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Solving my own problems: How an iOS focused developer ended up making a Slack app.

As a mobile app developer focused solely on the App Store and Play Store I hadn’t planned to ever make a Slack app, but that’s the exciting thing about being on the entrepreneurial path, you never know where the journey is going to take you. Looking back, it came down to the old adage “Necessity is the mother of all invention”, an ancient idea often attributed to the great Plato. Being a modern day app developer, I’ve heard this idea over and over again spending many brainstorming sessions trying to extract its wisdom in the form of my next great app idea. “Build what you wish existed” they said. “Solve your own pain points” they said. The quotes go on and on, attempting to illuminate the path towards your next game changing product. How many times have I sat down with a notebook and pen saying to myself “What are my problems?” and “How can I make an app to solve them?”. In practice this “product idea primer” wasn’t proving to yield many interesting ideas at all, and I’d often resort back to browsing the App Store looking at what apps were flooding the front pages and how I could jump on the next wave.

Then, the problem I had been searching for appeared where I least expected it to… in Slack.

I was looking for a better way to keep track of my App Store and Play Store reviews. It was a pain to go into each platform separately to see if I had received any new reviews. As a result I rarely checked on my reviews and they would sadly go un-replied to, a big no-no in the good book of customer support. This is what led me to setting up Slack’s native RSS integration for App Store reviews.

Well, it seemed simple enough in theory, I would set up a RSS feed for Slack to notify me when a new review came in. After subscribing to the first feed of one of my apps, for only one country (That’s right, the native RSS feed only works one App Store country at a time), I realized I had a problem on my hands. I have 6 apps on the App Store, with 155 supported app store countries, that is a lot of individual RSS feeds to manually subscribe to! Bah-Boom! There it was! An issue I could solve for myself. I wasn’t sure I had a true business idea, but I thought “let me look into building this” and maybe… just maybe it will be a software-as-a-servce idea I could run with.

Fast forward 2 years later and AppReviewBot.com has over 1,200 unique user signups ranging from indie devs to publicly traded super corps.

Somehow I managed to solve an issue for myself and turn it into a real business idea. Looking back, it’s easy to fit my journey with AppReviewBot into one of the many product development cliches but I wouldn’t recommend you use these cliches as a starting point. The bigger lesson I’m taking away from this reflection is to be open… open to achieving your desired end by taking a route your mind might have blocked off subconsciously. Labeling myself an iOS dev or an Android dev or even a mobile dev is too small of a box. The bigger your box, the more problems there are to solve. These days I try to think of myself more generally as a digital product developer, because the truth is that my end goal isn’t to be a certain type of developer for a specific platform. The end goal, stripped of all the fancy labels, is to operate a successful online business. That’s the goal, and while I’m still working on the certifiably successful part (a story for another day), I have managed to create a digital service that solves problems and reduces friction in the daily operations of its users with AppReviewBot.

I hope this reflection sparks some thought for my fellow digital product creators ✌️

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    Congrats @freezegun and thanks for sharing your story! We have been building inkrement.io and recently submitted to the app store.

    As you were growing appreviewbot,

    • are you doing this full time now?
    • which traction channels worked best for you ?
    • you don't share your pricing on your website? how come?

    look forward to learning more

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      @Mirv Thanks for checking out my post. Great job on the inkrement website! I’m currently in the middle of a redesign so I’ve been looking at a lot of websites, really like what you’ve got there.

      • I haven’t yet reached my revenue goal to go full time on appreviewbot.com - This is a major goal of mine and a milestone I hope to reach soon.

      • I’ve been quite busy with the redesign and haven’t explored many traction channels. I am currently reading the book Traction by Gabriel Weinberg the founder of Duck-DuckGo, there are so many avenues to explore. I’m excited about SEM - Search Engine Marketing and I also have a lot of SEO work to do as well.

      • Yes, I’ve gotten a lot of feedback from users saying that they would like to see prices upfront. A pricing page is going to be included in the redesign I’m currently working on. It was an interesting experiment but the people have spoken, they want to see prices upfront.

      I started following you, good luck with inkrement.io

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        Awesome man, all the best! Look forward to following your success as well :)

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