From Corporate Web Developer to Full-Time Indie Hacker — Sebastian Röhl, HabitKit

0:00hello I'm your host David Barnard and with me today Revenue cat CEO Jacob iding Our Guest today is Sebastian R an independent app developer from Germany who created habit kit on the podcast we talked with Sebastian about quitting a job to build his own apps going back to that job after failing to gain traction and the inflection point that allowed him to finally quit for good hey Sebastian thanks so much for joining us on the podcast today hi thank you for having me I'm a huge fan of the podcast and of Revenue kid of course oh bless you and Jacob nice to have you back on

0:37the podcast a long time without you has it been the production schedule for subclub is confusing and out of my sight but I assume I assume I'm on every episode is that not the case are there episodes without me we got talk we got to talk about this I did some live episodes and then go very good I listen to every single one I'm not on I promise of course you better all right so Sebastian I wanted to kick things off today so you're a career web developer but now a solo IND the app developer so how did you get started in apps as a web developer the motivation

1:15behind building mobile apps was actually because I decided to start my own app business I just wanted to work on my own products and sell them on the Internet and make a living of it and all the ideas that I had were all related to best suiting for the mobile platform and that's how I initially got excited for mobile app development it does feel like apps are a great Market not just that like you were saying that the idea but as a Marketplace and having access to so many consumers directly through the app stores were there not any Web projects that you thought would be successful or

1:54was it just kind of more exciting to build apps versus your bread and butter kind of web development yeah so this whole web development thing always felt a little bit more intimidating to me as a solo entrepreneur you have to build this back end then and you have to deal with payments and sales tax and stuff like that and when you're on the mobile platform all this payments and sales tax thing is handled by Apple and Google and that was really a good point for me to start there and yeah the ideas as I already said before yeah it makes it much more appealing I feel like in webd

2:33or like building Indie web apps you see much more like prosumer or utility SAS kind of stuff and a lot less consumer lifestyle focused things so it's almost like if you want to build stuff for consumers for people the web's not a great option right like mobile is like clearly a better and then of course like all the stuff that you discuss like payments like having a merchant of record all of that stuff and if you're in consumer all of those problems are much more multiplied because like if you're selling B2B your number of customers is usually much much lower right you might be at hundreds if you're

3:04doing well and in that case like you're dealing fewer jurisdictions and your compliance is maybe a little bit easier but when you're dealing with consumers it's thousands right and now you're multiplying that problem so yeah it's almost not even an option to do a consumer web app yeah and back when I started habit kits I already got this idea a couple of years ago for this app and back then when you scroll down all the way on my Twitter profile and look at my first post you can actually see me building a very early web version of habit kit and I actually completely abandoned this because habit tracking

3:39didn't feel natural to me on the web so it felt much more better well I mean you could build it as a progressive web app I'm sure but then you lose the distribution you lose all the things that make it nice about being mobile this is like one of those controversial opinions I feel like a pwa can never really totally feel as nice as a swift or even flutter or some sort of native back mobile app I don't think that's a controversial op it like I still think some I mean obviously there people who chose to use that technology to like die on that hill but price $1,000 the person

4:10can put a pwa in front of me and me not figure out it's a pwa like I guarantee you I will know yeah so you mentioned wanting to build your own stuff and there is kind of always that Allure of a side project of like having something going on on the side but was it always the goal to like leave your job what's so bad about having a day job I guess the first time that I thought about building my own apps was at the end of my University time when I was writing my Master's thesis and at that time I discovered the Indie hackers.com community and learned about all these

4:44cool people that are building their own products and selling them on the Internet and actually make a living of it and that felt super cool and exciting to me and although I took a real job as a software engineer after University the thought of bootstrapping my own business really got stuck at the back of my head so after 3 years of working for that company we were basically Contracting for this other company and building their enterprise resource planning back office s why why would Indie hacking seem appealing if you were doing that all day yeah so I guess it's the nature of Contracting work you have very limited

5:24control about how the product You're Building will look like how it will behave what's the ux and the UI and the only thing that you're mostly having control of is the technical side as a programmer in this project and I'm not really the type of developer that unconditionally loves programming I'm definitely not the type of software engineer that Geeks out on optimizing algorithms or something like that which also doesn't feel like something you're often doing when you're programming an Erp for an internal use case yeah exactly I'm the type of developer that likes to make his own Concepts and how a problem should be solved and then

6:02develop it myself and then see the concept in the real world and yeah so I got a little bit bored by this project that I couldn't really escape from and don't get me wrong the job was fine and I learned a lot met many cool people but at this time I wanted to try my own stuff was it also just kind of like having an outlet like working this job where it sounds like as a consultant it's like you just got handed specs like you were even getting to like interact with a product team or be in the meetings where things were decided and stuff so was it somewhat just like I

6:36have to build things it sounds like that's your deeper motivation was like creativity and just wanting to like build products yeah in the end the most important aspect was this creativity thing I guess some jobs can definitely make that possible but it's usually not the case in the Contracting World maybe I would have been better off at a company where they developed their own product I hope you can confirm that but I can imagine that the developers at Revenue C can bring in their own ideas and have a real impact on the product right sure sure I think though there maybe the moment it got ruined for you

7:10is when you found any hackers.com because I think once somebody gets the idea that they need to do this or they want to do this like all of the rest of it feels like you're just finding the justification to go do it when really it's just you want to go do it right it's just something you need to do and I try to tell that to folks that you know you're in Tech long enough and this goes between Venture back startups down to like Indie side projects going independent all of that stuff I think if you feel the need to do it like you have it in you like it's inside of you and

7:40you just need to go do it you can spend all the time you want justifying it building up the whatever things you got to do to convince yourself it's okay but like the real decision is made up is like is it inside you and do you have to do it if it's like ah it'd be nice it' be cool but whatever like do not do it do not do it because like nine times out of 10 maybe it's worked out well for you I don't know but like it doesn't net out but it will be successful if like you had to do this and then at least even if

8:06it fails like you did it right you got it out of you and you can decide then like you have clear eyes about what you want to do with your life and do you value the things that because I guess like to you like reading the Indie hackers he was cool but like what about it was appealing to you beyond the like having creative control over what you're building yeah so it's all about building a cool lifestyle business for myself I want to work whenever I want I want to take breaks whenever I want if life gets in the way something is with the family I want to be there and want to have my

8:36business there and don't touch it but it's somehow should run by its own this passive income thing I know it's not passive but I just like rental properties right very passive very passive for anybody who's ever owned a rental property knows it's very passive I mean I just took a three week vacation and didn't have to do a single thing for my business and it just continued to work yeah wow I had somewhat a different experience on the Indie hacker side in a way because I started the business first and just like jumped off a cliff but I will say for those kind of listening to

9:12this while that is the dream and Sebastian has done it well for me it was like over a decade of just grinding and this was before subscription so it's always paid up front and then you know my apps often would get a lot of press and then it was always like okay when am I going to get the next press and so you know I had a lot of flexibility and got to take some time as needed but I think it depends on your personality and backup financially and other things as to whether even once you start to achieve some level of success you can take that as a luxury versus like having

9:43this constant and and I had four kids along the way so like for me there was like this just constant fire under me I'm saying this to kind of maybe balance out the perspective is that there was just a constant fire and so then even though I did see some level of success I never took a 3 we vacation was pretty awesome so early in your journey that you were able to really take that time off I mean for me it was just always ah what's next what's next and just grinding grinding grinding I think it's a big personality thing I see this in entrepreneurs outside of tech a lot of

10:14times too like folks that own cash flowing businesses and things like this like some of them are really good about actually using it to like lever into a lifestyle that they want others it just becomes worse than a job because like a job you can quit or you can get fired right like there are outs that are like accessible to you but sometimes with these businesses there isn't and there's like Sebastian when you're gone for 3 weeks did no customers get mad nobody like came up or they did and you're just like you know what they'll live what's your philosophy for like creating these boundaries I

10:47usually get two or three emils a day at this season in winter it's a little bit more but in summer it's just three or four emails per day and it's mostly feature requests people saying hey I love your app but it would be cool if you could add that and that's not really an email I have to reply to but you're looking at them yes did you look at them okay okay see there's always there always in the lifestyle they don't tell you this on Indie hackers you're out on your yach for three weeks or whatever but you are checking right and I I was checking yeah yeah did you even respond

11:20to some of them after I was back here you're really on trial now Sebastian it's Indie hacker but I think it's a good point and like obviously that doesn't feel intrusive to you which I think also with a job can be very different sometimes right like with a job if you're on vacation or you're doing something and like the job tries to seal some of your time like that feels much more offensive sometimes when it's your own thing you're like well this is my own thing and I own it and like I have to do this and it doesn't necessarily feel like work but again it's so psychological like depending on

11:53the person and the mindset and that same for like your job like some people don't mind having to like take care of things for their job when they're like ostensibly out other people it's like the worst in the world and it really just depends on your mindset and personality and stuff like that I don't even know necessarily that there's a better or worse way to approach it but I do think it's interesting because well we haven't got to this yet because you got into Indie life and then you got out of Indie life is that correct not really because my app Business didn't really start as a side project because I

12:23actually quit my job to start my own business most Indie hackers tell you as device don't do this only do this when you have a stable income from your side Hustle but I actually did the opposite and left my comfortable job and then started my app Business how did that work financially you just kind of saved up and were single and kept your expenses low or how' you jump off that Cliff I had this safety net that I built up before I knew that at least as an experienced software developer here in Germany it isn't really hard to find a real job again if the business goes

12:58downhill so I got that safety I built up some savings that I could live off for at least a year and at that time I didn't have many Financial Obligations of course I had to pay for an apartment and food and stuff like that but I didn't have kids no loans for a house or something like that so I was basically free to do whatever I want yeah this is hard to reason about for most people like conceptualization of risk right when you are near the bottom and that's not the bottom like life's pretty good you have an apartment you have all these things but like you don't have debt you

13:31don't have obligations you don't have a lot of stacked leverage on yourself personally like you can jump off a cliff and you're only falling a foot right like but even if you don't have a lot of assets like if you have to declare bankruptcy your credit's screwed but like what are they going to take right like you don't have any asset you know most banks wouldn't give you loans and most of the time you're not going to end up in owing money that you can't pay but you really especially early in life it's just a fact there's less at stake and that's often the time it's best to start

13:58something thing but on the flip side it's also like you probably know the least you're like least experienced and things like this and I'm counseling somebody I know who's 21 years old and he's like thinking about starting a business right now but it's obviously there's a lot of considerations and I'm like I almost just like do it like do it because like even if you don't know what you're doing if it fails you put some stuff in your experience bag if it succeeds holy crap if you started a business that compounds at 21 years old like you could retire by the time you're 35 if you really wanted to if works out

14:29well right like to be able to start that so early in your life is such an advantage but again there's no free lunch right so doing it early versus doing it later like all has its trade-offs I do think there's something to like talking to a lot of entrepreneurs I think there Sound Advice in like saving and making it safe before you can take a leap but and I'm curious how this motivated you but I think when you jump off the cliff even if you have some safety net you know whatever I think jumping before you have a rope to grab onto is is a good motivator right

15:00it sort of like has to work you know what I mean like how did you feel about that jumping off with nothing in Hand by the time you were independ that yeah that definitely felt scary and weird but I also additionally to all the safety nets that I mentioned earlier I also said to myself okay I time boox this app Business experiment to exactly 12 months it seemed reasonable to me to have this backup plan if it doesn't work out and I said to myself okay if this doesn't work out I will go back to my old job or another job and what was your bar for

15:33definition of working out did you have like a number or like something in mind that you said like oh this is successful so the condition was to reach the base level which I could live of some indie hackers College Ramen profitability yeah yeah but I actually didn't reach it and so I left on good terms with my previous employer and then actually even got back to them once were over yeah I had to admit defeat and then had to was it tough did you have a lot of Pride and was it tough for you to go back and do that or did you just feel like hey I set

16:06myself this thing like how was that psychologically for you to kind of have to go back that wasn't really so bad because in my free year I learned so many great things I got so much self-confidence I developed this two cool apps and a lot of people downloaded them already and that really developed my selfconfidence so going back wasn't really that bad I even got a nice ways and yeah it was a great decision you there you go folks a minimum you can come back and renegotiate your salary so during that year though like how did things go like did you already have like an app in mind when you quit or was it

16:45like you quit and like okay now I got to pick the product let's talk through that first year and like how you built stuff when I made the decision to start my own business I didn't really have a good idea what app to build I think in the end the first idea isn't really that important what's more important is to start moving and just build anything it doesn't really matter what because once you started building something you'll automatically get new better ideas start writing that's like the famous thing for writing too it's like just start writing just start writing and then even if you throw it away you're more likely not

17:23you're going to wander onto something good right yeah just get into the flow I'm sure it activates certain of your brain that are responsible for creativity or something like that when I quit my job I took a look at my personal life and tried to figure out what app doesn't meet my requirements and I quickly decided that I want to build my own version of a fitness tracking app yeah sounds really boring there are already 100 slightly competitive market yeah yeah there are already a million other Fitness tracking apps but I just wanted to start moving and that's why I picked this idea that's how I came to

17:59build my first applift bear with this one year it's ultimately a lot of time so like you could have and I would have been the person doing this work for 12 months and then ship the app did you like have a deadline like I got to get this in the app store by X day so that I know whether it's going to work or not so that I can iterate like how did you set deadlines and set expectations in that 12-month period I already followed lot of other Indie hackers and I I read some advice and I already knew that I shouldn't develop this app for 12 months

18:35and then release it and then see that nobody really cares about it I just was disciplined enough to buckle down and then develop it in the first two months of my free year and then launch it so I didn't really had a problem with this yeah you have to have low expectations about what you're going to produce I think uh realistic expectations not necessarily low expect no low I say low I should find I I saw a first version of Revenue cap screenshot again the other day and it looks terrible and like honestly like I think not to toot my own horn or whatever but I think a lot of people would have

19:11trouble shipping that and like I just don't care what people think like you know or like what the majority of people think or something like this right like with your point Sebastian it's like just do something and I guess the flip side is like maybe you're concerned about your perception of yourself and what you can create that's one problem I think other people are just ered like oh what are people going to think about me and the thing is is like even if it's crap nobody pays attention if you ship something crappy it's fine because a few people might notice and a few people might be this is crappy but also like

19:40most people just won't notice and they won't care and then you make it nice over time and then more people are exposed to it as it gets better and better now there's flip sides if you're like the Humane team or like other teams like this where you have a lot of Spotlight on you your initial launch really matters but you're not the Humane team like you're most people aren't that right you can just kind of shipped something I think it's great like two months that's a really good timeline to get something into production and start learning yeah we kind of spoiled the ending because you went back to your job

20:08but what was the reception for Lift bear and how did things go at launch and then the rest of that year as you were already saying Jacob setting expectations is really important not only in terms of what you're producing also in terms of what the reception be of your first app so lift bear wasn't really a success it was a very quiet launch when I released it I didn't have many Twitter followers back then and I was and still am by the way a huge beginner when it comes to marketing so yeah that was tough I only got a couple of downloads but I was proud to finally

20:46have my own app on the App Store and Google Play that was that was a huge milestone yeah you got to the App Store you download it you see your name there are some users somebody downloaded it right I'm sure and you said a couple of people literally two people downloaded it it were more but okay in the first week maybe 100 and after that only 10 per week or something like that yeah which then it's like 10 activate five actually open the app two actually finish onboarding and then those all turn in a week right so it's below the minimum threshold for something that's actually being used right but in some

21:21ways that's actually incredible though it's like you built something and like a 100 random strangers around the world found it and downloaded it and then 10 people a week around the world I mean the power of the app store right it's like people are searching even if you're like number 50 on the list in a search or whatever it's background radiation the app store right find it yeah when you saw those numbers you now say like you're a bad marketer you didn't think about growth did you go like oh I have a growth problem like what was your diagnosis because at some point six months in maybe you're in the store you

21:53know the numbers are not great like what did you do or try or what was your next move yeah so after this very quiet launch of course I still got feedback from friends and a couple of Twitter followers and from my family because I myself used the app daily I decided not to give up on it immediately and then I continued developing cool new features because that's what developers do you know how to do yeah yeah yeah clearly I need more features clearly the problem is the feature set so I added cool stuff like statistics and new exercise types and stuff like that there is a logic to

22:30that right like there is a logic to build cool things as a method of growth but you also have to have a channel to like tell new people that that feature exists right because even if the 10 people that downloaded are incrementally more happy from that feature like it's not going to create a growth engine you know yeah exactly that's pretty tough yeah I did that roughly for six months I also tried to optimize the store listing doing some ASO try to do some marketing on Instagram and I even tried app search ads but the app wasn't going anywhere actually and after 6 months I couldn't

23:04take it anymore I could look back on roughly $100 of Revenue made totally in the six months brutal right wow yeah so that's cool because I made $100 with my f but I knew if I want to continue working on this app business I definitely your personal burn rate I assume is a little bit higher than that I definitely I mean if it makes you feel any Revenue cat 12 months in oh about 12 months in I think we had made $300 right so like SAS typically has a lower start rate but still we were in that same position I remember Miguel and I just being like this will never work

23:43like 300 and 10,000 are so far apart in mentally right that you're just like this will never work right so I can totally understand that's very demoralizing at the beginning when you have just really small numbers and like if you put it in the context of like you'll spend $100 on a nice dinner right it becomes really kind of brutal yeah yeah and that's exactly the point where you need to make the decision do I do something different with the same product or do I pivot it completely into a new product or or do I go back to work or do I got back to work

24:16yeah but that wasn't the part where I went back to work I still had six months in my fre oh okay okay okay got it after all this lift bear depression I actually decided to focus on a new project then I wanted to do it as an experiment I set myself a very small deadline of two months of building it and yeah that's how I built my second app habit kit which was way more successful then did you know right away when you launched it was it like night and day between the two launches or when did you know that maybe this was a better try it was

24:51actually before the launch of the app I was building in public on Twitter and the first time that I posted a picture of the main screen of habit kit this post totally blew up and I actually got 800 likes that was a lot for me back then that was the moment when I knew okay this could be more successful than lift bear interesting what about that post because like that could just be a fluke but there must have been something right like most of my posts don't get that let's and they're great in my opinion what was it was it just like hey here's what I'm building or was it like

25:25hey I'm launching this like what was the nature of it that you think made it so interesting to people yeah so I guess the text was just here this is the new app that I'm building that's the main screen and then I posted the main screen of habit kit where you see the grid with the color tiles and stuff like that for your habits that was it and people seem to resonate with it they really liked it and I don't know why but it actually went through the roof okay yeah I mean that's product Market fit right or that's something which growth does not matter as much if you have product

25:57Market at least like growth is not requisite for some amount of success if you have product Market fit I.E like people are going to pull your product out of you you can kind of wait and defer the like growth aspects and in fact like every Jewel of effort or dollar of effort you put into growth is going to be multiplied by more the better your product is and so that's really where you want to start it's hard to quantify the value of those signals but it's something right like this is the challenge with product Market fit or like validating do I have an interesting product especially before you have a

26:26product fully deployed and people using it in real measures of metrics you really do have to look at these anecdotal qualitative things and does seem valid so that had to be really encouraging while you're like pre-production to get that sort of response yeah that was awesome this is eight months in now of your year of Indie but you still ended up going back to your job so I'm assuming the launch didn't go quite as well as maybe the kind of one tweet blowing up indicated it could so in the first month after releasing habit kid K I made more money than in the last 6 months combined so

27:03that was a huge win but yeah so the first 6 months of habit kits I made roughly $ 1.5k in total revenue per month but the sad part was that my self-imposed deadline of 12 months was over and the revenue wasn't that great as I hope did you think about breaking your rules yeah I faced a tough decision to actually continue or returning back to my previous job but that's a that's a decision I think people don't realize it's not just like do I start a thing there's a lot of these points especially in the early days before you hit traction and then even like throughout the life of

27:41business it's like okay I got this far do I double down do I keep investing especially if you're like unprofitable like you're burning right it's like okay do I think there's a bet here that I can keep pouring into or is it time to like cash in my chips and give up or change strategy if I had known What would then I wouldn't have returned to my o job so it's always a really tough decision and it was actually pretty scary to continue burning for my savings it's real money and ex you're German you can't break the rules I wasn't going to say it we don't

28:11do stereotypes here but I was likeing very feel like a very D thing to be like I can't I made a rule I cannot break it was it almost to the day or month like you went back like right at the 12 months or you kind of saw the writing on the wall and were kind of ramping toward it yeah it was exactly 12 months I started my free year in April and went back in April again wow so you're back at your job but habit kid now you have a side project how did that go working full-time and working on habit kit on the side I have to say I wanted to

28:44continue working on my apps on the site so I decided to work only 4 days a week for my previous employer that's a nice perk like that's not always super possible in a lot of gigs so that was great yeah that was really great and that allowed me to take Fridays off and have this whole day for my own apps where I could continue improving my apps and do what I do that was awesome so I I went back to my old job and after two months or so something really great happened actually I remember back then I was at a friend's wedding on a Saturday

29:17and suddenly my phone started buzzing with a crazy frequency of notifications and when I checked that were actually sales notifications from revenue C and I quick checked some stats and then I saw that habit kit finally started to wank in the top five for a big keyword on the App Store and Google Play that led to Crazy growth in downloads and revenue um really so it was like one incremental step up the like search rankings and then that changed it it felt like it yes the fold is a real thing right being above the fold and below the fold is a real thing was that a change you made on

29:54the ASO side or was it an algorithm change that boosted you up no I actually didn't change anything back then for 3 months or so I didn't change anything so it wasn't a direct change outcome from something wow was that a little unsatisfying to me like I'm successful but I don't know why and I have no control over it uh no actually it felt really great okay good good you're a happier person than I am I had absolutely no regrets it felt more like ah finally I yeah I always knew it was great yeah exactly so that's two months into the job at what point did you hit Ramen

30:39profitability and then think okay now I really can quit I guess that was at the start of fall the end of summer in September I have to check the numbers but I guess that was the first time I reached multiple thousands of dollars in Revenue that led me to make the tough decision again should I continue at my job or should I quit and go fulltime again on this Indie hacker thing that was the point I had to take a couple of months to think about it because I really felt bad I really felt sorry for my employer and I had some great friends at the company and they were really

31:17engaged to bring me back and yeah I felt really bad but with these numbers I honestly had no other choice to so was that fall of 2022 or or was that just this last fall 2023 that was last fall yeah exactly okay wow and so you've been posting publicly and we'll get to that here in a sec but I know all your numbers because you post like you have a whole blog with weekly reviews and all that so you ended 2023 with 120,000 downloads and $51,000 in Revenue not a bad year for this side project that happened to blow up yeah exactly especially you account for my salary as

31:59a software engineer additionally that I had for the second half of the year yeah so that was a absolutely crazy year and looking back it even got crazier in January and February of this year yeah so I was looking again I was looking at your numbers prepping for this conversation and again you post it all publicly so just for the listeners benefit though so you quit in the fall and went full-time and then I want to ask like why you think this happened but what happened was in the first two months of 2024 you did 60k so almost 10,000 more than the whole 2023 just January and February and then in March

32:37April and May you did another 51k so in those three months you did the full amount that you had done the previous year but you had already even done 60k so you're at 110k of Revenue in 2024 so far incredible congratulations what happened like you quit in the fall you had some momentum coming in but what was that inflection point that this really became a real thing in 2024 I started ranking for the App Store and Google Play for this big keywords in May and back then from last winter I didn't have any points any numbers of the revenue because I just hadn't gotten to the reach that I have

33:16today so I couldn't really compare and didn't know what would come in Winter I guess it's in the nature of habit tracking apps that it's heavily influenced by seasonality so at the start of the Year lots of people make resolutions for the new year start new hobbies or just generally want to improve themselves so that's a huge factor I guess and that led to the incredible have new number wow so it wasn't new marketing it wasn't adding features to the app it was that you had built this base of a good enough product that people liked it and were willing to pay for it and then you I guess locked

33:58into combination of building a good product and the algorithms shining favorably upon you got this momentum in search then it was just the organic search and the spike from the new year and so the inflection point was again somewhat out of your control that's the beauty of the App Store and Google play I mean you get all this Impressions and reach for free basically and they do all the marketing don't have anything to do with it you developed any relationship with apple editorial or anything like that have they given you features or any of the like editorialized stuff not at all I applied through their form for

34:34being featured and stuff like that but it never really happen so I'm still waiting for that it's really interesting are you doing anything to like Leverage because I think one of the easy come easy go with these algorithm things right like are you worried about another algorithm change or like maybe just you falling down the rankings like how do you think about that as a risk to what you have that's definitely a hug point I'm really afraid or scared of this algorithm changes but I I have my ASO basics in place I think I didn't do any mistakes so I'm sure that if I don't make a very big mistake in crashing back

35:14to the app or something like that that I won't fall down that much in this ranking I hope so at least I mean it can be durable especially as your review base like builds up and like your mini brand and I don't know how the ASO algorithms work exactly but I the more clickthrough and I know they use usage as well as a proxy so if you have good retention in your product that that gets factored in so like again it sucks it's a black box like you don't know what's going on but you hope that it's aligned to like the correct incentives like I'm sure Apple wants that like they want

35:42correct like user incentives I don't know if they use subscription retention I wouldn't be surprised I don't know why they wouldn't use that as well as a metric obviously they should be promoting apps that make them more money right like that would be smart for them business-wise but yeah there is always this fear you live by the app stores algorithms you die by the app stores algorithms and I don't know the answer for Indie for where you're at because you could try to build your own acquisition channels and maybe that's worth experimenting with and maybe you have experimen with Asa but even going beyond that but that suddenly expands

36:13just the scope of what you do you said you experimented with Instagram ads but let's say you wanted to like experiment with that like you can't just be like I'll make a crappy ad and put it on Tik Tok like you have to like invest in that as if it's a whole project right like what is going to get people interested like what is about my app that's interesting like how do I make this work otherwise you'll lose money like it just won't be a profitable Enterprise yeah I should definitely do this or hire people to do this but right now I'm focusing on being creative and do the things that

36:43are fun to me right now I'm isn't a terrible isn't a terrible algorithm right like it's not a terrible algorithm because at least you're going to do it with energy right as opposed to if doing Tik Tock ads is not something that sounds fun to you don't do it because you'll probably do a bad job exactly that probably feel like work again and being here at home and focus down on my products and make them better that doesn't feel like worked for me which like also I mean the recurring subscriptions right like you have recurring subscriptions even if Apple dropped you out of the top you know

37:13ideally like you're retaining these people maybe even you're capturing the ability to Market to them you're also building your like Indie presence right you're becoming more of a known thing right you're not just getting the cash and the downloads like you're turning this into Brands you're turning it into install base and like all those things are somewhat durable and there's always chances to like capitalize on that which you don't have when you're leaving your job for the first time with zero right in revenue and to Jacob's point from earlier is that now that you have that level of product Market fit and some you have a channel now ASO is your channel

37:45and so like what Jacob was saying earlier it's like you need the channel you need some pull and when you have that pull and a channel then building features is actually maybe the best thing to do is it in until you see signs that you're dropping in the algorithm and maybe at some point it would be a night and day difference where you wake up one day and you're out of the top five and you're not getting that many downloads but even then it's like you'd probably drift to 10 and now you're getting half the downloads or whatever like it's not going to be night and day

38:13drop but now that you have that kind of buffer and the pull in the market building a really great app experimenting with monetization and stuff like that probably is a way better use of your time yeah maybe and I also have this other channel that we didn't talk about so I was building my apps in public and I have actually grown a following on X and nowadays LinkedIn even if Apple decides to down rank habit kit I always have this audience of people that would for me that are engaged with me and that want to help me I can always use that to build a new app

38:49or boost a new app to better wanking on stuff Community I mean Community is super durable it's why we do this podcast it's why those activities are very valuable if you can content that people find interesting and they want to be a part of it I was going to ask I was browsing to the app I don't think you collect any contact information in the app is that correct yeah nothing yeah which like there's good reasons to do it and not to do it but like collecting some way of communicating with that user base is really valuable as well so like let's say the ASO floor drops out from

39:17under you you can re-engage that user base you can send them and be like hey i s new features or like you could even add and I'm just giving app advice that you don't want but like you can always add like a sign up for the The Habit kit newsletter like sign up for email updates and make it very optin right you can make it very light that's one thing even with Revenue cat I've been surprised is like we were building contact list for a long time but we weren't really marketing to it heavily but then I learned like yeah shipping stuff is great but you have to tell

39:42people about it too or like it doesn't really connect you can connect those two things like building new features that are interesting and then telling the people who should care that's really magical and that can create this real flywheel effect of like re-engaging existing users and it can be really durble but that's always my biggest thing with people who are very successful from the App Store is like okay use this momentum to find some way to be successful without the app store because like it might not always be there yeah definitely that's a good point I got this email list thing on my to-do list my to-do list is very long um

40:14yeah sure yeah you talked about the advantages of building a public like building up a community and like having an audience to Market to a little bit although maybe the audience You're Building isn't necessarily people who are going to be subscribers or whatever but what are some of the other advantages and disadvantages you've seen building in public the way you have building in public has definitely been one of the best decisions that I made while building this app Business the benefits you will immerse yourself in this really cool community of other builders and creators developers designers and you get to know them meet up with them or partner up with them and

40:57you can draw a lot of motivation and inspiration from each other so when I'm feeling down and I'm not really in the mood of building new stuff or something like that I open Twitter and see my friends building other cool apps and features I instantly get motivated to do this myself that's a huge aspect of it at the start when you're releasing a new app you will get a lot of feedback which is super important even if it's not super durable right like it's just something some eyeballs some comments that's you usually really helps with improving the first version or it gives you at least a point or where to move

41:32next and then have you seen some disadvantages there are some disadvantages but I think that the advantages definitely outweigh them but sure when people see that you can make that much money with a relatively Simple app like habit kit for example it doesn't take too long until people start copying your apps concept or even shamelessly start copying your design blog by block that's downside but I usually try to ignore this copycats and focus on my own stuff yeah and and the thing is whether you build in public or not people can see the data on sensor Tower yeah you might make it happen a little bit faster by being more visible

42:13but the advantages outweigh them and we've never committed at Revenue cat to being fully open right so it's just different but we have been I think probably more open than most and for the same reasons it's like hey like we build for Builders so it's like a thing to talk about people like to see what we're building and how we're building and it creates a community and like you know once in a while you say something or do something that has some push back or some blowback and like you deal with it you apologize or you issue a retraction or whatever maybe this is just a

42:41uniquely me problem this might be a me problem it hasn't happened that many times right but I think in general you know if anybody's paying attention to you that's always you know no press is bad press I honestly think that goes pretty far if people are talking about what you're doing and you're okay with what you're doing ethically like I think it's all positive to be out there put yourself out there yeah sure you also get all those mean comments sometimes or there are always these people that know everything better and in every post it's always interesting though none of them are more successful than you are that's

43:13really funny is that how that works it's just for some reason it's always the less achieved people who have less to show for it that know all the answers I don't know there's some correlation there some yeah they are always smarter than me yes yes yes that can be quite intimidating especially when you yeah if you haven't actually you don't have anything in hand right like you haven't actually proven the ability to build something those comments can seem we have this one famous we made stickers for it for the team this one Reddit user who when we posted our launch thread called us a ripoff middlemen made easy

43:45because our tagline was in app subscriptions made easy and I have it screenshotted and I share it in slack fairly frequently anytime we have some amount of success but when we posted that it was 2017 like we had no Revenue we had no apps we had nothing and so this Rando on the internet calling me that I was like oh you know who is this person like what do they know like do they know more than me and you take it seriously and then it takes a while until you don't but I guess the advice for anybody is just never take the hater seriously I mean unless like literally

44:15all you get is haters then maybe maybe listen there is some there is some limit there but like maybe don't always just post through it I always save this stuff because like I find it super motivating like I keep it for the haters I have like a haters folder of all the like hateful comments people have said about Reven cat and I'm like you know what I'm just going to use that for fuel oh that's funny I have the opposite folder I only yeah the POS Different Strokes for different folks so whatever it takes that's probably more diagnosis of psychological profiles than any Myers Briggs Test could ever

44:53do yeah well speaking of unsolicited from people who are less successful than you the last thing I wanted to touch on was your pricing because I think it's way too low raise your prices so I'm curious if you've done any price experimentation and kind of what your pricing philosophy 99 cents a month geez 99 cents a month six bucks a year or $15 lifetime I was going through the app I had already downloaded it before but not paid ton of attention to your monetization but when we're talking about you coming on the podcast I was looking at your pay wall and all that kind of stuffff like whoa whoaa wait a

45:29minute he's like successful Indie charging $6 a year what's going on here so yeah what's your pricing philosophy when I released the first app of habit kit that felt like the fair pricing point to me and after that I was adding feature after feature and lots of cool stuff and I always said to myself okay after the next feature or update you will raise your prices and I didn't do it yeah that's it it's on my to-do list and and okay before you do the email list you know what you're in this position where you could just double it just double it $2 a month that's still really low and

46:08like nobody's gonna get mads a year keep doubling it until your haters folder gets too big and then then take it back and Notch I had this app that I sold uh Windows app for Microsoft flight simulator that I launched in like 2011 for like $4 or something like this I wrote it in a weekend all it did was like take one socket it connected an iPad app forf iPad app to Microsoft flight simulators this really nich utility and it was before Indie hacking had a name whatever I just put it up there's this thing gumroad that had just launched I put it up there $5 a month

46:39and just sold a bunch and a bunch and a bunch and I had all the support I was like oh geez whatever and eventually I was like so annoyed of all the support I was having to do I was just like I don't want any more I don't want anybody to download this anymore so I made it $20 a month zero change in downloads nobody was like I probably could have made it $50 and everybody would have still paid because of course it's like of the niche now habits are different right you probably couldn't Forex and maybe not see anything but that was to me like the most visceral

47:08experience of not really being able to understand the price value curve right like as a developer you can't really feel it until you actually take in data points you know yeah I think there are always two kinds of people some people say hey habit kit is way too inexpensive you should double your prices and then there are people usually get reviews on Google Play that say $1 a month for this app never that's a little bit intimidating but yeah I should definitely I mean by definition that person has no value to you they probably would never buy this yeah they're never going to buy it and I

47:43mean that's also being on Android is another you know you can't look at your price leverage on Android and iOS the same right they're very different communities maybe don't double on Android but I would put money on the fact that if you doubled your prices you would make double the money that's a 50/50 I'd say 50-50 over under on that one I it's pretty likely that that's the case yeah at that price point yeah 12 bucks a year two bucks a month well if there is a tool out here Sebastian that would let you run that price experiment fairly low effort so I know a guy let me

48:14know if you're interested in trying it out but like you could actually test this I heard about it yeah I I will definitely do it move that to the top of your to-do list and then share on Twitter and in your weekly log how things turn out but yeah as we wrap up was there anything else you wanted to share we're going to put links to your blog where you do your weekly updates to the app to your Twitter profile and Linkedin yeah anything else you wanted to share as we wrap up not really yeah that would be great check out my apps and my Twitter

48:41and leave it with well this was a ton of fun we haven't done this kind of Indie success story in a while and I'm like all fired up man it's so cool to see oh no David's going David's going to give himself a toet deadline and quit quit your job I've already already got my app out there my weather up app has been doing really well this year and it is really fun having I miss having an app I will say I miss having an app I miss having an app a little bit even though I have a you know big SAS whatever but like there

49:13is something special magical about having your own little app like it's fun it's great it is all right well thanks so much for joining us it was so fun chatting through all this and best of luck I think you're going places like I think you've got a great little business here it's not going to be so little a year from now and then a year from that some of the other folks we had on like Curtis Herbert it's like he did $10,000 his first two years and now he's doing over a million dollars a year so it's crazy how these things can scale from little side projects and Indie hacking

49:42to real businesses you know it sounds like you don't want to like hire people and do that kind of thing but you can build a great lifestyle business yeah yeah really crazy I'm excited for the time to come and yeah thank you for having me and I wish you all the best for having you kid of course I will use in every other app I make there we go there's the clip thank you Sebastian thank you thanks so much for listening if you have a minute please leave a review in your favorite podcast player you can also stop by chat. sub club.com to join our private community

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