The app experiment: — 01. What I’m planning to build.
The experiment
Recently I’ve completed goal 1 of the 2 big goals that I’ve outlined for myself to complete this year, and that means that now I can focus on goal 2 — which is to build an app that will bring me at least $100 :)
Due to my procrastinating nature and due to the fact that I have seen so many apps fail during my software engineering career I have an internal battle. That battle is actually completing this project without giving up at some point by convincing myself that all of my efforts will be in vain.
In order to increase my chances of completing this project, I decided that I:
- needed to be held accountable by posting updates
- enjoy the process besides striving for an end goal (I enjoy writing articles and teaching stuff).
That is precisely why I decided that I would document my journey through these series.
The experiment that I have set out to try for myself is very simple:
a. I want to build an app that actually makes $.
b. I want to share everything with you guys. All of the steps that I’m taking and all of the results that I’m getting. I believe there aren’t a lot of resources where you can get such information and I really hope that this will be useful for those interested in building apps as Indie devs.
I thought that I would post my updates on Youtube, but I decided that the best way for me to do it is through articles.
The app idea
I have considered a bunch of ideas and I came up a with a list. This is an actual screenshot of my “ideas” as to what apps to build. Feel free to use any for your own app :-D
The criteria
Because I had a whole bunch of app ideas, I needed criteria as to how I will pick the one that I will work with:
- It has to be easy in terms of business logic. I’ve built my fair share of apps and I know that a lot of them fail for this specific reason. A lot of founders (especially non-technical ones) set out to build a behemoth of an app and there are so many moving parts that it’s impossible to work with this app further. I’ve done this myself when I built a personal budget app a couple of years ago and the nightmare I endured with database migrations was beyond me. This, of course, is not a point of concern with good architecture, but once again — I believe that for a side-project, it’s best to implement something more on the trivial side.
- It has to be small. This is a logical continuation of the 1st point, but for my first app I specifically want to build something not too big. I’m a one-man-band and I need something that I know I will finish. Also, I’m probably going to make a lot of mistakes along the way and it won’t hurt that much (I hope) in case this thing goes belly up.
- There has to be demand for it. I think this is self-explanatory, but this is something that a lot of developers overlook when they set out to build an app. As software engineers, we’re are easily excited about the technical implementation and we don’t really think whether this will be useful for anyone at all. We might think it might be useful because it’s helpful to us — but that can be a tiny percentage of actual users.
The research
Ok, I have to admit, my research was far from thorough and perfect. For the main part, this is because I don’t really know how and what to research be honest. But this time, contrary to the time that I’ve built the aforementioned personal budget app, I have at least managed to look through Google Trends. I’ve managed to come up with these results:
Clearly applications in the travel category are on the rise right now. This makes sense as more and more countries are lifting their travel bans and people are getting vaccinated.
Travel app?
As interesting as it would be to develop a travel application — many of them require a significant technical effort to provide enough value. My further keyword research via tools like SimilarWeb uncovered that a lot of the searches in this domain referred to apps such as Google Maps, etc — which are very very complicated in terms of implementation. So travel apps were out of the question for now.
Meditation app?
My next idea was to build a meditation app. I’m an avid meditator myself and I would love to build an application that would assist with meditation. The reason as to why I decided to pass on this idea is because in order to be valuable — the app has to constantly keep the user engaged and thus it has to have lots and lots of meditations or guides for meditating, etc. There are apps like HeadSpace that do a wonderful job at this and I thought that competing with HeadSpace would violate my 2nd criteria.
Motivation app?
Finally, I was left with a habit tracking and a motivation / affirmation applications. Habit tracking is something I’m also a big fan of, so I was already seduced by the idea of building my own app. Having done a little bit of research I understood that I would have to build something extraordinary in order to stand out from the rest of the applications. Hence, my choice was settled on a motivation /affirmation app. Another great thing about these types of apps is that the technically the codebase can be reused with other types of affrimation/motivation/quote applications.
Conclusion for part 1
“Ideas are a dime a dozen. People who implement them are priceless.”
Mary Kay Ash
Well, here’s the first quote for my motivation/affirmation application :-D
I agree with this quote 100%. You can spend a ton of time looking for an original and interesting idea, however that doesn’t matter if you never get to execute them. That’s why I’m not really worrying about building an application that will be 100% original. My main focus will be the process rather than the end goal.
I will do my best to post regular updates on what I’m working on right now and the overall progress. For my next post, I will focus on the actual planning of the application and how I’m moving forward with the other parts besides coding.
Stay tuned for updates! Also, I’m really interested to hear your ideas and your experience building applications as Indie devs — feel free to share anything in the comments!
