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
Top comments (1)
This is incredibly relatable. I'm 7 days from launching HeyRobyn (Mac unified inbox) and the fear of Apple "Sherlocking" is real. Every WWDC keynote is a potential business-ending moment.
Your >60% Month 4 retention stat is impressive — that's what kept you alive during the cash burn. Most founders chase acquisition and ignore retention until it's too late.
The Mac acquisition problem you mention hits home. I'm finding that Mac users are incredibly loyal once they find an app they love, but discovery is brutal. App Store search is basically useless for new apps, and Mac users don't browse product directories like iOS users do.
Curious: did you find any acquisition channels that actually worked for Mac? Or was it purely word-of-mouth from your iOS base?