399: NativePHP: How Simon Hamp & Shane Rosenthal are Building & Monetizing PHP on Mobile
Download MP3Hey. It's Arvid and this is the Bootstrap founder. Today, I'm talking to Shane Rosenthal and Simon Hemp from the native PHP project. These fine gentlemen have brought PHP and with it my favorite web framework Laravel onto mobile devices. And I love this.
Kitze:They take established tech and they port it into places where you wouldn't expect. I'll be talking to Shane and Simon about how they accomplish this and maybe even more impressively how they turned this into a profitable business at a very early stage. That's always complicated with open source stuff, so it's really, really cool to see. This episode is sponsored by paddle.com, my personal favorite merchant of record, who also has something that might interest mobile developers. I recently perused a documentation for hosted checkouts because I was experimenting with the Vibe coding tool that needed some payment.
Kitze:And I found that Paddle has built a very functional and super easy to integrate hosted checkout for mobile applications. It works for other things too, but it's meant for mobile because it just makes it so easy to get people to pay for your app. Now pair this with a solution like native PHP, and you have yourself an application where all the money stuff is handled by professionals, and you can just keep building in the language that you already know. It's really cool. So go check it out at paddle.com.
Kitze:Now here are Shane and Simon and their intriguing native PHP project. You brought PHP to mobile devices. How did you guys do this, and why did it take until 2025 of all years for someone to finally get this right?
Simon:Oh wow, this is the loaded million dollar question. It's a journey, it's been a real journey and I mean in terms of taking till now and we were talking about this a few weeks ago just like thinking would this have even been possible a few years ago? And honestly I don't know the answer but it feels like it's all come together at this point in time so there's definitely, there's something in the air, you know, that has enabled all of this. So, but, yeah, getting to this point, I mean, for me personally, it started probably in 2019. I was working for a company.
Simon:I saw this tweet by a fellow called Marcel Pozziart, as you might know. And he was trying to get a project called Laravel Zero to run on somebody else's computer without them having to have PHP installed. And he was using this weird library that when I went to the GitHub page, was all in Chinese and I, you know, I kinda gave up at that point. But it stuck in my brain and I bookmarked the tweet and I thought right when I finish this job, know, when I get some free time I'm gonna come back to this and I'm gonna pick this up and I'm gonna see if I can reach out to Marcel, you know, figure out how to get this going. Because it is it looked like he kinda got so far and then I never heard anything about it again.
Simon:Anyway, me thinking like this is gonna take me a few months to get some free time to work on this Took me until the time when I left that job, which was three years later, you know, like three and a half years later. So it was the end of twenty twenty two and I finally picked it up. I dug out the tweet, you know, and then I went and reached out to Marcel and all of that kind of stuff. But, yeah, basically got Laravel working, not just the Laravel zero, which was for CLI applications, but full Laravel working on a distributable PHP executable, and that was it. That sort of unlocked the whole the whole thing, and then we're here today.
Kitze:What's the magic there? Like, why did it take so long? Because I I think combining PHP into something else, like, that feels odd, but not impossible. Like, not twenty twenty five impossible. So so what was it that was needed at that point?
Simon:That actually came out of a library that was able to compile PHP into this static binary. This is what allows it to be distributable. But getting it onto mobile is another lift. It's not the same because you can't just ship that static binary onto a phone. And that didn't really come and we were just talking about this before this call, Shane and I, that didn't really come until about October.
Simon:And I can't I can't really give a reason to why it's taken that time other than I think generally people go, we probably shouldn't be doing this with PHP.
Kitze:Yes. So it's probably what it is.
Shane:I would say I come at it from a very different angle. I didn't really have a curiosity or interest necessarily in compiling PHP for mobile or anything like that. I came at it from, like, a Laravel. Look. I interface with clients.
Shane:I build apps. I make money. I feed kids. That's just what I do. And the reasons why I started working on this was there's a whole kind of story there with Simon and I.
Shane:So we were already on a podcast together called the bucket, and we off air one day, he just announced he's going to talk at Lericon EU, and that's with just this last February. And I helped him prepare for slides if I could or talk you know, just go through his talk with him and really just try to ask the questions kind of what you're doing now. Like, how do you even do this? How do you go about this? And just conceptually understanding theoretically how it could be done, even though I didn't know until literally, like, ten minutes ago, he didn't even know how to do it at the time.
Shane:That's a second. I was like, okay. And, yeah, I I asked him a question that would forever change the trajectory of my life. So far, it has at least I don't see my life really going back to necessarily working on client work with the recent successes we've gained with this, but you never know. But I I asked him, you know, if you're gonna be charging money for this kind of thing, you can't just do it for iOS.
Shane:No company's gonna seriously invest into this unless you can provide the world, right, which is at least more than 95%, I would imagine. Android I and iOS is gonna cover that. There's other kinds. Right? So that question, he his response was maybe six months to a year until he works on Android.
Shane:I'm not gonna do the accent, but
Simon:Thank goodness for that.
Shane:Yeah. You know, maybe that long, he's also got client work he's doing at the same time, and he has to he just, you know, kind of figured things out in iOS, and that didn't sit well with me. I just felt like, you know, as my friend, which I do respect him in that regard highly. He's probably my best friend at this point or one of them. I felt almost like I wanna help ease the burden for him.
Shane:And it wasn't really like I hate the word entrepreneur. I think it's just overused, But it's really kind of what we are anyway. Like, we actually are looking for, like, the right business ideas always. And I've swung for the fences so many times in my, you know, fifteen years of web development and fallen short, and it you get burnt out. You know?
Shane:There's a churn there in your own mind, I guess. But I came at it from a different like, wholeheartedly, just a different angle. And I was like, wanna help my friend start tackling the Android side of things. And after a couple weeks, I was asking him different questions of, like, did you do this extension, and did you do that? And he was just like, are you doing are you trying to compete with me, or what are you doing?
Shane:Yeah. It wasn't for me. Like, I had this genuine curiosity as to what we could push the boundaries with. I just found myself pushing the boundaries with the work we were doing. So
Kitze:It's so interesting you say this with the entrepreneurial side of things too because I I have this feeling that particularly inside the Laravel community and the PHP community at large, there is, like, a a very palpable entrepreneurial spirit that's always kind of part of it. I don't see it that much in JavaScript. There's a lot of, you know, people who just, you know, wanna do stuff, but not necessarily to make money, but just to to make them. There's a there's a strong maker vibe. And I don't see it as much in in the the Ruby world or the Elixir world or or Scala or these other languages, right, where it's more kind of corporate ish almost, right, where it's like we have this this b to b SaaS business that needs that particular kind of thing.
Kitze:But in the Laravel world in particular and PHP in general, people just want to build some kind of business first and then they are technically curious. That to me is is very, very interesting because it's kind of rare in a very opinionated community of, you know, of developers.
Simon:That's a really good point. You know, from my my opinion on it is that it stems from almost like the kind of people that use PHP. Like, why did they adopt PHP in the first place? And the kind of person that they then are, you know, they're not the purists. They're not the computer science grads who are desperate for the most perfect syntax or I I I'm not trying to put anybody down by that.
Simon:Those are all good things to achieve. But by and large, my I've been doing PHP for over twenty years, and I think most of the PHP developers that I've rubbed shoulders with, they're pragmatic people like they just want to get the work done and the fact is like php has allowed them to do that you know and so they were already of this mindset and they've come to php because it lets them do that quickly. And the same for Laravel, you know, it's like why people have come to Laravel because it it lets them do that so quickly. And and then you just have this bias now because the community is full of these kinds of pragmatic business makers which I think is very, very cool.
Kitze:Yeah. And the tools that they build and I'm I'm not just even talking about the the Laravel team, is building amazing tools. But even like, people like Marcel building, like, the the tools that almost every Laravel developer uses. Right? Like, there's there's
Simon:That's crazy.
Kitze:There's so much there's so much, like, aim when it comes to tool building. People have this kind of shared goal, which is often lacking in these massive open source communities that are very like, splinter groups, right, where there's a lot of infighting, lot of I was talking to Taylor Oddwell about this too, like, just about Laravel in a recent episode of this show. And he he also said, yeah. PHP is just an adaptable language, and the people who started using it, they they adapted over time. Right?
Kitze:When when you think about PHP four, that that was before there was any, like, object oriented parts, and it was horrible. I remember building apps in, the early two thousands in that language. Web apps, gotta say, gotta be precise. But I kinda didn't like it. And then when you look at what a Laravel source code looks like now, it is nothing compared to back in the day.
Kitze:Like, all globals, gone. Right? Weird, like, dollar server accessors, like, gone. It's it's it's all completely different. It has been supplanted by better and stronger systems on top of this stuff.
Kitze:You could still use it probably. Right? You could still write, like, PHP code like back in the day. You shouldn't. Nobody ever should.
Kitze:But it's it's likely that the binary still could support it. So there is just some some pragmatism here in this community for which I think it's such an important thing that you guys been building something that allows them to now go onto a different platform. So let's talk maybe about mobile a little bit. I remember building mobile apps in what was it? Like, some weird Ionic, was it, framework?
Kitze:Like, a JavaScript framework that was the first thing that I ever used. It was horrible, but it kinda worked ish. But it was like a hybrid thing here and and didn't really work the way I wanted it, and I stopped doing this. I tried some Swift. I I tried some some Gradle stuff, and it all didn't really go anywhere.
Kitze:So I would like to know, just bringing PHP to mobile, how easy is it for me to build an app there, and what can I expect to be able to do?
Shane:I like this question. So touching a little bit on the accessibility of what PHP has provided and then what Laravel's done over the last almost fifteen years with Laravel. In a nutshell, just to get to the answer, if you can build in Laravel, you can run a single command. You have an app. You have to think about some things a little bit differently.
Shane:Your data is not shared globally. It's on a device. You need an API and, you know, security and files and and and some of those things. But as far as, like, the ease of use, we are fortunate and blessed to find ourselves using such a robust community ecosystem. It's not just the code base and the docs are nice.
Shane:They are. It's way beyond that. Laravel News and all the other news, news the the hat. Right?
Kitze:Yeah. I see
Shane:the hat. All all of the other places to to get information, all of the resources, YouTube channels, plus just there's so many people that just they come into it. And within the first few months of learning themselves how to do anything with Laravel, they're already posting videos on YouTube to show other people the way. And I don't there might be other things like that. I don't peek my head out of this bubble much because this is my whole world.
Shane:You know? My son will be 16 in December. Every meal he's eaten was paid for by PHP and or Laravel.
Kitze:That's amazing, man. That's awesome. So, like, I can stay
Shane:here and just do that. That's like my whole life can be inside of that. The best thing is we have now this whole ecosystem, community, resources, plethora, fifteen years plus of everything grown to where it is that we can just shoehorn our own foot into iOS and Android. And so we can leverage the power that's there already and just say, hey. Now you can literally run this one or two other commands, think about things a little bit differently, and you have iOS and Android with the same package installed on on your Laravel application.
Simon:So it's easy.
Shane:It's very easy.
Simon:Well, I it is it is. And at the same time, it really depends on, like, what you're trying to do. You know, that's a classic software engineering response. Obviously, if you're if you're trying to do something that it's not capable of right now, then it's very hard. But also if you're coming at this with a very specific thing in mind, then getting to the point where that is a robust solution for you isn't necessarily going to just like be a couple of commands away.
Simon:But I think that point of sort of getting going, there's been a really good kind of baseline for that. There's been, you know, Laravel has sort of set the precedent for us, and and it keeps getting better at it. You know? In the last year alone, I think there's things like php.new, which I also think is one of Marcel's projects, you know, which is just like you you don't even you've got a new machine, you just go to php.new and run a command and and now you've got php and composer and everything on your machine, you haven't got to think about it. You know, this this kind of idea of I can just type a single thing and and sort of and and this was embodied in in the community for some years.
Simon:I kind of got this sense of messages on Twitter and things where people would say there'll be a command that you can run, you know, like Laravel magic and it will be that you've created a sass or you've created a, you know, a whole new product.
Shane:Is at that point.
Kitze:Right? Yeah. Like, yeah, you we we already have that tech. You just need to pipe a couple prompts into a couple of, like, agents and then, like, wait a half an hour and you get, like, the full the full thing. Like, of course, it's not boxed up just yet, but that might be a couple months from now until we have this, like, fully featured as a pay once, use once kind of thing.
Kitze:When you guys talk about the challenges or the kind of the limitations maybe of of bringing something that is, like, natively a web app or web framework into the mobile world, I'm always thinking about, you know, the permissions or I'm thinking about, like, native access to things like cameras or or audio. What were the challenges along the way? Like, how how far are you to to having the kind parity with a native app, if that's even possible? What's the the technical situation there right now?
Simon:From that side, I mean, Shane, you'll have to speak to the Android side because I don't really understand that very well compared to the and I don't understand the iOS side very well, honestly. Built it.
Shane:No one does.
Simon:No one does. It's generally quite straightforward. Mean, we're we're tapping into truly native functionality. So there's no, like, layers really in the middle. I mean, PHP is built in c, the phones all have the ability to handle c instructions and most of the languages have got first party support for c.
Simon:So you can kind of throw c in there and it'll do a bunch of stuff for you. So and then the operating systems, like, let's take the iPhone, you've mentioned the camera and and permissions and that kind of thing. They've got their layers of security around all of that stuff. So we're not bypassing any of this. You know?
Simon:We're just tapping into the preexisting APIs that they've built, and we've put a nice little interface in between, which is so that your user land PHP code can just call those functions as if it was so it's essentially bringing the native functionality right into your script, you know, your PHP script.
Kitze:Yeah.
Simon:It is awesome. And we then wrap that up in a nice little composer package basically. So now you get all of the interfaces and all of the, you know, IDE, hints and support that you you'd hope for. And it's just this very easy to use tool And, hey, presto. You know, you're opening the camera and you're sending push notifications and who knows what next?
Kitze:Is it is it the same on the Android side?
Shane:Hey, presto. Yeah. I mean, it's yeah. It is. It's compiled to c, and so there's essentially, you're you're using a PHP function.
Shane:We have an extension, the native PHP extension compiled into our own binaries. And you call we are in parity, so we're not we're the same exact naming, so we can just build one. We're using facades if you're familiar with Laravel facades. And that facade is really, for the most part and we could get more creative with it than we intend to at some point, but it's just saying, hey. If that function exists, run it.
Shane:And if not, just don't show some weird error on the screen, essentially, if you're you're doing this in the browser, which is a great way to prototype, by the way. But, yeah, that PHP function is just calling into C. C is then in Android world is calling onto Kotlin. And at that point, anything that any API third party or first on Android, we can do whatever we really want to with. So we can just interface and build those things out.
Shane:So limitations. The biggest limitation that I see right now is time. I cannot find any anywhere. I know there used to be some all over my couch when I was sitting there for, you know, figuring this stuff out, but it's gone. So someday, maybe I'll find some time.
Shane:But that's that's really our priority. Simon and I are there's a lot of other things. I think that in the last even just the last maybe whole week, we're finding ourselves not even like we're not trying to build out this project and make it really awesome. We are finding ourselves managing a business. Right.
Shane:And that's not something that we intended initially. Maybe we wanted, but good problems. You know? Like, there's these are good good issues to have. But I think too, just to add to that point of, like, bringing it nicely and natively first hand experience with calling these facades inside of a LiveWire or just anywhere you want to inside of your Laravel application.
Shane:One of the things that I really like too that we spent quite a bit of time on was the config file for this. And there's a lot of switches inside of that that will during we'll call it compile time. We're actually adding just doing, like, string replacements and stuff inside of your XML files on Android side. I'm not sure how Simon's doing it on iOS. But to allow or to add or subtract those permissions.
Shane:So if you don't need permission, I think the app stores don't want you to
Kitze:just have a whole all of
Shane:the permissions. So it's all configurable, and it's very, like, Laravel first. If you're a Laravel developer, it's gonna feel extremely familiar because it is very familiar. You just end up with a nice emulator here instead of a browser, and you can turn on flashlight and make phone calls and all sorts of
Simon:other stuff.
Kitze:Yeah. That's the important stuff for a good app. Right? Gotta turn on flashlight. Yeah.
Kitze:It makes perfect sense. I I'm excited by the whole the business the the product side of things because you you kinda said you didn't really intend to build a business, but you wanted to. That that already is an interesting statement. But from from my perspective, and I've been following you guys for for a long while, like, prior to this as well, it felt like a very let's let's call it intentional approach to slowly building something into reality. Like, it didn't feel like you were surprising yourself with the success or even pitching it at the at LaraCon.
Kitze:Like, they they all felt very intentional and not orchestrated in in that sense, but with purpose. Like, along the way, you found validation. You did distribution first. Right? Like, that's the stuff that most founders never figure out.
Kitze:Like, you you did it first. You went into the conference scene and all that. So maybe you can tell me the story and, like, just where you guys are right now, like what the level of success is that you are enjoying at this point.
Shane:So I wanna say something real quick there, though, because I I don't know if I misspoke, but yeah. No. I think what you're saying is right. And I think to to some to some effect, it was kind of like we were going through the motions of the things that we had already done a million other times that probably failed to but they didn't. If you look at if we get success at one time, then those were just practice swings.
Shane:Right? But they don't feel like that when you're missing the ball. You know what I'm saying? So I really think that's probably the mindset, for me at least, behind this. Like, alright.
Shane:So if this is a floodgate of people coming in, where are we gonna direct that traffic? And there's, like, crickets. Right? There's nobody actually there. But we know, like, if this thing is a valid viable thing, then this is where they'll go, this is where we'll have them go.
Shane:And then when we turned the faucet on, the water came out. And so that's, I think, my response to that. You know?
Simon:Yeah. For me, it's it's quite I think I have to take in all of the context of like where native php as a project has come from first of all but there's even more than that I mean we're talking technically effectively of standing on the shoulders of giants with all the other stuff that people have done that have allowed us to get to this point and it's the same it's the true of the business in the same way you know there's in some cases the giants are past us you know having made loads of mistakes and whatever but yeah we kind of got to this well I got to the place where the technical challenge was sort of solved you know and then Marcel said, this is back in 2023, he was like I'm going to change my talk at LaraCon US which I think was in Nashville that year And I was like, what are you talking about? That's crazy. Like, this thing's never gonna be ready in this is like two months from that point in time and, you know, and, you know, people are just gonna ask us about mobile phones and all we've got is one, you know, Mac.
Simon:Like, we haven't got windows or linux or any of this, it's basically nowhere near good enough as was my point of view at the time. And he was like no let's you know let's do it, let's get it out there and I think that was an unlock thing for my brain straight away because him having the the confidence to to do that and saying that and reinforcing that the whole time, like, we're just gonna put it out and it's gonna be fine, was incredible because he was absolutely right, of course. He went on stage, talked about it, and obviously people got his they they know Marcel. They know that he's liable to do something crazy like this and so they they loved it. And I definitely that's no small part of like the success of the whole thing but you can't just rely on those moments you know and I think the my opportunity at LaraCon EU was another moment And they're great because they do bring a lot of attention.
Simon:You know, you get all of this influx of busyness around it for a short period of time. But you've gotta smooth over the gaps. You know, you've gotta it's gonna go wild, like, up and down for months. And when you're in it, you really feel that. Like, for me, there was this lull after LaraCon twenty twenty three.
Simon:The project sort of flooded with issues and and people wanting this and wanting that and it not being capable of doing all of those things. And me feeling, you know, personally, it was my responsibility to kind of solve all of that stuff. And then at some point last year, kind of digging myself out of that hole and going, I'm just gonna crack on with this. You know? I'm just gonna, like, dive back in, fix as much as I can, and move it forward.
Simon:Like, sometimes you just have to dig deep. You know? I remember spending days, weeks, getting up early, going to bed very late, doing my client work to pay the bills, and just putting in the hours of, like, solving issues and and all of this and just driving the thing forward and not even thinking like, oh, I've gotta market this product and and get to a place where I can build this community and then I can release mobile. You know? It was like, I'm just gonna do the desktop thing, make it sort of work and then maybe who knows what will happen.
Simon:And along the way of doing that you know some of the mobile pieces sort of clicked into place and along the way the community grew And along the way, these contributors came in who were like instrumental in taking off some of the workload. And, you know, Shane came along exactly the same, you know, here's a piece of work that I've done and this adds to the whole thing in a huge way and then when you step back and you look at this whole journey you're like oh there's a nice smooth curve and it's like it's not like that at all.
Kitze:Yeah. If you zoom out far enough, it always looks like a smooth something. Right? But it's not. Well, what was the point?
Kitze:Like, when exactly did you choose to monetize it the way you're doing it right now? Maybe you can explain exactly what you chose to do because that's also a a more rare occurrence in the open source community and maybe when that entered the conversation.
Simon:So I think I always knew that if we did mobile, it would have to be some kind of premium offering in some way. Now I'd hoped that by the time we got to that, that the whole project might have been getting some serious sponsorships. You know, I might have gotten some consultancy gigs doing stuff for native PHP for desktop. It didn't quite work out how I planned. Surprise.
Simon:Surprise. And I I sort of got to the place where this is working. You know, I've got technically, it's right. I'm gonna put it in front of other people, but I'm not just gonna give it to them. I'm gonna put a hurdle in front of it.
Simon:I'm just gonna say sponsor me. And I I picked that up from another person in the Laravel community called Caleb Pausio who built who's built many things, but among them Livewire and more recently Flux. And one of the things that he did with Livewire, which is in my view an incredible piece of kit and I use it all of the time, think Shane does as well, is he kind of monetized it through sponsorships. And he's never sold, as far as I'm aware, anything around Livewire, but it's become massively popular and he's become sufficiently wealthy from just that sponsorship setup that he had. And I think he was doing it around, like, content and you'd get access to this and that and some other things.
Simon:And that was like, right. Well, it doesn't need to be exactly like that, but I can see that there's this idea of if I gate this thing that appears to be of value and people see you know, if I'm showing them what it could be like, then I'll be able to test. If they think it's of value, some people will probably buy. You know, I'm saying buy or they'll sponsor. And, yeah, lo and behold, I had within a couple of weeks or 20 or 30 people who had just sponsored with no that all they got access to is a very very rubbish GitHub repository which is in a complete state and barely worked.
Simon:But it was this thing that told me people see value in this. They want what I'm building and they believe in what it can become. And that combination of those three things and the fact that people pass on real hard earned cash was enough for me to go, I have to see this through. You know, like, I have to get to the point where it really does meet their expectations. And, yeah, that was, like, the January this year.
Simon:So it was, like it's all been very, very rapid since then.
Kitze:Is it a full time gig for both of you just yet? Almost.
Shane:I love that. It is it is for me. It is for me. So I may as well take a moment here and thank Craig Anderson. Craig and Simon had been friends.
Shane:Simon introduced me to Craig. Craig has a small dev shop. I guess it's just really him. And then he had too many hours. And through Simon, we met.
Shane:And I think I started working with him around November, October, something like that. And it was a very flexible schedule for me from the beginning. So it was kind of like almost as many or as few hours as I wanted, which was awesome. So I could kinda control how much of my credit card I needed to spend to pay the bills versus, how much time I wanted to spend, working on this, which didn't come for me until, I guess, towards the January. So we had a pretty well established relationship.
Shane:And then it was just a few weeks ago, we had the conversation of like, you know, if you need help, if I need if I need the hours, you know, at some point. And then he's like, yeah, you've got you I already know a lot of his apps, and and he's got a lot of there's lot of stuff he's working on. But it's kind of still an open ish door. We still talk all the time. I was prepping for a talk yesterday.
Shane:He came in and gave us his sense on it. So that was that was cool. As far as the pricing, I wanted to just mention, though, real quick. Like, for me, it's like it's asked for forgiveness, not for permission kinda. Like, regardless of, like, whatever the dollar amount is, I think it's some people would think it's horrible if you put a dollar amount on this and nobody buys.
Shane:I think it's worse if you put no dollar amount on it, and everybody gets it. And now you have to support something and you're not even getting paid for it. It's a really it's a bad situation to end yourself up in. And Simon did on his own little podcast, little awesome podcast. He just did an episode called pillars that I would I would say, go check out pillars.
Shane:It's awesome. And it's not because I'm on this side of it. He just very precisely spoke on every topic regarding the justification of pricing and the things that we're working on and why we're choosing this this way to go forward for not just today and so that we can have an awesome summer, but where we wanna end up in a year or three or five with the business.
Kitze:I'll be linking that in the show notes. That's for sure. You were talking about pricing, and I I think it would be very interesting to just look a bit deeper into the the choices that you made along the way because I I know there's like this early beta stage that you have going on and pricing in early stage is always different, but that's coming to an end. Right?
Simon:Yeah. The May, we've decided now. I mean, we've put it back because I think it was gonna be a bit earlier, but we hadn't quite achieved some of the technical things that we wanted to achieve so it's still very early days. The project is going to keep evolving right but we have to draw a line in the sand as to what this early access means and you know who gets in on that, you know. It's been four months just over, will be about four months when it comes to an end and I think it's done the thing that I set it out you know like originally my plan was to just build up enough of a little base to prove that this is a viable product and really it's gone on way further than that you know and now we've got this business and it's going sort of wild And I think that there's a sense there's always been a sense from in my mind anyway, and we've talked about this a lot, where the value of this thing is far greater than the price that we're putting on it right now.
Simon:But then there's this juxtaposition with, like, what the rest of the the market, let's say, like, the competitors in the space, if we can call them that, are pricing their products at. And and for the most part, that's zero. You know? They're all free. And so yeah there's this like real challenge now as we come to the May of like are we shooting ourselves in the foot with upping the price quite significantly when there's a few people who have mentioned that you know they're very aware that the price of all these other tools is nowhere near what we're charging.
Simon:So, yeah, it's gonna be an interesting month I think. This
Shane:whole the conversation around everybody else is free and how how can we charge? We have sales that justifies the price. Right? Or at least it justifies the fact that people are finding value in what we're doing. And I wanna say too, we don't have any competitors.
Shane:And this may be a very controversial sort of statement. And that's okay because I'm a high risk kind of guy. Right? Why not? Alright.
Shane:So look at and I don't know these technologies very well. I've never built anything with React Native. I kind of learned a little Flutter once, and I did do some Ionic stuff back in the day. All of those frameworks are asking you to learn how to do mobile apps and to learn through their product, how to do things. Nobody has done what we have done, which is catered to the Laravel slash PHP developer.
Shane:We brought all of the tooling to your existing knowledge base with the exception of how to interface with the APIs. And then also there's a little armband of you have to kinda learn how to think as an app developer. So, you know, that whole that whole scenario, which you would have to do anyway, whether you're doing it with us or anybody else. So the pricing, I think, whether it's a pricing or not, just the fact that we're charging for something, look, we put it out there. If no one buys, then okay.
Shane:Then there's not a market at this price or there's not a, you know, this isn't viable for some people or whatever the the cause. But the fact that we've done sales, I mean and just to, I know your your audience specifically out of respect. Well, we announced May 2 was our official v one release date. On that day, actually, think it was just a few hours before that, we hit a $100,000 in sales. So I know, like, your audience would love to hear that.
Shane:Right?
Kitze:Yeah. I bet.
Shane:So, to say, like, what we're talking about and to be further clear about that, I think about 40 ish k was in the week leading up to that release date, and it's continuing. Like, there's still justification. We'll say it that way. And so that's like, alright. This is what people want, clearly.
Shane:This is what we need to be working on, and now we have to fall back a little bit, plan, strategize, and put some people around us that are really good in this space and lean on them and more of that managing the business more so than anything else. And I kinda went off on a little tangent there, but that's that's how I roll.
Kitze:I do appreciate it because I think it's important. Like, you you're talking about, like, very, very clear validation signals here. And that that's kinda what I meant with, like, the the PHP developer community is, at its heart, an entrepreneurial community. Like, you see not just the the value of the product in a technical sense, which is great. Like, it's a great accomplishment to get this on mobile, like, to begin with.
Kitze:Right? Again, it's it's 2025, and this is the first time it actually worked. That's wonderful. But the fact that you, from the beginning try to look for value signals that are actually like cold hard cash value signals and not just somebody like thumbs upping on some issue on GitHub.
Shane:Signing up for a newsletter.
Kitze:Yeah. Signing up for a newsletter or just just following you on social media or, you know, tracking starting your your repo or whatever. They're all signals. They're soft signals. They are great signals, but none of them are gonna pay the the rent.
Kitze:Right? That's that's something that as a developer who is trying to build something meaningful that has an impact on other people's lives, well, it has to have an impact on your own life as well. And I think that's a reality that founders get, and PHP developers are surprisingly strongly overlapping with that.
Simon:Yeah. I that's so true. I I think for me, like, the context of that really comes from trying really hard in the kind of previous almost two years to do the thing that all the other much bigger businesses frankly have been doing which is to give it away for free And although it was with the desktop tool, backing that up with you know I'm building it, I'm trying to encourage the community around it and foster more collaboration and all of that but at the same time I'm actively trying to pursue funding it. You know, I'd made lots of grant applications. I was quite active in getting people to sponsor the project, but it's just never enough.
Simon:Like, there was so much work and it was so hard to get to that point and you turned down so many times. I mean, I I don't know why specifically in all of those cases, you know, like grant applications were denied or whatever, but it doesn't really matter because the end result is it kind of forced me into this position of, like, if I want to work on this, if I want to make this a sustainable product that other people can rely on to use, I have to build a business around it. There's no two ways about it. And then the other problem is I can't spend my time on yet another thing to offset the cost of running that business. So the obvious answer was I gotta charge for the license to use the tool that I'm building and have that money come directly into building it.
Simon:That's where we're at.
Kitze:That sounds about right. That's you know, that's what a business is. It's it's so funny that so often people forget that that is, like, the main and, like, one of the only ways that these things can sustain themselves. The idea that monetization is an integral part of the product, that is something we we should also, like, just highlight for people who are building products on top of this. Right?
Kitze:I recently, there was this whole thing with the Fortnite situation. Let's just call it that. Right? With the Apple the walled garden opening its financial vault doors a little bit and not taking the 30% cut, at least enforcing it as much anymore as they used to do, although they still do outside of The US for some reason. But let's talk about monetization opportunities on mobile.
Kitze:Because for many of the SaaS founders that I know myself not having a mobile app, I don't think about this. But if I now could, and I am already like, I have to keep myself from thinking about it right now, the things that I could build with this because there's just so much opportunity for for my own business for Podscan. How would you approach this? Like, what does payment look like? What does monetization look like building mobile apps?
Shane:Yeah. I mean, the whole iOS in app billing thing. So I I don't follow I haven't followed that a lot. I guess there was, like, a lawsuit going on for a long time, and then they just finally settled that they're not forcing people to go through their 30% fee that they charge for the in app billing. That being said, that's one of the API functions we have not yet implemented on iOS or Android, which does, though it says, hey.
Shane:If you're going to build apps to release in The US on Apple, you can accept, like, a Stripe or something like that form inside of your app. There's already, like, cashier, and there's already like I said, these resources available to, Laravel developers that you can just plug and play, modify for the app environment, and, go to town. And so you can bypass this whole app sort of thing. I do think and I think I've seen some notes of it already. Like, I do feel like Apple is going to find a way to make that money back and probably retributably, if that's the word, like, to take, you know, take it out on whatever because that's kinda the mantra that they've given off to me at least.
Shane:I love Apple. I like their products. You know? If you're listening.
Simon:Please don't keep native PHP,
Shane:if you're still Right. So, I mean, as far as, like, what customer I mean, I had a guy I was I did a small talk at, a local meetup a month ago probably. And I was explaining after my talk to one of the guys there, like, there's someone that had come to me and was asking me about MDM. I didn't even know what that was. Some sort of drug maybe or something.
Shane:What is MDM? It's a, like, a mobile device, management. So he had this unique situation. He had, hundreds of malls in America have his devices with basically a kiosk, but it's using Android, and he wants to lock down that device just for that app. So nobody could exit out of it, but remotely, he could manage that.
Shane:And I'm like, well, we could totally do that. And so I started explaining the the technology to this guy, and he was like, oh, you guys could build you guys could build this, like, a a truck a trucker app, like, where you could, like, track where the truckers are for companies and stuff. And I'm like, no. You can do that. We are building the tool so that people with you that have ideas can do it.
Shane:Like, we have ideas for our own apps, of course. But, like, what we're doing is more like empowering, enabling that developer so that he can take that spark of an idea and start implementing it. Go find a trucker, go find a trucking company, or maybe you already are working in that kind of space. And now you're like, wow, we could monetize this through App Store or not, you know, because I don't know what the cut is with the Play Console, but, you know, they have their own in app billing there as well. And that's something even though I mean, we we have people all over the world are using this.
Shane:Like, the binary part of our our package that it downloads a ZIP, we had a CDN it because we're servicing people literally in India and Africa and all over the place. I couldn't have it in Ohio or whatever. So just because that applies to The US, it doesn't apply everywhere else. So we absolutely have to support in app billing on both OSs. And I think one of the coolest things, I guess, is our Discord server.
Shane:We have a channel there that's like, show us your app. Day one of releasing this, there were people like little, like like, JavaScript games. They're really just JavaScript. What was that? Like a snake game where you eat the eat the one of our good friends actually was working on that.
Shane:And but he tied it into, like, a PHP server. So when you finish, you got your score, you can have a leaderboard. And and it was, like, really cool. I even had put something together for, like I just found a GitHub Flappy Bird clone. Right?
Shane:And I just popped it in and hit run, and it just worked. And it was like, you know, a tie it to to touch. Yeah. We should play something. We could use reverb and play against each other.
Shane:Multiplay Flappy Bird. Yeah. I get one wing, you get the other. But, yeah, I think that people can get creative now, and they can start dreaming. And even with our, I will say, quote, unquote, limited libraries that we have right now, because that's something we're we're focusing on actively, it's about a dozen or so, You can already start to build on some things, and there's more and more coming out.
Shane:And we're trying to get to, like, a weekly release of more native functions.
Simon:I think that the whole Apple epic,
Shane:wasn't
Simon:it, epic games battle is it's obviously I don't want weigh in on that because I don't know very much about it really but the whole problem space of these walled gardens and what we've seen over twenty odd years of or more than that, really, but with the web, you know, the open technology is the thing that survives. It is the thing that drives innovation. It is the thing that enables, you know, new connections across the whole globe. And, you know, I can see Apple wanting to keep a hold of that for various reasons, but their their main one publicly has always been so that we can maintain quality. Right?
Simon:But what we will just see over time, I think, is a bit of a domino effect from here where more and more countries around the world will be pushing them to open the garden up a little bit you know and just let people have a bit of an easier time with it. So I think the opportunity now for people to really make money through apps is only going to increase. So I think we're gonna see a proliferation of more apps doing this and more countries kind of pushing companies like Apple to reduce their fees and help people out help people get started. And I think at the end of the day, like Shane said, that's actually gonna turn around to be a net benefit for companies like Apple because they'll figure out other ways to to generate revenue. And I think they'll realize that too and then it'll just it'll make perfect sense for everybody.
Simon:But yeah it's like essentially you're getting in with a shovel you know as we're just about to start another sort of gold potential gold rush for the app marketplace.
Kitze:Yeah. I think you mentioned this before. You phrased it as like democratization of app building too. Right? You're making things more accessible.
Kitze:You're making them less elitist and also just more playful. There's a there's a way that you can just do things now, particularly with and we didn't even get into, like, the whole AI coding, bype coding situation. Let's save that for another day because we could talk about this for an hour. But the tooling that we have right now to build these things is already there. Like, it's much easier now to build, like, a PHP app than it ever was before.
Kitze:And since since native PHP is sitting or is allowing for just regular Laravel apps to be built, like, that is what AI can already do. Right? Like, this this is this is really, really simple. And I guess over time, the AIs of the world will absorb native PHP's best practices and that stuff as well. Right?
Kitze:You could probably create some kind of documentation you can feed into a system like that, and it can create, like, the perfect code. It's it's just so easy now to build things that I'm excited to see where this is gonna go. Like, who is gonna build what and what the shift will look like when people talk about their big apps in the Laravel world in particular. Right? The the Laracons of the future, like, how many of them will just be mobile apps?
Kitze:Like, mobile first apps instead of, you know, SaaS web apps that we are have been used to over the last decades or so.
Shane:That's something hard not to think of, to be honest, because it's almost like because we're on this side. Am I being biased in that sense? So the sense is how many people might actually end up becoming Laravel devs because they want to be mobile devs? And this is actually the easiest way to start working on a more more robe. I feel PHP is more robust than JavaScript.
Shane:Again, maybe a bias, but It's not that hard. Especially the way things are going. One's trending one direction, the other's trending another. Right?
Kitze:So That's right.
Shane:Yeah. Maybe con controversial. But, I love JavaScript.
Kitze:Yeah. Me too. Think who doesn't?
Shane:Use it all the time. Right? But I think that, you know, again, with the resources we have available, this is a much more robust unlocking tool, key, if you will, to to getting into this realm. And so I do feel like, yeah, at some point, the more awareness we bring to this, more people are realizing that this is actually probably a better, if not best way. Maybe not today, but that's our goal.
Shane:We're gonna make this the best way. Like, that we're gonna strive and try our best to make it as good as it can be. And I do think they're gonna find people ending up at LaraCon that didn't know that we can do web with Laravel.
Kitze:Yeah. That's gonna be awesome. That's gonna be so wait. You could do websites too? That's gonna
Shane:be great.
Kitze:That's gonna be cool. Guys, I'm I'm really looking forward to seeing both where your business goes, obviously, because that's that's just the entrepreneurial side in me. I'm looking forward to seeing where you take the projects, like, what novel things you will find over the next months or years. There's going to be a lot of interesting stuff happening in the field. Like, it never stands still.
Kitze:Right? So you always have to adapt. And where you take the community. I think that's that's already established. You you were mentioning, like, a Discord, and people are flocking to you from, like, the the Twitters, the Axes, the Blue Skies, and whatnot.
Kitze:Right? People are excited for this. And for everybody who is listening to this and wonders, well, where can I find these people? Where can you guys be found? Where do you want people to go if they wanna learn more about you and the wonderful projects that you're working on?
Shane:I think
Simon:I'm horrifically online. My wife would tell me off if I said this because well, she knows it's true. But I'm on Twitter and Blue Sky and all of the places so wherever you kind of prefer. I'm usually at Simon hamp on there. So that's that's where you can find me.
Shane:I'm at chain d rosenthal. I believe I'm blue sky and Twitter. Yeah. I have opened the door right before we released to some, like, early beta testers. And so, like, on Telegram, they're messaging me problems now post release.
Shane:I'm like, please just go through the Discord, sir. So I'm, like, kinda reluctant to, like, give out too much info because but I do have, like, reel in my attention where I'm placing it these days. But, again, good problems to have, but I am we love conversation. We're very much talkers and feelers, and we love to dream. That's really where we wanna get to every day.
Shane:If we can do just ten minutes of dream time, you know, that that kinda ticks my boxes internally. So I welcome the messages for sure.
Kitze:Well, I love this. Yeah. Nativephp.com is the website of the project. If anybody wants to just immediately purchase a license, I highly recommend it. It's a good idea because it's great.
Kitze:Man, I I love this. You guys are doing such good work, it's so enjoyable to watch you build it in public, like, share the process and the journey with people. I I find this as an amazing thing. Thanks, Arvid. Thanks so much for for sharing all of your insights and and the journey of this on the show.
Kitze:Really appreciate it. Thanks. Thanks, Shayan. Thanks, Simon.
Simon:Thank you.
Shane:Thank you. Thank you. Appreciate it. Appreciate the opportunity.
Kitze:And that's it for today. Thank you so much for listening to The Bootswap Founder. You can find me on Twitter at avid k h l. And if you wanna support me in this show, please share podscan.fm, my SaaS business, with your professional peers and those who you think will benefit from tracking mentions of their brands, their businesses, and names on podcasts out there. PodScan is a near real time podcast database with a stellar API.
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