Making money from an Android app in 2018 (part 1/3)

In this article series, I’ll talk about my experience making some solid beer money building and maintaining an Android app as a side project.

This is the first part in a series of blog post on making money from an Android app in 2018.

• In the second part, I talk about what went into building this app 🔨(2/3).
• In the last part, I talk about the financial aspect of it 💰 (3/3).

Why building an app?

Definitely not money. This project had multiple motivations but money wasn’t the driver. Making money out of an app is incredibly hard, there is tons of apps out there, getting people to find yours is already challenging, let alone having them liking it enough to stick to it and eventually pay for it.

I’m not trying to discourage you to try to build an app and make money out of it, I’m just saying that if the main driver is money, it’s going to be really tough.

This were my main motivations to get started:

• Building a product that would solve a personal issue and that I could use on a regular basis.
• Keep learning and improving my Android development skills.
• The self-satisfaction of building and releasing your own product.

Getting an idea

My idea came from my personal use case. At the time, I started exercising and doing CrossFit regularly and I needed a timer for my workouts.

I began using the default timer on my phone, then I realized over time that it was too simple for me. I needed a big display so I could see the timer from far away while exercising, I needed to be able to count my rounds, I needed an easy way to read and understand how many minutes I had left on my workout etc.

From there, I started to look at apps that could provide me a solution. Of course there is TONS of timers on the Google Play Store. If you think about it, it’s nothing new or innovative. But they all looked either too simple, hard to use, or simply ugly. After seeing the other apps I decided to create my own and I was sure this app would be something worth building at least for me.

Also, it’s worth noting that very few of them had anything CrossFit related (this one or this one, for example), which is what I was looking for. I was conscious this was a niche market but I saw it as a good thing, it would separate me from the pack.

Generally speaking, I think solving a personal issue is the best validation you can find for a product idea. If you have the problem, other people might have it too.

Don’t be afraid of other existing apps, if you think you can make something better, just do it. After deciding this would be my next project, the real fun started.

Building the first version

I spent around 3 weeks (after work and on weekends) building the very first version of my app. It was very simple at the time, 4 different timers mode, a big display of the time and the possibility to count the number of rounds.

I wanted to make it as simple to use as possible but still having a lot of options so that it could work for everyone. Simple enough for new users that want something fast that works now. Complete enough for returning users that want to customize the app to their needs and basically use it as their timer app.

I focused a lot on design and the attention to detail. I wanted something beautiful, something I could be proud to share with my friends. I even paid a designer to craft me an app icon, this was a commitment for me to make this app as high-quality as I could.

Once I had that basic version, I released it on the play store.

Getting the first users

I was super excited about the app I just built, but then I started thinking, how do I get people to find it and give me feedback on it? Because yeah, now there is all the other apps + 1 timer apps on the Play Store.

Facebook groups

This was the most successful channel to let people know about my app. I joined a few CrossFit facebook groups (with 10k+ members) and started posting in there. People in those groups were already interested in CrossFit related things, so they were happy to give my app a try (A LOT of them asked for the iOs version..). I think I posted 2–3 times in such groups, every time I got around 150 to 200 downloads from there.

Good ASO

ASO stands for App Store Optimization, it refers to the discoverability you get in the Google Play Store when people search/browse for apps. This is an underestimated area for getting organic downloads (downloads that doesn’t come from an ad) for your app. After making some research on what makes a good ASO I tried to provide a great app description with a lot of keywords and clear screenshots of the app. It seemed to work and the first organic downloads started to show up.

I even ran A/B tests on the app icon to see which one would perform better. After two weeks I knew that people were 25% more inclined to download my app if it had a clock shaped icon versus a kettlebell shaped icon (app description & screenshots were the same, interesting, right?).

Also, the better ratings your app gets the better ranking it will have in the store. In the initial version of my app, I included a “rate the app” dialog that would appear after you completed 5 timers (e.g 5 workouts using my app, this meant they’re not completely new users and they actually used the timer at least 5 times). This had a massive impact on the number of rating I received and therefore on the store ranking.

User feedback is key

So at that point, I was starting to get some users and a lot of positive feedback (yay!). It was amazing seeing people using the product I built. People gave me feedback on the facebook post, and the app store rating.

I got pretty interesting ideas that I wouldn’t have thought of myself but that totally made sense in the context of my app. At some point, I put a “feature request” button inside the app that would simply open their email client with my email address pre-filled. From there, people started sending me e-mails like this:

So I started a new to-do list for with a mix of my personal ideas and user feedbacks on existing features/improvements that could be made. I still have it to this day, it’s basically the product roadmap of the app.

The key here was to iterate fast. I had a loooong list of things I wanted to add, but couldn’t do everything at the same time. So I just picked small features here and there and would implement them and release a new version every other week. People see that the app was getting updated, sometimes they even came back and thank me.

At some point though, you can’t implement every single feature that a user wants. You have to decide how to prioritize features. How do you do that? By looking at data. How are people using your app? Where do they spend the most time? What features are they using most?

This leads me to the part 2 of this series which will talk about what went into building the actual product, analyzing user behaviors and decision making is part of it.