For most of the last decade, the conventional wisdom in the mobile-app industry was that the small independent studio could no longer compete. A reporting trip through six working studios in the UK and the Netherlands suggests the conventional wisdom is, as conventional wisdom usually is, wrong.
A frame-by-frame look at a recent fintech onboarding flow that breaks every shorthand rule of mobile UX and, somehow, retains better than its three-screen rivals. We walked through it with the team that built it.
One small productivity app, three thoughtful choices, almost no copy.
Specsheet is an independent journal of app studios, product engineering, and the marketing decisions that surround both. We don't take vendor money. We don't run sponsored posts. We don't do top-ten lists.
For most of the SaaS decade, pricing pages got shorter. A small but growing number of independent studios have started putting them back — long, talky, willing to explain. Why it's working.
A long winter spent reading the marketing pages of independent app studios, mostly UK and EU, mostly under £2M ARR. A pattern emerged that nobody is talking about.
Two engineers, one product, one shared spreadsheet. They have not raised money. They have not hired. They have, by their own account, no plans to do either. An afternoon at their kitchen-table office.
Eight years at a B2B app company, growing the user base on content alone.