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Summary of my indie app business in 2023 and beyond
👨🏻💻 UX Designer, self-employed at NEXT PLANET - small design studio. 👨🏻💻 Indie iOS developer 📱 Creator of: Moons, Numi, Skoro, Wins and Emo. 🎸Guitarist at ZERO and Quadroom 🎨 MA in art 🌱 Vegan
Thank you, Sebastian! 😀 I hope to get closer to your results soon. Thank you for your articles. They inspire and motivate me.
SwiftUI / iPadOS / macOS
iOSdev / macOS / SwiftUI
iOSdev / SwiftUI
App Store Optimization
When I published my first iOS app on the App Store in February 2022 I didn’t know what to expect. My main goals were: to learn how to code and make apps that will help me solve my own problems. And while I was also thinking that it would be cool to make money on this, I didn’t have a clue when I will make my first dollar and how much money can I earn a month from my apps.
After exactly 2 years I am starting to understand what’s possible and how much time and effort it takes. And I hope that with this article you will see this as well. Important note, though - condition of the app business depends on many factors. I personally know many indie app creators that are more successful financially but also many folks that are not there yet. But I will share some insights and maybe this will give you some idea how the financial part of making iOS apps looks like if you are an indie developer.
Shoutout to future me with his 100 apps on all Apple devices. Poor guy needs a whole month and 3 AI assistants just to prepare screenshots for all of this.
But luckily, right now I still have only 5 iOS apps. And here they are with release dates - so if you want, you can compare this to my Proceeds charts to see how each of the apps affected my revenue.
Moons - Time tracking and project management
November 10, 2023
Wins - Setting and tracking personal goals
April 12, 2023
Numi - Expense tracker
December 22, 2022
Emo - Emotional inventory and journaling
October 10, 2022
Skoro - Scoreboard app for sports and games
February 26, 2022
All the screenshots you will see here are from Apple’s App Store Connect - a platform for app developers. Apple shows us a lot of data there. Two of the many metrics are Sales and Proceeds.
Sales - this is how much money your apps generated.
Proceeds - Sales minus some country specific taxes and Apple’s fee. For most developers this fee is 15% or 30% of your Sales.
So in other words, Proceeds is what you will actually get from Apple.
Because I want to show you my real revenue as an app developer, all the screenshots you can see here show my Proceeds, not Sales.
I made $1.270 on my apps in 2023. For some it's a lot, for some it's not. I always remind myself that it's not a sprint but a marathon. I am just starting and it takes time. And while I am aiming for better results in 2024, I am happy with the results so far.
To give you more perspective, this is how last year compares to 2022 when I started.
There is some progress here, right? But it doesn't look super constant. There are ups and downs. But you know what? Something that I learned after 2 years - you can't focus too much on the short-term results.
Let's zoom in for a moment to see how my daily proceeds looked like.
Looking at daily results you might think that I had a 1 great day. Can we stop for a moment here? I just want to say that I appreciate you, November 10 🙌 I wish more days were like you 😅
But even though not all my days brought $109, the long-term results are made of many many small steps. So let's zoom out to see my Proceeds per Quarter.
Looks better, right? If we zoom out even more and you look at Proceeds by Year, this progress looks even better.
Again - someone will say it's a lot. For someone else it's not much. If you are building your business, you need to remember exactly this - it's YOUR business. And only you can decide if it's good or not.
And you definitely need some patience.
Step by step. Ooh baby! Gonna get to you... wealth.
2024 started really good for me. I reached a new record: $217 in one month. Which is slightly better than November 2023 (my previous best).
But again, it's important how you look at your data. If we compare January 2024 to January 2023, the situation looks pretty good.
Will my proceeds keep growing? By 271% again? Slower? Or maybe faster? I do hope. I am definitely very excited to see where my app business will be next year. But you know, I am a bit biased 😉
Let's talk about costs for a moment. Having only the proceeds part doesn’t tell you the whole story and I want to be very transparent here.
I didn’t spend a lot. I pay $99/year for the Apple Developer account, so it’s $198 for 2 years. (There is also a Free account, but to distribute apps on the App Store you need the paid one). I tried Apple’s Search Ads a few months ago, but I only used the free $100 credit you get from Apple when you create your Ads account. And I turned off the ads few days after I used the free $100 so I spent maybe $10 of my own money.
And that’s it. I decided to not use any paid APIs in my apps. And so far I am not outsourcing any design or developer work. This could change if I would make more money and have the budget for this, but I wanted to be profitable since day 1, so right now it’s just me.
But to make it a "build in public", not a "brag in public" article, I would like to share some general info who and what helped me to get to this point.
iOSdev community - many people helped me with their advice, emotional support. Sometimes someone helped me with some code, often people were offering their help with localizing my app.
I would like to thank everyone collectively. I always do this individually anytime someone helpes me. I definitely need to write a separate article about all of you folks, because I wouldn't be here without you ❤️
#buildinpublic - sharing what you know and how you build your apps wth others is not just a great marketing but it's also a great networking opportunity and a chance to learn from others.
ASO - researching keywords with Astro
Localizations - I localized my apps to many languages. And my keywords to even more languages.
New apps - everytime I released a new app, it boosted my sales. But I don't think it's very scalable. More apps doesn't neccesarily mean more money. There are pros and cons of having many apps and I think it deserves a separate article.
To be honest, all of these things need a more in-depth articles. And I will try to share more soon. If you are interested in any of these topics or have some other questions, please leave a comment or contact me directly.
As many indie creators, I would like to change my app business into a sustainbale one. My focus is still on building useful apps with the best quality and User Experience that I can deliver right now with the knowledge and resources I have. But to make it possible for the long run I need improve the business aspect of this.
Here are some of my ideas how to get there:
macOS versions of some of my apps
More ASO experiments
Submitting my apps to be featured on the App Store
Experimenting with business models of my apps
Trying Apple Search Ads again
If you want to support my work, please like, comment, share the article and most importantly...
📱Check out my apps on the App Store:
https://apps.apple.com/developer/next-planet/id1495155532
☕ If you like what I do, consider supporting me on Ko-fi! Every little bit means the world!
https://ko-fi.com/kslazinski