James (00:08):
Frank, we're both have to do this. Is that a fair thing to say in this world?

Frank (00:14):
Um, yeah. You are what you do every day. And I feel like I failed to release apps every day. So I'm uh, I'm, I'm that kind of app developer. Uh, what kind of app developer are you?

James (00:25):
Well, I'm an app developer that starts a lot of applications but maybe doesn't necessarily finish those applications, but when I get to the point in which I want to actually publish them, you need to promote them. Now Frank, I think as app developers, I want to set up this sort of story and um, know the story adventure, if you will, is that Google and Apple and Microsoft, they give us like a means to the ends of publishing our application and promoting our applications inside of the app store. And what I mean by that is they give us a portal, a way to upload apps, a way to add screenshots, a way to get reviews, a way to add some text. We've talked about this on the podcast, like those things exist. [inaudible] am I missing anything that they, that they give us as app developers?

Frank (01:15):
Oh yeah. I mean they give us more, but I don't think we need to be pedantic and go through it all. But enough said that, um, if you write an app and upload it to say the Apple app store, that's pretty much all you have to do minimum requirements and people will still find your apps because they go to the store and they search around and that's it. So, yup. The store is your only home on the internet. It's totally possible

James (01:42):
PR pretty much. And that's the sort of the world that I've lived in and you know, they've added a lot of cool things. Like I was just doing a search for um, uh, Calca and circuits and um, keynote actually was, uh, searching for keynote cause I needed a presentation from six years ago. I gave and it was in keynote and I typed in a keynote into the app store

Frank (02:01):
and

James (02:02):
there was one of the hundred applications that had a video playing back and that blew my mind. I was like, wow, that is really neat. We talked about this what like a year and a half ago and that happened.

Frank (02:14):
Yeah. Yeah. And I think I made a lot of promises about I'm going to have 800 videos for all of my applications. Uh, a spoiler, I haven't actually done that, but I know what you mean. I've seen the videos and I think you said it to me, you're like, it just pops. It really differentiates the app from all the other apps

James (02:36):
pops right now specifically when those other applications don't have them. So that's the thing too. And you know, it doesn't have to be crazy. It just needs some motion of like what does this app look like and it, and then I click into it and go further. And I thought this was really cool because me, I'm getting ready to launch an app and what I'm, but I mean, getting ready. I've spent three days development so far and I have another two months, but I really want this to be done quick in a few followed me on Twitter. I'm making this animal crossing app, but I want to be able to promote it. So, but I don't want the app store to be the solo place because Frank, we are a cross platform app developers. We have to put that information in two places. But I want a single place that people can send and promote in general.

James (03:26):
And what I want, Frank is a website. I don't know if you've heard of these. I would like a web site. It's like a, it's a, it's a place on the internet that you go and it's like you type in this URL. I don't know what that stands for, but it's like, it's a good www dot. And sometimes you don't even need that www dot. By the way, you don't even need that. You just type in Michael app.com. Don't go there. I don't know what that website is. It could be. Um, and then your app would be there, but, but I'm not a web developer, but I want that thing. Is it unreasonable that I want that thing in my life?

Frank (03:56):
Oh, it's not unreasonable, but it's tragic that we need them actually. And I believe URL stands for Earl. That's, that's what I heard. Gosh, streets. Yeah. But by the creator of the Earl Earl, it stands for Earl's. Earl's Earl. Okay. Um, yeah, so unwrapping everything you said, you're a little sarcastic, but I think I, you made me so fond of the old days when you open the show and you're talking about just upload the app to the store and just let it go. Cod times were so much simpler back then, but you're right. Every app I release now, I create a website for, and I've done it with 800 different pieces of technology and I've done it for 800 different reasons, honestly. Um, but it could be as simple as things like the privacy policy. Apple and Google require a privacy policies and a link to a privacy policy. Well, that link is an Earl, like it's gotta go somewhere. Uh, what am I going to point it at? So like, just to fill in that one field in the app store, I'm almost like, jeez, and now I need a website and now I need a domain. Now I need a server and Oh my God, now I'm overwhelmed. Yeah.

James (05:11):
For me. I've spent all my time building the application. I don't have time to build a website, but Frank, I do want to talk really quick about your websites because I'm going to put all of them in the show notes and I hope that everybody goes and looks at them because you can tell which apps were released 10 years ago and which ones are least, I mean, a little shade. It's getting, it's getting pretty crappy. So you have, you know, yet high circuit app.com you have calca.io. You have, um, continuous.codes, right? Those are all websites that you

Frank (05:42):
marquez.io Mo Kalka. Yes,

James (05:46):
that IO. There's like a Kruger system website, I'm sure. Oh, see, this is [inaudible]. This is pretty, I like this. This is almost what I want, right? So I want a website that enables me to do something like this. So can you talk about some of the technology that you've used here and what your motivation was for it? Because for me, it's like promotion, but I think you may have other,

Frank (06:08):
yeah, yeah. Um, in general, my goal is to have a minimal static kind of website that is mostly just generated from like some markdown files, kind of how the, um, get hub documentation, host to page kind of stuff works, you know, that stuff. Um, that's my goal because the truth is I don't want to do any server maintenance. We always talk about server maintenance on the show. I really don't want to do it. Um, but at the same time, I do need these websites for these apps. So for each website, my goal is to make it a little bit distinct for the app without spending six months on the website, you know, uh, so I look at it as an opportunity to show off, um, a little bit of the design of the app, uh, in the website itself and honestly to provide that privacy policy and links to all the different app stores for the apps. Um, you know, it, it gets more complicated than that though. Uh, but we can talk about that. Um, but that's the general goal is to have a nice static site that I can update from time to time to promote the app.

James (07:20):
Yeah, I love that. I love that idea of it. I want it to be, you know, modern, responsive, all the things. And I actually built one one time, um, it was for my step counter and it was literally a GIF in the middle of the screen and then underneath it two links and I made the gift small enough that when it was on a mobile device like it, it was just the right size to fill the screen. Perfect. Because I don't know how to resize an image on the internet. Like I don't understand how the internet works, Frank really to create websites. So that's why I created mobile apps. I don't know if you've heard of them. They have modern UI frameworks that do a lot of stuff for you. But yeah, the [inaudible] site, it looks, it looks beautiful. There's some things that are changing in here. There's like features that you have on there are pretty cool. I like, there's a logo. Um, how have you built these over the years? Cause I'm assuming they're not all the same technology. Like is it all stuff you've developed or are they off the shelf solutions?

Frank (08:13):
It's a little bit all over the place. So, uh, when I first started out, I used Squarespace popular podcast sponsor because I listened to a lot of podcasts and I'm like, yes, I don't want to deal with managing a website, I'm going to use Squarespace. So I started doing that. Um, for my apps, unfortunately it gets a little bit expensive because each site is five or $10 a month. I honestly don't even know how much I'm paying. I should find that out. I should really know that number. Um, and so I started to look for, and you know, if an app is making money, fine, who cares if it cost five or 10 hours, cause hopefully you're making five or 10 hours, you're making more than five or $10 per month, you know, so, but at same time, I just don't like having a million services.

Frank (08:58):
So in one case I just have um, a shared server that I just put multiple domains on and that's what I put all the static stuff on. So if I can get away with it just being a static HTML website, you know, with graphics and all that. But you know, mostly just static HTML. Then um, you know I hand write that HTML cause I'm an old nineties kid and then I R sync it up to a server and it gets hosted upon that server. That's the simplest way. Um, but then I circuit is even crazier.

James (09:36):
All right. So we'll talk about the, the simple stuff and that's sort of the range that I'm looking for at least to begin with. And for me, I tweeted out a thing, I said, Hey, I would love a simple way to have a free, I like free. You also mentioned free, basically minimum self hosted. So someone else is going to host this for me. Not, doesn't have to, well a self host is I hosted technically. Yeah. That's the other way around. You want cloud hosted, right? It could be cloud hosted. So either free cloud hosted or Hey, here's a beautiful free thing that you install on your website, right? Like WordPress, right. You know, I could, I can install that and put it on the free tier of Azure. Um, your website template for promoting an app. Like can I drop in a few? This is what I wrote. Can I drop in a few images, write a few sentences and it will look pretty, that's what I really want. And I don't want to code anything cause I'm not smart on the web of doing it. Like someone was, I was building this app and I was live streaming and they're like, well why aren't you building a website? And I said, because I can't build websites. Like that's why like why aren't you doing it in a way? Because I don't know how to build websites and I don't, I'm not a web developer. So

Frank (10:45):
yeah. It's funny because so many programmers these days are web developers. So it's like we are the funny ones now. We're like, no, I know how to write windows apps. If it was a windows app, it would be fine. Um, so I agree with you 100% and the truth is rewind the clock all the way back to 2008 when I started doing all this stuff, I kind of was kicking myself to write such a platform as you're talking about because I realized that I'm going to be writing apps and a lot of apps over time and some are going to be winners and some, a lot of them are going to be losers and it's going to be hard to know how much time to devote to each one and resources, all of that. Um, but it was just one of those projects that I never got around to. Instead, I did ad hoc website after ad hoc website. I probably have like 12 of these kind of one off websites for each app. And honestly it bothers me because all the domains are on different registers. I have multiple servers using multiple services. It's crazy and confusing. Um, I don't really like thinking about it. This is a bad podcast.

James (12:00):
Well, no, I think it's healthy to think about it because you can tell the evolution of your need versus where it needed to go because obviously [inaudible] was very, very static, right? You have a support which goes to like a user voice basically, and for feature requests. And then you have eye serger, which has a whole bunch of integrated stuff in it and people are sharing and there's like a gallery and all this stuff. And, and for other ones, like a continuous, there's actually a support like portal built into the website itself. So there's actually a lot going on there. Um, and so your needs are sort of evolved over time, but then almost like managing multiple applications, you're now juggling twice the workload because you are juggling building the mobile applications and you're also juggling building and maintaining and supporting these websites.

Frank (12:53):
Yep. Oh wow. And just sinking feeling in my chest. Thank you. Oh boy. Okay. I'm going to get my act together. Uh, let me start with what you said about user voice there because that's a very important thing. So while I keep saying static, static, static statics, great. Uh, the truth is I do need some kind of user interaction. Um, I'm always trying to decrease the amount of emails that I get. I think the, the best way to do support in your app is just here's an email address, you know, email me. Um, but the thing is it's annoying, kind of like to have everything go through email. It'd be nice to have a recommendation system and that's why I use user voice where it's like, Hey, if you don't feel like composing a whole email but just want to pitch an idea, go over to this user voice thing.

Frank (13:44):
And that was basically, these are for feature features, not bugs. Please don't put bugs there. Just email me about bugs. Um, but that was admitting that the static websites not quite good enough. And then you include other things like a forum. Forums are great. Um, we could do a whole podcast on forums cause I still don't know how to do forums correctly because you need moderation forums and I don't really have the time to moderate. So I don't think forums are a good idea. But you need something like that. You need some kind of community collaborative thing, especially for the kinds of apps that I write that are creation apps where people can benefit from talking to each other. So forums and user voice. These are the dynamic features that I want, uh, in these websites, but I just don't know how to get them in fully correctly.

James (14:35):
Yeah. The, here's what I've done for one of them. So I have my stream timer. I don't know if you've heard of that web that, that, that application so that every week my stream or timer.com is a static website. Uh, it's a get page actually. And the cool part about that is that since it's an open source project, it is, you can say view on get hub. It's basically the read me, I turn the, read me into the get hub page, uh, in general, which I thought was really, really cool. And there's like a video, there's some things that's not pretty though. It's just a default template, you know, it doesn't give you any customization. Like I can't necessarily change the color. Like it just says my stream timer in one word. You know, I can't, you know, I can't really do a lot with it.

James (15:22):
Um, and what I've done though is like I have it like view on GitHub and I'll have like add an issue which is AVAC have a question, have a feature like post an issue like on the GitHub page. I don't actually know if that's good or not. I like the feedback on user voice because the reason that we do this and have this portal have an online presence is so users don't give us one star reviews. That's actually like the biggest part. Like you don't want the app store to be your acquisition and your communication with your users because that leads to negativity in the long run I think in the on the app.

Frank (15:58):
That's a good point. I never thought about that. Yeah. If you don't give anyone any outlets to contact you, then of course they'll do it there. I always hope that people will email me before they give a one star review. But that's not always true. And I used to make a, I mean support is a whole nother topic, but I used to make a mistake of having every email turn into an issue, like a proper bug thing in my code base. And it took me a few years to learn that that's terrible and don't do that because now you're basically dealing with things on two levels. It's flooding your project and it's flooding your email. And so just keeping the two worlds a little bit separate, like it's nice having the user voice slash website slash something where the community and the users can work out the features that they really want. I can check in and then I manually decide what I'm actually going to work on and that stuff and plan out the next release and do those. So I like that separation of the communities not doing its own thing, but it is its own thing. And then I just check in with it to see what I should be working on. Yeah, I like that. All is that a

James (17:12):
lot? I think that that's one of the things I've struggled with over the years as I put stuff out and I don't really know how to properly communicate with my users, which is very odd because I communicate with developers all the time in my position. That's literally my job is to talk to people and I don't know how to do that in the, it's not like I got a business degree or an MBA or a way of a marketing degree or something like that. Along the way, I just happened to fall into this position, which I, which I love. But yeah, I think it's very fascinating to find like all the different problems. Okay. So envision your perfect website and the features that it has. Because what I want to get out of this podcast is one, if anyone knows what, if something exists that I want, and also if there's something that exists that Frank wants, and maybe I want some of Frank's features, but also if it doesn't, then here's $1 million idea, Frank, that you can go build in a weekend like you did for apps.

Frank (18:07):
Yeah, I wish it were that easy. Um, but the truth is I always want, you know, some features from this cloud service, some features from that cloud service. You know, I pick and choose and I feel like everyone's going to be that way. They want these features and not those other features. But I'll give you a rough outline. Sure. Um, I want a relatively free service. You know, maybe I can pay for extra features or something like that where I can do exactly what you said. Have a landing page, make it all pretty, have a hundred percent control of the HTML, but maybe in a, maybe have some nice templates for you. That's, that's a feature for you. But I don't really need the tempo feature. I just want to write the HTML. Um, then I want a few of the vs community slash user voice kind of features where there is a very simple forum where people can post ideas and I can give broad feedback, but it's a public forum.

Frank (18:59):
I think that making that public is really important and I don't want it on get hub. I don't want it interacting with all that. I actually do want it to be a separate thing. That's all just nice. Then with every app I also have documentation, which you know, we upload a few screenshots over to the store, but if you write a complicated app, you kind of have to write a user manual. And I do that for all of my big complicated apps. Uh, the thing is I'm never happy with the documentation I write. Like if I have an app that runs on five platforms, I'll have screenshots from iOS even though it's like the windows user manual. So I would just love a better CMS system that could handle multi-platform, have easy links to all the stores. I'm not asking for much here, James, why can't I have this thing? Oh and free.

James (19:52):
Yeah. Or minimum. Like I would love, you know, for there's a bulk of our applications that are just promotional, right? You need the, the pages you described, you needed a landing page that's pretty, has a map, screenshots, here's the features that are on it. And for me like what I want is I would love, I would love to install this website and just, you know, there's like four images and they're like put the four images here, put the words here, and it just does the thing. Like that's really what I want by the way. And I can modify the HTML but like really like have the little device Chrome on there. But the thing, and then just telling me to put the images here and then almost like if there was a CMS or if there was a, a way of, if it was self hosted, right, they could just be like an upload your image here, upload your image here, upload your image here.

James (20:41):
And then you could say add on free premium things such as a user voice forum. You know, other things like that into it because that would be pretty nifty. And, and yeah, I just want to have that on the website and I can't find this thing. This scene doesn't seem to exist. I asked people on Twitter and people said, Oh, we'll check out those go daddy thing. Like, eh, not really. Like they're like, check out this, uh, HTML, what is it? HTML five up.net, which is like a bunch of templates but all right. None of them are made for mobile apps. You know what I mean? And then there's this other website called card a C a R R D. dot co beautiful free self hosted single one-page websites like really blank easy. But again, nothing's made for an app. Like I want like app website.com where we're like you go and a website for your app and I want that to exist so bad Frank in my heart. Like why does it matter?

Frank (21:38):
Oh I should have written it for you in 2008 the worst part is I was a web developer back then. Like this was my wheelhouse. I could've had it done in a yeah, a weekend. No. Oh man. Is this just us publicly thinking of an app together? Cause I'm like, yeah. Okay. The free version, you could have up to like two apps and then for 10 hours a month you could have five apps. $50 a month. Yeah. I'm just having too much fun now. Uh, so like, so that's the question. Are you an app developer James? Like if, if I were to write this thing and make it work the way that we want it to where it's mostly cloud hosted or it's an easy install and all that, that's basically a full time job. And so it becomes, do I want to be an app developer or do I want to be a white box website developer? I don't know. They don't have a flashy title like app developer. But anyway, um, you know, like that's not exactly the job I want. I kind of want to write Mac and iOS. That's what I wanna do. Um, but at the same time we need this thing.

James (22:51):
Yeah, we did really, really, really do. And I know that there's a few, um, websites out there that allow you to, you know, use like a Google sheet or something like that to create like a website. But I think all those are paid, right? You gotta pay stuff for month

Frank (23:06):
or it's a one off. It's like you said, it's not just tailored to app developers. I mean we are a silly minority. Like there just aren't enough of us that Google cares or Microsoft cares. I mean they care in that they built us app stores. Thank you. We appreciate those app stores, but they don't care enough to give us free web hosting. You know, they're not going to do that. That's where they draw the line. No, no, no free website for you. Our servers are full of other stuff.

James (23:33):
Yeah. Well, and that's the thing too is, uh, is, is the question is, is this even a feasible application? Because what we've been saying the entire time is we want something for free, right. We want something that I would, I would pay money for the template and like if, if someone was like, Hey, and I guess you could do this on theme forest or something like that, but if it was a literally like, here's a bunch of HTML, we're going to drop in some things for your promotional website and you can host it. Like I would pay you 20, 50 bucks for that probably. Um, but I think that the wizard of online, how would that work? Would I pay you a dollar a month? Can I do a dollar a month? Is that, is that feasible of something like what is the cost of this, right? That we could actually do

Frank (24:17):
well, if you're talking to me like a PM, how would I phrase this? Well, I would want to know how much money do I want to make? Let's say I want to make $1,000 a month. I can't live off of it, but I want to make $1,000 a month and I'm charging people $10 a month. That means I need a hundred active users. 100 active users of a website is a lot of maintenance. Think about all the emails you're going to get. So now you're like, Ooh, $10 that's not quite enough. So let's bump it up to $50 so I can justify my time and the amount of time I spent doing email support, it's website economics stink to be thoroughly honest. And, um, but yeah, I, I'm just stuttering now. I'm just like, let's make the spreadsheet James, but we'll figure it out. There's gotta be a sweet spot in these numbers.

James (25:05):
Gotta be a sweet spot. So what I think it comes from this is you're right, how much time and what's our energy and money towards being an app developer versus promoting our app? Because what [inaudible] are really wanting to bring this topical two up to discuss is that it's not that we just want this service, like this service provides value to me and to my end users. You talked about the user voice, you talked about the support channel, the privacy policy. I'm talking about the promotional part, which is what you also have to, and I think what's intriguing here is that we as app developers that are just rating app developers also should recognize that there's immense of value into this landing page. But beyond the landing page too, and even talking to you, I didn't even think like, Oh, you know, a feature requests, making sure there aren't the app store, things like that. That is something that to be honest with you makes a lot of sense.

Frank (25:56):
Yeah. And honestly we're just complimenting each other. But what you said makes a lot of sense to me is that if you don't give people an Avenue for communicating, this is all we're doing. We're trying to open up more communication channels, then you are stuck doing it all through the store, which can have very bad monetary effects and all that stuff. Uh, you know, I was just thinking like in the old days, um, they had frequently asked questions, don't you hate it when you go to a support site, T half support site and type in a support request. And they're like, here's some frequently asked questions. But at the same time, like as an app developer, God, I wish I had a nice automatic system for that and I wish it was good because I, when I'm doing email support, I reply, especially if I make a bug, I might type out the same email, you know, five times a day, basically the same verbiage with a little bit of, you know, different things here or there. So like, why don't I have a frequently asked questions? Uh, I've been doing this for 10 years. I should have a FAC. I don't, I just, it's, you know, it's part of, it's just maintenance. I know if I wrote out a FAC it just, I would end date it for 10 years and it would be out of date almost immediately.

James (27:10):
Yeah. It's almost the maintenance of this, which is to some advantage. What you almost want is, you know, some automatic updating, automatic going to town. I mean cause even with the self hosting, right, I said I wanted to solve host this. It'd be, it goes beyond the static website. Like I use ghost for a lot of my stuff, but I have a custom theme on top of it. And the problem there is that my custom theme whenever goes, updates needs to update. And right now I'm in the spot where if I don't update I can't blog basically. So I have been trying to frantically sort of update my personal website. You haven't seen any blogs in four months because I just haven't had the time to commit to fixing my theme even though I'm very, very close. But um, um, you know, I have not a lot of blog until, until I do that. I can ask them to unblock my site, but I'm, I'm actually not self hosting that. I'm having them host it for me and for my protection. They, you know, are making the upgrade. So that sort of becomes the problem there is, is the maintenance contract of it. So

Frank (28:11):
I mean I remember watching um, tumbler P built, um, and it started out as a very simple feature set. You know, the app that we're talking about is almost bigger than tumbler version 1.0 and they had a lot of people working a lot of time to make, you know, the theme system work, the theme editor, the content editor, the image uploader, all that stuff just takes in web terms an infinite amount of time, especially if you rewrite it from angular two Vue. Dot. JS halfway through as most web projects go. It sounds just like I'm afraid of like even tapping into that world because I know how big they are. Like it's so easy for us to say, yeah, I want this user voice feature where people can vote up and down. Well now you've got to do user accounts. Now you have to do a throttling. Now you have to do moderation. Now you have to do password resets. Now you have a login system. It's just Oh Lord. So it's work, it's work. I think that's why we haven't seen it yet.

James (29:19):
Managed it so far. In your sort of self fulfilling do it yourself Frank edition, how has that worked out? I mean as far as adding those features and maintaining those features.

Frank (29:31):
So I think that although I find it a bit ad hoc, I do like the way that I'm using multiple cloud services. Um, because I wasn't able to find single solution that does everything. You know, the ice circuit website is a mixture of Squarespace, my own statically hosted domain and an Azure web app. So I, circuit gallery is a full C sharp asp.net web app using Azure table storage. Um, I'm a little bit afraid of that code. I don't like to edit it, but it's there and it runs really well. In fact, uh, the problem is that's the ice circuit gallery. I really wish I had a Calca gallery or I wish I had a gallery for an app that I'm releasing right now and I don't have a good way to um, share that. It's kind of like, it's that one off problem. It's just one website.

Frank (30:23):
It's not 10 websites. Um, so I would say overall I'm okay with how I'm handling things cause I can keep just throwing things onto that one static server. Um, but at the same time, uh, it is all just so fragile is the problem with a million different accounts on a million different service providers and especially user voice gets very cranky from time to time. They'll just email you, they're like, Hey, you haven't logged in in three months, we're going to delete everything. And you're like, no, don't delete everything. I don't have to log in to see what people are voting on.

James (31:00):
Yeah. And also when you think about this website, I think it's also a good opportunity to talk about app updates, right? You just rolled out some new app updates, um, to I circuit across multiple platforms

Frank (31:12):
and

James (31:13):
it's a good place to send people to. When I think about how you did apps, that rollout and you know, it got picked up by a few places and that didn't even have a website. I guess the gum gum road website is good enough. But um, at the time, but, and I think about like, Hey, I'm rolling out a V two or V three, you can sort of simultaneously launch the website along with the app. Re-promote it, get it out there. So it, it, it acts as this not only initial but continuous upgrading of your application alongside the features that you're adding and that allows you to sort of evolve at the same time.

Frank (31:49):
Yup. Yup. Well said. It's, it's, yeah, it's not the worst. Honestly, I think my biggest regret is that these sites aren't tied into my code bases always as well as I would like, for example, the [inaudible] website is just a sub directory inside the code base, but I don't, I'm always updated. I don't update screenshots, things like that. So there are disconnects and I find, okay, if it's sitting in the directory, it'll get updated from time to time, but if it's on a cloud provider and I have to log into it and remember my credentials and they have a funny image uploader that sometimes doesn't work or I have to use Chrome in order for the image uploader to work and I'm not making any of this up, this is true, then you, there's just, there's enough of a hurdle there for me to say, Oh, forget it. I'm going to work on the app instead of working on the app website. So yeah, it's tough.

James (32:48):
It's always, it's always the side effect. We did an entire episode on app store and images and promotion and video back in the day. And I think we left out this part about the website about how really that can be your launch point to add additional functionality. You know, the one thing that I always like to talk about is um, overcast, right? Overcast on FM and the in the, the funny part about overcast is that website is not changed in forever. Really is a great podcast application. Um, I love MCAST too, but the, you know, he has a very similar does. He didn't have app screenshots, which I wished that he would, but probably because he'd have to update them. But the biggest part of what, um, of what he did is he added entire ads section to sell ads for the application onto the website that has, this table has a most Stripe processing payment. He turned his website, which was promotional first into in-app. That generates a lot of money.

Frank (33:51):
Oh yeah. Yeah. I mean that's, that's a classic Silicon Valley pivot. That's awesome. Yeah. But I agree 100% with the idea here because even these value added features, let's call it that value added feature. Um, you could spin it off as a whole business or in the very least, it's promotional. So my apps where you create something, it really behooves me to have a gallery where people can upload their stuff because number one, they're going to have awesome designs that I could never come up with that show off the features of the app or I'm just not as creative as you know, the internet, the internet is creative. I can only do so much. Uh, so that's going to show off the app. That's almost like making its own screenshots. And then the more websites you have, the more a little SEO juice you can do. So now you can start playing the SEO game of the little bit. But otherwise, you know, I'm just having a nice place that's dynamic, that's community oriented and that helps promote your app. That's all wins for me. Well that's what, it doesn't even have to be a side business.

James (35:04):
Yeah. Oh, that's what I'm interested in your listener of this show and you've listened to this podcast for 35 minutes and you're like, wow, I already have that thing. Like, I've, I've done that thing via something where I think my Apple website is cool or, or this thing exists, please let us know right into the show. But emerge conflict that if I'm hit the contact button, right, which is also on a, on fireside, which is a whole CMS that I pay money for every month. It was a, it's a website for podcasts. Like that's what they do and then generate a website for me. And there's a little bit of customization, but you know, I'd be really intrigued like, what's worked, what hasn't worked well, maybe you have insight, right? Like you've added tons of analytics to your website and guess what? Nobody goes to it. So maybe this entire episode was a waste of time and I don't even know. Right. I'm assuming it's not, but I would really be fascinated to know what's worked well for our listeners. What hasn't worked well right into the show. We'll read them back. We would love to go over it and sort of evolve on this too. I would love to do that.

Frank (36:02):
Uh, and just what you were saying. I don't have any stats in front of me, but I can say just off the top of my head, I get a good amount of traffic through the website and people definitely check out the websites. I mean it's what Google goes to. Uh, when your app goes to the app store, at least for Apple, they don't give the greatest experience. They show the icon, a couple of screenshots and a description and it's really in a box environment. They really want you to log in to the app store. There's no nothing for me to plug into. It's not a great experience, but, so if you can do a little bit better than Apple's default experience, I think that people just naturally go there. I mean, if someone tells you there's this cool new app of this name, what do you do? You go to Google to find it. You don't always just go directly to the app store? I tend to Google things first.

James (36:51):
Yeah, I usually try to Google and I'll type in app and then hopefully there's a website and if there's not a website then it's a, you're right, there's a link to the Google to the thing. But again, you're forced into that box. Right. And I want to kind of go outside of the box and really have that. To me it's the day one experience. I want to send someone to a thing and go and inherit is, and I've done blog posts before and I've done other things. It's not the same, right? It's not the same where if it's, if it's maybe a developer tool or something a little bit different, but really even for a developer until you want that nice fancy website, man, I wish I was a web developer sometimes,

Frank (37:25):
but then I wouldn't be like great to apps. So there's a bug. Let's just quit our jobs, James. We'll rent a garage in Silicon Valley and start the next great app hosts. Why don't we quit our job and go for it? And there we go. Perfect. No, can't do that. No, I'm really, I think that, uh, some wonderful listener is going to write in and be like, Hey, I built a whole business around this. This is exactly what I built feature for feature. I have everything you want. That's totally gonna happen.

James (37:51):
I mean, please do, please write into us. Uh, that'd be awesome. All right, Frank, I think that's it. I think, I don't think we can talk any more on this subject at all to be honest with you.

Frank (38:01):
Well, no we didn't. We didn't get into how many domains have you registered for all your websites, but that we can save that for another show.

James (38:07):
Let me just say today I did log into, I have three, right? I have three registers. Cause why don't you have three registers? So I have neat name, cheap, go daddy and I want my name because you told me to use,

Frank (38:18):
that's my fault. It's the blame it on me.

James (38:21):
It's, it's like the worst website but the most amazing website that it totally works. And the data found websites are way cheaper there. So it totally is worth it. I think total, I must own 40 domains and that's, that's gone down.

Frank (38:38):
I was trying to make a spreadsheet of it. I'm like, I'm going to log into, I think I have six registrars tanks. So I was logging into every single one of them trying to find out which domains are there and which ones were auto-renewing because my accountant literally said, how much are you spending on domains? And I'm like, I don't know.

James (38:57):
Promotional purposes. They're their business web service expense.

Frank (39:01):
Yeah. Yeah. Please tell my accountant.

James (39:04):
That's what I put it as. I don't know if I'm supposed to, but I do anyways. Oh, all right. IRS, please don't be listening my body. Well, it's going to do it for this week's verge conflict. Please write into us and have a solution for me cause I gotta launch this app. Frank, I got to do it. But until next time there's been another merge call.

James (39:20):
Jeez, monster bang. And I'm Frank Krueger. Thanks for listening.