Why I Haven't Succeeded...Yet

By Tucker Bichsel

7/6/2025

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I am an independent app developer. I'd love to change that to a successful independent app developer. I am not there yet soI want take a look at why I am not there yet.

What is Success?

Before I start thinking about why I am not yet successful I should properly define what that means. First I think it is important to say I believe there are levels of success, and honestly I think I have achieved at least one.

Even releasing an app is a level of success, and I have released four. So by this measure I would say I have been successful. I think some of the apps I have made a bit more of a success, meaning I think more went into a few of the apps. And obviously delivering more features is a bigger success.

The next level is having an active and sizable user base. Getting am app onto the app store is one thing, but convincing people to use it is another. I wouldn't say I have quite been successful here. A couple of my apps have had a few users, but less than one or two hundred. Plenty of room to grow.

And finally there is financially successful, and there are even tiers to this one. And unless you set the first level of success at 70 cents I haven't reached any level of financial success. I have my eyes set on a couple levels of financial success I am striving for, side hustle money and full time money.

Side hustle is just a significant amount of extra money but not really enough to change my life. This level of success will allow me to reinvest into my projects and hopefully make it easier to increase my success.

Full time success is my ultimate goal. I would love to make enough to fully replace my full time income from my day job. Or at least allow me to save up for awhile and replace most of my income. If I achieve this level I will be able to step away from my full time job and focus on my apps.This would be an absolute game changer. If I don't have to go to work I will be able to spend all that time working on my apps and grow my them to even more success.

What is stopping me?

So if you are scoring that's out of three. A pretty good bating average but I don't think that translates to pretty good here. So what is getting in my way? I think it all boils down to, unsurprisingly, something I am not very good at: marketing.

To get more downloads more people need to know about it. So I need to do a better job of spreading the word about my apps. It does notcome naturally to me because generally I don't want to bother people. I don't actually think marketing is bothering people, at least not good marketing. But subconsciously it's hard for me to get past the feeling of bothering people with my posts about my apps.

I think I am also missing on potential users with app store optimization. I don't spend the necessary time and effort in creating my app store meta data to get my apps visible to more people or to convert people to download the app. So I need to research and learn the optimizations I need to make then implement those for my apps.

Finally when it comes to financial success I think it's really building upon the success of a large user base. Once I have users that find value in my free apps I need to establish a clear set of premium features that should be put behind a paywall or consider making the entire app a paid app. I think this decision will come down to the individual app. But either way I need to create paywalls that convert well, it doesn't matter if I have life changing features behind a paywall if I can't convince anyone to buy it.

I also think gaining financial success, especially at the full time level, will take multiple apps. I think it will be more likely to get a handful of moderately successful apps as opposed to one insanely successful apps. And if I take a more long term look I suspect that there may be a bit of a revolving door of what apps are bringing in money so more and more apps will need to be created to replace one that is starting to fall in revenue.

I think it is clear to see that there is one single thing that is holding me back: Marketing. It's a broad topic but in general getting people informed and excited about my projects is a crucial step I need to make if I want to become a successful independent app developer.