Last week, I released two new version of my app Infinite Stories and I started thinking about what will be the end of the development of this simple tool. Now you can add labels to the videos which will stay there for the whole playback, not just for one 15 seconds slice, how you would be able to do it on Instagram right now. Then I thought about adding a feature to change the position of the labels in time, just like in Final Cut. I decided to leave that later especially because I’m going to Portugal for a week tomorrow and I wanted to release this version before I leave. So what I think is that this app will transform into a simpler video editor tool to help people make the best stories for Instagram. This won’t happen in a week but I really want to move in this direction in the next few months. I already learned how to handle videos and layers so I think it won’t be a problem in the technological point of view. This will be probably the biggest project I do since I started working as an indie, especially compared to how tiny was this when I started.
If you’re interested how it’ll evolve in the future just keep checking my blog because I’m planning to write about the progress and share my experiences.
So that’s it for now and see you in the next week, once I am back from Portugal!
I write about my experiences every week, if you would like to get notified when I publish a new article, please subscribe here:
So in this week, I’m super busy learning Android development and Kotlin to ship my app I wrote before, Infinite Stories on the Google Play Store as soon as possible. Luckily the dev tools and the platform looks promising so I will keep working on it during the week.
Meanwhile, I have an idea that I really want to try out, which I read about a few months before. It’s called engineered marketing. The main point of it is, to create apps that solve problems for the same audience to reach more people in the same niche and then lead them to your main product. I really liked the article when I read it but I didn’t do anything with it, so let’s change this! My Instagram story generator app is already doing pretty well but still, I’m not even close to being the biggest player in this field, even though I believe my app is the best in the App Store right now. So I decided to release in the near future a few simple apps in this niche and see how things would work together.
These apps will be:
An app that helps you to repost images or videos with showing the original creator on the image
A simple analytics tool for your account
A tool to manage your hashtags
Post and story scheduling app
These are the main pain points for an Instagram Influencer at the moment. So what I think is that if I cross promote my apps for this audience, I can get much more downloads and more revenue in the long term. This is right now just an idea and I don’t have much time to experiment with it, but I’ll share the lessons learned from this in the next month, once I’ll have at least one app out from this list! Probably I’ll start with the easiest one to see how things are working
If you have any recommendations for other apps, please let me know and I’ll add it to the list!
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So this could be an interesting one for you guys, because I’m not a dad and I’m not even close to the point where I’ll be one, therefore I’m not part of my target audience.
I watched Patrick McKenzie’s presentation about Marketing for Minorities and it really made me think how should I plan my future apps.
I really recommend you to watch it, it’s only 7 minutes:
The main point, in my opinion, is that developers like us tend to build something for us, developers. The only problem with this is basically that we will have a huge competition in this market. The solution is to create software for other groups of people. This is what led to me to ask around my friends and family that what’s their day-to-day struggles in their life and as I talked with one of my relative who has a small boy running around now, she mentioned to me that logging all the stuff about the baby when he was a newborn was a pain in the ass. It turned out that she had to write down all the logs of the baby such as the foods and the weight changes and a lot of different stuff.
This was an interesting topic to me especially after watching this presentation, so I decided to dive into this topic and I set up a lot of Skype calls with different moms, who I knew or somebody suggested. Slowly I collected enough information and learned a lot about how to take care of a newborn. (heck, this could be useful in the future!) In the same time I checked the app store for similar apps and what I found was really interesting. There was a couple of apps providing the same functionality, but all of that was really outdated, the market leader doesn’t even support the iPhone 6 size! So that was enough information for me to start working on a solution to this problem. The designing process wasn’t easy at all because I wanted to create a complex app which at the same time should be able to log everything in a few taps. You can check the end result in the app store but I’m happy with the result.
After this for the making, I decided to try Firebase for the first time. It was a great experience my only concern was that accessing the real-time database wasn’t really simple enough. As I saw now they released the Cloud Firestore which solves this problem now.
What I used was the database and the storage for my app and both worked great! The app is able to log the most common logs about the babies based on the data, I collected during the skype calls. After I was finished I decided to start testing it on the Hungarian market first, so I contacted a few Hungarian baby sites to ask them to write about my app.
Luckily one of the owners of these sites agreed to share a guest post so I wrote this:
So this brought me to the 3rd place in the Medical category in the Hungarian App Store! This doesn’t mean too much downloads but I got a lot of real-world feedback what to change in the app so time spent contacting this sites paid off!
Even though I got a lot of feedbacks, ASO perspective the app ranks really poorly yet, which I think is because it’s relatively new so it’s gonna be better if I’m gonna stay consistent with the updated in the future too!
I also tried search adds but with an app like this, which is free and there is an in-app purchase in it, it’s really hard to make it work, so I decided to focus on more on ASO first.
So that’s it, I hope you liked the article or learned something, see you in the next week!
I write about my experiences every week, if you would like to get notified when I publish a new article, please subscribe here:
I really hate to say this in the beginning, but yeah I did not write anything for a while. I’m gonna focus more on writing here from now, but first I would like to summarize what I did in the previous months while I wasn’t sharing anything here.
I did travel to Slovenia and to Italy. I loved Slovenia, it’s a beautiful country. If you’re around here in Europe I would definitely recommend to check out the lake Bled and in general the whole country!
I released an app called Baby Tracker which is a tracker app for moms and dads in the first weeks. The app was not a big success yet, but I’ll get into the details in another post. In technological perspective, it was a great project, because this was the first time I used Firebase and I have to say it made my life so much easier.
I also updated almost all my apps to support iPhone X and iOS 11, which wasn’t that hard since I used autolayouts already. Now I still have 3 apps waiting for me to update them but my schedule is full right now but let’s talk about this later.
As I wrote about I really do think that AR will be something super important in the future so I already made two apps with some AR features. The first is How a Car Works and the second is a little update to my flashcards learning app called now Flashcards plus AR. I don’t really see how this will end up in the future, but I see how useful these apps will be with a glass, so my plan is to keep releasing new AR apps.
According to my sales, I don’t really know the reason but the sales skyrocketed and went back a bit, but as I wrote in my first post my goal was to reach $2k / months which I’m happy to tell you that I did in September. October was a bit lower but still close to this, so I’m really happy with the financial results.
What I do focus on nowadays is making my apps more complex other than releasing a new one in every single month. My current plan is to dominate the niches where my apps are and I’m gonna write about the reason for that in a separate post later.
So that’s it for now, you can expect the next post in next Monday about the Baby Tracker app!
I write about my experiences every week, if you would like to get notified when I publish a new article, please subscribe here:
