2025 Indie Thoughts
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Another year down! I hope 2024 was a wonderful time for you and yours. As we look to 2025, I’ve decided to simplify my goals down to the essentials (a fair contrast to what I typically have done).
To that end, here’s what I’m shooting for:
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Scores for NCAA: I had no plans to make this app, but it just sort of came up. There is no good way to follow Division 2 or 3 scores on the App Store, so it feels like a worthwhile problem to solve. I’m keeping this one lean, and it should hit the App Store this month. Feel free to try out the beta while you’re here!
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iOS 18 Book Update: It is still crazy to me that I spent almost three years writing over a 1,000 pages over iOS development — but I did! I’ll never do it again, but being on this side of it (i.e., it’s done) feels great. I still look forward to updating it annually. While its sales aren’t nearly what they once were, folks still buy it every week and I’m grateful for that.
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Month or Marketing for Elite Hoops: Inspired by my friend and successful indie Emmanuel, I’m going to dedicate an entire month to simply marketing Elite Hoops every single day. I love to build stuff, but I’ve learned more and more that marketing is what makes MRR grow. Over a year ago, before I shipped Elite Hoops, Emmanuel and I chatted for a bit over practical marketing tips and tricks. That’s what lead to me leaning into email marketing, and it’s been a critical part of my growth. I’m excited to see what this month could do for Elite Hoops.
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Keyframe Plays in Elite Hoops: This is a big one - and what Elite Hoops was initially supposed to do and be. Basically, today you can record your plays (I use ReplayKit to do this - which is actually meant for gaming) and it spits out a video. Helpful! Validated! But also not what I originally intended to do. A lot of coaches want a step-by-step play creator that animates as each “step” occurs. This is how all other basketball software works. So, I need to nail it. I could write an entire post over this, but I’ll keep it short: the fact that I kept Elite Hoops to an MVP and launched with what I thought was a “janky” way to share plays, and yet it is growing and doing great — is an entire lesson in of itself. I don’t even have my primary feature done yet! I’ll be well positioned once I do this, because I’ll be the only app that lets you just fire off a quick video recording and make those in-depth frame by frame sets.
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Ship Alyx: Hey! My next “pillar” app! Alyx is a caffeine tracker I’ve used for well over a year. I kinda bounce off and on with its development, and it’s been a UI playground for me. But, I use it daily, and it’s turned into such a fun and quirky app. I want the rest of the world to see it. I plan on shipping it later this year.
- Elite Hoops Roadmap: This one is actually #6, but Markdown formatting is very upset about the image above. So, we’ll go with it. Anyways, from there, I’ve got a whole host of things to do to make Elite Hoops into a grown up business. If I get here in 2025, that’ll be a win.
Aside from that, my other business-y business goal is to get to $5,122 in MRR. Of course, I’d love to go beyond that — but I’ve tried to make a reasonable goal for each year to reach my ultimate “I could almost go full-time indie” MRR milestone:
So that’s it! I’m ready for 2025, and I hope to run into some of you IRL. This year, I know I’ll be at Deep Dish Swift and WWDC 2025.
Until next time ✌️