Goal: 10 Apps in 12 Months
2016 was a crappy year. It was the year of Brexit. It was the year of the rise of terror, the rise of far right movements. It was the year when we learned the phrase that, still, after many months continues to sound shocking: President Donald Trump.
For me, personally it was the year of bad professional decisions. See, I have been a lead engineer for a large(-ish) ad-tech startup for the past 9 years. It is a pretty exciting and challenging place to work and I’m incredibly glad that I can be a part of it.
That being said I also consider myself very producty…you know, a man of many ideas or whatever. And here is the thing, as a developer, even in the most innovative, open environment it is hard to be truly creative. Processes are in place to ensure quality and business fit, so any new idea takes a lot of time to materialize and it is rare that you can develop a product end-to-end. This is why lots of engineers have their own side projects.
Since I know how to code, I’ve been working on my own side projects. In fact when I applied for my current position, my first real job ever my CV solely consisted of side projects, and that’s what got me accepted. Sometimes my projects were commercially viable, making tens of thousands of £, and sometimes they were just fun to make, unique ideas. But a couple of things were always common:
- The main goal was never to make money, but to develop a product that is useful and solves a real problem.
- I’ve always learned something new during the process. Sometimes it was new programming skills, sometimes way to do marketing, sometimes design.
And this brings me back to my original statement. 2016 was a crappy year. Instead of working on products that I came up with I got involved in other people’s projects. There is nothing wrong with that but since they were not my ideas I only half believed them. The other half of me was in it for the money. And life is truly ironic about things like this. If you are chasing money it almost never comes to you. When you are building something for fun, eventually you will end up making money from it.
So in 2016 I developed three bigger projects (and some smaller ones) and ended up making less than 20% of what I made in 2015 while spent more of my free time working. More annoyingly I learned nothing. Well, not exactly nothing: I’ve learned to trust my gut and not to do projects that I don’t enjoy.
So during the first couple of months of this year I came up with a plan. A plan that will hopefully challenge me to learn new things and allow me to be creative.
I decided to challenge myself to build 10 mobile apps in the next 12 months.
The funny thing is that I’m not a mobile developer. Not even a front-end guy. I make APIs, mostly in Python and PHP. The only mobile app I’ve ever created was unSend.it. Before that my most recent compiled application was in junior year of high school. It was an ugly-ass Sneak type game written in Turbo Pascal. So yeah, it definitely will be challenging.
Because of the above however don’t expect these app to be life changing. They will most likely suck, but I’m sure I’m going to learn from each of them. I’m not setting any revenue goals either, there is no point really, but I will build each of them with marketing in mind and will use revenue numbers as a measure of success.
I have 5 or 6 ideas ready to be made, and as of yesterday my first app has been published.