From Coding to Creative Entrepreneurship — with Zsolt

00:01 We're synchronized, amazing. Hey, thank you so much for coming. Cheers, thank you for inviting. It's so cool to see you here. So why did you take your time for coming?

I'm excited to share my story, I think it's motivating. I've been doing this, like giving motivational talks at universities, really, at companies, at the groups, and it always comes along as motivational because it has been like 10 years of trying and then finally succeeding with my business. And it's a story there which people who wants to become entrepreneurs, they love to hear, because it tells them that there's hope, there's light at the end of the tunnel.

Well, I think you tried, you've tried a lot, right? Yeah. And you also failed, isn't it? Yeah. So who are you, and like, what, why the […] are you sitting here, like, what's the story?

01:02 Behind it, so my name is Zsolt, I usually introduce myself like salt, like the salt and pepper. And I'm a programmer by profession, I've been programming since 2007, started in school, intense programming, then university, programming, computer science. And then I've done like eight years full-time job as a programmer at Morgan Stanley in Amsterdam and another Dutch company, and now I'm running a business for 2 years. So it has been a long journey with programming, and a long, long way to try many different things.

So who am I? I love to hip-hop, I love to, we've seen this a few days ago, yeah, that was pretty cool. So I love to juggle, I love to drive boats, flips, parkour, freerunning, yeah, I'm into many.

02:02 Different things. I usually interested in many things, to try it out, and whatever I like sticks around. Yeah, you're a multifaceted human being. Do you feel like it's sometimes hard to keep on one thing? Yeah, yeah, yeah, variety is the spice of life. So I love to try out many things and see whatever I like, and which, what do I have a talent for, what keeps me motivated, what makes me wake up in the morning. That's super cool.

Where are you from? I'm from Hungary, I born in Romania. So yeah, now I'm traveling for four years. So where are you from? It's now, it's a bit invalid because now I didn't really visit home for a while, so like full-time traveling, yeah, since four years. Yep. And before that, did she live in Hungary? Before that I lived in Amsterdam, before that in Hungary, and before that in Romania where I was born. So you traveling along with my partner. Yeah, amazing years, she's, you also told me.

03:02 She's in your inside of your business too, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay. So she's a co-founder, and she's one of the main reasons why this company became successful. Credits to your wife, that's good. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's very good.

I mean, I was the one that tried many times, many years, but when she came along then all became structured. Everything became like, I am more like an ideas person, I have an idea, then I'm just excited about it, I don't even do research, I'm super excited, and like, I'm just do, I just do it, and I'm just executing it. And then 3, four months later I realize why wasn't it working from the beginning.

Yeah, yeah. So is she also a part of like the idea process, or is she like keeping you together and be like, yeah, you need to do this, you need to do this? Or like, what, what's exactly the other part that she's more of keeping me.

04:03 Together. So, as of how the story goes of this part of the story, I'm going to start from the beginning because then it gives more context. So, 2014, 13, I was a second year at university, I already started my first site project that was my own to build. I built like a CRM for a printing company, at the beginning I didn't even know what's a CRM, and I just built it, and it failed because I wasn't planning for scale, I planned only for one client. So that was kind of a side job, even though it could have been something bigger.

Then I tried to save the world from trash with a platform where you can give to each other free stuff that you would throw away. How old were you? I was 22. But I underestimated how marketing works, I thought that whenever I'm doing something good for the world then.

05:04 Everybody will be standing in line in front of my door, like, oh, finally somebody's doing some good, thank you, and like thousands are bombarding the website. It didn't happen. And I tried to push marketing myself, whatever marketing I could do, like went to the Metro, gave away flyers. I reached to the point after a few months when strangers gave things to strangers, but it was just too big of a piece. So I gave up after a while, because I was, I didn't even know the term marketing, not to mention like what takes to build such a, which came for chicken or the egg, like, you need people to give and people to get, so you need people. And I wasn't prepared for this infusion of people, and how much effort does it take to get yourself known, because people are advertising, they are like professions of marketing, you, yourself.

So did you realize in before the next project, or was it like many years later you were like, oh, that's why? Many years later I realized after.

06:07 Learning about marketing. Actually the whole business side of all the projects that I failed, I kind of learned while the successful business was ongoing, because then I knew what worked and, oh, this old project didn't work because of this, this is hard. Like, then I knew more about what works and what not after the success.

So yeah, basically I had an idea every week, or every month, every week I had an idea, and usually when I failed the project I already had a few projects in my head that I wanted to work on. And sometimes I had too many projects, that I worked on three, four projects at the same time, it was killing me, context switching is not so healthy. So I needed to focus on one, and sometimes it succeeded to focus on one, sometimes I didn't.

Did she already make money at this point? If your, so these side projects made almost zero money, so one of the Android games made $255, that's, you remember it? Yeah, because.

07:10 That was the first ever, I made a rip off of FL Flappy Bird, I called it Floppy Bird. I copy pasted it, I added some new features, some goat screaming, some fun. And so when the bird died was like, ah, like the goat was screaming. And I invited a lot of my friends, so that's when I connected with all of my Facebook friends. I wrote like, hey, how are you doing, and I needed to chat with them, and like, hey, by the way, I made this game. I was, my first marketing move, yeah, personal marketing. And I realized Google doesn't like it, because they realized that I have some shady activity, and they consider this that I invite like hundreds of my friends to download and rate it. It's not proper, actually, it's also in the terms and condition, but silly me, like young me, I didn't even know such things before.

You didn't even read the terms of? Yeah, yeah, they just scroll down. Except like, maybe I should start reading them then. Yeah.

08:10 Yeah, yeah, wise choices. Now Google is really strict about it, back in the days they would let through anything and everything. The Floppy Bird, I don't think this will happen. No, it's not going to happen now, it's taken down, so it's not available anymore, because throughout the day.

So it's funny, because now I'm an app developer, and back in the days they terminated my account because of these, invite my friends to like it, and I got suspended a few times, so they terminated my account. And it's pretty funny, I didn't talk about this anywhere, but I wrote them an email like, hey guys, I was young and naive, now I'm old and I am a professional programmer, app developer, do you mind to unblock my account maybe? And they unblocked it. Really? Yes, some Indian guy in Google office in LA was saying like, relatable, check, approve. It's pretty funny because it only takes an email, and like I got my personal account back. I was like, honest, like, look man, I was dumb.

09:10 I was young and naive. It's like, literally 17 years later, please give me back my account, please, like maybe it's my name, like. And I got my back, my personal account, even though I don't use it that anymore, we have a company account. So corporate stuff, you need to create a new account for it. Yeah.

So yeah, back to story, like, projects. I moved to Amsterdam and I started creating robotics, because I lived on a house boat. And physical, like physical, like I made a leadlike district, which is, you put sensors on your hand and on your feet, and you have a stage full with LEDs, full with lights. And I'm a hip-hop dancer, so wherever I move the lights are following my movement. Oh, that's so cool. I made a prototype, I even took it to a party, and it was with a battery and a lot of cables out of it, people were looking at it like it's a bomb. It was wired on my side of my trousers, literally, like a.

10:13 Bomber. It was funny, but like my whole jacket was L lit up. And it was, they have pictures of it, by any chance? Can you send me some? This would be amazing. It's cool, I even had the video when I first prototyped it, I took it to the party and like people were like, what is this? Yeah, don't […] forget to edit this in, sending the photos. Yeah.

And I started learning Arduino, so I built also bed boat, which is, I lived on a house boat, so it's an inflatable bed. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, this is the more interesting part, sorry, you lived in a house boat? Yeah, I moved to Amsterdam. So, okay, so give more context, I had a long relationship, and I broke up with a 4-year relationship, and I was a bit sad, so I was like, let's spice my life up, so let's buy a boat, let's buy a boat, and move to a house boat, what can go wrong, like. And it kind of worked, so I was like happy, like, in know, in a months after, like broke off four years, and that's super cool. It was like I was back to.

11:15 Business. It's like 35-year-old men suddenly buying motorcycles, and like you know the suicidal fought in them, trying to kill them, is it the same thing? Yeah, I need to spice up my life. I mean, I could only go with 6 km per hour in theer Canal, so no chance to kill him. But yeah, I mean this is kind of romantic, going 6 km hour on the Amer Canal, he. But it was spicy, because like a lot of people came to my boat, like every day I had like 50, 60 people, I took boat rides either free or paid. So I had a lot of, I went to work by boat, then at lunch time I organized, what? Really? Yeah. What the […], it was 6 minutes by bike or 12 minutes by boat, so I was like, okay, take the boat, new icon on Google Maps. Yeah, I put the breakfast on my steering wheel at the boat, and I just ate breakfast while I'm driving, 9 in the morning. This so cool, where do you park a boat? Actually the office was next to the.

12:17 Canal. So I literally had my own boat parking spot next to the building. Oh, this typical developers, you know, like, you know, they get everything if they ask for it, boat parking space. Well, it's not like I got it, I claimed it. Do you have pictures of that? Yeah, amazing, okay, this is the best YouTube videos. I have pictures when I'm developing, and next to me it's the boat, like two floors down there's the canal, and there's my boat parked, so I could look over it.

So nobody steals a boat, I guess? Yeah, I mean they steal motors, but the boats are were locked, and this was also like a camera area, so they don't […] […] with areas with cameras.

So you moved to the boat? Sorry, yeah, so I moved on a boat, and I had crazy ideas. And one day I get a lot of guests, I did a lot of couch surfing, so I had like 250 couch surfers, or 300, around in the boat, and in everywhere in the world, and I had inflatable mattresses to host them in.

13:17 The living room, and one day I threw it out on the window, because I was like, hey, this might be floating, let me show it out on the window from my house boat. And I tried it out, and it was super comfortable, like a water bed. So I sit down on it, let me bring the pillows, the bed sheet, the bedding. And I, outside of the boat, outside the boat, there was the canal, there was the water. So did she like bind it somehow, or? No, it was just loose, I mean it's not going anywhere, I had a pedal, so I could move, it was super light.

Yeah, so I put the pillows, the bedding, the bed sheet on it, and I was like, oh, this is super comfortable, let me just show it to the world. So I dragged it with my boat, with, I put a rope around it, and with my motorboat I dragged it through Amsterdam City Center. So the city center wasn't prepared for what was coming, because the bridges were full, they were like a bed on the canals, and they, I pretended that I'm.

14:19 Sleeping, and I was dragged, actually I dragged the, my ex-girlfriend through the canals, I was driving, and they, he, she was in the back testing the boat. And suddenly, you have to tell me, there's a video of it, there's a video of it, […]. And suddenly the police showed up, there's a video about that as well. When the police shows up, only when they start to come after me, because I, afterwards I cut it down, like, there's no party here. And they came after me, and like, you cannot do this, sir. And like, why? Because you cannot drag any object behind your boat. And I was thinking on myself, what if this is a boat, then it's possible? Yeah, it needs to be a boat, then let it be, let me create the bed boat.

So I went home, and I researched a bit, and I ordered submarine engines, so it classifies as a boat. Yeah, so it classifies as a boat. And I worked on hiding the engines under the whole mattress, so it's not visible, and they.

15:19 Must have been, they must be submarine engines, because I need to hide them, I need to submerge them under the water. And I built the whole, like, there's the bed, it's really wobbling, you know, like you need to put the engine somehow to be super steady. So for that I had mopping sticks, and I created a frame for mopping sticks, and I attached the boat to the mopping sticks, and that kind of grid went around the mattress. So it was like a sandwich, engines, mopping sticks, grid, and the soft boat.

Yeah, and under the pillow I had a joystick, so with the joystick I could move the boat forwards, backwards, didn't even need the boat to drag it. When you, no, I didn't need the boat to drag it, that was the whole prank. I wanted to build a boat, and I wanted to show it to the world, and without the police to tell me anything. And that's the funny part, because after a few months I prototyped it, I built it, and it was ready for production, and I asked some friends.

16:21 To drive my motorboat while I'm driving my bed boat, and the police immediately showed up, and they were like, no, you cannot do this. And I was like, hey, this is a boat, now look at this joystick, it goes left, it goes to right, it goes to front, it's no rope. And they were like, really? I've never seen anything like this, okay sir, have fun.

No, and I don't have a video of this, but it really happened. So the police really came, and they just looked at it, and like they thought that it's again, it's because, were the same policemen? I don't know if it's the same, because it has been a year a half a later, but the canals are full with cameras, so they know whatever's coming. So they kind of already knew that I'm preparing something, I'm going, I took the whole mattress on the boat itself, so they assumed that I'm going to drag it again behind the boat. And that was epic, like, I took it out, I have some videos when the people are just lining up at the bridge to watch, like, what is this crazy guy doing in the canals.

17:22 Sleeping on the mattress, and that was the prank, I wanted to sleep on the mattress while the mo boat under it, under me, moved, moves by itself. And it didn't happen that I slept, because I was so excited, like, finally my project is going. Yeah, and like people were asking me, are you sleeping? Yes, I just couldn't like close my eyes, but it's so exciting, like, moment of what I prepared for a half a year.

I can imagine. I have some videos about it, and people were throwing me beers, like, hey, this is cool, here's a beer, I collected seven beers through half an hour, and there were people were shouting me, much, two beers, two beers, I was shouting, 1,000, like, okay, like, just joking, I didn't have any license to give it. And it was super prototype, like, I literally have all the controllers in an egg box and a sandwich container, like, if somebody came with a needle from Tom and Jerry, and like popped it up, I would the.

18:23 Whole project would have been sank. And, yeah, that's that sounds kind of dangerous. Yeah, so it's not production ready. So how old were you? I was 27 at that point. But you were really thinking about making it production ready, you wanted to make a product out of it? So that's the point, I didn't really thought about production, I just thought about the idea. I like how I work is, I think about the product, I have a really strong vision of how it's going to be at the end, like I really imagine all the final version, and how impactful would it be on other people. And it was like that, actually the assumption was valid, because people really went crazy about it. But the thing is, I still don't know how to make money with it.

And let's talk about production, with production it's pretty hard to make hardware production proof, because you need to make a microcontroller, you need to like design it, and it shouldn't be cables all over, it should be like a board that.

19:24 Needs to be printed from China, and if something goes wrong you need to recall all the units. I kind of went into it, I researched a bit what would it take to make, you wanted, you wanted it to make a, I wanted it. But then when I've seen how much effort is it, and I've seen people talking about it, I was like, okay, I don't even know where am I selling, what permits do I get, I'm just going to stick with software. So that's, I still have the prototype of the bed boat in Amsterdam, in one of the basements, but I haven't touched it for like 4 years now.

Okay, I'm, we're going to Amsterdam at some point. Okay, we, you're unpacking this boat and we're doing this, 100%. All right, let's do it, it's so cool.

Okay, so I had fun projects like this, and I had ideas, and I wanted them, like, an analogy would be that a grown-up kid that wants Christmas presents, and the Christmas present is what whatever he imagines, like that.

20:27 Was me back in the days, I imagine something, I want it, I can build it, I'm going to build it because it's going to be fun. So I built it, so I kind of build things for the fun, so I wasn't work for me. Even though you would see me in the evening that I was working my ass off, I was home at 6, even at work I would just note down what I'm going to do when I get home, and when I got home I was immediately back to business, I like, yeah, finally, okay, let's do this, and this, and this.

This means dedication and love for what you're doing, isn't it? Was it hard, like, relationships, I could imagine, like, you know, girlfriend saying, oh, you come from work and then you work and then you work, was it hard? Well, the previous girlfriend that I broke up with four years ago, she was also a programmer, so, okay, I'm a workaholic, not in a, I don't know if it's bad or good way, I love to work because I love the process of it, like I have a strong vision, and each, I'm.

21:28 Getting closer to it, I'm happier to see my baby become true. So she was programmer, so it was a fit, because we, I could also project and prototype while I was home, while I was at the weekend, some weekends we would have just spent coding. And that was kind of the, yeah, the romance, coding, and then going out for dinner, coding, like instead of like, hey, the honey, how was your day, like, how was the project going. So I kind of focused on this, and even now my partner is my business partner, so otherwise I just like, other people might not be able to handle me.

Yeah, but this is such a controversial topic when it comes to relationship and doing business together. Some people say never do this, you know, like never […] the company, never do business with a partner or friend. And other people say like, okay, if you're doing business of a partner, it needs to be so well of a relation Rel.

22:28 ship that like, but then it's going to explode. Yeah, so we were super stable in the relationship wise, so we upgraded the relation to Enterprise, so the package promoted. So I mean there are dis, the only thing that happens now is sometimes we have disagreements in business, and that affects the relationship. But we kind of never had problems in the relationship that affect the business, usually, now it's the other way around, because we have stronger disagreement on business, like she's also strong minded, I'm also strong minded, when I have like something that I want to do, stubborn when you see the goal. Yeah, stubborn but also like, relatively, let say, intellectually stubborn, I don't know what the word for it, like I reason for my stubbornness, like why, and I would change my mindset if there's the data to prove it, better argument against, basically. So it's like basically.

23:28 Not stubborn with arguing, but if somebody has a better argument I would go for it. So yeah, with the relationship. Yeah, here I've heard horror stories with it, and some friends they started company together, then they broke up, and of course the company went with it, so he needed to pay his girlfriend like whatever the company worth at the time. So yeah, there are horror stories like that.

So, I mean, for has been 2 and a half years now that we are running the business, everything works so far.

Let's see, what was your, like, first successful, you know, like the real successful, after all of the projects and like you didn't know how to market it, and then what was your first thing that like blew up, and you were like, oh, okay. So I actually can live of that, personal, not employed. The first personal one was the beginning of my current, our current business, so after.

24:28 All these projects, we kind of getting to the end of the story, which will transition to this question, which I started building Android apps. Yeah, and the story goes back way before, before Christ, before the whole thing. So I'm a video editor for 20 years, I got my first computer, 11 year old me, and I started immediately editing videos frame by frame. I started drawing frames, and I put together like a music video frame by frame, and that was kind of my initial journey for video editing.

Yeah, and I ever since, I think I edited like 50, 60 anime music videos, and a lot of break dance, parkour, whatever video would it be. I think I've done more than a 100 projects in video editing, which is a hobby, it's a hobby, I didn't never learned it, I just learned it by doing. And one of the videos that I made, I, it took me 4.

25:29 Months to make, and it got 2 million views on YouTube. So it's a Hungarian music which is super ugly, like in the wording, it's like bad, it's like kurva, and like the law of Love swearing in it, in Hungarian, but it's full with swearing, so people loved it.

And I made a music video for, with Dragon Ball Z, when they lip sync on the music, so it feels like they are singing. Did you draw it yourself? Dragon Ball Z, Dragon Ball Z, I took it from the animation, like I just cut pieces out. So it took me a lot of time, because each mouth movement I needed to correctly synchronize, so each second took me like seven, eight videos sometimes to synchronize all the tiny mouth movement. I didn't know better, like I was 15 years old when I made this, and 2 million views of 15 years old, that's, I, that was a lucky video to get. I mean, I have other videos that also get half a million view to lip syncing.

26:29 But it got half a million because I used Linkin Park, In the End, which is a famous song, of course. And but the quality of the video is also good, like it had really good effects, I took my time, I built it in four months, like those four minutes, I took my four months on it. I had a infinite amount of time in school, I didn't have bills to pay, I didn't have Gils to answer.

So, and I back, like now as a programmer, I was thinking about it again, like, what if, what if I'm just going to milk that success a bit more, what if I'm going to create an automation that I can lip sync everything easily without spending four months. And I wanted to create the lip automation programmatically, so that was the goal, that was the whole mission. I called it me Melody, that was the program, why I started to build apps. Yeah, Melody. Yeah, yeah, is it still online?

27:30 Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's reachable, it's still working, and it's still, I put a lot of effort in it. So the whole deal was that I wanted to build apps, but I didn't know how to build Android apps, I built before but not native Android, I used some game engines for the Floppy Bird, but it was not the native Android which I needed now for video editing.

So to warm myself up, I started using the video editing library, and it had some features like splitting up the video, stabilizing the video, I wanted to try them, and I wanted to create like prototypes to warm myself up for the big project. And I released the first project ever released was The Mask soundboard, what, which was the movie The Mask, you just tap a button like spoken, and like it's going, it's nothing, it's literally just took me like a few days because I got used with the environment. The second was the video splitter, the.

28:31 Third one was video compressor, and the fourth one was video stabilizer. Like all of them ever SE, until the stabilizer got, like I don't know, one, two downloads every day. But video stabilizer just blew up, like it got hundreds of downloads every day, and it got to like thousands of downloads every day.

Did you monetize it already? No, I just released it, in 4 hours it was just a warm up, like literally, like select, the press processing, save the video, it was just my 4 hours of prototyping. It wasn't even working properly, I released it, and I got so many downloads, and people were like, please fix it, we need it, they were writing me emails, I was like, okay, I'm going to fix it. That was the time when I started traveling with my partner, when the video stabilizer got the emails, actually I still remember the first Airbnb we went to, I'm getting the emails that, hey, please fix this video stabilizer, and I was like, and you're like the […]. Yeah, I was telling.

29:32 Her, like, actually, sorry, I'm need to fix some stuff. So I went into fix, because I've seen how many downloads it get, it was surprising, because it's just a test, it was not the project that I wanted, never expected this, I never expected. It was just a warm up, it was something to get ready for the big apple, the M Melody project for the lip syncing. And still people just went NS for it, they were like, yeah, I want it, give me more, I want a fixed version. So I fixed it, and now if you type in video stabilizer in the Play Store, it's going to be on the top three, sometimes in the first one, okay, cause I was the second video stabilizer at the time, and mine was working, the other ones wasn't, so they kind of did something wrong, and I was, at a certain point I was the only one that was working on Android.

Well, did you monetize it at some point? At some point, yes, a few months later I put in ads and purchase, one time purchase, which.

30:33 I kind of regret, because if it would have been a subscription, but I read, what is subscription, subscription is for newsletters or something recurring, for monthly payment. No, and now everything is subscription, I should have just put in subscription, I could have gotten way more money out of it. Anyway, those are like warm up.

Yeah, so is it an okay question to ask, like, how, like, because I have no idea about how exactly apps are monetized, and what makes more money, ads or the onetime purchase? I would say that subscriptions, sub, not one time purchase. No, onetime purchase, at this point if you want to make money you should think in subscriptions. Onetime purchase, no, doesn't really make that much sense, for me at this time, when we had so much experience with subscriptions, so it's good for the users, because then they don't need to pay, but if you look.

31:33 At the budget, like how much you end up in the, at the end, the profits, subscriptions make more sense long term.

What was the first big paycheck out of the stabilizer thing? I still remember going up, and at the beginning it was only ads, because a subscription was harder to implement, so I was like just getting the paycheck from the ads. And I still remember crossing like the one EUR mark for the day, and like crossing the 10 EUR mark for the day, like there was like checkpoints on like how much do I get, like at the beginning we were joking that I can now buy a coffee in the, every day.

But like that's a lot, like one year every day from an app. Yeah, yeah, I mean it got downloads, so I reached it because it had hundreds and even thousands of downloads, so then it started going up and up like paycheck. I wouldn't say that it was big at the, like boom, like YouTubers like go.

32:34 Overnight success with one video, it's usually, for me it was like steady growing. I still remember like there were spikes, when I still was at the one EUR level, somehow it was 13 EUR, like something happened, I still don't know what happened, I think a YouTuber shouted out my stabilizer, and then people downloaded it, because I found myself on YouTube, other people are talking about it, even though I didn't ask them for. So it's kind of organically growing because it is good, so people see the value in it, so they recommend, download it, yeah please.

Is there a subscription model now? No, it's still one time purchase. Why not? I don't know, like it doesn't make that much sense, I mean it brings a few hundred EUR now every month, so if I do subscription it's going to be a few hundred more, but with the current projects it's way more, so it doesn't worth my time to go back. And even though, like now I'm planning to.

33:34 Switch the subscription, let me see how much effort will it take, like, in my nontechnical mind, this is not clear why it takes more of a, of an implementation time to do retainer instead of onetime purchase, what's the, why is it so much harder to do a subscription model instead of one time purchase?

Oh, it's just a implementation thing, because you change the product that's going to be purchased, you need to set it up, you need to like code it properly, they need to check it if it's active, if it's expired. So it's, with one time purchase, if it's there, yes, not there, no, so it's like easy logic, it was super like easier to implement than subscription. Subscriptions takes more to synchronize and stuff like that, so it's going to take a bit, and I didn't touch this code for years, so I need to dust it up, it again, upgrade library, so it's going to be taking my time to like put it in my context, in my brain again. I.

34:34 See, I see, and you're trying not to start side projects? Yeah. Or your wife is trying to not make you start new projects? Yeah, that doesn't make it, I mean it's a few hundred EUR, at this point we have a company, and we had a certain point eight people to feed with salaries and everything, so a few hundred more it doesn't really bring anything more, like we have bigger fish, fishes to fry.

How much percentage does Google Play take, for, like a, so it's funny because, like, you sign NDA, it's 15%, but you think that apps is a b2c, and it's actually, if you think about it from invoicing standpoint, it's a B2B, because Google collects the money from everybody, and they charge 15%, they handle the payment provider, they handle the taxes, they handle everything.

35:34 And then they send it to you once every month, so it's not bad, right? So it's really good, because otherwise you would need to deal with paying taxes in each country, distributing the money, like there are services that do this. I heard that if you do like b2c, and if you people are buying from you, from Kazakhstan, or Dubai, you would, or Greece, they would, you would need to send them the taxes, because you kind of get money from their people. So there are companies that are specialized for this, that you send them the amount and they spread it around across countries, but luckily Google does take care of this, so they pay taxes in the specific country where the user came from, so you can go global and then you just don't care about it. Google collects everything, takes 15%.

And do you think it's okay, it's a valid price point, you think it's okay? I think so, I mean they provide the store, they provide the users, they provide.

36:34 Availability. So I mean it's their platform, payment, taxes, in like accounting wise as well, spreadsheets of what happened. So it's a full on man managed platform, and I think it's pretty fair, because they bring, if your app is good it's going to blow up, like, I think it's easier, I mean for me, because we had success with it, it was easier for us to do apps than websites, because on the App Store it's you have easier chance to get blown up.

So like it's in like a Tik Tok or Instagram algorithm, there's no SEO. And Google, yeah, yeah, like Google ads, SEO super W is really hard to find you unless you like go marketing, but here if you have a good app, Google will promote you. So it's just instantly, like it's not like you need to write the app and you need to wait half a year until the SEO grows and you get known, here no, you upload the app, if it's good Google will push it. So interesting, so yeah.

37:37 Regarding 15%, I think it's fair. And ads, I don't even know how much percent they take, but they take some cut, I mean from ads as well, so they, so they, you can like turn ads on and it's going to go. Yeah, yeah, okay, okay, okay.

So you need to place the ads, you have few ads option, you have a banner ad, you have, which is like banner, you just have a banner. You have the full screen interstitial, that's the word for it, like the full screen ad which you can X. And then you have the rewarded ads, which are like half a minute videos, which we use when you process photos now, because that's the most valuable, because it takes the user time half a minute, and then they pay way more. And with the ads you need to be careful, of not careful, but need to bear in mind that each country is going to pay you differently, like India has super low CPM, and then.

38:38 For example, America, or Australia, or Germany have really high CPM, cost per click. That's what you get. So the, yeah, the most more valuable, the more money the people have in a country, makes sense, the more the advertiser will pay for it.

Yeah, why are mobile app advertisements always so shitty, like these unclear kid games, of like some cheap animations, why, what is that? I mean, at the end it's all different for everybody, who whoever pays the most, so it's everybody, every one of us is targeted. So if you scroll on Facebook, or wherever, or a website, and you stopped for a bit, it's recorded in your history that, hey, you might be interested in this, so then you're going to be targeted. Or if you ever got.

39:41 Like curious about such shitty ad accidentally even, or I don't know, then they were like, oh, this person stayed for a few seconds, let me just bombard more. So it's all different, for like, it's the same that I'm getting a lot of intellectual videos on my YouTube feed, and somebody's getting a lot of cat videos, because they are just, you just said people that like cats are D just. No, it's the algorithm. Yeah, the algorithm just knows. No, the cats are intellectual as well, they come to you to get food. That's true.

How did you get, so it's like the company's four years old, and you say you started with your wife as a co-founder, and now you have eight more employees besides your wife, you, and then eight more people we had at a certain point, now it's downgraded. So the story goes that, yeah, the eight.

40:44 Employees. So just to keep the story line, with this out with the success, because it's going to get to the employee is this, that's, so there was this accidental apps, like the, back to the previous line, the video stabilizer, and then I wrote this m Melody app, which I planned for the whole time, and it wasn't successful, it wasn't so viral that I imagined it. So I even started a YouTube channel for this to promote my crazy project which nobody's searching for. And afterwards I took a part out from this m Melody, and I, 10% of it was video to photo, and that also blew up, like video, like a thumbnail to photo, or like to extract photos from a video. Yeah.

41:46 Yeah, okay, and why it blew up, because mine was unique in a way that I designed it, I designed a carousel of frames, so you could literally see each frame, like in the iCloud, like in the Google, iOS photo app, or you like in the photo app, so you can scroll through the thumb, the photos of the video, so you can pick the right one, exactly the right one, so that's why it stood out. Yeah, it was super convenient, even though there were like 20, 30 video to photos, mine got not again to the top three because it was a unique design, I never checked the competition, I just had something in my, in my mind, I implemented it, and yeah it was there, and it was became successful. So that was also helping for my coffee money.

So going forwards, I had three apps out of the 15 that got me passive income, that was, there was like, I got to the point, I told.

42:47 Myself that I'm going to quit my job as soon as I got, get 1,000 passively from the apps. And after one and a half years of developing I got to that point. So that was a point where, with my partner, we, next to these apps I did also other apps because I cannot focus on one thing, we tried three different projects, it, they didn't work out. But at that point, when I reached 1,000 passive income, something miraculous happened, like something amazing, because I told her, hey, there's this video to photo app, and HD video extracts a really pixelated photo, what if we could upscale it with AI or something. And I told her this idea, and then she took it to the garage and did a research, and she.

43:47 Did the keyword research on AI photo enhancer, and she's seen that it was booming, like it was just like Bitcoin at the beginning, it was just sky marketing. And she checked the competition, and she's seen that there's only two players in the field, and she also found the GitHub repository where we can upscale the photos. So she literally laid down the whole plan in front of me, like, look, we can make this photo enhancer, look at the numbers, it's going up like a rocket, like a business plan. Yeah, look at these two apps, they have both have like 10 million downloads, and they are two only in the store, they just got released a few months ago.

Yeah, and yeah, it's, we also have the technology, so let's make. I was super against it, because I was like, why would we make such a project where we would need computing power, like, because a phone cannot enhance a photo, it's just too.

44:48 Weak, so you need a computer with server. And a server, like with the video card, the GPU, those crypto mining devices, you need those to enhance, upscale, colorize photos. So basically the phone sends the picture to the server, it enhances it there, or upscales it there, and then it sends it back. Exactly, so you have running costs for an app. Exactly, to minimize it I bought the computer. So we bought the first computer, like the server, like, we literally bought the video card computer. It was a huge 40 kg computer with two GPUs, two units that could process photos. I built PCs myself. What did you do? Like, what kind of GPUs were it? It's the 2080 TI, two of them, it was water cooled, and it was super heavy and beautiful as well. It was super heavy to move it, I remember. I was getting out from the covid at that time, it was like 2021, uh, wait, 20, no, 202, what was it.

45:52 Anyway, oh, I got the covid in 21, and I got out, I was healing, I already got negative results, and I went to pick up this PC. And I brought a backpack, like I imagined, I never had a PC, I had laptop for years, and I was like, it's going to fit in this backpack, I had an old PC myself, like it was not bigger than this backpack. I see that PC, 40 kg, holy shit, how I'm going to, how I brought the backpack. So I needed to go to the Craftman, the craft store, the Ikea, I don't know which one was it, but I brought like wheels for it, so I put it on a platform, so I pushed it home.

So weren't you traveling full time at this point? At that point, yes, and we got back to Amsterdam because of this project. So we, that's an investment, so we were at Malta, and then we were planning to stay in Amsterdam for 1 and a half.

46:52 Months, until the project is over. So we went there and we stayed indoors and kind of haven't really went outside for one and a half months until the project was over, and we were just coding, coding, coding.

And is your girlfriend, now your wife, also coding? No, she's originally not a coder, but she helped me out, so she was learning by herself for a few years, in the university she did some years of python stuff, so I showed her how to program. And then she also did some, it was funny because, yeah, she, I mean as a programmer I know structure and everything, she was writing everything in one file, and then I was like, okay, this is now how you do it, you take it out, you take it here, you take different file, and now it's organized. And she was like, where's my code, what did you do with my code, it was cute and funny. Yeah, I can imagine. But then she was super fastly learning to get up to.

47:52 Speed. And then yeah, we released, and the first month we released we got 72,000 downloads in the first month, in the first month? That's crazy. Exactly, and it was just without ads, without subscriptions, wasn't sometimes working properly, the computer, we had only one computer, and it turned off in the middle of the night, so the server was down.

Now we have 23 computers, so we have like a whole mini server park around Europe, in six different locations. So where, no, like is it an apartment, is it a basement, is it like a rented out physical server to data center, what is it? So it's different places, so I have it in my childhood bedroom, like five GPUs there. Yeah, I have it at my godfather, four GPUs, I have some in Deen, at one of my really good friends.

48:53 Printing factory. I have eight computers in an Amsterdam hacker space, and I have two more in the neighbor hacker space next door, and I have two more in Rotterdam co-working space. So it was just all about who offered me, like people knew me that I'm, I have this, and they wanted to reduce their rent.

And just so, how much are you paying, like per computer space? Well, per computer is like in average plus minus 50, 40, 5050 EUR per GPU unit. Oh yeah, okay, so because of the electricity and stuff? Yeah, so electricity and rent included. Yeah, I used to mine Bitcoin, not ethereum, etherum, my new computer. Oh yeah, like then electricity price was also. Yeah, I actually made profits, so I was like making like 70 a month, and then like 50 of this on for electricity. Oh wow. So.

49:55 Plenty profit. And how many GPUs did you have? Only one, only one, one. Yeah, yeah, yeah, with one. Yeah, I mean it's still a profit, right? It's still running. Yeah, also during covid, also dur. Yeah, interesting.

So it went that well, it went so well that you were like, okay, now I need way more computing power? Yeah, I immediately, well, we planned a trip to Madera, and as soon as we left the computer behind, and I was disturbing my roommate, my flatmate, every night, please check the server, can you please go down, unplug it, and plug it back again, so I could connect with SSH through the terminal to the computer, so I can fix.

Even now I can connect to every computer, it's like set up in a safe environment, the, like a local VPN, so it's not visible from the outside, but it's visible for me. So I immediately planned my computer's purchases, as soon as I went to Madera, I.

50:56 Looked up for some new computers, and it was always depending on who could I trust to buy me the computer and set it up. So I have really good friends who I helped back in the days, so now they help me back. So in Rotterdam I have a really close friend who helped me to put a computer in his friend's co-working space, I never seen that computer in my life, and really, I bought it, he put it, I can still log into it, but I never ially seen it yet. So there are some computers that I never seen, I think like 30% I haven't seen yet, maybe more.

But is it only for this one app, or is it for all of your AI apps? For this and the new one. So what we've done, we released photo enhancer and photo restore AI, two apps that at the beginning they were doing slightly different things, like one was doing like old photos and the other was doing only enhancer, and as a certain point we kind of mixed and merged.

51:57 Everything, in everything, so both of the apps do the same thing, and both of the apps make the same money, almost like equally big. And the funny thing is that, like, it doesn't matter that it does the same, what matters are the keywords, because the photo enhancer keyword niche genre is totally different than the photo restore, old photo restore, that's another section in the keyword.

So we could have released like 10 apps, I'm just like now regretting not to release like 10 different apps with whatever keyword we could think about, like grandma photo fixer, or like I don't know, like face beautifier AI. Oh, there's a bunch of those. Yeah, I should have released, like we should have released like 10 of those, because like both of these apps just became equally successful, and if we would have like 10 of them, like we would have like, I know, like five times more money, but.

52:59 Even now I'm grateful, it's not like I'm like bitching about it. But what systems did you use behind, like on the AI side, like stable diffusion or what was it? So they were like yeah, so we are using now stable diffusion to colorize, and like there's like some models that are enhancing the photo, you can find these, like, there you go to GitHub, and then you just search for models, and then you just install it on your computer, and then you can process the photo and send it back. So stable diffusion is one of the widely well known, we use it a lot, so it has like colorizing is really good in it, and yeah it's also enhancing the faces, it goes multiple steps.

So yeah, it really blew up, and yeah, back to the story, when it started to blow up, I quit my job finally, and she did also.

54:00 Quit her job, because she didn't go to take PhD, she was accepted for the PhD, she has three universities, and then she didn't go through with the PhD. So we were both fully committed on it, and imagine, first month, so we got limited by ads, as soon as we quit our revenue went down to almost zero.

So what happened is that admob, whenever you need to, there are two type of accounts for ads, there's a personal account and there's a corporate account, so you cannot switch, there's not a setting in the settings so you can add it to change it from a personal to corporate. So what you do, you create a new account and migrate your apps to the new account, so you need to fix the ad ID in the app and do an updates, so you have the newest version, fresh version, but Google is thinks it's.

55:02 Smart with the automations, and at that point we got like €100 per day from the ads, and it was a new account, so we migrated, and the new account immediately got €100 per day. And Google was like, this is too much, it's limited, okay, from now on it's limited. Oh no, and it was pretty intense, that was, yeah, we were fighting quite a lot about it, like it was because of the Indians, we should block India, because they are doing click farming, and we thought that because Indians are also using our app, they might affect the ads algorithm, that they see them also using, so they think it's invalid traffic. So we were fighting lot about like which country should we block, what step should we take, because it was like chaos, like we just quit our jobs, and like the revenue went like, okay, from now.

56:03 On savings, you have savings for half year, like if you can survive, go for it, like literally we had, like, I had 16k savings, and that was with our traveling, we were still traveling by the way, so we were going to Mexico at that point, and it was enough for half year based on, for two people, expenses. And if we make it, we make it, if we fail, we fail, and go back to work.

So that six, so like this is so bad, limitation is so bad, you can be a half a year or a year without the account, basically. Yeah, yeah. And what about texting them an email, being, hey, I was young and naive? No, because the point there, they would only open customer support, if I remember correctly, for, if you reached at €250, but they blocked us so fast that we couldn't even contact the real customer support to check it out, because we are legit and we are have been in.

57:03 Business for two years at that point, with different, with the before the apps. And what then, like what you, so it, well, we went to different ad providers, so there's not, it was not Google directly, was some like ad platform, so admob, it's Google's platform, they block us. And what we decided is, what, that we are going to migrate to other ad providers while Google is going to fix us, because we couldn't fix it with customer support. So we went to other providers, and slowly after one and a half months Google gave us back the traffic, so like organically we let a few really valuable users there, but like 90% of the ads traffic we directed to another provider, and like we built a system where you could put how much percentage.

58:03 Should the admob, or AppLovin, or IronSource, we had like five different ad providers, because we were like, we, I'm not going to stick with one, what if this one also […] us again, so we were playing it safe and having multiple providers at the same time. But then admob pays the most, so why? So that one I don't know why, they just do, I think they, because they want to maybe to stick you with Google, maybe because Google does a really good job in filtering out the ads that come, so the ads and the apps that are doing it, they limited us, so they really care about the quality of an ad, an app that shows ads, so whoever pays to Google they can make sure that it's not going to be scammy app that's just making money from Indian click farms. So I think that's.

59:03 Why Google does a really good filtering and really good housekeeping in keeping good quality apps in the who could use the ads. Interesting, as an advertiser that does ads on Google apps is the worst, we, I, all, we always exclude apps and display. Oh really? Yeah, maybe not, they don't do such a good job anymore. No, I think it's just two different sides, because it's not about the, yes, it's about the ad themselves basically. Okay, interesting, I didn't see this part yet from the other side, like which one works better for you?

We exclude app traffic completely, so if you're doing like a advertising for a service, for a website, not for an app, right, we exclude always app traffic because it's always spammy […], Val, low value traffic. So then web is left. Yeah, yeah, web is the best, so if somebody comes from Google, it's the best, from google.com it's the best, if it's like Search Partners, it's sh, and this is Search Partners, or Display.

60:05 Basically. I see, interesting, okay, and then you made it, like after one a half months, you say one and a half months, the revenue came back? We were super happy, actually it was like Christmas, so this whole thing started in August, and when it came back it was like December, and around like Christmas period, like the Santa Claus brought the account back, the money, basically.

Yeah, and that was the point where we started also building an iOS app as well, because we were releasing on Android only, and we had two options, either I'm going to learn how to write code in Swift in the iOS platform, or I'm going to use a multi platform coding tool like React Native or Flutter. So I decided to use Flutter because it was by Google, I was like, yeah, Google knows whatever, they're doing their app first, and React, I know React from the web, so I was like, yeah, maybe Flutter.

61:08 Will work better for me, so I destroyed the whole code base, and I rewrote, actually that point we were rewriting the whole system in Flutter, so it was like demolish, boom. And then the new app that we wrote, it was both for Android and iOS as well, so it was one simple code base, and that I think, by December we released the first ever iOS app that we have. And yeah, iOS just also didn't blow up as much as Android, it was harder to get people, but when we got people, they worth a lot more, like 10, 15 times more. So if you have like 1,000, they, an iPhone is more expensive, if you have money for an iPhone you will also subscribe more often, so like 1,000 iOS users is equal to, I think, 15,000 Android users in.

62:08 Revenue wise, so it's interesting, like from ad traffic, or from subscriptions, or from purchases, from purchases and ads as well, so both. So, oh, crazy, okay. So just iPhone users, like iPhone people are usually have more money than non iPhone people, like that's kind of, that doesn't mean that Android people don't have money, it's just that iPhone is kind of more expensive, the Apple product, like, oh, we know this. So yeah, that's how it went, and we released iOS as well, and at that point we tried so many things for like half year, and we grew until a point where it was more than our salaries before, so it was like we could live like fishes with it. But it was, we kind of thought that there is more, there's more behind, there's more.

63:08 What we don't see, what we don't know. So we posted a job offer for a product owner to help us grow this app and to multiply our revenue. And we found, we were really lucky with this, this guy is from Ukraine, and he helped us, like he interviewed, and it was, he was really sympathic, and he had like a presentation of how he thinks that this app was going to worth millions and everything. And after we started working with him on a percentage base, for like one year, so until one year whatever he makes he can take away 50%, and he grew our apps five times in revenue wise. He's a millionaire now, I guess, not well, not millionaire exactly, but he made money that I've never made in my life, and I never seen such paycheck that he made, really. So he made really good money, but then, but also you did then, because you.

64:09 Exactly, and now the deal is over. So we've done like more than 100 plus AB tests. Yeah, and so like what exactly did he, maybe not exactly, but like, what's a strategy in general, what does a product owner do? So the product owner checks the data, and checks where can we improve it, and checks what competitors are doing, analyzing it, and make sure, like I would say like product owner is literally like the CEO but not the CEO, so he executes all these, thinking about like where should the product go and how it will be successful. So I remember that every time that we talked, each meeting was the following, that he was bringing user statistics of like, these many users are getting to the onboarding, these many people are getting to the clicking the.

65:09 Select photo, these many people are starting the process, these many people are saving it, so it was like analytics funnel. Yeah, the funnel, like 100%, like 80%, 60, and like 30% saved, so how can we fix it. And they, we were thinking about looking at the app, how can we make it easier for people, to have more people to reach to clicking select photo, maybe making the button bigger, maybe making it different color, like a conversion rate optimization, basically. Okay, so it was literally like that, and it was funny, like some of the things at the beginning.

So how our app works, you have 10 photos. What happened? I don't know, it's still going, I don't.

66:11 Huh, it just doesn't record anymore. No? Do you have space? I think so. Sorry, which, well, whatever, I'm going to just change the audio then. All right, so we were at the part, conversion rate optimization. Yes, so interesting tests were, one of the tests where our app works the following, you have 10 photos per day, if you don't subscribe, if you subscribe you have unlimited photos.

67:11 To process, and at the beginning we were showing people that, how many photos they have left, on the header, when you enter the app you have 10, and when you start processing you have nine, you have eight, and get guess what, we did a test to hide it. And it worked better, it worked way better, because people were spending it like, ah, […], now I want more, yes, because people tried it out and people liked the results, you, and as soon as we didn't show them how much they have left, they were going for it, and after 10 they were blocked with a paywall, with the screen, hey, please pay, otherwise you need to wait until tomorrow until the timer resets. So this helped a tiny bit with the retention, people stayed more, people were coming back more and used it more if they didn't know the limits. So that was the fun part, but the most valuable test.

68:14 For us was to build the onboarding, like next, next, next, and then the paywall, a screen where you can purchase up front, but you don't need to, and there's an X button to quit the onboarding, paywall, but the not everybody knows that there's an X button. So this worked the most, because then people sometimes think it's a paid app, so they will pay up front for it, sometimes people close, sometimes people like, I think we had users, users were a bit going down because of this, like not so many people engaged with the app, so you can see like a go, like a downhill in the users acquisition, because it were just like, oh no, whatever, I'm going to leave, yeah, yeah, I'm going to leave. But then you also seen like a spike in the revenue. Yeah, interesting. Interesting. So that worked for us really well.

69:14 So less usage of your computers, less usage of electricity, less usage of internet, whatever, like of the material, and at the same time more revenue. Yeah, I mean we also for a lot of trials, so usually this pay was are trial, so you can also cancel it if you want, so, but this paywall worked the best for us, so that was one of the biggest point which we, which was successful.

Super cool, okay. But we also had like many more AB tests, we also put like reviews there at the beginning, to show that people like it, which were real reviews from the store, we have really good product because like people are rated above 4, 4.5, so we have an average of sometimes 4 point, based on country, because each review is per country, some countries have five, some 4.7, some 4.2, of course, but usually it's above four, and sometime.

70:15 Mostly above four, five. So people really like the product, and it's fast, it's easy to use.

I think, was it the last app you built? No, sorry, was it the last app you have built? No, so we have two successful apps, I mean, of course this photo enhancer restore is a duo twin, I'm calling them one because from the same code base, but the next one was Avatar, which is generating AI avatars for you, like you upload a photo and you get like prince or Tinder profile picture or whatever you want to be generated, like anything, like we have like thousands of styles in the app. And that project was because, I don't know if you remember Lensa, the, in like two years ago, in.

71:18 August, they, there was a mania, like a whole boom of AI. Okay, yeah, so two years ago there was like a boom of AI generated photos. So you, there was this Lensa, that was the biggest player, and you could upload your some of your photos, 10, 15 photos of yourself, and then wait 10, 15 minutes, and then you get back like 50 photos generated by AI. And it was like, who, look at me, LinkedIn profile pictures, and what, yeah, like princess, like fairy tale photos, like fantasy photos, and Batman, Superman, whatever you wanted. And people were crazy about it, because it was about them, like they wanted to share, like people like love themselves, so people immediately started sharing it. And I remember, at that point, I have.

72:19 Experimented with stable diffusion, and I knew about it, and I told to the others, like, I can do this, I know how to do this, but I was busy with some other project. And few months passed, like August, September, October, November, and more and more people started sharing it, like more and more of my close friends just shared it organically, like, here's my photos, I did it with Lensa, check it out, like, I can do it, I can do it. And like December came, and some of my really close friends shared it, and like, […] it, I'm going to do it. So I threw away projects that I had, and I remember, December, like one and a half years ago, I started prototyping this new app called Avatar, and it was ready in like a month. So the prototype was out, and it could get 10 photos from you, and wait like 10, 15 minutes, and then it spitted out like 50 photos of yourself. It.

73:20 Was good, but we've seen the retention was not good enough. So in a few months later, I looked at Reddit, and I looked at technologies, and I figured out that there's a faster way to avatars, by keeping the face and keeping the depth of the image, and just regenerating the rest of the image based on the depth, and it took 10 seconds instead of 10 minutes. And as soon as we released this new technology, everything changed, because like the US users was 3x, like the installs went from 200, 300 to 7, 800 per day.

And yeah, and did the competition did the same? No, not yet, like I think one or two competitions were out with this technology, but we were one of the first ones to implement it, because usually competitions like depends on who's running it, because if they are.

74:20 Developers with a lot of time without management, then they can move fast. If there's a corporate behind it with a lot of people, they are busy with the previous technology still, so they not don't have time to look at the newest Reddit trend.

So pro tip, if you want to do something big, just look at what new technologies is coming out, like I can give you a hint now, the biggest trend is video AI, like it's booming. Yeah, like actually we are planning to develop an app right now, so if you want to be competitor, if you want to do, just go to Reddit and check out what's trending, what's new technology there's out there. Yeah, this video AI is on the top right now, in a month it might be something else. So that's interesting, I'm going to be in a month sitting there and be like, oh, oh, Joel told me about this one, that's probably his, and there are other, there are.

75:20 Players already in the market, but I think there's still space, because it's just such a new niche, like this, Luma, I think came out, it's a closed source project but you can use it, and yeah, it's just epic what it does. I mean, there's no open source project that does such a beautiful video as them, so it's going to be something worse in result terms, but the keywords are booming because everybody is searching for video AI as they've seen the results now with the new techn, so because of that people are organically naturally searching for it, thus if you create a video AI anything, that will be also booming because people will just flood it, they just going to come.

I can imagine. Yeah, because of the natural search thing, like how it goes. So yeah, just keep an eye on Reddit, see what's going, what's trending, what type of new.

76:20 Technology they came up with, what people are talking about, and you can just find something new. And yeah, get it going.

Super cool, super cool, that's such a cool insight on this whole topic, because I don't know any app developers at all, and it's such a completely different branch of things to do.

Yeah, have you got time left? Yeah, I think there's a fan going in the toilet, one sec, let me just turn it off. Thanks, way better. That's true, more quiet here. All right, let me just plug it in again. Okay, so yeah, I have still like 10, 15 minutes, can finish up the story, so after this product owner left us, now everything is back to us, so 100%, no more.

77:20 Commission to pay. And you've learned from it as well? We learned a lot, and we took it to the next level as well, with, he also helped us with Avatar, so he was here with us to this project as well, so now he has ownership on in Avatar, that's not time limited, so he's also an owner in this. So he worked on it for more than a year, one and a half years, and yeah he's also making a good buck out of it.

I can imagine. Yeah, one3, so yeah now we had a certain point, yeah, I want to talk about paid marketing, because we did that as well, but for apps it's not so easy, because apps are cheap, and the lifetime value of a user, it's not so big. What's like the typical churn, like of, after what month do users cancel subscription? Okay, the statistics, your.

78:21 Your wife, your wife understood? Yes, yes, my partner, she's doing it. So, but it was like I'm talking about it while I was hearing the story, I mean if there's more insights needed, she will tell, she could tell more things, but I've seen the meetings.

And what was the conclusion about it, like if you invest, like I don't know, 30, 40K every month, even then it only works if you invest this much money, and even then you get the money back in one year, and only like 20% profit. So, okay, at a certain point we calculated that if you invest in S&P 500 then you don't have so much headache, and if you go bigger than 1 million, then Google and Apple will charge you 30% service fee. Really? So they up the fee the more you actually invest. Yeah, so if you make more than 1.

79:24 Million revenue, you, in Google or Apple, they both have this policy that above 1 million it's 30% service fee. So what? Yeah, it's, we started pushing the gas, we almost invested everything we made, but yeah, certain point we realize if we keep pushing the gas then the revenue won't make any more sense, because 15% is still kind of worth it, but when it goes up to 30% you would rather just invest in S&P 500 and just don't care about paid marketing. So we tried paid marketing for many months, and we spent quite some money, and a certain point when we realized where we're going, we just cancelled everything. And now, I think like one months ago, we soft exited the business, that means that we stopped further development, we.

80:24 Stopped paid marketing, we just maintain it, we fix some bugs and we respond to users, so it really needs like eight hour work for one person per week.

That's super cool, so you are like, you're done with it, kind of, so right? It has been two and a half years of hard work on it. Yeah, so now I'm also taking a bit of, I'm distancing myself as much as I can, because I still have 23 computers to feed. Yeah, that's good distancing. Yeah, I cannot fully distance myself, because the system is relying still on me, and our programmer as well, we have also virtual assistant replying to emails, so it's still an active system, so we couldn't fully distance ourselves, but we reduce the work that it needs like minimally. So now we have time.

81:26 For new projects, and this is where it comes to in, where I'm going back to the prototyping self of mine, so I'm back to dreaming, per se, it sounds a bit in all directions. Yeah, yeah, because you've probably kind of lost it a bit, or like pushed it away during the building app things. Yeah, I had a lot of ideas while I was building these apps, and I didn't let for them, so I'm now going back, and with a more knowledgeable mindset I'm re-evaluating. And it's funny, because I have a list of ideas, but some of them are like, I have like a notion idea, I have a book as well, which, what I wanted to make once, one day, but now, after I've done this journey of two and a half years business, most of them don't make that much sense business wise, and most of them, like I evaluated again, and I gave them like, don't do it, like, just.

82:27 Do it if you want to have fun, but you're not going to make money out of this. So now I'm more, I'm harder to dismiss ideas, because I've seen how things work, and what takes to build something, and how to succeed and how to fail. I have a cemetery of projects behind, meem project, I think if I can count at this point I have like more than 50 projects that I started, prototypes or mini projects or whatever you call that, I made it, it works, it does something, but it just didn't make it until production or profitability, sometimes it made profit but not enough, so they are kind of in the cemetery of projects.

Okay, interesting, why did you decide to exit, with your partner, this whole business softly, at least, because 2 and a half years was a lot? And I'll be honest, enhancing photos was never my dream, so it was just a lucky coincidence that we.

83:30 Were at the right place at the right time. And how do I say, so there are more cooler projects and more interesting projects to work on than enhancing photos. I mean, I'm not saving the world with a black and white photo to colorful, you know, like what change I'm making. And I had bigger dreams, to, I don't know, save the planet from garbage, like, or help people to, I don't know, to motivate other people to help the needy, to volunteer, to make a platform for volunteers, or composting or recycling or green. Like this is why, like there was a double push, like my partner wants to go in a sustainability business because her dream is to make something meaningful, is to do something for the planet, and now she's actually actively studying physics, biology, everything.

84:31 Else that needs for sustainability. So now hopefully she's going to enter a business in sustainability. And for myself, I have plenty of dream projects, and I'm working on one right now, which is, I'm a dancer, so I'm working on a dancing event where you can find all the dancers and dance classes in a single place. What's the name of it, you have a name already? Dy. app, it's already available, but we didn't release it for production, so we didn't spread the word yet, but the prototype, the MVP, is there, it needs some fine tuning, and it's going to be going out. I'm doing it with a partner, so pro tip, pro tip, pro tip, get yourself a co-founder, because that's how I succeeded, so I'm not doing any more projects alone, because I know where it's going to end up, right there, behind, in the cemetery next to the others. So if, a good co-founder, because I heard horror stories about it, when, just make a test, make sure that you your values are matching when.

85:33 Do you want to exit, or not exit, how much time can you put each in the business realistically? Yeah, so I have two stories with two good co-founders that I worked with, I have stories with co-founders, not necessarily bad, but they were not committed enough to follow up after steps from me. So I developed something, and it was their side to bring me back client feedback, and it was just like, I'm too busy, M2, like at M2, M2, M2, and it just didn't follow up. So it's really hard for to commit for and get commitment from people, so it is hard to get a co-founder.

But I can recommend, like, Y Combinator co-founder matching, it's a platform, Y Combinator, biggest business incubator, Airbnb came out of there, and they have a platform to match you with co-founders, and we tried it.

86:33 Out, we had a few calls, we didn't follow up because we didn't find the fit, but it was cool to catch up and see that this exists, and we could have been also co-founders if it would have been the right match. So it works, we really had calls, and we almost went with somebody from there, but at the end we found this Ukrainian guy who was helping us a lot.

So co-founder, co-founder, co-founder, you don't need to do everything alone, and you shouldn't. And you are not even, like, just be honest with yourself, are you good in marketing, are you good in sales, are you good in product, are you good at looking at competition, are you good at analyzing the user data. If the answer is no, if it bores you, and if you're a developer, just forget about it, just partner up with somebody that's going to help you, because it did help me a lot, and I didn't know, like, if I can go back in time I would have searched for a co-founder way earlier than I did.

87:36 Because at the beginning I was naive to think that I can do everything by myself, and I've watched the social media movie with Mark Zuckerberg, coding Facebook in one night with some beers, he was passing out at the end by tiredness and alcohol, and he was waking up in the morning and hundreds of people are using his platform. That's not how it works, I believe, that's how I thought it works, that's how I always imagined, like I'm going to write something so epic, then I'm just going to pass out by the alcohol, and then in the next day everything just blows up. I mean, it kind of happened with the enhancer, because it blew up, but it's hard to repeat. And yeah, Mark was, Mark Zuckerberg was lucky, because he, one of a kind, but it's like a shooting star, it's not going to happen. Like there's so many stars, that those are your ideas, and the one shooting star that's coming, if it's like you look up the side, is there shooting star, no, like it's really rare to find one.

88:37 Of these, and to be there to look at the shooting star, like, and then actually execute and do something with the shooting star. Yeah, yeah, because you might be able to like have a beautiful idea, but ideas are 1%, execution is 99%.

It's so funny, because I went tox Meo, and there was this guy, I have a good idea, and like, tell me more. No, you need to sign an NDA first. Oh wow, and like, go […] yourself, come on. And like I told him, like, no, I told him this is silly, and then a few months later he was like, I talked with a few people and you're right, yeah, this is silly, I'm going, but you still want to co-found this, come on dude, like you kind of, no, if we start the relationship like that, the red flags are there, it's going to be, there's no trust at all. Yeah, yeah, so yeah, 1% idea, 99% execution. Yeah, I mean, people have ideas, every person have an idea, but then, yeah, nobody.

89:39 Wants to execute, and execution is hard, because you're going to fail, and you're going to fail multiple times until you get to the one, and you need to be ready, you need to already know how to be. If I would have been finding out about this AI High enhancer, and I don't know how to apps, okay, I could take half year, and then after half year the market is already crowded, so I might not have that much of a success how I got now.

Like, agree, so your wife wants to go more into sustainability, what about you? I want to have fun, no […] this reliable sustainable […]. No, no, but I don't want to help people, I want to help myself. No, it's actually, like, if she finds something, she didn't find anything yet, that's working, and then it's something stable and something that's certain, if she finds something I will jump in to help her with my skills as.

90:41 Well if, like my big goal is to be an investor, so that's my long-term goal, like in a few years from now I want to have multiple projects, and I want to have system everywhere, and I want to also be the one that funds it and have tell the direction where to go, so, in apps, not necessarily just in apps, it could be also web, it could also be like physical product. Hell yeah, like if somebody got through the boat, maybe again, come on, maybe. But the only thing is that, if I start something, I'm not starting myself without a co-founder, and if I fund something, I want to make sure that the person is not having his first project, because if it's first project it's highly likely it's going to fail. And even now, I've in Nomad Fest I've seen people showing their prototypes, it's nice that they're doing it, and I'm pretty sure that they're.

91:42 Going to need to change it, because it's the way of learning, you need to try, try and try, and learn from it, and then your assumptions are getting clearer, and the next time you assume something it's based on your failures, so you need to build up those failures in order to reach to the success, or partner up with somebody really knowledgeable and listen to them. But then it also depends on you how much you can pivot your thoughts and to give in to somebody more knowledgeable, because sometimes you have like, yeah, this is going to work because I believe in this and that. So it really depends if, how, what type of person you are, cuz, yeah, I think partnering up with somebody knowledgeable makes sense, but then it's hard to find somebody knowledgeable that's going to partner up with you if you're a beginner. So it's a, yeah, but also makes.

92:42 Sense, because like people that start their own first project, they maybe are dedicated and motivated, but they just don't have eaten enough […] yet, I believe, right? I cannot say that because I have myself, but I believe that, you know, like they're going to fall. Yeah, they're going to, so it's a way of business, you will need to get used to fail, and if you get used to failure, and if you don't take it personally, then you're good to go. Like the only, there's only, how is it, you cannot fail if you don't quit, so if you keep on doing then, yeah, is going to succeed, just keep on doing it. And it's, I mean it's the same thing, like if you want a girlfriend by sitting home, you're not going to get a girlfriend, you need to go out, you need to meet, execute, this is the same with projects, same like projects, same as girlfriend, it's not going to be like.

93:43 Projects are not going to come in your way if you not start to execute, not start to put some […] out there, whatever it's ready or not, you need to start putting things out, starting things, validating your ideas and executing and put products out. So it's really important, and people should start doing it more and complain less.

But yeah, I think there's a lot of space to for apps, websites, so there's a lot of chances, it's still not too late, AI is still at the beginning, whatever is going to happen, we are still in the early stage, nothing is too late. Big players are taking the big fishes, but there's still a lot of small fishes that don't even know about AI, so whatever you do with GPT, Stable Diffusion, there's still place in the market, you just need to be creative.

I love that you try and try to inspire, that's amazing, you are very inspiring. Thank you so much.

94:44 Thank you, thank you, appreciate it. That's very, very cool, very, very, very cool, and it's an amazing story to tell. Really, it is. Thank you, cheers.