Apple

`3:49:11`

is sent through Gmail. I think their world rates are probably in that neighborhood as well. They're just absolutely huge and trying to attack an enormous established competitor like that who's so actually still loved by plenty of people. And is free seems like a suicide mission. And it was only a mission we signed up for because we had grown ambitious enough after making Basecamp for 20 years that we thought we could tackle that problem. So I thought, hey, this is dumb. I would not advise anyone to go head to head with Gmail. That seems like a suicide mission. We're gonna try anyway, because you know what? If we fail it's gonna be fine. We're just gonna build a better email experience for me and Jason and the people at the company and our cat, and that'll be okay 'cause we're gonna afford to do so. But when we got ready to launch, after spending two years building this product, millions of dollars in investment to it. We obviously needed mobile apps.

`3:50:12`

You're not gonna be a serious contender with email if you're not on a mobile phone and you need to be there with a native client. So we had built a great native client for both iOS and for Android. And as we were getting ready to launch, we submitted both of them to the app stores, got both of them approved on I think Friday afternoon for the iOS app. And we then went live on Monday. And we were so excited. Hey world, we've been working on this new thing, I'd love for you to check it out. And of course as with anything, when you launch a new product, there are some bugs. So we quickly found a few in the iOS client and submitted a new build to Apple. Hey, here's our bug faces, can you please update? And that's when on help broke loose. Not only were they not gonna prove our update, they said, oh wait a minute, we gave you permission to be in the app store, but I'm sorry that was a mistake. We see that you're not using our in-app payment system, which means that we don't get 30% of your business. You will have to rectify that

`3:51:14`

or you can't be in the app store. And first I thought like, well it got approved already. We're running on the same model. We've run Basecamp on in the app store for a decade. If you're not signing up through the app and we're signing up our own customers on our own website and they're just going to the app store to download their companion app, we're gonna be fine. That was the truth, right? That was why I never got so fired up about the app store. Even as Apple started tightening the screws was like my business was okay. Now suddenly my business wasn't okay. Apple was willing to destroy HEY if we did not agree to give them 30% of all the signups that came through the iOS app. And it wasn't just about the 30%. It was also about splitting and not longer having a direct relationship with our customers. When you sell an app in the app store, you're not selling an app to a customer. You're selling an app to inventory at Apple, and then Apple sells an app to that customer. That customer has a purchasing relationship with Apple.

`3:52:16`

So if you wanna give discounts or refunds or whatever, it's complete hell. If you want to easily support multi-platform that's complete hell if someone signs up for HEY on their iPhone and they wanna switch to Android. But that billing relationship, it's tied to Apple, it's complete hell. For a million reasons, I did not want to hand my business over to Apple. I did not want to hand 30% of our revenue over to Apple. So we decided to do something that seemingly Apple had never heard before. We said no, we're not gonna add the in-app payment. I don't care if you're threatening us. this is not fair, this is not reasonable, please approve. And of course they didn't and it escalated. And after a couple of days we realized, you know what? This isn't a mistake. This isn't going away. We're gonna be dead if they go through with this. If we're not gonna yield and give them the 30%, they're gonna kick us off unless we make such a racket

`3:53:21`

such noise that they will regret it. And that's exactly what then happened. We were blessed by the fact that we launched HEY one week before the WWDC, their Worldwide Developer Conference. Where Apple loves to get up on stage and harp on how much they do for developers, how much they love them and why you should bill for their new devices and so on and so forth. And then we also just happened to have a platform on the internet, which is very convenient when you need to go to war with a $3 trillion company. So I started kicking and screaming — Oh boy. — And essentially turning it up to 11 in terms of the fight and going public with our or denial to be in the app store. And that turned into a prolonged two week battle with Apple that essentially ended in the best possible outcome we could have gotten as David fighting Goliath, which was a bit of a truce. We wouldn't hand 30% over to Apple. They do wouldn't kick us out of the app store,