In September I built two small Mac utilities. One is Voltyn, which shows your Mac’s current power use in the menu bar and lets you look back at the trends on your desktop. The other is Glasswitch, for switching your default browser. I use Glasswitch all the time and think it turned out really well.
Both are now on the App Store. Only after finishing them did I realize the hard part was just beginning.
Building it is not the hard part
I know there is another route: set up payments with Stripe and sell the apps on my own website. That way Apple does not take its 30% cut. But I tend to avoid hassle, so I did not go that way.
The cut is not what is holding me back, though. Turning an idea into a working app is not hard at all anymore. What is hard is getting people to know the app exists, and getting them to download it and give it a try.
Without that step, it does not matter how good your app is. Hardly anyone will use it. A good product does not get discovered on its own.
Marketing is much harder than coding
The way I see it now, if you want people to find you, you need to get at least two things right: a good-looking marketing site, and search engine optimization for Google.
Both are more work than writing code. SEO takes a lot of effort, and you will not see results any time soon. A marketing site is not just a list of features, either. You have to figure out what visitors care about most and what will make them keep reading.
I have used apps with beautiful websites, and I never knew how those developers pulled them off. Now that I am doing this myself, I understand that pages like that must have taken a lot of work.
A wish from two years ago
All of this reminds me of 2024. Back then I really wanted to become an indie developer.
Two years later, I have actually started. I pay for ChatGPT Pro at $200 a month, and for Claude Pro as well. With agents, writing code really is a lot faster.
But building a product on your own is much more than writing code. You write the code, you do the marketing, and you collect user feedback, and none of it is easy. Agents have taken care of the easiest part for me.
Writing the code is the easy part. Getting the product out there and letting people know it exists is the hardest.