How Contrast grows

Apple had not approved David's developer account before the App Store launch. WWDC 2008 slides listed Apple evangelists' email addresses, so he emailed about five of them; John Geleynse replied and called him.

When starting the company in 2008, before the App Store launched, bought a second iPhone (too nervous to jailbreak his own), jailbroke it and installed the ~500 jailbreak apps to learn what apps could do and what developers were building.

Arrived a month after a first-mover mileage log with a Windows Phone-style UI. Built a native app that followed iOS interface paradigms for a phone-only use case (logging gas and mileage in the car). John Gruber linked to it on Daring Fireball in fall 2008; Gruber says he picked it because it was a phone-first idea that would make no sense on a Mac.

Wrote a business investment thesis to his parents and uncle arguing the App Store removed the costs of hosting a store, bandwidth and payment processing; they invested and he founded the company in April 2008.

After two hourly-contractor projects dragged on and never shipped (~$50K lost on each, $100K written off), from 2010-2011 worked with developer partners on a mix of pay and revenue share so they had skin in the game.

Early in the App Store, spent thousands of dollars on paid advertising for paid apps. Has done very little paid advertising since, relying on organic channels.