For many years now, I have run a small software business. I'm the only employee. Most of what the company does is contract work for wonderful clients, and I've had the privilege of working on projects and teams that I thought I'd only ever get to admire from afar.
The company has also built and sold software products through the App Store, which is becoming an increasingly larger percentage of overall revenue, and is what I want to discuss in this post. The main product prior to 2023 was Petty which is an app for Australian motorists to help them find nearby petrol stations and real-time prices. Petty has always been a passion project, and still is. It makes some money, but the few hundred dollars a month it makes doesn't move the needle for my business. Regardless, I enjoy working on it, will continue to do so, have learnt a tonne in the process, and it's the perfect app to experiment with cool new iOS features such as widgets, shortcuts, and an Apple Watch app.
Enter Glucomate
In my spare time over the last few years, I'd been working on an app to help people make sense of their blood glucose data. It comes from a personal need, as I have a continuous glucose monitor which records my sugar every 5 minutes and sends these readings to HealthKit on my iPhone, but it can be difficult analyse these readings later on.
After polishing it intensely for almost a year, Glucomate launched in April of 2023. The launch went better than I could've imagined, and I was incredibly fortunate to have kind words written about it on the launch day by many, including on popular Apple sites such as Daring Fireball and 9to5Mac. This kicked off immediate interest in the app, and meant Glucomate hit the ground running with a decent user base that has continued to help me know where to take the app thanks to lots of feedback and suggestions.
Growth potential
Only a few months after launch, it was clear that Glucomate had potential, but only if I was willing to put in the time to build what people want.
Most of the features I've prioritised building until now are a direct result of feedback. Knowing what people find difficult, or things they want to be able to do, is incredibly helpful. Building things that people suggest over and over gives me the confidence that I'm not wasting time building it, as the demand is clearly there.
It wouldn't grow without me putting in the work – both on the app itself but also on getting it out there. Spreading the word. "Marketing", if you will…
Part-time indie
I've always wanted to spend more time building and shipping my own software. Knowing that Glucomate had potential, but needed more time and effort put in, around September last year I set out to grow it and started by significantly reducing the amount of contract work I took on. While I also have more time to spend on Petty, and I have some great things planned, it's clear from the sales numbers that Glucomate is my best chance of improving revenue from my indie apps.
App Store revenue by month in 2023. Screenshot from the excellent Trendly app.
The above chart shows sales numbers for 2023 broken down by month. You can see an April was the best month for revenue, as it was the launch month for Glucomate. In April, revenue reached AU$4.6K (after Apple’s 15% and after GST [tax applied to sales in Australia]).
Has spending more time on my own projects worked so far? I think so. Looking at the above chart you can see clear growth from the moment I started spending more of my week working on them, which was late August/early September. Admittedly most of the growth is from Glucomate, and I'm spending somewhere around AU$1K per month in marketing to get there, but growth is growth.
Growing the app
The part that has surprised me most about spending more and more time on Glucomate is how building new features and improving the app is only half the story. The other is a focus on marketing. All of which is new to me, and consists of trying things out and seeing what sticks.
So, what has and hasn't worked?
App Store Search Ads. These have worked. I seem to have capped out what I can spend on search ads, at least with the most relevant keywords, but I continue to see a good return from them. Though I do appear to have come close to capping out what they can do. i.e. It's now at a point where throwing more money at the Search Ads budget doesn't result in the ad being shown more, as I guess there is only a certain number of people searching for this kind of app in a given day.
Instagram is also been something I'm experimenting with. I'm not totally sure it's worked, but I don't think it's been a total waste of time and money either. I realised that there's a huge type 1 diabetes community on Instagram, and with that in mind I set up an account for Glucomate. Apparently it also legitimises an app or website amongst the youth to have an active presence on Instagram. I'm trying to post regularly, and not exclusively about Glucomate, to keep it interesting for a wider group of people interested in diabetes content. Some paid posts seem to have done a good job in driving people to the website, though it's hard to know exactly how many downloads this has resulted in. Even if Instagram ads are break even or run at a slight loss I'm willing to continue running them as part of a broader marketing strategy. I plan to continue regularly posting (hopefully relevant!) things to Instagram throughout the next year, in attempt to continue growing this account.
Glucomate also just launched a partnership with the great organisation the DANII Foundation. You may know them as the charity responsible for lobbying for the heavy subsidy of continuous glucose monitors (CGM's) for all Australians with type 1 diabetes. Truly great work. Glucomate is providing a subscription free for 3 months to all their audience. It helps their mission of helping people with diabetes, while also helping to get Glucomate in front of more people. Hopefully a genuine win-win, though of course I won't know if this helps Glucomate subscriptions for another 3 months.
Something that didn't work was discounting the yearly subscription to Glucomate by a full 50% during the Thanksgiving/Black Friday/Cyber Monday week. I did see slightly more people pick yearly than monthly during the sale, but there just wasn't enough of a boost on new subscribers compared to a regular week to justify the discount and "make it up in volume." I suppose it makes sense – there just wouldn't be much overlap between people looking through indie app sales lists and people who'd find Glucomate useful. I'd absolutely run a sale again (in fact, I'm running a Christmas/New Year sale right now), but the discount would be far more modest than 50%.
Things to try
I tend to think of growing an app has happening in stages. First you launch and go from zero to (hopefully) non-zero revenue. Then maybe you get some press attention which leads to growth which then settles down at a new normal. Then maybe ads have a similar effect. At least this is what I am finding with Glucomate.
So how can I work on getting new and different attention on Glucomate? My first thought was to try and get covered by websites/blogs that do lists of apps that are helpful to people with diabetes. Some of these sites write reviews as well. I reached out to dozens, and followed up, and the responses can be categorised into a few categories.
- No reply. The most common.
- "We'll take a look" followed by nothing
- "Sure, our rates are $XYZ to write about your thing. The last one in particular surprised me. Since I have no idea what to expect in terms of a return, this seems risky. I'm also not sure how I feel about supporting sites that claim to have a "best of" list that you can pay to be featured on when this isn't clearly disclosed.
I mentioned earlier that Instagram is popular place for people with diabetes to share things. And where there is an audience there are, of course, influencers. It's a bit out of my depth, but I'd like to try some paid promotion for Glucomate that way. I'm not sure what to expect, but it would be yet another way to get the app directly in front of its target audience.
Other than that, I'll continue with Search Ads as these are having great success, and of course continue building new features based on user feedback. A major feature I hope to build and release this year is integration with more HealthKit data types, as it's a common request from people to want to see how other data points (such as weight and blood pressure) correlate with their blood glucose.
Summary
So there's my 2023 business retrospective. It was certainly an interesting year. If you'd told me this time last year that I'd be able to justify time during the week to working on my own stuff, and exactly how much revenue has grown over the last year, I'd be over the moon. However in the moment it's easy to take this for granted and look forward to the next milestone. My own apps clearly don't make enough for me to live off of exclusively yet (Sydney mortgage and all), but things are definitely trending in the right direction and I couldn't be happier with that. Most importantly, I'm excited about my work again. Building Glucomate is something I enjoy immensely, because I find the app itself so useful. The challenge of trying to grow the business is also enjoyable, and it's satisfying every time a change to the app or a new marketing strategy pays off. It's also not too disappointing when something doesn't work, as I've generally still learnt something by trying.
Would I work exclusively on my own things if I could? I'm not sure, but it would be nice to have the option. I'll continue working towards it in 2024.