Building the impossible and making $100k in the first three months

Simon Hamp built something that no one thought could be built — NativePHP, which allows devs to build desktop and mobile apps with PHP.

Since launching the mobile version three months ago, he has made $100k.

Here's Simon on how he did it. 👇

Not doing the "right" thing

At the end of 2022, I took voluntary redundancy from a startup — not mine — that I had been pouring my energy into for almost six years. So I went from a reasonable, regular salary, to no income with only a few months of runway.

So I’m frantically trying to get freelance clients. I’ve got no savings, no recurring income... but instead of doing the “right" thing I decided to finally try this idea I’d had for years.

While I was working at the startup, I saw on Twitter a Laravel community member called Marcel Pociot post about building portable terminal apps with Laravel — imagine, I could write a PHP application that I could send to someone else, and without any setup, they could just run it.

I've been working with PHP for a very long time — my whole career — and I've always wanted to be able to write distributable apps with it.

Stealing the show

I put together a proof of concept back in 2023 using a statically compiled version of PHP and a Tauri shell, and got it to run full blown Laravel; not just a TUI, a full web application.

I posted about it on Twitter. I probably had just about 1,000 followers there at the time.

Somehow Marcel of all people spotted it and he reached out to collaborate.

NativePHP was born a couple of months later — it's a library that allows anyone with Laravel and PHP skills to build desktop and mobile applications without having to learn any new tools or languages. Marcel switched the topic of his Laracon US talk (the biggest conference for Laravel devs), announcing NativePHP to the world from Nashville, Tennessee in front of a thousand Laravel developers. I dare say it stole the show.

But one of the earliest and most persistent questions from the community has been: When will it support mobile?

Lighting a fire

NativePHP was really only meant for building desktop apps. While we had dreams of making it work for mobile, we never believed it would be possible to truly make it work or that it would get past Apple’s App Store review, which is something of a black box and would be a show-stopper.

But last year, while I was exploring various POCs for the desktop version, I stumbled on a way to run PHP web applications without a web server —most devs would say you need a web server to run PHP, but that’s not strictly true.

Once I’d tackled that, I thought, “the rest is easy”. I submitted some talk proposals under the heading “Building mobile apps with PHP” to various conferences and then sat back. I planned to use any invitation to speak as an impetus to flesh out the project.

Months went by. I’d applied to give conference talks quite a few times and never been accepted. I figured it was too hair-brained to see the light of day. But then, at the end of October 2024, the organizer for Laracon EU reached out and said they liked my talk and wanted to see if I was still free to deliver.

Of course I said "yes", but that meant I only had two months to finalize the tech and write the talk.

So I knuckled down. I was getting up at 6am every day, and some days not going to bed until 2 or 3am. I was fleshing out my talk, working on client projects and then also trying to figure out the most important pieces of this puzzle:

1. How do I build PHP to work on iOS?

2. How do I get PHP code to speak to native functions?

3. Will Apple approve an app built this way?

Long story short, I launched NativePHP for mobile in February. In the past 3 months, it has grossed over $100k.

The glory of compiling

NativePHP for Mobile relies on a variety of tech, but high-level:

• C is what PHP is built in. For PHP to work with native features, we’ve built custom extensions in C that can call native Swift and Java functions directly. The PHP code then calls the native function directly.

• While we’ve made it so that PHP developers don’t need to think about Swift or Kotlin/Java to build their apps, we still have to write bridging code and build app-side functionality in these languages.

• There’s also PHP code in there that we use to wrap everything up and make it feel familiar. In fact, NativePHP for Mobile is delivered as a Composer package that you install into a Laravel application. So it feels completely at home in the Laravel developer’s toolbelt.

We’ll support more PHP frameworks at some point, but we’re focused on Laravel right now as it’s the most popular web application framework on the planet.

The many layers of tech here present lots of challenges, but the biggest one has been compiling PHP. It’s different for both platforms, iOS and Android, and requires multiple rounds of compilation. Compiling software often takes many minutes at a time and when you’re trying to do weird new things like this, you end up compiling it over and over again, failing to compile hundreds if not thousands of times.

It’s time-consuming and often frustrating. But when it finally compiles and works, it’s absolutely glorious.

"Build many, release one" licenses

NativePHP for Mobile makes money through selling licenses. Currently, this is the only source of revenue.

A license grants customers access to the package, which they can install via Composer, and provides them with a license to build as many apps as they want. But depending on the license level they purchase, they might only be allowed to distribute a single app.

I call this a “build many, release one” license. You can bulk-buy 10 licenses at a discount, or go Max and get unlimited licenses.

We’ve also been offering this at a hefty discount during what we’ve called our Early Access Program (EAP). We didn’t want to go with ‘alpha’ or even ‘beta’ software — what we’ve built is ready, it’s stable and it works: you can ship apps with it today and folks already are! — but we know that it’s not 100% complete.

Honestly, it may never be, but for folks who want to get in early, the prices are heavily discounted. Regular prices come into effect June 1.

I started charging before it was even ready. I have tried to use payment as a way to determine others' perception of value. It’s an experiment. If people pay, then you know they value it.

This experiment has been a huge success so far. We’ve learned that hundreds of developers and teams will pay for a tool like this.

What we don’t know is how much they’re prepared to pay. So we have to continue experimenting. But we also know that we need to do this carefully. Changing prices every 5 minutes isn’t going to make us any friends.

We’re making close to $50k per month at this point.

Setting the stage for growth

NativePHP had already been around for almost two years at the point that I started going public with the work I was doing on the mobile side.

While NativePHP for Desktop (as it’s now known) isn’t huge by any stretch, it has built up a community, a loyal group of contributors and some general awareness and sustained interest. I’ve been running social media accounts under the project name for a little while, building up a following. The Discord crossed over a thousand members a little while back.

So, I was able to leverage a lot of that.

I also started to build a mailing list, collecting email addresses via nativephp.com.

I soft-launched on Twitter before this thing was even ready, announcing my early access pass to folks sponsoring through GitHub. That got a few folks interested. Mostly, the folks who paid to get access to this were the ones who were already begging for us to support mobile.

All of this was a lead up to my conference talk.

Announcing at a conference

Now, I love a good technical conference talk and soft-skills stuff, but there’s nothing quite like a great product demo and a kick-ass announcement. My big reveal on the day was that Apple had in fact approved my very first iPhone app, which was the first one ever built with Laravel and PHP in this way.

The app I released is pretty basic and honestly it has a few bugs. I’d love to get time to revisit it. Maybe one day. It served its purpose though, solidifying NativePHP for Mobile as a viable way to build and distribute mobile apps, something I could legitimately point to as a definitive example.

And in my talk it was really critical for me to demo writing actual code and compiling an application in real-time. It took a few minutes longer than I’d anticipated, but it was so worth it. Loads of folks said to me after they couldn’t believe I went with live-coding and compiling on stage for my first ever conference talk. Very risky, but it paid off!

Throwing money at developers

Another thing I’ve wanted to do is give back to the community. It turns out that developer communities love it when you throw some money at them! Who knew that buying food and drinks for meetups that are filled with developers that are your target audience could be such an incredible advantage? Obviously the organisers love it, but it’s definitely translating into sales.

This has afforded us the opportunity to get even just a few minutes of facetime with these groups — often via Zoom, but occasionally in person. I think that adds a much more human dimension to what we’re doing here and helps the community connect with us. I love that and want to keep on doing it.

We’ve not made any firm commitments on how much we’ll spend on this. It has all happened super organically, but we’ve spent almost 10% of our gross income already on giving back to the community in various ways. The return on this is largely unquantifiable, but I don’t really care. For as long as we can keep on doing it, we’ll do it.

This includes paying for spots on well-known podcasts in the community and sponsoring a variety of open source projects and contributors, tools that our target audience use.

One particularly great channel for us has been Laravel News, run by long-time community member, Eric Barnes.

Dealing with stiff competition

We have some stiff “competition” in the shape of completely free-to-use and open source libraries like React Native and Flutter. Sure they’re sponsored by some big, well-known corporations with large teams of far superior engineers, and even bigger budgets.

I say “competition” like this because really they’re not competition at all. For one, we love all of these alternative technologies and encourage everyone to learn them and try them out. Like all tools, they have their really-good and their not-so-good parts.

But secondly, none of them are serving the PHP community directly. That leaves a neat little gap for us to fill. We’re uniquely positioned as the only product in what is truly a vast market. Imagine, basically overnight, every PHP developer can now build mobile apps, adding this new skillset with almost no effort on their part.

Where other providers are writing a tool that requires everyone to come to them, we’re building a bridge from one skillset to another without forcing all these people to learn a whole new language, toolchain or ecosystem.

But it’s still hard to see folks saying publicly, "Why would I pay for this when I can use x for free?"

We have to navigate this because, if left unchecked, it could leave quite a negative sentiment about the product. When other folks see messages like that just dangling unanswered, it could give the impression we don’t care or don’t know how to handle such messages.

When I respond to these comments, I try to be objective and unemotional. Some of them definitely do get under my skin. But if I can temper my reply, I may win a customer. At the worst, I might have given someone pause.

Key takeaways

A lot of this is advice that’s come from other places, but I can’t remember all of the references. I’m also going to horrifically misquote people, so apologies in advance!

• Do things that don’t scale. You don't need perfect processes in place for every little thing. I’m manually handling refunds and upgrades right now. We’ll iterate to something more automated when we need to.

• Release early. You’ve just got to get something out there. Don’t be sitting on building a product for months and months before you show it to people. It doesn’t need to be done or perfect, it just needs to solve some problems that will save others time or money or both.

• Iterate.

• Don’t be afraid to charge money. Don't overcomplicate it. Get something in place that lets you take payments and do it sooner rather than later. Even if it’s completely manual like invoicing and receiving wires into a business bank account, give folks a way to pay.

• Don’t agonize over price. Try to put yourself in the shoes of your target customer and decide on a realistic price you’d be prepared to pay. Remember that price affects everyone differently. Some folks will not be happy no matter what the price is. Supportive folks will likely encourage you to set the price higher. You probably need to land somewhere on the higher side of the middle.

• Use AI. Move faster. Stay leaner for longer. But don’t forget all the “healthy living” software practices — understand what you’re deploying, test, proofread.

• Validate before you build. Share it with your audience. Not your granny, not your neighbor... unless they’re your target customer. If you don’t have people who you can share it with first, stop. Find those people before you go any further.

• Don’t give up the day job! Having that regular income is worth a couple of long nights. I’m not saying we should celebrate this — it would be better all 'round if the system’s economics allowed us all to pursue passion projects — but putting in the time to achieve your goals just has to be done sometimes.

• Don’t build everything or reinvent every wheel. Focus on your innovation. Leverage existing tools so you can put your energy into the special and unique proposition that you should be building. Almost everything else is distraction and procrastination.

• Don’t get sucked into social media. It’s a time-sink and it can kill your productivity and mental wellbeing. Share stuff and close it down. Resist the urge to pop in and refresh the feed every 5 seconds. Waiting for the next like, follow, share or reply that doesn’t come will destroy your morale. Learn from it though. If the engagement isn’t coming, it could mean something isn’t right. Don’t waste time flogging a dead horse.

• Don’t pay for stuff you don’t need. Can you go without Slack? Do you really need Linear and Zendesk right now?

• Don’t dawdle. Make decisions, execute and keep pressing forward. If you’re struggling to decide, talk to someone. Get guidance. Ask ChatGPT!

• Partner up. Shane, my cofounder, has been incredible. He’s full of positive energy and wisdom. We balance each other out really well. He’s super driven too and has a very proactive approach. The project literally wouldn’t be where it is without his input.

What's next?

We’ve got big ideas. Our next goal is $500k. I think the path to that right now is to get some key product features like In-App Purchases and Over-the-Air (OTA) app updates working.

Some of this will require extra tooling which we plan to offer on a subscription basis. This will augment the license revenue and also help us move from annual “maybe-recurring” revenue to more of a traditional SaaS MRR income basis.

Personally, my next main milestone is to go full-time on NativePHP. I’m weeks away from that. Then we can really start to move and do all the things folks want us to.

Our biggest unknown right now is what our price change at the end of our EAP will do to income. It really feels like it could go either way at this point.

You can follow along at NativePHP.com/mobile and on our X. And here's my X and Shane's X.