🦄 Dev Diaries – Month 3

Welcome to my indie dev journey.

New here?

Hey, I’m Mikaela 🦄 I’m an independent iOS developer working on making my own apps profitable, and doing some freelance on the side.

Every month, I plan on publishing a journal / retrospective like this one to share how things are going with my business. You an read from the beginning here.

I want to develop my own apps full time and make enough money from them so I can live off the proceeds, and not have to get a full time job or do freelance work.

The Goal

I’ve quit my job and gone full indie developer, well kinda. I left my job with the goal to be a full time indie developer, meaning that I can make an app and it will be profitable enough to live off the proceeds. I am also still doing some part time freelance work as well, so this cuts into my “full indie time,” but it does make money that allows me to stay independent longer. My main goal is to work full time on my own apps, once my freelance projects end.

I have a few ongoing projects. I won’t mention any of them in depth, and they won’t be the main topic of these posts, but they take up my time throughout the month.

This month was very busy and mostly travel! I only had 10 days this month where it’d be possible to do any work, and I only managed to do maybe 3 days of actual work, between traveling. But I knew going into March that I was going to be super busy and barely get anything done.

This month’s retro is going to be kind of a “filler month,” but I hope it’s still useful to see realistically how each month has gone. DM me on social media if you have something specific you want me to mention during the retros!

Goal Grades

At the beginning of the month, I’m going to set high level goals, and then rate myself on how I did at the end of the month.

Make the UI flow for Fruitful

Result: The flow is laid out in Mockup, but not coded yet.
Grade: C

I laid out a majority of the UI flow in Mockup app, the app I use for basic sketching on my iPad. I’m rating it a C because it’s all there but not super concrete yet, there’s still some stuff I’m deciding on, but a majority of it is done! It always feels weird to me to be coding something, when I still don’t know exactly how it’s going to look / flow together.

Freelance

I have 2 freelance clients that I work with. Client A, I’ve had for several years, and is an ongoing project at an hourly rate. For March I notified them that I wouldn’t be available to do any work. This means in April I’ll be picking up the slack and going to do more hours. We’re hoping to finish the project by the end of Q2.

Client B is new where I’ve been trying a productized service model. I charge a flat amount per month. Last month, I was thinking I’d need to do the work myself, when originally I was planning on hiring a subcontractor. But, it worked out, and I hired a subcontractor!

They’ll be doing a majority of the coding, and I’ll be doing the high level thinking with the client. I finished up a task I was working on for them, and started a small new one, but mainly I onboarded the subcontractor and to get them up and running for April.

Hiring a Subcontractor

I wanted to share a little more about how I hired a subcontractor for Client B.

For Client B, we’re implementing RevenueCat for this project, migrating the app from non-consumable one time in-app purchases to subscriptions.

When I was looking for a subcontractor, at first I asked several friends who may be interested. For one reason or another they all weren’t able to work on this project at the moment. I could’ve turned to social media, but that always floods DMs and I didn’t have the time to go through resumes and sift through DMs.

I ended up tweeting something random and unrelated about freelancing, and someone responded asking how to find clients, so I reached out if they were looking for any projects. I recognized that they attended iOSDevHappyHour, but I didn’t personally know them.

We got on a call to discuss their portfolio and mainly I was looking for their ability to work independently and jump into a new topic that they haven’t worked with before (RevenueCat).

Everything seemed good to go, and they were hired! The whole process was about a week from initially reaching out to being hired. (Well slightly longer because of all my travels, but I mentioned that upfront).

I hired Joseph Bouhanef… here’s his LinkedIn to reach out about other projects. (Future me: If we were to work together again, I’d do better at organizing his tasks because towards the end of working together we had some communication issues because I wasn’t clearly communicating my expectations).

Fruitful

I finished the general UI flow for Fruitful working between traveling days here and there. I use the Mockup app to sketch everything.

I have a very poor drawing of each of the screens, like where the buttons go, and how you get from one screen to the next.

Since June of last year, 2023, I’ve been thinking of this app and planning it. I have a majority of the backend figured out and how I want it to work, in hopes that once real development starts, it’ll be “easy” to follow the tickets I’ve created.

Now to reveal the idea! 💡 I’ve kept quiet about it because I didn’t want someone else to build it before I can, but I’ve found out that someone did make this already! But also I’m concerned if i’ll be able to finish it in a month, so I’m not as worried someone else will be able to.

Fruitful is an app to connect with others at conferences! Instead of following each other on all of the social medias, and then forgetting who they were 2 weeks later, now you can connect on my app!

But it won’t just be adding a name to the list that you inevitably forget. To connect with someone you’ll share your own personal Pokémon like card with them!

Throughout the conference you can meet with others, share cards, and tag each card with the conference you met them at.

That’s the idea! The actual implementation will definitely be ready by WWDC in June, and hopefully going to be ready by Deep Dish Swift, more on that below. (future narrator: the app was not ready by either of these events)

Travel

In March I attended the Women’s Day Event at Apple, went snowboarding at Fireside Cocoa, and the Vision Pro Dev Camp hackathon!

To say it was a busy month is an understatement. But I wouldn’t trade it for anything! The flexibility that I have to do all these events is exactly why I decided to quit my job and go indie!

Lessons Learned

There’s not too much to add here because a majority of the month was travel.

The main thing I’m doing to stay on schedule and accomplish what I need, is by writing down a list of tasks I need to do, and then prioritizing them. This is the method I used in college and still works for me today.

Now I just need to remember to follow this list 😂 and listen to my productive self, not my chaotic self.

Goals for Next Month

Finish Fruitful MVP

This is a huge one and almost feels ridiculous to set because this is the 3rd post in this series and I’ve hardly done any work on it yet. But my goal is to write the whole MVP of my app Fruitful because I want to ship it by the conference Deep Dish Swift, which is May 5 to 7, 2024. Which means I want to have this finished and submitted to the App Store earlier than that.

Here we go! 🫨