What I accomplished in 2022 as an indie developer and YouTuber

My product turned 6 years old / New mobile app available in beta / Got 150k subs on YouTube / Learned how to ask someone for help

Takuya Matsuyama

15 Dec 2022 — 6 min read

Me coding in nature

Hi, it’s Takuya. I hope you had a great year in 2022! This year was great for me.

TL;DR

Inkdrop turned 6 years old 🥳
Inkdrop mobile v5 is now available in beta
devaslife hit 150k subscribers — increased the app revenue, but it takes too much time to make videos
Learned how to ask someone for help
I’ll take the end-of-year holidays from Dec 19 to Jan 9

Inkdrop turned 6 years old 🥳

I’m the author of a Markdown note-taking app called Inkdrop. It turned 6 years old recently🥳 It means that Inkdrop is sustainable in the niche market. Many similar apps have come and gone, but I’m so happy to have built something that people are still using and enjoying.

Let me talk a little bit about how it started. 6 years ago, I’ve announced the first official release on the blog. The result was not very good:

It got only 314 views. It was clear that there was no traction. But I didn’t give up because there were already some heavy users during the private beta testing. After struggling for a year, it succeeded to earn $1300/mo profit! I’ve written about how I endured this hard time and made it profitable in this article:

This is the beginning of my journey. Since then, it’s been part of my life. Thank you so much for your support🙏 I’ll keep it going.

Inkdrop mobile v5 is now available in beta

As you may know, I’ve been working hard to rebuild the new mobile app for Android and iOS from scratch, and I’m happy to announce that it’s finally entering its beta phase! I’m so excited about that. There were so manny technical difficulties I’ve overcome, like attaining better editing experience on Android, improving performance, migrating the codebase from FlowJS to TypeScript, multiple UI theme support, Gmail-inspired UIs, etc.

I started a weekly vlog on YouTube as I wanted you to enjoy this beta testing. Here is the first post from 3 weeks ago:

It’s unscripted as you can see I’m struggling to speak English😂 But I would like to practice it! And also, here is the announcement of the beta testing:

I guess this channel is becoming a great place to communicate with the users. I’ll keep sharing my progress on improving Inkdrop here.

Please join the beta and let me know your thoughts!

User forum (Login required)

devaslife hit 150k subscribers — increased the app revenue, but it takes too much time to make videos

I started a YouTube channel called devaslife as a marketing channel in December 2018. Last year, I successfully found my own vlog style called the ‘Wabi-sabi’ style, where I just code some projects without talking while showing beautiful places around. Then, I’ve been working hard to improve the video quality. Here is the latest video at the moment:

Here is my favorite one: Building a website for a React Native software agency. It was my first freelance work for a foreign company and I enjoyed it so much! On top of that, it got over 500k views so far.

As a result, I can see people enjoying my videos so much, which is awesome. The best thing is that it has generated great traction for Inkdrop, particularly, with this video:

It was a novel way to introduce your product. It increased the revenue by about 1.7 times, which is awesome. I have some ideas for promoting my product further in an entertaining way.

I’m pretty happy with the result, but there is an issue: Making videos takes too much time. I’ve been spending 2 weeks making a video. While working on the videos, the development of Inkdrop had to be put on hold. Of course, marketing is important, but switching my focus between video making and app development is so hard. Besides, I wanted to release the new mobile version as soon as possible because it’s been already 2 years since I announced its development. While it’s great to have a large audience, I must not lose focus on my core business. Also, my channel can’t keep going without the financial support of the Inkdrop customers. I thought it’s hard to keep both my product and channel going well at this rate.

I should explore alternative video formats that require less time and effort. Or, perhaps I should take a break from the channel for a while and focus on the app development. It’s kind of risky to lose the current momentum on the channel though.

Learned how to ask someone for help

I think the most important lesson I’ve learned this year was how to ask someone for help with my tasks. The app revenue increased pretty well thanks to the success of my YouTube channel, but I didn’t know how to spend it wisely. Purchasing high-performance computers, high-end camera equipment, and professional software have definitely opened up new possibilities for me. However, these things can’t solve everything. There are a lot of tasks that can’t be automated.

One of my bad habits is that I try to do everything all alone. I felt uncomfortable leaving tasks to people for some reason. It’s rather just my mentality issue. But, I’m already running out of time to do everything. It’s time to leave some tasks to other people.

First, I decided to hire a back-office agent for accounting tasks. It was kind of annoying to make manuals for the agent, but after that, it’s oddly comfortable that I don’t have to think about those annoying chores, which is awesome. Besides, it only costs about $100/m, which is unexpectedly great.

Secondly, there are already some people who have helped me make English content. I’m so grateful to them for proofreading my content for free. Adrian Otgonzaya helped proofread this AstroJS tutorial and this Q&A despite his busy school work. Marco Cognetta generously proofread this React Native tutorial. Dmitriy helped greatly improve the Inkdrop documentation. I can’t be thankful enough for their contributions.

From these experiences, I felt that it’s even fun to leave my tasks to someone. By doing so, I could do more things that matter. I’d like to gradually leave tasks more, starting with chores. And I would eventually like to ask for paid work for the app development. It’s not possible yet to hire a full-time person, but I can pay for small tasks like maintaining manuals, fixing bugs, etc. For example, there are developers who made awesome plugins for Inkdrop. I guess some of them would be interested in doing some paid work. I’ll consider contacting them individually when the time comes. Maybe I could do this also for the YouTube channel.

I’ll take the end-of-year holidays from Dec 19 to Jan 9

That’s a wrap-up of my 2022. As always, thank you for all your support! I’m going to take the end-of-year holidays. I’d like to spend time with my family, learn new things, and plan for the upcoming year. Happy and prosperous 2023 to you! Cheers.