Weekly Indie Log #47

Topic: My Indie App Business Master Plan For The Upcoming Months

Welcome back to another edition of my weekly indie log! Let’s start with a short shoutout: My app HabitKit got featured in a DailyTekk video. Make sure to check it out, it’s pretty cool: DailyTekk - Can’t Miss Apps of the Week

This week, I'm excited to share a new plan I've been dreaming up for a while now. It's a bit ambitious, but I think it has the potential to be a huge success for my indie app business. Let's dive into the details.

The Master Plan

Here's what I'm aiming to accomplish in the coming months:

✅ Finish the first version of my @FlutterDev boilerplate
⬜️ Build a fresh app that I've been thinking about for the past 12 months
⬜️ Refine boilerplate project with learnings from building the new app
⬜️ Sell the boilerplate project
💰 Double Profit (?)

Now, let me break this down a little bit.

1. Flutter Boilerplate

As you might remember from my previous logs, I've been working on a Flutter boilerplate project. It's a collection of all the best practices and learnings I've gathered over the last years building apps like HabitKit, Liftbear, and WinDiary. I'm happy to report that the first version is nearly complete! I already started sharing some screenshots on X and received some positive feedback. I also received some negative feedback (people seem to be really annoyed by the amount of new boilerplate projects). Still, I guess that's just a matter of taste and completely normal that I won't reach a huge audience longing for this.

2. Fresh App Idea

For the past year, I've had this app idea waiting in the back of my mind. Now that the first version of the boilerplate is almost ready, I'm itching to put it to the test. This new app will be a great playground to validate the boilerplate's effectiveness. I'll keep the specifics of the new app under wraps for now, but I can tell you that it will be another productivity app.

3. Refine and Improve

Building this new app will definitely uncover areas where the boilerplate can be improved. I plan to take all these learnings and feed them back into the boilerplate, making it even more robust and useful.

4. Monetize the Boilerplate

Here's where things get interesting. Once the boilerplate has been battle-tested and refined, I plan to package it up and sell it to other Flutter developers. I've seen other boilerplate projects in the market, but I believe my "not so common" (and highly opinionated) tech stack will offer unique value.

5. Double Profit?

This is the ambitious part. The idea is to create two revenue streams at once: one from the new app I'm building, and another from selling the boilerplate. I already thought about pre-selling the boilerplate, but I actually don't like the idea of selling something that's not finished yet.

HabitKit Paywall Improvements and Black Friday Sale

This week, I made some adjustments to the paywall for my habit-tracking app, HabitKit. I want to test two different layouts for presenting subscription options to users. The current layout features smaller, individual buttons for each subscription tier that the user can tap on. The new option uses radio buttons for selecting a subscription tier, with a single large "Buy" (or "Continue") button at the bottom of the screen. Let's see which one performs better!

I worked on adding a "Black Friday Sale" banner to the app, promoting discounts on the lifetime option. I also faced an interesting challenge while preparing for the discounts: The inability to automatically cancel a user's existing subscription when they purchase a lifetime option. I couldn't believe that there is no API for this problem, but even large apps like Calm seem to require manual cancellation. The best practice seems to be to show the users a modal that clearly states that they need to cancel the subscription manually.

That's it for this week's log. As always, thanks for following along on this indie hacking journey. See you in the next one! 👋