Croissant

I’m very pleased to announce Croissant, a brand new app for cross-posting to Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads.

Over the summer, I began helping Aaron Vegh with the design of his blogging platform. One of its features was the ability to post directly to Mastodon in addition to your own blog. That struck a chord with me and I was curious if it could be expanded to other social networks. I asked Aaron if that’s something he’d considered, but he wanted to focus on the blogging side of things for the time being. 

Around that time, I found myself getting increasingly frustrated with the experience of trying to post to multiple social networks at once, especially from my phone. I’d started selling some photography wallpaper packs and was trying to promote them everywhere I could. But trying to write a post, attach multiple images, write alt-text descriptions for each image and then copy and paste everything while swiping between multiple apps felt much more tedious than it should be. And heaven forbid you make a typo, or want to rearrange the images, you almost have to start over from scratch.

So I thought, how hard can it be to improve on that? I had a few days where I was feeling a little run down. Not so bad that I should take the day off, but enough that I didn’t want to tackle anything complicated. So I opened up Sketch and began throwing some ideas together which quickly turned into a SwiftUI prototype. After a few days I showed it to Aaron and asked if he was interested in working on this together or if it was something I should just pursue myself. He immediately dropped everything else to focus on Croissant.

We worked incredibly quickly, motivated in part by RevenueCat’s Ship-a-Ton competition, but also because we didn’t want to invest a tonne of time into a project that might appeal to no one but ourselves. Once the app was somewhat presentable, I began showing it to a few close friends who immediately got it. Myke Hurley pushed me to get a TestFlight beta ready as soon as possible to make his life easier during the 12 hour long Relay Podcastathon. I couldn’t be more happy to have helped out in a small way. Myke also told me about Buffer (we were working so fast that market research wasn’t really a consideration!), a similar offering aimed at social media professionals. But Buffer’s pricing was almost 10 times what we had in mind for Croissant, and way outside what I think most independent creators would be able to afford. For many folks like us, social media is a very important part of the job, but it’s not our main focus, nor should it be. 

As we got closer to launching, we started teasing Croissant on social media (slightly hard to conceal when Mastodon shows the service you use to post!) and it started generating quite a bit of buzz that was a great motivation to get it out the door. Frustratingly, we were slowed down by Meta, who’s API for Threads requires a whole separate App Review (a shiver just went down the spine of any app developer reading this) as well as a whole business verification process. Not quite as an Open Web experience as Mastodon and Bluesky, but after a week or so we made it through the various hoops and were finally ready to launch.

I’ve always been a big fan of puns and wordplay, and many jokes cropped up over the course of Croissant’s development. As I started writing the announcement post, more and more puns kept jumping out at me and I couldn’t resist leaning fully into the bit. You should check out the thread, I think it’s some of my best copywriting.

Working with Aaron has been a blast so far, it’s a great experience waking up each morning to see the progress he’s made. We both have big plans for how to improve Croissant going forward, and we’ve been thrilled with the response so far, we think it has a very bright future ahead.

If you haven’t already, you can download Croissant on the App Store.