Let's Talk About Panels

so last week I launched a project that I was really excited about that we've been working on for a while a wallpaper app called panels and I made a lot of mistakes along the way including the fact that I didn't really explain anything I didn't explain the UI what was in it the point of the app and most importantly why it had a freaking $50 price tier and so appropriately the entire internet was very disappointed and that's 100% on me I think that that's part of what can happen when you spend a long time building

something that you forget that other people don't have that context but the point of this video is not to make excuses it's to actually break down and explain everything so that you have it straight from me now first of all and I'll get to pricing in a second but just right from the top a wallpaper app pretty Niche thing right like most people just use one of their own pictures as a wallpaper or grab something cool from Google that's something I've done many times over the years so it's a very small fraction of people who

will actually download an app let alone pay for a wallpaper on their phone but the reason I decided to try and make a wallpaper app is because for years I've been answering this one very common question which is where' you get that wallpaper like in videos and screens and devices I'm reviewing where'd you get that piece and so if I could always have some place to point to that's on IOS and Android if I could have a link in every description then that would be awesome and if I can leverage this incredible platform you guys

have given me to give way more eyeballs to the artists that make that art that I'm using I felt like that was something worth building it's actually an idea that's been floating around the studio for years and we never really knew where to start but then like a year and a half ago a developer reached out to us with a similar idea and we were like all right this is great let's collaborate and let's actually build this thing so that's when we set off to actually start making it so many months ago myself and a

developer team of two along with some others on my team here at the studio set off to build this thing and this is what we ended up with it's a fresh new app there's a few hundred pieces in here by a bunch of different handpicked artists that I've used art from in the past plus a few people in the studio here submitting their own and then on any page if you like it you can get it but you can also click on the artist name and see more from that person including their socials so this

is something specific that sets it apart now again most people like 99% 99.9% of humans do not buy wallpapers but there is a pretty awesome community of artists making sick art sometimes free sometimes a few bucks I know from being in the thick of it for many years I've personally gotten very used to fking around and finding a sick wallpaper or icon pack and go straight to the source and it's a few bucks and you download it straight from there and we wanted to support both of those in this app free art and paid art

so this is where a lot of the pricing conversation comes in and this was a misjudgment on my part like this is also terribly communicated so I want to make super clear this should be a free app this should be a great free app experience for the vast majority of people who use it and I really dropped the ball there and obviously I've never made an app before I make videos and review products but the people are right like if I was reviewing this app I would not have been very nice but this is this

is the two-sided coin of you know deciding to not go build something in public is if we're going to Dish it we got to be able to take it too and so there has been no shortage of tons of actually constructive feedback that we've taken in Taken notes on and sort of started to turn into this app that we had pictured in our heads we're sort of dialing in what we actually want to make but hey a lot of people have a lot of questions now so for the sake of transparency let me just go

over the biggest questions give you the answers to those questions and then some of the biggest updates that we've made so far so number one pricing nobody wants to pay that much for wallpapers totally get it and there are so many reasons why we failed on the price front so three steps that we're taking here so first of all just to bring it back a wallpaper app is Niche paying for a wallpaper is even more Niche and so like a subscription to wallpapers is something that I think less than 1% of 1% of people would

ever even consider so if you're looking at panels and find yourself thinking this seems crazy paying for a wallpaper you're not wrong you are most people so our first priority is we want to make sure the free experience of the app is great it's got to be way better so I'm getting rid of those third party in feed ads this is one of my misjudgments like we just don't need those they feel cheap and they're also harder to attribute to specific artists anyway so now the feed is clean and then all non-collection wallpapers are available

for free in 1080P no ads and if you want the full res sometimes 4K sometimes 8K depending on the art you can get a full resolution version with a single 30- second ad to try to offset server costs and pay artists so if you really want it for a like a high res tablet or a computer wallpaper or some big screen in your life then you can get all of it any of it for free now even though subscriptions are incredibly unpopular uh we wanted to at least offer one that made sense for the wallpaper

power user for how few of you actually exist uh so first of all we have a new tier that is two bucks a month which is everything I just mentioned completely ad free and full resolution everything across the board so that means you never have to see another ad never have to worry about that and you always get the highest resolution version no matter what screen you're downloading for I think this is really fair and should hopefully continue to help pay to keep the app running as well secondly we also offer for those of you

who are really into this world like I said earlier we support paid art uh collections is what they're called so there are artists who have really gone out of their way to put a ton of work in on certain pieces they've made made and have decided to charge for those collections of pieces totally cool there's a whole world of those to so if you're using panels and you jump in and decide to buy one single collection for three four five bucks or whatever that's cool but if there's a bunch of these that you really like

we wanted to give people an option to just unlock literally everything so that's panels plus so you can subscribe and for 12 bucks it unlocks literally every single collection in the whole app plus anything premium that gets added while you're a subscriber I think as of right now that entire value of every artist's paid packs if you paid them individually is about 100 bucks even before any new art drops so we settled that $12 because that's around what it would cost if you were purchasing more than two collections straight up and then in case you're

someone who really loves to change your wallpaper say you're a tech reviewer or something or you have a whole bunch of devices um then you know you're already going to commit to this for more than a few months we wanted to give people the option to just pay for panels Plus for a year and we made that 50 bucks so I think that Nets to the equivalent of like roughly $4 a month but that's the point of why that exists and I understand that most people will still find Forever the $50 number crazy because it's

for power users and it seems crazy but if you happen to be one of those power users then that's why this tier exists so at least now you know why and the third important point is that we're splitting profits with the artist 50/50 this is something I mentioned in the original video and there's a lot of initial discussion around if this is fair I think it is I base this on to be totally honest on YouTube which actually I believe theirs is 4555 but I did 50/50 to be simple but the idea is the same

which is that hopefully this whole thing can bring a bunch of extra eyes to the art the same way YouTube drives to frankly there's another thing I'm open to changing like we've set it at that and now are collecting as much information as we can but I'll be in touch with artists about that too I do think it's worth noting that this is the main point of the app like this is what I hope it can be which is a platform for discovering new artists and what they make and I haven't told anyone this but

I might as well the artist agreements that we've made none of them have any exclusivity at all in them which means they can artists can host the exact same art and stuff on their own website it so if you find a piece from watching a video or whatever you go into panels and then you find their socials and then go find a whole bunch more stuff from that artist and go buy a bunch of that without the 50/50 split I still consider that a win for everyone involved so number two privacy what is going on

with all that tracking great question a lot of people have been rightfully concerned with the one sheater that the App Store shows which at launch showed this huge list of like things the app might track which included things like location and tracking across apps another blunder by us this was way too broad for clarity this was not actually the set of permissions that the app would ask for the app would never once ask for your location it's actually a list of things that you as a developer provide to the app store for things that the

app May at some point ask just to tell people ahead of time just to be safe and we just checked way too many boxes so for transparency most of these boxes were checked because of broad suggestion from the ad service ad Mob We AED on the side of just leaving them all there to be safe but that was a dumb choice no other way to say it so to be clear I do not want your data actually you can use the app without ever logging in like you don't even need to give us so much

as an email address to actually use it and get a wallpaper and save a wallpaper like obviously you need to make an account to sync across devices and stuff like that but yeah that that was my B on the disclosures and that's been fixed so number three it's a bad app so okay once we get past all of the rest of the constructive criticism that the app has rightfully gotten then you get to the enormous variety of opinions about the app itself and of course in the chaos of launching like this and ending up like

in the top 10 of the App Store is we get a lot of information about usage and responses from people and we find all kinds of bugs bugs were always expected we're already on that but also for the design itself My Philosophy actually was to just try to make as close to the same exact experience as possible between IOS and Android same UI same feature set same everything and some people like that some people don't obviously a lot of this is a matter of taste but some people like especially want an Android app to feel

like to use the slideout menus and to feel like a native Android app versus iOS so that's that is something I'm thinking a lot about and there are also pieces of it like image preview and onboarding that we want to improve a lot uh one of the weirdest things I saw was this rumor that we' bought an old existing app and then repackaged it and slapped my face on it this is very false I actually found where this came from basically people saw that the panel's Twitter account appears to be from 2021 that's literally because

we repurposed an old and inactive Twitter account I hope you know that that sounds as ridiculous to me as it does to you but the other thing that came up was that the app being filled with AI generator art that's also not true but I should explain how we got to this so there are a few pieces that were edited using AI like some of these skyscraper Pieces by Chris hea are a really good example where he's taken his own images these photos of historic buildings used AI trained on them to generate new ones and

then refine them with Photoshop and they look so sick so anyway I did respond to a tweet like this but obviously that's my fault again for not explaining everything super clearly so we we've made sure to label anything that has any AI involved at any step in the process as AI enhanced so that's very visible and if you're curious about how they're using AI again a lot of the social media Pages linked to the artist they actually explain how they're using some of this stuff which is super cool so to answer the question of how

do we know that this app won't someday just be filled with AI generated slop that's the curated part so every piece of art that goes into the app is actually gone through us and so I can personally promise that will never happen but then aside from that I'm obviously pretty biased but I think the app itself is a pretty solid start there's reviews out there already like there's a review from zone of tech where he Compares it to his own wallpaper app and notes some cool features like visual search that our app has that his

doesn't even though there's a lot of work we still have to do on that it's cool to see and his is also Awesome by the way it has some interesting UI ideas and nice haptic touches uh this channel juxtaposed did a great review it's actually like a like a constructive facelift for a lot of UI elements and I just want to say thank you for that video like there's a lot of really helpful stuff in there this is literally one of my favorite videos of the week and I subscribed after I watched it I also

want to improve the code to be much more native to each OS um this should help with just memory efficiency in general but that's something I can put on our developers but this is the stuff that takes longer this takes more time so this is something like we know most of the hard hard work is ahead of us and this app should be improving over time clearly so then number four the future which brings us to that thing I keep saying which is never buy a product based on the promise of future software updates buy

it for what it is today and I'm never going to stop preaching that that is still extremely true but the irony is not lost on me that I've also made a lot of references and promises about the future of this app in this video so I'll still say if you want to grab a wallpaper or download this app and check it out get it for what it is today which is a wallpaper app like if if you see a link in the description of any video with a cool piece that you like you can just

jump over there and that's that's what panels is today I actually didn't want to make this video Until we'd actually fixed and shipped and gotten approved all the updates to the app that I talked about in this video so you can see now exactly what it is today but I also want to shed light on our plans for the future it's not something you always get to see and hey if those plans do materialize then maybe you'll down the road pick up that app for what it becomes we are committing to doing weekly drops every

Friday of new art into the app so we have a ton of stuff in que that we're going to be going through that's super sick and also if you are an artist and want to be in panels I'll have a link to a Google form below this video where you can fill it out and then we can be in touch I don't have a timeline for when we're going to get through everyone but we do have a lot of good stuff incoming and we'll also regularly be updating the app in the app store and the

Play Store I'm not going to like detail every time there's a new update to it here but if you want to follow that stuff you can follow the panels account on Twitter and that'll be when there's new art in the app with the weekly drops and when there's big new features and stuff like that so yeah we may we may forever be cursed by a one star rating and I know that the comments and memes will probably never actually end even though some of them were pretty funny uh but at least hopefully we can with

enough transparency earn your respect and your trust back and ideally they people who want the wallpapers now they got somewhere to get them truly thanks for listening thanks for watching catch you guys in the next one peace