How I Created a Successful App & Quit My Job

in this video i'm going to explain how i created a successful app called fudgit and how i increased its revenue to the point where i was able to quit my developer job in august 2017. so back in 2011 i was working as a full-time developer here in manchester and i was mostly doing front-end using html css javascript and jquery and also some back-end using php and wordpress and at some point a guy i was working with called andy told me about a new framework called cordova although i think it was just called phonegap at the time which allowed you to create apps for the ios and android app stores using html css and javascript and i loved the idea of being able to create an app using the skills i already had and i couldn't wait to get started so i bought a book about phonegap i think it was the only book available at the time called building iphone apps with html css and javascript and i read that book cover to cover and got started on my first app so i needed an idea for an app and at this time i was cycling quite a lot all over town and google maps wasn't too hot back then and i wanted to be able to figure out how long it would take me to cycle to different places so that i could make sure i could get to places on time and also to be able to figure out my average speed on different journeys so this gave me the idea to create an app for calculating speed distance or time where you could for example calculate the average speed of a journey by entering the distance and time or calculate the time of a journey by entering the speed and distance and i thought there could be many different use cases for this cyclists truck drivers taxi drivers even scientists so the idea for my first app speed distance time calculator was born and since i only had an ios phone i wanted to create an ios app unfortunately i quickly found out that you need to have a mac to develop ios apps and i didn't have a mac however my partner did have a mark that her employers gave her for work but the problem was it was about 10 years old and unbelievably slow and only barely possible to work on so i did most of my work on my windows pc in a web browser building the app with html css and jquery and i just used the ancient mac whenever i needed to get the app onto a real device and it took me about three months to create the app working every evening so i would work my day job and get home have some dinner and then get back to work on the app for a few hours and despite the limitations of the 10 year old mac that was using i managed to publish speed distance time calculator to the ios app store in july 2011 [Music] so i published speed distance time calculator in july 2011 and the next day i kept refreshing the stats page over and over again because i couldn't wait to see my revenue stats for the first day and i was amazed to find that i'd made over four pounds on the first day and then on the second day i made over seven pounds well after that it settled down to around two pounds a day and i was pretty happy i mean yeah i wasn't gonna be buying a ferrari or anything but i was making enough to pay for my lunch every day without really doing anything and also it was a pretty simple app which was not likely to require much maintenance so it's basically a nice little bit of passive income and i thought maybe i could increase this revenue a bit if i improve the app and add some new features and give it a new design however the 10 year old mac that i was using was really getting in my way i really needed a shiny new map [Music] around this time a front-ender called daz that i was working with told me that he was thinking of taking part in a competition called css off and in this competition entrance would be given a photoshop design of a web page and we're given two weeks to build the web page and it would be judged on various different aspects like code cleanliness semantics validation how much it matched up to the design browser support and optimization techniques and it would be judged by various industry figureheads including chris coyer the creator of css tricks and codepen and ethan marco the web pioneer who first coined the phrase responsive design and the top prize was a shiny new macbook air which was exactly what i needed so i thought i might as well give it a go and i signed up and as soon as i received the design i spent every possible moment working on my entry and only slept for a couple of hours a night and at the end of that intense two weeks i submitted my entry i found out that over 400 people had taken part and with all those people taking part i was certain that i wouldn't win or even be a runner-up but a few months later i received an email telling me that i'd won the competition which was just unbelievable and shortly after i received exactly what i needed a shiny new macbook air [Music] so with my new mac into i set about improving speed distance time calculator and it was looking pretty gross at this point and with the help of an amazing designer that i was working with i completely redesigned the icon the app and all of the screenshots and i also added some cool new features such as a stopwatch and tons of new speed and distance units but despite all of these efforts i was never able to generate more than a few pounds a day from this app and i was feeling quite disheartened figured out that in order to quit my job i would need about 50 apps like this and i would never have time to create that many apps so at this point which was a big mistake i just slowly walked away from working on apps with my tail between my legs and just enjoyed the few pounds that i was making each day so for the next year or so i didn't really do anything outside of my job i just quietly fell into a bit of a comfort zone so i went to my job enjoyed paying for my lunch with my app revenue occasionally fixed bugs in the app but i never really worked on any other apps or side projects and after about a year i realized i was starting to feel pretty depressed i was bored of doing the same kind of work every day basically just turning a psd into a html and css template adding a little bit of jquery to add the same carousels the same pop-ups and load in some dynamic content in the same way and also the place where i was working which had previously been a really fun place to work it started to develop a really negative culture and it was all just getting me a bit down and something needed to change [Music] at some point in 2013 when i was trying to figure out why i was feeling so down i stumbled into a video on youtube called the strangest secret and this is kind of a motivational video from the 1950s it's really dated and old-fashioned but for some reason it really struck a chord with me and it made me realize the importance of always having a goal to work towards it made me think back to the time when i was working on my first app and also the time when i was working on the css off competition it made me realize that even though doing those things was really hard and i was working my butt off and it was kind of painful that those were the times when i was actually happiest i kind of realized that to be okay i need to always be working towards some kind of big goal and i always need to be creating something that's mine so i decided to get my butt back into gear and create something new and i set a very specific goal for myself that in two years time i would be making a hundred pounds per day from apps and i would quit my job i needed a good idea for a new app something with broader appeal than speed distance time calculator that could be used by many different people the kind of app that once you start using it you can't live without it and for several years i've been using an excel spreadsheet to work out how much spending money i had to play with each month and this spreadsheet was basically just a list of income items and expense items so i'd throw in my salary and my app revenue as income items for the month and then i'd throw in all of my expenses for the month so rent car mobile phone savings etc and i would display the overall balance of all these income and expense items at the bottom of the spreadsheet and whatever that number was would be my spending money for the month so i would take that money out in cash and i would only spend this money and this way i never got into financial trouble and at some point i realized it was silly to still be using excel for this in the era of smartphones and apps i thought there must be an app for this so i spent weeks on the app store trying to find an app which would do this simple task of just adding up a bunch of income and expense items and giving you the balance but i couldn't find anything i downloaded countless budgeting apps but none of them had the ability to perform this simple function they were all just quite complicated and difficult to learn even as a technical person i couldn't figure out how to use some of these apps at all and i would read the reviews for these apps and i found other people complaining about how difficult to use they were and this made me realize that it wasn't just me who was desperate for a simple budgeting app something that anyone can just pick up and start using without any learning curve and so the idea for budget was born kind of mobile spreadsheet with a simple list of income and expense items with the balance displayed at the bottom and if you've enjoyed this video so far do me a favor and smash the like button and also leave a comment let me know if you want to see more videos like this where i'm just talking about stuff [Music] so budget was a lot more complicated than speed distance time calculator because it had data and i created it using html css and jquery and i use web sql for storing the data on the user's device and using web sql was a huge mistake by the way i should have used indexeddb because websql caused me tons of problems but i won't get into that now and i still had a full-time job at this point and i had a baby in the house and i was tired and it was a real struggle to keep going with it and to get the work done and so to help me keep going i started using the pomodoro technique where you set a timer for 25 minutes work exclusively on one thing and then take a five minute break and then move on to the next 25 minute pomodoro and i made it kind of like a game to see how many pomodoros i could fit into the day for fujit and i still had a full-time job so there was only so many i could do but i'd get up really early and do one or two pomodoros in the morning and then i'd go to my day job and work my day job for the morning then i do one or two pomodoros during my lunch break and then i'd do maybe four more in the evening as well after dinner so i could sometimes get eight or more pomodoros done in a day so i had to make quite a lot of sacrifices to get all of these pomodoros done i basically stopped hanging around with people at work i gave up my lunch break i gave up tv and playing guitar in the evening but after six months i finally published budget to the ios app store as a paid app in july 2014 and i couldn't wait to see what was going to happen [Music] and nothing happened hardly anybody bought the app it didn't even do as well as speed distance time calculator and it seemed like a total failure and a total waste of time however the people that did buy the app left great reviews and praised it for how simple it was and i still believed in the app and i was using it every day and i'd kind of become dependent on it so i decided to change budget from a paid app to a free app with no monetization whatsoever to see if i could build up a user base and maybe figure out how to make some money from it later on and so for the rest of 2014 fudgit made no money but slowly built up a user base and got more and more positive reviews on the app store and almost a whole year after the app was released i added an in-app purchase a pro upgrade which offered extra features like a calculator an export feature and a bunch of different color themes because of this in-app purchase by the end of 2015 forget was making around 10 pounds a day around this time i got a new day job as a hybrid app developer so i was creating cross-platform apps using ionic for the charity sector so this was a much better job which was much more relevant to what i was trying to achieve with my side hustle and gave me a lot of new and relevant skills and i was also here that i started to learn vue.js as well and after a while the company allowed me to drop a day and only work four days a week which gave me a whole day to myself each week and at this point i had small children in the house and couldn't really work at home so on that day off i would take my laptop to manchester library and spend the whole day working on fudgie which massively helped to speed things up [Music] in early 2016 i took the next step and added some ads to budget just some google admob banner ads which are displayed along the bottom of the app and could be removed by purchasing the pro upgrade and it only took me about two hours to implement these ads and this immediately added around 20 pounds of revenue per day and to this day this is still my favorite two hours work because since doing that two hours work i've barely touched those ads and they've been making anywhere from 20 pounds to 50 pounds per day every day ever since and so at this point i was about a third of the way to my goal of 100 pounds a day but i still needed more so i decided to create an android version of fudgit and then a mac version and then a windows version and adding these platforms added about another 30 or 40 pounds a day to my revenue but i still wasn't quite making enough to pay the bills and quit my job so after reading tons of books and watching tons of videos about apps entrepreneurship and business in general i also did a bunch of other things such as listening to my users and adding new features that they wanted so i kept a spreadsheet of all of the feature requests from users and i kept a count of how many times each feature was requested and this enabled me to easily see which features most people wanted and one of the most requested features was data sync across devices so i added a dropbox data sync feature for pro users and this massively increased the number of in-app purchases being bought since that feature was so in demand i also worked on app store optimization or aso which means getting budget to rank in search results for popular phrases such as budget budget planner money tracker etc using tools such as sensor tower and mobile action and also just using a ton of trial and error playing around with budgets title subtitle keywords and description fields on the app store listing pages and i also massively improved the icon changing it from a really ugly pig icon to this beautiful coin style design which was designed by an amazing web designer called pete that i was working with so thanks pete i also massively improved my screenshots in the app store and on those screenshots i focused on social proof instead of focusing on features which is what i was doing with my previous screenshots and i also got budget featured on appsconfree which is both an app and a website which features a number of apps every day which are temporarily free or have in-app purchases which are temporarily free and this led to tens of thousands of downloads and even after the offer was over i still continue to get way more downloads than before so i kept on working on all of these different things trying things analyzing the results tweaking things and the revenue slowly kept increasing until finally in april 2017 i'd finally reached my goal of 100 pounds a day for the next few months i saved all of the money that budget was making i wanted to have enough money saved up to cover three months worth of expenses when i quit my job so that if everything went wrong i wouldn't need to go straight back to a job and i'd have a little bit of time to get things going again and all of this time budget's revenue kept increasing and in july 2017 i handed in my notice and in august 2017 i worked my last day in my job and i haven't had a job since and since then i've just been creating my own apps creating youtube videos and creating courses [Music] so i'm going to tell you the 10 main keys that i believe led to fudgett's success and i'm going to elaborate on each of these points in a future video called how to create a successful app in 10 steps so make sure you subscribe and click the bell if you don't want to miss that and when that video is out i'll link to it at the end of this video but in a nutshell here are the 10 key things i did that made budget successful number one i created an app that met a demand so i could tell by looking at all of these complicated budget apps and all of the reviews complaining about this complexity that there was a real demand for something simple like fudgie and i also knew that budget would be an app that i would use every day myself and become dependent on so i was able to tell that there was a demand for this app before i even started working on it number two is i asked for reviews and feedback so getting good reviews for your app is absolutely critical the more positive reviews you get the higher your app will be in search results the more social proof you'll have and the more downloads you'll get and getting feedback from your users is also critical so that you can figure out what you're doing right and what you're doing wrong so i would ask users for feedback inside the app number three is i listen to my users so like i said i would ask users for feedback within the app and i would keep a spreadsheet of all of the feature requests and i would keep a count of exactly how many times each feature was requested so that i would know exactly what features were most in demand and add those in demand features to the app and number four is i used the freemium model so as a paid app budget was just never gonna work so making it a free app with in-app purchases was absolutely critical to its success and number five is i displayed ads with admob so adding ads to the app increase the revenue by around 20 to 30 pounds a day from only a couple of hours work so this was absolutely key to its success and number six is i covered multiple platforms although most of budget's revenue came from and still comes from the ios version i needed all of the other platforms android mac and windows to boost the revenue to where it needed to be and you never know which platform your app is going to be most successful on some apps are more successful on ios and some apps are more successful on android so you really want to cover as many different platforms as possible now number seven is i learned and implemented app store optimization so learning the fundamentals of aso app store optimization was critical and enabled me to get budget to rank for tons of keywords that people were searching for leading to hundreds of more daily downloads and number eight is i optimized the icon and screenshots so i believe having a beautiful icon the kind of icon that people are happy to have on their home screen and not buried in some folder is critical because nobody wants an ugly pig icon on their home screen and also creating beautiful screenshots that focus on social proof and the benefits of the app instead of focusing on features led to hundreds more downloads people are generally more concerned that something is being used and valued by other people than they are concerned about a specific list of features number nine is i got the app featured on appsconfree so i got fudgit featured on appsconfree several times by giving away the in-app purchase for free for a day and every time this led to tens of thousands of downloads increased search visibility and increased ongoing downloads over time and number 10 was i created an email list so i created an email list for future and encouraged people to join inside the app and this has led to a list of thousands of people and i've been able to use this list for many different things such as putting out surveys and getting critical feedback about how to improve the app i've used it to employ beta testers for pre-release versions of budget i've used it to promote other apps that i've created and when budget 2 is released hopefully later this year i'll be able to use this list to hopefully get thousands of people who know like and trust the app to download the new app straight away which will massively help to give budget 2 some initial traction [Music] so here's three things that i would have done differently number one i would have saved more money before i quit my job so before i quit my job i saved up enough money to cover around three months worth of expenses but what happened was right after i handed in my notice my revenue started to drop and i ended up spending all of that money in the first few months after quitting my job and it was a very hairy time where i came very close to having to get a job again but fortunately i was able to turn things around using many of the strategies that i mentioned earlier but by then all of that money was gone so i would recommend saving up a lot more money before you quit your job at least enough to cover six months worth of expenses but ideally around 12 months worth and number two i would have iterated more quickly so i spent a lot of time sitting around between making big changes on budget and if i could do it again i would have been much quicker at making a change analyzing the results and then moving on to the next change and so on i also would have been much quicker at reading books watching videos and just learning all the things that i needed to learn and if i had moved more quickly i probably could have quit my job one or two years after creating budget instead of the three years that it actually took me in the end number three is i would have set a goal sooner so it was only when i set that clear goal the goal to make 100 pounds per day from apps that things really started to move forward for me and once you set a clear goal it's always there in the back of your mind and you become hyper aware to any ideas or information that can help you move towards that goal and you also become hyper avoidant of anything or anyone that's going to get in your way of reaching that goal so if i could go back i would have set that goal much earlier so if you want to quit your job with an apps business or some other kind of side business here's how to do it the right way in five steps so number one write down your goal figure out exactly what your goal is what you're going to do how much money you're going to make and when you're going to achieve that by and write it down and think about it all the time number two create something that there's a demand for just because you think it's a great idea and your uncle steve thinks it's a great idea doesn't mean that there's a demand for it in the real world so make sure you're creating something that there's a real demand for that's gonna solve the real problems of real people number three save as much money as you can when you finally quit your job you should have enough money in the bank to cover your expenses for at least six months but preferably a year so that if it all goes wrong you never need to go back to a job again number four work on your side business as much as you can get up early work in the morning work during your lunch break work in the evenings work at the weekend if you have to and give up whatever you need to give up to make this happen whether that's socializing netflix video games or whatever and number five leave on good terms so once your side business is making enough to pay your bills and once you have enough money in the bank to cover your expenses for six to 12 months hand in your notice and leave on good terms and never go back to a job again i hope you found this video useful and i wish you the best of luck with your app or side hustle whatever that is uh make sure you check out this follow-up video how to create a successful app in 10 steps which will be up there if it's out and if not make sure you hover over my face over there and click subscribe so you don't miss that thanks for watching and i'll see you in the next one you

Channel: Make Apps with Danny

Views: 6,446

Keywords: quit your job, how to quit your job and make money, how to quit your job and start a business, how to start a business, how to start an app business, quit your job and start a business, successful app stories, successful app developer stories, how i quit my job, how i quit my job and started my own business, app business, make money with apps, cordova, electron, html, css, javascript

Id: JyERoAUByeU

Length: 25min 5sec (1505 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 17 2021