It is the job of the entrepreneur to build many unsuccessful products. That is until one of them turns out to capture an audience and work out. Work out in a way where it’s both a financially and spiritually sound decision to keep working on one thing and to give this thing your all.
Until then, however, it’s all about iterating. It’s all about throwing things at the wall until something sticks. I’m sure there are tons of people out there who will say otherwise. People who work on the same products for years and years until they’ve perfected them and turned them into something that works well enough. I’m not that kind of entrepreneur. I am very attached to all of my ideas—until I’m not, And until I move on and find the next thing to obsess over.
This post is the beginning of a series of post-mortems. I am writing about the failed products I’ve built, celebrating the process of failing and learning from failure, and the many helpful and amazing things I’ve picked up and learned along the way. Every product makes you better at building the next.
”Dub” was an app that me and my co-founder at the time worked on in 2019. He and I worked together on three products, Dub, Knok, and School Night, until the co-founder conflict tore the company apart, leading to many hours spent with lawyers and litigation. I worked on these products with someone I then considered a great friend. Him betraying me and taking all of what we worked for away from me was very hard. It’s not the topic of this post, though, and I’ll leave all the interpersonal drama out of my writing. I’ll focus on my work for these products and what I learned during the projects.
Dub was a simple idea. Apple had just launched the iPhone 12 Pro with a new but little-known API. It allowed developers to tap into more than one camera feed at a time, letting you take photos and videos simultaneously with both the phone’s front- and back-facing lenses picture-in-picture. This API came with a simple example project that we adapted and turned into an app: Dub. Short for Double Photo, it was a playful title for a silly singular-purpose app.
While Dub had a basic feature set, we wanted to be smart about how we turned it into a product. At the same time the Apple API came out, Snapchat also released an API that lets users sign in with their Snap account to third-party apps. It also enabled one more crucial feature—zero-tap sharing of images and videos as snaps. So, instead of taking a photo or video in the Snap app, you had the same experience by creating those images and videos with Dub. Frame your photo, tap the shutter, and you’re immediately on the Snap posting screen. Very seamless.
Snapchat loved this tight integration and invited us to partner events, where I made several valuable connections and conversations. Social founder Greg Isenberg was there, and while we exchanged contact information and linked up for coffee later, I’m sure we didn’t leave the best impression on him. I had just moved out of Europe for the first time two weeks prior, and I was quite the young, anxious German outcast. I’d like to think I make better first impressions now, but back then, I don’t think I would’ve given myself my number, either.
Twelve months later, one of the people leading the Snapchat design team told us they found our app and were inspired by our product when we first launched it all those months ago. We never had more than a few hundred users. Surprisingly, about a dozen of them were sitting in Snapchat’s headquarters admiring the UX we built for a new kind of photo.
To Summarize
Dub was my start in product development. It was my first side project that shipped, and I started considering myself a founder & builder because of it. I had only ever built other people’s products until that point, and it was an intoxicating experience to bring something to life that I had a part in drawing up from scratch. I used some basic Metal shaders for the app’s visuals and adding graphics to the final video file output. So, in addition to it being my first app, it also introduced me to some of Apple’s audio and video libraries, Metal shaders, and the brand-new Snapchat APIs.
Dub was a full success, and I’m happy I spent time polishing every single frame and pixel to create something to be proud of.
