chapman: I do wonder how many people who watch our companies online will think that this is a, I can't believe they're together. Nature is healing. Look at them. Nature's healing. Yeah. No, me and Jordan, we go way back. But also the Superwell team's great. We have a good relationship, I feel like. But yeah. So now you're a developer advocate. I'm a developer advocate. We both have sort of side apps on the side, and then over the last year we've actually both released new apps, which I do want to get into. But first I want to catch up on what the latest is with Elite Hoops. The last episode, I was just listening to it. You talked a lot about your paid advertising that you've been doing Jordan Morgan: With that, Charlie Chapman: And you were like, we'll check in next year to see how that's gone, because Jordan Morgan: You Charlie Chapman: Had recently kind of been ramping it up, and so I guess now I get to ask you, how has that gone? Jordan Morgan: That's actually a really good thing to talk about. I have a lot of new news there. So yeah, at Swift, my talk there, I mentioned paid ads as well, and the ironic funny thing about that is I've never been doing paid ads, right? Or correctly. Charlie Chapman: I think I said that to you a lot during Jordan Morgan: This Charlie Chapman: Episode. No, Jordan Morgan: Everyone I talked to that does actual marketing has told me that. So when they ask, Hey, what's your CPI? What's your LTV cost to acquire customer, all these things, I'm like, well, actually, I don't even have the Facebook SDK installed. So I just kind of know what my installs normally look like when I turn ads off and on. And there's two reactions. Some of 'em are nice, like, oh, okay, I get it. I know what you mean. And other people are like, dude, what are you doing? You're wasting money. You have to be able to know what's working. So I think because pretty transparent with the numbers, I think this year I've spent 16 K on ads. I only spend $30 a day right now because two reasons. One, I hired a marketing agency this past month to show me how to do this right, to teach me how to actually do paid ads correctly. And two, what I discovered is elite hoops during basketball season, like 90% of the paid user bases, they're American, probably higher than that, probably like 95. Over the few years it's been out. I know it's seasonal. So the beginning of October to the end of March, that's when I'll make 80% of the revenue give or take. If I had to guess off the top of my head, I'll make most of the revenue in these next four or five months. And what I discovered is it's getting so much on its own. Apple search ads do really, really well for it. I wish I could even spend more. I upped the spend on it all the time, and I've kind of hit the ceiling of what people search for in a day, and I'm pretty confident I capture most of that. Charlie Chapman: You're saying Apple search ads are doing well, do you know that now? Are you looking at your cost acquisition and your LTV and is the math thing? Jordan Morgan: The math is math thing, and this is where I have to put the big ironic asterisk. So yes, I started this app 2023 before I joined Super Wall. So my app doing really well is on Revenue Cat, which I always have to laugh at that, the irony, but I do tell people I want apps on every platform. I want to know what the pain points are, how things, yeah. So I have apps on revenue CAD on Super Wall with the mix with neither one. When you guys first launched the Apple Search ads attribution thing, I turned that on the day that I saw your video about it. So yeah, I can go and look in the charts and see where actual paid conversions are coming from and segment it by the Apple search ad stuff. So yeah, I can see that that does really well. But it caps at like 500 bucks a week. That's the most I can spend on it. I would spend more if I could. Charlie Chapman: That's a limit Apple just has for everybody. Jordan Morgan: No, no, no. It's just like that's the search volume. Yeah, but I don't know how much you want to dive into paid ads at the moment, but the preview is from my learnings with the marketing agency is I think the term they said was like, turn that off right now you're burning money. Turn off Apple search ads. Turn off the ads that I've made on my own the way that I have it. They're like, turn that off right now. The money that you're making right now is not because of this basically is what they were saying. You're making money because it's in season your search, you have good a SO for it. Your Apple search ads are working. This is not making a difference what the setup that you have. Charlie Chapman: So they're saying the turn off your non-Apple search ads? Jordan Morgan: Correct. My meta ads. Charlie Chapman: So the meta ads specifically? Jordan Morgan: Yeah. Yeah. Gotcha. Yeah, the ads as I have them today are pointless basically is kind of what they're saying. The biggest reason they gave is one, they're like, yes, you need attribution. You have to figure out how to do it. I think I may have even put this in our group chat. I was like, you either die the righteous Cindy or live long enough to have to finally install the Facebook SDK or something like that. So the biggest reason they said is, so I made one, and this might've been this year, so we may not even talked about it. I can't remember if we chatted about it last year, but I made one video that went semi viral and hit, I dunno say 200,000 organic views, and then I pumped ad spin behind it and whether it's correlation or causation, because I don't have the SD K revenue did super well in that time for me, and I am pretty confident that's where it came Charlie Chapman: From. Jordan Morgan: But what the marketing agents, and they're called EVO Consulting, EVO O, they're a great bunch, just finished up with them, learned a ton that I'm sure we'll chat about, but they were pretty much saying, you're just milking the same creative, you've been using the same creative all year, that's not going to work. You need to refresh their creatives and you need to do that fairly often. So this one that you have, it's done. It served its purpose, it is time to move on and you got to use something else. So yeah, that's kind of what they gave me. But so the TLDR, I'm a big believer in paid ads. I've used 'em a lot. I've spent a lot of money on 'em, and now I know how to do them correctly. I never have had the setup exactly how it's supposed to be. Charlie Chapman: So you do have that set up now Jordan Morgan: That's next on the list. So what I have right now from the marketing agency are how to correctly run a paid ads campaign. They taught me how that looks. I have to get the Facebook SEK installed, which that doesn't take long. So that's my next technical thing I have to do before I turn these on. And as part of the consulting package, I have 20 creatives to use, which to me was the biggest value add because I don't like making creatives, I just don't like it. So I have a very good game plan, a professional that knows what they're doing, set everything up for me. They gave me the playbook, now I just have to kind of execute on it is where it's at. Charlie Chapman: And your idea is that you're going to do your own creatives and then run them as ads basically. This isn't using influencers, Jordan Morgan: This is using their creatives. So, so the videos themselves, there's different formats, but they made 'em all for me. So they have their own creators that they contract with. And the thing that really impressed me is the first thing that they did is they came up with this massive notion doc of who my ICP is my ideal customer persona, what the strengths of elite hoops are, why people would download it, how to talk about it. And it was almost surreal seeing that, like this thing that I've worked on for two and a half years, they knew it better than me. I was like, oh dude, this makes so much sense. Okay, yeah, this is how I should talk Charlie Chapman: About it. They can come up from a very different angle than you, Jordan Morgan: A pure marketing one. And it just reinforced me how people have that talent. They have that bone in their body to kind of dig through. And if you told me I had to make a notion Doc like that, I would put it off for months. It just sounds like that kind of thing is so mentally taxing to me. Okay. My ideal customer persona, Charlie Chapman: That's what CHATT is for. Jordan Morgan: Yeah, absolutely. Chat it up. I don't know. They would do a good job, although it's a good way to get started. It is a good way to get started. Yeah, what they've delivered to me is basically a lot of information on how to market elite hoops, the people that I'm trying to reach, how I should talk to those people, and most importantly, how to correctly set up an ad campaign with meta and here's a good starting point of creatives you can use to get going on that. So really, I've had paid ads and they've never been done correctly, and I want to see what happens when I do set 'em up correctly because it does so well just with Apple search ads and organic search right now that maybe this is that last little bit of gasoline I need to make it go to the next step and grow faster than it is right now. Charlie Chapman: So I guess that gives us our first follow-up item for 2026 Christmas Jordan Morgan: Special, and it'll be like, oh, I never installed the SDK. I just like, Hey, I'll do it later. Then a year goes by, oh yeah, that's going to start next week. Yeah. Whoops. Charlie Chapman: What about over the last year though? Has it been growing? I know the ad agency was saying the creatives aren't the reason that it's doing whatever it's doing, but has the needle been moving basically? Jordan Morgan: Yeah, so the start of the year, this is kind of what it's done the last two years. It goes up into the right until about the end of March, beginning of April, and then it'll stay basically straight the whole way through until I get back to October and then it'll go up again. Charlie Chapman: What are we saying goes up though? Is that revenue or is that your MRR or something? Jordan Morgan: You could pretty much say every healthy business metric. Charlie Chapman: I get that it's seasonal in the sense that that's when the money starts coming in, but is it growing and then growing on top of that or is it goes up, goes down, goes up, but then the baseline kind of stays the same? Jordan Morgan: Let's look at some charts and find out why don't we? Yeah, no, it's grown every single year. It's never stayed stagnant. So ARS is going climbing, climbing, climbing until we get to about May, and then from May all the way to September, it barely moves. It doesn't really go up, doesn't really go down, just stays where it's at. Charlie Chapman: So you're not getting new subscribers at that point? Jordan Morgan: No, not really. Not during that time, which surprised me because I thought I could really hit the summer ball circuit a U teams because that's their time. Since I ask people their demographics during onboarding, a lot of 'em are a U coaches, so I don't know if they've already subscribed or what, but what the data is telling me is it correlates to the basketball season, which is not surprising, but I am surprised I can't hit that growth year round because people are looking for a solution still during the summertime. It is funny looking at, I split it out by 12 months and it looks like if you started at the top right of the graph, you'd be going down the ski slope and then you have this nice settling period where you can kind of coast and then it goes down again. So it, it's weird. I have this thing that seems to kind of grow is in a spot where it's somewhat mature. It hasn't been out, I mean in the grand scheme of things very long, but I know when it's going to start growing a bit more, Charlie Chapman: But your churn, once annuals started hitting, did not overcome the new subscribers you brought in. Jordan Morgan: It stayed straight. So during what I call the off season, I'll get one or two conversions a day, and then because churn is depressing, I don't ever look at it, but obviously what that chart is showing is they pretty much cancel each other out, which is one reason why I have the luxury, I guess, of being able to really try paid ads even more because the revenue is good for me day in, day out now to where I know it's going to make at least 500 to a thousand pretty much every day. So I want to take that and see, I've never been shy about just putting money back into the business. What would happen if I got to the point where I could spend 500 a day on ads? What does it look Charlie Chapman: Like? Think the description of us too is that yeah, you'll reinvest and I am five years in, still scared of the tax man suddenly showing up, so, but you could buy Jordan Morgan: A lamb and a mansion. I could buy a McDonald's happy value meal, so don't feel bad. Charlie Chapman: No, that's good though. Yeah, my story is definitely different. Dark noise is coasting more or less. It's not really going down. It goes down. A big part of my user acquisition is press and apple features, so that's my big waves anyway, so September, October, I'll get a lot from either Apple features when a new version of iOS comes out or mentions on podcasts, especially end of the year, what's your favorite, whatever, what apps are on your home screen? Those always give me some big spikes. But those subscribers I found, I don't know the raw numbers, but at least based on the shape of the graphs, it seems like those tend to have a higher churn, which makes sense. More people kicking the tires. They have disposable income, the type of people who listen to productivity apps, but they're not necessarily fully invested. They weren't searching for it. They heard about it on something, and so that churn is higher. So depending on how that year goes, some years I'll lose more subscribers than I gained because I had a really big year the year before, not as big some years. It goes kind of the inverse, but more or less it's like, but I haven't been investing heavily into dark noise. I would like to be, it's more or less, I'm keeping it up to date every year with the latest iOS features and it's kind of plugging along, so it's not like a growing thing. But I did release a new app, which listening to our last episode, I actually talked about it. It had a different name. It was called Screen Frames initially, which was just my, I guess to back up, I had decided I wanted to try just building an app fast. Always been like you, I would sit there and just kind of obsess over something for forever, and I'm not a person who lets projects die very often, but I will work on them for a very long time before I release them. And so I was like, I'm going to try this. Yardie Bruin had this method called the two method that was popular or maybe still is popular, where it's like you work on something for two days and get a working version and then you give it two weeks and you should have a version on test flight and then two months you should have it out in the store, or maybe his is two hours, two days and two weeks. His is Jordan Morgan: Really compressed. It's very quick. It gave me anxiety. His is like, Charlie Chapman: Yeah, yeah, but either way I made mine an alternated version of that. But it was the same thing where I was like, all right, I'm going to get a working version as fast as I can. And I did, and the idea that I had was I wanted a Mac app that let me add device frames around screenshots. So like app developers, probably a lot of people listening, you frequently use an Apple shortcut or Figma or something where it's like you take a screenshot of your app in a certain phase and you want to share it in some marketing assets, so you need to put the frame of the phone around it so it looks like it's in a phone. And this was just to automate that basically. And so I had a very particular way I wanted it to work. I wanted to be able to copy and paste pictures into it and then copy and paste pictures out of it and just do everything immediately like that. And so I built a really, really quick, really dirty version that I never would've even built it that way in the first place. And then I got that version cleaned up enough to get on test flight even where it was slow. It was very slow because architecturally the way I did it was kind of insane. It was literally, I guess this is the Christmas special. We can go into stupid details. The way I built it originally was you can rasterize a bitmap image out of a Swift UI view, right? UI Graphics render image renderer or I don't remember. I don't remember actually anymore. Yeah, it's going through Kit I think. But either way it's a Swift UI view. I'm rendering it into an image, but the screenshots are decent sized obviously. And then the frames that you get 'em in are a decent sized image. And so the way I built it all originally was like you need to be able to preview what the image is going to look like. The way I did it was I literally would render the bitmap and then put that bitmap in the canvas. What you had in the canvas was not Swift UI views being rendered there. It was the bitmap, which meant if you change literally anything, it re-render the whole image. That's fine. This is why I did it. It was fine. It got the job done, but especially as if you had a Mac screenshot, well, that's a 5K image depending on your screen. And then you have the ability to drag in three or four images to have the phones lined up, which is pretty popular, but that's a big image, even if you don't need it eventually that big. Anyway, I built that version, got it on test flight really fast, and then life got in the way. And so when we recorded last year, I was in that phase where I had released it to test flight, but I hadn't gotten it fully released. Anyway, this is a lot of context to say. I did release that app in I think March of this year. It's now called Fraus, which our mutual friend Josh Holtz, I just gave him my name and said, you need to give me a real name. That's good. Jordan Morgan: Although here's a fun little hashtag check better than chat GPT at those names. Charlie Chapman: Yeah. Yes. And Jordan Morgan: That got the best ones Charlie Chapman: Chat, GP t's bad at naming still. Jordan Morgan: Yeah, Charlie Chapman: That is one thing it is just not good at. But this is another fun little tidbit and maybe you have an answer for me here. Well, no, you don't. I've asked you this before over spoiler, but the Mac app store sucks. Did you know this? Yeah, it's very Jordan Morgan: Bad. Yeah, it's depressing every time I go to it. Charlie Chapman: But as a product, it's very frustrating. And the reason I say this is my app is called Frame, like a pun on frame and famous. And what I have determined is that the Mac app store just autocorrects behind the scenes, the word famous into Famous, which means my app never ranks to the top of the word famous. It's always like fifth and it's fifth behind random apps, but they have the word famous whatever, and they have nothing to do obviously with anything. My app has to do with, Jordan Morgan: Would you like to give me a live demo of what you're behind right now when I search for Famous? So you're seven, okay, this is great. Number one, yeah, arc for You. Famous paintings. Number two, famous quotes. All right, number three, famous cities. Now we're really going to go off the rails on fourth through sixth here, four currency converter calculator, exclamation point, what's in the subtitle? How did the word famous exchange rates to USD is the subtitle. And then this might be my favorite, number seven before famous is Kingdom Rush HD the most. Oh, there we go. The most famous strategy td. So of those currency calculator has famous nowhere in it at all. And to be Charlie Chapman: Clear, you searched Frame with an R, right? Jordan Morgan: I'm getting ready to send you the Charlie Chapman: Screenshot. Oh my gosh. Yeah. So I thought I fixed this. So the app came out, did pretty well, got press in a lot of the big podcast and stuff, and I was very excited. And then I noticed this problem and it's like I'm doing all this earned press, and so people are going to the store and typing in Frais and they don't see my app and it's like, this is insane. Totally insane. I'm asking around and everybody, all the sort of usual experts are like, to be fair, I don't think most people know as much or care as much about the Mac app store. They're like, this doesn't seem right. I bet it'll fix itself in a few days. And lo and behold, in a few days I was ranking up at the top and I thought, okay, this is great. And I didn't pay much attention to it for a while, and then I go back a few months in and I'm back down again. What the heck? And then after a couple more of these little press cycles, I realized I'm pretty sure I'm just ranking higher for the word famous because when I get a bunch of earned media, it's like, oh yeah, lots of people are downloading it here, but then it kind of falls back down. I don't know that that's the case, but that's my only guess because it does seem like when there's a bunch of activity, it fixes itself. And I thought it was like the algorithm fixing itself or some engineer heard me complaining and fixed whatever, hard coded, not probably not hard coded, but whatever thing in there is making it say they may have typed famous and we might be showing that they typed Fraus, but let's just assume they actually meant famous. That seems to be what's happening. Very aggravating. Jordan Morgan: Just put famous in it, but it looks like you did that. So that was my big amazing idea. Charlie Chapman: Well, I have it in the subtitle, right? I literally was thinking, do I, do you have it open? What? Do I have something in the title, right? It's like screenshot sharing or screenshot frame Jordan Morgan: Or something. Yeah. Let's see. It says Frame Cole and Screenshot Frames, and then your subtitle is Famous device bezels Framer, which I love. I mean you just got to lean into it at that point. Yeah, very Charlie Chapman: Aggravating. But anyway, I don't think that's a big deal because it's not like my a SO on the word famous matters. What it has to be hurting though is it's showing up on the app store or somebody hearing about it on a podcast or whatever, searching for it on the app store. And then it's like if you don't see it in the top five, the top three results, that surely hurts the amount of people who actually convert. And even if you do see it at that point, it makes it, it's below a bunch of apps that give you this vibe of this doesn't seem like very legitimate. Yeah, I don't love it. But anyway, all that to say, that app has been doing really well for me, actually, it's a meaningful amount. It's a noticeable Jordan Morgan: Bump. Your SEO is fantastic if you just type frame this, it's the top result on Google. So I mean, you Charlie Chapman: Got the web browser, and honestly, that's probably what more people do on the Mac anyway. So yeah, that app has been doing pretty well. And there's a couple interesting things I did with that app that might be worth talking about. I made it a subscription, but then I kind of tried a slightly different monetization method that I don't know yet if I've decided if I regret it or not. But basically it's a subscription for $10 a year, or you can do a lifetime purchase for 20 or something, but that lifetime purchase only unlocks the frames that came out in the year that you purchased it and all the previous years. So I'm selling the 2025 frames and anything that came up before, actually I'm in the process right now. The idea was I would run a Black Friday sale and then after the Black Friday sale's over, then I switch over and I'll start selling the 2026 frames, which is I'm literally, this weekend is what I'll switch over to. And so it's annoying because it means I have to make sure I go in and do that, but it's actually not too complicated. And so we'll see. I'll find out next year what that looks like because if I convert 30 or 40% of the people who did that, which I probably won't, maybe 10% of the people, it might still even out to being similar because it costs more than the regular auto-renewing subscription. So it'll be interesting to see how that goes. Jordan Morgan: I like that model. I remember, I don't know how I remember this years ago, apple Design Award winner agenda, they called it the Cash Cow, which I think ironically it was like an ironic name, but that was their thing. If you bought, I don't think they actually had a subscription, maybe it was just an in-app purchase or non consumable, but it's like if you bought the date that you bought, the tier entitled you in perpetuity to the pro stuff up to that date. But if they released another thing after a year or whatever, then you had to buy it again or whatever. With the idea being you never lost the pro features that you paid for, which I thought was interesting. Charlie Chapman: They were trying to do the sketch model because Sketch at that time was really popular with the whole, you just get updates up to a year after you bought it or Jordan Morgan: Whatever, Charlie Chapman: But on the Mac, that's an easier thing to do. But on iPhones, it's like you can't really do that because you can't give them access to old versions of the software. And so yeah, agenda's way of doing that was, I don't actually know anybody there, so I don't know technically how they did it, but they would've had to have built a system into the app where every single feature had to have a year gate on it. But then the crazy part about that to me is just the qa. It's like you have to be able to QA every year's version of it. So somebody who bought it and didn't pay for the upgrade and had had it for 10 years, you need to be able to run it in that mode to see is this version that we're releasing this year totally broken in that mode. And I feel like every single year, that would just get more and more and more complicated, right? Jordan Morgan: Yeah, I mean, I found a blog post about it from seven years ago, so yeah, gosh, time flies. But yeah, it looks like they're still doing it. Charlie Chapman: I should get them on the show. That would be very interesting to talk to. Jordan Morgan: I think the developer was someone that was pretty, he had a presence on Twitter, and then I think the great social media divide happened, and I don't know maybe that he's on mast somewhere, but Drew I think was his name. But yeah, I always thought that model was really, it felt sustainable, but it felt technically the implementation of it would be difficult to do. Charlie Chapman: I feel like the implementation's pretty straightforward. It's the QA that's hard. I'm essentially doing the same thing in frames, but it's not complicated because it's just the content that changes. So it's like if I release a new feature, it's like you'll have the new feature, you just might not be able to use it with a current frame or whatever like that. So testing wise, it doesn't really matter. It's not like I need to test every single piece of content that my app can show, but if you're doing it around features, it's like I just feel like it would get really complicated. But I'm sure if they've been doing it for this long, I'm sure they have all sorts of interesting ways to deal with all those. Jordan Morgan: I think when I Googled it is a perfect time to talk about the great press power of Charlie Chapman that I constantly always give you half joking digs about when we chat throughout the year. I try to get press all the time, it never works, but I just Googled and man, we got max stories, tech crunch, nine to five, max, six colors, daring Fireball, you just crushed the press game. Charlie Chapman: That was my first Fireball, which that Jordan Morgan: Was it. Your first one for some reason. I thought there was another one, but yeah. Yeah, I'm the only loser at our friends that hasn't been Fireball. So John, if you're listening, come on man, hook me up. It's funny, your app portfolio is almost like the iOS power user guide. If Apple was to do, you'll love these power apps by any developers, almost all of yours could fit in that dark noise and frame us and all those Charlie Chapman: Things. It's luck that I kind of landed in it to a degree in a lot of different ways. But also when I joined an iOS team for the very first time, and I'd been doing web development and I was like, I need a side project and I need to build an app or else I'm not going to be helpful on this team. I have a list of app ideas, a nerd and picked this one. It doesn't have a backend. The very first thing I did wasn't start coding, which would make Jordan Morgan: Sense. I love that. That's usually our starting point. Do we have to deal with the backend? Nope. Let's build. Charlie Chapman: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Well, and in my case it was because I was doing backend development. It's like I don't want to spend time doing the thing I already know how to do. The first thing I did was I wrote down, alright, I'm going to treat this a product because I want to wear this hat. This is really fun. And I was like, I need three guiding principles for why this exists. There's a million white noise apps out there and I could actually, I'm just going to pull it up. We can do that. Alright, so this is literally the first doc last updated August 4th, 2019. So apparently I moved off of this doc into something else. So yeah, this is truly the original words. So I actually had three and here's what they are. So the first one is configurability targeting pro users who want to use as many options and hooks to work the app into the workflow as possible. So that was literally the first thing. That was what I felt like was the least served, and it was an area I knew. So if you're asking why do I get press among that crowd? Well that was literally my guiding principle number one when I built it. The next thing is speed, which is kind of the same thing. Open the app and playing a sound should be as fast as possible, Jordan Morgan: But still really speaks to that same demographic though. Charlie Chapman: That's what I mean. Yeah, yeah. Jordan Morgan: What do they hate? Electron apps. Something slow, something not efficient. Charlie Chapman: That's why I didn't have onboarding at first, which I should change, but the idea was it should get you to a sound as fast as possible. When you first open the app, you don't even see other sounds. You literally see a big play button. And that was part of my overly thinking it idea. Jordan Morgan: I think that's part of the its strengths. Honestly, Charlie Chapman: I don't disagree. I should try it. One of those things where it's like if it helps with conversion, Jordan Morgan: It's Charlie Chapman: Worth. And as I've added more features behind the scenes, I still get emails about adding the ability to create mixes, which is a feature I've had in there for three years. Jordan Morgan: It's Charlie Chapman: Like if I had a simple, you can mix sounds here, then people might hit the button that literally is on the main page to create a Jordan Morgan: Mix tip kit, that bad boy man, throw one Charlie Chapman: In there or I tip kit it. That's true, that's true. So yeah, speed was the second one. And then the third one was keep it dark parentheses, expect Fat Fingers. That's where the name Dark Noise comes from is the apps that me and my wife were using were bright and when you use it at night, it was annoying. And I wear glasses and that's why I said Expect Fat Fingers. The very first design, which is really, really ugly, was literally a circle that it was as wide as the screen was because the idea was it should just be the easiest thing to hit in the world. And then for looks reasons, I shrunk it, but then I made it white and everything else is very, very black and dark, kind of like the alarm. The alarm has the big orange snooze or whatever. I think that's a big part of the press thing. There's a lot of things I do obviously to try and make that work, but a big part of it is because it's aimed squarely at that group and what came along with the Target pro users. That wasn't part of my original thinking, but immediately a couple months after releasing, because iOS 13 came out a month after I released it, I learned very quickly aiming for pro users means implementing whatever features Apple gives you right away, which was fine by me. I was one of those dorks who was into it and wanted to do all that. But that also makes people, I say it makes Apple very happy, but Apple is obviously a big cloud of lots of people. So that's people on App Store editorial are hunting around for apps that utilize their new frameworks. Engineers inside of the spaceship are hunting around for apps that utilize their features because they're testing, did we break this? Did we mess this up? And if they find an app that a lot of the standard apps that you hear about or whatever, it's like they listen to a lot of the same podcasts. Not all of them do, but a lot of 'em do. And those apps that always take advantage of the latest features, those are going to be the easiest apps for them to test out and see, did I break this? Does this run on Vision Pro? Whenever Vision Pro Auto will run your iPad app, they're going to use the usual suspects as well as obviously the YouTubes and the Netflixs and the big apps that everybody uses. But if they're trying to test, did my esoteric widget feature, does that work over here? Well, they're going to go to one of the indie apps that they know implemented. Those are the things that have really helped on sort of that press. Jordan Morgan: It's funny because I've almost, part of me is like, man, I just give up on press. But it can be so powerful, and I know I'm skipping ahead here, but when it came to Alex, that was the one where I was like, I think this one can do it for a lot of reasons because it's like that power user app, it's built all around iOS features, and I don't want to give away names, but I had a few people in Apple using it throughout the summer, like engineer a few in human interface and the app store editorial team. So I'm like, this is it. The stars are going to align. And then when the launch day came out, and actually I feel like press was kind of weird with this cycle there. The usual, here are the apps for iOS 26, which I feel like that wasn't day and day. Didn't that happen a week or so after? Charlie Chapman: No, most of them never happened at all. Talking about the press, not Apple, Jordan Morgan: The press, there's usually, there was always every year there was that kind of article on all the big sides. Charlie Chapman: Definitely took a hit across all of them. I think TechCrunch eventually did and nine to five a month later or something did. But it was way less impactful. Jordan Morgan: It was all about wig Charlie Chapman: Glass. I was surprised. I really expected this year, and this is the other side to the coin of what I just said, is, I dunno what the right phrase is. You're throwing your lot in with something you can't really control and that is a risk. And this year was an example of that because I thought for sure that there would be a big focus on who's using the Apple Foundation models in interesting ways. Jordan Morgan: Dude, I totally forgot that even came out Charlie Chapman: And it was like the press didn't lean into it, but honestly Apple didn't really lean that hard into it, if I remember correctly. Jordan Morgan: Yeah, I don't remember a bunch of lists about it, which is this year I felt like was massive. There was so many things that you could angle an app launched towards that. Yeah, I don't know. I feel like this was a year, I felt like I lucked out because this was a good year to release a new app. There was so much you could show off new stuff with Appens foundation models, the new design language, all these things. And I don't know, I guess one thing in retrospect that may have happened was the launch was so big for Apple that I think the focus was just on Apple's ecosystem at large instead of the third party apps that were building for 'em. Charlie Chapman: Yeah, that's true. Let's talk about Alex. So I talked about the app that I released, but yeah, you've released I think two really briefly, elite Football, which is your soccer app. Jordan Morgan: That was last year. Oh, Charlie Chapman: That was last year. It's Jordan Morgan: Been out for a bit. Charlie Chapman: And I know that's not a huge app for you, so we don't have to get into details on that. But yeah, you released Alex, which to me felt like this is in the on elite hoops because Elite Hoops is a capital a app still. But Alex felt like a return to form in the sense of this is a Jordan Morgan TM app. It felt like a U app in that sense, not as big of a market, not as big of a business. And you knew that going in and that was not your thinking, but it was an app that scratch the niche, which I'll let you explain what it actually does, but importantly, it just felt like it had that level of delight and polish and all that stuff that I think of as a Jordan Morgan app, and that was really fun to watch. But yeah, what's the story behind that? Where did that come from? Jordan Morgan: You nailed it. Ever since spinach, because spinach was a lot like that. It was more polish and form over the actual function of what problem does it solve, who is it for? But it's pretty, I wanted to have that again, right? Elite hoops I think of much more as a business. I integrate new iOS features. I can't help myself and I always will. And one that I was really proud of actually last year was the custom pencil kit. You can customize the toolbar and I add all the elite hoops glyphs that coaches you to draw up plays like squiggly arrows and boxes, all this stuff. And it had the custom haptics, so I still do stuff for it, but Alex was just like, I want another Spins stack. That's what it was. I don't really care if it makes tons of money. It'll be nice if it can, but I'm at least unlike Spins Stack, I'm at least going to have a very clear market for it and who would use it and why they would use it. So all that to say I annoyingly track so much data about my life to where it's getting to the point where it even annoys me sleep. I track my food, I track water intake. I've tracked my food almost like ever since Apple Health came out whenever it launched. What do you use for that? I use Food Noms and I joked with Ryan for a long time when I'd seen him at Deep Dish Swift. I'm like, I'm still not a pro user dude. You give way too much for free. You got to do something. And then he Charlie Chapman: Finally, you don't use all the new AI input stuff. Jordan Morgan: He finally got me last year and it was funny. It was a fun moment for him and he's doing really well with food, but I was like, this is the year man. I finally converted. So that's a good lesson in product development at large. He needs to get on here, man. He's got a great story. Charlie Chapman: Well, no, he's been on the show quite a while ago. The show's getting old enough now. I used to have a rule that the only person who's ever allowed to return is you. And it was kind of a running joke. The famed Christmas special. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I already broke that once I started Revenue Cats already tearing down all the foundations of the show, but the launch episode was our live episode we did at our Jordan Morgan: Conference. Oh yeah. So he's been on twice technically then. Charlie Chapman: Yeah, with Ryan Jones with Flighty. And it was really fun, even though that episode was great, legitimately it was, yeah, it was very fun. But it was also like, God, I wish I had another hour. It was death to only have 30 minutes. But that was a good signal to me that I can have on people who I've had on before. Jordan Morgan: You should, if there's been a long break, you need both the Ryan's back. Actually, you need to get Ryan Jones back and Charlie Chapman: Well, but Ryan Jones. Oh, you mean do a normal episode with them Jordan Morgan: Too? Yeah, I mean, flighty is an interesting one. It launched the same time that Spins Stack did, but it's been around and now as did Charlie Chapman: Food Noms, as did Dark Noise, did Jordan Morgan: Food Noms launch around that same time? I Charlie Chapman: Believe it was 2019. Okay. Yeah, it may have been 2020, but it was in that same, we've talked about it. There was a post Swift ui, like boom. And it's ironic because I don't think any of the apps we just labeled are Swift UI apps, But it was right around the time that Swift UI came out. And maybe it's really more attributed to Swift, like matured by that point. I don't know the details. My story has nothing to do with the lay of the land, I don't think. But it feels like there was this boom in from maybe 20 18, 20 19 through 20 20, 20 21, it didn't feel like it died with the pandemic, but there was all these indie apps. When I started the show, it felt like there was just constantly these new apps coming out and everybody was referring to it as a resurgence. There had been this lull for a while, and I feel like we're back in one of those lulls later. Jordan Morgan: I was just about to say that same thing, and I don't know if it's because of it's our jobs. We're so focused on helping people grow revenue, but my whole feed is growth hacking. If you asked me to just list, Hey, what's that indie app that just came out recently? I don't have one off the top of my head. Charlie Chapman: Here's my theory, because I've thought a lot about this and it's actually one of the reasons why I was very excited to try and get the show back going again. I think that in whatever year it was 20 22, 20 23, whenever Twitter became on Twittered And all that drama happened, there was a big lift and move away from the internet of a significant portion of the legacy of craftsmanship, app developer, influencer type people. A lot of 'em went to Mastodon. But then once they got there, it's an interesting platform and I'm a supporter, yada, yada, but it's not a place where you find new people and new voices and it doesn't really foster this sort of growing community. It's a place where people go and hang out with some of their friends to a degree, but it's very different. It was almost just like a specific type of influencer group, which is the, I don't know how you describe it. It's not just indie app developers, it's specifically the legacy of the old Delicious Mac app generation. You can draw a straight line and you can find people and connect these dots through bots and all these people who transitioned into iOS and did really, really well. And I think that connected to that group that we're talking about in 20 19, 20 18, and there's this kind of continuity of people. And then in this one moment it was decapitated and there was nobody there. And so if you are coming out of college and you're wanting to make stuff, there's two factors that are true. You got a job at a company, but you're wanting to do stuff on your own or whatever, and you're on Twitter because that's the platform where you go, if you want to find people in our space, the people you're going to see are either going to be all AI oriented, which is where all the sort of exciting action is happening. But that's happened before with Web, Jordan Morgan: So Charlie Chapman: That's not new. But then on the app developer side, there isn't anybody on this sort of craftsmanship thing advocating for that Jordan Morgan: Anymore. Charlie Chapman: It's pretty much all, I don't want to say all vibe coders, that's not really true, but it's people who are talking about their MRR or how they've ran these big influencer campaigns and I put $30,000 into this thing and I got a hundred thousand dollars out. And I'm not saying those are bad, but it's very different. Jordan Morgan: It's funny because as you were saying that, I realize that it's almost like that with me more personally too. I don't talk as much anymore about like, Hey, here's this new a I. Charlie Chapman: It doesn't feel like that's the conversation. Jordan Morgan: Yeah, and I know we've reminisced about this before, probably on one of the previous Christmas specials, but the time back when in a hipster had a new post every week, or you had just good friends like Becky from Yarn Buddy, I don't think she really is on sociable as much anymore. They were just all these internet friends that were all in the same spot for a short period of time. And those were the days. Charlie Chapman: There's still people doing it. Clemen Stresser, he's one who I see very actively talking on social media and posting about things. He's doing things, he's trying and sort of pushing the medium. Now his is more game oriented, But I feel like he's doing that. I feel like Andy Allen, who, if you're listening, Andy, I would love to have you on the show. He's definitely somebody who is still actively constantly talking about the craft of iOS development. You know what I mean? I only say that to say that it does still exist. It's not just completely moved into the business side. And it's funny because I feel like the majority of my time running this show, I would have all these conversations and talk to people who were like, I was embarrassed to care about the business or to try subscriptions or to try this. And it was all about trying to get people to be a little more open to the idea of it's okay to not let your business die and to actually treat it like a business and not just as a piece of art. And then all this, it was like it violently switched to. Now I'm like, whoa. I obviously, I work for both of us. We work for companies that are all about making money and making sustainable businesses, whatever. But there's a little bit of a like, but software's cool too. Let's make cool, crafted, well done things. One of the things that doing this podcast has helped already with in the recordings I've been doing, I've done maybe five or six of these recordings at this point, is I come out of them and I'm just like, people make cool stuff. Jordan Morgan: It Charlie Chapman: Feels good to talk about that. Again, not because the other stuff is bad, but because I think I at least was getting a little oversaturated with just the money, money side. So yeah, I definitely think there's a balance there. But anyway, very long aside to say, you apparently agreed because you wanted to make an app that was about the craftsman's side. So yeah, what is that app? Jordan Morgan: Okay, so after our 30 minute aside, it's a caffeine tracker. Someone has been waiting 30 minutes to just be like, what is the app? What does it do? So yeah, I mean, we were chatting about this before you started recording, but we're both coffee drinkers and like I said, I track so much data about my life. I just think it's nerdy and fun and interesting. I've always tracked caffeine and I had, let's see, two dub dubs ago when Luca Bernardi, he did a session over the interactive widgets and he, oh, and it was a Charlie Chapman: Caffeine Jordan Morgan: Caffeine Charlie Chapman: Tracking widget. Jordan Morgan: Yeah, I forgot it was. And I was like, that's perfect. I use a shortcut all the time. This is the use case. And so Elite Hoops had been out for a couple months by that point, and I was like, oh, this is a great time to do a Spin Stacky project where I'm not going to really worry too much about the revenue. I'm just going to make sure there's a defined target thing that it does and just kind go off the rails. So I had the loose design of it done over that summer just for kicks and giggles, and it just sat on my phone for years unchanged, and I used it all the time. Charlie Chapman: This is not a unique thing for Jordan. Jordan Morgan: No. Charlie Chapman: I feel like Jordan randomly pulls out a screenshot and we're like, whoa, what app is that? And he's like, ah, yeah, just a little app. I built for myself a long time, like an entire to-do app or something Jordan Morgan: Side quests. I go on a lot of side quests and sometimes they're useful, sometimes not so much. But I didn't have the app done. If you open the app, it was pretty much like placeholder stuff. I have Charlie Chapman: An idea of what I wanted. You were just dumping it into health kit. Jordan Morgan: Yeah, and that's one of the great things about the app is I don't own the data model, which is great for me. It just goes to HealthKit. It is all through HealthKit. So yeah, I would use the widget and I would use the shortcut to just log the same things like espresso. I'm so boring. I drink the same coffees all the time, but I don't even remember what pushed me over the edge to do it. I don't know if this was a, I know over the years I've brought up the group chat, we've chatted for years and I don't know, and you guys are my indie through line. If one of you finally just convinced me to make it into an app or how it happened, you I don't remember. I don't either. Charlie Chapman: He's probably the ship. Jordan Morgan: That's what it was. That'd be ironic. And this year I was just like, I'm going to do it. I'm very nerdy with lists and I have a reminder to make my goals for next year. I saw coming up in a week, Charlie Chapman: You have an app for that too. Am I remembering that correctly? Jordan Morgan: I did. I finally sunset that one. But the blog post for that was very popular a lot. And people always say, oh, ship it, but you never know if they're actually going to use it. It was very like, yeah, everyone wants the mockup. But my goal for this year, I'm looking at my indie goals and it was to ship. I've always wanted to ship a new app with a new version of iOS. I had never done that. So that was my goal this year is like, I'm not going to really worry about Elite Hoops and iOS 26. I want it to look good and I want it to work, but I'm not going to worry about as long as it works with Liquid Glass Charlie Chapman: Because that audience, Jordan Morgan: No, they don't care. Charlie Chapman: They're already going to be upset that the OS changed. Jordan Morgan: Exactly. Why is this all bubbly and soapy now? And it was a crazy summer and it was actually one of the most fun times I've had building, and I really needed that because that joy of building I just hadn't had in a while. And I spent that whole summer just going nuts on it. And it was crazy because with the advent of AI assistance, I could just build out, I got to a point where I had CLO code almost perfectly make an app intent for me because I made how I wanted it and I had my patterns and I had the entities I had just the way I wanted it all in one file. And then from there I could pretty much just dream up what shortcut I wanted to make or what action I wanted. And Claude Code could do it almost perfectly the first time. So I ended up having, I don't know, I think there's 50 to 70 Appin intent in the app. Charlie Chapman: It's an interesting side effect. This is a little technical, but they changed the appin intent, what, two years ago from this kind of insane UI thing. And it was not saved in a plain text file, it was in some sort of XML or something weird format, and they changed it to code. And obviously at that time they, I'm almost certain that the reason they did that was not because of AI coding tools becoming popular, but they very quickly became popular. And I guess now that actually would make that way easier to do Jordan Morgan: It is because the API is simple to get started with, but kind of hard to master. But I found the Swed spot with Claude where it could just spit 'em out. And so I went crazy with that. And then I had so many powerful shortcuts. I was having so much fun with it. I would just think up something like, I don't know, when's caffeine going to be out of my body? And how many shots of espresso is that equivalent to? Just crazy stuff. I am like, why not? It takes me five minutes. Now I have the baseline down and I had already written the plumbing for it years ago, the health kit stuff to retrieve the data. So the hard critical paths were already finished. Yeah, I mean the whole point of the app was I wanted that nice pretty indie app. That's what I wanted to make. And if we link to the press kit, if you go to alex caffeine.com and look at Prescott at the top, you'll see all of the iOS centric features that I shipped for it. And it's just like, and I marketed it that way. I'm like, this is an iOS playground for caffeine tracking. And it turned out really fun. I'm really proud of it. I think it's one of the prettiest apps that I've made. And it's funny because one of the biggest compliments it gets is the onboarding. I'm like, yeah, but do you like the app? But just everything, there's a visual lookup you can scan to log drinks. There's the interactive shortcuts, it has the foundation models, all of the liquid glass stuff, alarm kit, widgets. I hit every single box that I could. It was on purpose. I wanted to make an insanely good iOS app that shows all the features and it was playful. And that was really freeing for me because Elite Hoops is more like they have a job to get done. They don't really want the nice cool animation. Whereas from the start, I came up with the idea to have Alex be a mascot a long time ago. I could just riff on that and just be goofy and sarcastic in a lot of places. And I forget, one big inspiration for the design was at the time, remember two years ago photos went through that big redesign where they kind of went all in on this single long scrolling content view where they kind of shifted away from tab views, which that's since reversed. But I liked the idea on a smaller scale. I was like, what if I can make Alex just be one just sheet of stuff about caffeine? There's no toggling tabs, there's no other places to go. It's just one view and everything is there. And so that's where I ended up. And it turned out really nice. It turned out really pretty. And it's always going to be my little thing to tinker with Muse every Summer Muse. Yeah, it's my muse. Absolutely. And again, I'm really thankful that Elite hoops is growing and it's like doing stable growth, whatever you want to call it. It gives me an excuse to have this little thing to just play around with. Now, don't get me wrong, I would love for it to grow and make as much as Elite Hoops does. And I think there's paths to get there. And a little realization that I had is when I was looking into this genre of health apps, I think, I can't prove this. I think what's happening is if you go to the health app and you look at some sort of metric like water intake and you scroll down or wait or steps, it'll say recommended apps and it'll list like four or five third party apps. So if you look at weight, you'll see Happy Scales on there. If you look at Step Counts, pedometer plus Pluses on there, if you look at water intake, water miners on there, water lamas on there. And in my head I'm like, dude, these have to be driving crazy amounts of downloads because so many people look at the health app. And my hope is that eventually they'll do the same thing for caffeine. And I was shocked. Charlie Chapman: So Caffeine doesn't have one right now. Jordan Morgan: Caffeine has no, use these apps to track your caffeine. Charlie Chapman: Oh my gosh, it would be so cool if you suddenly saw a stream of users. I wonder if they, surely they must expose that in App Store Connect. Jordan Morgan: I don't know. And I've even tried to get businessy. Lemme put my suit and tie on. I got on LinkedIn and tried to find health kit engineers or anyone that worked at Health Kit, and I don't think anyone accepted my request. It's LinkedIn and they're like, who is this weirdo? But I'm just like, guys, if anyone, you should put Caffeine Absent, not the only one. There's a high Coffee's been around for several years. It's a great app. It has a lot more knobs and stuff you can turn than Alex does. And then there's a few other ones. And then Water Minder actually. And Water Llama, they both allow you to put caffeine. It's not the sole focus. Water intake obviously is. So that's kind of my pie in the sky Wish. If the Health app does that, this thing could really grow quick. And for air quotes for free, the health app is on every iPhone. Charlie Chapman: Obviously Elite Hoops has a much clear tam, you know, can target coaches and that coaches are going to be willing to spend because it saves on their time for their job. It's a tool. This feels more like dark noise in the sense that it's way more just Jordan Morgan: Ubiquitous. It is. Charlie Chapman: It's still a lot less than I guess a white Noise app or something. A smaller percentage of users would use it, but it's very widely applicable. It feels like the type of thing that if you handed it to one of these people that knows how to play the influencer campaign game, they could go out and find health influencer people who are already recommending people track their caffeine. There's got to be just massive markets of people that do that, and hey, maybe recommend this app as a nice one or run some sort of deal or something with them. It does feel like there's a little bit more consumer app playbooks that you could run with this than Elite Hoops, which is, it's obviously not B2C, but it's almost more like that. Jordan Morgan: It's much more a consumer app than elite hoops would be. Charlie Chapman: Yeah. Yeah. Jordan Morgan: And almost when I contracted with Evo for this month, I almost did it for Alex. There's so many angles of the UGC playbook that you could run with it, but I was like, I'm just going to be a big boy and focus on lead hoops. Charlie Chapman: Well, and in reality, the value and the amount of people who are willing to spend is going to be very different between those two. Jordan Morgan: I mean, I guess cheap is very, very subjective to whoever you're talking to, but for this to make significant money, for me it would be a volume thing. The downloads would have to be extremely high, and it may never be. But the other angle to this is the prestige play too. Of course, everybody wants an Apple design award recognition with Apple. So it's like, this is almost like my Apple reward bait app too. If one was going to get any recognition, it would be this Charlie Chapman: One. The sports coach oriented. This changes my actual life apps. They often win stuff because the design award is just as much about innovation in some capacity as it is about it looking beautiful or whatever. Jordan Morgan: For sure. For sure. It really is. I'm glad that it's out because I kind of have my cake and eat it too. Now if I just want to do Charlie Chapman: Fun Jordan Morgan: Pretty iOS stuff, then I'll open up Alex. And it doesn't even support the last version of iOS. I didn't even bother with iOS 18. It's just like, this is for iOS 26, I'm building it for iOS 26. I'm just going all in on it. And when we were laughing about the press stuff earlier, like Apple, they did ask for the promo art, and I was really psyched about that. But remember, I think this is on the archives too, when they asked for the promo art for Spins Stack, they didn't use it for a full calendar year. So it's like they haven't used it as of this recording that I know of. I mean, I have app figures and they ping you now from App Store Connect too. I think you get a major feature. So it hasn't been used that I know of, but the promo art is so bananas that if it gets used, I'm going to be so excited. Yeah, I think I sent it to you. It's like I had a designer just go nuts with all the little Alex glyphs and it had Siri Orb glows pulsing through the top of the espresso cup. So it was wild. Maybe they saw it and they're like, yeah, we're not using that. So we'll see. So the goals are Make a Pretty app and it's the app I use most on my phone. So that's kind of like a fun thing. I'll never get tired of working on it. And I have a laundry list of ideas like we all do for the stuff that we make. But yeah, I mean, I'm proud that it's out. It was just a personal achievement. I just want to ship with a new version of iOS. I've never done it, so I can mark that off the list. It's been done and I'll soup it up every year for sure. Charlie Chapman: Awesome. Well, I think we're getting short on time, so I guess we should probably go ahead and wrap this up another year in the books, as they say. It was super fun doing this. It's always super fun doing this. I'm glad Launched, survived. This is the only time we're allowed to talk. Jordan Morgan: Absolutely. Yeah. We were born bound by our contracts at both jobs to not speak formally outside of these walls. Charlie Chapman: Exactly. No, this is great. So I guess where can people find you and I guess your work? No, I'm just kidding. Jordan Morgan: Yeah, yeah, yeah. X at Jordan Morganton or my blog, swift objective c.com. And I think I list all the apps out on there too, if you ever want to check them out. So I am actually, unlike Fraus, blessed by the A o Gods. So if you search for Alex or you search for Elite, oops, you'll find 'em up there pretty high. RIP for frame and it's a SO. Charlie Chapman: Yeah, it's all good. It's all good. But if you're listening and you haven't downloaded it yet, you should go search frame, Jordan Morgan: Scroll, scroll, Charlie Chapman: Scroll, scroll, find it, download it, Jordan Morgan: Or look at any of the 10 major press outlets that have covered it as well. Hashtag, Charlie Chapman: Yeah, yeah. There you go. There Jordan Morgan: You go, you go. Charlie Chapman: Awesome. Alright, well thank you all for listening. This episode as always is brought to you by Revenue Cap, and if you want to find more launched, you can go to launch fm.com and launched FM is the Twitter handle as well as pretty much all the other social media handles. If you want to find me directly, you can find me at underscore Chucky C on Twitter and at Charlie m Chapman pretty much everywhere else. That's it. See you all in two weeks. Thank you so much for listening. You can find more launched@launchedfm.com and you can find me on pretty much all the social medias I'm at under Chucky C on Twitter or Charlie m Chapman pretty much everywhere else. And of course, huge thanks to Revenue Cap for making this episode and all future episodes of Launched Possible. I'll see you all again in two weeks.