Issue #19 - Tinseltown
Hey everyone, I’m back! In case you hadn’t seen the social media posts, I had to pause the newsletter because juggling my apps, family life, and the newsletter was too much to manage. From now on, the plan is to have a more flexible schedule rather than a regular one, updating as I have time and discover interesting apps. If you have an app or know of one I should check out, please get in touch.
In this issue, we’re taking a look at Tinseltown, created by Tim Schmitz. Tinseltown is an app I’ve been on the lookout for some time. It allows you to track films and TV shows you want to watch. Additionally, it gives advice on which streaming services are best for you based on what you want to watch.
It's early days for Tinseltown, but it shows promise. I’m interested to see how Tim builds on this great foundation.
App Spotlight
App Name : Tinseltown
Developer : Tim Schmitz - Mastodon
What is Tinseltown?
Tinseltown is an app that helps you find where you can stream the movies and shows you want to watch. The goal is to go beyond looking up a single title and make it easier to decide which services make the most sense for you. There are a ton of services out there, and nobody can subscribe to them all. Tinseltown is a way to make smarter choices so you get access to lots of stuff to watch without breaking the bank.
Where did the idea for Tinseltown come from?
Like so many indie apps, Tinseltown really got started because it was something I wanted to use myself. There are other apps out there that will look up where you can watch an individual movie or show, but I wanted something more holistic than that. There are so many streaming services now, and they’re all more expensive than they used to be, so I like to pick a couple at a time and then rotate them out periodically. I kept thinking something like “I want to watch The Last of Us, and I know it’s on Max. If I subscribed to Max, would I get access to anything else I’ve been meaning to watch?” Tinseltown can answer that question for me because I’ve built a list of shows and movies I want to watch. I can tap on the Max tab in Tinseltown and find that in addition to The Last of Us, I’ll get access to Julia and The White Lotus too. Bingo.
What’s one stand out feature you’d like everyone to know about?
If you tap the star in the upper right, you’ll see the Recommendations view. The idea here is that Tinseltown can look at everything on your Watchlist, plus the list of services you subscribe to, and figure out if there are services you don’t need, or ones you might benefit from adding. For instance, if I subscribe to Disney+ but don’t have any Disney+ titles on my watchlist, it’ll suggest unsubscribing since I’m not really getting anything out of that service. Or if I have 10 Netflix titles on my watchlist but don’t currently subscribe, Tinseltown might suggest adding it. I have a number of ideas for ways I can keeping improving recommendations in the future, but even now I think they’re pretty nifty.
Why did you decide to link to Callsheet instead of showing details in the app?
The biggest reason is that I wanted to keep Tinseltown focused on what differentiates it from other apps, finding where to stream your content and helping you make choices about which services to use. There’s so much detail available about each movie or series, and I knew I could blow through a lot of time making all that information available in Tinseltown. I figured why not stay focused on what’s unique about my app and let others do what they do best in terms of details. I also just think Casey Liss has done such a great job with Callsheet so it seemed like a fun chance to send people his way if they have the app installed. (Folks who don’t can link to the web where TMDB, my data provider, provides some good info as well.) It’s possible that somewhere down the line I might decide to bring more details into Tinseltown, but for now I have a long list of other features I want to add first.
How do you promote Tinseltown?
It’s a highly technical multi-pronged strategy centered around badgering all my friends and family to try the app and then tell everyone they know! Seriously though, I think word of mouth helps a lot. One thing that really encouraged me to go forward with building Tinseltown was the positive feedback I got consistently when I told people about the idea. I heard a lot of versions of “Oh wow, I can’t believe I don’t already have an app for that!” So there seems to be some enthusiasm there. I’ve also done some limited App Store Search Ads campaigns, and I’ve reached out to some publications that cover this sort of thing. Marketing is something I need to get better at, and my budget for paid advertising is really limited, but I’m hoping it’s something I can improve and expand over time.
Did App Store Search Ads help drive downloads?
I’d say it wasn’t a huge effect. I did notice a significant increase in my App Store impressions, but it didn’t translate into a ton more downloads. That’s probably a sign that I should work on improving my App Store screenshots and other marketing to make sure I’m communication the best features of the app. On the other hand, I do think it helped improve my search rankings, and that was definitely part of my goal in starting the campaign in the first place, so I consider it a qualified success.
How did you decide on the pricing?
I decided early on to use subscriptions because I think ongoing revenue is so important for apps over the long run. One of the fun things about developing for Apple platforms is that they’re always evolving, but that also means apps need to evolve with them. Since the App Store doesn’t support upgrade pricing, subscriptions mean I can continue building new features, taking advantage of new platform opportunities, and fixing bugs after that initial release. For Tinseltown specifically, I also need to pull data about movie and series availability from a third party API, and subscriptions help me be ready if my API costs change in the future.
All that said, I didn’t want the app to be super expensive, so I settled on $2/month or $20/year. If Tinseltown helps you figure out that you’re subscribed to a streaming service you weren’t using, that might save you $10 or $15 in a month right there.
Tinseltown is also my first foray into having an ad-supported free tier. I wanted people to be able to try out the app before committing to a subscription, but again I wanted to ensure some kind of ongoing revenue. In the past I’ve been leery of the privacy implications of putting ads in apps, but I’m also inspired by developers like David Smith who are willing to experiment with new ideas and business models and see where it takes them. I decided to give it a whirl and so far I think the results have been promising.
How did you launch Tinseltown?
I launched the app on May 1, which was mostly an arbitrary date when I didn’t have too much going on in the rest of my life. I’d reached out to some press who cover new apps, and the folks over at MacStories were kind enough to include Tinseltown in the MacStories Weekly newsletter. (I feel like I’m terrible at naming things so I loved that they called Tinseltown “delightfully named.”) I also posted about the launch on social media and sent an email to a small distribution list I have from previous apps. Finally, I experimented with a small App Store Search Ads campaign, in part to help improve my App Store search rankings after the initial release.
How long did it take to get to the first version?
I first started noodling around with the idea in the spring of 2023, but at first I was just doing some proof of concept work and playing around with different designs and layouts. Things really started to come together in earnest in early 2024, and from there it was 3 or 4 months of more focused work before I released it at the beginning of May 2024. I could have easily spent more time on the first version - I have a long list of ideas! But I also wanted to get something in users’ hands so I could get a feel for whether other people found the app as useful as I do.
Is there anything you’ve learnt that stands out?
I knew this already to some degree, but I feel like I learned the lesson all over again: Marketing is hard! And in a lot of ways it’s just as important as the code. I wish I’d started doing press outreach sooner, and I think I might have benefited from posting a little more on social media about what I was building during the development process. (I love following along with other developers as they build stuff. I think it’s so inspiring!) It can be so easy to get focused on building the app and it’s tempting to think that if you build something fun and useful, people will find it. The reality of the App Store in 2024 is that you really have to build an audience for yourself and your app because it’s not as easy to stumble onto things as it used to be. That’s a lesson that I’ll need to keep on learning. Also, the social media world is much more fractured now than it was a few years ago! I never had a huge following on Twitter, but now with Mastodon, Threads, and other services, it’s just a different ballgame.
Any plans to add episode tracking?
Yes, absolutely! I’m actually working on that now as part of the first significant update. You’ll also be able to mark things as watched, which will let the app do interesting things like make recommendations based on how many unwatched titles are available on a given service. I actually did a design session during WWDC to talk about the app and the Apple folks I spoke to had a bunch of interesting suggestions along those lines. Further down the road, I hope to add integrations with services like Trakt so that you can import and sync your watchlist and progress if you already have them there.
Any tools or apps you would recommend others check out?
As anybody who uses Xcode knows, it can really chew through your disk space, and I find DevCleaner super helpful in tidying it up. I also used Picasso to help create my App Store screenshots. It’s a cool, native Mac app that really helped speed up what can be kind of a time-consuming and not very fun process. Finally, even though it’s not technically a tool, I’d be remiss if I didn’t give a mention to Hacking with Swift. Paul Hudson has really put together an incredible resource for developers. Tinseltown is the first app I’ve build that’s entirely SwiftUI, and there were more than a couple of occasions when I’d have wasted a ton of time figuring something out if not for Paul’s work.
What's one tip you would give to someone starting out?
This is a bit of a cliche, but work on something that interests or excites you. If you find something fun or useful, I think the chances are high that someone else will too. If building apps is a side project for you, like it is for so many indie developers, it can be an opportunity to set your own direction that we don’t always get in our day jobs. Enjoy it!
Where can everyone go to find out more?
You can download Tinseltown on the App Store. You can follow the app on Mastodon and on Threads. I’m on Mastodon.
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IndieAppSpotlight - Mastodon, Twitter/X
by Craig Osborne - Mastodon, Twitter/X