A lot has happened in the month since my first issue of Solo Builder Notes. In the last post, I didn't get a chance to mention that December's revenue surpassed November's, as a few sales came through on the last day of the month.

Now, let's talk about January!

January:

Highlights:

• January 1st was an absolute delight, as I woke up to a Revenue Cat notification first thing in the morning.

• In that order, I ran two campaigns in January for Echo and Orbitime. Both campaigns made the apps free for 24 to 36 hours. When marketed properly, these campaigns always see a surge in downloads, which helps with ASO and App Store ratings.

• The first campaign was with Indie App Santa for Echo. I saw a huge spike in downloads, far more than I had expected.

  

  
  

• The second campaign was with AppsGoneFree for Orbitime. I learned from my mistakes with Echo but still made some new ones, which I'll discuss in the next section. Orbitime saw double the downloads compared to Echo, likely due to its nature. This boost in downloads also led to significantly better ratings from the campaign.

• I got my first subscription for Echo, after previously having only lifetime sales.

• January's revenue has surpassed December's, maintaining a strong growth trajectory.

  

Lowlights:

• I want to run Apple Search Ads, but it doesn't allow me to do so without a GST (which I don't have) and doesn't accept Indian credit cards. The only solution I see is to incorporate in the US as a Wyoming LLC or Denver C-corp using Firstbase or Stripe. At the moment, this is a major roadblock to my growth. Google Search Ads haven't been effective for me so far.

• Mistakes I made with each campaign:

  • For Echo, I had kept the ratings prompt behind an action (first entry), which resulted in very few ratings for a paid campaign, diminishing the ROI.

  • I corrected this mistake with Orbitime by having the ratings prompt appear right after the purchase. However, I made other mistakes–

  • I hadn't done enough QA for the app, which resulted in the Search function not working on iOS 18 iPhones. I ended up fixing this bug and submitting an expedited review.

    

    
    

  • While submitting this fix, I accidentally pushed an in-progress widget to production. This caused issues with one of my other widgets. It would have been manageable if it hadn't taken me 2-3 days to figure it out and it didn’t help that it occurred right in the middle of a huge campaign.

Learnings:

• When running a free campaign, don't hide ratings behind an action, at least for the duration of the campaign. Orbitime clearly performed better because of this.

• Always respond to your users, no matter how busy you are.

  

  
  

• Conduct thorough QA before any major or large-scale campaign.

• I'm starting to realize that marketing is so much more about trying things than having a solid plan. It's been a fun and challenging learning experience. I will continue to do the same in February.

What's next?

• I picked up the animations.dev course from Emil Kowalski. Through this course, I want to learn how to improve transitions/animations in my apps.

• I want to see if I can break even for this financial year (Apr 2024 - Mar 2025). It'll be a very ambitious goal.

• I might have to explore other marketing channels like TikTok, Instagram, etc.

• A lot of fixes and features are planned for both Echo and Orbitime.

• Landing pages for my apps have been long overdue. It's unlikely I can finish them in the next month, but it's an ambitious plan.