Hi there, thanks for checking out our first Developer Commentary article! Let’s start with a bit of a backstory.
After working as freelancers (and having to keep track of our time and invoice for our work) for a while, we’ve tried over a dozen different time tracking and invoicing products. Since we couldn’t find a product that fitted our specific use-case and requirements, we set out to build it ourselves. Our goal was to create a fully-featured, native, nicely designed app for the Mac and iPhone that’s easy to get started using but with a rich feature set.
The story of building our apps, the technologies we choose to use, and the iterations we went through, all deserve their own blog posts. So let’s jump ahead a bit. We released our app “Orbit: Time-based Invoicing” for macOS in June 2020, and for iOS and iPadOS in October 2020.
With Orbit available on the App Store, our focus is now on adding more features and on growing our userbase, with the goal of making Orbit our main source of income, replacing our freelance work. This is where Developer Commentary comes in!
Developer Commentary is a combination of this blog, a YouTube channel, and a podcast, where we’re sharing our approaches, experiments, and experiences growing Orbit.
So, here are some of our concrete goals:
Product Goals
At the time of writing this, Orbit makes just under $1k (USD) in monthly recurring revenue (MRR), with just over 100 paying subscribers. This is a great start, but we’re still far away from Orbit paying the bills. Our immediate goal is to get to $5k MRR. At that point, we’d consider ourselves ramen profitable (since Malin is gluten intolerant, we needed to add an extra $500 to account for the premium, gluten-free ramen), and no longer rely on finding new freelance work to cover our cost of living.
Once we’ve reached this initial goal, we’ll work on growing Orbit further, towards our next milestone of $13k MRR. This is roughly equivalent to what the two of us would earn combined if we would be full-time employed as software developers in Vancouver, BC. So this feels like a natural point to aim towards.
Developer Commentary Goals
There are many great indie developers, who are creating amazing apps, wanting to make it their main source of income. With Developer Commentary, we’re hoping to share our experience of trying to grow our business. We hope we can provide some helpful insights for both people who are thinking of building their own business, as well as for people who are already in a similar situation to us. Hopefully, this can also help people avoid some of the mistakes that we’ll make along the way 😅
The Next Steps
We have a few different approaches on how to reach our next milestone. We can put these into two groups: Marketing and product development.
Group One: Marketing
We’ll experiment with different forms of marketing. One way will be to experiment with paid marketing on Twitter, LinkedIn, reddit, and Google. We’ll run small campaigns on the different platforms to try to find the right messaging, style, and platform. We’re also experimenting with different types of intro offers for Orbit, such as discounts and free trials. We also want to do some non-paid marketing, primarily content marketing, where we’ll write articles about topics related to freelancing and running a business.
We’ll share our experiments here (in blog posts and in video/audio format), as well as on Twitter.
Group Two: Product Development
We have a lot of exciting features planned that we think will both benefit existing users, as well as attract new users. We are building Orbit out in the open and have our roadmap publicly available and will be sharing our progress as we build new features. The idea behind this is to showcase Orbit, to help future users decide whether Orbit is the right app for them, to keep existing users in the loop about upcoming features, and to share our journey with other indie developers.
Wrap-up
Thank you so much for taking the time to read our very first post. If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to message either Malin or Kai, we’d love to hear from you!