s02e02 : underdog monetization experiment

I am still the same developer who turned bills into pixel farm animals, only now there is a small line of income on my dashboard. It is not a lot, but it is the first time anyone has paid for something I built on my own.

the bold idea that read itself

After SubFarm I moved on to Bionica. The goal was straightforward: help people with scattered attention read faster by bolding the first half of every word. The bold letters act as anchors for the eyes to help find the next word. I wrapped the idea into an iOS app, added a way to feed it ebooks and web pages, then shipped it.

A Reddit post brought in plenty of eyes. People asked for a one time payment option, so I added it and went to bed. By morning I had earned thirty five dollars and thirty two cents from names I did not recognize. Seeing that number felt different from any metric I had chased before. It meant someone valued the work enough to pay.

the app store treasure map

That small win nudged me to rethink how people even find these apps. Instead of scrolling the search box myself, I tried a tool called Astro. Type in a phrase and it tells you how many folks look for it and how tough it is to show up at the top. I fed it everything that crossed my mind, from reading help for ADHD to cat related trackers to prompts couples might google at midnight. Patterns appeared. Some phrases had steady traffic and low competition. Gold dots on a map.

This was the big shift from my old build‑first days. I was finally starting with demand. Astro’s numbers steered me toward ideas where users already exist, then I used basic App Store optimisation to meet them halfway. It is not a guarantee of success, but it feels like walking with a compass instead of guessing north.

deeply, maybe more

Wanting an idea that people might share with partners(read: easy to organically market), I started deeply.. It is a collection of conversation prompts designed to skip over small talk and reach topics that matter. I leaned on the same search approach and launched quietly. No ads. No big splash. Ten people started the free trial just from stumbling across it in search. One conversion. 15$ in revenue.

small numbers, solid direction

So far my indie revenue stands at seventy dollars and some change. It will not cover rent, yet it tells me the approach is working better than my old habit of building first and hoping later. I am still the underdog in this story, but now I can point to a result.

Next week I will be back at the keyboard, looking for the next search phrase worth building around and learning a bit more about how this storefront works.

Progress is slow, yet steady, and for now that is enough.

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SubFarm - A gamified subscription tracker

Download on the App Store

Bionica - 2x your reading speed for ADHD

Download on the App Store

deeply. - never a dull conversation

Download on the App Store