iPhone “Progress App” Weighs in with Measurable Profits

This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.

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Greetings, what's up? Welcome to Side Hustle School. I'm your host, Chris Guillebeau. So glad you're here. In today's story, a UK bank employee misses out on the early gold rush of the Apple Store, but then arrives three years later with an app that's built to last.

This guy now earns a full-time income from one app while traveling the world. My favorite part of this story is the fact that the only marketing he does is improving the product. Basically all he does to get the word out, at least in the long term, is just make that product better and better. He's really focused on his customers, which can be a great strategy once you have something that is working. So we're calling this iPhone Progress app weighs in with measurable profits.

And at the end of this episode, I'll talk about how you can make an app without being a programmer, including some practical steps, as well as how I've changed my mind a bit about this topic since we were first making the show. I used to say that nobody out there should make an app unless you really know what you were doing, unless you were definitely a programmer. I still have some concerns, but I'm also a bit more flexible because you know, life, old age. Here we are at episode 738. That story begins after the shout out to our sponsor.

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When Apple launched the iPhone app store in 2008, they kicked off a modern day gold rush. Software developers everywhere submitted their apps and fortunes were made overnight. With few apps on offer at the time, people were installing almost anything. You could create something completely ridiculous or something non-functional and still get paid. But all good things must come to an end.

And like the California gold rush of the 1800s, a few got rich while the rest died trying, or I guess their apps just weren't downloaded. Within a few years, there was more competition and it became harder for apps to stand out from the crowd. Lewis Smith missed the gold rush, but he came in afterwards with something heftier than those initial apps. At the time, Lewis was working for Barclays Bank in the UK. He loved learning new technologies and building things.

So creating an app seemed like a good way to do both. He began by looking at problems in his own life that he thought might be made easier with an app. He didn't take long to come up with something. Lewis was getting married and the wedding date was fast approaching. To get in shape for it, he'd started on the slow carb diet.

That diet proposes measuring different parts of your body to track your progress. Variables like weight, waistline, hips, and shoulder width. Together these give a much better indication of progress than simply weighing yourself, which can be affected by building muscle. Lewis figured an app would make it easy to track everything in one place. A quick search of the app store revealed nothing like it existed, so it became his project.

Every day, for an hour before work, Lewis worked on the app, learning the nuances of app store development as he went along. Within a few months, he had a basic version up and running. It wasn't well-designed, but it worked well enough that it could be listed in the store. For the name, Lewis chose the Progress app. He paid the $100 listing fee, his only startup cost, and within days, the app was available for download.

All Lewis remembers about his launch was how bad the app looked. He was surprised anyone downloaded it, but download they did. Slowly but surely, the installation numbers grew, and the app developed a following. This gave Lewis incentive to keep going, and finally, on July 1, 2012, he made his first income, $5.60 from an in-app purchase. You're probably familiar with in-app purchases.

These allow developers to charge users for additional features inside the app. In his case, for Lewis, his app is free, but users pay a little extra for features like progress, photos, and graphs. It took time, but eventually, the Progress app became Lewis' full-time job. Two years ago, in 2016, he was making enough to quit his day job and then begin making a living entirely off the app. Like weight loss itself, the progress was slow, not an overnight success, took a lot of hard work, but eventually, it paid off.

You could say that his app has achieved critical mass. Over the past year, it has generated an average of $6,500 a month. Now, this money comes in even when Lewis is sleeping or taking a day off or on an airplane, and he's on airplanes a lot because this project has enabled him to travel the world as a digital nomad all the way through to 2018. So in 2019 and beyond, his aim is to help a million people lose weight through his app. It might be easy to look at this story and think, "Well, he got in early, or this could never work now." But remember, he didn't get in early.

He got in three years after the App Store launch. Things were extremely competitive even then, but Lewis found a way to stand out from the crowd. He built a very specific app that didn't yet exist for a specific intentional group of people. And because he followed through, his progress app has completely changed his life. [Music]

All right, here's some advice as promised.

I used to say, if you're not a programmer, don't make an app. Generally, I think that's still true, but if you insist, you can launch an app by outsourcing development. And you can do this by using sites like Upwork and Freelancer.com. Upwork is Upwork.com. I'll link it all up in the show notes.

Now, finding a good freelancer can be difficult. It takes some time to find the right person. You need to be really specific about what you're looking for. Don't try to build another productivity app or another to-do list. There are hundreds of those, if not more, in the App Store.

Instead, do what Lewis did and brainstorm a specific need in that specific niche, and then build something directly for those people. When working with that developer, find out if design is included in the quote. If not, you might want to find somebody who does both programming and design rather than use two different people or two different agencies. This can make the process much smoother and cheaper. The final cost will depend on how complex your app idea is as well as how many iterations or how much improvement you need along the way.

And speaking of iterations and improvement, last but not least, remember that apps break. This is something that a lot of people forget about. They think, "Oh, I'm gonna outsource my development. I've got a great idea. I'll just get somebody to build it and then I'll be done." Well, if you have a smartphone, you're probably familiar that apps don't always work.

And often they crash or they have bugs and they have to get fixed. That's why there's constantly updates to them. So if you don't know how to fix your app when it breaks because of an Apple update or whatever else it is, you need to have some kind of a plan for it. So definitely not impossible, but something you need to be mindful of. Okay, that's it for today.

Thank you so much. I hope you enjoyed it. Our show notes are at sidehustleschool.com/738. That is for episode 738. I will be back again tomorrow and I hope you will be too.

My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]