Show IH: Staying motivated at $200 MRR by doing what I love (tiny music apps)

Hello IHers!

I launched dopeloop.ai one year ago. At Dopeloop my mission is to bring music making to everyone with simple music apps. Growth has been steady and the site now gets 15,000 visitors each month.

Most of the visitors are using Melody Generator and I have 2 other native apps that I also sell on Android and iOS. I've been having a ton of fun working on this and that's what keeps me going.

I'm at $200 MRR now from the apps. Each one makes about $50 MRR on each platform. I'm currently in the process of porting my second app to iOS which should boost me above $250 MRR when it launches. After that I have a plan to get to $300 MRR, and then $500 MRR after that.

I know $200 MRR is not much, but it pays a few bills each month, and it really is 100% passive and remarkably consistent. I can stop working on it for a few weeks and people just keep buying the apps. It is a cool feeling to earn income even when I am literally at the beach staring at the ocean.

Before I turned to making music apps I tried a ton of different ideas. I thought I need to build a "business SaaS app". So I tried a ton of different things. Check out my gigantic list of failed indie hacks:

There was one big problem with all of these ideas. I thought they were good business ideas, but none of them excited me. I didn't enjoy the day to day process enough to keep working on them.

On the other hand, I've been building music tech, synths, and custom hardware my whole life as a hobby. So building these apps is really fun to me. It's a thing I can do regardless of whether they make any money. Paradoxically I think that is what has allowed me to finally find something that does make a little bit of income on the side.

There are a lot of ways bootstrapping can fail and one of the big ones is people just give up. Giving up guarantees failure. You have to keep going!

So that's what I'm going to do. I'll keep shipping small, fun music apps.

Thanks for reading!