Please, Don’t Write About My App

Please, don’t write about my app. It’s not that good. In fact, it probably crashes sometimes. Also, I don’t really know what I’m doing.

Please, don’t tell your friends about my app. They probably won’t like it. I mean, the art assets aren’t good enough. It’s too simple. And it only really appeals to a tiny niche anyway.

Thus goes my inner monologue every time I prepare to ship an app. It’s not because I’m humble: trust me, I’m not. It’s just…fear of failure, I guess?

For indie developers, marketing is especially important. You gotta get the word out about your stuff. You gotta build your audience, refine your #brand, hack all dat growth, and so on and so forth. It feels gross. It isn’t, though—at least not for the most part. I struggle with it though, as I’m sure many of you do as well.

Look, my app isn’t special. It’s not Apple Design Award material. Does that mean it shouldn’t exist? No, it doesn’t mean that at all. I created something that’s useful to me, and now I’m going to share it with others. If they don’t find it useful, that’s fine. But if I want to give it its best chance at success, it’s still my job to tell its story.

But if you do…

Look, if you’re going to write about my app, say this: it’s a simple utility for merging short, portrait videos. It’s called SnapThread. It’s currently waiting for review.

It’s for parents who have a bajillion Snapchat videos of their kids with Marilyn Monroe hair or with a hot dog dancing on their head or what-have-you and all they want to do is create a sweet supercut of them all. No fancy filters or overlays or stickers or cropping. No dumb letter-boxing that forces it into landscape. Just stitch ’em all together and get on with your day.

It’s for travelers who have 30 Instagram Stories videos from their trip to Disney World spread over several days, and want to mash them all into one movie.

It was created by a mom who wanted to visualize how her son has grown.

SnapThread does what it says on the tin: it let’s you select portrait videos from your photo library that are 15 seconds or less, re-arrange them to your liking, merge them together, and save them to your photo library. Sometimes it takes a long time. Sometimes the videos have to be downloaded from iCloud. Sometimes their rotation has to be fixed before the merge can finish.

This isn’t an app for your home screen. This is an app you throw in your “Photo/Video Editing” folder and use once in awhile when you need it. It’s like “Clips,” but simpler.

SnapThread will be out soon. In the meantime, you can check out this page about it (the App Store link doesn’t work yet obviously).

Tell your friends! Or don’t, maybe. I don’t know.