What I accomplished in 2019 & my challenge for 2020 #DevAsLife
Hi, it’s Takuya. In 2019, I was able to fully commit to my solo project without doing freelance dev work. I would like to summarize what I…
Hi, it’s Takuya. In 2019, I was able to fully commit to my solo project without doing freelance dev work. I would like to summarize what I achieved through this year and would like to also talk about what I’m planning to do next year as an indie developer.
Development : User support : Marketing = 4 : 2 : 4
I have a product called Inkdrop which is a Markdown note-taking app I am developing alone. I am mainly working on it most of time and living off of it. But the work is not only programming but also providing user support and doing various marketing such as blogging. The ratio of those works is: Development : User support : Marketing = 4 : 2 : 4. To be honest, I would do coding forever if I could but I resist it for other tasks. I don’t switch tasks based on a fixed time schedule. I only switch when finished a current task because I prefer single-tasking for better productivity (As I wrote). By the way, I work in this way from the early days of Inkdrop. So, my accomplishments would be not only about sales or the number of my customers but also the growth of my followers on the social media.
“Dev as Life” — An ideal lifestyle of solo developers
As Inkdrop started earning enough profit since having more than 1,000 customers, I no longer need to care about my living costs. In order to keep it going, I decided to stop setting any goals based on numbers as I wrote:
So I don’t pursue “numbers” anymore. I think the same as Sahil, a founder of Gumroad, recently tweeted:
I would rather pursue my ideal lifestyle, and I would call it “Dev as Life” as my motto. As you may know, it is already used in my blog title and my YouTube channel’s name. So, what does it mean? There is a similar word “Work-Life Balance” which is a concept where you take a balance between work and personal life. But the point is that work and life are opposing each other in this idea, like a seesaw. Because work and life are basically divided and never overlapped. On the other hand, “Dev as Life” is a concept for those who really love developing apps, where the development is the very ends rather than the means for day jobs in your life. So, life is dev, and vice versa. Dev is equally important as eating and sleeping for you. That’s Dev as Life.
In other words, it is a lifestyle that you can do what you love, which is to develop apps, without worrying about living costs. Minimizing what you don’t want to do, and maximizing what you’d love to do. I would like to share what I learned with you through my strategies and tactics I tried for realizing this lifestyle. If you like this idea, please tweet your thoughts with a hashtag #DevAsLife. Let’s spread this lifestyle together :)
Gross volume doubled this year
Here is a summary of my achievements of this year. I also put the last year’s numbers respectively:
- Sales: 36k USD → 70k USD
- Paid customers: 804 → 1,429
- Twitter followers (@craftzdog): 6,400 → 9,190
- Twitter followers (@inkdrop_app): 1,217 → 2,081
- YouTube subscribers (Dev As Life): 200 → 1,340
The big reason for this growth is the successful launch of Inkdrop’s new version. It has reached #1 on Hacker News for a while. I’ve wrote how I did here:
As I mentioned earlier, I don’t have goals now, so I’m not going to talk much about those numbers. I’m just happy with them. I will keep it going without caring about numbers and would like to enjoy it. The most important thing is to take care of my health and avoid burning out. That’s it.
My next year’s challenge: Self-branding
I’ve already started it a little bit though, I have a thing to do next year: Building a brand for myself — Like companies usually do for themselves. I am an indie developer, so it is going to be a personal branding. Its purpose is, of course, a marketing for my apps. Not for selling myself.
Let’s say I started to develop a new app in the future. I think it’s important to have fans who would support my app as many as possible in order to increase its chance of success. You can support it by not only becoming a user but also spreading a word-of-mouse, sending feedback and so on.
Luckily, writing my development tips worked great for Inkdrop’s marketing directly because it is an app for developers like me by chance. But I guess my next app’s target will not be developers, so I will need to attract people in a different way. This self-branding would hopefully solve this issue.
So I decided to build a community around me little by little where people support my work regardless of particular app. Yukosu, a girl who calls herself ‘Moté-creator’ (Cutie-creator), is a good example in Japan. She has a lot of her fans who want to become kawaii(pretty) like her and she shares her tips and also sells her cosmetic products. Edouard, an iOS developer who has 21k followers on Instagram, is posting daily snaps of his work progress.
I am trying to post on Instagram and YouTube as well. As I love cafes so much, I post my selfies at cafes like this one:
In this post, I talk about why I love working at a cafe. I’m not sure it is going to work well but I guess it’s worth challenging. I already posted some videos regarding solo devs on YouTube but I’m also planning to talk about my lifestyle on my channel. It looks like people enjoy them as its number of subscribers has reached to 1,300. The most recent video is here:
I feel like so embarrassing to show people my selfies. You may think that programmers should stick with a computer screen and solely do coding. I think so. But in order to live a way of Dev as Life, I believe that it’s important to challenge new things which most people don’t try yet. You don’t have time to worry about how other people would think of you.
It’s not fun to repeat doing the same way that I already found it works well. So I always try a different approach when building a new app. I don’t care if it fails because I can learn from it. I will fully enjoy my #DevAsLife next year. Thank you for reading. Happy and prosperous 2020 to you!
