Road to $1k/Month App • The Reality Check

GOAL

Make $1k/month with this app.

This series is me documenting the journey of taking a simple app from $0 to (hopefully) $1k/month.

I am just now getting my first few paying subscribers so this is a good time to document this journey of building and monetising a real app. Each episode I’ll share my progress and how much $ it currently makes, the problems I’m facing and the solutions I’ll use to solve them.. so hopefully in every episode you can see the app improve.

The app itself is a minimal habit tracker, called ritualz, you can go download it right now and it’ll be fun because you can see the app grow in real time.

IDEA

Personally, one of my biggest problems in life was consistency, and a book I really love is Atomic Habits by James Clear. One of the insights that I love is if you want to improve something, simply track it.

So I started with a Google Sheet with the good habits I wanted to have in my life:

• one for learning (read)
• one for creativity (code)
• one for physical health (gym)
• one for mental health (meditation)

I tracked it on Google Sheets for years and then decided I should code up an app for this. Something nice and minimal.

BUILDING THE APP

I chose to use Flutter to build my app as it was important to me as a solo developer to have both iOS and Android. Coding with Flutter has been really fun and I built the habit tracker from scratch by hand (before AI coding and ChatGPT was a thing). The app had one basic functionality to track your habits and visualised in a nice heatmap. For a while I was just using the app myself. Then one day I decided to take the leap and publish it to the Google Play Store.

LAUNCH

I submitted the most basic version of the app to the Google Play Store first. My app at this time had no authentication, no online database, no monetization. Just a simple habit tracker with a nice heat map. Honestly at this point even having my app on the app store was a big milestone for me. To realise that it’s actually possible.. you can make something and people can download it on their device.. something about it is so cool and inspiring.

The next goal was to launch on both iOS and Android. I continued building out my app by adding authentication and an online database (using Firebase). I also bought the domain name ritualz.app and created a simple landing page. I shared the ritualz.app link around social media and YouTube and over time people downloaded the app.

MONETIZATION

People are downloading my app but I had no monetisation in place so I added subscriptions using RevenueCat. Monthly subscriptions of $0.99 or something really low to see if anyone would actually subscribe. I also added a yearly option just to see what would happen.

Once I implemented the subscription feature, I subscribed to my own app just for fun haha just to experience the full customer flow. I knew the app had a long way to go but someone actually subscribed! This was another big milestone for me as this was the first dollar I ever made from my own app.

CURRENT PROGRESS

$8/month, few paying subscribers only..

PROBLEMS & SOLUTIONS

💔 Fix User Retention

The problem that has to be fixed urgently is that my retention sucks. My RevenueCat dashboard shows that the app got around 500 new customers in the last month but I only have 5 subscriptions ~ 1% conversion rate (it’s actually worse than that because the 5 subscriptions are from the lifetime of the app not just the last month). So marketing is not my biggest problem right now because I need to fix the user retention.

The first thing I did was to remove as much friction as possible between the user downloading the app and the user getting value from the app. For example, the app required you to create an account right away. That alone was something I could remove and at least allow the user to experience the app first and make it as easy as possible to start using the app.

⚙️ Need Analytics to Understand User Behaviour

The other big problem is I have no idea how they are even using the app, if they are using the app at all. Maybe they are just using the app once and then never using it again? I need some kind of analytics to understand user behaviour.

So in my latest update I added a simple backend with Supabase to save random bits of information that might be helpful such as:

• when the user opened the app
• when the user created a new habit
• when the user completed a habit
• what platform the user is on (iOS or Android)
• etc..

My new app update is live so I will come back to this data over time to analyse the user behaviour more closely.

💰 New Monetization Model

This was originally a subscription-based app but I recently implemented ads into the free version of the app using Google AdMob. I typically never wanted to include ads in my apps because I felt like it lowers the user experience. However compared to a subscription maybe users are more okay with ads if it means they can use the app for free.

I just made the new update and made my first few cents on Google AdMob so I know it’s working now. I’ll see how the ads go as a source of revenue. I'm also tinkering with the subcription prices. I'll see how the different monetization models go and report back here.