Already 26 weeks of writing this weekly roundup for my week. In some weeks I have to force myself to sit down and actually write it, other weeks are easier. But overall I have to say that it's always a great idea to sit down and review the past couple of days. Especially celebrating/highlighting wins is a huge motivational factor that keeps me going and boosts my energy levels.
So let's start with the wins for this week:
March Revenue Recap
Another month has come to an end and revenue-wise it has been incredible again. Here are the hard numbers:
💰 My app business generated $20,337 of revenue in March. This includes revenue from monthly and annual subscriptions as well as one-time purchases like lifetime licenses for HabitKit or WinDiary. In comparison to last month this has been a decline of 23%. I already expected another declining month though. It's hard to keep up with the New Year's hype for habit tracking apps.
💸 The monthly recurring revenue (MRR) increase by 6% and led to the incredible number of $6995. Great growth, I hope to maintain this percentage numbers.
👥 Consequently, the number of subscribers (people who got a monthly/annual subscription to one of my apps) increased by 9% and grew to 8502 subscribers overall. Again, I'm super happy with this number and hope to maintain this as well.
Obviously, $20k of revenue is awesome for an indie hacker like me and it's safe to say that March was a great month for my app business. Let's hope the decline in total revenue will be smaller in April though.
Android Ratings/Reviews
Another cool new milestone: My habit tracking app HabitKit accumulated over 3,000 ratings and reviews on Google Play. The lifetime average rating is at 4.6 right now and that's a pretty great number in my opinion. By adding quality updates to the app over the course of the next months I hope to increase it even more.
Of the 3,000 people who rated the app, 730 left a written review. Besides some angry voices about my pricing or some funny comments, most of them are really valuable feedback and I'm happy for everyone who left their opinion there. The feature requests and bug reports there are super helpful with improving the app and deciding what to tackle next.
By adding the amount of reviews/rating for HabitKit on iOS, we end up with over 5,000 ratings overall for the app. Pretty cool!
Native Android Widgets
I'm still stuck with the rewrite of HabitKit's native Android home screen widgets. I invited a couple of power-users to the closed beta test of the app and got devastating feedback. For some people the app instantly crashed after adding the widgets to their home screen, some got weird error messages and others had UI bugs.
Here is an example of the UI glitches: The grid completely gave up and rendered only two columns. Seems like I made a mistake with the size calculations in the widget. Sadly, I can't reproduce this issue on my device and have to fish in the dark.
On my own test device I'm also still struggling with performance issues. I contacted an Android expert and he gave me a couple of really useful tips that I instantly tried out. I added the remember function to various places in the widget code and hope to preserve some computational power in subsequent re-renderings.
Another thing that I tried out: Remove code until it's working without lag and then slowly reintroduce snippets until it breaks again. By doing that, I found some issues with nested components inside the grid. I removed it and hope that it helps.
That's it for this week, see you in the next one 👋