Month 4 of building 6 apps solo: what the numbers look like
Four months in. Six apps live. Zero venture funding. Here's the honest snapshot.
The apps: ContentForge (AI content tools), Momentum (habit tracking), HomeGrown (garden planning), PillPal (medication reminders), Pawformance (pet health), and Palette Pro (color palette generator for designers).
Stack: All built on Supabase + Vercel. Monitoring through Sentry and BetterStack. DNS and CDN through Cloudflare. Total infrastructure cost across all six is under $50/month.
What's working: Palette Pro is getting the most organic traction. Designers find it through search and stay because the palette generation is fast and the export options match their workflow. Launching on Product Hunt tomorrow (March 29) to see if that accelerates things.
What's not working yet: Discovery for the health and wellness apps (PillPal, Momentum) is slow. The SEO play is a 6-month game, and I'm in month 4. Content marketing just started this week with a proper pipeline: briefs generated from a marketing engine, content written with brand rules enforced, distributed across 8 platforms.
Biggest lesson so far: Building the apps was the easy part. Building the distribution engine is the actual job now. I spent weeks automating the marketing pipeline (Supabase edge functions pulling from a queue, brand voice rules stored in the database, portfolio items cross-referenced for accuracy) because I knew I couldn't manually post across 8 platforms every week and still ship features.
Revenue: $0. Not sugarcoating it. The Stripe account is live, products are configured, but subscriptions haven't started yet. The goal is first paying customer by end of Q2.
If you're building solo and the numbers look similar, you're not behind. You're just in the part where distribution matters more than code.
good results bro, keep going! which platforms do you use for marketing?
"Building the apps was the easy part. Building the distribution engine is the actual job now." — this hit hard.
I'm in month 1 with a single app and already feeling this. The SEO play is slow by definition, so I've been layering: programmatic landing pages (186 of them from a DB), building in public on multiple platforms, manual outreach to listicle authors. Each channel takes weeks to show signal.
Curious about your content pipeline — are you generating the actual article text automatically or just the briefs? And across 8 platforms, are you seeing any one channel pull ahead for organic discovery?
Interesting that the one getting organic traction (Palette Pro) is also probably the simplest and most hands-off. At month 4 with a single product I'm already barely keeping up with support and feedback requests — 6x that feels like it only works if each app stays truly tool-shaped rather than becoming a relationship with users. Not saying it's wrong, but I'd watch which of your six starts growing user expectations for you, because that's the one that stops being 1/6 of your attention and silently becomes 50%. Curious if you've already seen that pattern.