For years, Matt Birchler was known as a prolific tech blogger, YouTuber, and podcaster—not as a native iOS developer. He had a degree in television production, an early career in retail management and tech support, and one rough Swift weather app sitting at the bottom of his App Store Connect account as a permanent reminder of his first attempt.
Then he got tired of opening Sketch just to write a movie review.
That inconvenience eventually became Quick Reviews, the first app Matt considers a serious release. It also started a run of small utilities built from the same question: if a piece of software keeps annoying you, why not fix it yourself?
A Sketch artboard had to become an app
Before Quick Reviews was an iOS app, it was a manual design chore. Matt wanted to post visually appealing reviews of movies and games to his social accounts, so he built a Sketch document. Every time he wanted to post a review, he had to sit at his Mac, duplicate the artboard, swap the poster image, and retype the text.
When people started asking what app he was using, he built a simple, one-page jQuery website to automate the process. It still required users to screenshot the final result, and it had no account system or review history. He wanted the tool on his phone, which meant he finally had to figure out native iOS development.
Bad AI made him learn the code
Matt knew CSS and HTML, but his previous attempt at building an iOS app felt like "laying out your HTML in tables." SwiftUI's declarative syntax felt familiar to someone who already knew the web. At the same time, early AI coding tools like Cursor were becoming available.
He spent about a month and a half working through the app, but the AI tools available at the time were frustratingly rudimentary.
“It was so hard. You had to tell it to do one small thing. It would screw it up. You'd have to do it again... The entire app would be in one Swift file, and you'd have to remind it, ‘you might want to do a second file.’” — Matt Birchler
But that friction was exactly what he needed. Because the AI couldn't build the app perfectly on the first try, Matt was forced to read the output, understand the data structures, and learn how the views interacted. That structural knowledge paid off. Today, when he uses much better AI tools, he actually knows what to ask for and how to verify that the generated code is correct.
The $10 subscription was downside protection
Quick Reviews is a free app, but it includes a $10 annual subscription from day one. That decision wasn't driven by aggressive growth targets; it was driven by API exposure.
The app pulls metadata, posters, and cast information from The Movie Database and uses an RSS feed to import a user's recent Letterboxd reviews. Relying on third-party services meant Matt couldn't assume every dependency would remain free forever.
“I wanted to make sure all of these projects do not lose me money.” — Matt Birchler
By putting the automated metadata and Letterboxd sync behind a paywall immediately, he gave the app a way to cover future service costs. Separately, the wider app catalog has become Matt's largest side-income stream, bringing in more revenue than either his blog or his YouTube channel by a significant margin.
99 folders of experiments
Once Matt realized he could fix his own software annoyances, the development bug bit hard. He built Quick Subtitles and Chapterize to remove friction from his own podcast workflow, using them multiple times a week. When he set a goal to run 365 miles in a year and couldn't find a workout app that simply graphed his progress toward that specific target, his immediate response was, "I could make that." So he built Yearly Run Goals.
He names his apps clearly—using words like "Quick"—to signal that they are focused utilities, not massive platforms that require endless support. But he doesn't release everything he builds.
In his Mac's home directory, Matt has a folder simply named "Apps." It contains 99 folders—not all of them projects he built himself, but many of them tiny tools, abandoned visualizers, and experiments that never went anywhere. He sees a friction point and wants to know whether he can fix it. Sometimes the answer is yes, and a new app ships. Sometimes the answer is no, and the experiment stays in the folder.
Where to go next
In the full episode, Matt also discusses why actually selling software on the App Store changed his view of Apple's 30% commission, why YouTube sponsorships often create more administrative work than they are worth, and how co-hosting the Comfort Zone podcast gives him a collaborative creative outlet.