137: One Million App Downloads in One Year with Trey George

In this episode, I'm going to be talking about a super simple tool that you can use for checking your alt text. And bonus, it's free. And then we're going to be talking about apps and how you as a blogger might consider apps for building your online business. Hey there everybody. This is Bjork Ostrom and you are listening to the Food Blogger Pro podcast which is brought to you by WP Tasty. WP Tasty is the ultimate go to place for anybody that is building a WordPress site, especially if you are building a food or recipe website. We have two plugins right now. One is called Tasty Recipes and that is for anybody that has a recipe site. It marks up your content, your recipe in a way that Google recognizes it and Pinterest recognizes it. It's super simple, super clean and and it's really well maintained. And the other plugin is called TastyPins. And TastyPins allows you to create an optimized Pinterest text as well as an optimized alt text. And we've talked about the alt text before in the podcast, so I'm not gonna go into it and I'm not gonna dive deep into how that works. But I do wanna share for today's Tasty tip, a really fun way. And I say fun because it's easy. A really fun way for you to check a certain post on your blog to make sure that it includes the alt text. And I actually ran this for the Pinch of Yum homepage and realized that we have a ton of images that don't include our alt text or don't include alt text for that specific image. And we've done a really good job of optimizing the posts because we use WP Tasty Pins for that. And we've gone through and made sure every one of our posts is updated, but we haven't done a good job of doing that on the homepage. So how did we figure that out? What tool did we use? It's a tool called SEO Site Checkup and it's free if you don't use it a lot. And what is a lot? Well, it allows you to run one page every hour through this Alt Text tester. We'll link to this in the show notes. But you can get there by going to seositecheckup.com tools image alt-test and you could also just search in Google SEO site checkup alt Test. And what happens is it's a really simple tool that you just put a URL into and that will look through all of the images on that URL on that page and it will tell you which images don't include an alt text. Now, what we've done is we've started the process of making sure that all of those images on Pinch of Yum are updated so they have an alt text or on the homepage. And that's what you would do as well. You wanna make sure that your images have an alt text. And if you haven't yet heard of Tastypins, one way that that's gonna improve your images is it allows you to do both the alt text and a Pinterest text. It allows you to create both of those for your image. So you can properly create the alt text and you can properly create the Pinterest text. And if you don't know what that means or how that works, what I'll do is in the show Notes, which you can get to by either looking at the podcast app, if you're listening to this on your phone, or you can get to by going to foodbloggerpro.com137. What I'll do is include the two articles that we have on WPTC that talks about how to do the correct alt text and how to do the correct Pinterest text. And the worst case scenario would be if you don't have any alt text at all, which we learned the hard way by using this tool. So we're going through the process and updating that for the Pinch of Yum homepage. That's today's Tasty tip. In this episode, we're going to be chatting with Trey George. And Trey runs an app company called A Color Story. And if you've been following along with the Food Blogger Pro podcast, you know that we chatted with Trey's wife Emma in episode number 121, and she talked about how she came to run a successful blog, a beautiful mess with her sister, and what her journey was like, what her path was like as she went through that process. And Trey today is going to talk about another part of their business, and the business is all about apps. He's going to talk about the successful app launch of A Beautiful Mess, and then the other apps that they've come out after that, some of the successes they've had and why he thinks those were successful, as well as some of the failures that they had and what they learned from those. He's also gonna talk about how much they spent when they built the apps, how many downloads they have, and some of the marketing strategies. That they have when it comes to building their app business. It's a really fun interview that's a little bit outside of the blogging interviews we do, which I think is really important because it's not just about blogging. It's all about building an online business. So I can't wait to share this interview with you, Trey. Welcome to the podcast.

Hey, thanks for having me.

Yeah, I almost had to hold myself back when we were talking before this because we started to get into stuff that I'm so excited to talk about on the podcast. It's going to be a really fresh perspective on building a business online on the Internet. But before we get there and before we jump into that, I want to hear a little bit about your story. I love hearing stories of how people got to where they are. So if you could rewind the tape a little bit and share a little bit about how you got to where you are right now.

Yeah, I'll try not to be too long winded about it because it's a little bit of a strange path how I got here. I mean, it's just management, but when I got out of college, I started working for ad agencies and that was a little bit what I was doing. And so just kind of managing projects and seeing all sorts of things that would come through. Then I met my now wife, Emma. We got together and I kind of was. And Emma's from a Beautiful Mess. And so they've had a whole lot of success with their blog and everything there. And so I was kind of watching what was going on with their blog and they were talking to me a lot about kind of that the sponsored programs that they were doing and the sponsorships, and I was hearing how little money they were charging for things. And I just kept kind of like butting in and saying, hey, what about this? What have you? I feel like you get way more money for that. I mean, what about that? And because when I was hearing about the impressions they were getting, I was like, that's out of this world. I mean, in our space, I know how much we would pay for that. So they're like, do you want to just work here? And I'm just like, kinda.

Kinda one of those formal business arrangements.

Exactly.

Yeah.

I think we had like a. And I was terrified a little bit. I think my dad tried to tell me it's a scary move, but maybe go for it. And then. And then, yeah, they hired me on and then that took off. And so I was running their sponsorship program. And then kind of while I was doing that. They got to work on their A Beautiful Mess app, which is the first app that came out in like 2013. And keep in mind, I'd come from the agency world where like, I could swear every other week I was talking my client out of trying to make some stupid app that I'm just like, it's not going to take. Like, apps fail. Like, we have insight after insight that says, nobody wants to download your stupid app. Stop trying to push this. And so I'm telling them, I'm like, nah, this is a bad idea. They're like, you're talking about like an M&MS.app. yeah, nobody wants to. Maybe nobody wants some grocery store app or something, but I think this idea is going to take. People are always asking. And the Beautiful Masks app, it was kind of like a design app of sorts. Like you could add cute doodles and things like that that you could recolor and put on your photos. And people are always asking Elsie how she puts text and drawings on her, like on her photos that she puts on Instagram. And so this would just give them a faster way to do it. And I was just like, yeah, sure, it is a good idea, it could work. But just the whole time I'm trying to soften their expectations. And then toward the end of it, I'm starting to help test and it kind of becomes another similar thing of like, do you want to just start taking this over? And I'm like, well, kind of. Anyway, the app launches and it like, I think it hit number one in the paid store before we could even announce did it did so, so well for us. And so I was proved vehemently wrong. Just could not have been, could not have been more incorrect about what I thought that would do. I was just like, I was like preparing them. Just like, well, you know, just be satisfied if you get a few thousand downloads. Like, be happy with that. And yeah, they did a lot better than that.

Do you remember what those numbers were initially or.

Honestly, off the top of my head, I couldn't. I do know that in the first year they saw like 1.2 million installs. I can tell you that. I can't tell you what it was in the first month though, off the top of my head.

So one of the things that. There's a few things I want to pull out from your story that are really interesting. One of them is going back actually to talking about when you're at the ad agency and weighing into what was happening at A Beautiful Mess. Side note, interviewed emma in episode 121. So for those that want to listen to that interview and Emma's story, we talk about kind of this idea of her journey and her path and overcoming some failures in order to find some massive success, one of which you just talked about. So you can go to foodbloggerpro.com121 to listen to that. But to go back to the ad agency talking about that and weighing into a beautiful mess, it sounds like what you were seeing was, hey, on the brand side of things, they're coming to us and they're spending X amount of dollars. X amount probably being quite a bit, and then saying, okay, I see that you're working with these brands and not charging enough based on what we see from the ad agency side. Is that in. In very simple way, is that what was happening?

It's exactly what was happening.

I mean, yeah. So with that, I would be interested to hear you talk more about that and maybe speak to the people that are in that position right now and don't feel fully empowered to ask a lot. And I say that knowing that we came from that place, Lindsey was a teacher. I worked at a nonprofit. Like, the idea of asking for as much as we'd make in a month for a sponsored post, it just felt like, so uncomfortable for us. So can you speak to those people?

Yes, absolutely. My favorite thing to bring up to people as far as the wild money that gets spent out there is one of the agencies that I worked for was a shopper marketing agency. So what that means is this agency did nothing, but they didn't do any of the ads you'd see on TV or anything. When you think of advertising, what they did was like in store marketing. So when you go to Walmart and you see, you know, you see a sausage brand promoted on an end cap, that is like, that's something that was negotiated by the sales team and there. And the brand completely pays for all of that signage and make sure that it goes up. And so one of my favorite things to bring up when it comes to the kind of money that these. These brands are spending is those little sample carts. So anytime you go to, like, a grocery store and somebody's handing you a sausage on a stick, if you want full store coverage, like, if you want to have one of those in every single store, it's not Walmart that's paying for that. It's not going to be Kroger that's paying for that. It's the brand. And for one day to have a little old lady say, hey, do you want a sausage? And then for you to say, no, please leave me alone, yeah, or yes.

I'll take that in my case.

Or yes, give me all of them, please. It's $500,000 and that was the rate seven years ago. So a half a million dollars is getting spent on one day for a lady to stand at a cart and hand you something. And it makes sense whenever you think about it from a logistical standpoint. But also you're like, whoa, that's a lot of budget. Another silly thing that there's all those coupons that are stuffed in the back of the, that are stuffed in the back of a newspaper like a Sunday newspaper. Nobody reads this stuff, nobody sees it, yet they're still spending upwards of 60 to $100,000 on every single insertion of that. And this is something that's just getting wildly ignored. But because it does have a traceable metric to it, which is the coupon, because they can see, okay, whenever I spin this, I know this many people. I can at least tell you how many people I got to, you know, to buy our product from it. It's something that they just keep spending money on. I do think again, that was, that was a few years back. And so I would, I would hope that that spending has come down a little bit by a lot of brands. But those coupons still exist and I have no doubt that that price has gone down anytime soon. And so it's like those are just two, like, like I'm not even talking super bowl ads or even primetime ads. Like we're talking about things that are getting largely ignored. But because they have that metric and they have that trace, they have that traceability, brands are spending a whole bunch of money on it. And so that's whenever, like, then I'm looking at, you know, a beautiful mess. And I'm seeing, you know, this is nothing but metrics. Like you have, you have all of this data that you can share, you can show that you're actually getting impressions and it can be something that's actually going to get click throughs. Like we had to do a QR code that I know that we spent $40,000 building a website that got seen by 3,000 people.

This was at the ad agency, this.

Is at the attics.

Isn't that crazy?

Yeah. Meanwhile, you have all of this traffic on a blog and you're just like, I mean, guys, this comes together. So that was so then whenever I was hearing about, it was the early days of sponsored content at the time. And I was hearing about some of the sponsorships that they were doing and how low these PR agencies were haggling bloggers. I was just like, guys, value, you've got something valuable here. And so just kind of raise that up. I mean, you need to put a metric to it, like, figure out exactly how many page views and put a reasonable CPM on that. But still, it's like, there's. You've got something here.

Yeah. How do you. How did you break through the. The kind of. It sounds like for you, maybe you had that mindset going into it, and then it was maybe instilling that within, you know, whether it was for an Emma or Elsie or whoever it was for. But how would people do that on a. You know, is it just like, hey, double your price? Like, is it putting a metric around things? How do people actually go from not charging as much to charging more?

Well, the answer is, unfortunately, you want to pace it so slowly because at the end of the day, like, especially if this is a steady income for yourself and it's money that you count on, you can't just up your rates on everybody. I was there. I was in the business development position at a beautiful mess for a year before we were charging prices that I was comfortable with. And so, first of all, it's that. But as far as how you get to those numbers, something that I did that not everybody does, but what made the most sense to me was to look at how many page views a post is actually getting and making sure I have a way to see that and not just the individual link, but everything. Like, so when it comes to sponsored content, for example, we want to see all of the page views that this is going to get. And at the time, a beautiful mess was kind of the classic blog format where the homepage was just. You just kind of scroll through, like what you guys call the blog view on Pinch of Yum, actually, we do the same thing. And so it was just this scroller. And so you need to make sure that you're not just tracking the traffic of your individual link, but you also want to track the traffic of that homepage view anyway, kind of come figure out what those page views are. And then I build out a CPM and like something that's pretty reasonable. And in my brain anywhere, like, I see people charge anywhere from a $35 CPM all the way up to a $200 CPM for sponsored content and CPM, I assume your cost per thousand, or RPM as they're calling it now too. But so Something like that. So if you have, you know, if you have 1,000 page views on a post, you know, charge $200 for it. If you've got, you know, if you're going to do a $200 CPM and then multiply that up as far as how it goes.

Yeah, sorry, go ahead. Yeah, you go, you go, you go.

Okay. In my brain, backing into numbers always makes it easier to explain to a potential sponsor. And then you can kind of. You can really justify yourself from there. However, sometimes it can just be. I mean, the sad truth of business and marketing. A lot of times it's just like if you ask for it, you'd be surprised what they'll be comfortable with because their budgets are quite large.

Yeah, I think it was essentially, I was going to say the same thing that you were, which is, it's nice to have those numbers that then you can communicate to the brand or whoever it is that you're working with. Here's the justification for it, and to really concretely say, okay, we look for this CPM, whatever it would be, $30, $200, you know, somewhere in that range, maybe, and say, okay, I'm going to use that. And say, not my page views overall, but on an average piece of content, maybe including the homepage as well. How many times will this get an impression for somebody? And then using that as a multiplier, it's industry language, people will understand it, that are part of ad agencies or PR companies, and it allows you then to feel comfortable flexing on that if you need to. So I think that's. I think those are some takeaways. Obviously not the focus of the interview, but it's something that we get questions about all the time and people always want to know, like, what's your rate? How much do you charge? And I think the basic thing is be attentive to it. And also know that as an individual creator, the numbers that you are thinking about are so different than the numbers that an ad agency or PR company or a brand is exposed to. And it's. As much as possible, I feel like it's beneficial to have conversations around closing that gap for the people that listen to this podcast. So, one, one over a million downloads for this application that you launch. I want to talk about that, because for people that listen to this podcast, I think we, first and foremost, myself included, think about creating content and creating things on a blog. It's called the Food Blogger Pro podcast. Right. But it's so much more than that that exists in terms of building A brand building a business. So when you look at that first app that you launched, A Beautiful mess, back in 2013, extremely successful. If you were to do kind of a post op on it and say, here's why we think it was successful, what were some of the elements that led into that initial success?

Well, handful of things. So having A Beautiful Mess as a launch platform is incredibly valuable. It was whenever the notion of influencer was becoming a word at all back then I think everybody was still just saying blogger, but it was whenever that whole concept. So having A Beautiful Mess as a platform was very helpful. And it was also the first app that we did. So the following was particularly behind it. And I'll talk a little bit about our follow up app, which is called Party Party, which was not as successful. Still did okay, but not as successful. But I'll talk about that in a sec or in a bit. But as far as what made A Beautiful Mess so successful, I think being the first app and then also having, I think the other piece of it that was big was it had a very self promotional element to was really obvious if somebody was using this app. And at the time people weren't taking their Instagram grids quite as seriously as they're taking them now. And so they would just kind of post anything. And so everybody was willing to post about it in their main feed. And then whenever you post about it, it's like its own little advertisement because like I said, it would add kind of like doodles that were very clearly from one source. It wasn't like, oh, that could have come from anywhere. It's like, oh, what app did you use to do this? And that's how it would be. So it was a very self promoting app, which was nice. And then beyond that, the App Store was a slightly different landscape at the time or the way that the App Store laid out was a little bit different because it would prioritize the top charts really well. It would be like the middle one. They don't prioritize it nearly as much as they do. But a lot of people be surprised to find out how it doesn't take as many downloads as you would think to get yourself to number one and paid. And so we were able to get ourselves up to number one and paid and then we could stay there. And then that became its own piece of marketing as well.

It kind of becomes a self fulfilling prophecy where you're number one because you're number one.

Exactly. Yes.

So A Beautiful Mess launches and obviously there's the app and Then there's the brand and the blog. And the brand and the blog. The influencer side of things allows you to launch the app, but what did it look like to promote it? Do you send out an email? You talk about it once. How did you get the momentum started with it when you first initially launched it?

So with this, embarrassingly enough, we didn't even have our email list going. I don't think like, I think we started it maybe a few months after we launched Beautiful Mess. So we didn't have that. It was all. We did a teaser post on the blog and then Elsie and Emma using their personal Instagram accounts because we didn't even have a business, a Beautiful Mez account yet. And they were just talking about it on their Instagram accounts leading up to it. And then the other big piece of it and something, again, I recommend as much as possible was the networking element. So Elsie in general has always been fantastic at networking and just finding, like, minds and people who do what she does online. They kind of get together and they become friends and then they grow together. And so throughout the years, she's kind of had that going for her. And we had this pretty long physical mailing list of people that we sent just little packages that were little promote, like it had like candy and an itunes gift card and then like a little blurb about the Beautiful Mess app. And we sent that out. And so in addition to kind of people using the app and showing it that way, we had a handful of larger Instagrammers that were getting these packages and then taking a look at what was inside and then taking a picture of that and posting that picture online. And then that also helped us out a lot.

Yeah, it's one of the things I've been thinking about with the work that we're doing is it sounds so obvious, but nobody knows what you're doing unless you tell them.

Yes.

And I think so often we live in our own head and we are heads down doing work. It's good work, but we're not telling any about it. Whether it's my parents or the, you know, people that we have on an email list. You really need to be intentional about thinking about creative ways. You don't want to spam people, but how do you creatively communicate what you're doing in a way that's engaging and fun and also helpful? And I feel like that's a great example of it's solving a problem. The first app you did, it's something that you knew people wanted. And so then how do you creatively think about ways to let people know about that. A physical package being one that not many people would think about. And it's a lot of work too, right, that goes into that. But creative way to engage people. One of the things that you had talked about was there was kind of a self promotional element with the app. And I know that especially for platforms, there's this really important concept called the viral coefficient. And are you familiar with that? I've heard the expression, but it's essentially exactly like what you were talking about, where it comes from. Eric Rees, I think is his name, how you pronounce his last name. And he wrote a book called the Lean Startup and he talks about how it's important for platforms to have an element of or a viral coefficient greater than 1. Meaning that for every person that comes on, they bring more than one other person onto the platform. Exactly. I'm wondering with a beautiful mess, that first app that you launched, you talked about kind of the natural self promotional element where people saw it and then other people like, hey, what are you using? And then downloading it. Are there other ways that you leveraged kind of your creators, becoming your promoters?

Hashtags were always such a big thing. And it sounds obvious, but with that app like Instagram has since changed up their API so it's not so easy to do this anymore. But we were able to auto populate abutifulmess in with everything that would be posted. So that was another thing that kind of really helped bring people on board. What was funny is that you can kind of almost see the, you know, when Instagram changed their API because you see that drop off, you'll see kind of the drop off in the hashtag, but it blew up to like well over a million in the hashtag very quickly just because we were able to kind of incorporate something like that. So, you know, it sucks. I'm using an outdated.

Yeah, but it's part of the story.

Yeah, but it's like something like that is what we always look for. And honestly, anytime we're creating an app, we always consider the hashtag. And so whenever we're creating a new product, we check the hashtag to see if it's something that, if it's something that's not very used, so then we know that we can start populating it and we can take it over. That was why we did a color story. The reason why we chose a color story versus color story was one, it was initially just because we could get all the domains, we could get the Hashtag. We could get the. We could get all the social accounts. We made sure that we were able to do that out the gate. And then the other piece of it was obviously kind of families with a beautiful mess. But initially we weren't planning on sticking with the whole, you know, that a. This. This. Like, that wasn't our initial plan, but it worked out as such. Like, well, actually, if we just put an A in front of it, the hashtag is. It's completely clean.

Yeah, it's funny. It's. This is related. Unrelated. But Lindsey will often do hashtags for when we do a trip or vacation or just like, we have a dog and the dog. Our dog's name is Sage. So she does Sage in the wild. And she's always. And it's not like other people are doing it. It's just Lindsay. But it's always this sad moment where, like, for some odd reason, somebody uses this super specific hashtag. And so it's like these pictures of our dog and then like this family of six in Orlando and we're like, oh, no, this is. Somebody is using this, thinking it's something.

Else we added to. We ran into the exact same thing with our wedding hashtag because we. We did hashtag trema.

Yeah.

Because, yeah, it was just kind of like a funny thing that my sister would always call us, and we're just like, yeah, that's good. And it wasn't taken at the time. And since there have been. There have been at least two other weddings. One of them, I think, was like one of the newer Power Rangers.

Oh, nice.

It was like. It was like one. It was some couple from that. So it's just like, if we want to see our wedding photos, we're scrolling like, way down before we find true theirs.

So you're in 2013, you're launching this app. I'm guessing you don't have a lot of experience with it, Your experience with the sponsor content. At this point, you have a little bit of a background at your ad agency with companies that come to you as the ad agency and say, hey, we want to launch an app. And you're kind of trying to convince them not to do it. But now you don't have the backing of a team of an ad agency. It's the scrappy startup mode. So how did you go about doing it? And for those that would be interested in doing it, is it a realistic thing for somebody who's not technical, who's not an app developer to get into the App Store and to start Their own app or build their own app?

Short answer, yes. Long answer, yes, but. And so it's as far as how we got started. It's funny that you mentioned an agency. We actually just threw a friend of a friend. There are some people that used to live in our hometown of Springfield, but it all moved down to Austin to start up their own little app agency. So it's kind of like an ad agency that does nothing but make apps. So it's like the kind of the thing I would imagine shouldn't exist if you would have asked me in 2010. So all they did was make apps. So we kind of. So what we did was we founded. We essentially found a team. Like, we didn't have a team, and we just hired one contractor. And what was good about that pairing? Like, we ran into some frustrations and some challenges with them, for sure, but they. But they were small, too, and so they were able to kind of work with us. We later tried to work with a larger agency, and it was a disaster. We had to cancel the whole thing. It was very frustrating. It was just. They were price gouging us at, like, they were just nickel and diming us at every corner and just really just playing a lot of, like, the old agency. And I think, like, the old account service person in me, like, flared up, and I'm like, I know exactly what you're doing, and this annoys me. And so. But with the smaller agency, they were kind. They were like us, and so they were a good mirror to us, and they really understood our budget. And a beautiful mess was like, they were big, but they hadn't gotten the business down yet. They were still kind of tightening things up and trying to grow this into that. And like I said, it took me a year before. Before I was even able to get the sponsored program even close to where I wanted it to be. So Emma was just like, okay, let me put together what a payment plan would be to make this app happen. So worst case scenario, we'll still be okay. It'll hurt, it'll definitely ding us, but we'll be okay. And just to give you guys a frame of reference there, it's like, I mean, I think. I believe for the first, a beautiful mass app, we spent $40,000 all in on that, which is steep and a little bit of a scary price, for sure. But like I said, they were willing to work with us on payments and all that kind of stuff and figuring out that payment plan. And so Emma's always about taking risks and diving in, but she never wants to take a risk without a parachute. So she always makes sure, she always looks at what worst case scenario is going to be before she'll jump and make sure that she can handle that. But really hope that that doesn't happen.

Yeah. So for those that are thinking about getting into it or like, hey, I'm kind of interested in, you know, playing around in this space, the probably the first place you're going to go if you're not somebody who's going to jump in and actually program the app yourself, which is totally doable, but a huge, huge thing to take on. How would you look for an agency? What are the things that were great about this? What were some of the good things with a smaller agency that you work with, some of the positives. And then you also talked about some things that were difficult about that and also some difficult things about working with a really big app agency. What should people look for when they're doing their interviewing and sourcing for an agency specifically for app development?

So it really kind of depends on what your budget is. I would recommend if somebody is entering this for the very first time, for the very first time and like they have no experience with the space at all to go the agency route. So not only can they, you know, not only can they get their product built, but they can learn the process in the meantime and that and the agency agencies are really good about kind of holding your hand through the process and really explaining that to you. I will say, though, once you do have that know how, I highly recommend going freelance. It can be so much more cost effective. And so just trying to find your own freelancers because functionally, full time, one developer built the Beautiful mess app per platform. So on iOS we had one developer. On Android, we had one developer who was making that. There were multiple developers that did work on it. But when it comes to the lion's share of the work, one guy can do it. And so that's why I definitely recommend, once you have an understanding of the process. But to answer your question more directly, as far as what's the best way to go about it, I mean, for us it was an introduction and that's how we landed on this. There was no rhyme or reason to it. They didn't have any experience with what we were doing afterward. Once I started searching agencies out on my own, very much just Google searching app agencies and then just going down the list, looking through their portfolio, look to see if they've done an app remotely similar to what you want to do. And like, think about it. Not necessarily. They've done the exact same app as you. Like, we don't necessarily. Like, when I'm looking, I'm not looking for somebody who's made a photo editing app that adds doodles to your. I'm not giving that specific. I'm just looking for somebody who has experience with image processing at all. Like, they've got some app where it's, like, where filters are, an offshoot process or something like that. So I'm looking for somebody. I'm just looking for any sort of experience in my space. And then I highly recommend small. Like, as far as the pros of the small team, like I said, they're in it with you. They want it to succeed, too. They're taking a gamble on you. They're, like, trying to get their business going. You know, it's. It's all of these things. And so there's just so many good things to say about working with a small team. Like the agency we worked with, they're such nice guys. We're still friends with them to this day, even with the challenges that we had and we had to part ways and all that kind of stuff. So still friends with them to this day. They're wonderful guys.

Yeah. One of the things that. And you kind of touched on this a little bit in telling your story, but I think it's important to point out and that I appreciate about your story is that a lot of what can happen in podcast interviews like this or with people that are even, like, courses, online, Internet courses, is people will have success. They'll move through something, and then they'll look back and say. And then tell the story of how they got to the point of where they are. But so often it's not that you need to follow that exact path in order to find that success. It's just like we started and we stumbled through and took this turn, and then this turn, and then this turn and this turn and this turn, and now we're here and we're experiencing success, whatever that might look like. And it's easy to look back at that and say, okay, what are the exact turns and twists along the way? Because I need to follow those. But it's not necessarily true. We don't have to follow that exact same path. And before we were talking about before we press record on this, and you'd kind of shared a similar idea with that and specifically kind of tying it back into school and schooling and kind of having this mindset of right and wrong. And I think that's such a cool concept. Can you talk a little bit about that and how you apply that to the work that you do?

Oh, definitely. I think especially grade school, like, you know, K through 12, but college, I mean, for my gen eds, like also school instills this idea of a correct way to do something, you know, you think about, like, and a lot of, and I still, like, I sense it with a lot of people today. Like whenever they ask, you know, what I do, they'll be like, oh, so what was your major? They want to hear that. I majored in app development or app development management. They want to hear that, like, I've gone through this process to figure everything out and I have the right answers. But the truth is, I mean the more I think about it, and this is just, it's a theory I have, but. But by the time something has a right and wrong process that is able to be quantified into schooling, it's going to be a pretty saturated market and it's going to be harder to break into. And the industries where you kind of fumble around and you're googling your way to figure it out, that tends to be kind of like where you're breaking new ground if you're having to figure it out yourself, I think, or you're just more likely to be. And so that's why just, I highly encourage it. Just like just figure it out. Any anytime that you're worried about something, don't ever, you know, beat yourself up because you don't have a degree in it or because you didn't study it. Like just learn it yourself, figure it out, teach yourself these things and you'll probably be more on the cutting edge by doing that.

Yeah, especially as it relates to the niche of anything online, whether that be apps or website development. Everything is developing and changing and moving so quickly that by the time it gets into that structured format, there's bleeding edge stuff that's happening that is going to be more beneficial to learn that can't be distilled down into like a structured chapter book as easily. Obviously exceptions in different fields, whether that be medical or engineering or what have you, but specifically for the people that we're talking to and the type of entrepreneurship that we're talking about, so, so, so relevant. And in doing that you'll be able to experience things like successes as you had with the Beautiful Mess and the app, but also you'll learn from the things that don't go as well. And you had mentioned an app called Party Party. I want to hear about the reasoning for deciding to launch another app. And then we can get into some specifics around that and how you kind of exit out of that as well.

Sure. So Beautiful Mess was incredibly successful. We had all this. We did a pretty sizable update to it, and. And we spent. I think we spent almost twice what we spent developing it initially to update it and to create an Android version. And it was so pretty sizable investment to get ourselves to that place. However, because we had the success of the initial launch, we had some budget, and we had the padding to try to invest a lot of that back in the product, and it just didn't really return. It's not that it didn't ever. I mean, the app was still doing okay, but we didn't experience the big explosion that we had from the initial launch. And so we're seeing. Well, people aren't as excited about this right now. So when you launch new products, that's when they'll do it. So that's when we kind of got into this mindset of like, okay, we gotta create. We need to create a new product here. And not to say that that's always the solution. Like, a color story is a good example of something where we've created a really good business structure out of consistently updating and growing and all that. But at the time, this was like, our only understanding. And so, so we set out to create Party Party, and it started as a photo booth app idea. Basically, all of the photo booth apps that existed were really old and didn't really respond. They weren't really conducive to Instagram. And we thought, well, that's interesting. This seems like an opportunity if nobody, like, because the photo booth apps, it was still. They would all just make strips that you could save on your phone and then do nothing with. And so we. We thought, hey, let's do it where it'll be a photo booth. But it'll lay it out in a grid of four. So then you can post that on Instagram. And then from there, we got the idea of, what if we stack these photos that it takes on top of each other and it'll create kind of like an animated gif. This is before boomerang or before photo, however you pronounce that. And we're just like, so it'll be kind of a fun little animation. And whenever we launched a Beautiful Mess, a lot of people complained about how we had in app purchases and it hurt our reviews. And so we're just like, what if we try to do this one with Just no in app purchases and we'll just put that out there and see how it goes. So it was like, it was a handful of experiments and ultimately it was a neat idea. Like I still really liked the idea and this is like a perfect example of like here's a great idea, but it was just harder for people to think of times when they could use it. But the Beautiful Mess app, any photo you could just drop like any photo you could just drop some text on or a doodle or a border or whatever and it just works. But with Party Party, it was very much like an experiential app. Like it only like when we launched, you couldn't import and so you would have to take photos right then and it would just do, you know, it worked like a photo booth. And so it did well. Like we had a good initial launch. It ultimately paid back its initial investment, but. But not much more beyond that. Like it probably. Yeah. So it started to, whenever we saw it, kind of stall out. We realized we can't actually afford to continue investing in this because at the time we were still like all of our developers were still paying contract. So with Party Party, that was actually the first time we ventured into all freelance. So we ended up being able to be much more cost effective with development because we hired a designer freelance independently and we hired a developer freelance independently who I found just through again Google searches. I was like looking. I would try to. Just a fun little trick if you're ever looking for a developer, especially for an app, is to look in the category that you're looking for and then kind of scroll through and look and look to see. Then you can see the developers. And if it's a person's name as the developer of the app, you can pretty much bank that it's an individual putting it out. And almost never is the individual putting it out a developer. They've usually hired somebody freelance. So then you can go and try to hire the guy that developed that app, which is exactly, that's exactly what we did. For Party Party there was an app called Mixtures, that's really strong app, super good, created by this very talented photographer. And we just kind of read through a blog post and he linked out a freelance developer that he found. And I'm just like, like, oh, wow, there we go. So I emailed him, I'm like, hey, you busy? He's like, not really. I'm like, great, let's work.

Yeah. So just to make sure people understand that. So you're talking about when you're looking through the App Store, what you'll see is you'll see the name of the app and then you'll also see underneath it, the app developer.

Yep.

And you can click on that app developer and then that can lead you to the other apps that they've developed. So, like, for instance, if I click on a Color Story, the app in the App Store, it shows me that it's produced by a Color Story llc. So you, in House, you own that. In this example, if I wanted to search a little bit more, I'd look for a Color Story website and see, you know, hey, do they mention anything about a freelance developer they worked with or maybe even reach out to a certain company and say, hey, you know, did you develop this in house? Did you work with an agency? Did you like them? Obviously, a lot of people won't respond, but that's kind of the name of the game is like. Like digging, researching, communicating, doing what you can to kind of hustle and make that connection.

Totally. Yeah. I mean, that's really what it was. I mean, I emailed a lot of people that didn't respond. We reached out to one company that did respond, and they took a meeting with us and they're like, nah, we're too big for you. Sorry, we're not interested in doing that. We only want to make our own products. And we ran into a lot of people like that. I mean, what I could just a tip on that is like, whenever you click on a developer and you realize that they have a whole bunch of apps, chances are they're a pretty large organization. So I wouldn't mess with it. But, yeah, we found this, and it was the same way we found our first developer for a Color Story. He's this guy based out of Manchester. He and a friend do this kind of side business called Simple Simple. They created a really great app called Lancan that was actually. It was similar to a beautiful mess, but the functionality was honestly stronger from a development standpoint. It was built better. And so but it just. But the app never really took off. And there's like. That's another little piece of insight is don't look at, like, go to the category and don't look at the top 10 necessarily. But maybe look at like the top 50 or top even. Honestly, look at the top 150, scroll all the way down. Because if you find. Because if something is only like. Especially on the paid side, if it's like past 100, that means it's probably getting. It's probably only getting a Few hundred installs a day which is not paying anybody's salary. So what that, so if you see that that's the only app that they have out, then that person has a full time job. So try to find. So like you just like you look for the people that are like clearly relying on freelancers and then and it's just like there's a bunch of little cues like that where you can. That was how we found our developer for Color Story and he was freaking phenomenal. Like just, just so, so good. That was who built it initially before we kind of built up our staff and everything.

Yeah. And do you have on, on your team now staff and developers or do you continue to work with freelancers at this point?

Yes and yes. We, we, we just, we finally we've hired, we've hired some full time develop. We have one full time developer, we're looking to hire a second right now. And then we continue to supplement the extra work to other freelancers that we've made contact with throughout the year.

Sure.

And honest. And too is once you get connected with one freelancer, they've always got a friend.

Yes.

They've always got somebody else like and then you just get more and more connected. Like right now I have a fleet of freelancers I could reach out to at any given point for any need that we have because of just this process. But when we started A Color Story, I mean I was spending, I mean I was spending 30 hours a week. That sounds daunting but like I was really like I was just hunting and searching and doing everything I could could like to try to find, to try to find that right person.

Yeah. They say that the role of a CEO as you grow a company and this is relevant even for people that are solopreneurs because there'll be a point where you have to decide do I want to be the maker or the manager? And there's no harm in being the maker, but you have to be okay in some sense staying where you are. And again not a bad thing at all. But if you want to, to continue to grow and scale, there has to be that point where you switch to kind of manager. And that means the role of CEO and recruiter. And they say with CEOs as your company's growing, you know, a fourth to a third of your time should be spent thinking about building your team and recruiting and adding people to that. So if you are somebody when you're listening to this, that's a little bit later on. Obviously that's kind of intimidating. If you're in the early stages, you're like, I'm just trying to grow this thing initially, but eventually, if you stick with it, you will get to that point and it might be, you know, two years and it might be five years and it might be eight years. But I think it's important to hear that because that is work. It's just a different type of work than you're used to doing as the maker. So you have this team now. What is the team at for a color story?

So officially we are 1, 2, 3 people strong, about to be 4 and possibly 5. Got it. Where we're looking to make. Once a design kit launches, it's gonna give us a really clear picture of our business and exactly where it is. And then because we. I've worked for companies that lay people off like crazy, so we are very careful about every hire that we make, so we can sustain them for as long as possible.

Absolutely.

And so. Oh, go ahead.

Yeah, well, and I was gonna say ask some questions specifically about the business side of things, but before I do that, I want to make sure that you get a chance to say what you're going to say.

Oh, that was about it. I did want to say one little piece of encouragement or one little nugget of truth that I've also observed by people who might be a little bit overwhelmed by the initial cost of an app. Another path to go that we do know works is to be able to find some. Try to find a developer that. That really believes in your project and will just take ownership as payment. I've seen that happen. Actually. The developer we used to make, Party Party, I connected to a friend who was kind of working on a gadget that had an app to it, and he just accepted ownership with them because he was so excited about the project. The app Rana Designs, I don't want to speak everything to it, but I know that she partnered up with. I know that she. She partnered up with a developer. From the start. I think it was just her and a guy and they kind of put the whole thing together. Afterlight was a similar story. It was this guy, Simon, just met up with a really talented developer and they partnered partnerships. Also, if you're just able to find. If you got a really good idea and it's something you think you can sell a developer on depth. Like, don't underestimate the power of your idea because if it is something strong, it's also a very likely situation that you would be able to bring in some developer for just ownership and then that way you're not having to front thousands of dollars to get it off the ground.

Yeah. I remember hearing the founder of Mint.com, which is a personal finance site, talking about his first engineer hire. Paid a salary, but as somebody just out of college. And so he's like. Like, they kind of still had that scrappy college mentality of like, sleeping on a friend's couch and but exchanged that low salary with an equity percentage of the company. So even though that person had to eat ramens, ramen noodles, you know, for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, there was this idea they were passionate about there. It wasn't a huge lifestyle change for them. And there was this upside potential of like, hey, if this becomes something, which it did, and it was purchased by QuickBooks or the company that does QuickBooks, then there's upside potential for that. So one more thing I actually want to hit before we talk about kind of some of the business side of things. Party Party. There came a point where you said, this isn't worth doing anymore. How do you know when that point is? And how do you know when to wind it down?

You really start to. You feel it off an update and the excitement that comes from the update, honestly, like, because with the App Store, you have really clear metrics ongoing. You can always see exactly how well something's doing. So whenever you've put a substantial amount of money into this update and you don't have any other ways to. I mean, in Party Party's case, the only way we could monetize was by people buying the app more. And so if we noticed that there was just a big drop off in excitement and we just kind of watched the numbers decline and we're just like, oh, okay, so. So you can see a pattern again, with anything digital, you can really see that decline go down. And not to say that maybe a more competent businessman could have taken a look at that and turned it into something amazing, but I was looking at it and I was just like, I think this is winding down. Once we got to a few hundred installs a day. And you do the math, it just doesn't add up. We're just like, okay, cool, this is. We're going to just kind of let that ride out and then move on to the next thing.

Yeah. And just logistically, does that look like, hey, setting a date? And this is when it goes out of the App Store and do you have to make an announcement to people about it? Are people angry that they paid for it? And then it's not Updated. Was there anything in terms of the communication side of things that was an issue or that was hard to do?

Well, it's a. It's a hard thing to say. I mean, it's a very organic. It was a very organic process for us. It was like interest winded down. People weren't really. You could see in the hashtag, people weren't really using it as much. And there wasn't really, like I said in. The downloads were declining.

Yeah.

And so no, whenever it comes to the App Store, I mean, that's like, once you install something, you have it. Like they have. Anybody who has installed Party Party still has it on their phone if they want to use it. And we supported it for, I believe, a year. And so when I think about spending a dollar and the idea that.

Isn't that the absurdity of apps.

Oh, my God, I can't tell you how many times we have that conversation. You spend double this on a cup of coffee all of the time. And I can guarantee you have never expected your cup of coffee to last you a year.

Yeah. And if the barista spills it on you while they're giving to you, you're like, not a big deal. You paid 350 to get your hand scalded.

Yeah, it's the strangest thing. But so because of that, honest. And there wasn't really much pushback. I mean, some people, there were definitely some users that were disappointed. It still did have a few active users. It still had a decent amount of active users that wished that it could have gone on forever. But it's a reality of business. This is a $1 product. We can't update that indefinitely. And quite frankly, it wasn't getting enough use. And we didn't think to make any rhyme or reason of including in app purchases. And so we're just like, let's just call it good. We made this thing, it's out there, it paid for itself, and now it's, you know, you enjoyed it for a while and now you don't. Yep, for sure.

That makes sense. So in app purchases, that brings me to the next and kind of final conversation piece that I wanted to have, which is the business side of things. And. And for bloggers, we think about SEO and we think about social media followers and maybe we think about ads, and that's kind of the mindset that we live in. But for apps, you think about things like purchase price or in app purchases. From a business side, does it make sense to have a paid app? Does it make sense to only go in app purchases and maybe just in general, can you talk about the business strategy with apps and how they're different than a blogging mindset?

For sure. So it's. Apps have been an experiment for us from day one. We're now, I mean, like I said, so Color Story is now incorporated as its own company and it's still an experiment every day. I mean, it's. You mentioned, you mentioned Lean Startup. It's kind of, it is that whole like, that's the mentality. You're just trying stuff, see if people like it and then bring it back and then you fix it. If they don't like it, you and you cut it off if it doesn't work. And so it's all that kind of thinking. And so with in app purchase, like with a free app versus a paid app, a paid app really made a lot of sense for a Beautiful Mess. But what it meant from a business standpoint is we had an enormous spike in the beginning and then we never saw that spike again. With a Color Story, we actually have really steady monthly and we have really steady, like up and down. And we, I mean, we still had a really, really big spike in the beginning, of course, but we've since had months where we've had more downloads than our, you know, than our first month. Our second year we actually made, we actually doubled. We. We made twice the money we made in our first year.

Does that come from increased downloads or does that, do you attribute that to the strategy involved with the in app purchases?

So it's a. Increased downloads is a big, big thing, but then also an in app purchase strategy. And so a Color Story took longer to make as much money as a Beautiful Mess made. It has since passed that, but it took longer for it to do that because every, because every install, I mean, depending on location, like, but every US install is only worth so much money to us and so we have to kind of quantify exact what that is. Whereas a Beautiful Mess, it's much more straightforward how much an install is worth. Whereas with in app purchases, you kind of have to look at how much money you made over a given time period, divide that by how many installs you've gotten, and then kind of get a rough number of how much you can make per user. So the pros to doing a paid app obviously is that you get money right up front. And the people who buy that app, I think, are a little bit more invested in it because they have paid for it and so they're going to give it. They're going to try harder at it, they're going to try harder to like it, they're going to use it more. It's just you get a little bit more engagement out of a paid app and you do it because a free app, it's disposable. You can install it like click, tap a few months, yeah, realize, oh, this sucks, I don't want it, and get rid of it. So free apps ultimately can be more disposable. So you need way more users to, to kind of get your, to get your return. And so it's a much bigger game. I would recommend somebody, you know, if you, if you don't have a clear, like a clear, large launch pad. Paid apps are a great way to go. But the first thing you have to check is what category am I, what category am I in and what's the standard for that category. You can't like, you know, trying to launch a social. Trying to launch a paid social media app, for example, is probably not going to work. Like no one, you know. And that's just, it's the unfortunate reality of it. And you know, as, you know, running platforms, it's very expensive to keep something like a social network going. So that's why it's like we kind of shy away from social networks altogether because they're just such a scary. Social media is such a scary space to try to enter. It's so competitive and it's so expensive because you have to have all of that server space. And so anyway, look at your category, see what's standard for it. And the photo category is really nice. It has an even split of paid and free. And so people are very willing to pay for apps in the photo category, but they also are willing to make in app purchases. And there's some really good established business models on the in app purchase side. So a color story was where we wanted to venture into that, to the free side and see how that worked out. Actually, with this new app, a design kit, we are going to make that paid out the gate. So you're going to get more with your download than you would than you would with a color story. And so we're going to kind of see what those two look like when they're paired together. We know a design kit's not going to get nearly as many installs as a color story, But we know that we'll make more per user and theoretically we could have a more engaged user. And so, you know, so maybe that gives us something that we can work with for a Little bit more long term.

Got it. So you had mentioned server space and for people that have a blog, they think about WordPress as the content management system and we have different hosts that we use. What is the equivalent for an app? Do you build it on a certain system and what would your recommendation be for that kind of back end server or the place where you'd build it? I'm guessing you've looked at a lot of different options and have talked to different freelancers and developers. Are all of your apps built on the same stack, as we would call it, or is it different for each one?

These of them. Knowing how well you know the headache of hosting, I'm so excited to tell you that you don't. Depending on what app it is, you don't have to deal with hosting hardly at all because Apple will. Apple actually hosts your software. So I think it's just what it is. Apple and Google both. So you create a package, you deliver it to the App Store and then Apple hosts it and they download it from the App Store. So unless you have some sort of of web based element to your app, to your application, like a beautiful mess, for example, didn't have any web based element to it, so we just put it in the App Store and then we didn't have to worry about hosting at all. A Color Story has a really, really lightweight web based component where we can add new filter packs whenever we make new additions like filter or effects packs. So we want to be able to add those dynamically. So we host on a really basic managed dedicated server. But because it's so lightweight, it doesn't matter and it can handle the traffic no problem. So the hosting can be very minimal. If you were to do something like a social network, then you're talking about a stack, then you're talking about getting a scalable situation with AWS or whatever the Microsoft version of that's called.

For people that follow along closely with what we do, you'll know that there's. This was maybe two years ago. Podcast listeners will know that I talked about playing around in this space of apps in social networks with an app called Plate View for recipe videos. And we pressed pause on that. The biggest issue being exactly what you're describing is the scalability and the cost associated with that, especially with video. Like video is the extreme example of costly magic. Yeah. And so that's something I'm still interested in. And this is one of the many reasons why this is. This conversation was so interesting and is interesting is because there's so much potential for apps and it's such a great avenue for creators. But also there's, it's a, it's an entirely different avenue. Right. You're not walking down the same path as you are with building a blog or building a website. So if somebody's listening to this and they say, hey, I, this kind of actually sounds interesting to me. This is something that I would want to do. What would your one piece of advice be for them, Trey, in terms of, of taking that first step into pursuing their idea, whether it be an iOS or Android app?

I would say try to have a really clear launch path and maybe not necessarily all the way of path to profitability, but really, really think about how you're going to get your money back. Because I think we see movies like the Social Network or something like that and we think, oh, I'm just going to go get venture capital. It's just like venture capital firms invest in like companies a year total of like the thousands and thousands of companies that exist. It's very unlikely that you're going to end up in that space. So it's. So have a very clear idea of how you're going to pay for it and how you're going to make your money. Because if you don't have that idea, like there are mediocre ideas that have a really good business plan that flourish wildly, but a fantastic idea with a terrible business plan will fail every time time. So just always like just really think through the business piece of it and don't get me wrong, have a great idea that's very valuable but that's, that's one side of it in the business side. And having a clear, like a clear launch plan and a clear path to money is just so, so important.

Yeah, that's great because I think oftentimes we do think of apps as the social network and oh, we're going to build this thing, a lot of people are going to use it and then maybe somebody would be interested in buying, buying it. Or that piece of the Facebook story that people so often don't think about is the venture capital part where it's like they had these millions and millions of dollars that were coming into the company before it was profitable and the stress that's related to that, not that you can't do that, but it's just a very different path than a kind of a bootstrapped profit first approach. So we talked about a couple different apps, but I want to give you a chance to do a little bit of a shout out to Those. And. And for people that want to download those, I've downloaded both of those apps. Where can they do that? And then also talk a little bit about a design kit and what's to come.

Absolutely. So we have a Color Story. Color Story is kind of our flagship product at the moment, and it is a photo editing app kind of at its highest level. But the point of difference that we wanted to create was we saw a certain look specifically in kind of the blogger world. And everything that we're doing that was like just a brighter, bolder, more colorful look to photography that we felt like wasn't really reflected in a lot of the really popular apps out there, or really any apps that we could find. And so we set out to make something just to create this very, very colorful vibe with our filters. And so that's the filter piece of it, which is probably our number one kind of selling point. And then after that, Elsie really wanted to create. She really wanted to be able to add light effects to photos. But all of the apps out there that add light effects, it's kind of a fixed position, and a light effect being a light leak or a light flare or something like that, and it's a fixed position when you drop it on your photo. She wanted something you could drag around with your finger. Technologically, this is actually one of the more impressive pieces of our app, because what those light effects are is several layers of color that blend with your photo in different modes. So overlay and screen and normal or whatever. And every time you tap it with your finger to move it, it kind of lifts it up and unblends it. And then whenever you drop it, it blends. So it becomes truly part of your photo whenever it does it. But again, it's a little bit. It's like a very specific niche. Who wants that? But I really. I'm just real, technologically really proud of how well it works. And then our tools, we just try to have pretty robust tools, but the big feature in our tools is that we have curves that you can use really easily with your finger. And then last, we make it so you can kind of create the equivalent of a Photoshop action with our saved section. So if you have an edit that you really like, you can save that edit and store it. And that way you can run that edit over and over again on any others. And then when this new update that we just put out that we're still kind of managing through right now, we added Instagram Grid planning and batch editing. So now you can preview what your photo will look like in the context of your grid before you publish it to Instagram.

Oh, that's great. And like you said in the middle of the podcast, that's such an important thing, right?

How does the grid look? Yes. Oh, my gosh, so much. I mean, it's so, so useful. I'm using it because right now I've got a pretty close watch on the design kit Instagram, as we're getting that launch. And we use it exclusively for actually all of our Instagram feeds. We always drop it in to see how it looks and all that kind of stuff. So it's pretty great.

Awesome.

Yeah, go ahead then. A Design Kit is the new app that we're coming out with. It actually comes out tomorrow. I don't know when this is going to be.

So it'll be live when this airs?

Yep, there we go. It'll be live. Hopefully. It went really well anyway. And it's a design companion app to a color story. So we set out thinking we were going to try to update the Beautiful Mess, but ultimately we just had a completely different vision on the kind of designs that we wanted to create and the kind of experience that we wanted to create. And it just ended up being way too different from a Beautiful mess, where we felt like if we were to give people this as an update to a beautiful message, they would just be upset because we took away all of their functionality that they might have liked. And so with this, the big feature is that we have realistic brushes that are kind of modeled after pencils and paint brushes and markers and things. And so it was a big piece to get that element right. But not only can you draw in color, but you can also draw in texture. So if you wanted to do a paint streak of gold leaf or of marble or of a gradient or something like that, you're able to do that in real time. So you can kind of like, as you draw, you just see kind of the gold reveal on your photo. Awesome.

Great. And when this goes live, we'll be sure to link to those in the show notes, too. So if you listen on your phone to this podcast, the nice thing is you can go in and click on those links and that will direct you right over to the app store. So you'll be able to check those out. And if not, you can just search, I would guess, any of the names on the app stores and those will pull up.

Yep.

Cool. Thanks so much for coming on the podcast. Really great to talk to you. And it's a niche in an area that we haven't had a lot of time to talk about on the podcast, so I know people take a lot away from it.

Yeah, definitely. Thanks for having me.

Thanks a lot.

Hey beautiful people. Alexa here bringing you an announcement and the Reviewer of the Week. So first the announcement. You guys are probably familiar with our WP Tasty brand right now. It's the brand where we sell WordPress plugins to food bloggers like Tasty Recipes, which is a recipe plugin, and Tasty Pins, which is a plugin that helps you with your Pinterest descriptions. So this brand is growing rapidly. So we are looking for a customer success agent who will help us support our customers and keep track of feature requests for our products. We're looking for someone who's patient, a self starter, someone who has a passion for customer service and someone who is just a really good communicator to help our customers out. So if this sounds like you, or maybe you know of someone who would be the perfect fit for us, you can go to wptasty.com job and find out more information and then submit your application. And if you're interested, be sure to hop over there sooner rather than later because the application deadline is this Sunday, Feb. 18, 2018. And now it's time for our Reviewer of the Week. And this one comes from anushree from simmertoslimmer.com this blog is amazing. She has so many wonderful, beautiful photographs and she has has a ton of really delicious looking Indian recipes that I can't wait to try in my own kitchen. And she says, I just got done listening to Bjork and Casey chat about SEO. I am blown away with all of the wealth of information that was shared and for free. This podcast is the best way to keep yourself up to date on the latest and greatest that is happening in the food blogging world. Thanks a ton Bjork. Keep up the good work. Thank you so much for listening Anushree and thank you so much for your wonderful review. And if you guys want to check out that interview with Casey, it's one of my favorite episodes. You can find it at foodbloggerpro.com 133 all right friends, signing off here. We really appreciate you listening and tuning in every week. You are the best from all of us here at fbphq. Make it a great week.

Sam.