Cloudy

All of a sudden, the application downloads went through the roof. On a Sunday I saw that the day before I got almost 350 downloads, when usually I was getting 10 at most per day so I decided to wait and see if this repeats.

Sunday evening - 400 downloads - I had to check what was happening so I went to AppStore Connect to check the source of downloads and it said that all these downloads and impressions came through browsing. I knew it was impossible to find the app unless it was featured and based on the fact that it was downloaded mainly in the US, I was obvious to me that I was somehow featured without me even knowing.

And indeed, Cloudy was featured on the App Store in the "Apps we love right now" section and boy it was amazing! The app wasn't doing amazing, honestly, but I keep providing it with updates from time to time. Not only that it's a huge milestone as an iOS developer to have an app featured by Apple but the traffic it drove was amazing:

1,8 million impressions
6000 downloads
188$ in in-app purchases

Thanks, guy from Apple that stumbled upon my app!

After another 3 months the app has reached 50$ in MRR. 80$, here we come! At this point the costs with the app are around 75$/month as seen here: https://www.startupcosts.co/cloudy-19

After another two months I paid up until now a total of 320$ on APIs and around 30$ on the domain name and hosting while to total revenues went up to 280$.

The total amount invested was around 170$ up until this point and the first payment I got from Apple was around 160$.

I launched the app on July 17th and managed to get a 4th place for Product of the Day on Product Hunt. Over 1000 downloads have been made in the first couple of days.

Two months down the road I had doubled the number of subscribers on Ship and kept getting positive and constructive feedback from users. It felt awesome to connect with someone from half-way around the globe that cared so much about something that I was building in my spare time.

After three weeks I had 100 people subscribed on Ship for the app and I was sending updated builds regularly.

After a couple of months in which I worked on it for nights and weekends the app was looking and running well enough to launch it into public beta so I signed up for a landing page on Product Hunt's Ship.

I'm an iOS developer that always wanted to move from working in outsourcing to building my own products. At the end of October 2017, after a project has ended I decided to start working on Cloudy. I wanted to do everything: design it, code it, build the backend for it, launch it, market it and most importantly: learn from it.