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Category: App Development
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You've got the idea and you've done your market research. Now you need to just build the thing.
But if you've ever sat down to build an entire app from the ground up, you will know just how daunting that process actually is. I've been building apps now for 5 years and
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I've generated over a million in app store sales. That's not a typo.
In the last 12 months alone, my app portfolio has generated over $800,000 in sales. In this video, I'm going to show you how I actually go from an idea to a product.
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The systems, constraints, and design mindset I use to build fast, stay focused, and turn rough ideas into finished apps that feel deliberate, fun, and original. This is part two of my video series showing my exact process to go from idea to shipping the actual
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thing. In the last video, I covered the ideation and validation process.
I showed the example of my Swipe the Cat app, how the idea was born, and how I quickly pivoted based on market research. If you haven't checked it out, I recommend watching it after this video.
I'll put a link in the
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description below. But once you have the idea, you need to actually build the thing.
You need to get into the app store. To do that, don't fall for the endless build trap.
I see this so often with developers who are building a project on their own. You got no boss,
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no team, and no real deadlines. So, projects just naturally blow out.
Something that should have taken only a few weeks or a month at the most, ends up taking several months, maybe even a year. And I think there's a bunch of reasons for why this happens.
The
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developer just gets caught up in the code, all of the technical parts, and ends up refactoring every single part of it before launching. Sometimes there's a bit of self-sabotage going on here.
Other times it's some sort of procrastination and other times a developer feels like they need to make
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the app perfect before they can release it into the world. But sometimes it's just hard for a developer to find the motivation to tackle their product.
That ever growing list of bugs, the tasks, the features just kind of feels overwhelming. But there's a simple strategy you can use to overcome all of
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these issues. Self-imposed deadlines.
A self-imposed deadline is simply put a deadline that you set for yourself. The more specific you get, the better it is.
So, setting an exact date works really well. But if you can really hook into
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something tangible, something real it works even better. For my Piano Run app, I know there's going to be a massive demand for learn piano apps over the holiday season.
I've set myself a deadline for December 10 to launch the new version. This is a real deadline and
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the consequences of not reaching the deadline are simple. I'll get less downloads and miss out on a great opportunity.
And for this app, my Swipe the Cat app, I wanted to release it before this video series goes live. It's Wednesday now and the first video goes
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live in just a couple of days. That gives me a few days to finish the app.
Setting a clear goal and clear constraints helps me understand how much time I should be spending on features within the app. If my deadline is only a few days away, I just don't have the time to overengineer every part of it.
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The look and feel that I'm going for is this cartoon sketch style. I'll show you why in just a bit.
This means I need to painstakingly handdraw every graphic element, and I need to do at least three different frames to give it that sketched feeling. But because of my
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tight deadline, I'm only focusing on the parts that matter the most. The title screen, the main parts of the app, and score overlay.
these elements like the gift, the lock button, I want to handdraw them. They're sticking out and they feel out of place.
It's kind of
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annoying me, but I won't reach my deadline if I do, so they're going to stay in their current form. Instead, I put these items into my then list.
I've got my primary tasks all sorted out, and anything that's not urgent for launch, anything that is cosmetic, or any of the
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nice to have features gets added to my then list. One of the biggest challenges I faced building apps was getting stuck on the wrong areas.
Just overdeveloping or overdesigning an area. It's just not that important.
And I see this with a lot of other developers as well. It's
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easy to try making something perfect to keep tweaking parts of the app. But this is kind of a trap.
The saying the last 20% makes up 80% of your time is so true, especially in app development. So I like to focus first on building the 80%.
I spend 20% of my time building it,
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the quick and easy stuff that actually brings the app close enough to a finished product. Then I visit my then list, slowly making my way through the final 20% of the app.
And check this out. This is the purchase sheet that lets users buy coins to unlock more cats
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and characters in the app. This is my monetization strategy.
And this first version, it's nothing special. It's very ugly, but my energy went into making the functionality of it work first, and then I can go back and give it a nicer look.
Oh, that looks better. But what should
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you prioritize first? What should you actually be spending your energy on?
If you're like me, you just get stuck straight into building something and then work out the details as you go. I call this process code massaging.
I start with the rigid functionality first
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and just get it to work. No bells, no cosmetics, no whistles.
Just the feature and the functionality. I run through the entire app and I'll do this first pass for every single feature.
Just the basic functionality. Just get it working.
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Nothing special. With Swipe the Cat, I had multiple elements to build out.
The title screen, main game loop, scoring, rewards, point progression, coins, purchasing, unlocking cats. It was a lot.
A rough version of the app was built first. Then I massage the code to
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refine every single part one by one. This gives room for me to test each area of the app in its simplest form.
Kind of like a more advanced prototype. And it's during this process I'll think of a new idea or realize something just doesn't
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work the way that I wanted it to and just needed to be replaced or removed completely. And because I haven't spent excessive amount of time building that feature, it's not time wasted.
During the build phase, I only ever focus on a single project at once. Currently, my
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piano app is on hold while I build this small project. If I come up with a new idea I want to explore, I'll make a note of it and I'll revisit it later.
For now, the objective is simple. Get this app, this app right here, released.
Throughout each step of the build
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process, I'll get feedback from my family, from friends, or even from other developers. With Swipe the Cat, I wanted to test how accessible it was, how engaging it is.
So, I gave it to my children one by one and even my fianceé, and I watched how they interacted with
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the features, and whether they could actually use it from just handing it to them. I learned some valuable lessons here.
When you first start the game, it shows a demo of how the swipe feature works. And originally, the beat would be playing at the same time, so you had to
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follow the example precisely to start the game. But my younger son really struggled with this.
He couldn't get the timing right and couldn't even get a score of one. So I changed the game and the demonstration no longer ran to a beat.
In fact, there's no beat. The beat
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only starts when you commence the game. Now we can start without any issue.
And you also get a bunch of feedback when you show friends and family. And it's important to really consider what they say and not just shut them down by saying, "I'm still building it.
I'm still working on it. Give me a break."
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Because the worst thing you can do is make your testers feel uncomfortable providing feedback. This game is fun and immediately I got a bunch of feedback from my testers that the cat needs to climb a tree or the cat needs to be cuter.
And that's really valuable. Building an app on your own is kind of
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like releasing your own movie where you're the director, producer, lead actor, and cameraman all rolled into one. And as such, you are the person responsible not only for building the app, but also holding the ultimate vision of the app.
The decisions you make will impact the app in more ways
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than you think. Just because the app is well coded doesn't mean it will be enjoyable to use.
If the app just doesn't flow, it's going to feel really bad. Most apps I build follow a similar template.
You got your onboarding, your trial activation screen, then the app throws you straight into the thing that
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the user wants to do. No tapping on menus, no hiding the main feature on a second screen.
Just throw them straight into the use case. With Swipe My Cat, the user sees the title screen, then immediately they're in the game.
No lengthy descriptions, no play button,
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just go. And it's this flow that I take very seriously throughout the app.
You play the game, you get game over, and immediately you're thrown to the score tally screen. It's here and only here that the user interacts with the continue button.
And this is
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intentional. I want the user to take a screenshot of their score or share it with a friend.
Clicking continue throws you to a gift unlock screen and immediately after the points tallied, it throws you back into the main screen where you play the game again. The gift tally screen will ultimately let the
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user unlock coins to purchase new scenes and new cats. And I put the available scenes and coin count on the main game screen.
This flow means the user gets thrown straight into the game again. They get game over.
They pause for a moment while their score is tallied.
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Then they're thrown straight into the game to play again. Minimal disruptions, minimal pauses with the intention to create an addictive loop that throws them back into that game again.
And this entire process could have been a lot more complicated. I could have had menus
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everywhere, play buttons to start, unlock buttons to unlock cats, that sort of thing. Instead, the aim has been simple.
Base everything around the core feature. In this case, the core feature is the game loop.
Throw the user back into the core feature and resurface them
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when it's game over. Throw them right back in again.
And this is where your vision and design choices start to kick in. These days, most developers using AI tools to write some of their code or all of their code.
And we're seeing the same bland, medium quality interfaces
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everywhere. They're just all starting to look the same.
I'm not against building with AI, don't get me wrong. I personally use chat GPT quite a bit to help out with some of the more tedious tasks, but without a design vision in mind, you run the risk of letting AI dictate how your final app is going to
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look. And news flash, it will just kind of look a bit boring.
The best way to create a vision for your own app is just imagine what you think it would look like and pull inspiration from other apps you've seen before. And I'm not quite sure if this is something everybody can actually do.
Some people
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are born with varying levels of affantasia, the inability to picture vivid images in one's mind. If this is something you struggle with, then having a visual board might help you here.
A whiteboard does wonders for visualizing your ideas into a physical space and
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then pull on inspiration from other apps or ideas you've seen from other places. My app is based on the viral thumb swipe trend and one of the videos that really captured me was this handdrawn animation of a dog.
And this clip dictated the entire creative direction for my game. I
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wanted to create something new, something fresh. I wanted to challenge myself a bit.
But how to make a game actually fun and how to make something that's truly unique. To achieve this effect, I want every element in the app to look like it's handdrawn.
It's like
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being rendered on a sketch pad in real time. And this is visually communicated immediately from the title screen.
The writing is handdrawn and the background is handdrawn as well, like a grid, like I'm drawing on actual paper. And I think this works.
It gives the app its own
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unique feel and it brings the app to life. In a world of AI generic stuff, this kind of feels authentic.
Ideally, I want someone to be able to record the screen of their game session and share it onto Tik Tok or reals. And when you see the video pop up in your feed, you
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should immediately think it's been handdrawn, not an app. I'll cover my entire marketing strategy in the next video.
So, to recap, set yourself a clear deadline, something real, something with consequences. When you've only got a few days to build, you don't
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have time to overengineer everything. Keep a then list for all the stuff that isn't critical for launch or kind of cosmetic.
Get your app to 80% done and worry about the final polish later. Focus on building rigid features first.
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Then massage the code, refining everything one piece at a time until it feels right. And get feedback early.
Let people break your app before strangers do. Protect the flow of your app at all cost.
Make sure your user stays within
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the experience. Reduce the number of menus.
Reduce the friction. Just let them go and do what they need to do.
And finally, have a clear design vision in mind. It's your app.
You get to do whatever you want with it, but keep it aligned with your vision and goals. With
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these strategies, you can ship your apps faster, reduce bugs, and create better overall app experiences. In the next video, I'm going to step through my exact launch strategy for this game, how I rank for competitive keywords, and how I get downloads from day one.
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