14 days trending: what launching Flipcorder taught me

Flipcorder came out on October 23, the same day as the iPhone Duo, and 14 days later it's still trending on the App Store. It's a retro camcorder for iPhone, made for iPhone Duo, where you film little 20-second flips through your day and by tonight they're one home video on today's tape. Two weeks in feels like a good moment to write down what launching it has taught me, because almost all of it was something I was doing for the first time.

Learning something new

Originally, what I was most excited about was the development side of it: learning some of the newer SDKs, and building an app that was really focused on video. I'd had some experience with WebRTC back in the early 2010s, but I had never created a photo or video application before, so there was a lot to learn there, especially for a phone that I didn't even have. There's more about how I built it in the Flipcorder case study.

Before I ever wrote the first line of code, though, I did my full discovery process, the same one I ran for Lotus clients for years: the market analysis, the competitors and all of that sort of thing. So I felt confident that I had an idea that would sell decently well, if it was executed correctly.

Actually marketing it this time

What I didn't expect was how exciting it would be to see all of the other things I could put effort into. My two previous App Store apps under my own name, I didn't try very hard to market or sell, and this time I knew that if I wanted to do this right and have any success, I was going to have to put that effort in.

That led me to really lean into AI for the marketing side specifically, and it ended up being key to the whole marketing and outreach angle. I set up a new Mac Studio at the house to do as much research as possible and keep social media fairly automated, building out keyword trackers and viral post analysis, finding followers, and building an outreach pool of writers and content creators to pitch, and it was great to see how much all of that really helped.

It also kept me organized. I set up a bunch of things in Google Drive and wrote a custom Google Tasks connector, so now I get a daily briefing and some weekly overviews, and all of the data gets captured for trend analysis, so I can make data-based decisions about the marketing and the ad spending.

Ads and the App Store listing

I'd never run ads before, and I'd never used Apple Ads, so constantly refining my ad strategy there was all new, and it's had quite a good amount of success. Along with that came looking at conversion rates, working out how to optimize the App Store listing, and figuring out how to link all of the pieces together, from the marketing website to the App Store pages to installs, and the Apple Ads campaigns to custom product pages.

There were just so many things to learn and do for the first time. It was really rewarding to explore all of it and figure out how to get it all set up, but also to actually see it work.

Trending

The whole idea of building an app for the iPhone Duo was a hope that I'd find a unique angle, something that could really make use of the free press coverage a brand-new kind of phone gets. I wasn't confident that would work out nearly as well as it did.

So it's been really validating and exciting to see Flipcorder trend so well across so many different App Stores, and to see it still doing well 14 days later. It has reached the top 10 in Top Paid, Photo & Video, in 46 countries, and #1 in 13 of them, and it's been in the top 100 of all paid apps, in every category, in 44 countries. Most of the traffic came from people browsing the App Store and finding it in Apple's collections for iPhone Duo, and the listing has passed 10 million impressions.

On top of that, it's been really great seeing the enthusiasm from the community, in App Store reviews but also from people emailing me about how they and their friends are using it. I feel like there's a real chance for this to build a community and a movement around the vision.

More than a folding phone app

What started out as building for the iPhone Duo has morphed into something else. The main value of Flipcorder isn't that it's an app for a folding phone. As a society we're really focused on recording high-quality content for social media, and we've lost touch with authentic home video, and that's what has really resonated with people.

The constraint of capturing unedited footage is part of the fun. It forces you to just take more authentic video, and then you get to enjoy it. There's a bit of nostalgia in it too. I'm turning 40 soon, and there's certainly part of that at play, thinking about retro tech and a different time, when tech was a little simpler.

What's next

It's been a lot of things to learn and enjoy, and I'm still enjoying it. I have lots of features planned for Flipcorder, and I'm just looking forward to seeing where this takes me.