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Category: Entrepreneurship
Tags: appsdevelopmentgrowthmotivationrevenue
Entities: App StoreAppleFloren Pop
00:00
Why is $10,000 a month the milestone most indie developers are aiming for? Doesn't matter if you're building an app, a SAS, targeting consumers, or targeting businesses.
Every new indie developer seems to be targeting the exact same number. Floren Pop posted,
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$10,000 monthly recurring revenue is the dream for the majority of builders. So, if that's the dream, why why is $10,000 a month such an important milestone?
And is it even enough? In this video, I'm going to show you how I reached the magic $10,000 a month milestone and how
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it changed my entire life. But first, what are your revenue goals for 2026?
Let me know in the comments below. Florence Post got me thinking.
It took me 4 years of grinding away to reach $10,000 a month. Yes, 4 years.
Well,
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technically anyway. I started building apps in 2020, and my aim was really simple.
release apps for free, get them on the app store, and release something positive into the world, and learn a new skill set along the way. My aim wasn't just to learn about app development.
It
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was to learn in a practical sense how every element of the app industry works, from the distribution, the marketing, coming up with ideas, and working out what people actually want. And at some stage, I learned I wasn't just learning to code apps.
I was learning how to build products, like real products. And
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the niche I landed in was consumer apps, specifically utility type apps. These were the easiest products to get traction for because people are looking the app store for a specific issue.
You target that keyword and you get an endless supply of new downloads every single day. In May 2021, I put my first
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payw wall on the internet and I made $815. It felt good.
It felt really good. That $815 felt different.
Around this time, I was running a lawn mowing business, and to earn $815, I would have to mow 16 lawns
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at $50 each. I don't know if you've ever mowed lawns before, but it's kind of hard work.
You get a job and you find out the grass is a lot more overgrown than you imagined, and you're forever chasing up payments, and then you get a few days of bad weather, and you just can't work. My entire income was based
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on the time that I put into my mowing business. If I don't put the time in, I just don't get paid.
But apps were different. This $815 that I earned in May 2021, this was not tethered to the time that I put into building the app.
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It wasn't like the app store worked out that I'd spent 3 days building the thing, so my time was compensated. No, no, no, no, [laughter] no, no, no.
This this is different. Apps are different.
This was generating revenue literally while I slept. And this is the
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definition of a passive income. But Adam, it's not really a passive income because you still had to build the thing.
Yeah, it's true. You still got to, you know, build the thing.
And just because you spend 1,000 hours building it doesn't mean your time is going to be compensated. You could spend 1 hour
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building an app and generate revenue for life, or you could spend a year building an app and it just flops. But here's the thing.
Now that I had apps on the app store, I could still keep mowing lawns. I could keep my day job all while my apps were generating additional revenue.
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But I think that's kind of the point. New developers aiming for $10,000 a month, not because it's a nice round number, but because that's the tipping point where revenue being generated from the solo project can now replace the income of your day job.
It's the moment
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you could really envision quitting your day job and going fulltime building apps. It wasn't until around April 2024 last year that I reached the milestone of $10,000 a month.
That's 4 years of building from $0 a month to $10,100.
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And it felt great. It felt amazing.
I kept all of my company outgoings low. I didn't splurge on expensive infrastructure.
And I hosted everything myself on a shared server. That meant my only expense was Apple's 15% developer
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fee and my take-home paycheck was $8,585. But then something really interesting happened.
3 months later, my apps were now earning $30,000 a month. And each month after that, it kept climbing.
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40,000 46,000 55,000 62,000 72,000. It was almost like the $10,000 goal was actually a barrier.
Break through that barrier and you have learned everything you need to scale and grow the business
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even further. And there's kind of a mixture here of a few different things happening, a few different barriers.
There was a psychological barrier that $10,000 a month felt so out of reach. It felt like a dream until it didn't.
Until one day it was a reality. Then when it
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was real, I realized, hey, there's something here. And it gave me the confidence, the boost that I needed to double down, putting more time into this thing, more energy, and just create new things.
The second barrier is a skill issue. When I started out, I was kind of
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doing this blind. I didn't know what I was doing at all.
Just trying to work out where I fit in the market, what my strengths were, what my weaknesses were. And each time I released a new app, I discovered something quite interesting.
You kind of can't predict what apps will be a runaway success. There's a weird
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level of randomness to this whole thing. Just because you love the idea, just because you spent weeks building it doesn't mean others will like it or even care about it.
Or maybe they will, but the app store algorithm just doesn't rank you very well. And I started to
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learn something very quickly. This is not about building the best app possible.
Yes, that's important, but it's also about pushing through the failures, learning each step along the way, and trying to focus on a single metric on the next app. Instead of setting the goal of, I want this app to
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earn $10,000 a month, the goal was simply, I want this app to get more downloads than my last one. Then you start to learn the new skills that are needed to make that goal happen.
It could be app store optimization, improving screenshots, making your next app a bit more polished, that sort of
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thing. And this changes the game completely.
Now, when my next app fails, I don't get upset. I don't feel crushed by the world.
I don't feel like I'm not cut out to do this. I don't get upset at others and compare myself.
Instead, I go, "Huh, why did that fail?" And it's
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here that the real learning begins. Oh, yeah.
Of course, the screenshot was a bit dull. Oh, yeah.
Of course, the idea just didn't work as well as I thought. And finally, the biggest barrier to reaching $10,000 a month is financial constraints.
When I was trying to build a successful app portfolio, my decisions
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were grounded in the idea of will this make any money? So, a lot of ideas that seem silly or a bit fun or a bit whimsical, I I just kind of scrapped them.
But when you're not chasing the money metric, you actually have the freedom to build and experiment with ideas that seem silly or seem a bit too
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far out there. And it turns out these ideas are not only fun to build, but seem to get a lot more traction than some of my other more dull apps.
I don't know, it sounds a bit silly, but I think people can sense the intention behind the work. If it's just a money grab,
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it's going to feel like a money grab, but if it's a work of love, people are going to pick up on that. So, the key is to find the right balance.
But is $10,000 monthly revenue really enough? The short answer is yes.
No, maybe it depends on you. Take a
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moment to really be intentional and to think about what you actually want to achieve from being a solo builder and growing a successful app portfolio. Are you having fun?
Are you excited to wake up each day to create? Or does this feel like a job?
If it feels like a job, you're going to suffer through those 2,
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3, 4 years of not reaching your goals. But if you love this, if you're eager to learn and you enjoy challenges that come with it, then this will really help you get through the tough times because building a successful app portfolio has really taught me something really
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important. Whatever your intentions were at the beginning, that just simply gets amplified as the revenue and the success grows.
If your whole goal is to make as much money as possible to buy flashy cars, let me tell you a little secret. It's it's never going to be enough.
No
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amount of revenue will ever be enough. You'll always be chasing the next thing, the next step, the next purchase.
But my intentions were always simple, like really simple. I wanted to make enough revenue to do this full-time, to be creative, and to put a roof over my kids' heads and not worry about any of
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the bills. Everything else is just kind of a bonus.
So, yes, $10,000 a month is the dream for the majority of builders, and for good reason. So, how do you actually do it?
Well, it's kind of up to you. The thing nobody tells you that
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there's no one way to do this whole thing. You've got to experiment, find out what works for you, and keep learning.
Then, reaching that $10,000 a month milestone becomes a matter of when, not a matter of if.