Michael Tigas is the founder of Dumb Phone, an app that makes your smart phone into a minimal device! Instead of having lots of distracting, colorful apps, Dumb Phone makes your home screen into a plain page with your app names written out. It's basically a way to make you stop picking up your phone so much.
I had a chat with him about his inspiration for making Dumb Phone, his best marketing moves and his pricing choices. Enjoy!
Can you tell us about what inspired you to make DumbPhone?
Dumb Phone definitely wasn’t an idea I had planned far out! A couple months prior to working on it I launched a new product named focusedOS, an app that hides all distractions in one click on your Mac, which also had an iOS counterpart.
However, it bugged me how basic that counterpart was - quite a bit. The only real fancy thing it could do was restrict apps via Screen Time which could remotely be activated via the Mac app. Because this was the only key feature, it mostly felt like a companion app rather than something awesome that stood out on its own.
Although iOS is extremely rigid with customisation, I was confident there must be a way for it to have a larger impact on further reducing screen time. I then devised a way to clean up the Home Screen by replacing colour and icons with simple text buttons, and realised it’d be very difficult to properly market this new feature in a Mac-dominated product. So I decided to roll it into its own app, which became Dumb Phone!
Have you cut your screen time since making the app?
In half, easily. I think mainly from solving my “phone pickup” problem. When I pick up my phone to do something, I occasionally get distracted by irrelevant Home Screen notifications from other apps, or after I have completed my task and return to the home screen, I get sucked into some other kind of app and sometimes go down a rabbit hole wasting over 10 minutes each time.
Since Dumb Phone has made my Home Screen boring, my brain can no longer cognitively latch onto anything that normally gives me a dopamine rush, and I find myself putting my phone back down.
And I’m having so many people share similar feedback with me, which is great to have validation that is an actual problem others face.
It seems to have captured a lot of attention! Can you talk through your results?
Dumb Phone snuck past 8,000 downloads during launch week, which was really cool to see, and was my largest tally since I launched another of my apps, Shelf, a couple years ago. That particular app was released during the iPhone 14 Pro launch week, as it focused on improving the Dynamic Island capabilities.
Unfortunately I did a terrible job at converting those downloads to paid users, so I made sure I learned from my mistakes with Dumb Phone. I made it past $5k in revenue during launch week, and ironically, I reused quite a lot of code from it in Dumb Phone to launch apps from the Home Screen widgets.
My downloads also spiked at 1,500 in a single day and there’s over 1,000 people using Dumb Phone every day. Getting that 9to5Mac feature really helped. It’s so gratifying seeing one of my apps finally stick with many people, and I can’t wait to grow it further.
How does Dumb Phone work?
Setting up Dumb Phone is quite simple.
It’s generally a four-step process after you have downloaded it from the App Store;
- Step 1: Add the Dumb Phone widget to your Home Screen
- Step 2: Set the wallpaper to match the Dumb Phone widget and dock
- Step 3: Turn on Dark Mode and watch everything blend in together
- Step 4: Turn on Reduce Motion for the Home Screen to make app launching appear instant
From there you can select your essential apps and style the Home Screen widget (that displays those apps) to your liking with the preview editor that I created.
How did you get started in entrepreneurship?
I’ve been building apps for 10 years, initially for a startup then predominantly as a freelancer.
But the real fun began in March 2020 when I started creating my own indie apps when COVID broke out in Australia, and I lost most of my client work.
I launched;
- Focused Work in 2020
- Ochi in 2022
- Go To Sleep in 2022
- Shelf in 2023
- focusedOS in 2024
- Dumb Phone in 2024
- And a few other un-notable apps in between
During this time Focused Work has been the main breadwinner, but I’m glad I’ve finally created something that looks to finally surpass Focused Work.
Do you have any advice for other entrepreneurs?
Based on my experience launching Dumb Phone, when you create something try to focus on one key thing for the MVP and do that better than your competitors.
I’m reaping the benefits of this right now with Dumb Phone. It’s not the first app of its kind to make your Home Screen look minimalistic, but the way it does it is effective - based on feedback I’ve received so far.
And you can then carry those lessons on to your next product.
Also, definitely build in public. It’s way more fun meeting new people along the way! I’ve been doing this since the very start.
Besides Dumb Phone, do you have any other apps for keeping focus?
Sure do! Three apps in particular;
focusedOS: Hide all distractions in one-click on your Mac, and you can link your iPhone too (as mentioned earlier)
Focused Work: A powerful timer for getting stuff done. It integrates with Pomodoro, Flowmodoro, and more timer techniques - and can be used on iPhone, iPad, and Mac
Ochi: A simple app/website blocking tool for Mac and iPhone
What have been the best marketing channels for growing Dumb Phone?
I’ve been “building in public” on X / Twitter since I started in 2020, consistently sharing what I’m working on. (including Dumb Phone)
This helped me make lots of friends along the way who have also helped me grow as a maker, while having plenty of fun as I went.
In recent months I’ve tried to do this every day, now consecutively for 10 weeks, which I’ve now created a habit around.
I’ve also started sharing on alternate social platforms like LinkedIn, Threads, and Mastodon. LinkedIn has been a clear winner alongside Twitter though..
Outside of this, getting covered by 9to5Mac really helped accelerate Dumb Phone’s early growth. I’ve also tried reaching out to YouTubers as well and other tech journalists.
Can you explain the pricing and your decisions around that?
I honestly kept it pretty simple and generally followed what other similar apps are doing in the space.
Outside of the 1-week free trial, if they want to try it out for a month there is a low enough price point ($2.99) and also a yearly option ($9.99).
If they’d like to unlock the app forever then I have added a one-time purchase too ($24.99).
Feedback has been quite positive so far, and I’ve had only a couple people ask when the app will go on sale next. I’m confident I nailed it for the app launch!
Can you talk about what your stack is?
I keep things quite simple, especially for Dumb Phone in particular.
The app is made in native SwiftUI, I use RevenueCat to handle IAP transactions, Amplitude for basic stats tracking, and Tally.so for feedback.
One thing I tried differently with Dumb Phone is adding Tally forms instead of directly linking my email, so people can easily request apps they’d like added or submit general feedback, and both give me more nuanced details earlier on in the conversation.
Previously I had a simple Contact Us button that displayed a Compose Email sheet, which added friction if the user didn’t have the Mail app set up. Otherwise they would need to copy the contact email address into their app of choice and then draft an email to me, if they hadn’t given up at this point yet.
Also, every time I received a new direct email I’d feel pressured/bad if I wasn’t able to reply soon enough.
But since Tally is one-way and done via the web, receiving feedback this way is more seamless / relaxed, and I can freely reply when time permits.
I ultimately end up chatting with people over email still.
Where can people find out more about you and Dumb Phone?
I’ve a monthly newsletter where I share my indie journey that you can follow along here, which I love writing about!
You can also catch me on;
And if you haven’t tried out Dumb Phone yet, download it from dumbphone.so and let me know what you think!
