About Tiny Ideas
⭐️ Stuart Hall and Claire McGregor are co-founders of Appbot, a market-leading app review analytics tool.
📱With a background in electrical and software engineering, Stuart has been making apps since the very earliest days of the App Store. His first significant success was Discovr Music in 2010, reaching #1 in the Music category in 68 countries and achieving over 4.5 million downloads in its first 18 months. Stuart followed this success with the original 7 Minute Workout app. Built in 6 hours with zero marketing spend, 7 Minute Workout garnered 2.3 million downloads, a 4.9 star rating, and ultimately an exit to Wahoo Fitness in its first 18 months. Stuart re-acquired 7 Minute Workout in 2021 and has since also launched Wordboard, a third-party keyboard shortcut app, which has received numerous Apple features. Both apps remain consistently commercially successful.
🐶 Claire's story began a little differently. Originally a veterinary surgeon by training, Claire moved into technology in 2008 at MedicAnimal.com - at the time, the UK's largest online-only retailer of pet medicines and other supplies. This first experience in a startup unearthed a love of digital marketing, product management and UX, and Claire ultimately became CMO & CPO as the company grew to £25 million pa in it's first 3.5 years. After returning to Australia Claire project managed the launch of a new mobile app for L'Oreal Australia and launched the Perth chapter of the Founder Institute in 2012. She then became Head of Marketing at mobile farm management startup, Agworld, in 2013 - where she was a user of the very first iteration of Appbot.
🌯 Claire and Stuart had their first meeting in 2014 over a cheap and fairly dirty burrito. Stuart had an Appbot-related SaaS idea he wanted to commercialize, and asked Claire if she would be a sounding board for the new idea. By the end of that meeting the focus was back on Appbot's core offering, which Claire used and loved. They scribbled a subscription model on a burrito napkin, Stuart went home and built the prototype and a wave of paid adoption from the free user base followed.
💡After 10 years growing Appbot together, Stuart and Claire are now also cofounders of Tiny Ideas; founded to scratch the "scrappy startup founder itch". Their ultimate goal for the new venture is to use apps to solve problems they both experience in their daily lives, learn a bunch of things (hello SwiftUI!) and have fun doing so! Get in touch with us at hello@tinyideas.net.
About Morph
📸 Morph is an app for tracking visual changes over time, using a series of photos.
⚖️ The idea came from two use cases that arose for Stuart & Claire around the same time. Claire had experienced massive hair loss due to illness and wanted to track its regrowth (tmi, amirite?). Stu was in the process of losing weight, and wanted to track it with progress photos. They both found that getting consistent photos was very hard in terms of lighting, zoom, angle, positioning in the frame. Privacy was also a challenge, and using the Hidden folder in Photos was only useful for progress comparisons if it was used for a single series of images.
🤦♀️ Stuart and Claire started work on Morph 2 years ago with some help from their awesome Appbot team, but soon ran into some snags. The Appbot product required too much focus at that point in time to split the team. Photo consistency was also much harder to solve than expected.
🍎 At WWDC 24 Stuart spotted a tiny mention of some new tech for image alignment. When they went digging through the docs that evening the new feature looked like it might form part of the solution for bringing Morph to life!
✅ Claire then did a bunch of competitor research and analysis and found some competitor weaknesses that could be addressed with Morph.
✨ The result is Morph; an app that reminds you to take progress photos regularly and helps you get very consistent shots each time. It stitches each series of photos together in a timeline and allows you to export them in a variety of cool, social media-friendly formats. You can also upload existing photos and use the built in alignment tools to make quick before and after comparisons.
🤷♀️ You could use it for anything from tracking weight loss progress to showing off how well you cleaned your bathroom!
About Hooray!
🎉 Hooray! is a birthday reminder app, created so that you never forget your Mum/brother/cousin/random-workmate-from-three-jobs-ago's birthday ever again!
🍎 The inspiration for Hooray also arose at WWDC, in 2023. During that week, Stu and Claire were attending all the events and Claire had a bunch of birthdays for family and friends that fell during the week.
⏰ After running late for the third time while Claire "smashed out a quick birthday message before I forget" (a process which reliably took at least 15 minutes), Stu suggested using this simple use case to build an app. The idea was app to address the mental load of remembering to message, and to use AI to help you draft something warm and personalized to both your style and the recipient when you're pressed for time.
✅ Hooray! ticked three important boxes for Claire and Stuart. Neither had used SwiftUI before, both felt daunted by the idea of attempting to build an app again after failing to launch Morph 2 years earlier. Hooray! was a) a small, discrete idea, b) would give them both an opportunity to learn SwiftUI and c) give them some exposure to prompt engineering for AI.
✍️ Hooray! launched in late 2023. Claire has blogged about the process of building it, and she hasn't forgotten a birthday since!