Indie Interviews
Can you tell us more about yourself and what led you to become an indie maker
Hey Khoa, thanks for having me!
My name is Flo and I’m currently a 26 year old PhD student from Germany. I have always been fascinated with programming and wrote my very first LoC at the age of about 12, which is when I took a “website design” voluntary course in school. My teacher taught us HTML, CSS and a bit of JavaScript, which made me explore JavaScript and PHP myself later on.
Fast forward a few years and I stumbled upon a book on UIKit and SpriteKit in 2016 - the summer before starting my bachelor’s in computer science (games engineering). I played around with it, but due to my studies I only had very limited time to work on my own apps. I came back to iOS development and first explored SwiftUI for my bachelor’s thesis, during which I built an Apple Watch app to help the elderly in everyday life. Then, during my master’s I took a course on iOS development in university and stuck with it every since!
Eventually that led me to publish my own apps on the App Store, stacking up a resume of over 15 apps on the App Store while being a student. I have removed a bunch of them from sale since then, but others are still out there
How did you come up with the idea? How do you generate ideas for your apps or projects, and how do you identify the problems or needs your app can address?
Ideation happens naturally for me - I encounter a problem in real life and think about how an app could help me overcome it. I keep a long list of app ideas in LaunchBuddy, the “biggest” app I’m working on as an indie. LaunchBuddy is a project management tool specifically for indie developers that I started working on to manage my own growing list of apps. And I even while working on LaunchBuddy I faced many issues like social media marketing and creating App Store Connect screenshots. These are the kinds of issues that would then become their own app or feature of an existing app. For example, I built a SwiftUI framework to auto-generate ASC screenshots from within Xcode (It’s called Blacksmith and it’s available for free on Gumroad). I also look at new APIs after WWDC and brainstorm ideas on how to creatively (mis-)use them
How does your day-to-day app development workflow look like?
I usually start by creating a new release in LaunchBuddy. There I can set a deadline for myself and choose the tasks I want to work on. Then I usually start with the smaller tasks to get in the flow and finish the day off by working on some larger features.
For example I recently changed how tasks are stored in LaunchBuddy (they used to have “taskboards”, but now they’re part of a release) this feature took me several weeks to implement, but I always started the day by working on something small. That’s how I find the courage to work on hard problems.
How do you launch and market your app?
The only app I do a lot of marketing for is LaunchBuddy - all my other apps are just for myself, so I don’t really care about their success. Since LaunchBuddy is made for indie developers I mainly market through Twitter/X. I post about development updates and new releases I shipped. It’s a natural platform to talk about these things, especially given that my audience on X are exactly the people I want to target with LaunchBuddy. It’s the perfect fit. I also run Apple Search Ads for LaunchBuddy, and they seem to be worth it for me. I’ve also heard that running ASA helps with ASO, but given that I’m by no means an expert at ASO, take this with a grain of salt.
What are the future plans for your app?
I don’t plan too much into the future, but I have some really fun stuff coming up for LaunchBuddy. Eventually I want to finally add widgets, but that needs another rewrite of my CoreData stack and I don’t feel ready for that yet. iPadOS & visionOS support is my next priority and I’m hoping to ship the iPad version of LaunchBuddy later this year.
Do you have any interesting lessons learned or tips for other indie makers?
Ship fast, ship often. You can always polish later on, that’s needed to understand if people actually want your product. Aside from that I learned about Apple Search Ads and that they’re a great way for me to get downloads & increase revenue.
I also recently removed all custom styling from LaunchBuddy to go back to the default SwiftUI style. It’s cleaner and makes it so much easier to reuse my code for another platform. I highly recommend doing that!
Looking back, are there any decisions or actions you regret not taking before or during the development and launch of your apps? Is there anything you would have done differently?
Yes, two things come to mind:
- ✨ Add Subscriptions earlier. I was missing out on a ton of revenue because I only added them after a year. The previous pay-what-you-want business model wasn’t sustainable.
- ✨ Do more marketing. It’s crazy how big of a different just a few tweets / ASA budget makes. In hindsight I should have been way more consistent with my marketing, as well as explore many another channels.
Are there any indie makers or creators whose work you admire and follow closely?
There are tons of indie makers on X that inspire me, so I just can’t name all of them. My biggest inspiration is Jordi Bruin though. He ships tons of high-quality, yet super simple apps. He’s also a really nice guy, and we frequently chat about iOS dev and other stuff going on in the Apple ecosystem. Give him a follow if you haven’t already!
Could you recommend any specific tools or resources that you believe are helpful for other indie makers, especially those just starting out?
I always recommend to try out several different ways to learn: articles, documentation, videos, courses, books and just building projects. Tools aren’t as important as getting your hands dirty is. Just play around with code and sooner than later you will know your way around how to make apps.
Thanks a ton for having me! If you’re interested in what I do or want to learn more about iOS development, check out my youtube channe and my social media. See you around!
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