From $83 in a Year to $89 a Month

Around end of 2022, I started developing a simple intermittent fasting app for iOS. The main purpose was to learn SwiftUI more (Apple’s shiny new UI framework). I prefer making a small project when I try to learn any languages or frameworks. I searched for some ideas and noticed that fasting apps were quite popular and seemed to make quite some money. So, I chose to make intermittent fasting app and thought I could earn some quick cash too.

Initially I launched the app on the App Store with minimal effort. I made a few sales and pushed a couple of updates, but I mostly neglected it because it wasn't performing as well as I had hoped. By the end of 2023, the app had only made $83.

A few months ago, my wife started getting into intermittent fasting and needed an app to track her progress. I proudly asked her to try my app and give me feedback. To my surprise (but not entirely unexpectedly), she had a lot of complaints (I mean a lot). She pointed out several issues and missing features, which made me realize that the app needed a complete overhaul. I, redesigned the app from the ground up, fixed numerous bugs, and added all the missing functionalities. The end result was an app that was finally "usable" (according to my wife). I pushed the new update around beginning of June and slowly the app has started gaining traction. In July 2024 alone, it made around $89 in sales—more than what I earned in the entire previous year. (I know it’s a very tiny amount but at least it’s something).

From all this, I realized few things

• I thought the app had no issues at all because no user reached out to me regarding any issues or missing functionality. So you cannot only passively wait for your users to give you the feedback or raise an issue.

• When I was observing my wife using the app, I noticed something interesting. she was expecting the app to work in a certain way and was trying to use it in a different way than what I had created/thought. Some trivial things (such as button placement or screen navigation) which made sense for me didn’t make sense to her. This lead to the redesign & I think it was worth it in the end.

• I think it’s really wise to validate the app at least with the targeted user before launching it. Validating here does not mean to make some sales before you even start but it can be about making sure that the effort that you are applying to develop the app is at least going on in the right direction.

Now my goal is to reach $1,000 in sales by the end of this year (hopefully 🤞). You can try the app here from AppStore.
https://apps.apple.com/app/apple-store/id6443566279?pt=118921423&ct=reddit&mt=8