For two years, I completely neglected this blog. The main reason is that I was busy building my company and I felt that there is no real benefit of writing about it here. In short term I’m still convinced it’s true, it is really hard to gain any advantage of writing about my apps so if I just compare how much time it takes to write an article with the potential traffic it gets it’s a really bad deal! Although I still decided to start writing again and here are the reasons why:
- I really want to learn SEO and this could be a great sandbox to experiment with.
- Writing down my plans helps me to execute faster and help me to structure my thought while the readers benefit from learning something as well. It’s a win-win situation.
- Sometimes I can get lucky and write something that ranks well on google driving me a lot of traffic. I’m not expecting this, but it definitely happened in the past, my post about How to post landscape videos to instagram stories got 11k visits from google and drove 50% of the downloads back then when it was relevant.
Summary of the last 2 years
Me and my girlfriend moved to Barcelona where we spend two great years, I proposed her and we are moving back to Hungary in a month once the lockdowns will be easing. I bought my first car which I still drive in the weekends and I plan to keep it when we move home. I’m sure I’ll write about this as well, even though it’s not related to indie development by any means. My apps grew even more, I released quite a few new apps and kept updating the existing ones. In the beginning of the year, I reached 1 Million downloads total, and that number is still growing (1.4 M right now). I started working with freelancers and I’m actively looking to hire the first real employee right now. I learned a ton how to create and market apps profitably which is a long-long journey and I feel like I’m still just in the beginning of it. In terms of that now that I make enough to support myself I’m more and more motivated to learn about different businesses to diversify my cashflow. Now I make all my money from the App Store, which is not healthy for a business. I am actively thinking about doing something offline or branch out building a SaaS in the future. We will see I guess!
Failures
If it feels like I only had successes I can assure you that it’s not the case, I just wanted to highlight the best things happened to me during these last two years since I haven’t touched this blog! I even forgot to renew the ssl certificate, which explains why the search traffic disappeared. What I like in blogging that this is not just a highlight reel as today’s social media where everybody is breaking records and being massively successful. I am sure I could have reached 5x more in anything that I achieved if I would have known what I do now, but that’s part of the learning process and I’m grateful that I have the time and the freedom to go down on this path and learn it! I guess that’s why people say that you can not learn entrepreneurship in school, you need to learn by doing it. So here is some things I failed to do:
- Even though I lived here in Spain, my Spanish is pretty bad still, I am able to do almost everything if I have to, I rented an apartment and bought a car in Spanish and I’m okay in restaurants and bars but I’m nowhere near to the level, I expected will reach after even one year living abroad!
- My overall fitness level is much worse now than it was in Hungary, which is mostly because I do not eat as healthy here as I did at home, where I had my routines to stay healthy already. Also the last few months of quarantine did not help either!
- I’m still struggling to keep my focus for some days, when something annoying happens. It’s hard to explain, but I can be furious about some small things that should not matter at all and it ruins my productivity of the whole day for me.
- Lastly I stopped writing my blog and now I feel I have to start over from scratch again.
Plans
This blog still gets about 150 visitors / week, so the last statement is not entirely true, but I’m sure I will be able to increase this number if I provide value so that’s the plan from now on. The best part of this blog as I’m writing this article is that I do not care too much about what I share here, if it can drive traffic to my apps that’s great, if not that’s okay too. If nobody reads it but it helps me to structure my thought it’s still a win for me, although I hope I will learn something about SEO and eventually I will be able to get traffic from google!
So that’s it for now, I just wanted to let you know that I’m back and I will not overpromise anything, I’ll plan to write at least 12 more posts this year! (2 per month)