Weekly Indie Log #42

Welcome back to another issues of "What did I do this week to move forward with my app business"!

This week I was interview by Katie from Indie Hackers and she published a cool article about me and how I built my app business in public and bootstrapped it to $15k/month. You can read it here if you're interested in my back story and some lessons I learned along the way.

Sadly, we won't be able to celebrate any significant milestones this week, because no cool number was reached. But, as a little teaser, we're slowly approach two big numbers and will be able to feature them in the next couple of weeks: Right now, we're pretty close to $8,000 MRR (revenue made from monthly/annual subscriptions) and - an even cooler milestone - $200,000 of total revenue made over the span of my whole indie career. Let's see when I will be able to announce that!

HabitKit Improvements

This week I've been fixing some pressing (but still smaller) issues in HabitKit: After I added the "Compact" view mode with HabitKit 1.8, I received many messages from users who have trouble tapping the completion indicators. That's a common problem in my apps, I always make the tap areas way too small. So, this week I decided to finally fix this and now you can tap the weekday labels as well to check off a habit in the Compact view.

I also fixed another interesting problem this week: Since I added official Shortcuts support to check off your habits with iOS automations, I got a ton of emails from people requesting that I also enable this for habits which track multiple completions per day. I added a "Increment Completion of Habit" Shortcut action to support this use case. The implementation was pretty straight forward and I will ship this with the release of HabitKit 1.9.

Future Plans

I still got a full week of work ahead of me right now, but then I will head on a vacation and take two full weeks of from indie app business. The past couple of months have been really exhausting and I shipped many new features and bugfixes to HabitKit, so I kind of feel like I deserve this vacation. Always hard to make this decision as an indie hacker, but calming down and relaxing for a little bit is super important to fuel up on creative energy.

I will launch HabitKit 1.9 (which adds categories support to the app) when I'm back from vacation. I'm actually too scared to make this big release with only one week of time before my vacation. I have absolutely no interest in fixing bugs on the road, so I will take the safe road and wait a couple of weeks. This also enables me to thoroughly beta test the changes I made.

Another thing that I would like to do when I'm back from vacation: Taking a step back from HabitKit for a while and start something new. I got a really cool new idea for an app that I desperately want to use myself on a daily basis. So I decided to actually take the time (probably a couple of weeks) and do it. I'm sure it will be great to finally ship a new app again. My last app release was for WinDiary and was already well over a year ago.

New Indie Releases

Last thing, a couple of shoutouts:

Florian Vates finally launches his "How to make super cool animations with Figma"-course. I've been waiting so long for this course now and it's super good. Make sure to check it out if you want to spice up your social media presence:

And another launch of a cool new indie app: Jack Cornet launched his new app "Rise" and it's a pretty cool app for people who have trouble with snoozing too much. Make sure to check it out if you want to support a talented young indie app developer:

That's it for this week, see you in the next one! 👋