Hello from zzd Labs: building three apps in public, break-even and all
zzd is a one-person web studio in Switzerland. The day job is building websites for local businesses. But between client work, three products have been growing in private repos, and all three are close enough to shipping that keeping them private has stopped making sense.
So this is zzd Labs: the corner of this site where those products live in public, from now until they succeed or visibly don't.
The three products
Selfvie turns a batch of selfies into a face-centered movie. Everything runs on your phone — face detection, alignment, video export — because the photos people would feed it are exactly the photos that should never touch a server. One TypeScript codebase, wrapped for Android, iOS and the web.
DualShot is a fork of the venerable Open Camera that records with the front and back cameras at the same time — your face in a movable picture-in-picture over what you're filming. It exists because of a happy hardware accident on the Fairphone 5 (more on that in its own post).
Chatter is a language-learning app where you talk to an avatar. Speech recognition and speech synthesis run on the device, so a conversation costs nothing to serve — which is the only way a freemium language app makes sense at this scale.
The rules of this devlog
- Real numbers. Each product has a break-even bar (Selfvie's is roughly $110/year — one Apple developer fee plus rounding). Downloads, revenue, and the distance to that bar get published monthly, whether flattering or not.
- Real code. Each product gets a public repository. The commit history is the devlog's source material; if the git log can't tell the story, the story probably isn't true.
- Real mistakes. The most useful posts here will be the ones about what broke. There is already a queue of those.
Why bother
Because the alternative — polishing in private until some imaginary perfect launch — has a well-documented failure rate, and because a web studio that ships its own products is a more credible partner for clients than one that only talks about shipping.
Posts land here first, then get syndicated out. If you want the feed, there's RSS.