I shipped all these apps in 2020. Most of them generated $0.

🎬 https://t.co/JAhXqsuu6h $0
🌍 https://t.co/BrNUAhfiIT $0
💡 https://t.co/ZWcLfOH4aI $0
🐞 https://t.co/aghOxYEcPI $1.99
👍 https://t.co/2JhJLe27pW $3,025 in 10 days.

But that's ok, just keep shipping! My stories👇

🎬 https://t.co/wuiBp1XsYD is the first thing I created. It's a community for indie makers. The different thing is we post updates in videos. I created it for fun as I think the world doesn't need one more text-based forum, so I make a video one. No monetization plan so far.
🌍 https://t.co/fiwjgCWho5 is a social app. The idea is from Linktree, an app to share your social links. I thought it would be cool to add more visuals to it, and meanwhile we can explore others around. I also have no monetization plan for it. Make it for fun too.
💡 https://t.co/fZfL45uvVX is a platform to connect influencers with their fans. People says it's like @superpeer. But the only difference is it's all sync. Influencers don't need to commit their time to fixed slot. Fans pay to ask questions, influencers can answer at anytime.
Continuing Influenswer... I think the product has its potential. But for now maybe I didn't find the right niche to serve. Will re-evaluate it in future.
🐞 https://t.co/RkDgmOLs3a is a tool I created for tracking backlogs for IndieLog (This is IndieLog's public page https://t.co/z5k6jhwiEt). Of course the inspiration is from @cannyHQ, but that's too expensive for solo like me. So I decided to create a light-weighted one.
Continuing Backlogs. Why I earned $1.99? Haha, it's because my silly bug. In my code, I put 199, but on Stripe side, the unit is cent, so my price becomes $1.99 😅 The price is really friendly for indie makers. But I didn't put too much effort on marketing it, then the 💵 stops.
👍 https://t.co/F5tXTxFwfD is the only one that makes some money. I said it took me 4 days from my 1st commit. But I won't deny, lots of code is re-used from my previous projects. Without previous cumulative effort, I have no way to make a profitable product in just 4 days.
I told some of my friends but I never shared it publicly that I learnt the whole web dev thing from a Udemy $9.99 course. Well, I still haven't 100% completed the course, but at least I got the idea. It totally opened up my world to create my side projects.
Luckily I have my full-time job, so I didn't mean to make any money in the beginning. I just started for fun, for solving some problems that I have, and others may have. So if you are creating your 1st app, don't expect to make even $1. If you make it, you're super lucky!
I never regret that I made several apps that didn't even generate any revenue. My core is a developer, along building those app, I am building my own tool belt. The same to you. You will learn lots nitty gritty stuff only when getting your hands dirty.
So if your indie journey just gets started, don't worry about making money. Money comes when you have better tool belt to make a better product. Money comes when your idea condensed to be a validated one. Money comes when your passion powers through any obstacles.
2021 can only be better. All the best my friends 👊

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There are a *lot* of software shops in the world that would far rather have one more technical dependency than they'd like to pay for one of their 20 engineers to become the company's SPOF expert on the joys of e.g. HTTP file uploads, CSV parsing bugs, PDF generation, etc.


Every year at MicroConf I get surprised-not-surprised by the number of people I meet who are running "Does one thing reasonably well, ranks well for it, pulls down a full-time dev salary" out of a fun side project which obviates a frequent 1~5 engineer-day sprint horizontally.

"Who is the prototypical client here?"

A consulting shop delivering a $X00k engagement for an internal system, a SaaS company doing something custom for a large client or internally facing or deeply non-core to their business, etc.

(I feel like many of these businesses are good answers to the "how would you monetize OSS to make it sustainable?" fashion, since they often wrap a core OSS offering in the assorted infrastructure which makes it easily consumable.)

"But don't the customers get subscription fatigue?"

I think subscription fatigue is far more reported by people who are embarrassed to charge money for software than it is experienced by for-profit businesses, who don't seem to have gotten pay-biweekly-for-services fatigue.

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