This week, I published Guilherme Rambo's #DevJourney story on my eponym Podcast: Software developer's Journey. Among many other things, here are my main personal takeaways:

  • Gui started programming websites, and by the time the iPhone came out, he was almost ready to drop coding alltogether. The state of WebDev back then was really pushing him away from our industry.
  • When he switched to iOS, he started coding small apps for himself, and the fun came back.
  • In 2017, Gui started in a company, located on an island on the east-coast of Brazil :D
  • A couple years later, he reduced his time working there in order to continue working on his growing side projects. Now those make out about 50% of his income. So great!
  • Gui remembers a time when he had to fax a form to Apple to get accepted into the developer program :D
  • Gui's first app wasn't a financial success, but it taught him some of the most important lessons: how to deal with real customers, outages, legal and commercial activities, etc.
  • For one of his apps, Gui experimented with creating his own store to release his apps ; and after the facts, he'd still do it. It was worth the effort. On the other side, he didn't implement a subscription model yet. That's still too much of a hurdle.
  • Chibi Studio's idea came from a demo app for the iMessage protocol. And then Gui had the advantage of being a first mover in this space: "being the first will get you some visibility". That said, Gui was well inspired to release the app as a standalone app as well, because this version was then very successful, and not the iMessage one.
  • The idea for the AirBuddy app came from scratching his own itch, it was initially supposed to be "just for himself"... but seeing the interest of people on social media, he decided to make it available.
  • Of course, the success of AirBuddy is also linked to the time of its release. Again, right time, right place, right product!
  • When I design an app, I ask myself: "what if Apple had implemented this stuff?" That's how Gui prevents feature creep, (too) many settings, etc.

Advice: Put your work out there, don't worry about people's response. It is a very good way to improve your skills and understand the whole process of publishing an app.

Thanks Guilherme for sharing your story with us!

You can find the full episode and the shownotes here on devjourney.info.

Did you listen to his story?

  • What did you learn?
  • What are your personal takeaways?
  • What did you find particularly interesting?