All posts filed under: Business

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 […]

Google’s industrial espionage potential

August 12, 2015
by Marc
Business / Musings

We all know that Google “reads” all gmail. Let’s assume for now that all commercial Google Apps content is secure and not viewed by Google. What may not have occurred to you is that, like Slice Intelligence who have recently been in the news for extrapolating Apple Watch sales data from willing users’ email accounts — this means they can tell what you are buying, and this is incredibly valuable information.

Trying out indie dev on my pygmy pony

August 10, 2014
by Marc
Apple / Business / Development / iOS

There’s a lot said about the troubles of being an indie iOS developer, with a recurrence doing the rounds at the moment. It’s fair to say that many consider it an ill-advised move, at least the ones who have not tried it or have tried and failed to make enough money. I remain convinced that to some degree the indies out there who have found profitable niches are not too eager to share this information, […]