Weekly Indie Log #34

This week has been absolutely crazy for me and I am really grateful for all the cool things that happened to me and my app business. I guess it’s safe to say that this week was all about RevenueCat and how they empower app developers all around the world with their awesome service and their genius marketing strategies.

NYC Times Square Ad

As I already disclosed a couple of weeks ago: I’ve won in RevenueCat’s Your app on Times Square giveaway and this week it finally happened. My app was displayed on a huge billboard right on the NYC Times Square. The marketing department of RevenueCat prepared a cool animated video with the screenshots and texts I provided earlier. I think it was roughly 30 seconds long and was shown 168 times between June 24th and June 30th.

Although the download numbers or page views on my landing page didn’t really move (I will share some statistics next week), I am really happy about this opportunity and the feeling of seeing my own app up there was incredible. Thanks to RevenueCat and all their employees/founders for this amazing event! I am sure that I will be a happy customer of their service for a long time.

RevenueCat Sub Club Podcast

I had the honor to be a guest on the Sub Club Podcast by RevenueCat and talk with David and Jacob about my business and how you know when it’s a good idea to quit your job and focus on building your app business full-time. We pretty much explain my whole backstory, how I discovered the topic “Indie Hacking” and how I created and grew my apps.

After talking to David and Jacob about my business, I immediately re-prioritized an old task in my backlog: Doing some pricing experiments for my habit tracking app HabitKit. After putting out over seven content updates with brand new features and countless bugfixes, I think it’s time to figure out how to raise prices. I will only do this for new customers of course. Everybody who is still on the old subscription plan will keep the $1/month.

If you’re an app developer (or trying to become one), please check out the podcast. There are countless episodes about how to grow your apps on the App Store and Google Play and helped me a lot when I started my business.

HabitKit 1.8 – View Modes

My development progress for the latest HabitKit update (1.8) was really great this week. I was trying to wrap up the new “view modes” feature which allows users to change up their dashboard inside the app. Soon, users will be able to use some new, dynamic ways to navigate the HabitKit dashboard. They can choose between the streamlined Compact Mode or experience the versatile Split Mode. Or just stay in Classic Mode, which is the good-old HabitKit default mode.

I played around with it on my testing devices and it already feels pretty solid so far! I quickly discovered some improvements that I had to add (and already did):

• Make visibility of bottom bar configurable. Not everyone likes changes and many people probably want HabitKit to be as simple as possible. Now users can hide the bottom bar in the settings of the app.

• Make default mode configurable: Maybe some users want to hide the bottom bar but still use the Compact or Split Mode as default. Now they can edit this setting as well.

• Save last used mode and re-use it on app startup: I guess this is self-explanatory. The last used mode should be selected when the app restarts.

• Make the hit-area of the buttons bigger: I had some problems hitting the buttons because their hit-area was too small. Fixed it now!

There are still some small tasks left though:

• I need to create the content for the “What’s New” modal which shows when users update to that version. This will be a couple of texts and an image displaying the various new view modes.

• I need to create translations for the new labels, but with the help of ChatGPT this will be an easy task.

• I am still not sure if I like the Compact Mode how it is right now. I will probably change it up a little bit. It feels to dull at the moment and I would love to show at least some days of habit progress on it.

Besides that, I also released HabitKit 1.7.3 to the App Store and Google Play. It includes the following changes:

That’s it for this week, see you in the next one!