What do you do when you spend months building an AI-powered iOS keyboard to proofread text, and then Apple announces native proofreading in iOS 26? You panic, joke that Tim Cook is stealing your ideas, and then you adapt.
I just published a 16-month retrospective on building my app, Smart Keys. It started as a basic WordPress site using ChatGPT prompts and evolved into a full iOS and MacOS tool for text transformation.
The biggest technical and product takeaways:
Platform native is hard: The iOS ecosystem is tough for acquisition, but building the MacOS version actually became my personal favorite (even if I have no idea how to market it).
Retention over Acquisition: We burned cash for a year with a low ROAS. But because our Month 4 retention was >60%, the math eventually flipped in our favor.
I wrote a detailed breakdown of the development journey, the failed marketing experiments, and how I finally reached profitability without taking VC money. You can read the full architecture and business teardown on my dev log: diego.horse
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