Small Numbers starts at zero

The counter on this page reads €0.

Last year I released an app, Drinklytics, free. It grew on its own to about 200 active installs, with no budget and barely any work from me beyond a bit of ASO: I had no time, and I was already focused on other projects. At some point growth started to decline, and I had no way to work on it. I posted an update every month, on a section of this blog and on LinkedIn. I had set myself a goal of 1,000 active installs.

Not working on it anymore, I was never going to reach it. I would have had to report a decline, month after month. It felt pointless. I skipped one month. Then the next. From there I stopped, and never went back.

Drinklytics kept going on its own, nothing dramatic either way; it's stuck at around 300 active installs now.

I didn't stop building, though. I still liked the idea of talking about what I was doing in public, I just had nothing left to say about Drinklytics. One step at a time, I started working on another app, Stiva, and writing its blog, one post per update. That work made the direction clearer, and made me rethink how I was telling the story.

I still think building in public, telling people what you're doing, is a good way to keep going, to help you not quit. And some evenings, it helps.

Installs don't work as a goal across everything I build. Not every product I work on gets installed, some are, or will be, services used online. And not every product needs to make money, some are free on purpose.

Anyway, the time I put into this comes out of time with my family, and I'd like that time to start being worth something, not just in what I learn: a concrete way of giving it back.

That something is a monetary value. The number is €100,000, cumulative, from everything I build. Low enough to feel credible, high enough to scare me a little. And that matters because I already have a job, I work on this after dinner: it's part of my life, not all of it.

This is Small Numbers, and I'll post here about once a month, whichever product I happen to be working on that evening: Stiva now, something else later. The counter above tracks all of it together.

I'm writing for people in my same situation: starting from zero, who like the idea of building a product, who'd like to see it grow. I'd like you to find this, tell me what you think, compare notes. If you have something like this yourself, I'd read it gladly.

I won't publish release updates. I'll try to share decision processes, approaches, techniques, mistakes. Sometimes about one app, sometimes across several products.

If you want to follow along, the RSS feed for this series is the easiest way for now. I'm working on turning it into a newsletter too, but this site will stay the central place everything gets published.