Quotable

Turn your favourite quotes into stunning quote art for iOS widgets, wallpapers, and social posts. Design your inspiration.

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Inspiration

Quotable was inspired by an Instagram page pathsofstoicism that pairs quotes from stoicism and anime visuals as posts. I thought, wouldn't it be great be able to easily create these kinds of visuals yourself, personalise them to your taste, and interact them as iOS widgets, wallpapers, notifications and more. This was the main idea behind Quotable.

What it does

Quotable is the visual home of inspirational quotes; where users create their personal gallery of quote art from their favourite quotes for use in iOS widgets, wallpapers and social posts.

What you can do with Quotable

📚 Explore an extensive quote library full of inspiring and motivational quotes. 🎨 Create stunning visuals with text, fonts, images, and custom effects. 🖼️ Design custom widgets and wallpapers for daily inspiration right on your iPhone’s home screen. 🔔 Get a quote of the day notification for your daily dose of motivation. 📱 Share your creations to socials.

How I built it

Quotable is native iOS, built with SwiftUI and Firebase. Development has been partially AI driven using GPT4 and was shipped with the help of Helm for App Store Connect.

I am a solo builder so I also cover research, design and marketing - working with Astro as a tool for keyword research, Figma for design, Xcode for development, and (of course) RevenueCat for monetisation and analytics.

It took just over 4 weeks to create the app from start to ship, leaving me with a week for any final updates and marketing before the deadline.

Challenges I ran into

🎨 Designing an intuitive text-art editor that works well on all device sizes (iPhone SE). ⚡️ Achieving lightning fast performance while storing and displaying high-res imagery using SwiftData and SwiftUI. 🧟 Scope creep and perfectionism - I had given myself 2 weeks to ship, it took 4. I struggled to stick to a single feature for MVP launch which is something I'm trying to aim for with indie building. I found myself saying 'this isn't enough' a lot.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

🚢 Shipping a week before the deadline. ✅ Being approved by the AppStore on first submission (first time I've managed this). 💰 First subscription started within 24 hours of launch. 🎨 General design of the app and marketing assets - I started designing only this year and I think this is my best work yet.

What I learned

💽 SwiftData @Query is not performant with large data across multiple views, wrapping the framework in a repository pattern for more granular management helps with this. 🛑 It's tough to let go of self-doubt and the ego and ship fast with minimal features. 💈 The power of marketing and storytelling in driving downloads and selling subscriptions.

What's next for Quotable

I have lots of feature ideas and plans for the app itself but first I'm focusing on marketing the current version and collecting feedback to gain an understanding of its current conversion rates, what the target user wants, and how to sell to them.

I'm launching on platforms such as Product Hunt and Beta List, boosting downloads with a small ASA spend and doing organic marketing via socials. This is how I'll gain the first 1000 users. Based on the data collected from these initial users I will make decisions on how much time (if any) to spend on Quotable RE development and marketing.

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