Going solo: logbook of an indie developer

Documenting my adventure building an app from scratch

A while back I had an idea for an app that could be fun to build and potentially profitable, but between my full-time job, other commitments and some serious lack of direction, my progress has been slow to say the least.

I’ve been feeling trapped in a job that I desperately want to love, but that I just… don’t. Despite loving my boss, colleagues and company, the 9–5 grind doesn’t sit well with me and I crave the independence of a source of income that is just mine. I dream of making mistakes and not having to explain them to anyone but myself. While I’m aware that the chances of building a successful app are small, the nagging feeling that this could be it just won’t go away, so I want to try — even just so I can scratch the itch, realise that no, it didn’t work, and move on.

The ultimate goal is to build something that in around two years will allow me to quit my job, or start working only part-time. I wrote and deleted this paragraph several times, because I would like to be someone who says “I don’t care about the money, I’m just doing it because I love programming and I want a little fun adventure :)”, but that would be a lie. I like programming and I do think this project could be a lot of fun to work on, but my goal is very clear: get me out of the fucking 9–5. Seriously. Please.

My background

Like everyone and their dog, I currently work in data science. I’ve only been working for a little over a year, so I’m not very experienced. This means that yes, I can already program (Python) and I like to think I’m not excessively shit at it, but no there is very little of what I currently do that will actually transfer to app development. I mean, pretty much nothing: only general programming concepts and the basics of working with a shell.

This should be fun. 🙃

What I’m going to build

Well, an app. For iOS to start with. I don’t feel comfortable sharing the details but here are some general ideas:

• It will mainly be a personal tracker for a specific type of user. The idea is to start with a very niche subset of the overall audience I aim to target (read: there will likely be very little — if any — profit involved at this stage), nail that, and gradually expand to other relevant users.
• It will likely have some social features but it will not be a social media app (God spare us from another one). I’m thinking that the level of interaction I’d like to see is what I imagine most Strava users experience: log your workout, scroll your feed for ~2min, give a few kudos to your friends, then get the fuck off the app. I would hate to build yet another useless time sink.
• The stage immediately after the MVP will likely require being able to get a live feed from the user’s camera and microphone and do some very light audio analysis in real time. I have absolutely no idea of the level of complexity this entails (I’m going to bet that if I did I would not want to try), so I’ll need to be aware of it during the planning phase.

Why I’m starting this (b)log

For starters, there’s the usual accountability argument of I told the internet I would build this app so now I have to, shit. Another reason is that while I’ve been lazily researching solo developers I found surprisingly few accounts of people going down this route while documenting the journey in depth (this might be a bad sign but I’m choosing to ignore it). So my goal is to share with a reasonable level of detail my process, successes (?), failures, profits (?), and so on with you all. If even just a few of you find this helpful that will be a win.

Finally, I think better in writing and despite me being aware of this I will stupidly refuse to write stuff down unless there’s some ulterior purpose like sharing it with a bunch of strangers, so here we are.

Next steps

Here’s my immediate to-do list:

• Pick a language/framework. I technically have already started writing the app in Swift, but that was a spur of the moment this will do decision and since I’m not very far along, I’d like to consider my options a bit more carefully.
• Think about the overall stack: I’m leaning towards fully prototyping using Firebase for pretty much everything (auth, backend, database) and calling it a day, simply because I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing and that looks like the simpler option. However, I need to do some research on whether going with down that route will cause me unnecessarily bad headaches in 6–12 months that would significantly beat the headache I would suffer now if I went for something a little more complicated to get started with.
• Sketch out in a bit more detail what I imagine the product roadmap will look like, while keeping in mind that it will most likely radically change in a few months anyway so, you know, let’s not go crazy with the details.

So, here we go! If this sounds like something that might be interesting to you, please do follow me in this frankly ridiculous journey — and share your advice! — so that I can feel slightly less alone.