5 Projects, 5 7 Weeks: Retro #3

tl;dr#

Four weeks in, three to go. I put project #2 on pause and built two mobile apps instead. Project #3 took 6 hours from start to app submission and is already live with 4 downloads. Project #4 is a reskin of #3 for a different audience and took less than an hour. Project #1 is now free because it costs me nothing to run. The big realization this cycle: building has gotten so cheap that shipping is table stakes and the bar for standing out keeps climbing.

Project #1: Going Free#

Last retro I left an open question: what does project #1 cost to run every month and should it stay paid? I ran the numbers and the answer surprised me. On the free tiers of the services I’m using, it costs nothing until I hit somewhere around 200 daily active users. So the decision made itself. Project #1 is now free until the usage forces me to think harder.

The ads stayed paused the whole two weeks and the site picked up 5 organic clicks on its own. That’s the entire funnel. The new question is how to attract users to a free product without ads and I don’t have that answer yet. Total additional time spent: about 15 minutes.

Projects #3 and #4: Two Apps in a Week#

This is where the two weeks actually went. Project #3 is a mobile app. Total development time from start to finish was 6 hours spread over 2 days, including the App Store submission. It’s been approved, it’s live and it has 4 downloads so far.

Project #4 is a reskin of project #3 for a different audience. That took less than an hour and most of that hour was capturing screenshots for the new listing. It’s still in review.

I haven’t spent a dollar on ads for either one yet. After the $157.80 lesson from project #1, I want to be tactful about it instead of setting a daily budget and letting the meter run.

The Bar Keeps Rising#

While researching project #3, I counted at least 10 competitors doing a similar idea. Ten years ago there would have been 1 or 2. Part of that is how simple the app is, so the barrier to entry is low. But the bigger force is that building is now so cheap that people are churning out applications daily just to see what sticks. When shipping costs almost nothing, everyone ships.

I’ve seen this movie before. When mobile apps first came out, expectations were low. Paint-level art was acceptable. Now if you release a game without high quality animations and graphics, nobody gives it a second look. Same with YouTube. It started with people filming skits on handheld cameras and webcams. Now the baseline is movie production quality with an entire team behind it, because that’s what viewers expect before they’ll even click.

The same shift is hitting indie software. Ten years ago you validated an idea with a waitlist landing page. Today I don’t think people would even join one. With AI, the expectation is that you show up with an actual working product. Last retro I skipped the waitlist for project #2 because building is the part I enjoy. In hindsight it was also the right call for a reason I didn’t see at the time: I don’t think people would have joined. It’s also why project #3 will need multiple iterations to sharpen its differentiator. In a space with 10 lookalikes, shipping is the entry fee, not the win. The bar is much higher and honestly, that’s a good thing.

Project #2: Untouched#

Full honesty: I haven’t touched project #2 since the last retro, even though finishing it was action item number one. I chose to ride the momentum on the mobile apps instead. It’s still the plan to pick it back up in the remaining weeks.

Project #5: You’ve Been Sending Ideas#

The submissions for project #5 have been coming in and I’m genuinely appreciative. The range goes from simple to grandiose. A few examples to give you a flavor:

• An app that reminds you when things expire or renew, like passports, licenses and free trials. My take: the iOS Reminders app already does this well. The real problem is that people forget to set the reminder in the first place, so the interesting version would detect renewals automatically from your email. That’s a much bigger build.
• A way to report and find lost items.
• A tool that tells you which class action lawsuits you’re eligible to claim.
• Connecting high school and college students with young kids for activities.
• A handful of hardware ideas, which I’d love to try but can’t reasonably do in the time frame.

I don’t know yet whether project #5 will come from this pile, but I wanted to show the kind of ideas people are sending in. Keep them coming.

The Scoreboard#

Running total: $157.80 spent, about 17 hours of building, two apps shipped and zero dollars earned. The money is still running in one direction, but for the first time there are products live in two different stores waiting for it to turn around.

Highlights#

• I built both mobile apps I wanted to build this cycle. 6 hours for one, under an hour for the other, both submitted.
• Project #1’s running cost turned out to be zero, which made the free decision easy.

Lowlights#

• I didn’t work on project #2, which was the original goal for these two weeks.
• I still don’t have a distribution answer. My go-to move was finding a niche community like Reddit, but there’s so much slop being posted that communities are now openly hostile to self-promotion. The same force that made building easy made promoting hard.

Action Items#

• Decide how to attract users to project #1 now that it’s free and ads are off the table for the moment.
• Figure out how to get downloads for projects #3 and #4 without spamming communities.
• Pick project #2 back up where I dropped it.
• Decide what project #5 will be.

One last thing. If you have a problem you wish someone would solve, send it my way. It might just become project #5.

See you in two weeks.