As usual, let's start with celebrating the small (or not so small wins) of this week:
10,000 Followers on X
This is a really special achievement for me: After posting (almost) daily for two years on Twitter/X, I was finally able to reach the 10k follower mark. I know, many of them are probably dead accounts or bots, but it still feels crazy to me that so many people are interested in my app development journey.
I'm sure that my business wouldn't be the same without the awesome #buildinpublic community there. I've met so many cool people there, received help when I had a problem and drew motivation from all the other cool creators. If I had to travel back in time, I would totally start the building in public journey again. No regrets! Looking back, it has been one of the best decisions of my life so far.
WinDiary Revenue
Unexpected but pleasant surprise: After months of not doing marketing or development for my third app WinDiary it finally made some revenue again. I got a couple of lifetime sales this month and got really surprised when I checked the stats. Happy to see this development and I hope that it continues to grow. Because that's the reason why I even built it: Diversifying my app portfolio and income streams to not be so dependent on a single app (Yes, I'm talking about you, HabitKit).
IDX First Impression
So, a couple of weeks ago I got access to Project IDX, the new cloud-based development environment made by Google. I imagine it being pretty useful when I'm on vacation and don't want to bring my expensive laptop. A user reported a bug? Let me open my browser real quick and check what's going on in the code.
I tried to run my app HabitKit on it, but instantly got in trouble with weird configuration files and errors, which I couldn't solve by consulting the docs. This week I got help from some awesome folks at Google to finally get started on IDX. With a recent update they also improved the onboarding tremendously and made it easy to add a basic configuration file for Flutter projects.
The only problem right now: They currently don't support the lates Flutter version (3.19.3) so my latest branch didn't build. In a cool meeting with David East and his colleagues we were able to upgrade the version. They promised to update the supported version very soon and I'm excited to jump back into it once they resolved this issue.
On another note: Super cool that awesome people at Google value my opinion and meet me to get feedback and help me setting up the project.
Slow Progress
If you would have told me that I wouldn't ship a single update in my first two months of going full-time on my app business - I wouldn't have believed you. But it is how it is and I'm slowly realising that more time doesn't always leads to more progress or more energy.
Every once in a while you'll hit a roadblock (in your code or marketing efforts) which totally drains your energy to continue. The most important thing you can do then: Don't quit! Try to do at least a couple of small tasks or experiments per day. Sooner or later you will overcome your obstacle and motivation/energy levels will slowly come back again.
That's what I'm doing with the next big HabitKit update: I've hit some technical challenges but I'm sure - if I persist and stay consistent - I will manage to overcome them and soon I'll be working on more exciting features.
That's it for this week, see you in the next one 👋