Villain era - part 1

Honeymoon Phase

I had been working in startups almost my entire career, but I always had a soft spot for iOS apps. I’m a proud user of Things, Sketch, Goodlinks, NetNewsWire—you get the idea. Although I’d never built anything for Apple’s platforms, I was an Apple fanboy (back when that wasn’t a bad thing)

On one hot afternoon, I called my friend and said we gonna build photo encryption app. Secure, simple, and without subscriptions—the kind of app I would love to use myself.

Apple had just released SwiftUI, which was getting its first updates. “Production-ready,” as they claimed. Of course, it wasn’t, and in many ways still isn’t almost five years later. Nonetheless, we had a good talk, decided to start, and so began the Apple journey.

Side Projects Stay on the Side

Around the same time, my career took a huge turn. Zero interest rates ended, easygoing startups disappeared, capital dried up, and I was leaving the e-commerce startup I’d built from scratch. SafeSpace was progressing insanely slowly. Even though my co-founder was an experienced iOS engineer, the new Apple paradigm was nothing like the old one. A three-month prototype turned into six months, then a year.

Meanwhile, I decided to completely change my career, move to another country, and, of course, there was COVID. My co-founder’s life wasn’t much calmer, and SafeSpace drifted to the sidelines for the rest of the year. But we prevailed on sheer illusion of success around the corner.

The Bad Apple

Seeds of hesitation grew throughout the year. How could a company that rarely misses with its products (butterfly keyboard aside) be so wrong with its development tools? SwiftUI was bad, if not horrible. But I thought it was just a skill issue—maybe I didn’t know how to work with a new platform. The App Store release was close.

I didn’t know what to expect, to be honest. A call from Tim Cook to list the #1 privacy app featured on the main page of the App Store right after publication? Obviously, that didn’t happen. Nearly a year after writing the first line of code, I got my first App Store rejection.

I was devastated. Not only there was no finish line with prizes, but the rejection reason was so vague it was clear the reviewers simply didn’t want the app on the platform at all.

The app’s sole function was encryption. The whole point of encryption is that you can’t see what’s inside the file without a password. It makes stealing the file itself useless unless you also have the password. Maybe not the simplest concept in the world, but fairly straightforward.

Apple’s rejection was blunt: SafeSpace is just a file viewer and, therefore, not welcome in the App Store. Period. They couldn’t answer my question whether or not it was possible to view photos without SafeSpace, nor did they ever reply. After a long summer and 12 rejections we’ve finally got through.

Business is Sales, and We Had No Sales

Year two began. I had nothing to do with Apple at my day job, my co-founder was working only with UIKit, but in our free time, we were trying to become cutting-edge Apple developers and marketers.

Needless to say, the App Store release brought us nothing. One single purchase in a month, followed by a refund. There are billions of people using the App Store, and nobody wanted to even try the app. It was the first time I wanted to shut it down and never touch the App Store again.

I finally realized why indie apps struggle. It’s not because they’re worse; it’s because of the brutal process of going from 0 to 1. You need consistency, deep pockets, and the willingness to work for free for years—and only after that might you get a chance.

Then I got a call from an old friend who was into App Store optimization. He listened to my story and said, “I know a guy who’s just starting out but is very talented.” And just like that, we became a team of three. The team was growing, the sales did not

Marketing and Ads Are Not the Same Thing

My motivation to continue SafeSpace was almost zero. So, I did what any reasonable adult would do: I doubled down and gambled on paid ads.

For a brief moment, I saw the numbers go up—downloads, purchases, reviews, support emails. It felt like overnight success was within reach.

Until, of course, the bill came. In just a couple of months, the project went from making $0 to being $30,000 in debt from my personal savings.

Turns out, ads are not marketing. Whatever was happening in the golden days of online ads, things are very different now—especially after iOS 14’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT) crackdown. We still had no idea what we were doing.

The Darkest Hour Before Sunrise

Another year passed. The three of us had a long call about what to do with SafeSpace. I was ready to completely leave Apple’s ecosystem, forget about App Store reviews and rejections, and never touch Xcode again.

I was also starting a new side project with a guy I met on an airplane, who, to this day, is the most skilled marketer I know. So I couldn’t miss such a chance for a dying project.

SafeSpace, on the other hand, wasn’t growing organically. It covered two out of three months of its own marketing budget. We had users; they just weren’t paying enough, and we couldn’t do anything about it.

After an hour-long call, we decided to test a sharp pivot just before shutting it down: rename the app, change the concept from a photo vault to a converter disguise, and sell encryption as a feature.

With little hope and a heavy heart, I pushed an update and, in my mind, buried the project.

Within the next month, all the metrics doubled—some even tripled. SafeSpace required no maintenance, no new features, no marketing spend. Within the next year, I recovered all the losses, and the project finally started generating profit for the first time in three years. The moment we’ve all been waiting for

But, of course, it didn’t last long, until I’ve got message from Apple with the scariest message you can get. My account was under investigation for fraudulent activity and in 2 weeeks they’ll come back with a decision. But that’s for Part 2 because this is becoming unreadable