MoneyCoach Diaries is my ongoing journey to turn my indie app into a more sustainable part of my business. First time reading? See what happened until now by tapping this link.
This is an ongoing article where I will document what happened in the last 2 weeks. Apparently this is gonna be a long one. So grab a coffee and enjoy the read. Or better grab a coffee dispenser because it is a long one.
WWDC 2023
Who's excited? I am. I am not sure what to expect, but I am excited. I will watch it live from the confort of my office in Berlin. I will be live tweeting about it. So make sure to follow me on X. There is a lot of talks about AR. If that happens we will see how we can bring MoneyCoach to the next level. I have some ideas. If you have any, reply to this email and let me know.
May 16, 2023
I spent major part of the day focusing on invoicing and bookkeeping. For such a small company you would wonder how much shitty bookkeeping you have to do. I am not even talking about the taxes. I am talking about the day to day bookkeeping. I am not a fan of it, but it has to be done. My bookkeeper and tax advisor needs all invoices by tomorrow.
I also sat down together with Krist and developed the structure that will support localizing the most important pages of our website. Why are we doing this, you might ask? Well here are three arguments:
- We want to be able to assist our users in their native language
- We want to rank higher in the search engines
- We want to be able to see if we can get more customers from other countries
We are starting with the Italian language. We will see how it goes and then we will decide if we will continue with other languages.
May 17, 2023
Italian localization finished. After testing the website, I deployed it in an instant. Thanks God for Vercel. Now let's wait for Google to crawl it and see if that will impact our search position in Italy.
Surfing the waves of optimism, we decided to localizing the website in German as well. I was lazy to localize it manually. So I went on and used DeepL. The first pass was alright. Now some tweaks and there we have it. Check it out here and let me know what you think. Good or bad. Here is the link.
Then I got a message again from my bookkeeper saying that there are some other invoices that she couldn't find. I have to manually search through all my emails and web accounts to find them and match them. I am slowly thinking about creating an AI assistant that will do this for me. If you are a freelancer or run a small company, please tell me if this is a problem for you as well? Let me know.
Things nobody asked for
If you are already familiar with this occurence throughout my diaries, you know what I am talking about. If not, let me explain. I am talking about the things that I do, but nobody asked me to do them. I just do them because I think they are important. And I think they are important because I am the founder of this company and I have to make sure that everything is running smoothly. To tell you the truth, we thought about this with Krist. And now here it is. I added a simple language switcher to the footer and mobile menu of the website. It is not perfect, but it does the job. I will improve it in the future. But for now, it is good enough.
May 18, 2023
I came to work completely tired. I didn't want to do anything. I had this crazy idea about a new app messing around in my head. I couldn't focus on anything else. I had to do something about it. So I decided to take a day off and work on this new idea. I will tell you more about it in the future. But for now, I will keep it a secret.
May 19, 2023
Short working day today. I finished earlier to spend some time with my family.
May 22, 2023
Monday. I should be full of energy, right? Wrong. After entertaining the little ones over a looooong weekend, because the daycare (kita) was closed on Thursday and Friday, I am completely exhausted. I am not even sure how I managed to get to work. I am not even sure how I managed to get out of bed. I am not even sure how I managed to get dressed.
To start things off, I had to listen to a 30 minutes theatrical play of the drama titled "I have nothing to wear" starring my daughter. After that, I had to listen to a 30 minutes theatrical play of the drama titled "I don't want to go to the daycare" starring my daughter, again. To all the parents out there, reply to this email if you want to share your experience with me. I am sure you have some stories to tell ;).
Nevertheless, I am finally to the office. Only my newly repaired espresso machine can save me. Turned it on, waited for it to heat up, grinded the freshly roasted coffee beans and made myself a double espresso. I am ready to go 🚀.
I made a new app
As mentioned above, I had this app idea for the last couple of months. To tell you the truth, I don't expect it to be a financial success, because I made it for me, out of love and need. I have a setup with two 27 inch monitors, one of which should act as a data dashboard of all company vitals (revenue, subscriptions, DAU, MAU, etc.). I have tried many apps, but none of them was good enough. So I decided to make my own.
After a short kickoff meeting with Krist, we started. I am happy to say that I am done with the first version. We wrote an article about it. It is called Decky: Build Custom Dashboards.
YC's "Talk To Users"
I am a big fan of YC's "Talk To Users" advice. It is just that in the last months due to a lot of topics on my plate, I delegated this to Krist. Don't get me wrong, he is doing a great job.
But I think it is time for me to get back to it for Premium users only. Why? Because they are the reason why I keep developing MoneyCoach further and why I get to drink great coffee every day. So from now on until the foreseeable future, I will be talking to Premium users. I will be asking them about their experience with MoneyCoach, what they like, what they don't like, what they would like to see in the future, etc. I will be doing this for the next couple of weeks. I will keep you posted on the results.
May 23, 2023
As a matter of fact, I started to work on a feature that Gabriele requested. He is a Premium user and he asked me if I can add a feature that will allow him to select multiple categories and delete them at once. I thought about it and I think it is a good idea. So I started working on it. After being nearly done with the feature, I realized that this will be an expected behaviour for all the other items that have a list of items. So I decided to refactor the code and make it a global feature.
May 24, 2023
After working the entire day on this, I am happy to say that I am done with it. I am not sure if I will be able to release it this week, but I will try my best. Starting from the next version you can go to Settings -> Categories and select multiple categories and delete them at once. This will be available for all the other items that have a list of items. You can do the same for subcategories, payees and tags. Leave a review if this helps you. I would love to hear your feedback.
May 25, 2023
New version is live on the App Store. Go and update your beloved budgeting app. I am sure you will love the new feature.
May 31, 2023
Today I started the day in the most amazing way. No theatrical plays, no drama, no nothing. My daughter woke up, got dressed faster than me and went to the daycare. I am not sure what happened, but I am not complaining. Knock on wood.
I spent the entire day working on a new feature for MoneyCoach. A feature that will allow you to exclude certain transactions from the reports. After finishing, we did a quick test and it worked. It has some kinks, but we can figure those out. What we cannot figure out is how to make it work for the Overview and for first time users. I just don't want the app to be too complicated for new users. I want them to be able to use it without any problems. I will think about it and see what I can do.
Wow. That was a long one. That was it for this month. See you in the next one.
