Oops! I pivoted again (app development devlog)

0:00 do you ever feel like you just don't have enough hours in the day to build the project that you're currently working on but you end up coming up with new ideas all the time about projects and products that you could be building well that's what's been happening to me recently I've had some time to be away from the computer and focus on the family and during that time I've come up with some new ideas and some new directions and some apps that I wanted to build but I've still got a lot of work to do on my current project so what's an indie app developer to do that's right I'd registered the domain names my name is Adam Lial and I recently became debt-free by building and releasing consumer apps on the App Store now I document how I did it and show you what works what doesn't work

0:45 and my developer Journey along the way in this video I'm going to show you how I'm pivoting from creating an app that automatically adds captions to shortform content to a software product that can be integrated in OBS to automatically add live captions that are Dynamic and fun to watch on stream in the past I've created apps that were only a couple of weeks or at most a month to create it allowed me to sort of jump to the next project and keep things Dynamic keep things exciting and keep working and building that momentum and also hooking into that feedback loop where I release it get feedback whether it's a viable product and then make iterations make changes based on that feedback and go from there this app started as a bigger

1:31 project a video editing app that uses AI to reduce my editing Time by 80% and one of the components that I was building was this automatic captions so I thought if I could take that part of the code and put it into its own app where you can add your video and it automatically adds nice Dynamic and impactful captions that capture attention then people might use the app in YouTube shorts in Tik Tok and in reals but there's still a lot of work to go on the user interface and the optimization of the video exporting so I'm finding myself getting distracted and thinking of different ideas and just generally feeling like I'm about to give up on building this project but the more

2:18 I think about it the more I realize it's probably more about getting a small a small win a small endorphin rush from releasing something getting something out there and getting into that feedback loop like a bit of a distraction a hobby away from my hobby or a pivot away from my Pivot and then it dawned on me there was a comment that popped up to me in my live stream that my thick Australian accent people couldn't quite understand it and that's when the the idea hit me hang on a second I've got an app that I'm building that automatically adds captions to videos can I apply that same logic IC that same animation that same Dynamic feel to the subtitles and can I

3:05 put that into a Mac app that can be integrated into OBS or any one of those streaming services but there are some issues everything's built in UI kit and I really don't know why it's so difficult to Port an app from IOS into a Mac app easily it's the same kind of ecosystem I feel like apple and and Swift UI should have some sort of shared library that lets you have some of the core functionalities I get it like UI kit has a lot of use cases that are just specifically for the phone but in this case I'm dealing with images I'm dealing with storing images I'm dealing with manipulating images and I'm using CG

3:50 image which works well on the Mac core images works well on the Mac and it works well on the iPhone but in some cases I'm having to use UI image to view a preview of the image to the user on the iOS device so UI image is like coded quite heavily in a lot of the functions of the animation and key framing that I've built so when I import this code into the Mac I have to replace everything that is UI kit specific or UI image specific with NS image and I'm really not sure what the difference is I just know that when I jump into Claude And I ask it to convert from UI image to NS image that it kind of works it's a

4:36 bit clunky in the implementation because you have to specify the width and the height but it kind of works and it works just as well in a few hours I answered the question does this work and yes I can report that it does work and now we have live captions on stream that's cool and it still needs a lot of work to add that Dynamic feel to it but this is a good start so now the question is is there a market for this and what is the competition like and a quick search on Google shows that there are automatic caption apps for OBS and for live streaming which add like captions to your video they're a little bit clunky and a bit

5:22 oldfashioned looking they look like when you turn on the TV and you put closed captions on and it just runs with some text at the bottom of the screen and I think in this day and age that there is a use case where you can have a much more Dynamic caption that appears when you're talking I I've got the functionality in there that I can add explosions and animations that get triggered by specific words and I can add all of the animations that I've already created for my auto captions app my best auto captions app that can be added to this app after converting it from UI kit to appkit it works and all of my existing code works so this is a possibility and this is something that I can do and something that's quite

6:07 exciting to get stuck into but I'm going to have to set some rules this app can't carry on too long can't distract me from my best auto captions app it needs to be completed by the end of the month and it needs to complement the existing functionality of my best auto captions app so there's no forking the code and no adding extra features to the code that don't already exist in the primary app and then I want to release it and just diversify how many apps use this same code to increase my chances of success in one of them actually succeeding the thing I've noticed about streaming is while you're currently streaming a preview of the last few seconds is shown within twitch within YouTube and within Twitter and this

6:55 becomes the thumbnail of your entire stream from these services and when I look back at the Times where I've got the most people engaging and the most people entering the stream it's always when there's something interesting on the screen that people see when they're sort of scrolling through Twitter or they're scrolling through YouTube and something captures their eye and these captions have worked really well on short form content to do the exact same thing where you're just scrolling and you see it it captivates you you know what's being said without having the volume on without even clicking on it because it's got the caption that's engaged you and it's telling you what's being said on screen so I think I think there's a use case for adding that level of captions to live streams so in the

7:41 thumbnail when it does pop up in Twitter when it does pop up in YouTube when it does pop up in twitch immediately you can see what's being said what's being talked about and it's engaging and people will click on it this is my theory I'm going to test it and see how it goes I'm going to build this thing live on stream and see what sort of Engagement it gets when I preview the the captions on screen but then the issue is how do I Market this thing this thing is going to be so different from what I would usually do building apps when I build an app I Target keywords in the App Store that people are targeting and I'll be doing that with my best autoc captions app this one has a different use case this one is going to

8:29 be use in combination with services like software like OBS so now how do I Target my target audience that aren't specifically looking in the app store for this product for this software and how do I educate people about this this product that I'm building this is going to be the challenge that I'm going to run into because this is a bit outside of my usual experience my gut is telling me that s SEO is going to be king here getting ranked for keywords for live captions and automatic captions on live streams those types of keywords but in doing so I'm going to have to create a

9:15 pretty fancy landing page that demonstrates how it works what sort of functionality can be expected that's optimized for search engine optimization and probably a lot of how-to tutorials and guides so when people are asking how to I add captions to my videos in OBS that it comes up this is all very new to me and I'm kind of excited to go down that path but at the same time it's I'm going to be fumbling around a lot with with that process my core skill set is building apps releasing onto the App Store targeting keywords on the App Store that people will download and get just an evergreen supply of customers downloading my product but this one has a different use case this one is more of a professional use case so I guess it's got a lower Market a lower share of the

10:02 market of people who will actually download this thing but a higher value associated with it and my intention is that I'm going to go down the same path as my best auto captions app this app will have the captions on screen with an overlay a watermark in the middle of the caption with the website to download the captions I'm hoping that this will add some sort of viral growth to the app app getting people downloading it and then people can subscribe to remove the watermark otherwise they get full access to everything within the app to help with that Viral growth that's the business model I'm going with I it's a little bit of a different area for me it's sort of pushing away from consumer apps maybe more in terms of a

10:50 professional app but we'll see we'll see how it goes and I'm interested in documenting my journey now I've got a name in mind for it and I've registered both the do main names but I'm not quite sure I need some help working out what the best name for this thing is it's either live Auto captions or Auto live captions so let me know what one think works best for this project I'm in two minds about it live Auto captions Works nicely next to my best autoc captions app for uh for the consumer side so I think that like I'm leaning towards that as the like a bit of a brand building up type deal but by

11:39 my research shows that live captions is the keyword I'll be targeting so Auto live captions has that in the domain and it's been a few years since I've done search engine optimization I'm not quite sure what the weight of the domain has on anymore but it'll be interesting to know your thoughts if there's any experts out there there let me know also if you can help me build this landing page and help me put together a good website for this hit me up in my DMs I'm more than happy to sort of hire someone to help me out with this stuff so I can focus entirely on building the app and ideally what I'd like to see is show me what your what you've previously worked on your portfolio uh send it through

12:24 best way to contact me is on Twitter through DM or just m message me tag me in a a post and I can have a look at your portfolio and let you know from there let me know your rate let me know your portfolio we'll go from there