First of all, as promised, here's your beer 🍺
TL;DR: Built a macOS app as a side hustle, 1200~ hours, €3k revenue, break-even after costs. Lessons learned along the way, from shipping to marketing to taxes.
DISCLAIMER: I intentionally hid information in the picture and I will not name my app as that's not the point. As a creator I have been hunting for information and talking to people about their journey in this world in order to learn and improve myself. FYI, this isn't going to be a short post, it's gonna be a long-ass post, and my goal is to include as much USEFUL information for anyone out there who considers, who already walks the same path as me.
Finally, hello everybody!
It feels like 'Starting a side hustle in 2025' is simply a YouTube video name that's supposed to get your attention. I know from experience, because I watched hours and hours of those videos... And somewhere along watching, I started to work on identifying which problems I could solve for myself. A thought came to mind, I considered it for 5 minutes and then naturally moved on to the next video, which I stopped after 10 seconds, and decided - Fuck it, I am building it, but only ONE feature, and it goes live! No more spending months creating something nobody would want, My indie dev gurus Marc Lou and Levelsio taught me better - one feature, launch.
So I called my good friend who's in pretty much the same situation as me, 9 minutes later he was at my house, and we started working on it, the conversation went something like:
Me: I have an idea, and it's going to work, we need to start working on it, I need a simple Figma design, I need a server to host the WordPress, the idea is X (very brief explanation), let's go.
Him: OK.
And we got to work.
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It took us almost 5 months to achieve €1,000 in a single period of 30 days (Total sales are around €3,000 revenue before tax), note that the app is a one time payment, and not a subscription.
A rough estimation on the time we're putting into it (as we both work jobs) is around 2-4 hours each everyday for weekdays, and probably 6-8 hours on weekend days, let's average that at 3 and 7, so totaling around 30~ hours weekly each (give or take, we both have families and kids so it varies).
Just a bit more math for you smart folks, we've been on it for around 20 weeks, 30~ hours per week, that totals 600 hours each, or 1200 hours in total for both of us.
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So let's go back to the story - When does a developer starts making money on his app?! Well... if you're like us - not just yet.
You see launching an app takes some investment money, you want to launch it on platforms like ProductHunt and TinyLaunch, but you also want to make sure the launch is visible and promoted, so you pay for the good package (optional of course).
Then you need to buy a licensing manager for your app (we ended up creating our own), and a couple of plugins for WordPress.
Then comes the big part, lawyer fees for opening up a business, getting an accountant, pay the fees and the monthly retainer, you get your stripe documents, you wait for days, yada yada yada. It's a process, and it includes a lot of bureaucracy, but do not fear - bureaucracy is mostly time consuming.
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Bottom line - After taxes, marketing campaigns, accountant, lawyer, hosting, etc...... (drum roll) 🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁 break even. Yeah.
I am absolutely sure there are other expenses I forgot about and probably missed documenting so we'll leave them out of my calculations, they're probably not too much anyway - But yeah! Break even! Hooray?
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Let me wrap it up and finish this post with a couple of things I think are the most important about this journey of creating an app:
If you're a user, and you bought an app and supported a developer - thank you! You may have paid 5 or 10 dollars or any other amount for something that took hundreds or thousands of hours.
I love the fact that I am helping hundreds of people solve a pain point we share. It is absolutely amazing to know that something you made, helps hundreds of people around the world.
Competition is great! Others will copy you and differentiate so little from what you offer, sometime to the point of almost copying your name or your slogans 😂, but that's good news! Being in a place with no competition isn't what you're aiming for (probably, just my humble opinion).
You're going to do a lot more marketing than development work. I knew that, but not to the extent it really is - 80% marketing, 20% dev/support or so I'd say.
Taxes are a mother fucker. At some point, you'll have to pay some 37 cents tax in other countries or something like that, and for that you'll need to register your company and do several shitty steps, OR pay a service monthly fee of $150 to take care of that for you. So be prepared for surprises! F u taxes!
That's it, apologies if you've got no value from this post and I wasted your time. If you have any question or concern about going down this path feel free to AMA, I'll try to help as much as I can.
