September Statistics Recap

This week I sat down and took a look at the September statistics for my app business:

• 💰 $4386 revenue (-8%)

• 💸 $1666 MRR (+15%)

• 👥 2017 subscribers (+17%)

Although the total revenue was down by 8% in comparison to August, I'm pretty happy with these numbers. MRR and subscribers grew and the revenue didn't fall below $4000. After sharing my results I got a lot of other founders which confirmed that their revenue was also down in September. So it's some kind of seasonality and not just me (I was already afraid that I did something wrong or lost ranking on the App Store or Google Play).

(If you ask yourself with which app I'm tracking my revenue numbers: This is RCKit and it's a great companion for RevenueCat users)

Happy Bootstrapping Podcast

Had the honor to be a guest on the Happy Bootstrapping Podcast this week. We already recorded this episode in August and now it's finally here. If you're fine with German I highly recommend you check it out. I talk about my journey of becoming an indie hacker and how I develop and grow my apps. When the episode dropped on Thursday I instantly listened to it while doing some cardio and cringed super hard about hearing my voice. But I guess this is just part of the game and everyone does it. All in all, I'm pretty happy about this episode and Andy did an awesome job in highlighting the most important parts about my business. Thanks for having me!

HabitKit 1.6.0 Development

The week started pretty slow in terms of progress for me because of a national holiday in Germany. I used Monday and Tuesday to relax a little bit and get some energy for the rest of the week.

Later I continued working on the latest HabitKit update and fixed some performance issues that I recently discovered. In the end, I had to do a big refactoring of the ConsistencyGraph widget (which is the GitHub-like graph and therefore the heart of the application). I am pretty sure that the decreased performance is related to unnecessary rebuilds that happen every time a completion is added. It was a tricky problem and I struggled to time-block enough focus time to tackle this problem in a longer session. Only working on your apps on the side is hard...

It was a lot of work but I fixed the issue after all and now I'm pretty happy with the performance:

I also got some cool feedback on X about the completion animation in HabitKit and instantly revamped it. Instead of wiggling, it's now more subtle and feels like it's pulsating:

A couple of other things I did:

• Added the necessary properties to my entities to support another cool new feature which I will add in the future: Allowing number input when adding a completion (needed for people who want to track completions with a certain unit, like "Read 100 pages a day").

• Fixed a bug in the placeholder function of my native iOS widgets.

• Did some testing for the upcoming cross-device synchronization feature.

That's it for this week! See you next Sunday 🙂🚀

PS: If you want to support me, please consider checking out my apps HabitKit, WinDiary and Liftbear.