So, last week I didn't find the motivation to write an issue of this weekly log. Instead, I wrote an article with the title Five Tools I (Almost) Use Everyday As An Indie Hacker because I get daily messages in which people ask me which tool I use for my daily planning or how I do my screenshots. I got a lot of positive feedback and I plan to write articles like that more frequently because it's a nice distraction from my daily doing. Sometimes you need to see/do something different!

Let's start this issue with a nice milestone: I generated over $1.25k in revenue in one week with my apps. That's a crazy personal best for me and I'm really happy that my apps are selling so good at the moment. I have the feeling that the Christmas/New Year season has begun and a lot of people are already working on their goals and resolutions for the next year. Of course, that's great for my habit-tracking app HabitKit. Although I'm sure that these numbers will be going down again and March church will be brutal, this is a great "side income".

Another great achievement that I unlocked this week, was accumulating over 600 ratings/reviews on Google Play. Since I started ranking for some relevant keywords there I got a huge influx of new users, revenue and ratings!

HabitKit 1.6.0

I continued working on the latest HabitKit version. I onboarded a couple of users on both iOS and Android and got great feedback so far. One of the Android users also discovered a crash after upgrading to the latest version. Because he is well-versed in mobile development he was able to give me all the required information to fix the issue. The fix was a little bit tricky and cost a lot of time: Because I switched my database architecture from Isar to Sqlite and also migrated the IDs of the entities from basic integers to complex UUIDs, I also needed to migrate the associated data in the shared preferencees of the app in case the user added a home screen widget.

So after getting that done, I needed a quick win and decided to implement user feedback that I get a lot: Displaying information about the selected habit in the charts section of the app. Blasted through this in a couple of minutes and realized that I should have done this request way earlier.

I even made a post on X asking people if they want to join the beta and a handful of engaged users decided to help me. It was a little bit stressful to onboard them all at once to the beta version, but most of them were mobile developers themselves and had already a pretty good idea of how to join and what to look out for. Besides the aforementioned crash, no big issues so far and I'm really happy that I did a beta test this time because this gives me a lot of confidence.

On Competitor Launches

There is a recent spike in new habit tracker apps launching on the App Store. They all use the same GitHub-style visualization technique as HabitKit. No problem with that so far, that's fair game. I didn't invent this visualization and everybody can use it. What's bugging me recently: Every time one of these apps launches, a huge load of people message me and tell me: "Woah dude, he is copying you, you need to step up your game now." and, to be honest, that's pretty stressful for my mental health. I don't want to know anything about my competitors, neither what they are doing nor how it's going for them.

I just want to focus on my app and ignore the rest. So, if you're feeling the urge to share an announcement post about the latest habit-tracking app: I really appreciate the support, but please don't, it just makes me feel miserable!

Blog Makeover

As you probably already seen: I gave this blog a small makeover, changed some of the colors and updated the header image for every article. It was the first time I used DALL-E-3, which is included in my ChatGPT Plus subscription. I'm pretty happy with the result and will keep this design for now. Hope you like it too!

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