Building An Indie App Business #60

Taking a break and realizing I've built my dream lifestyle business

After taking a longer break from my indie app business, I'm finally back at work and feeling refreshed. What amazes me most is how the business continued to thrive even during my absence. Thanks to the mighty distribution channels of the App Store and Google Play, the app kept delivering a strong performance and healthy numbers while I spent some time away. It's really crazy to experience this level of "passive" income - being able to step away for an extended period while knowing that the business continues to run smoothly in the background.

Thanks for being patient, now let's get back into the habit of writing this newsletter 💪

📈 Business Updates

As already stated, the app business (mainly my habit tracking app HabitKit of course) has been performing really well during the past 4-5 weeks. While the numbers are steadily declining from the New Year's peak, they remain crazy high, and I'm super happy to see them maintaining this strong level.

During my break, I completely stayed away from work activities, only responsing to support emails from users. This also meant I didn't share any content on my social media accounts. While this didn't lead to any growth in my social presence, it also didn't cause any decline. I'm now excited to get back to growing these channels. I am so happy to see that my business success isn't tied to a constant stream of "building in public" content - my absence from social media had no noticeable impact on my app's impressions, downloads, or revenue numbers.

I also found a cool video about HabitKit this week. It was a comparison video of different habit trackers and HabitKit was compared to Forte and Streaks. It has been an honor to mentioned along these great competitors and the video creator even said HabitKit is his favorite. Means a lot to me to hear that some people genuinely think that HabitKit is the best habit tracker out there.

In terms of goal setting, my plan remains the same: I will dedicate the next few months exclusively to HabitKit development. While I often get excited about potential side projects, I will try to avoid those distractions. My roadmap for HabitKit is full of exciting features and improvements that I believe will make a real impact for users. Especially with the current revenue numbers of HabitKit, it would be hard to argument for spending a significant amount of time on a side project.

🛠️ Development Corner

Getting back into development after a longer break is always a bit of a challenge for me, but this week I managed to wrap up a major HabitKit update that I've been working on for the past two months. The big new feature: Users will now be able to set any number of completions per day and even exceed their daily goals - something that's been requested by the community a lot.

The most interesting part of this update was tackling the UI challenge. The habit edit screen was already feeling a bit crowded before, and adding the new completion settings made it even more overwhelming. After hearing feedback from some users about the screen's complexity, I came up with what I think is a pretty clever (but actually super simple) solution. I'm moving all the "advanced" features - like reminders, categories, and the new completion settings - behind a collapsible view. Users will need to tap "Show Advanced Features" to access these options, keeping the main interface clean and simple while still providing all the power features for those who need them. Now, users only see the name, description, icon and color fields at the start.

This feature has been one of the most requested ones lately, and I'm super excited about the progress I've made. I'll be doing some thorough testing at the start of next week, and if everything looks good, I'll submit it for review at Apple and Google. With a bit of luck, we might see the start of the staged release by Wednesday or Thursday. Fingers crossed that the App Store review goes smoothly!

Getting back into programming after a break always requires some adjustment, but having Cursor as my AI-powered coding assistant made the transition much smoother. It's amazing how much this tool has transformed my development workflow - the code suggestions and inline help really speed up my productivity. I've also been hearing great things about Windsurf, another AI-enhanced VS Code fork, and plan to evaluate it next week to see how it compares. I'm always excited to try new tools that could optimize my development process.

💡 Indie Insights

This week has really made me appreciate how fortunate I am to have built exactly the kind of lifestyle business I dreamed of when I started this journey three years ago. From the very beginning, I knew I didn't want to build a traditional company with employees and bureaucracy - that would have felt too much like a regular job, which was exactly what I was trying to escape from.

What I really wanted was the freedom to work on projects I'm passionate about, on my own terms. I wanted the flexibility to take time off whenever I felt like it, with no one to answer to except myself (and my apps, of course). The past four weeks have been the perfect validation of this vision: I only handled support emails, and yet my business continued to thrive with no impact on downloads or revenue.

Of course, I know this wouldn't last forever if I decided to completely step away for months or years. But it's such a great feeling to know that I can take extended breaks without worrying about my business falling apart. This level of freedom and flexibility is exactly what I was aiming for when I started this journey, and it feels amazing to have achieved it.