Building profitable iOS apps & SaaS in public. Sharing real revenue, launches and lessons - including what fails. Founder of Parivee. 🇳🇱
Friesland, The Netherlands
Joined April 2025
- Tweets858
- Following229
- Followers178
- Likes300
Most days I only talk to one bot.
It hands the work to the others
and tells me what needs my yes.
Strange way to run a solo business.
I kind of love it.
Anyone else building this way?
Tell me what you're working on 👇
Quiet reminder that the agent layer you depend on can disappear overnight. I keep my bot jobs as plain instructions I can move — not locked to one harness.
23 content briefs for two marketing sites.
Batch 1 has one job:
strip every App Store claim.
The apps aren't live yet.
So "Download now" would be a lie.
Smart banners out.
Fake install links out.
Honest pages first.
Would you put a marketing site online before the app clears App Review?
6 replies overnight — manga with agents, homeschool worlds, puzzle games.
Still looking for my people.
What are you building this week?
5 short videos for one of my apps.
Captions written.
Files ready.
Sitting in a folder since Sunday.
My content bot did its job.
I haven't pressed schedule yet.
The bottleneck isn't the bot.
It's me saying yes.
How long do finished drafts sit with you before you ship them?
hey X algorithm,
I think you lost my people.
I'm Patrick.
I build iOS puzzle games and small SaaS tools,
and AI agents do my testing and the boring reports.
If that sounds like you, or close,
say hi 👋
What's the one thing you're building right now?
Apple now lets subscription apps show a message right when someone cancels.
Up to 10 per app, with an optional offer.
The cancel screen just became one of the most important screens in your app.
how to keep people from cancelling your app store subscription
apple just shipped retention messages (nov 4)
the play:
1. app store connect → your app → subscriptions
2. set up a retention message (up to 10 per app)
3. add text, and optionally an image or a special offer
4. assign it and submit for app review
the catch: it only shows while someone is cancelling. win-back offers are for after they already left
set one up before your next churn spike
Top answers for testing iOS apps with an agent: XCUITest and Maestro.
Trying Maestro first this week.
Anyone already running it with an agent?
I have a bot that tests my web apps,
a bot that writes my cold emails,
and still no way to test my iOS apps end to end 😅
Building iOS apps and SaaS in public,
with AI agents doing the grunt work.
If you build with agents too,
or you're fighting the iOS simulator,
say hi 👋
What are you building this week?
4 AI agents wrote pages for the same website.
Each on its own branch.
None of them knew about the others.
3 of them edited the same page.
The first 2 merged fine.
The 3rd: merge conflicts.
So a 5th agent got one job:
clean up after the other 4.
New rule: one merge per site per day.
How do you stop parallel agents from stepping on each other?
I have a bot that tests my web apps,
a bot that writes my cold emails,
and still no way to test my iOS apps end to end 😅
Building iOS apps and SaaS in public,
with AI agents doing the grunt work.
If you build with agents too,
or you're fighting the iOS simulator,
say hi 👋
What are you building this week?
Two of my puzzle games aren't in the App Store yet.
That's already blocking their marketing.
Every list and review site I checked
wants a download link first.
One iOS news site even wrote
there's no real official app for that puzzle type yet.
Perfect fit.
But only once I'm live.
So: launch first, pitch second.
Do you start outreach before launch, or wait for the live link?
One of my sites lost almost all its Google impressions overnight.
Oct 26: 1,054.
Oct 27: 18.
Nothing broke.
Pages still indexed.
No errors anywhere.
My best guess:
hundreds of near-identical pages.
Same template, different city.
Now: redirects, noindex on the templates,
128 pages left in the sitemap.
Has Google ever dropped your site overnight, and did it come back?
Good habit. The privacy label is the one App Store field nobody rereads after launch, and every new SDK can quietly make it wrong.
Settle this for me, builders.
I tried to list a small tools site
on 7 "free" directories.
Listings I got: 0.
Every one had a catch:
a badge on my site,
an account with a password,
or a fee.
Pick one:
1. add the badge
2. pay the $10
3. skip directories, write better pages
What would you do?
My backlink bot sent its first cold emails.
4 sent.
2 bounced.
The rules I set before it sent anything:
max 10 a week.
one email per site, ever.
no address or phone number in any form.
Would you let a bot send cold emails for you?
Building got fast with AI.
Testing didn't.
So I gave testing to a bot.
It clicks through my live web apps
like a real user would.
12 bugs found
before a single user ran into them.
Who tests your vibe-coded app?
Monday check-in for builders.
Tell me what you're stuck on this week.
I'll go first:
A small tools site of mine has 98 pages.
Google indexed exactly one.
The homepage.
The rest:
"Crawled, currently not indexed."
Your turn 👋
What's blocking you this week?
Instructions in a file are a request. A hook is a rule.
Filtering Xcode build output before the agent sees it is a smart one for iOS projects.
AGENTS . md instructions are not always reliable, agent hooks are:
avanderlee.com/ai-developmen…
🪝 What agent hooks are and how they work
🔀 Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex hooks compared
🏗️ A hook that filters Xcode build output
#swiftlang #iosdev
Found a bug
that wasn't in my code.
Sites that list iOS apps
kept linking one of my apps
to the wrong website.
The cause:
the developer website in the App Store
still points to an old domain.
And every listing copies it.
Which App Store Connect setting has bitten you?