Weekly Indie Log #14

Weekly Indie Log #14

Topics: Quitting my job, year-in-review post and growth over the holidays

Check out my apps: HabitKit, WinDiary and Liftbear

Happy New Year to you! I hope your holiday season was filled with joy and that you've had a fantastic start to the new year.

Let's start with the banger: I made the decision to quit my job and focus entirely on my app business. I'm proud to share that in December, the revenue from my apps surpassed my previous salary and this made the decision much easier. I'm really looking forward to dedicating more time and energy towards the development of my apps. February will be my first full month as a full-time indie hacker, and I am excited for the challenges and opportunities this change brings.

In case you missed it, I published a "Year in Review" article last week, recapping the incredible experiences and achievements of 2023. The response has been extremely positive, with many messages of thanks for the inspiration my story has provided. I'm incredibly happy and grateful for this feedback. If you haven't had a chance to read the article yet, I highly encourage you to check it out and join me in reflecting on an awesome year.

I took a step back from heavy coding to focus on some necessary planning. I didn't get a lot of actual development work done, but it felt good to spend time reflecting on my goals and laying out plans for 2024. I've got some really cool features in mind for HabitKit, my main app, and I'm also planning to roll out updates for WinDiary and Liftbear. Sometimes, taking a break to organize thoughts and goals can be just as productive as coding.

Holiday Season

The holiday season has been absolutely crazy for my app business. The App Store and Google Play seems to be buzzing with people trying to improve their lives and looking for a habit tracking app. The peak values for impressions were 12,228 on the App Store and 9,962 on a single day. A huge portion of these people decided to give HabitKit a try and download it.

Downloads are looking great as well: The peak values were 1,019 on the App Store and 3,496 on Google Play. Thanks for all the support!

If you ask yourself "What about the revenue", let me tell you, it has been absolutely insane and awesome. When the dust has settled, I will make an extra post about it at the end of the month.

HabitKit Development

Because I'm still working 4 days for my employer and some family obligations took some time, I didn't find much development time for the next big HabitKit update. I am currently reworking the home screen widgets for HabitKit, where I'll be adding interactivity and introducing a new widget type. And the worst part about it is, that I have to write native code for this! As a Flutter developer, used to the convenience and efficiency of a cross-platform framework, writing native code presents its own set of challenges. But I'm still determined to release the big update this month. Let's see how much time I will find next week.

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

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