Story of my first online software sale

Hi Indie Hackers,

I wanted to share my story of my first online software sale as an indie hacker. I've made plenty of money selling my time for money to employers. But I've never sold software online to a customer until this project.

I read many stories on here of people hitting 5 figures quickly, or people going from idea to $1k in 48 hours, my story is a little less impressive than that, as I generated $40 in sales in 3 weeks. Still, I think the first digital dollar of any sort qualifies as a milestone so I thought I'd share here.

Project Ideation

In this case, I specifically set out to make the simplest app that makes money. I have a million project ideas, but I wanted to start getting in the habit of making monetizable projects so I filtered my hundreds of ideas to basically the one I thought was most likely to get a sale.

Of course, if theres an app that's simple and makes money, chances are its filled to the brim with competition. So I thought I'd target a niche. Having said that, I see a lot of success from indie hackers in crowded spaces like AI Logo generators so perhaps this wasn't the best criteria.

I ended up making an app for poker players that puts preflop charts on the Apple Watch called "Ace Up My Sleeve".

The landing page for the project is : https://aceupmysleeve.app

My other motivations for this project is it's something that I wanted myself, and in general I have a lot of Watch ideas, and especially my biggset passion project is a goal tracker called Navigoals that needs a first-class watchOS experience. So I wanted to explore building a simple one.

App Development

I am new to Swift and did a lot of tutorials earlier this year. I didn't perfectly track it but in Navigoals I have about 50 hours of studying Swift from scratch before I started this app. Of course, most of that wasn't necessary but I might do more Swift in the future.

I did track development of this app in my goal tracker . I spent around 24 hours coding the app, and about 3 hours doing marketing type work, and around 2 hours doing ops type stuff (chatting with Apple in app review).

Originally, I was evaluating using CoreData (ios internal SQL management tool) vs JSON vs Firestore for data storage. Ultimately I decided to cut those features to keep the first version as simple as possible so the entire v1 data is just hardcoded.

The biggest challenge was In-App purchase coding. There are a lot of edge cases to get right such as someone buying the purchase as a gift and restoring purchases on a new phone. Fortunately Apple provides a sample app I was mostly able to copy.

The second challenge was that watchOS does not reliably detect the purchase. So I spent time learning the Watch Connectivity API so that I could communicate between the iPhone and Watch and have the iPhone alert the Watch if it detected the purchase.

It's good that I kept the original app as simple as possible because as you can see, even with a simple hardcoded app, there were still a lot of details to polish.

Finally, App Review was very frustrating. To some extent, it's my own fault because Apple wants to have high standards and I had minor issues like missing links to privacy policy. However, sometimes Apple clearly did not take the time to explore the app and would reject me for missing content when they really just didn't look at the Watch. I also got rejected for making an illegal gambling device, and it took me 4 days to appeal the decision and argue to Apple that my app wasn't illegal.

App Marketing

My original price is $19.99 lifetime. I want to move to subscription model but I want to validate there's demand at all so I started with lifetime. I posted in /r/poker and it was a very controversial post, I got fairly ripped in the comments.

I expected some controversy since the app helps people win money at real-life poker and some feel bends the rules, despite my landing page clarifying it's allowed at famous tournaments like the World Series of Poker.

Though there was some interesting back-and-forth because many people pointed out that high-profile famous poker players openly admit to using preflop charts.

I did convert 2 sales, which isn't much but does validate that if I improve the product more and market more, I may be able to get more sales in the future.

Lessons Learned

• I made a big marketing mistake by not attaching a logo to my video demo on Reddit. The post now comes up in Google search for "poker apple watch" but you have to click through my profile to arrive at my landing page or get the name of the app.

• Mobile apps are an exciting but risky place to develop. On the one hand, consumers love mobile apps - Lensa AI is winning the AI avatar wars in part because it's mobile and consumers are glued to their phone. On the other hand, consumers are cheap. $20 lifetime is considered expensive even though my app can help you win money. App Store review also seems very fickle and blocked bug fixes at time. After I complained, Apple called and gave me a number to call but I was frustated I had to pay $99 a year and a 30% cut only to have bug fixes blocked by reviewers who took a long time and did not look carefully at my app before rejecting . I'm still very excited about watchOS ideas as a new frontier but I'm second guessing if there's a good ROI of my time vs safer b2b web apps.

• My other issue with Swift is that having mostly been a backend/infra dev in my career, I'm already overwhelmed a bit trying to learn modern full-stack dev, native iOS is an additional challenge. On the flip side, a lot of design and UI concepts from native can inform web dev and vice-versa

• Mobile apps will be tough to distribute. My post got removed from the subreddit, either for self-promotion or the controversial nature of it. I have other channels I can try, but it's not super easy to reach my target audience and Apple app store search seems to favor polished free apps

• It's not clear if I should market more to professional/semi-professional players ( who understand the value prop, but might resent amateurs using it) or amateur players (who might not, but might be happy to have a tool that helps them catch up to professionals)

Conclusion

$40 is only $40. It’s not exactly going to pay my mortgage.

Still, it’s an exciting start. It shows I validated that at least some people are willing to pay for an app in this space. It allows me to run ads and try to make advertisements profitable rather than light money on fire to acquire non-paying users. If I can use the validation here as a starting point to improve the product and earn a bit more money, it could help extend my entrepreneurial runway while I work on other projects.

Overall, if you’re looking to “go indie” as a developer, I highly recommend going through this exercise at least once. Instead of looking to build the next billion-user app, the next billion-dollar business, the coolest app you can think of, or the most fun app you can think of, instead, filter your extensive list of ideas down to a single criterion - the simplest app that makes money.