An interview with David Barnard, founder of Contrast
David Barnard is the founder of Contrast, a small app development shop based in San Marcos, Texas.
The company is most famously known for making Launch Center Pro, an app that lets you launch really cool actions, as well as apps (for example, press one button to call your wife, or another to quickly search Twitter inside Tweetbot, etc.).
I had the pleasure of meeting David in person at WWDC in 2013 (albeit briefly). He's a really genuine guy – one of those down to earth people you can count on. Since then we've kept in touch via email/Twitter, and so I thought it would be nice to interview him.
*Please note: this interview was conducted in June of 2014*
Tell us a bit about yourself. Where have you traveled to? What kind of music do you listen to? What are your hobbies?
My name is David Barnard, I’m the founder Contrast. We build iOS apps.
I’m not particularly well traveled, but that’s mostly because I’ve never really had much disposable income. And now that I have a bit more disposable income I have 3 kids. I’ve been to China, Mexico, and Canada. I absolutely love traveling in Mexico and wish it hadn’t become so dangerous to do so.
I don’t listen to much music. Because I spent such a long time studying and working on music, it’s hard for me to concentrate while listening to music. Since founding App Cubby in 2008, I mostly just work or spend time with my family. So, the only music I really listen to regularly is the LEGO movie and Frozen soundtracks!
Though I don’t spend nearly as much time doing them as I’d like, I suppose my hobbies are mountain biking and kayaking.
What was your first job growing up?
Working for my father in the family real estate business (founded by my great grandfather, who sold it to my grandmother, who sold it to my father and uncle).
Tell us about the early days of Contrast (formerly known as App Cubby). Why did you decide to get into making apps?
There are two main reasons I founded App Cubby. First, I got married in 2007 and quickly realized my life as a recording engineer wasn’t going to be particularly compatible with family life.
My wife worked 9 to 5 and I worked noon to 2AM. We hardly saw each other when I had clients in the recording studio. That combined with not making much money had me looking for a new career within a few months of getting married.
Second, I was completely enamored with the iPhone and thought it could be a huge wave to ride. Late in 2007 I was listening to Leo Laporte and Amber MaCarthur on net@night talking about what a massive tech wave Facebook was and how many people were building companies around Facebook. As rumors grew of an iPhone SDK, I started to think through the opportunities it might present. Here’s the investment proposal I drafted for App Cubby just a couple weeks after Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone SDK on March 6th, 2008.
Where’d the idea for your first product come from? How’d you get started working on it? Did you run into any major obstacles with your first app?
I founded App Cubby on a $20k loan from family members, which put a ton of pressure on me to build something viable rather than rolling the dice on a gimmicky app. My wife had been tracking mileage for work and losing lots of money by not tracking accurately, so a mileage log seemed like an obvious app to build.
At first I thought I could learn to code and be a one-man shop. After a few weeks of learning Objective-C I was making tons of progress, but realized that it would take years to get good at it. Especially since there was an NDA covering the entire iPhone SDK in 2008. There were no books, no tutorials, and you couldn’t legally post questions to sites like Stack Overflow (which didn’t even exist at the time). So, I decided to hire a contract programmer and never looked back.
What was the best decision you’ve ever made at Contrast?
Early on I started blogging about the success and failures of App Cubby. It wasn’t an explicit decision, but really a series of choices to be open and blog/tweet about my various experiments and what worked and what didn’t. That openness and honesty has opened a lot of doors for me over the years.
When you're evaluating a new product idea, what's involved in the research/planning? What’s your favourite part of the process?
In researching a new product, I spend a lot of time digging around the App Store. One of the keys to building a sustainable app is to build something people will actually go looking for in the App Store. It’s nearly impossible to pay for and/or generate enough free exposure for an app to do well over time unless it does something that people actively search the App Store for. That being the case, I spend a ton of time looking for use cases and keywords that are underserved in the App Store.
My favorite part of the process is building prototypes.
Launch Center Pro seems to be your flagship product. Where’d the idea for the app come from, and what motivated you to build it?
Launch Center Pro began life late in 2011 as Launch Center, a hack to launch apps from Notification Center. Apple rejected the app because they didn’t want apps abusing Notification Center in that way, but we decided to pull that feature and release the app as a quick launcher. From there it sort of took on a life of its own as we saw how people used the app and requested new features.
Over the 2013 holiday season you coordinated App Santa. What compelled you to put something like this together? How successful was it for you and the other developers involved?
I’ve always thought there is a lot of untapped potential in pooling the marketing resources of indie developers. There are lots of publishers in the App Store that have multiple apps and use them to promote each other and market them as a group rather than individually. The promotion was a success for everyone involved, though not wildly successful. I hope to help organize other such promotions and cooperative marketing in the future.
If you could go back 5 years, would you do anything differently?
I would have built an emoji app.
When you first got your hands on iOS 7, what was your first impression? Has that changed as you’ve used it more? Is there anything you miss about iOS 6?
My first impression was that Apple made too many form over function decisions in building iOS 7, and that position hasn’t changed much now that I’ve been using it for a year. To be clear, I love iOS 7 and think Apple got a lot of things right, but there are so many little oddities like the disappearing Safari toolbar that still impede my use of iOS on a regular basis.
I still miss the fact that buttons looked like buttons in iOS 6. I don’t miss how gaudy they were, just that they made it obvious where I should tap.
What do you see happening with Apple and more specifically iOS in the next 5 years? Is there anything you’re specifically hoping for, as a developer and as a customer?
A lot of people seem to think that the best years of the iPhone and iPad are now in the rear view mirror, but I don’t think that’s the case at all. The meteoric growth may be behind us, but as a platform iOS will continue to grow in relation to the entire cell phone/PC market, and as products iOS and the iPhone/iPad still have so much room to evolve. At the moment I’m actually most excited about the future of the Apple TV. At WWDC 2014 there were so many hints that Apple has some great things planned.
What hardware and software are the most important for you in getting your job done? What are some of your favourite iOS apps at the moment?
I primarily use my retina MacBook Pro, iPhone 5s, and iPad Air to get work done (and use them roughly in the order listed). Since I do a lot of typing while at my MacBook Pro, I got a Leopold mechanical keyboard with Topre switches (at the suggestion of Justin, my business partner in Launch Center Pro). I’ve been amazed at how much faster I type and how much better my hands feel doing it.
As far as software, I end up spending most of my time in Mail and Safari communicating with team members, handling tech support, etc. We use Basecamp for project management, and while I’d prefer a native Mac app, the web app is passable.
My current favorite iOS app is Listacular, it’s now my todo/note taking app of choice. I absolutely love that everything presented in the app is just plain text in .txt or .md files on Dropbox. I use Basecamp for the heavy lifting of project management, so I just don’t need something like OmniFocus to manage the rest of my todos.
Do you have any advice for aspiring entrepreneurs?
Learn and build and learn, then repeat until you manage to build something great.
That is, you should strive to learn, not just in the process of building, but in the context of what and how to build it, then learn from the successes and failures of what you managed to build. Early on this should be a relatively short cycle. Working on something for years without any feedback from customers and/or potential customers is a recipe for disaster. I’m not a huge proponent of the minimally viable product strategy as a filter for every product/decision, but there’s definitely something to the basic concept. Get market feedback early, either by building a minimally viable product or just tackling a problem that you have the resources to tackle well in a relatively short time-frame.
If you could spend a few hours over dinner with anyone in the world, who would it be and why?
Eddie Cue. He’s in charge of the App Store and ultimately has more influence over apps than anyone else in the world. Not that he’d be able to say much, but I have tons of questions (and plenty of feedback) about the history, current state, and future trajectory of the App Store.
What would you be doing if you weren’t building apps? I know you used to be a recording engineer – is this something that still interests you, or is there something else you might be doing instead?
If I weren’t building apps, I’d probably be working in the tech industry in some capacity. Being a recording engineer would be a fun hobby, and something I’d love to do more if money were no object, but the crazy hours and low pay of a freelance recording engineer isn’t particularly attractive to me as a family man.
If you won the lottery (say $20 million), what would you do with the money (besides the typical stuff)?
I’d love to be an angel investor. And not just for tech startups. The $20k my family lent me to found App Cubby changed the course of my life and I know there are lots of great people out there who have the potential to build businesses, but don’t have friends/family who are able or willing to get them started.
If you make apps, you need to follow @drbarnard on Twitter. You should also check out some of the articles he's written on his website here.
To check out Contrast's apps, visit their website: http://contrast.co
Follow me on Twitter at @ryanacash for more posts like this.
