Buying a house with RealBasic
Developers love to argue about which framework is best. Daniel Kennett’s career is a reminder that users rarely care.
As a teenager in the UK, Daniel wanted to learn how to program a hand-me-down Mac LC2. After failing to grasp Java and C++, he found RealBasic — a cross-platform visual language. He used it to build Music Rescue, an app that let users copy music off their iPods back onto their Macs.
The app was born in the back of a physics class, but it hit the market at exactly the right time. When the popular website iPod Lounge used Music Rescue in a tutorial on how to back up an iPod, sales took off. “I always find it funny when people these days are like, ‘Well, you have to use X programming language or X framework to build an app,'” Daniel says. “It’s like, come on, I bought a house with RealBasic.”
The lesson was clear early on: if an app is polished, solves a real problem, and fits well on the platform, the underlying technology is just a detail.
The human cost of going broke
The success of Music Rescue meant Daniel went from working part-time in a hardware store to earning a senior developer salary while still at university. But the financial education didn’t match the income.
“I just buy stuff, credit card, credit card. Oh, credit card’s maxed out, pay it all off, whole thing and do that,” he recalls. When the iPhone arrived and Spotify launched, the iPod market began to shrink. Music Rescue’s revenue dipped. At the same time, Daniel and a friend started building a new app, spreading their focus too thin. Because of his spending habits and the delayed reality of credit card debt, by the time he realized the business was in trouble, it was too late.
“We lost a car, just suddenly came and took the car one day, fighting to keep the house and eventually sold it to avoid it being taken basically. Lost friends, everything my entire life was kind of destroyed,” he says.
He avoided bankruptcy “by the skin of my teeth” and took a job at a then-small Swedish startup called Spotify to rebuild his finances. The experience didn’t shake his confidence as a developer, but it fundamentally changed how he approached business risk. Years later, when he decided to go indie again with Cascable, he did it with strict financial guardrails, rolling goals, and the support of his wife, who had lived through the crash with him.
Pricing for a $4,000 camera
When Daniel launched Cascable Studio — an app that lets photographers remote-control non-iPhone cameras via WiFi — he faced a market that expected mobile apps to be cheap. He rejected that expectation immediately.
“If you can afford $4,000 for a camera, you can pay more than $2 for my app,” he says.
Cascable targets advanced amateurs and professional photographers who use expensive gear from Canon, Nikon, Sony, and Fujifilm. Because the app genuinely unlocks new capabilities for that hardware — like complex automation for astrophotography — the audience understands its value. The app’s non-subscription purchase option is currently $99, and Daniel notes that they rarely get complaints about the price.
This pricing confidence extended to how they handled the industry’s shift toward subscriptions. When Adobe moved its photography tools to a subscription-only model, it angered the entire photography community. Watching that backlash, Daniel chose to offer both a subscription and a one-time purchase option. He avoids the word “lifetime” — which creates unrealistic expectations — and instead promises that buying the non-subscription version and paying for occasional major upgrades will always be cheaper over the long run than subscribing.
The result? A healthy business with a paid-to-free ratio of about 25%, which is exceptionally high for a freemium app.
The three-week COVID pivot
Cascable Studio grew slowly and steadily for years. But in early 2020, the pandemic hit. Events were cancelled, event photographers lost their jobs, and they stopped buying photography apps. Cascable’s revenue dropped.
At the same time, remote work exploded, creating a massive shortage of webcams. People wanted to use their expensive DSLR and mirrorless cameras as high-quality webcams for Zoom calls.
Years earlier, Daniel had made an architectural decision to pull Cascable’s camera connection logic into a standalone SDK. It was originally done to license the technology to other developers, but in March 2020, it became a lifeline. Because the SDK already knew how to talk to 250 different cameras, Daniel was able to build a Mac virtual webcam app in just three weeks.
“From idea to money was three weeks and I’m very proud of that,” he says. The new app, Cascable Pro Webcam, filled the revenue gap left by the core app and effectively saved the company during the worst of the pandemic. It was a stark reminder that clean architecture isn’t just about code quality — it’s about business optionality.
In the full episode, Daniel also talks about his time at early Spotify, reverse-engineering the iPod using SCSI commands, why he still buys expensive cameras just to test them, and his new app PhotoScout.