Everyday(.app) Year 6: Every day, for a very long time
Happy new 2023 IndieHackers!! :)
I've had a dejavú. It's not the first time that I start the year by posting a small update/reflection on IndieHackers, the site that changed my life. (Thank you @csallen & @channingallen!!)
It's been 6 years since I started working on everyday.app as a side-project and it has now been my full time indie business for over 4 years. In this period, more than one million habits 🤯 have been tracked. Besides reaching my original goal of financial independence while working on a product I care about, the journey has brought me many happy experiences and takeaways. If I had to pick, I'd say it has helped me grow a lot as a person and has helped me connect with a bunch of awesome people I admire.
I generally see myself as an imposter (who do I want to lie? I am an imposter!!), but in case this helps anyone starting their indie journey, I'm just an idiot who has worked on it every day, for a very long time.
You can find some of my previous updates here:
2017 IH interview: https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/the-productivity-app-that-helped-to-build-and-grow-itself-b4d7afdf11
Year 1: https://www.indiehackers.com/forum/everyday-one-year-later-1609ae3575
Year 3: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/everyday-app-year-3-approaching-5k-mrr-cb5916f0fe
Year 4: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/everyday-year-4-approaching-10k-mrr-9e3c4041bd
2022 has been the first year in a while where I took things easy. It's funny how the work and the return don't correlate at all. When you put in the hard early work, hardly anything happens, but as time goes by, your work starts compounding and you become complacent. That's why I love having ended the year with a big push, breaking things again and getting back some of the thrill of the early days!
Oh, Everyday 3.0 got hunted on ProductHunt today! What a coincidence ;D Yes, the beginning of a new year is always a good time to reset and iterate on our habits and goals :)
Some of my 2022 habits:
📕 Read 21 books. Read on 86% of the days!
💪 Did 9440 push-ups. Did push-ups on 100% of days.
👥 Met 476 people. Met new ppl on 37% of the days! (I really need to change this)
🍺 I'm on a 112 no (or very little) alcohol streak!
🚀 Worked on everyday.app every day! and broke my previous plateau. It was becoming a glass ceiling so that's something!
I am on a 1584 day streak of working on everyday :)
The biggest changes this year have been to refactor most of the main UI elements on the iOS, Android, macOS that I had originally developed while learning React-Native. These allowed not only the app to be more performant, but to massively improve the UX and to add some animations :) I also added a controlpanel that makes it much easier to experiment with habits, schedules and triggers. Polished the onboarding, I really want people who check the app out to at least learn something useful for their lives even if they immediately leave the app after wards. It's like a very overengineered tweet haha.
However, one can't stop thinking about all the things that are not getting done. All the original ideas that never saw the light. All the expected iterations that never seem to come. There is a lot of room for improvement, this journey has just begun.
I think we are very lucky that we have the opportunity to create something. It's a beautiful skill. All we need, is to work on it a little bit, every day, for a very long time! ;D
PS: I'm always happy to help fellow indie hackers, so feel free to shoot me an email or get in touch on twitter.
PS2: As someone who enjoys product, code and business in equal proportions I struggled to find my path until I came across the idea of indie hackers. It's been a very enriching adventure so far and it's got me to meet a lot of awesome people. I like to feel I contributed to the movement with my awesome-indie 8k stars github repo (https://github.com/mezod/awesome...). Feel free to contribute to keep it updated! Keep building every day! 🚀🚀🚀
PS3: IndieHackers has definitely played an important role on the little success I've found. We still meet regularly on IndieHackers Barcelona so make sure to join us when you are in town!
Wow! Seems like your persistence really paid off! If MRR growth keeps doubling every year (and I assume it will MORE than double every year), you'll reach close to 100k MRR per month in 3 more years!
I'm curious how you marketed the app though. It surprises me that some indiehackers on here barely focus on marketing and still make large strides in growth, but I'd imagine good marketing would definitely boost growth.
For my own project Evoke, I've been laser focused on marketing before we even have a launch.
Curious to see where this goes in the future and shot you a follow on twitter. Here's mine for reference: https://twitter.com/TheRealEtch
Good luck and wish you a happy new year!
hehe well you got pretty optimistic there! My MRR isn't updated anymore (build in public issues) but yeah, at a low level it's hard to scale. I have many different traffic streams but most of it is organic (appstores, seo, etc). I'm sure I could move faster with marketing but either I suck or I don't focus on it because it doesn't interest me :P
Evoke looks dope, awesome project at the right timing for AI! is that a half-life favicon? :P
That's just a lambda for the logo of Evoke, but I am a big fan of half-life haha.
As for marketing, I've mainly been using organic means as well even before launch lol. What I've been doing is just promoting my project everywhere on social media + building up a discord server as part of the funnel.
But if building invigorates you more than marketing, there's no shame in that :D
For me, it's the opposite since my co-founders manage the building and I do the marketing.
hey, thanks for posting this. I've just been starting up with indie hackers and such experiences gives me assurance to spend my time and efforts here on indie hackers.
glad to hear it helps :)
Oddly enough consistency wasn't the key. You've missed posting about 2nd and 5th years.
Jokes aside, the app looks great, and the site looks great. Everything looks grade. Keep on going every day!
hahaha, I'm pretty sure I created the posts but I didn't find em or maybe used a different title :P
I know you are joking but consistency and completeness are not the same thing!
Thank you! :)
happy new year and thanks for sharing. I admire that you are working on it for so long. I find it hard to stay on project after its implemented and the real work of marketing/sales starts.
hehe it's hard for me to ever consider a project as finished. I see everything as a work in progress.
Great, what a success! I would suggest that if you have gone through that much and made your app worth for users you must promote your app called AppsHive. Where you will get a chance to list your app on three different segments and you can increase your downloads by 43%. Have a look: https://www.appshive.co/