Already the 40th edition of this weekly indie log. Although this blog entries doesn't really pull a lot of traffic, I really enjoy writing them. It's a great way for me to hold myself accountable and reflect on what I achieved and what not. I can't promise that I will do this forever (I will do at least #50!) though, because it definitely takes some time to write this!

It's really crazy how fast time is flying since I went full-time on my indie app business again. I have some many plans/apps/features in my mind but I feel every week is getting shorter and shorter which means that I will never be able to do it all. So I have to be really careful when prioritising my projects. I recently started talking to a couple of other indie hackers regularly and it really helps figuring out what to focus on.

iOS Ratings

I managed to collect over 2000 ratings for my habit tracking app HabitKit on iOS and the average rating is still at the incredible number of 4.8! I am really happy that I found the super cool #buildinpublic community that supported me and helped me reaching that number. Thanks to everyone who followed my journey and left a review.

Because I get this questions a lot, here is my rating/review collection strategy: Inside the app, I show the native rating dialog on both iOS and Android when the user makes the first completion for a habit. Outside the app, when I get a kind message with praise or feature requests, I explicitly ask for a review/rating at the end of the message. It's usually this text: "PS: If you’re enjoying the app, I’d be grateful if you could leave a review on [the App Store / Google Play]. It helps others discover the app and gives it a boost!". This led to awesome results so far!

Churn

Another cool achievement I discovered recently ("discovered" - because I rarely check this metric in my day to day life): I reduced the churn rate of my app business by 6% over the course of the last 12 months. This somewhat feels like I started to fix the leaking leaking bucket that's called "my subscriber base" and I'm sure this will have a compounding effect on many aspects of my business. Please understand that I won't share the exact number because I have the feeling that this metric could be used against me by my competitors.

And I hope to get this number even further down. Listening to user feedback and delivering cool new updates really seem to help, so I will definitely continue doing that! Basically all new features I'm adding to the app right now are base on user feedback! And the best part is: I get a ton of mails per week with even more feedback.

RevenueCat Ship-a-ton

In case you missed it: RevenueCat started their Ship-a-ton, a hackathon that focuses on shipping new App Store / Google Play apps that are monetized with In-App Purchases. Check it out if you're interested in building a cool new app and maybe even win great prices: https://www.revenuecat.com/blog/engineering/revenuecat-ship-a-ton/!

I won't participate because I have the honor to be a judge on this competition. Really happy and proud to be listed among these legends and I will try my best to judge the results fairly.

HabitKit Categories

I continued working on the big new HabitKit feature (which will be included in the next big version 1.9, releasing in September). This update will add some form of categories to the app, which allows you to group your habits based on pre-defined or custom categories and filter your dashboard based on them.

So far, I made good progress and I'm positive that I will finish this feature very soon! I also continued experimenting with the design refresh of the card appearance that I mentioned last week. This will probably be also included in version 1.9!

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