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.
Hey you, thanks for being part of our journey.
Once a month, maybe every two weeks, I will post a monthly update about all things MoneyCoach. What happened in the office, what did we work on, what did we waste our time on, etc.
This is not a formal corporate update. It is me, talking to you (well, writing) while seated in our office, drinking a warm cup of flat white.
If you like the format, let me know. If you don’t like it, even better. Please tell me what to improve.
Ready? Prepare some coffee or tea, like I did before writing this. I am a coffee guy myself.
Here are some highlights from January.
New Year. New Bugs.
There is a stupid bug that has reset the Overview configuration for everyone. When we tested it before the release everything went smooth. Of course it did. And now shit is hitting the fan. The goal is to investigate the issue and then replicate it and then fix it.
Update: We fixed it a couple of days ago.
Result: A lot of 1-star reviews, because legacy users thought we stripped away free features.
Bugs. Bug Fixes.
No one likes bugs. We went on and started to fix the most reported and some mini-bugs we found along the way. If you spot anything else, you know what to do. Submit a support ticket, not a 1-star review. We hate those, everyone does.
UI & Design Improvements.
By special request, our own Design Master Michelangelo (not the painter, the T.M.N.T), went on and created some amazing new images for the Overview cards. And he went on and redesigned the tab bar icons as well. Did you already spot them?
And we redesigned the screenshots for the App Store. Sexier. Brighter. Just better.
New Year. Old Friends.
My goal this year is to make MoneyCoach better for you and strengthen relationships with fellow independent iOS developers. Sometimes it feels lonely out there. Brainstorming and sharing know-how with like minded talented people, is one of the best ways to keep improving. I spend a lot of time last month with Frederik (fellow indie dev & One Sec creator). Discussed about marketing, analytics, techniques to offer a better service and so much more. And ate a lot of fancy salad. By the way, if you are in Berlin, you must check Klub-Kitchen.
Onboarding Emails
In order to guide and retain new users, we created an onboarding journey with 7 emails. We sent the campaign to new and existing users that registered for the newsletter. Then, to my surprise, one of our earliest users told me that he liked the content, but it was too much to get an email every day. Boom. changed. Now users get an onboarding email every 2 days.
Update: Talked to Frederik about emails as well.
2 days is still often. Then 4 it is.
Result: We don’t know it yet. I have to measure it someday and see if it is better.
The long term goal is to post 2-3 diary entries per month or when we have big releases with new features. Like this one for example.
New Features
I started to work on a new feature related to accounts. As it turns out it is more complex than we thought. It always is, no matter for how long you have been doing iOS development, or any development for that matter.
What makes it complex is multi-currency support. I need to go back to the drawing board and think about this again.
Things Nobody Asked For…
I was building this new feature, and I needed to use our custom red and green colours. I needed to pass them around a lot of SwiftUI files. So I started to refactor code and have them referenced from a single place. I had to put those colours in our Foundations framework. Which broke the entire app and it didn’t build anymore. So I had to do some easy refactoring. Why? So that we can have more consistent look and feel and not write the same red colour 1000 times.
That was it for this month. In reality I can write 2x as much, since I am in a flow. But I am forcing myself to stop, otherwise I will miss the gym slot.
Next month I will tell you again what happened.
I am curious about your feedback.
With love from Berlin,
Perjan
