How we accidentally discovered product market fit and why it turned out to be a bad thing.

How we accidentally discovered product market fit and why it turned out to be a bad thing.

If you didn’t read part you can do it here Villain era - part 1

The success

Dumb experiment we decided to run right before closing the project, turned out to be genius. Changing app positioning from private photo vault, to disguised converter, worked so well it was probably the closes I’ve been to product market fit. Everything just worked. Installs were growing, search positions rising, everything started to make sense. SafeSpace, back than it was Converter: private photo vault, started earning 2k, then 4k, then 6k a month. Almost without any maintenance. It didn’t require any marketing or even new features.

But there was a big catch. We couldn’t update the app. Somewhere around 3 months after big change. I’ve got message from Apple. The type of message you would never want to get. it said my account was under investigation. It was around time I’ve started panicking, then I had a call with Apple representative, and it was really scary. TLDR of that talk is first, we changed the app functionality without clearly stating that the app functionality was changed. That’s half true at best, since it was written in caps everywhere, new functionality Converter disguise. Both in app title, in release notes and everywhere else

Second, disguise itself. Hiding any part of functionality is a very big no, no for Apple. If I understood correctly, the same flow we did, when you release an app which does one thing and then after a year changes crucial part of functionality. it’s not exactly That playbook is casinos playbook. So when we were flagged, we got into the same support cohort as casinos. I’ve remained pale during the whole call. 3 years of building, countless sleepless nights and now our account is under investigation with casinos? I’ve never heard about casinos in AppStore, which gives an idea on bad it was.

The termination is no joke as well. If Apple closes your account, you can’t just open another one. First of all that’s my personal iCloud. I know it’s stupid. Second, even if you manage to open another account, but use the new account at least once on the same iPhone, Mac, wifi or literally anything. Apple will immediately terminate new account as well.

How about that?

The implications of success

We’ve got some issues with Apple before, both when first time trying to publish an app, and during the lifetime of the app as well. We’ve survived targeted attacks with low quality traffic installs, review bombs, critical bugs with iOS 17 update. My pain tolerance was quite high already. I knew one thing. When Apple wants to terminate your account, they don’t call. So after careful consideration (it was a gamble) we decided to just leave the app and try to overcome AppStore review.

We finally chilled a bit. Yes, it was uncomfortable, but the app was working. Not in the best shape, but without any mission-critical bugs, and we just got back to work. During that year Converter private photo vault generated 60k USD. We did a team retreat in Turkey and even used some of that money as down payment for mortgage for my cofounder. It felt very real, yet uncanny at the same time.

What are we going to do next? When music inevitably stops playing?

Pain is not the enemy

Most of that journey was pain. Pleasure moments were very rare, that’s why I’ve decided to celebrate every single bit of success as good as we can. Future was completely unclear, but at some point we’ve got a profitable running business. We did it against all odds. And odds are not favorable.

And we actually did it. We are in 1% of apps both surviving 3 years mark and turning profit even if temporary. There is a joke in iOS circles. You only know if your app worth it, only if it’s rejected by Apple. Judging by that I was hoping we’ll just figure things out. So we just went back to our normal life.

What would you do?

Just imagine, we have a decent running app, generating profit and not taking much of maintenance time. It has bugs, and it’s not the best shape, but you kinda see all the metrics slowly going up. Even with bugs and weird quirks, it’s clear users do need this type of app. But you can’t update it, if you do, you’ll need to remove disguise functionality completely, not only it will destroy your current user’s flow, but also will tank reviews almost guaranteed, but also destroy all the organic outreach and of course the slight risk of getting too much rejections could result in account termination as well. I was thinking about closing the app completely. The idea of going through such a painful process for really nothing. Nobody would listen the details about why did I remove converter disguise, simply because I can’t even communicate it properly. One day you woke up, go to use the app you’ve used 100 of times, but can’t find it, because the name has changed. You finally figure out how new app is called and when open it, you see the main feature is gone. The whole purpose of the app is completely defeated.

What would you do? We tried to change disguise functionality to camera disguise, kinda like a generic photo app with hidden vault. it didn’t work well

The brutality of angry users

it was brutal. Update did go through, hundreds and hundreds of angry emails, telegram messages. 1-star ratings, angry comments in App Store and the worst part, nobody even understood the backstory. Like an update didn’t financially make sense, we could just leave and app and rally it to the ground and then delete it. People would lose access to files, but there is no app anymore, no place to write negative feedback or do whatever. It required 0 work and would be way more profitable.

But I’ve decided to build iOS apps specifically because I hate modern SAAS economics. I understand it pretty well and I hate it. You have 2 years to make something big, burning through investor money and if you fail, it’s over. And fail means anything smaller than unicorn valuation, not sure if the answer to that is FOSS, but old school App Store definetely was. So safespace.is is still available, disguise functionality is there, but it’s not as good, but it still has on device encryption, and we are just getting started.

In part 3, I’ll explain how do we run experiments, why at the end, I’m on Apple’s side still and how we will (hopefully) turn unprofitable, time-consuming indie project to a profitable once again.

P.S. if you have any questions, ideas or requests about what I should write more about hit me up on dima@safespace.is