Weekly Indie Log #22

#weeklyindielog

Hello! Welcome to my Weekly Indie Log #22! Let’s dive right into it and talk numbers.

Active Users

Last week has been an eventful week! Habit Pixel reached nearly a **1000** users combined across both iOS and Android, see numbers below:

My goal for end of the month of May is to reach ~1500 active users and I am actively promoting the app across any medium I can find.

Revenue

I introduced 2 subscriptions (monthly/yearly) and one lifetime plan for Habit Pixel earlier during the month and I’ve got 1 sale across the 3 different plans already. This bodes well - I am hoping to win paid customers as I continue to improve the application - however, right now my focus is on marketing as the revenue numbers are negligible.

What’s New? - v2.21.0

I released a new version of Habit Pixel over the weekend (2.21) which is the culmination of the work I’ve done on Android widgets. One of the early adopters (Aldy) reported that the widgets were looking weird on HyperOS and the alignment was off as well on a couple of the devices he test and the streak count has some issues too when no streak goal was set.

Alignment is off with too much spacing on the right side

For launchers which had different cell counts, the widget aspect ratio would change and I didn’t factor that in during my initial development and it would show up like so:

v2.21.0 fixed all of those things and dynamically adjusts the layout based on the available space. This is not easy in widget-land for Android and there was a lot of hair pulling but I am glad this is sorted and now in a stable state.

Paywall First

I’ve also change the onboarding flow a little bit to show the paywall first - as several reports regarding conversion rate indicate that showing the paywall during onboarding increase conversion. This is something I am monitoring closely how it impacts sales.

Data Pipeline

One of the biggest under-the-hood implementation for Habit Pixel is for me to setup proper analytics using PostHog to measure activation/retention/rating requests to know exactly how many users are activating i.e. creating a habit of their own and sticking around to use the app.

I am also monitoring how many times users are being shown the rate app modal to understand the conversion between being shown the request and actual ratings - the platform APIs do not let you know when a user has rated your app - so this needs to be tracked and correlated manually.

Miscellaneous Changes

Tap Edit: Another feedback I got from Reddit was to allow editing of a habit when tapping on the title/description - I thought this was a good idea and implemented and shipped this.

Tap Widget & Scroll to Habit In-App: Tapping on the widget will now open the app and scroll to that widget if it is outside of the viewport
Implemented OTA Updates: It will now be possible to push OTA updates directly to users without having to go through store approval processes. This is something I plan on using to fix bugs and push minor tweaks directly to devices - this gives me comfort as I iterate fast and possibly break things - bugs being monitored by Crashlytics.

Marketing

On the marketing side, I am posting about Habit Pixel every where I possibly can and intend to step up the effort even more in the upcoming weeks.
I made a promo video which is now displayed on both the app store and the play store which I hope helps boost conversion and downloads. This is the video:

Upcoming

My upcoming plans for Habit Pixel include:

Working on a new and better onboarding to prime users and improve retention rates.
Have a built-in “What’s new” section which will inform users of new features and improvements for new versions dropped - be it via OTA updates or via store updates.
I am also gearing up towards connecting a back-end to Habit Pixel which should open up a world of possibilities including cross-device sync, AI integrations and more - excited but a lot of work to be done before this is ready - probably Q3/Q4 work.

Community

I have gotten a lot of incredible feedback on Habit Pixel over the last week and I will make sure to collect them and share them here as this fuels my drive and gives me hope that Habit Pixel will make it among the big boy habit trackers 😅

The first one is from Charlie Cheever one of the top members of the Expo team - the framework I used to build Habit Pixel. If he says it’s nice, it’s must be pretty rad 😁