In 8 Months We Had Over 600,000 Downloads

An interview with Sarp Erdag an independent software developer and creator of Typorama — the easy way to create attractive visuals

Paul: Welcome to another episode of The App Guy Podcast. I am your host, it’s Paul Kemp. This is the show where I love to meet new, interesting app developers and co-founders, entrepreneurs, because what it does is it inspires me in this world of digital, world of apps, world of mobile, and I’m sure it will inspire you, as well, in what you’re doing and in your journey. To help you out, I get guests every week and I make sure that it is a great, global show, that means we go around the world, and I really do mean that. It’s not just focused on Silicon Valley or London, or these other digital hubs; it is purely global. My last guest, he was from Romania. Today I have a guest and he’s based in Istanbul, and we are going to learn about his journey with the app that he’s built, Typorama — there will be links to this on the show notes, episode 413, theappguy.co. Let me introduce Sarp Erdag. He is an indie iOS developer and he’s the co-founder of this app, Typorama, and we’re going to learn about his journey with it. Sarp, welcome to The App Guy Podcast!

Sarp: Hello, hello everyone.

Paul: Hello, it’s great — first of all, it’s quite nice because you found me because of the podcast, you listen to the podcast. What actually brought you to listen to it, what do you get from it?

Sarp: Well, I’ve always loved listening to other people’s experiences and their success stories on building apps and products on mobile, and there are many good shows, so congratulations to you as well on progressing on such a great show. There are many technical news sources on this thing, but there aren’t many shows and resources that are putting importance on the business and on the entrepreneurship side of solely building apps, so I think that’s what attracted me and here I am, as a speaker.

Paul: Yes, I’m so thrilled because in a way, if you think about it, we can’t get this information from universities anymore, colleges or go to schools or classes; we’re getting our knowledge from the blogs and the websites. Is that the knowledge that helps you with your business and your app development? The online resources.

Sarp: For me, for example, I never studied iOS programming or any kind of mobile coding in university or in college, because the technology is advancing so fast that the colleges and universities and school are lagging behind. Yes, there are a couple of universities, like Stanford… Many iOS developers I think have known those lessons on the Stanford course, maybe you even checked them out yourself, they’re famous, but many of them are learning this on their own. They are both learning the business, entrepreneurship, and the technical side, so these kinds of resources — podcasts, blogs and other online resources from independent producers — are super important, I think.

Paul: Yes, and they’re a lot cheaper, as well. I know that if you wanna go to a business school nowadays, one of the top business schools — you mentioned Stanford, but there are others like INSEAD — can set you back 60,000 to 100,000 dollars at least, so that is a lot cheaper.

Sarp: Until they update their curriculum and their courses… Like, there’s a new version of iOS released and they’re already lagging behind, and it’s hard for universities as well.

Paul: So let’s talk about your journey then with your app. It’d be nice to know what the app does first, and then we can explore how you got to where you are, so tell us about Typorama.

Sarp: Yes, so Typorama is an app for the iPhone and the iPads, and it’s a photo and typographic editor and designer, but its specialty is that it helps you design great-looking visuals, amazing graphics in a snap. We’ve built a special algorithm for it to create complex typography designs quickly, so that even people with zero design skills can generate and create great-looking visuals in a very short time. There are options to search for backgrounds for your creation, apply overlays and filters, simple photo editing and photo adjustment tools, and there are different text styles that cool graphics and inspirations words, any kind of text-focused graphic that you would need to use on your social media account, on your blog, or anything that you need on a daily basis.

Paul: Well, I actually use a lot of graphics myself; I take quotes from the show, typically, and post them onto Pinterest and Twitter. It’s helpful, because on average, when I post to Pinterest, for example, it’s between fifty and a hundred thousand views per month that I get to those quotes, and on Twitter at some point I saw myself going up to 14 million people that read a tweet. So I like to post these things, but could I use your app?

Sarp: Exactly, there are many other people, many other podcasters, social media managers, personal branding guys that are using our app, and it really eases the process up, because otherwise you would need to open Photoshop yourself on your desktop, or download a more professional editing tool, you would need to try to design something on your own and it takes a lot of time. With this app, it’s just much easier because it gives you a cleverly-designed, beautiful layout, cool graphic and you can enrich it with 3D effects, you can raise parts of the text to make it look like it’s behind other objects. So it really helps you out and brings you more followers, brings more attention, and it’s much easier than using an advanced tool like Photoshop or more pro editing tools on mobile.

Paul: So it sounds like a terrific app, and in a way, is this for you a passion project, or is it a business that you can build around the app? Tell us what inspired you to actually make the app.

Sarp: Yes, I think it’s a mix of both, because it started as a passion project. We didn’t know it was gonna go this big, to be honest. One of our previous clients — because I was doing a lot of freelance work before — was a founder of a traditional type of photo and text editing app, and after working on that project we realized that there is a demand for much quicker to use tools. Right now, people are using these tools to quickly create graphics; they don’t want to spend lots of time, and I think since we started there have been probably lots of competitors to this business, it’s just becoming much bigger. Recently Adobe has joined, so they’re like roaming the market. I don’t want to give the name to their product. It’s becoming a business, and creating quick graphics, creating amazing visuals on your mobile, on the go, I think it’s becoming another section under the Photo and Video category on the app stores. So there are tools that are very professional, and you can just spend hours creating super custom-made stuff, and if you have design skills you can create amazing things, but if you don’t have that much time and you’re more of a business guy or a technical guy that doesn’t want to spend a lot of time designing, then these kinds of tools like Typorama and similar apps, they’ll help you a lot and I think its market is growing and it’s becoming a business on its own.

Paul: This is really inspirational because I’m sure that a lot of people listening have the desire to build an app. It starts out as a passion project, but you mentioned that it has turned into a real business. Was there a point when you got it out there that you realized that the number of downloads, or the engagement, or something about it changed and you could turn it into a business? What was that point?

Sarp: Yes, exactly. We actually weren’t expecting that much from this app, because when we started there weren’t many similar apps and this was more on the innovation side; we didn’t know how well it was going to do, and in less than three months we released the beta and later on we turned it on live. We got more than 200k downloads, and then in eight months we were over 600k, I think, and then we said

Hey, I think we were able to build something really good and there is a demand for it.

Everybody was asking for new features, new versions, Android, there were people asking for a Mac version, so this just made us pursue this idea even further, and that’s why we didn’t do any other project, we didn’t take any other clients. Also, it started appearing in magazines, like the Time Magazine, lots of other designer/tech-related blogs, and people were appreciating this app and what they were doing with this app a lot. So we’ve fully focused on it, we’ve been working on it since April 2015, it’s been a little more than eight or nine months now. We didn’t take any other clients, we didn’t take any other work; we started another project on the side, similar to Typorama, but it’s not finished yet, so our whole focus was on this app and we are working hard to grow it into a bigger business.

Paul: Okay, so this is truly why I set this show up, because to me, people like yourself, entrepreneurs… Have you spent a lot of money on the marketing side, budget side, or is this a lot of the organic/word-of-mouth downloads?

Sarp: Yes, so we did a little bit of marketing because our app is used a lot on Instagram and on Twitter, especially. We did some traditional marketing, like Twitter ads, and there’s this new thing — Instagram Ads, IG-Ads. We did some of those, and we did some influencer marketing as well, but most of it was from word-of-mouth, because when people like something, they tell their friends and it just spreads organically. We were featured by a couple blogs — that really helped a lot, and we also spent a lot of time on app store optimization. We were careful in choosing the correct keywords, because most of the downloads on the app store come from keyword searches. Another thing was that we were featured by Apple multiple times; even right now we are featured on the AppStore in more than 500 countries, I think. We once got a homepage feature, it just blew up downloads. We were paid at that time, but even if we were paid, we were getting a lot of downloads. Now we kept getting featured every couple months, and that helped a lot. We wouldn’t be here if there wasn’t that Apple feature, so my advice to any developer who’s building apps would be to try to get featured by Apple on the AppStore, it helps a lot.

Paul: Yes, I couldn’t agree more. Luckily, I was involved in some launches of apps last year that got to be featured by Apple, and there’s no technique, in a way. What I’m learning from you, Sarp, and I’m sure what the listeners are learning is to just build something pretty awesome that happens to meet a real need, and even if there are other apps out there, make sure that you focus on it. If it’s a beautiful app, then it will kind of spread. You mentioned Instagram ads, and I was doing a bit with Instagram Ads — did you actually find that was a useful return on investment?

Sarp: Not that much… I think it’s all about the average revenue per user, the average revenue you can get from each user you get to your app. They’re rather expensive; maybe they’ll help in the long run. We decided not to do that much of that, and we decided that going organic is a better way for this app. Maybe if you increase your app’s prize, maybe if you try to get a higher average revenue per user, then you might try Twitter, Facebook or Instagram ads more; there are much bigger brands, and you’re competing with them. Or maybe you can try small countries. Especially in the US, UK and Canada, there’s a much bigger competition.

Paul: Okay, so what I’m learning is that you actually target lower cost countries, that don’t demand such high levels of clicks.

Sarp: It was just experimental, we didn’t really build a strategy on that, but it was our experience that targeting keywords on lower-income countries would be easier if you want to spread outside the US. Or if you want o just test this marketing strategy or how well your app is doing on other AppStores, that could be a way.

Paul: You also mentioned some big things that must have helped. You said there were a couple of blogs, I was wondering if you’re able to give the name of those blogs that helped you?

Sarp: Yes, there is AppAdvice, maybe developers know it.

Paul: Yes, Tyler runs that, doesn’t he?

Sarp: Yes, they really gave two big features to us, they helped a lot.

Paul: Is that because you went from paid to free?

Sarp: No, no. I don’t know, it happened with a new update release. We released these new tools, we were excited about the 3D text rotation stuff and the gradient colors, partial text raising, that was a differentiation we made, and it really took the app to a higher level. I think those guys were excited by it and they said that it’s just becoming the best app in its category on the AppStore, so they featured us after this new update.

Paul: How did you get in there? Was a case of submitting the app on their contact form?

Sarp: No, I actually didn’t do anything. I had my Twitter on and I was just searching for the ‘Typorama’ keyword and I just saw that they had just featured us. This has been happening organically, and we are sometimes amazed at it as well, because we’re not doing a lot of pushing on social media, posting our app and trying to get reviews and blog posts — we didn’t do that. We kept focusing on quality, we kept trying to differentiate it from other people, and we just spent a lot of time on quality. I think that’s what brought us here.

Paul: So there was AppAdvice, and you were going to mention another one as well.

Sarp: Yes, the Time Magazine.

Paul: Oh, Time Magazine, wow. Did you have your picture of your face on the front cover?

Sarp: That’s for our next project. Me and my co-founder on the cover of Time Magazine, that would be awesome. But this one wasn’t a huge feature. I think it was a monthly or a weekly feature, they were selecting the best apps of that month, and among Pacemaker and a bunch of other apps, we were featured as well. It helped a lot. I don’t know if we were in the real, physical magazine, but we were on the website.

Paul: But who cares about the physical magazine? Does anyone read that anymore?

Sarp: Exactly, yes. The physical magazines are dead.

Paul: That’s really inspiring, because a lot of people that approach me are trying to push their message out, and it’s all about marketing, approaching journalists… And what’s happened to you is that you’ve shown that you focus on quality and the press will do their job and find good quality apps like yours, and start to cover them and feature them without any incentives, without being approached, that’s what I’ve learned from you.

Sarp: Yes. In fact, contradictory to what you said, it’s something we’re battling, because both me and my co-founder have engineering backgrounds, and the best thing we can do is coding, engineering and developing. We don’t put that much time into marketing, and I think that’s what we need to improve ourselves at. Because when a new idea for a new feature comes to your mind, when you’ve got that new spark in your head for an exciting new feature, then you just go right into Xcode or whatever you’re using and just start coding, and that’s just not really good, I think.

Paul: But that’s like a lot of people listening: you’re good at some things and you’re not so good at others, and I guess what you’ve got to realize — and I want people listening to this to think about their own weaknesses, and to just accept that. Because you could just outsource the marketing, appoint an agency that could help you, rather than do it yourself.

Sarp:Yes, but maybe if you’re an independent developer it might be easier and better for you to do the marketing of your app yourself, because no other marketing agency or PR firm is going to be able to help you, especially in the beginning, as much as you would do yourself, because you know your product the best. It’s your baby, so especially in the beginning, I think the founders should be the marketers. It’s hard, in the beginning, the founders should be everything: the cleaning lady, the marketer, the designer, the accountant… So maybe one of my pieces of advice would be to try to get a co-founder who has complementary skills to you. If you’re not good on the design side and your co-founder is better, then it’s a huge plus. For us, my co-founder is better on the backend, on coding stuff, and I’m better on the frontend. He’s doing accounting, I’m doing more marketing stuff. But 90% of our time goes to coding. If you’re a developer yourself, I think developers should, at least, spend half of their time — or app entrepreneurs I should say, not developers — anybody who is building an app should spend at least half of the time on development or any other stuff, and on marketing as well. That’s really important. Don’t just get stuck on one thing, try to do everything at once. It’s hard, but it’s…

Paul: There’s a few things that I’m learning… I’m loving this conversation because what I’m learning from it is that… I personally interview a lot of founders that go through Y Combinator, or 500 Startups, or all these big incubators that really give them a good exposure, but what you’ve been able to achieve is absolutely astounding, and in fact sometimes it feels like you have achieved a lot more than many of these companies that go through Y Combinator have achieved. And you’ve done it really with minimal effort on the marketing and only focusing on quality, and that’s what I think we need to hear. What we’re learning from you is that it is possible to do this thing on a small budget.

Sarp: It’s totally possible. I was obsessed with being in Silicon Valley and getting into 500 Startups and Y Combinator. It’s a way! Many entrepreneurs are doing it really well, but for me there’s just so many things that you can do… You have to first try to maximize yourself. Afterwards you can try getting an investment, you can try going to 500 Startups and Y Combinator. When you’re stuck, when you can’t do anything on your own anymore, then you should be looking for external help, I think. I am not even in the same place with my co-founder right now. I’m in a different city, we’ve been working remotely since we started working on our app. Yes, we’re based in Istanbul, but Istanbul is a huge city, it’s got more than 15 million people living in it. I’m on the other side of the city, and even meeting on a daily basis takes four hours of our time, and it’s just something we can’t afford. That’s why we just invest a lot in remote communication, tools like Slack and Skype, and cool management tools like GitHub, and stuff. There are so many things you can do, bootstrapping… We’re not doing the traditional, TechCrunch-style entrepreneurship.

Paul: Yes, because I can also imagine that if you were to approach one of those 500 Startups or Y Combinator or the other ones, you are in a much stronger position, because you’ve actually grown a solid base of users, and you know exactly what you need these people for, such as funding for growth, expansion, employees or whatever it is.

Sarp: Yes, because the hardest thing is to generate revenue. Many people go to investors, incubators before they have revenue, even before they have any real product. What we like to do is to generate as much revenue as we can without getting any investment or without getting into any incubator. Until that time, we can just try to grow as much as we can, get as many downloads as we can, as much revenue as we can. I think there’s a huge opportunity on the AppStore for innovative ideas. We’re seeing examples like single developers going in the top charts, making millions in a year. It’s not that common, it’s very rare, I know, but I think any good developer who can find a good, complementary co-founder to himself can do at least a couple hundred thousand per year on the AppStore, without any investment or anything, just by bootstrapping. It’s possible.

Paul: That is what we want to hear, absolutely.

Paul: There’s two more things we like to do on this show before we say goodbye to you. One is that we’d love to know about… I mean, you mentioned some productivity tools that you use for remote work, and we’d love to find out about useful, practical things that we can use for our remote working, so I wondered if you can just go through that list again, of how you’re actually working remotely with your co-founder.

Sarp: We use Slack a lot, Slack is very popular.

Paul: On that then, Sarp, are you using Slack for your own communication, but are you actually joining other teams and other channels?

Sarp: Yes, I have a couple groups on my list, like developer groups, product hunters, they help a lot. For example, this wasn’t my strategy, but one of my friends tried contacting every influencer and every popular guy on Product Hunt’s Slack group, asking for reviews, so that his product on ProductHunt just goes higher and higher, and gets more reviews and votes. So it helps in that way, as well. We both use Slack internally, and externally to reach out to other people.

Paul: Great, okay. I’ve done a lot of stuff on ProductHunt. You’ve already been on ProductHunt, how did you find that?

Sarp: Well, that was something I tried to push, but it wasn’t a big success because I didn’t have many followers there. Later on, I don’t know the name, but a girl with much more influence, much more followers, posted our product and it just went up to number two in a day.

Paul: Yes, that’s what I advise, anyone who listens to my show will know this, but you need someone of influence to hunt you, and it needs to be almost planned, curated for a certain day.

Sarp: Exactly. We hadn’t planned it, we weren’t even ready for it. You can create specialized ProductHunt pages for your product on your website, and if you can get someone who can post your product instead of you — if you don’t have many followers…

Paul: The worst thing you can do is hunt your own product, because it’s almost guaranteed you’ll not end up on the featured page, but the upcoming page. There’s obviously a lot of past episodes that the listeners can listen to. So the final thing then, this is a show about apps, and I’d love to get from you one or two apps that perhaps are on your phone, that you can recommend to us, and maybe ones that you don’t feel like we’ve come across before.

Sarp: Yes, so as developers we use App Annie a lot. AppFigures and App Annie are just great for tracking your analytics, your sales and your market position.

Paul: Yes, can I just mention… AppFigures, how good are they at refreshing? Because when I do a launch I’ll look at AppFigures, but the position in the AppStore, it takes a while for it to refresh, I think. Are they any better at it now?

Sarp: Yes, it depends… I don’t know how those companies are scraping the iTunes Connect, but sometimes App Annie is faster, sometimes AppFigures is faster. It just depends on the day, I don’t know…

Paul: Yes, because I’ve done launch episodes on this series of podcasts, and we’ll actually be looking and refreshing… Because ProductHunt sometimes, if for instance you’re number two, it does make actually a really big impact in your chart position. So I often use AppFigures, but it doesn’t seem to keep up with where you are. Maybe that’s because it takes a while for them to scrape the store.

Sarp: Yes. Well, I don’t actually know what’s going on behind the scenes with those apps. They don’t really give out the same report all the time, but you can get an average feeling of how your app is doing, and how your sales and positions are. There is another thing I’d like to mention, it’s called Adobe Preview. If you’re doing UI designs in Photoshop or a similar app, you can just directly get your design show on your app to iPhone or iPad. It connects your device in real time, and while you’re designing your user interface, it just gets shown on your device so that you can get a better feeling of how it’s becoming. I use it a lot, and I recommend it to any developer and designer. That’s my favorite app these days.

Paul: Great. Okay, Sarp, this has been a really fascinating journey, and I’m totally grateful for us connecting, because it just inspired me to move on with this podcast and meet more people like you, who are doing a lot of stuff independent of big resources, and it means that there’s opportunity for all of us. All the show notes will be on the episode 413, so everyone listening can go to theappguy.co and you’ll be able to download the app, and also go to the resources that Sarp has just mentioned. In the meantime, how best can people reach out to you? What’s the best way of getting in touch?

Sarp: They can find me on Twitter, my handle is @sarperdag, or they can e-mail me at [email protected] Or if they just write my name on Google, I’ll just come up there.

Paul: The benefits of having a unique name…

Sarp: There aren’t many other Sarp Erdags on this planet, so I’m the only guy you can find.

Paul: This has been great, what a terrific journey! Thank you so much for sharing your journey with us. I feel like we’re in the presence of a potentially great app, that who knows, could be up there. Thank you very much for coming on this show!

Sarp: You’re welcome, Paul. Thank you for inviting me!