🚀 From Idea to $161 in revenue in 1 month & 2 weeks 💪

Hey hi! I'm Rutvik, maker of AppShots. Today, I want to share with you all, how I went from an idea to $161 revenue in 1 month and ~2 weeks.

💡 Idea

The idea of AppShots was always there in my mind since the start of this year. But I was hesitant to work on it as at that time I was already getting ready to launch my prev indie project, ShadeSnap which I had been working on for the last 1 month.

Around the end of February, I realized that my prev indie project would be very difficult to grow and barely was providing any value, also I didn't had any proper revenue model for it. So, literally, as I was thinking abt this at 3am lol, I decided to abandon it and start working on AppShots immediately at that time.

I even did the announcement on Twitter early mrng 😅

It was all a gut feeling of abandoning the prev project and starting on AppShots. I knew the value was there in the idea, but still had a doubt about whether I would be able to execute it properly. Nevertheless, I went forward with it.

👷🏽 Building the MVP

I decided to launch the MVP in 7 days so I can quickly get something out and see if there's enough interest and have idea validation early. And spend the rest of the time polishing the product.

In 3 days I was able to build something out that I can share on Twitter,

So in the coming days as I was sharing updates on Twitter, I saw that a huge number of people were interested in the project. So I pushed hard and was able to get the MVP out and roll out the beta in seven days💪

I wrote abt my journey of building the MVP in a week in this post, Idea to MVP in 7 days

🚀 Launch

And then with continuous iterations on beta with feedback from testers, I was able to launch the app the on app store in the coming 2 weeks,

💸 Generating Revenue

Now I want to share some decisions I made to grow the revenue from $0 to $161 in the last 2 weeks.

Initially, when AppShots was still on the app store which was only coze I didn't had any website at launch and no idea of how I'll be distributing it outside of the app store, I had made the app free to download and had premium features inside the app that users can access with subscription or LTD. I also started working on the site in the coming days and also observing the growth.

As I observed the usage, analytics, and growth over the next week and so of launch, I realized that the features that 90% of users would need were already there for free so it would be really difficult for me to generate any revenue. Also, offering various discounts, pushing updates quickly, and getting in touch with users who downloaded the app was really difficult.

As I was thinking abt this literally around 3-4am at night again lol, I quickly decided to move away from app store to Lemon Squeezy to distribute my app that night. I made the necessary updates in the coming 2 days to the app and made the announcement asap,

This transition allowed me to validate the product firsthand as it was now behind a paywall and question whether anyone would pay for what I have built. And also made it really easy for me to distribute the app, offer discounts, push updates quickly, and get in touch with customers directly.

In the coming days, as I already had a product that was providing value, I doubled down on improving the site for better conversion and give more visibility into what AppShots was offering and shared updates on Twitter through my handle as well as AppShots handle to build up awareness of the product.

And I got my first sales just 3 days after this updates 💪,

And another sale the next day,

📖 Lessons Learned

I built the product in a week and drastically improved it in a month but it was built based on my experience over the last 3 years of building apps, working on side projects, doing creative coding, etc. All those learnings happened to come together in this project and made it possible.

And making quick decisions was something I believe helped me. Like adding a Mockups-Playground feature which can be used to create marketing/social app mockups to share. This was something that added a lot more value to the overall product. Along with the decision of moving to lmnsqueezy was important.

For anyone else that's building their product, I would recommend getting an MVP out asap while sharing updates on Twitter, Reddit, or here and see if anyone would be interested in using the product. Then iterate on it with beta testers and ship it asap. Keep on improving and making quick decisions based on what you observe. Moving quickly will help you see how things are affecting your product's growth and give you some idea of the direction you wanna go in.

🙏 Conclusion

At last, I want to thank the whole #indiedevs and #buildinpublic community over Twitter and here who followed my journey and supported me along the way.

Thanx for reading this. I hope this post gave you a new look at building things and helped you out in some way.

Again, thanks for reading and I hope to share more of my journey in the coming days as I explore this indie dream💪 . You can follow me here or on Twitter @TakRutvik where I share all of my indie updates😊

Have an amazing day ahead friends🙌

PS: I'm running a special discount for students and indiedevs for AppShots. Dm me on Twitter or @AppShots, if you wanna have it 🙌