A few things. ReleaseRocket announces your releases for you. You tag a release on GitHub and it drafts the changelog, social posts, email and more. You review everything before it goes out. My wife and I build it together. Itemlist is a home inventory app for iPhone and iPad. You map what you own by location, room and container, so you can find it later and show what you had if you ever file an insurance claim. People track more than 130,000 items in it. QRGenie is a QR code generator for iPhone, iPad and Mac. BarcodeCraft is a barcode generator for iPhone and iPad. I'm also working on my next mobile app. It's not announced yet.

Announcing updates. Every time I shipped a new version of one of my apps, the work wasn't done. I still had to write the App Store notes, the social posts and the email, by hand, for three apps. So we started building ReleaseRocket. I know the problem firsthand because I had it myself.

I used to think building was the hard part. Itemlist settled at around $1K a month, a fraction of what I was aiming for, and getting it even that far meant learning SEO, App Store optimization, localization, A/B testing screenshots and email. These days I focus more on marketing than on code.

In summer 2023 I rebranded my app from Golden Squirrel to Itemlist. New name, new icon, new colors. Downloads doubled.

Sales. ReleaseRocket is for teams that ship fast, and reaching them means I have to sell it myself. I've marketed consumer apps for years, but I've never done sales. Getting on a call with a startup is new to me. I'm also still testing who feels the pain most. Is it every team that ships fast, or the ones that already publish a changelog and resent the work?

Build in public, even when it feels like nobody is watching. I think it compounds. It builds trust, it keeps you accountable, and it means standing behind what you ship. And bootstrap if you can.