How I began to take my 10 year old side-businesses more seriously ($3.6K MRR)

Moin,

I’m an iOS developer and freelance IT Consultant from northern Germany.

In late 2009 I released my first app WorkTimes (track and manage your hours worked). 3 years later, in 2012, my second app MinuteTaker (create and share structured meeting minutes) followed.

Both apps were payed upfront and ran kind of okay.

But: The revenue never allowed me to work on them full-time - not even part-time. Both apps made around $600 per month on average. That’s why I had to freelance all the years. In retrospect, it might was a chicken-egg dilemma … or just my rigid focus on only developing new features and not building a business. 🤷‍♂️

Change needed

By end of last year (2020) – about 11 years after the first release – I made the decision to give it a last try: Can I turn both apps to become somewhat profitable within one year?

So I decided change the business model and switch both apps to subscriptions.

I started with MinuteTaker and … continued my bad habit by adding a huge feature first … 🤦‍♂️. Eventually I shipped the new version incl. subscriptions and it turned out be good. Not only MinuteTaker’s revenue ($400 MRR) went up. Being free upfront resulted in much, much higher downloads. Totally obvious in retrospect.

I then started working on WorkTimes and was able to ship a new subscription based version within 4 weeks. The results blew my mind: 2 weeks after releasing the new version it reached $500 MRR.

I’m now at $3.6k MRR and 2k subscribers for both apps combined. 🎉

I didn’t work full-time on my business in 2021. Instead I’ve worked on various freelance gigs (project management) which again resulted in much less time for my business than originally planned.

Findings

Focus: I’m really bad in switching contexts. Doing project management for a client one day and coding the other day turned out to be very inefficient for me.
Metrics: I’ve added analytics to my apps to see which features are being used frequently and which are not. But I rarely looked at the numbers after releasing new features. I definitely have to improve that.
Business: I’m still feature-focused most of the time. I have to be business-focused in the first place without losing my joy of building things.

2022

Main target: $10k MRR.

Concrete actions:

Work full-time on both apps – as long as (financially) possible
Target-audience marketing
Focus on metrics driven feature development
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