I worked on the first Swift app at Google. I said I'll take the offer as long as you let me do Swift. The director that was interviewing me said, I don't know what that is but okay, I come to Google and I'm fumbling to get it set up. So I sent an email out to the iOS dev group in Google. I said, hey you know I'm new.
I'm just gonna build podcasts. Podcasts are going to interview entrepreneurs, engineers, product managers, whoever builds great products about how they build this. Yeah, it's like how I build this light with the less famous people. That's what we are. I'm your host, Ilya Bisilov.
And I'm Arnaud Dekka. Arnaud Baniak, co-founders of metacast. Metacast is a new podcast app. It is a powerful tool that helps get the most out of podcasts because we have transcripts that you can bookmark, you can read them, you can scheme.
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The guest of today's episode is Henry Kirk. Henry is a former engineer and manager at Google and Amazon. He is a founder of a studio in need, software development company.
On this episode, we talked about Google's layoffs and how they became a blessing in disguise for Henry to start doing his own thing when he was laid off in January 2023. We talked about viral leaked in posts that brought him business. I found that part to be pretty insightful.
We talked about development of mobile apps with cross-platform frameworks like Flutter and React Native versus using native languages like Swift and Kotlin and the infamous 30% Apple tags in app purchases made on iOS devices.
Henry has a contrarian opinion on. I really enjoyed that part too. And finally, we talked about the devaluation of software, which is again caused primarily by Apple by encouraging developers to set a 99 cent price on their software.
Enjoy the episode. If you like it, please leave us a review. Ray does five stars. Or send us a note at hello at buildersgoingnebuild.com. Without further ado, here is Henry Kirk. Henry, it's great to have you here. Welcome to the show. So to get started, can you tell us a bit about yourself and what you have to do these days?
Sure. Well, thank you very much for having me. To be honest, this is actually my first podcast, which is cool. I've done my own, but it's actually pretty exciting to be on someone else's. So thank you for deciding to have me on here.
Hopefully it'll be valuable for your viewers. So who am I? I'm Henry Kirk. I am one of the partners at a company called StudioNet. Why is that important? Well, StudioNet was started after Google had laid off my team back in January 2023.
So I had to been in Google for about eight years. Amazon Prider, that bunch of startups prider that. So when we got the layoff notice, they basically cut my whole work minus a couple of people.
So, you know, I's bummed out for a little bit, but I had immediately started to connect with my other colleagues. And a bunch of us like didn't really want to go back to the corporate world.
We like to work with each other. So we basically like decided to put together a little company, couldn't think of a good startup to work on. That was the original idea. So we said, Hey, a lot of the work we did inside of Google was special projects and like very zero to one work.
So we said, Hey, let's put together a digital product studio. So a couple weeks later, we figured it out called it StudioNet. And here we are well over a year later, and we're still hanging in there. So things are looking good.
Yeah, cool. So since you started with the layoffs, I remember one of your posts on LinkedIn went really viral. How many of you did that post get that like I think it's over a million right?
So it's gonna be honest. I've actually went viral twice. So the first time I went viral on LinkedIn was anything was like February six or something like that. It was a few weeks after the layoffs were January 20.
So a few weeks later, when we decided to do the studio, I had said, Well, Hey, let's like MVP this with the LinkedIn post and see if anyone will be willing to hire us. I actually wrote about it recently. And I just put together, you know, Hey, this is what we're doing is anyone willing to introduce us. And that one viral. That was like 2.6 million views.
I think it like 10,000 comments, 10,000 likes and like almost a thousand comments. It was pretty crazy. And then getting like months worth of meetings out of it and met a lot of really cool people. And that seated the business for the first several months, which was great.
Then on the anniversary of the layoff, I made another post and it was kind of like my whole personal goal when I got laid off was not to see this is a bad thing right because most people like I get laid off I'm not good enough. I've peaked never be able to do it. I was like, you know what? I'm going to turn this into a good thing. And so I've been preaching that since I got laid off that I will make sure that whatever happens to me next like it's going to be the greatest thing ever. And this was a good thing.
What I did was is I kind of reframed and rewrote the layoff email that I got instead of making up for some random HR person. I wrote an email that soon are to me telling me that it was time for me to move on that I've outgrown Google.
And I was ready to go out my own and they were going to give me a severance to see the next thing I was doing. I wrote it really just to reframe again that like you can turn these negative things into a positive one.
Insanely viral that was like 5.8 million views that was like 50 something thousand likes at least a thousand comments on there.
And they're getting some business out of it believe it or not. And it was just so wild like and you know what's funny is that people are saying it was like a master class in like empathy and how you know leadership and stuff like I didn't intended to be that but like all right cool I'll take it for that.
The point is that it's been unfortunate that so many people are laid off big tech or just tech in general is going through this like very strange recession in our own sense right usually technology is like always growing.
So getting laid off you know I just wanted to tell people that like it's not a bad thing you can turn this around it could be a good thing.
And so I wrote it and it's one crazy viral so oddly enough it's really help the studio get brand recognition so to speak because we ended up getting some work out of this most recent post which is interesting it just goes to show that there's really no secret into going viral like doing these like social media right it's what I've learned is that as long as you deliver valuable content it doesn't really matter what engagement you get at the end of the day you're going to get attention out of it that's what you're really trying to do so like I don't try to game anything.
I just write whatever I think would be valuable and so I was just sharing that it went pretty crazy so yeah it's wild.
Yeah it's kind of interesting that the posts that went viral for me I didn't have that level of your success I think my most viral post was just over a million or just under a million but it was about bashing Google's culture.
I think it was more about like how I left and why.
And I was talking about comparing Google and Amazon like different cultures that went pretty wide to there was another one that went more viral after that one but yeah basically it's like what I realized and people were writing to me in DMs and also in comments is that there are many people in those companies I don't know if it's most but certainly big percentage who actually wish to leave but could never some on the courage or the helicopter handcaps or obligations and just stay there and then they see this as an inspiration that some people are going to be able to see.
I think it's a very important inspiration that somebody else has left or somebody got laid off but they didn't take it as like oh my God sky is falling small like oh my God I'm free now so and they also gave me money to start the next thing and that really inspires people because I think about those posts right it's not like people get some knowledge out of it I think it's all emotional that they get from those most viral posts from regular folks like us not to very levels the liberties right.
We've never had these kind of layoffs before right so nobody really knows how to react to them some people just go and try to get other jobs and you know it's sad that they'd struggles like I've always been entrepreneurial like the reason I joined Amazon and Google is because most of my startups that I had failed and I wanted to learn what I was doing wrong oddly enough it was me but you know I've kind of improved over the years so now I'm ready to put all of the skills that I've learned in big tech to work hopefully I'll be much more successful I was earlier in my career so it's like we're just normal.
So it's like we're just normal people and so when we hit these things and we share our experiences and be like hey like it's really not so bad and it's okay to take risks there's nothing wrong with it yeah it's great I talked to a bunch of people now that would love to leave big tech but the like but the salary is too great for me to leave and like okay think about it what five or 10 years are going to be more on this company like you can regret it.
I'm curious about both of you what do you think about why these layoffs are happening and I feel like we're not even peaking there I feel like the last few years there's been a few huge shifts in the industry there's the whole LLM and AI related stuff Twitter I think some of that also led to this but I feel like a lot of companies are basically taking a look like if we cut 5% off is there any difference to what revenue we're making or the future of the company and there isn't and it keeps going on.
And it keeps going on and on and I think we're going to see a substantial shift in this so it's not the AI coming and taking all our jobs all at once is not going to happen all at once but it's I think over a 10 year period companies of these Google and Amazon size might be half what they had and still basically keep doing what they're doing.
I think that there's a whole lot of reasons why this has been happening so it's everything from leaders trying to create shareholder value it's the whole especially in big tech getting promoted as a leader the only way you can do that at least that the common like assumption is is that you do this by building empires below you and the more people you have the more important you must be rather than actually like what are you delivering and what's valuable.
There's so many things wrong with why this happened I'll go into a couple things that I think are interesting so I've always been the big believer that small teams can execute better and so building an empire you'll never get stuff done there's just too many cooks in the kitchen so to speak.
So what I tend to think is like you want to have small nimble teams but how do you become a big director senior director of EP of a company need to have tons of people underneath you.
So they created this weird incentive system so instead of it being actually based off of like what are you producing what value you're creating it's like oh look they have like a thousand people with promote them there's a couple huge shifts that I think I saw so first off a lot must taking over Twitter and going for what 7000 people to like a thousand people and everybody said Twitter is going to fall apart it didn't really break and fall apart they stumbled a little bit they got it together just goes a show that like what were those other people really doing did they really need them no okay.
Some can argue that there's holes in their operation probably but you know they didn't need all those people technically I think there have been problems but it's not like the whole thing fell apart yeah yeah exactly it's still there you can go to twitter dot com or x dot com and it still works I think that started to change some folks perception now why did Google a people off the first thing I'll say is that apple is not laid anyway off now why is that because apple did not go on a hiring spree over the last few years like Tim Cook is a fantastic artist.
The fantastic operator the core employees if you're an employee at apple nobody scared that they're going to get laid off all my friends there like yeah it's great we were just operating the same I don't know why companies would go on a hiring spree during the last few years I just think that's strange like some say that they were going crazy hiring because they were trying to take talent assuming that this growth
would continue to happen but I didn't even think it would last long eventually it made no sense so I'm not really sure why that happened why did Google have all the layoffs because they over hired and then what happened is they couldn't find enough people that were like really great at what they did so they reduced the hiring bar in my opinion and then you ended up with a whole bunch of people that technically would have never passed the Google interview a few years prior I know this I was a manager I interviewed hundreds of people for my team of roughly 30 and I've done external interviews and internal interviews I saw
it's unfortunate the culture changed along the way they had to let people go write that ship however I think they did it the wrong way because they let a lot of really good people go we saw this in a lot of other companies as well they just over hired executives were not thinking right I have a lot of opinions on this but I think that running a company is hard right and like the leader is accountable at the end of the day and so they made poor decisions and it impacted people's lives and so at the end of the day those leaders should be held the kids
accountable and they're not that's a big problem what are they carrying all these people off but they increase the shareholders profits of course yeah so they're going to get rewards for that yeah yeah they're going to get rewards and it's kind of crazy because look at all of the one can say all this craziness with Gemini the last couple days and Google is always struggled getting products out the doer I remember a few years ago there was an internal dog food you know we'd call it like testing stuff and it was basically what was barred
or Gemini whatever it was like an internal chatbot and it something leaked where one of the product managers was saying that it was a real person and he was like he fell in love with it or something like that
there was some crazy story right they had that there and they didn't see what the value was to turn it into a product and of course opening I comes out with chat GBT and next thing you know they like
cobble together barred which I still don't understand the name then they go and replace it with Gemini not even a year later and then they have another false start with Gemini and this thing it's just like Google is clearly struggling with
execution of product and they're very good at inventing things so I know I'm going on a tangent on Google here but like the way I was
caused by poor leadership is at the end of the day it's like executives are out of touch with the real world and their incentives are aligned poorly that's really what it is
my version of the answer to this question I mean obviously I spent less time than you at Google I only spent about three years and I joined after the pandemic started so I joined in June 2020
and I joined from Amazon from AWS and I joined GCP my first perception was wow the quality bar of people seem to be lower at Google that's what I felt I felt like there was more entitlement and I generally felt like Google was very inefficient compared to Amazon
after the first few weeks I was like wow this is very different and I wonder if it's going to like survive in a long term even before they started firing people
I felt like Google is becoming the IBM of the internet age sliding into interrelevance over time yeah and then playoffs happened and all that and I just wasn't surprised because like one of the things that really puzzled me at Google is just how short term oriented leadership thinking is
and I worked in enterprise products I first worked on GCP and I worked on Google Maps API stuff people want very quick returns but quick returns don't happen in that space
it's not like B2C where you just push the thing out and it gets adopted by millions of users right away the adoption cycle can be months and quarters in even years for those big companies
and then you have to nurture them for years but instead Google they want quick returns the shift kind of half-ast products and they deprecate them because they don't work but it was also because they shipped them prematurely and because they expected quick returns
there is no that long term thinking in my opinion at least on the enterprise side at Google and that's why I always felt like it's not going to be able to compete with folks
like AWS or Microsoft on the cloud side but also I haven't really had a glimpse into the consumer side but just overall my impression of Google was like this is not the company that's going to survive the next 20 years probably at least not to be kind of the crown jewel of the internet era
yeah I think you really know that it was super fun when I joined in fact to decide whether I was going to take my offer I watched the movie The Intern if you remember and when I got there that's what it was like it was incredible to work for it was just great
and I worked my butt off because I felt grateful to have the opportunity to be in an environment like that and it really changed and it's sad but you're right we were very slow to get things out the door it was always tons of red tape everywhere
I got really good at getting through the red tape which is pretty sad so we were able to ship stuff the deprecating things when they don't hit a billion users by not investing in is a big problem one of the things when I left the first I will not build stuff on GCP
I build stuff on AWS because they don't change and deprecate things as often as Google does when I first started doing some stuff with AutoML on GCP on the side personal projects they changed it to like Vertex AI like a year later and it was just like getting the hang of things
yeah it was kind of similar but like they didn't need to go and do that it just made no sense I've seen it way too much especially with Firebase over the years you know I supported mobile apps at Google on iOS and Android and we had to work with the Firebase team a lot
and they were always changing the APIs even though they had this ridiculous council of API review where it would take you like eight weeks just to get a one line changed through where they're constantly changing things and it made maintenance really hard
so of course developers were getting frustrated with it I totally agree with you Alia it's just been broken and it's sad things have changed because it used to be the greatest it was seriously a great company I worked for yeah let's shift gears a little bit since you mentioned mobile apps
because that's your specialty I mean let's dive straight there because we are building a podcast app for both iOS and Android it's a consumer app that's built actually almost entirely using Google's products and you just mentioned Firebase so far we have not seen any breaking changes
well it's not yet I think I think last big one was dynamic links they deprecated that but the core products that we use they haven't changed for a while yeah I'm curious to hear your opinion of actually letting the next step back
because we are also using Flutter because when we started it was just the two of us Ardenab was the only one coding so we had no time and resources to building two apps in Swift and Kotlin so we just chose Flutter what is your take on using cross-platform languages for app development?
Great question so let me ask you this for an answer what's your monetization strategy for your podcasting app?
Subscriptions subscription like a monthly subscription okay yeah basically the freemium model will be free tier with limited functionality and if you want to get access to other features then you have to pay much subscription we also have ads in the free version
okay who's your target audience for this?
so we are looking at more sophisticated podcast listeners who listen to a lot of podcasts who need tools basically they need the podcast it's like a tool that helps them triage all of that sort of barrage of podcasts that be computer-released every day
so they can pick and choose what they actually want to listen and because our app has transcripts so we are building the functionality such that you can use it to extract knowledge from podcasts listen to audio but you can bookmark things in transcript you can share you can copy stuff
so you can always go back to the things that you think oh this was interesting but where was it in this 4.5 hour episode?
so we have the search we have the bookmarking we have the sharing that helps you really navigate audio non-linearly that's our sort of differentiation point yeah the niche would be like people who really need to use that information from podcasts
like researchers maybe technology learners people preparing for interviews researching about companies
history science that sort of like nerds in a good way right? like I'm a nerd myself yeah we have to think about like a top 1% of the podcast listeners who really get most of their knowledge from audio okay cool gotcha and priority guys building us
did you guys have any native app development experience or flutter or anything like that?
we didn't have any app development experience we were all back-end developers well I guess it's not a territory because you were a tech lead principal at AWS who built AWS mobile app and I was working on the mobile SDK for Google maps but like we haven't really built an app with our own hands
yeah I was more of the principal engineer in the space there was a team that was building the mobile app and I was guiding them but I didn't know any of the how it was built the app
okay what is my opinion on cross-platform? it really depends on what your use cases who your audiences and long-term maintenance like is it gonna be a successful app over time?
so I'll give you a couple examples so I'm asking a lot of these like probing questions to see where you're at if you have existing experience in the mobile space in one or the other I would say just go for that we all know that to be honest
Apple has a much better ecosystem and people are more willing to pay on Apple's ecosystem than anything else so if I were to say what's the best platform to dive into and build something quickly and get it out to do her I would always pick iOS
unless you're doing something like we're working on a project now where it's like for essentially the Google's like next billion users we called it where it's like in emerging markets where they only have access to like hundred dollar android phones
and so that's a different that would be an android first nobody has iPhones there so you don't even consider it so my opinion is that you build the platform for who your users are and what you're trying to accomplish so if you're a startup you've never done it before
I would pick one of the other let me ask you this when you're going through the flutter you're going on it and you're launching an android and you're launching for iOS you probably hit some platform level issues that you took you quite some time to figure out
I would guess right with the bridging that you have to do or they're like a couple audio broke one of the packages like it wasn't working on android but it was working fine on iOS and now we have actually the opposite problem some of the functionality in audio works on android doesn't work on iOS
right and that slows you down so let's say you don't have any users yet right and you're trying to like get something out the door having the bee experts in both platforms plus that cross platform technology can make it a big pain
especially if the bridging doesn't work or these third party libraries are not well maintained and you're putting it all together it's your job or your goal when you have this idea to get something out is to get it in the market
and then determine whether users are going to want to use it get their feedback and build upon it I always have drawn more towards just doing it on iOS and if it's successful I will then move it to android now at that point I'll decide do I want to go cross platform or not depending on the app
if it's some simple business app maybe flutter or react native or something will work really well but I would be willing to bet if you had a fairly complicated app or something cool which has like interesting layout and you want to keep it designed to the platform
you're going to struggle trying to get it right on both why spend all the extra time we've actually been thinking about it I think the opposite way is get started with cross platform and if we do see success with one or the other
basically fork it off maybe the android app might continue to be the flutter one because it's more material design and all that anyway it's all baked in whereas the iOS one we may fork off and start writing a native one in Swift at some point but that requires more developers and all that too
yeah that's true that's a good way to look at it everything takes time so there's no magic pill that you can take with any of this right so you have to think of the pros and cons what is the skill set of your existing team
I was talking with someone recently and said well I have a lot of react developers on my team so I could just throw them into the react native project maybe but then like are they going to be able to like understand how to build in Xcode
or android studio and fix all those issues that come up with just building native apps in general that's going to take them a lot of time so what is important for your long term success of app because everything has maintenance cost when people ask me like do I go native or cross platform
I would be willing to bet if you actually tracked it in two separate teams that it would take you the same amount of time at the end of the day especially when you look long term horizon if an app is successful yeah okay you can do cross platform and get both platforms out the door
maybe fairly quickly for some simple apps but then what happens if it explodes overnight what is the cost then?
here's an interesting thing that I always consider when I'm working on my apps so I worked with DevRel at Google for a bunch of years and so I would sit in on a lot of these calls with Apple and then I would take a lot of the direction of things that I learned
and we would try to put it in Google products and why would we do that?
so Apple really likes when folks integrate things that are in their platform in their apps and then they will then feature them in the store they're never going to feature an app that looks like material design they're never going to feature an app that doesn't take advantage of the platform
a lot of these cross platform things are behind the curve takes them a long time to like support things when we were doing home screen widgets a bunch of years ago it wasn't available in Flutter it couldn't be done in the apps that were built in Flutter it took them like a year to get it out
but when we did it we got promotion from Apple in the app store so if you have like an interesting app what you should really be doing is focusing on the things that make the platform awesome because then that will get you attention so that you should also factor that
just thinking like oh I need to have Android and iOS because I need to have the most users is not really the best way to look at it you should look at everything like can I get attention from Apple or Google and where are my users and who's more willing to pay for apps
I think on the Android side most people expect free apps or add supported apps right and so on iOS people are willing to pay and they're willing to pay more so if you're looking to prove a concept and you want people to pay and support a company always do that
one of my personal apps is an app for children with special needs I've had it for many many years I've supported it and people email me every now and then are you bringing it to Android and I just do some quick check to see it's like way too many tablet devices to support
and there's not enough demand on Android what do I do?
I just made a Mac desktop version of it so that way like at least people that have Macintosh desktops and not have an iPad or an iPhone or someone can use it and then I've also considered going to the web to make a cross platform but all the money is on iOS because it's much simpler to develop for
how did you determine that there wasn't enough demand in Android?
what I would do is I would look at the device sales the tablet usages, what the OS versions were on I think at the time when I was looking at the Kindle Fire was the most popular Android tablet and so that would mean that I would have to build for most of theirs
for my particular use case, yeah, for my particular niche educational usage like the Android tablets were not really selling and all like iPads were really big in education and that's what most people had so it didn't make sense for me to do that now the Microsoft Surface tablet on the other hand
is actually got really good saturation so if you're doing like a tablet app for like maybe a business application certainly you can look at that particular platform but you really got to look for what your users are doing that's really important so like I disagree when people say
I need to do a on both yeah one of the reasons why we think we need to be in Android is when iOS Apple just commands line market share in podcasts because the app comes pre-installed I mean in our opinion the UX is almost unusable if you subscribe to many podcasts but for many people it's just fine
like if you want to listen to some true crime show in sequence it just works for you if you want to do some research well good luck and they also have a bunch of other good apps like Overcast for example is for iOS only that people pay for there are a couple of others that iOS only
but then you go into Android most of the apps are actually pretty bad and then Google is deprecating Google podcasts and they are pushing people off to YouTube music which is going to be the same as sort of Spotify with bundles music and podcasts together many people don't like that experience
because they just want to have the music and podcast separate so it sounds like there is just more motion going in the Android space so there is potentially also some length of a grab there if it Google podcasts being deprecated yeah again I think it comes down to our people
willing to pay more on the Android side or not so far it has seemed like no iOS is predominantly where people pay for apps and all that and maybe you can cover the top of the ads yeah another way to look at this right is there is nothing wrong with the cross platform technologies
as a whole like it's a means to an end there is different tools for building all kinds of things but my advice would be to someone like if you really Jones and I do a Flutter app just pick one in platform get it right on there and then you can always bring it to the other
don't do both at the same time if you are doing a Flutter app and you want to do Android first focus on Android get it right launch it then learn from that and then bring it to the iOS by just doing it spending the time on both it's a huge time sync when you're a startup trying to
like figure out where you kind of fit in the world yeah I think we sort of have gone that path because third person in our company we are a three person company right now she predominantly uses Android she only uses Android only uses Android yeah so until she came to join us
we were not really focusing on deploying to Android because we are not primarily Android users anyway because the app was primarily tested and made to work well on iOS and then we started basically figuring out how do we make this yeah that's a great strategy
I would agree with that I feel like you're using the resources right and then if you're spending your time on iOS first or when you pick first and then you're bringing it over and then learning there and then also you may find out that the different platforms
will have different features that you want to add I think it's fine but I have worked on both native and crossplatin before I as an engineer prefer working native I think it's just cooler I like tinkering with all the new stuff too so that's just a personal opinion
it's like you're held to the minimum common denominator if you're in a cross platform app some of the new features that Apple is going to bring in you're not going to be able to integrate with it quickly yeah and then if there's any bugs in the platform when the new platforms come out
you got to deal with those that could be a headache at times you just have to weigh the pros and cons of what you're willing to deal with but at the end of the day you're creating a product for users as long as you continue to build for the user it doesn't matter what platform you choose
yeah let's go to the next step of the app you've built app now it's time to get it into the hands of users so let's talk about the Google and Apple publication process to Google Play and Apple App Store what does it like to actually get an app to the end users?
way back in the day app reviews to take up the two weeks which was crazy if they found a bug when they were testing it like you would have to turn it around pretty quickly and get them to review it Google was never really the same I feel like Google's release process
has been highly influenced by Apple over the years and Google still chooses to have a much more automated review process than Apple does what's the most likely to run into roadblocks along the way that's shipping on Apple but it makes complete sense to me you don't see spammy apps in the app store
you don't see a lot of these fishing apps or like apps that are going to force you to install things you don't want to do like add wear I guess or spam wear or whatever you want to call it so you don't see those in the app store really because they're looking for it
and they're making sure that the apps are basically safe for the user so you can download just about anything yes stuff does get through Apple every now and then it gets in the news and they make it like every app is like that but that's not true in Android world
there is a ridiculous amount of apps that are not what they intend to be I appreciate that Apple has the review process and does the diligence now with that is going to come a lot of problems right so if you're not following the rules or you don't read the app store review guidelines
which have kind of evolved over time you may find yourself with rejections and then have frustrating time getting things out the door I guess the biggest topic of late is in app purchase and Apple's 30% tax so to speak which I have lots of opinions on if you'd like me to share
it's actually a tax on top of the government tax too right so it's like getting double tax by private entity well Apple is the government in the app store so yeah so yeah there has been a lot of bashing of Apple by folks like Jason Frieden David Heimacher Heisenstone from 37 Signals
they have this email app and calendar app hey you just face the thing with the login screen you have to login and then you get access to the backend similarly like Slack or Netflix you can't create an account on iOS you create an account on desktop and then you can login and use it as a client
so 37 Signals for Apple rejected them and they were like this is unfair others can do that
why can't we? Apple doesn't follow their own rules it was a very interesting thing to follow almost people with this who expressed their opinion publicly they would side with the developers because like yeah 40% is unfair why they do that but I know you have a different opinion than this I do
I'll start with my opinion on the 30% thing so first off I built my entire career off of Apple so if Apple never came out with the App Store I probably wouldn't be standing here now talking with you guys about building applications that opportunity that Apple presented
by creating that developer ecosystem and the concept of the App Store has like given me a career so I have nothing bad to say about that I'm grateful that they invested the resources and made that happen because it's never been done before other folks have tried
there's been like Blackberry App Store is Microsoft App Store has never really took off Apple did it right so I'm okay paying the 30% tax or fee on it but on the Apple side if you have less than a million dollars of revenue across all of your own developer accounts it's 15% of you apply for it
so they give you at least an opportunity to grow your business and do it but once you hit a million across all your accounts you have to pay the 30% I didn't know you have to apply for it specifically isn't that automatic?
You apply for it but it's pretty easy you just have to basically assert all of the accounts that you have you apply and they get back to you in a couple days that's what I recommend everyone do you just have to go in there and list all the developer accounts
because sometimes people own multiple apps so they want to make sure that collectively you're not doing over a million dollars so the way that I look at the 30% is like okay if you've read in the news lately in the legal deposition of the App Store case in the news
there was like a mention that Apple's gross margin is like 70-something percent in the App Store now the way I look at the 30% tax is like would you be willing to take 10% profit or gross profit on your app if you are building a product?
Probably not after expenses and paying yourself and growing could you make money off of a gross margin and 10% probably not unless you're doing insane volume so from a business standpoint 30% as like a gross margin is actually pretty decent in medical and other technology and all this stuff
their margins are much higher the airline industry is like a 70% gross margin you don't see them complaining like oh they're making too much money or if there's a lot of talk with healthcare and drugs okay they make a lot of profit margin within that becomes generic over time and stuff like that
but like for Apple to take a 30% tax I'm more than happy to give it to them because they continue to invest in the ecosystem B it gives them the incentive to keep making the App Store better and building cool features and they also bring the users it doesn't matter to me where I will fault Apple
is prior to the App Store where iTunes in general having the 99 cent or $99 cent download concept used to pay a lot for music used to pay a lot for software and so they trained people that software and apps in general is only worth a buck or two and so what ended up happening
is it became much harder to earn a living later in the game as like the App Store is growing so early on when there weren't a lot of apps people would download your apps in millions you had a flashlight app you can make hundreds of thousands of dollars today, a few years in
probably couldn't make that kind of money so even with my own personal experience building some apps really early I made really good money in the beginning and then as things started to taper off and it became more saturated in the market I wasn't making as much money for that one time fee
so what did I do? I switched the subscription model and then charged an annual fee or monthly fee users got really upset because the app used to be 10 bucks or whatever it was and then I would respond to them well okay well I have to compensate my time I've got expenses for cloud computing costs
like that I can't do the low one-time fee so if I'm going to fall Apple for anything it's for creating that appearance that software should be free especially when they make macOS free and they used to be $100 then it went down to $29 for a while and then it's free
it's like they devalue what we bring to the table sometimes so that's the only part that I would fall Apple on there otherwise I'm happy to pay the 30% all day long I'm curious what you would say to this counter-argument first of all I would agree that you need to be compensated for what they do
where I find challenging is the Spotify versus Apple case where both companies offer the same product so Apple Music and Spotify and to be only Apple platform Spotify has to either take less profit home or charge users 30% more so that feels anti-competitive
I still think Spotify should pay something to Apple it can be entirely free but like 30% is very significant especially for a big player like Spotify so what do you think about that part where Apple actually offers they can offer the same product as other companies
but 30% cheaper because they don't have to pay their own tax well I mean they're still cost involved it's still a business and so they're giving away for free so they ought to have the money from somewhere to invest in these apps I mean like yeah you're paying a monthly fee for Apple Music
and that goes towards development and sure maybe they're waiting the 30% and want to be competitive but at the end of the day we've always been competing with Apple apps and yes Apple will then go in for a while when I worked at Google I always help out the Google Translate team a lot
and then Apple came out with their own Translate app now their Translate app was a lot better it had a lot more features to it it was more tightly coupled in the operating system then what Google did Google didn't invest in their app there were other third party apps
that were way better than Google Translate at the time and Apple just came in and made that experience now had other developers created an awesome experience and really paid attention to the Apple platform
would they have done it? I don't know yes there is times where Apple comes in and competes with us third party developers and then it can take away some of our market share of our apps but I think of anything that just push us to build better products we can never get lazy
when we're building software so we're always going to have competition so in my opinion it's just like you need to have that competition to improve things and get an example of like my thinking is on competition so prior to Apple Pay coming out NFC payments were a thing Google wallet was a thing
you can always pay with Android that was around forever but when Apple Pay came out and made it a thing everybody benefited from that because then all of these merchants were converting their terminals over to support NFC payments and now you can use Android or iOS and that's really because of Apple
so Apple has a lot of influence in things so if they're creating an app they're trying to find a problem with an app that they make and you build a product that provides a better user experience or more value for that user you're going to win now maybe Apple will copy it one day
okay but that's just light that's how this works you can't be sitting there not innovating and building out your product it's just how it works so I have no problem with it and I tend to think that it's not that it's unfair this is just business and you're always going to have competition
that I would love to see Apple vs. Spotify reminds me of some of the Amazon marketplace versus its merchants where Amazon opened up the platform for people to sell stuff and then, well supposedly what people say is like the monitor what merchants sell so they see what sells well on marketplace
and then they can create an Amazon-basics brand that just undercuts the price by significant percentage and also obviously they have to pay to Amazon to be on the marketplace so Amazon kind of watches what works and builds a copycat product the same thing happened on AWS too
they would do the open source thing as a service and then they just build their own I think it was Mongo that it happened to Apple Music came out after Spotify so you could also make a similar case that Apple looked hey it works pretty well for Spotify
why don't we make the same feature as Spotify has bundle it with the OS and also charge 30% less that's true but also like big companies move slower so like there's always going to be opportunity to improve things so Amazon competes with its resellers because they look at the data
and they build Amazon-basics again it's just being in business its competition it also helps drive prices down across the board for people which technically is good Costco does the same thing they'll have brand name on the shelf and then they go and do a generic now with the Kirkland Signature brand
but they're using those companies to do it because it's not Amazon actually making the product they're probably going to the person that's selling the most anyway buying 10 times the volume you know it looks like these companies are taking the little guy out and hurting their business
my dad is a sales rep in New York City in the photo industry and he's been hurt by Amazon but he's also been helped by Amazon but what he's learned is that he has to pay very close attention to how he does business on Amazon because he's done like you have to be competitive in this environment
and there are certain ways to do things just post a product and just assume that it's going to last years and years and years of profits coming in eventually somebody is going to go and create a better product now same thing with software, physical products
anything it is as long as you're continuing the deliver value and deliver really good products you will continue to sell stuff and you won't have to worry about competition that's the thing look at like Chick-fil-A in all of these other restaurants the average Chick-fil-A
understand correctly does about $8 million other fast food restaurants do not do that does Chick-fil-A have a humongous menu no it's very tight that they make the best chicken sandwich maybe someone can argue the Popeyes or someone else they better right but they make a darn good
chicken sandwich and they do it really well and they are out selling many other fast food restaurants that's how it is you don't see them going so we got to go and add crazy burgers and all kinds of stuff they don't need to build a big mac so to speak they just keep doing what they're doing
and people continue to return I wanted to explore this one more topic we had in here and you mentioned enterprises move slower can you tell us a little bit about you built lots of apps inside Google how does that process go how do you figure this out how do release management and all that
yeah I feel like I was an anomaly inside of Google I was known for getting stuff done that's what I really like doing again like I was very entrepreneurial coming in and another thing is I'm a little more extroverted as an engineer so I'm okay interacting with people I also have sales background
I'm okay with engaging people and understand relationships and building relationships to like get what you want out of stuff and I also when I first joined Google I'm sorry to go on a little tangent here but like this is important for like how to get things done in these big companies
so when I first joined Google they had this like concept of like Google universities so to speak and I took all of the courses over the like first year or two one of them was negotiating class I took his class and person that was important but he was amazing yeah okay yeah he used to come to Google
and then they killed the contract but like he used to come so I took his class and I learned how to really negotiate at Google and I then applied it to everything I did so I used his method and some other methods that I learned over time to get the products that I was working on out the door
so typically what would happen is you go and work through all this product and you get tons of red tape at these big companies it could be like I want to see the data to prove that this is valuable to users and like well we don't have any it's a branding feature or something like that
they want to just go and say okay let's go take a risk and see if users like it this has been on the list of things to do or this is something Apple asked for or this is really good for the Android ecosystem or Google whatever it was
you'd always hit red tape even if it was the greatest idea in the world and so my job basically up until the time when I got laid off was cutting through the red tape and that's what I got really good at I was really not engineering that much on my team I was coming up with product ideas
getting the team to execute on them motivating the team and then getting it out the door I'd like basically five teams five small teams that were working across different disciplines what I would just basically do is anytime they would hit a blocker maybe some TL was taking too long
on a code review or something like that I would step in and help them get over the hurdle or whatever it was because that happened all the time they were like why are you doing this or this is this way or this is that way and then I would add understanding what that other person's position is
and so in the big companies especially Google it's risk will this look bad on me if this goes bad and so they were very very hesitant to take any risk whatsoever executives up and down the line and then it was also a maintenance thing they didn't want to have to be responsible for more work
because everyone felt like they had too much on their play as it was there was one time you were trying to get a feature out and they said well this feature will only benefit 0.01% of Gmail users and they're like okay cool but that's still a lot
it's like yeah but it's not enough that it's going to be worth my effort in this thing I'm like well someone down the chain has approved it and we're going to do it you have to work that out so it is very hard to ship at these companies it was much easier to ship at Amazon
actually in my eight years at Google and two years at Amazon I think I shipped almost the same amount of products it was much easier to do things there I don't know how other companies are but at Google it was incredible but I did get really good at being willing to like go to that stakeholder
that could have been all the way to a VP and say this is why I think we should do this here's one of the craziest things that we have to do so my team built the first YouTube Music watch app we wanted to bring watch apps across Google because we wanted to build out the ecosystem
and obviously watches were being used everywhere Apple watches were everywhere so we were like hey let's start building apps at the time we had really poorly executed on them YouTube Music was willing to work with us but we also wanted to build it and Swift UI because previously building watches
was pretty crummy so I had like these like storyboards and stuff like that it was not a lot of fun so we're like we can do a complete custom watch app in Swift UI so we got the team on board but then the folks at YouTube caught wind that we were doing Swift UI and it was a banned language
Swift even was a banned language within YouTube so we engineered the app designed it and engineered it and had it complete in between six to eight weeks it took us six weeks to get the VP of YouTube to agree to let us use Swift or Swift UI in this watch app that we were building for YouTube
completely isolated there was no risk involved at all we said that we would maintain it we had to make a presentation and go through the pros and cons and why we chose this technology and all this stuff was crazy it was a complete waste of time there were five people working on this
and then we finally got it over the top but it was just absolutely crazy that we had to go through this a long time back I remember Google had three or four languages and those were the only things you could ever develop anything in I worked on the first Swift app at Google I'll tell you this
when I first joined Google I was hired to work on the Google Me app that was what they wanted me to work on so I said I'll take the offer as long as you let me do Swift the director that was interviewing me at the time said I don't know what that is but okay whatever you want to do
I was like I was just a project and I'm like using this thing called blazer, basil or whatever oh we were using something else I forgot what it was but I was like fumbling the get it setup because it turns out Swift wasn't really supported with in Google infrastructure
so I sent an email out to like the iOS dev group in Google I said hey you know I'm new I'm doing a Swift app and I don't have any pointers because I can't get this thing to work and immediately I'm bombarded oh we're not allowed to do Swift here another guy had a bunch of other meetings
with high level folks there and they were like Henry you know just can't do that no I said okay great thanks I'm doing it anyway so I figured it out and it turns out that would end it up being the first Swift app at Google we got out the door six months later like the frag that I left the project
and then went to do something else but then they did take that code base and they shipped eventually shipped it out the door which was cool and then that was like a catalyst for bringing Swift across Google the infrastructure got better but was I like a pioneer no but I just
went in there thinking like this is absolutely crazy Swift was becoming a thing and like how do you recruit really good engineers if you're not going to support the latest and greatest I was really really silly decision and the fact that people jumped on me was nuts yeah and this also is
true when Google a lot of naming specific product but when they shipped an SDK for mobile and the fourth iOS developers in the non-Swift I don't even remember what the language was and yeah devrel has been talking for months and years like well everybody is moving to Swift so I can no no no
they have to use this language or we don't have resources or whatever that was so sad part of Google's DNA is to force its own ways of doing things onto the developers who develop on the platform because it's the best way to do it yeah because there's only one way to do it
seriously don't get me wrong I learned a ton at Google but what I also learned was that if I kept at it at least in big tech following using all their tools and infrastructure and just getting in line and just doing my thing I would be a dinosaur so I would work on my own projects on the weekends
just to keep myself relevant so it was very important that's true at Amazon to be struggled for years trying to get Ruby and Ruby on Rails to be used that Amazon this is like five years after Ruby is everywhere eventually we got it all working and then it thrived right
and then the whole company shifted in turn all apps for everything as the default big companies tend to stay behind my first job was at a bank and there was like we were struggling to adopt Java 15 years after Java is everywhere so it's all the cost and benefit from the company's perspective
at the highest levels so can you call it in Kabul?
is this what you're saying?
no at the end of the day it's hard being a technical leader for a bunch of years and you have to make the right decision but at the same time you're going to have to attract talent so you have to find ways to do things more modern otherwise you're going to never attract the talent
that's really what it boils down to and like you said as a developer it's very important when you're inside these big companies to keep up with what's happening outside in the world and basically hone your craft and all that on the side absolutely yeah it's very important
yeah cool so what I'd really talk about your company so studio in it or other people is it right?
absolutely yep so what studio in it does is basically we bring all of our collective experience have five partners and we each have a different area of expertise and so what we do is we've been partnering a lot with either non-technical founders or just like technical founders
that need some of our expertise to like get their either MVP or get their first version out the door or come in and use something like a mobile app or whatever it might be speciality we've partnered with a lot of different startups at different stages and it's been a lot of fun
why do we gravitate more towards startups or just any businesses that have a new need it's because we've always been very zero to one focused it's like three to six month projects because that's all you really need to get something off the ground and out the door and we're very good at that
and I think I've taken a lot of my ability to just cut through the baloney and get like a really tight scope that would delight users and get it out the door so we've been helping a lot of folks with that we're not like an agency we just give us a list of requirements and we build it
and then we give it back to you we're not like an offshoring or a near-shore company we just bunch of ex-googlers that love doing this work so we like to do that whole zero to one exercise as part of building the app do you also train the startup or the companies their employees
to like basically take it on afterwards so we have to because when we're done they're going to have ideally no one so we'll have these arrangements we'll continue to do maintenance in five to ten years it's not realistic so we'll help them transition I've done it before
I've built plenty of teams in the past where I can help them find their first hire and then build the company out make sure that you're finding that technical co-founder or whoever you want to work with it's got the right skills that you need to build out for your company
because it's like your first couple of hires are very important yeah we definitely help folks out with that it's very cool we do end the end door and we're looking to add marketing in the near future there's like a whole end-to-end need that I think we like to address in the market
so I'm curious when you first got started so you go let go from Google and you couple of weeks you start the company how do you get the first customers?
I was fortunate enough that when my post went viral I got a bunch of leads out of that but I think if you just take out let's say luck that I had with going viral is that you really as a founder whether you're technical or not you get yourself out there and you have to spend your time on selling
so I think that from the start maybe 80% of my time has been spent on selling and developing relationships to bring in the business if I didn't do that then we wouldn't be where we are today despite our talent so that's what I do it's all cold outreach
we don't really have that much money to spend on ads but I also think ads is useless because it's just spanning everywhere you're not targeting very well you're not using the founders use my own connections but you have to be willing to be outgoing and put yourself out there and reach out the people
pick up the phone, send an email whatever it is to be successful so that's what I've just been doing for the last year So I'm curious if you can share maybe an example of a cold outreach how do you do this?
do you send a DM, do you send an email where do you get the email from what kind of a peach you use trying to close the sale or an email close the sale in the first run and that's the wrong way to approach it what I'll do is I'll buy lists of founders or buy lists of
whatever target that I'm going after maybe it's CTOs or something that I'll buy list of people I'll then go through it and then I'll send an email to them with an introduction of who I am and I keep it short and sweet I'm like I'm not going to waste your time and I keep my skills
and if they say yes or no great I keep it simple I don't go and say I have worked on all these projects and you should hire me click here to schedule time my calendar and call me today this is my pricing rate and I do xyz, I don't do any of that
because that's just no way people will have the time for it so I keep it simple I have these skills I'm looking for work would you be interested in having a conversation
short and sweet. But I do spend some time targeting people and then I'll
experiment with different groups. Maybe it's like non-technical co-founders or
maybe it's like CTOs that maybe don't have a specialty. I'll try to buy lists of
people or find groups of people that may fit a target. Maybe X Googlers or
something like that, right? Because there's a familiar already there. So that's how I
approach it. What are they by the lists of emails from? So there's lots of
services you can use. LinkedIn has a tool called Sales Navigator where you can
create lead lists, Apollo. I've been using a service called Apollo. They have
lead lists that you can buy in there. There's also third-party brokers that can go on up work usually and like find people with lists or just make a request of
what lists you're looking for. Like I'm looking for a list of founders. There's also a thing is like TechCrunch or someone who has a service that you can buy.
That has lists of like startups if you're that's the area that you're focusing.
But basically it's like they're available anywhere. So you just go through a name,
get these lists and some of them could be crummy. Another thing you can do is also
just have someone create the list for you. So you have like a virtual assistant, go through and find all the people and create a list of emails and phone
numbers for you. And do you actually craft emails personally or you use some
automations to? Oh no, it's all me. Yeah. Automation is not good at the
short and sweet. You can tell when people are using GPT to reach out to you.
So quick question before we wrap it up. Are most companies that are working with
StudioInit? Are they venture funded? How do they pay you basically?
It varies. But it's all paid. So right now we're trying to recover from having
big salaries to like basically nothing. We've been using our severance as like our
seed fund to get ourselves going. So all of the work that we do is fee-based
right now. And I think we're priced pretty competitively because we're trying to grow and build the business out and we're starting to hire some employees
which is great. And we've been very fortunate to have that. But the long-term vision is that we're going to hopefully build up the studio big enough that it
can then support us to then branch off and start doing incubation. So the
idea is that we become like that start-uping bitters. So like we can't always
think of the great ideas. So we'll like probably partner with people that
have really good ideas that need that execution help. So that's a long-term
vision. But we're not able to do any equity stuff now. I get that question a
lot. Great, great. Yeah. So Henry that's been
great conversation. To close this off we always ask our guests to
recommend a book or a podcast. Kind of some piece of information, long-form
information I guess that you can recommend to people. Sure, I would say focusing on the leadership aspect because that's where I see most engineers and founders
struggle. The book that I would always recommend to like a new founder is called
Permission to Screw Up by Kristen Hadid. That was a very high-opening book for me.
It turns out I was a really crummy leader early on. I was a jerk to work with.
When someone finally had the courage to tell me that I remember finding that book and reading it and Kristen went through a lot of the same struggles that I did
as a leader. And I think it's like reading her stories and understanding
that it's totally okay to have made mistakes. And as long as you learn from
them and recover, that was a very, very good book. And it had a lot of hidden
gems in there. So that's the book I usually recommend to folks. Because it's like
we're very technical people generally. Leadership is the one area we don't focus on.
That's where I start. Also, there's a book called Crucial Conversations, really like that one.
Because usually people are afraid to confront others. And that's very helpful.
We also mentioned the Negotiating Book, Stuart Diamond's book.
And then I would also say the one-minute manager series that's always been
full and helpful short and sweet. So I tend to like those books to help me along.
I think that made it very valuable. Yeah, the Stuart Diamond's book is called
Getting More. I love that book. So I'm curious. You said,
somebody told you that you were a jerk. How would you get a conversation
going? You just, oh, what did they actually say?
I was having a one-on-one with someone and I think they gave me like a poor
view or something like that. And we were walking around. I was like, what are you talking about?
I'm awesome. I'm the greatest engineer ever. Why would you give me a poor rating?
And then they finally turned me and said, Henry, do you realize that nobody
likes working with you? And I'm like, what? I was like, I don't get it.
Can you just explain? You started going through all the things like they created a bubble around me
because I was very, very high performer. So they didn't want to discourage me.
It was just a whole management breakdown from the top.
Pretty typical of what you'll see. Well, where the managers are just
isolated people and just like, don't worry about Henry. I'll take care of him.
Instead of going and say, Henry, you're a jerk. So finally,
someone had to courage to tell me that. And I completely turned it around.
I went on an apology tour to everyone I ever worked with and I apologize for being a jerk.
That was very interesting conversations. And then I just started working on myself.
That was when I got Kristen's book and a whole bunch of other stuff. I got a coach.
I've been working with my coach Jonathan Aronson. He's awesome.
And it just really helped me and it really improved my career.
Instantly, once I did that, I started getting promoted more often.
Turns out that being a good leader and a good person to work with is actually very good for your career.
Yeah, awesome. Well, I think it would be a very good person for another podcast.
Yeah, no, absolutely. Thank you so much for having me.
We'll be again in short the conversation. Yeah, this is great. Wonderful. Thank you guys.
Thanks. Yeah, thank you so much.