My Mac History

January 25, 2024
by Marc
Apple / Musings
Photo of an original Mac running Through The Looking Glass

Everybody posting their 40th Anniversary of the Mac stories obviously prompted me to write this, which is a roundabout Mac journey. In hindsight the Mac clearly had its effect on me even when I wasn’t using it…

I grew up in Kingston, South West London. Very popular at the time for its affordable/renovatable semi-detached Victorian houses which are now largely unaffordable to normal people. I didn’t know it at the time but I saw what I presume was one of the first ever Macs in the UK, in our house.

Read More

We tried using video ads for Indie App user acquisition. Are TikTok ads a scam?

July 1, 2023
by Marc
Business / Making of Captionista
Composite of three iPhones 14 Pro showing screenshots of the app Captionista and its Freestyle feature

Back in late August 2022 we launched version 1.0 of our social video subtitling app Captionista into a crowded segment dominated by huge players including CapCut which is owned by the company behind TikTok. This makes App Store Search ads way too expensive for the keywords we need.

As we were just this week posting videos as part of the marketing, we tried paid video ads to see if that might move the needle. We’ve experimented a little before, but this time we spent more over a shorter period.

TL:DR; Sad trombone sound with a spicy twist.

Read More