My You Doodle Journey

I’ve spent at least 250+ hours of my life the past few months on You Doodle, a new app for iOS. I looked at all the drawing apps on the app store and realized most were filled with ads, had cluttered user interfaces and charged for features that should be free, like text and getting rid of ads. Right from the start I wanted to make the basic features free and keep ads out of the app.

Yesterday was a milestone for the app as I reached the 1,500 downloads in a day milestone. My long term goal is to get 10,000 downloads a day. To think that I am at 1,500 downloads a day after only 4 months absolutely astonishes me. People are using the app for all sorts of things such as note taking, sending photos to mechanics, highlighting text and more – in addition to the standard draw a mustache and tail on your friend. It always makes me happy when someone uses software for purposes that the original creator did not anticipate.

I don’t know how many nights I’ve been up until 1 or 2 am trying to fix a bug or polishing a feature or performance until it was top notch. “Just one more thing…” is great at an Apple reveal, not so great late at night with software bugs…

On top of this, I have a family that probably gets too often neglected AND a full time day job that I do my very best to give an honest days work to every day.

Part of me wants to just outsource everything when it’s a late nigh with a frustrating bug. I don’t want to do that ultimately. I was born to write software, and I don’t want to become just a manager. Perhaps I will outsource a Windows or Android version some day, but the app has no revenue stream – yet.

The last month I have been working on a new collage / picture frame feature that has tested my limits. A lot of complicated code has to work well together to allow the user to download a template, insert all their pictures into it and then save it or share it. Sounds simple in one sentence, but I have spent well over 50 hours on just this one feature! This will be the first in app purchase for the app and I really hope people like it enough to buy it. I think the feature is really neat.

Thanks for reading, and good night. Download You Doodle now 🙂

You Doodle Free - Digital Ruby, LLC
0 0 votes
Article Rating
Subscribe
Notify of
guest

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

2 Comments
Newest
Oldest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
Hoose
Hoose
11 years ago

This is really an amazing app. You have to download it and play with it to realize how many cool features have been integrated for a great user experience. Thanks for making such a great free app. Wish there were more people in the world like you. I’ll def pay for in-app purchases if it will keep you going.

Paul Johnson
Paul Johnson
11 years ago

Good job, Jeff! You have become a very accomplished programmer — makes me proud… 🙂