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.
// pop-up with indie acquisitions offer