I'm selling shovels
Hi everyone, I'm a mobile app developer and have been building apps professionally for the past 10 years. I've created and released some of my own apps which have seen varying degrees of success.
There is an old story about the California Gold Rush where some people got rich off of selling shovels to gold miners. I've never struck gold selling my own apps, so I've decided to switch gears and sell shovels instead.
Flutter is a front-end mobile application framework that is gaining a lot of steam. You can use it to build apps for Android and iOS while only maintaining one code base.
This week I launched my website https://www.fluttertemplates.com/ which sells Flutter templates to mobile app developers.
The first product is a crypto currency app which is similar in design to Kraken and Coinbase, I call it Basecoin. It has all the components you need to build your own crypto-currency application.
What are your thoughts on this approach? Have you found more success selling to developers?
Thanks for reading, please feel free to give me feedback.
I think the UI looks really clean! Have you started marketing it?
Thank you! No I havn't done any marketing other than sharing the link on reddit. Will try ads once I have more templates ready to go.
Twitter might be something worth checking out. There's a lot of crypto activity.
Will keep this in mind, thanks.
Generally speaking, I think the "sell shovels" ideology is quite interesting.
Selling themes & templates seems like a nice business, and I've seen some people on IH having had decent success with it.
I don't know a lot about mobile development, but building apps for the App Store feels very much like a waste of time to me when almost no one downloads an app nowadays. Why build something that nobody is willing to download? Extremely crowded and regulated (by Apple) market. Do you have any other insights?
I agree, not every website on the internet needs an app. A mobile app makes sense if your application requires or can take advantage of native mobile APIs like Apple Pay, Security, Camera or IAP APIs, then you can build a much more pleasant user experience for your users.
Looks cool Tommy!
Thanks!
Just briefly opened your website and, disclaimer, I have no experience with flutter, but the rather large text "More to Come" that you use to get signups, is oddly off putting. It makes everything seem unfinished and makes me wonder if there are "finished" alternatives.
Just 2 Cents of feedback, I think it's great otherwise!
Flutter template is looks cool. Hope it will gain more users. I created this new tool where you can target potential customers and tell them about your flutter template. Can you DM me ? so that we can discuss more about what it will do.
Regarding the crypto idea you will never know what will happen until you have the MVP