First things first, quick intros! - My name is Michael, I'm an iOS Developer based in the UK. I've been working full-time as an iOS Developer for over 3 years now and for the past year I've been trying my hand at building my own apps in my free time (so far with little success haha).

My first app being a shopping list app that took me around 8 months to build, which ended up being a complete flop with practically 0 traction, and my second app (the one this devlog series will be focussing on) an expense tracking app which from start to MVP took me around 2 weeks (Spoiler alert! it's doing way better than my first app).

Cool, now that we've got the boring stuff out of the way let's get into what this whole devlog will be about... My app WalletPal is now 1 month old!

I wont go into details on what WalletPal is or does as this is not a marketing pitch, so if you want context then Check it out here.

Preparing for release

Yes, as I previously mentioned my app has now been available on the App Store for a month. And what a stressful month it has been! Lets go through what has happened in the passed month in chronological order.

It all really starts before release. I learnt a lot from releasing my first app. The main thing being that marketing is SO important. I honestly thought at first that as long as I build a good app it will just get downloads. Naive I know right. I quickly found out that no matter how good your app is, nobody can download it if they don't know about it.

So before I even started building WalletPal I spent months researching the different ways and best practices for marketing your app. I did this by listening to podcasts such as launched by Charlie Chapman (great podcast for indie devs) and also watching various YouTube videos such as AppMasters and Appfigures.

From this research I found that the most effective ways of marketing are either paying for ads or getting your hands dirty and putting yourself out in the world (reaching out to press, posting on socials etc.) Being the cheapskate I am and also not having much disposable income to pour into ads, I chose the latter. Another hidden gem I discovered was ASO (Appstore optimisation). There was apps making a killing from pure ASO alone!

With this information I created a marketing plan. I told myself that I need to reach out to at least 10 people in the press, and start a social media account that I would post on regularly... And that's exactly what I did.

Reaching out to the press

With my MVP ready I created a testflight (a way for people to download and test a version of your app without having to release it). I looked up many popular blog sites that focus on mobile apps and the apple ecosystem and wrote down all the emails I could find of the writers. This was somewhat easy for me as many of these sites I read regularly so sourcing a list of sites took no time at all.

Once I had the emails in a list I created a press kit detailing my app, it's target release date (29th January 2024) and what makes it special and sent this along with screenshots and the TestFlight link to everyone on that list. Out of the 20+ people I emailed I ended up getting 3 replies. which I was quite happy about given my app hasn't even been released yet and I'm completely unknown in the indie dev world.

Now it was just a waiting game to see if anyone liked the app enough to write about it on release! (more on that later)

Social media

Next was setting up a social media account and posting regularly on there. I've had a twitter account for years which I never use but have around 300 followers on from my teenage years so I decided to just use that, I also created a fresh threads account starting at 0 followers as I know threads is quite new and thought there could be an opportunity there to grow.

I began posting daily on both twitter and threads and..... The contrast was insane. With twitter it was like I was posting into the void. Literally 0 engagement and 0 reach. My posts were not being seen by anyone. Honestly anyone looking at my twitter would think I'm some mad man just talking to myself daily.

Threads was the complete opposite. Although having no followers I was getting likes and comments on my posts. And I also was able to find many people I felt I could identify with. They seemed to be on a similar journey to me and it was refreshing.

After about a week or two I decided to forget twitter and go all in on threads. I guess we'll see if this was a good decision or not in the future. As of writing this post I have 120 followers on threads. It'll be interesting to see how that number changes over the coming weeks and months. But for now I'm extremely happy with the growth.

Release

Ahh yes. Now let's talk about release day! I released WalletPal 29th Jan 2024. Just under a month from today. My plan was just to post to as many places as I could to let people know that my app exists.

I posted on threads, twitter and reddit!

My post on twitter (no surprises here) got 1 like... And that like was from my other account loool

My post on threads got a decent amount of engagement but nothing groundbreaking. - 19 likes and 7 replies

It was my post on Reddit that surprised me the most! It ended up getting over 130 upvotes and over 60 replies! Honestly I'm still shocked as I wasn't expecting this.

Thanks to reddit my launch day stats were looking pretty decent. This along with Apples initial boost that they give to all apps I ended up getting 122 on day 1! This may not sound like much but if we put this into perspective with my first app only getting 4 downloads on the first day (all of them being my family), this was a huge success for me.

First week stats

This trend followed for the continuing week, averaging over 100 downloads a day. With this burst of users many people reached out to me through the feedback form in my app requesting features and giving such valuable feedback.

Also remember how earlier I mentioned that I reached out to people from the press? Unfortunately nobody wrote up about my app, which in hindsight I fully understand as the app was honestly just an MVP and didn't have enough features to warrant a write up.

However Federico Viticci from Macstories did give it a mention within his Club Macstories membership. This was pretty cool and defo gave me a bit of validation! Hopefully as I improve on the app and add more features I can eventually get a full write up!

Anyways with all of that, onto the first weeks stats! After 1 week on the Appstore WalletPal ended with.....

811 downloads! Again this may not seem much to many but to me this completely exceeded my expectations. The conversion rate too I'm told is very good, so I can't complain.

First months stats

After the initial week things started to die down. I think I started wasting too much time looking at the stats and not enough time attempting to market haha. However I received so much feedback in that initial week that I had a lot of stuff on my todo list to add to the app and improve it. I took this period to plan out my next update where in which I wanted to implement every feature requested by users.

I wrote out a list and set a target to complete them all by the end of the week. This has got to be the most ambitious thing I had ever set out to do and I can happily report that, I failed lool. It ended up taking me just under 3 weeks to add all of the requested features.

Over this 3 week period I was still getting a fair amount of feedback emails and people reaching out to me saying how much they like the app. This made me realise that I think with the addition of the new features, It would also make sense to start monetising the app. So along with these new features I also created a new subscription. I named this Wallet+.

Before I go onto how this update went let give you the first month stats.

As I started the devlog with, this first month has been a rollercoaster. After the great first week everything slowed down to around an average of 25 downloads a day. Which to be honest I'm still happy with. There was a little spike on week 3 where I got a random 100 downloads from Brazil which to this day I have no clue why.

WalletPal v1.1.0

You know that update I was just talking about? As of writing this it has now been out for two days! I emailed everyone that reached out to me and provided feedback or requested a feature and gave them all a year free of my Wallet+ subscription as a thank you. Which they all seemed to really appreciate so I'm happy!

Unfortunately I'm unable to share with you much on how its going as it's literally just been released and as appstore connect only shows analytics from the previous day I am only able to see how it performed from yesterday.

That being said yesterday I got one paying user! Knowing that a complete stranger is willing to pay for you product is a great feeling and really makes me believe I can push this app to do pretty well!

What's next?

So.. what's next? I plan to reach out to press again to let them know about my new update and also continue to improve on the app with the feedback I receive from users. I'm going to try and post my updates on here every 2 weeks (as I don't think there would be enough change each week to write about).

Hopefully my next update will come with some positive news but even if it's negative I'll still be sure to post as a journey always has ups and downs and I think it's equally as important to document the losses as much as you document the wins.

Anyways that's it for this devlog. Totally forgot to talk about ASO as well so will probably write about that next time too... Oh and also address that crazy crash rate!

Thanks to everyone that took the time to give this a read and hope you was able to find some value within the madness!