Kualia - Envelope Budgeting

Good afternoon / evening all! Wanted to take a moment and share some of the Kualia journey so far in 2024. It's been an exciting year to say the least, and for all of those that have taken a look into our project, had conversations with us, engaged with our IndieHacker content, or hopefully felt inspired in the slightest to take a stab at starting something -- a heartfelt thank you and wishing you the best for 2025!!

SOME OF OUR 2024 MILESTONES
- JUL 13th: First iOS Install (they uninstalled almost immediately)
- JUL 17th: 10+ iOS Installs (they ALL uninstalled almost immediately lol)
- AUG 13th: First in-app subscription (they ended up refunding)
- SEP 1st: Noah (me) joins Igor on the Kualia journey
- OCT 31st: Reached 1,000+ downloads (zero conversions tho)
- NOV 26th: First proper monthly subscriber converts (still active too)
- NOV 29th: Kualia enters the #RCGrowthChallenge (we did not win)
- DEC 1st: MRR Grows to $20 (lots & lots of DM hustling to get this)
- DEC 29th: MRR hits $40 with 11 active subscriptions
- DEC 31st: First breakeven month (~$150 in revenue.. lots of annual subs)
- (current stats from Revenue Cat listed below)

There's obviously a ton missing, not on purpose, just too much has happened in such a short period of time it's impossible to recount everything. Some of the things we're looking forward to in 2025:

- Ridiculous amounts of PMF testing in Q1
- Goal to hit $150 MRR by end of Q1
- Continual iteration of core product from user feedback
- Ad-spend testing and value proposition refinement
- Eventual referral link program for evangelist users

- Tons more, my brain is mush, so I'll sign off here :)

One common misconception among people starting out in business is the belief that an idea must be completely original to be worth pursuing. This applies to the business model, design, user experience, support strategy, and even down to individual features. Before you bring out your pitchforks... hear me out. :)

While originality is great where possible, it’s not a necessity if you spot an opportunity to improve on an existing idea and solve a problem more effectively. Let me share an example from our budgeting app. One issue we’ve consistently heard from our user base is the need for better reports and graphs to show spending and progress over time. That feedback makes sense. We’ve learned that spending breakdowns (month by month) and net worth over time are two of the most critical features, so we’ll start there and iterate.

Creating a “net worth over time” feature is straightforward—a basic bar graph does the trick. However, spending breakdowns are a bit trickier. Should we use bar charts, stacked bars, pie charts, stacked lines? Where to begin?

The default answer often seems to be a pie chart, but when we looked at YNAB (a very popular budgeting tool similar to ours), we noticed they use a horizontal stacked bar chart. We liked that idea a lot, but we wondered: how can we make it even better?

While exploring further, we came across Monarch (another popular budgeting tool) and their implementation of a similar report. Monarch lists each category with a relative percentage bar chart spanning the width of the row. It’s incredibly intuitive and helpful for diving deeper into the data. Inspired by this, we decided to incorporate elements of that approach into our design.

The result? A combination of the best ideas from both tools, delivering what we believe is a more polished and effective experience than either method alone. But we think the ultimate verdict should come from the community.

What do you think? Is it morally wrong to take existing ideas and improve upon them, or is that just smart business and product design? Let me know!

Exciting news to share within these past couple of weeks - Kualia (our envelope budgeting app for iOS) has just recently surpassed 10 active paying users. Over the past 30 days we've had a handful of yearly subscriptions and monthly subscriptions bringing us to a grand total of $38 in MRR with over $150 in revenue these past 30 days. We focused heavily on feedback from our users to increase our day 1 and day 7 retention which has things looking bright! Now we've just got to figure out the secret sauce to go from 10 to 100!