From Corporate Web Developer to Full-Time Indie Hacker — Sebastian Röhl, HabitKit

David Barnard:

Welcome to the Sub Club podcast, a show dedicated to the best practices for building and growing app businesses. We sit down with the entrepreneurs, investors, and builders behind the most successful apps in the world to learn from their successes and failures.

Sub Club is brought to you by RevenueCat. Thousands of the world's best apps trust RevenueCat to power in-app purchases, manage customers, and grow revenue across iOS, Android, and the web. You can learn more at RevenueCat.com. Let's get into the show.

Hello, I'm your host, David Barnard, and with me today, RevenueCat CEO, Jacob Eiting. Our guest today is Sebastian Röhl, an independent app developer from Germany who created HabitKit. On the podcast we talk with Sebastian about quitting a job to build his own apps, going back to that job after failing to gain traction, and the inflection point that allowed him to finally quit for good.

Hey, Sebastian, thanks so much for joining us on the podcast today.

Sebastian Röhl:

Hi. Thank you for having me. I'm a huge fan of the podcast and of RevenueCat, of course.

Jacob Eiting:

Oh, bless you.

David Barnard:

And Jacob, nice to have you back on the podcast. A long time without you.

Jacob Eiting:

Has it been? The production schedule for Sub Club is confusing and out of my sight, but I assume I'm on every episode. Is that not the case? Are there episodes without me? Wow, we Got to talk about this, David.

David Barnard:

I did some live episodes, without a Google I/O.

Jacob Eiting:

Very good. I listen to every single one I'm not on, I promise.

David Barnard:

Of course. You better. All right, so Sebastian, I wanted to kick things off today. So you're a career web developer, but now a solo indie app developer. So how did you get started in apps as a web developer?

Sebastian Röhl:

The motivation behind building mobile apps was actually because I decided to start my own app business. I just wanted to work on my own products and sell them on the internet and make a living off it. And all the ideas that I had were all related to best suiting for the mobile platform, and that's how I initially got excited for mobile app development.

David Barnard:

It does feel like apps are a great market, not just that, like you were saying, that the ideas, but as a marketplace and having access to so many consumers directly through the app stores. Were there not any web projects that you thought would be successful, or was it just more exciting to build apps, versus your bread and butter web development?

Sebastian Röhl:

Yeah, so this whole web development thing always felt a little bit more intimidating to me. As a solo entrepreneur, you have to build this backend then, and you have to deal with payments and sales tax and stuff like that. And when you're on the mobile platform, all the payments and sales tax thing is handled by Apple and Google, and that was really a good point for me to start there. And yeah, the ideas, as I already said before.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah, it makes it much more appealing. I feel like in web dev or building indie web apps, you see much more like prosumer or utility SaaS kind of stuff and a lot less consumer lifestyle focused things. So it's almost like, if you want to build stuff for consumers, for people, the web's not a great option. Mobile is clearly a better... And then, of course, all of the stuff that you discussed, like payments, like having a merchant of record, all of that stuff. And if you're in consumer, all of those problems are much more multiplied, because if you're selling B2B, your number of customers is usually much, much lower. You might be at hundreds if you're doing well, and in that case, you're dealing with fewer jurisdictions and your compliance is maybe a little bit easier. But when you're dealing with consumers, it's thousands, right? And now you're multiplying that problem. So yeah, it's almost not even an option to do a consumer web app.

Sebastian Röhl:

And back when I started HabitKit, I already got this idea a couple of years ago for this app, and back then, when you scroll down all the way on my Twitter profile and look at my first posts, you can actually see me building a very early web version of HabitKit. And I actually completely abandoned this because habit tracking didn't feel natural to me on the web, so it felt much more better.

Jacob Eiting:

Well, I mean, you could build it as a progressive web app I'm sure, but then you lose the distribution, you lose all of the things that make it nice about being mobile. This is one of those controversial opinions. I feel like a PWA can never really totally feel as nice as a Swift or even Flutter or some sort of native backed mobile app.

David Barnard:

I don't think that's a controversial opinion.

Jacob Eiting:

It is! I still think some people... I mean, obviously there's people who chose to use that technology to die on that hill, but, well, the price. For $1,000, the person can put a PWA in front of me and me not figure out it's a PWA. I guarantee you, I will know.

David Barnard:

Yeah. You mentioned wanting to build your own stuff, and there is always that allure of a side project, of having something going on on the side. But was it always the goal to leave your job? What's so bad about having a day job?

Sebastian Röhl:

I guess the first time that I thought about building my own apps was at the end of my university time when I was writing my master's thesis. And at that time, I discovered the IndieHackers.com community and learned about all these cool people that are building their own products and selling them on the internet and actually make a living of it. And that felt super cool and exciting to me. Although I took a real job as a software engineer after university, the thought of bootstrapping my own business really got stuck at the back of my head. So after three years of working for that company, we were basically contracting for this other company and building their enterprise resource planning back office software.

Jacob Eiting:

Why would indie hacking seem appealing if you were doing that all day?

Sebastian Röhl:

Yeah, so I guess it's the nature of contracting work. You have very limited control about how the product you're building will look like, how it will behave, what's the UX and the UI, and the only thing that you're mostly having control of is the technical side as a programmer in this project. And I'm not really the type of developer that unconditionally loves programming. I'm definitely not the type of software engineer that geeks out on optimizing algorithms or something like that.

Jacob Eiting:

Which also doesn't feel like something you're often doing when you're programming an ERP for an internal use case.

Sebastian Röhl:

Yeah, exactly. I'm the type of developer that likes to make his own concepts and how a problem should be solved and then develop it myself and then see the concept in the real world. Yeah, so I got a little bit bored by this project that I couldn't really escape from. And don't get me wrong, the job was fine and I learned a lot, met many cool people, but at this time, I wanted to try my own stuff.

David Barnard:

Was it also just kind of having an outlet? Working this job where it sounds like as a consultant it's like, you just got handed specs. You weren't even getting to interact with a product team or be in the meetings where things were decided and stuff. So was it somewhat just like, I have to build things? It sounds like that's your deeper motivation, was creativity and just wanting to build products.

Sebastian Röhl:

In the end, the most important aspect was this creativity thing. I guess some jobs can definitely make that possible, but it's usually not the case in the contracting world. Maybe I would have been better off at a company where they develop their own product. I hope you can confirm that, but I can imagine that the developers at RevenueCat can bring in their own ideas and have a real impact on the product, right?

Jacob Eiting:

Sure. I think though there, maybe the moment it got ruined for you is when you found IndieHackers.com. Because I think once somebody gets the idea that they need to do this or they want to do this, all of the rest of it feels like you're just finding the justification to go do it, when really it's just you want to go do it, right? It's just something you need to do.

And I try to tell that to folks that, and you're in tech long enough, and this goes between venture-backed startups, down to indie side projects, going independent, all of that stuff. I think if you feel the need to do it, you have it in you, it's inside of you and you just need to go do it, you can spend all the time you want, justifying it, building up whatever things you got to do to convince yourself it's okay, but the real decision is made up. Is it inside you and do you have to do it?

If it's like, eh, it'd be nice, it'd be cool, but whatever, do not do it. Do not do it because nine times out of 10, and maybe it's worked out well for you, Sebastian, I don't know, but it doesn't net out. But it will be successful if you had to do this, and then at least even if it fails, you did it. You got it out of you and you can decide then, you have clear eyes about what you want to do with your life. And do you value the things that... Because I guess to you, reading the Indie Hackers stuff, you said it was cool, but what about it was appealing to you, beyond having creative control over what you're building?

Sebastian Röhl:

It's all about building a cool lifestyle business for myself. I want to work whenever I want. I want to take breaks whenever I want. If life gets in the way, something is with the family, I want to be there and want to have my business there and don't touch it, but it's somehow should, one by its own this passive income thing. I know it's not passive, but I just...

Jacob Eiting:

It's like rental properties, right? Very passive. Very passive. For anybody who's ever owned a rental property knows, it's very passive.

Sebastian Röhl:

I mean, I just took a three-week vacation and didn't have to do a single thing for my business and it just continued to work. Yeah.

David Barnard:

Wow. I had somewhat a different experience on the Indie Hacker site in a way, because I started the business first and just jumped off a cliff. But I will say, for those kind of listening to this, while that is the dream and Sebastian has done it well, for me it was over a decade of just grinding. And this was before subscription, so it was always paid up front, and then my apps often would get a lot of press, and then it was always like, okay, when am I going to get the next press? And so, I had a lot of flexibility and got to take some time as needed.

But I think it depends on your personality and backup financially and other things as to whether even once you start to achieve some level of success, you can take that as a luxury, versus having this constant... And I had four kids along the way, so for me there was this just constant fire under me. I'm saying this to maybe balance out the perspective, is that there was just a constant fire. And so then, even though I did see some level of success, I never took a three-week vacation. So that's pretty awesome so early in your journey, that you were able to really take that time off. For me it was just always, what's next, what's next? And just grinding, grinding, grinding.

Jacob Eiting:

I think it's a big personality thing. I see this in entrepreneurs outside of tech a lot of times too, like folks that own cashflowing businesses and things like this. Some of them are really good about actually using it to lever into a lifestyle that they want. Others, it just becomes worse than a job, because a job you can quit or you can get fired, right? There are outs that are accessible to you, but sometimes with these businesses there isn't. And there's like, Sebastian, when you're gone for three weeks, did no customers get mad, nobody came up? Or they did and you're just like, you know what? They'll live. What's your philosophy for creating these boundaries?

Sebastian Röhl:

I usually get two or three emails a day at this season. In winter it's a little bit more, but in summer it's just three or four emails per day, and it's mostly feature requests, people saying, "Hey, I love your app, but it would be cool if you could add that." And that's not really an email I have to reply to.

Jacob Eiting:

But you're looking at them, yes?

David Barnard:

Did you look at them?

Sebastian Röhl:

Yes.

Jacob Eiting:

Okay. See, it's always in the lifestyle. They don't tell you this on Indie Hackers, you're out on your yacht for three weeks or whatever, but you are checking, right?

Sebastian Röhl:

Yeah, I was checking. Yeah.

David Barnard:

Did you even respond to some of them?

Sebastian Röhl:

After I was back, yeah.

Jacob Eiting:

You're really on trial now, Sebastian. It's Indie Hacker court. But I think it's a good point, and obviously that doesn't feel intrusive to you, which I think also with a job can be very different sometimes, right? With a job, if you're on vacation or you're doing something and the job tries to steal some of your time, that feels much more offensive sometimes. When it's your own thing, you're like, well, this is my own thing and I own it and I have to do this, and it doesn't necessarily feel like work. But again, it's so psychological, depending on the person and the mindset. And that same for your job. Some people don't mind having to take care of things for their job when they're ostensibly out. Other people, it's like the worst in the world, and it really just depends on your mindset and personality and stuff like that. I don't even know necessarily that there's a better or worse way to approach it, but I do think it's interesting, because... We haven't gotten to this yet. You got into indie life and then you got out of indie life. Is that correct?

Sebastian Röhl:

Not really, because my app business didn't really start as a side project because I actually quit my job to start my own business. Most Indie Hackers tell you as advice, don't do this, only do this when you have a stable income from your side hustle. But I actually did the opposite and left my comfortable job and then started my business.

David Barnard:

How did that work financially? You just kind of saved up and were single and kept your expenses low, or how'd you jump off that cliff?

Sebastian Röhl:

I had this safety net that I built up before. I knew that at least as an experienced software developer here in Germany, it isn't really hard to find a real job again if the business goes downhill. So I got that safety. I built up some savings that I could live off for at least a year, and at that time I didn't have many financial obligations. Of course, I had to pay for an apartment and food and stuff like that, but I didn't have kids, no loans for a house or something like that, so I was basically free to do whatever I want.

David Barnard:

Yeah.

Jacob Eiting:

This is hard to reason about for most people, conceptualization of risk. When you are near the bottom... And that's not the bottom, life's pretty good, you have an apartment, you have all these things. But you don't have debt, you don't have obligations, you don't have a lot of stacked leverage on yourself personally. You can jump off a cliff and you're only falling a foot. But even if you don't have a lot of assets, if you have to declare bankruptcy, your credit's screwed, but what are they going to take? You don't have any asset. Most banks wouldn't give you loans and most of the time you're not going to end up in owing money that you can't pay, but you really, especially early in life, it's just a fact. There's less at stake, and that's often the time it's best to start something.

But on the flip side, it's also, you probably know the least, you're least experienced and things like this. And I'm counseling somebody I know who's 21 years old and he's thinking about starting a business right now, but obviously there's a lot of considerations, and I'm like, I'm always just like, do it. Do it. Because even if you don't know what you're doing, if it fails, you put some stuff in your experience bag. If it succeeds, holy crap, if you started a business that compounds at 21 years old, you could retire by the time you're 35 if you really wanted to, if it works out well. To be able to start that so early in your life is such an advantage. But again, there's no free lunch, so doing it early versus doing it later all has its trade-offs.

I do think there's something to... Talking to a lot of entrepreneurs, I think there's sound advice in saving and making it safe before you can take a leap, and I'm curious how this motivated you, but I think when you jump off the cliff, even if you have some safety net, whatever, I think jumping before you have a rope to grab onto is a good motivator. It sort of has to work, you know what I mean? How did you feel about that jumping off with nothing in hand by the time you were independent?

Sebastian Röhl:

Yeah, that definitely felt scary and weird, but I also, additionally to all the safety nets that I mentioned earlier, I also said to myself, okay, I time box this app business experiment to exactly 12 months. It seemed reasonable to me to have this backup plan if it doesn't work out, and I said to myself, okay, if this doesn't work out, I will go back to my old job or another job.

Jacob Eiting:

And what was your bar for definition of working out? Did you have a number or something in mind that you said, oh, this is successful?

Sebastian Röhl:

So the condition was to reach the base level which I could live off. Some Indie Hackers call it ramen profitability?

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah, yeah.

Sebastian Röhl:

But I actually didn't reach it, and so I left on good terms with my previous employer and then actually even got back to them once the 12 months was over.

Jacob Eiting:

Came back, hat in hands?

Sebastian Röhl:

Yeah, I had to admit the defeat and then had to...

Jacob Eiting:

Was it tough? Did you have a lot of pride and was it tough for you to go back and do that, or did you just feel like, hey, I set myself this thing? How was that psychologically for you to kind of have to go back?

Sebastian Röhl:

That wasn't really so bad, because in my free year I learned so many great things. I got so much self-confidence. I developed these two cool apps and a lot of people downloaded them already, and that really developed my self-confidence. So going back wasn't really that bad. I even got a nice raise, and yeah, it was a great decision.

Jacob Eiting:

There you go. There you go, folks. At a minimum you could come back and renegotiate your salary.

David Barnard:

So during that year though, how did things go? Did you already have an app in mind when you quit, or was it like you quit and okay, now I got to pick the product? Let's talk through that first year and how you built stuff.

Sebastian Röhl:

When I made the decision to start my own business, I didn't really have a good idea what app to build. I think in the end, the first idea isn't really that important. What's more important is to start moving and just build anything. It doesn't really matter what, because once you started building something, you'll automatically get new, better ideas.

Jacob Eiting:

Just start writing. That's the famous thing for writing too. It's like, just start writing. You start writing and then even if you throw it away, you're more likely than not, you're going to wander onto something good, right?

Sebastian Röhl:

Yeah, just get into the flow. I'm sure it activates certain parts of your brain that are responsible for creativity or something like that. When I quit my job, I took a look at my personal life and tried to figure out what app doesn't meet my requirements, and I quickly decided that I want to build my own version of a fitness tracking app. It sounds really boring. There are already 100 or so.

Jacob Eiting:

Slightly competitive market.

Sebastian Röhl:

Yeah. There are already a million other fitness tracking apps, but I just wanted to start moving, and that's why I picked this idea. That's how I came to build my first app, LiftBear.

David Barnard:

With this one year, it's ultimately a lot of time, so you could have, and I would have been the person doing this, work for 12 months and then ship the app. Did you have a deadline? Like, I got to get this in the app store by X day so that I know whether it's going to work or not so that I can iterate. How did you set deadlines and set expectations in that 12-month period?

Sebastian Röhl:

I already followed a lot of other indie hackers, and I read some advice and I already knew that I shouldn't develop this app for 12 months and then release it and then see that nobody really cares about it. I just was disciplined enough to buckle down and then develop it in the first two months of my free year and then launch it. So I didn't really had a problem with this.

Jacob Eiting:

You have to have low expectations about what you're going to produce, I think.

David Barnard:

Realistic expectations, not necessarily low.

Jacob Eiting:

No, low. I say low. I should find, I saw a first version of RevenueCat screenshot again the other day and it looks terrible. And honestly I think, not to toot my own horn or whatever, but I think a lot of people would have a trouble shipping that, and I just don't care what people think, or what the majority of people think, or something like this, right? With your point, Sebastian, is just do something.

And I guess the flip side is maybe you're concerned about your perception of yourself and what you can create. That's one problem. I think other people are just concerned like, oh, what are people going to think about me? And the thing is, even if it's crap, nobody pays attention. If you ship something crappy, it's fine because a few people might notice and a few people might be, this is crappy, but also most people just won't notice and they won't care, and then you make it nice over time and then more people are exposed to it as it gets better and better.

Now there's flip sides if you're the Humane Team or other teams like this, where you have a lot of spotlight on you, your initial launch really matters. But you're not the Humane Team. Most people aren't that, right? You can just kind ship some things. I think that's great. Two months, that's a really good timeline to get something into production and start learning.

David Barnard:

We spoiled the ending because you went back to your job, but what was the reception for Liftbear, and how did things go at launch and then the rest of that year?

Sebastian Röhl:

As you were already saying, Jacob, setting expectations is really important, not only in terms of what you're producing, also in terms of what the reception be of your first app. So Liftbear wasn't really a success. It was a very quiet launch when I released it. I didn't have many Twitter followers back then, and I was, and still am, by the way, a huge beginner when it comes to marketing. So, yeah, that was tough. I only got a couple of downloads, but I was proud to finally have my own app on the app store and Google Play. That was a huge milestone.

Jacob Eiting:

That feels historic. Yeah, you go to the app store, you download it, you see your name. There are some users. Somebody downloaded it, right, I'm sure.

David Barnard:

And you said a couple of people. Literally two people downloaded it?

Sebastian Röhl:

It were more, but in the first week, maybe a hundred, and after that, only 10 per week or something like that.

David Barnard:

Yeah, which then it's like 10 activate, five actually open the app, two actually finish onboarding, and then those all churn in a week.

Sebastian Röhl:

Yeah, exactly.

Jacob Eiting:

So it's below the minimum threshold for something that's actually being used, right?

David Barnard:

But in some ways that's actually incredible, though. It's like, you built something and a hundred random strangers around the world found it and downloaded it, and then 10 people a week around the world. I mean, the power of the App Store, right? It's like, people are searching. Even if you're like number 50 on the list in a search or whatever...

Jacob Eiting:

It's like cosmic background radiation in the app store, right?

David Barnard:

People somehow find it.

Jacob Eiting:

When you saw those numbers, you now say you're a bad marketer, you didn't think about growth. Did you go like, oh, I have a growth problem? What was your diagnosis? Because at some point six months in, maybe you're in the store, the numbers are not great. What did you do or try, or what was your next move?

Sebastian Röhl:

Yeah, so after this very quiet launch, of course I still got feedback from friends and a couple of Twitter followers and from my family, because I myself used the app daily, I decided not to give up on it immediately, and then I continued developing cool new features, because that's what developers do.

Jacob Eiting:

...You know how to do. Yeah, yeah. Clearly, I need more features.

Sebastian Röhl:

Clearly, the problem is the feature set. So I added cool stuff like statistics and new exercise types and stuff like that.

Jacob Eiting:

There is a logic to that, right? There is a logic to build cool things as a method of growth, but you also have to have a channel to tell new people that feature exists, right? Because even if the 10 people that downloaded are incrementally more happy from that feature, it's not going to create a growth engine.

Sebastian Röhl:

Yeah, exactly. That's pretty tough. Yeah, I did that roughly for six months. I also tried to optimize the store listing, doing some ASO, tried to do some marketing on Instagram, and I even tried Apple search ads, but the app wasn't going anywhere actually, and after six months I couldn't take it anymore. I could look back on roughly $100 of revenue made totally in the six months.

Jacob Eiting:

It's brutal, right?

David Barnard:

Wow.

Sebastian Röhl:

Yeah, so that's cool because I made $100 with my app, but I knew if I wanted to continue working on this app business, I definitely...

Jacob Eiting:

Your personal burn rate, I assume, is a little bit higher than that.

Sebastian Röhl:

I definitely make some changes.

Jacob Eiting:

If it makes you feel any better, RevenueCat, 12 months in, oh, about 12 months in, I think we had made $300. So SaaS typically has a lower start rate, but still, we were in that same position. I remember Miguel and I just being like, this will never work. $300, #10,000 are so far apart in mentally that you're just like, this will never work. So I can totally understand. That's very demoralizing at the beginning when you have just really small numbers, and if you put it in the context of you'll spend a hundred dollars on a nice dinner, it becomes really kind of brutal.

Sebastian Röhl:

Yeah, and that's exactly the point where you need to make the decision, do I do something different with the same product or do I pivot it completely into a new product?

Jacob Eiting:

Or do I go back to work?

Sebastian Röhl:

Or do I go back to work? But that wasn't the part where I went back to work. I still had six months in my full year.

Jacob Eiting:

Oh, okay, okay, got it.

Sebastian Röhl:

After all this LiftBear depression, I actually decided to focus on a new project then. I wanted to do it as an experiment. I set myself a very small deadline of two months of building it, and yeah, that's how I built my second app HabitKit, which was way more successful then.

Jacob Eiting:

Did you know right away when you launched it, was it like night and day between the two launches? Or when did you know that maybe this was a better try?

Sebastian Röhl:

It was actually before the launch of the app. I was building a public on Twitter, and the first time that I posted a picture of the main screen of HabitKit, this post totally blew up and I actually got 800 likes. That was a lot for me back then. That was the moment when I knew, okay, this could be more successful than LiftBear.

Jacob Eiting:

Interesting. What about that post? Because that could just be a fluke, but there must have been something, right? Most of my posts don't get that, and they're great, in my opinion. What was it? Was it just like, hey, here's what I'm building, or was it like, hey, I'm launching this? What was the nature of it that you think made it so interesting to people?

Sebastian Röhl:

So I guess the text was just, here, this is the new app that I'm building, that's the main screen, and then I posted the main screen of HabitKit where you see the grid with the color tiles and stuff like that for your habits. That was it, and people seemed to resonate with it. They really liked it, and I don't know why, but it actually went through the roof.

Jacob Eiting:

Okay, yeah, that's product market fit, or that's something... Which, growth does not matter as much if you have product market. At least, growth is not requisite for some amount of success. If you have product market fit, I.E. people are going to pull your product out of you you can kind of wait and defer the growth aspects. And in fact, every jewel of effort or dollar of effort you put into growth is going to be multiplied by more, the better your product is, and so that's really where you want to start.

It's hard to quantify the value of those signals, but it's something, right? This is the challenge with product market fit or validating, do I have an interesting product? Especially before you have a product fully deployed and people using it in real measures of metrics, you really do have to look at these anecdotal qualitative things, and that does seem valid, so that had to be really encouraging while you're pre-production, to get that sort of response.

Sebastian Röhl:

Yeah, that was awesome.

David Barnard:

This is eight months in now of your year of indie, but you still ended up going back to your job, so I'm assuming the launch didn't go quite as well as maybe the kind of one tweet blowing up indicated it could?

Sebastian Röhl:

So in the first month after releasing HabitKits, I made more money than in the last six months combined, so that was a huge win, but yeah, so the first six months of HabitKits, I made roughly $1.5K in total revenue per month, but the set part was that my self-imposed deadline of 12 months was over and the revenue wasn't that great as I hoped.

Jacob Eiting:

Did you think about breaking your rules?

Sebastian Röhl:

Yeah, I faced a tough decision to actually continue or returning back to my previous job, but I...

Jacob Eiting:

That's a decision I think people don't realize. It's not just like, do I start a thing? There's a lot of these points, especially in the early days before you hit traction, and then even throughout the life of a business it's like, okay, I got this far. Do I double down? Do I keep investing? Especially if you're unprofitable, you're burning. It's like, okay, do I think there's a bet here that I can keep pouring into, or is it time to cash in my chips and give up or change strategy?

Sebastian Röhl:

If I had known what would follow, then I wouldn't have returned to my old job. It's always a really tough decision, and it was actually pretty scary to continue burning through my savings.

Jacob Eiting:

It's real money.

David Barnard:

And you're German, you can't break the rules.

Jacob Eiting:

I wasn't going to say. We don't do stereotypes here, but I was like, it's a very German thing to be like, I made a rule, I cannot break it.

Sebastian Röhl:

Yeah.

David Barnard:

Was it almost to the day or the month you went back, right at the 12 months, or you kind of saw the writing on the wall and were kind of ramping toward it?

Sebastian Röhl:

Yeah, it was exactly 12 months. I started my free year in April and went back in April again.

David Barnard:

Wow. So you're back at your job, but HabitKit, now you have a side project. How did that go, working full-time and working on HabitKit on the side?

Sebastian Röhl:

I have to say, I wanted to continue working on my apps on the side, so I decided to work only four days a week for my previous employer.

Jacob Eiting:

That's a nice perk. That's not always super possible in a lot of gigs, so that was great.

Sebastian Röhl:

Yeah, that was really great and that allowed me to take Fridays off and have this whole day for my own apps where I could continue improving my apps and do what I do. That was awesome. So I went back to my old job and after two months or so, something really great happened, actually. I remember back then I was at a friend's wedding on a Saturday, and suddenly my phone started buzzing with a crazy frequency of notifications, and when I checked that were actually sales notifications from RevenueCat, and I quickly checked some stats and then I saw that HabitKits finally started to rank in the top five for a big keyword on the App Store and Google Play. That led to crazy growth in downloads and revenue, really.

Jacob Eiting:

So it was like one incremental step up the search rankings and then that changed it?

Sebastian Röhl:

It felt like it, yes.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah. The fold is a real thing, right? Being above the fold and below the fold is a real thing.

David Barnard:

Was it a change you made on the ASO side, or was it an algorithm change that boosted you up?

Sebastian Röhl:

No, I actually didn't change anything back then. For three months or so, I didn't change anything. So it wasn't a direct change outcome from something.

Jacob Eiting:

Wow. Was that a little unsatisfying? I mean, I'm successful, but I don't know why and I have no control over it.

Sebastian Röhl:

No, actually it felt really great.

Jacob Eiting:

Okay, good. Good. You're a happier person than I am.

Sebastian Röhl:

I had absolutely no regrets. It felt more like, oh, finally, recognition.

Jacob Eiting:

Finally I'm recognized. Yeah, I always knew it was great.

Sebastian Röhl:

Yeah, exactly.

David Barnard:

So that's two months into the job. At what point did you hit ramen profitability and then think, okay, now I really can quit?

Sebastian Röhl:

I guess that was at the start of fall, the end of summer in September. I have to check the numbers, but I guess that was the first time I reached multiple thousands of dollars in revenue. That led me to make the tough decision again, should I continue at my job or should I quit and go full-time again on this Indie Hacker thing? That was the point I had to take a couple of months to think about it, because I really felt bad. I really felt sorry for my employer and I had some great friends at the company, and they were really engaged to bring me back, and I felt really bad, but with these numbers, I honestly had no other choice.

David Barnard:

So was that fall of 2022, or was that just this last fall, 2023?

Sebastian Röhl:

That was last fall. Yeah, exactly.

David Barnard:

Okay, wow. And so you've been posting publicly, and we'll get to that here in a sec, but I know all your numbers because you post. You have a whole blog with weekly reviews and all that. So you ended 2023 with 120,000 downloads and $51,000 in revenue. Not a bad year for this side project that happened to blow up.

Sebastian Röhl:

Yeah, exactly. Especially if you account for my salary as a software engineer additionally, that I had for the second half of the year. So that was a absolutely crazy year, and looking back, it even got crazier in January and February of this year.

David Barnard:

So I was looking again, I was looking at your numbers prepping for this conversation, and again, you post it all publicly. So just for the listener's benefit though, so you quit in the fall and went full time, and then I want to ask why you think this happened, but what happened was, in the first two months of 2024, you did $60K, so almost $10,000 more than the whole 2023, just January and February. And then in March, April and May, you did another $51K. So in those three months, you did the full amount that you had done the previous year, but you had already even done $60K. So you're at $110K of revenue in 2024 so far. Incredible. Congratulations. What happened? You quit in the fall, you had some momentum coming in, but what was that inflection point that this really became a real thing in 2024?

Sebastian Röhl:

I started ranking for the App Store and Google play for these big keywords in May, and back then from last winter, I didn't have any points, any numbers of the revenue because I just hadn't gotten to the reach that I have today. So I couldn't really compare and didn't know what would come in winter. I guess it's in the nature of habit tracking apps that it's heavily influenced by seasonality. So at the start of the year, lots of people make resolutions for the new year, start new hobbies or just generally want to improve themselves. So that's a huge factor I guess, and that led to the incredible revenue numbers.

David Barnard:

So it wasn't new marketing, it wasn't adding features to the app, it was that you had built this base of a good enough product that people liked it and were willing to pay for it, and then you, I guess, lucked into combination of building a good product and the algorithms shining favorably upon you, got this momentum in search. Then it was just the organic search and this spike from the new year. So the inflection point was, again, somewhat out of your control.

Sebastian Röhl:

That's the beauty of the App Store and Google Play. I mean, you get all this impressions and reach for free basically, and they do all the marketing. I don't have anything to do with it.

Jacob Eiting:

Have you developed any relationship with Apple editorial or anything like that? Have they given you features or any of the editorialized stuff?

Sebastian Röhl:

Not at all. I applied through their form for being featured and stuff like that, but it never really happened, so I'm still waiting for that, yeah.

Jacob Eiting:

It's really interesting. Are you doing anything to leverage... Because I think one of the easy come easy go with these algorithm things, right? Are you worried about another algorithm change or maybe just you falling down the rankings? How do you think about that as a risk to what you have?

Sebastian Röhl:

That's definitely a huge point. I'm really afraid or scared of this algorithm changes, but I have my ASO basics in place. I think I didn't do any mistakes, so I'm sure that if I don't make a very big mistake in crashing back to the app or something like that, that I won't fall down that much in this ranking. I hope so, at least.

Jacob Eiting:

I mean it can be durable, especially as your review base builds up and your mini brand, and I don't know how the ASO algorithms work exactly, but I imagine the more click through, and I know they use usage as well as a proxy, so if you have good retention in your product, that gets factored in. So again, it sucks. It's a black box. You don't know what's going on, but you hope that it's aligned to the correct incentives. I'm sure Apple wants that. They want correct user incentives. I don't know if they use subscription retention. I wouldn't be surprised. I don't know why they wouldn't use that as well as a metric. Obviously they should be promoting apps that make them more money. That wouldn't be smart for them, business-wise.

But yeah, there is always this fear. You live by the App Store's algorithms, you die by the App Store's algorithms. And I don't know the answer for indie, for where you are at, because you could try to build your own acquisition channels, and maybe that's worth experimenting with, and maybe you have experiment with ASA, but even going beyond that.

But that suddenly expands just the scope of what you do. You said you experiment with Instagram ads, but let's say you wanted to experiment with that. You can't just be like, I'll make a crappy ad and put it on TikTok. You have to invest in that as if it's a whole project. What is going to get people interested? What is about my app that's interesting? How do I make this work? Otherwise you'll lose money. It just won't be a profitable enterprise.

Sebastian Röhl:

Yeah. I should definitely do this or hire people to do this, but right now I'm focusing on being creative and do the things that are fun to me right now.

Jacob Eiting:

It isn't a terrible algorithm, right? It's not a terrible algorithm. Because at least you're going to do it with energy, as opposed to if doing TikTok ads is not something that sounds fun to you, don't do it, because you'll probably do a bad job.

Sebastian Röhl:

Exactly. That would probably feel like work again, and being here at home and focused down on my products and make them better, that doesn't feel like work to me.

Jacob Eiting:

Which also, I mean the recurring subscriptions, right? You have recurring subscriptions. Even if Apple dropped you out of the top, ideally you're retaining these people, maybe even you're capturing the ability to market to them. You're also building your indie presence. You're becoming more of a known thing. So you're not just getting the cash in the downloads. You're turning this into brand, you're turning it into install base, and all of those things are somewhat durable, and there's always chances to capitalize on that, which you don't have when you're leaving your job for the first time with $0 in revenue.

David Barnard:

And to Jacob's point from earlier is that now that you have that level of product market fit and you have a channel now. ASO is your channel. And so, what Jacob was saying earlier, it's like you need the channel, you need some pull, and when you have that pull in a channel, then building features is actually maybe the best thing to do. Is that, until you see signs that you're dropping in the algorithm, and maybe at some point it would be a night and day difference where you wake up one day and you're out of the top five and you're not getting that many downloads, but even then it's like, you'd probably drift to 10 and now you're getting half the downloads or whatever. It's not going to be night and day drop. But now that you have that kind of buffer and the pull in the market, building a really great app, experimenting with monetization and stuff like that, probably is a way better use of your time.

Sebastian Röhl:

Yeah, maybe. And I also have this other channel that we didn't talk about. So I was building my apps in public and I have actually grown a following on X, and nowadays LinkedIn. Even if Apple decides to down rank HabitKit, I always have this audience of people that root for me, that are engaged with me, and that want to help me. I can always use that to build a new app or boost a new app to better ranking or stuff like that.

Jacob Eiting:

It's community. I mean, community is super durable. It's why we do this podcast. It's why those activities are very valuable if you can create content that people find interesting and they want to be a part of it. I was going to ask, I was browsing to the app. I don't think you collect any contact information in the app, is that correct?

Sebastian Röhl:

Yeah, nothing.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah, which there's good reasons to do it and not to do it, but collecting some way of communicating with that user base is really valuable as well. So let's say the ASO floor drops out from under you, you can re-engage that user base. You can send them and be like, Hey, I have new features. Or you could even add, and I'm just giving app advice that you don't want, but you can always add, sign up for the HabitKit newsletter, sign up for email updates, and make it very opt-in. You can make it very light.

That's one thing, even with RevenueCat, I've been surprised, is we were building contact lists for a long time, but we weren't really marketing to it heavily. But then I learned, yeah, shipping stuff is great, but you have to tell people about it too, or it doesn't really connect. You can connect those two things, like building new features that are interesting and then telling the people who should care. That's really magical, and that can create this real flywheel effect of re-engaging existing users and it can be really durable. But that's always my biggest thing with people who are very successful from the App Store. It's like, okay, use this momentum to find some way to be successful without the App Store, because it might not always be there.

Sebastian Röhl:

Yeah, definitely. That's a good point. I got this email list thing on my to-do list. My to-do list is very long.

Jacob Eiting:

Sure.

David Barnard:

Yeah. You talked about the advantages of building in public, building up a community and having an audience to market to a little bit, although maybe the audience you're building isn't necessarily people who are going to be subscribers or whatever, but what are some of the other advantages and disadvantages you've seen building in public the way you have?

Sebastian Röhl:

Building in public has definitely been one of the best decisions that I've made while building this app business. The benefits, you will immerse yourself in this really cool community of other builders and creators, developers, designers, and you get to know them, meet up with them or partner up with them, and you can draw a lot of motivation and inspiration from each other. So when I'm feeling down and I'm not really in the mood of building new stuff or something like that, I open Twitter and see my friends building other cool apps and features, I instantly get motivated to do this myself. That's a huge aspect of it. At the start when you're releasing a new app, you will get a lot of feedback, which is super important.

Jacob Eiting:

Even if it's not super durable, right? It is just something, some eyeballs, some comments.

Sebastian Röhl:

That usually really helps with improving the first version, or it gives you at least a pointer, where to move next.

David Barnard:

And then, have you seen some disadvantages?

Sebastian Röhl:

There are some disadvantages, but I think that the advantages definitely outweigh them. But sure, when people see that you can make that much money with a relatively simple app like HabitKit for example, it doesn't take too long until people start copying your app's concept, or even shamelessly start copying your design block by block. That's downside, but I usually try to ignore these copycats and focus on my own stuff.

David Barnard:

And the thing is, whether you build in public or not, people can see the data on Sensor Tower.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah, you might make it happen a little bit faster by being more visible, but the advantages outweigh them. And we've never committed at RevenueCat to being fully open, so it's just different. But we have been, I think, probably more open than most, and for the same reasons. It's like, hey, we've built for builders, so it's a thing to talk about. People like to see what we're building and how we're building, and it creates a community.

And once in a while, you say something or do something that has some pushback or some blowback, and you deal with it, you apologize, or you issue a retraction or whatever. Maybe this is just a uniquely me problem. This might be a me problem. It hasn't happened that many times. But I think in general, if anybody's paying attention to you, that's always... No press is bad press. I honestly think that goes pretty far. If people are talking about what you're doing and you're okay with what you're doing ethically, I think it's all positive to be out there, put yourself out there.

Sebastian Röhl:

Yeah, sure. You'll also get all these mean comments sometimes, or there are always these people that know everything better in every post.

Jacob Eiting:

Oh, yeah. It's always interesting, though. None of them are more successful than you are. That's really funny, isn't that, how that works? It just, for some reason, it's always the less achieved people who have less to show for it that know all the answers. I don't know. There's some correlation there. Somebody should look at that.

Sebastian Röhl:

They are always smarter than me. Yes, yes, yes. That can be quite intimidating, especially when you start out.

Jacob Eiting:

Sure, yeah. If you haven't actually, you don't have anything in hand. You haven't actually proven the ability to build something, those comments can seem... We have this one famous, we made stickers for it for the team, this one Reddit user who when we posted our launch thread called us our ripoff, middleman made easy, because our tagline was in-app subscriptions made easy. And I have it screenshotted and I share it in Slack fairly frequently, anytime we have some amount of success. But when we posted that, it was 2017. We had no revenue, we had no apps, we had nothing. And so, this rando on the internet, calling me that. I was like, oh, who is this person? What do they know? Do they know more than me? And you take it seriously, and then it takes a while until you don't.

But I guess the advice for anybody is just never take the haters seriously. I mean, unless literally all you get is haters, then maybe listen. There is some limit there, but maybe don't always just post through it. I always save this stuff because I find it super motivating. I keep it for the haters.

David Barnard:

Chip on your shoulder.

Jacob Eiting:

I have a haters folder of all the hateful comments people have said about RevenueCat, and I'm like, you know what? I'm just going to use that for fuel.

Sebastian Röhl:

That's funny. I have the opposite folder. I only save stuff...

Jacob Eiting:

Oh, the positive?

Sebastian Röhl:

Yeah, the positive.

Jacob Eiting:

Different strokes for different folks, so whatever it takes. That's probably more diagnosis of psychological profiles than any Myers-Briggs test could ever do.

Sebastian Röhl:

Yeah.

David Barnard:

Well, speaking of unsolicited advice from people who are less successful than you, the last thing I wanted to touch on was your pricing, because I think it's way too low.

Jacob Eiting:

Raise your prices.

David Barnard:

So I'm curious if you've done any price experimentation, and kind of what your pricing philosophy is.

Jacob Eiting:

Holy cow. 99 cents a month. Geez.

David Barnard:

99 cents a month, $6 bucks a year, or $15 lifetime. I was going through the app .I'd already downloaded it before, but not paid ton of attention to your monetization. But when we're talking about you coming on the podcast, I was looking at your paywall and all that kind of stuff like, whoa, whoa, wait a minute. He's like, successful indie charging $6 a year? What's going on here? So yeah, what's your pricing philosophy?

Sebastian Röhl:

When I released the first app of HabitKit, that felt like the fair pricing point to me, and after that I was adding feature after feature and lots of cool stuff, and I always said to myself, okay, after the next feature or update, you will raise your prices, and I didn't do it yet. That's it. It's on my to-do list.

Jacob Eiting:

Okay, before you do the email list. You know what? You're in this position where you could just double it. Just double it. $2 a month. That's still really low, and nobody's going to get mad.

David Barnard:

$12 bucks a year.

Jacob Eiting:

Keep doubling it until your haters folder gets too big and then take it back a notch. I had this app that I sold, Windows app for Microsoft Flight Simulator that I launched in 2011 for $4 or something like this. I wrote it in a weekend. All it did was take one socket, it connected an iPad app, ForeFlight iPad app to Microsoft Flight Simulator. This is a really niche little utility. And it was before Indie Hacking had a name, whatever. I just put it up, there's this thing. Gumroad had just launched. I put it up there. $5 a month, and just sold a bunch and a bunch and a bunch, and I had all this support, and I was like, oh, geez, whatever.

And eventually I was so annoyed of all the support I was having to do, I was just like, I don't want anybody to download this anymore. So I made it $20 a month. Zero change in downloads. Nobody cared. It was like, I probably could have made it $50 and everybody would have still paid, because of course it's of the niche. Now, habits are different. You probably couldn't 4X and maybe not see anything. But that was to me, the most visceral experience of not really being able to understand the price value curve. As a developer, you can't really feel it until you actually take in data points.

Sebastian Röhl:

Yeah. I think there are always two kinds of people. Some people say, hey, HabitKit is way too inexpensive. You should double your prices. And then there are people, usually bad reviews on Google Play that say, $1 a month for this app? Never. That's a little bit intimidating. But yeah, I should definitely...

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah, I mean, by definition, that person has no value to you.

Sebastian Röhl:

Yeah. They probably would never buy this.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah, they're never going to buy it. And I mean, that's also, being on Android is another, you can't look at your price leverage on Android and iOS the same, right? They're very different communities.

David Barnard:

Maybe don't double on Android, but I would put money on the fact that if you doubled your prices, you would make double the money.

Jacob Eiting:

That's a 50/50. I'd say 50/50 over/under on that one. I think it's pretty likely that that's the case, yeah, at that price point.

David Barnard:

Yeah. 12 bucks a year, two bucks a month.

Jacob Eiting:

Well, if there is a tool out here, Sebastian, that would let you run that price experiment. Fairly low effort. So, I know a guy, let me know if you're interested in trying it out, but you could actually test this.

Sebastian Röhl:

I heard about it, yeah. I would definitely do it.

David Barnard:

Move that to the top of your to-do list and then share on Twitter and in your weekly log how things turn out. But yeah, as we wrap up, was there anything else you wanted to share? We're going to put links to your blog where you do your weekly updates, to the app, to your Twitter profile and LinkedIn. Yeah. Anything else you wanted to share as we wrap up?

Sebastian Röhl:

Not really. Yeah, that would be great. Check out my apps and my Twitter and [inaudible 00:49:23].

David Barnard:

Awesome. Well, this was a ton of fun. We haven't done this kind of indie success story in a while, and I'm all fired up, man. It's so cool to see.

Jacob Eiting:

Oh no, David's going to give himself a 12-month deadline and quit.

Sebastian Röhl:

Quit your job.

David Barnard:

I've already...

Jacob Eiting:

Keep doing the podcast.

David Barnard:

I've already got my app.

Jacob Eiting:

That's all I ask.

David Barnard:

My Weather Up app has been doing really well this year, and it is really fun having...

Jacob Eiting:

I miss having an app. I will say, I miss having an app. I miss having an app a little bit. Even though I have a big SaaS company, whatever. But there is something special, magical about having your own little app. It's fun. It's great.

David Barnard:

Yeah, it is. All right, well, thanks so much for joining us. It was so fun chatting through all this, and best of luck. I think you're going places. I think you've got a great little business here.

Jacob Eiting:

Keep shipping.

David Barnard:

It's not going to be so little a year from now, and then a year from that. Some of the other folks we've had on, like Curtis Herbert, it's like, he did $10,000 his first two years and now he's doing over a million dollars a year. So it's crazy how these things can scale from little side projects and indie hacking to real businesses. It sounds like you don't want to hire people and do that kind of thing, but you can build a great lifestyle business.

Sebastian Röhl:

Yeah. Yeah. Really crazy. I'm excited for the time to come, and yeah. Thank you for having me and I wish you all the best for RevenueCat. Of course, I will use it in every other app I make.

Jacob Eiting:

There we go. There's the clip. Thank you, Sebastian.

David Barnard:

Thank you.

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