Apptisan #032 — Talking with Queue’s Creator: How This Former Bento Designer Used ChatGPT to Build Queue, a Minimalist Podcast App That Featured on The Verge Within a Week
For our 32nd edition, we welcome Eike Drescher, a former Bento designer who created Queue, a minimalist podcast app that caught The Verge’s attention within weeks of launch.
Name: Queue
Developer / Team: Eike Drescher
Platforms: iOS
Read this newsletter issue in Chinese (中文) .
Please describe your product.
Queue is the simplest podcast app out there. It’s basically one simple list, your Queue. New episodes from all your podcast subscriptions automatically appear at the top of your Queue. Here you can either play them, or archive them. It’s by far the easiest to use podcast app that exists.
I also put a lot of love into the visual design of the app. There are highly polished animations and transitions hidden across the entire app, and even some easter eggs if you listen to certain podcasts.
Was there a pivotal moment that inspired your product’s creation?
In late 2023, I started playing with SwiftUI and ChatGPT and wanted to see how far I come in building a little prototype. As a huge podcast listener, the first thing I asked ChatGPT is if it could write me the code that automatically fetches the artwork and the title of a certain podcasts RSS feed and display both of them using SwiftUI. The code worked immediately! As someone who always thought of new ideas to build but could never code it on my own, this completely blew my mind and I couldn’t stop anymore. Fast forward to now, and Queue is live on the App Store.
What makes your product unique compared to others in the market?
Queue is all about simplicity and beauty. As I described above, Queue removes all the clutter and options from all other podcast apps, and makes it as simple as possible. At the same time, my goal was to also make it the most beautiful podcast app out there and I spent months polishing every corners, interaction, and animation.
How have you marketed your product, and what key lessons have you learned?
I’ve been listening to a few tech podcasts for almost a decade now and have been using indie podcast apps for just as long. So I wasn’t just aware of this early adopter tech audience, I was, and still am, a part of it. And I always thought that there was no simple and yet beautiful podcast app out there. I also gained some experience from my time at Bento that beautifully animated UI videos always perform very well on social media.
So when the app was ready, I prepared a video that included all the nice animations from Queue and postet it to Twitter, Threads, and Mastodon – all the networks where this tech audience was active. The post performed extremely well, even people like Ridd from Dive Club and Josh Miller from Browser Company reacted to it. Within the first two weeks, Queue gained so much visibility from that post that it was mentioned in multiple podcasts and it was even featured on The Verge which brought in a ton of new users.
I think trying to build a way better version of an existing concept can be a very good way to find some early success because people get what it's for and are excited to try it.
What has been some memorable feedback since your product’s release?
Everyone wants CarPlay. I didn’t expect people to care so much about CarPlay that I didn’t even include it in the initial version, and I was also skeptical at first because I personally don’t own a car and never had the need for it. But after getting tons of emails and comments from people who say they would love to use the app but they really need CarPlay to listen on their way to work, I decided to add it to Queue very soon.
Are there any products out there that you feel deserve more recognition?
My friend Dennis Gecaj recently launched his new app Talkbook. It allows you to keep a diary by just recording a video of yourself talking, so you don’t have to sit down and write anything. It automatically transcribes what you say and even gives you interesting insights into what it learns about you – try it out!
Tell us a bit about yourself and what you envision for the future.
Queue is the first app that I built completely by myself with the goal of making a living from it. I always worked in small early stage startups and built new products from scratch. With Queue I’m finally able to build an app completely by myself (I did have some help from friends in the beginning, shout out to Silvan, Dennis, and Mugeeb!) and my plan is to grow the apps revenue enough to allow me to work on it full time at some point. I’m really excited by the idea of this little passion project being able to completely sustain myself financially at some point in the future, which would give me complete independence. I couldn’t imagine a better job.
I’m seeing more and more designers launching their first own apps, and it really seems like a wave of small and creative new apps is hitting the market. Cool little app businesses run by one-person teams could become very common very soon. What an exciting time! You can follow me on Threads, Twitter, or BlueSky for all the latest news about Queue and other projects of mine.
As a solo developer transitioning towards making Queue your full-time focus, how do you balance immediate user needs with your long-term vision?
Queues selling point is that it’s very opinionated – it’s based on what I personally think is the best way to listen to podcasts. I’m convinced that building something for yourself, something you personally really want to have, is the best way of increasing your chances that somebody else wants this too. That’s why I’m generally somewhat hesitant to build something into Queue that I personally wouldn’t really need. How do I know the experience is really great and fits into the idea of Queue if I personally can’t relate at all?
There can be exceptions though, especially when they don’t hurt the core user experience of the app. CarPlay comes to mind – I decided to add support for it because of the incredible demand from early users, even though I personally don’t own a car and would never use it. It turns out CarPlay is a very restricted environment where you can only pick from a couple template views, meaning any podcast apps CarPlay extension will be more or less identical, so there's no space to build a custom experience anyways.
As someone now experienced in launching multiple products, what advice would you give to other designers looking to become indie developers?
After trying and failing multiple times to get into coding for the last 8 years, I think the following things made the difference this time:
Simple powerful frameworks (SwiftUI, Supabase, RevenueCat): They do so much of the work for you and are also super well designed so that you want to use them. You just constantly think what else you could build.
ChatGPT: The fact that it can help you code (and is fully aware of the SDK documentation of the frameworks I mentioned above) and can also help you understand a piece of code and debug it changed everything. You’ll simple never be fully stuck, there’s always a way to make something work, which keeps you going. Even if the code turns out to be tacky and unstable – that’s part of the learning journey.
Having a project that you really want to exist and that’s realistically achievable: You just need a project that motivates and excites you every single day to keep going and work through the list of annoying bugs that just don’t want to get fixed. Every day you will achieve something you’ve never done before and you’re just riding this wave of excitement and possibility, it’s a drug!
Time: I quit my last job at the end of 2023 and was living off of savings until the fall of 2024. And I was using that time to basically learn to code and work on my apps full time. That obviously gave me the time I normally don’t have to progress way faster than I could have if I had done it evenings and weekends.
About Apptisan
Apptisan is a portmanteau of “application” and “artisan”, signifying “a weekly exploration into the world of apps and the passionate artisans who create them.” Each issue is a conversation with global creators, aiming to uncover and present intriguing products to a wider audience.
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