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Jul 3, 2026 · 11 min read

Month 5: June 2026

Halfway through 2026. It's unreal how fast time moves.

Since starting this venture late last year, I've built and built and built with few interruptions. Finish an app, start a new one. Repeat.

As I wrap up a half year of building, I find myself at a fun juncture - figuring out how to distribute the things I've made.

The honest truth is the act of building has become a bit boring. The first app I had approved on the App Store was exciting, but by the fifth one, that excitement had dimmed. I set out to develop a skill, did it, and now I'm craving novelty again.

How will I get novelty?

By learning distribution, marketing, growing - whatever you want to call it.

Getting my work in front of people and convincing them to pay for it.

As an extreme beginner at marketing, I'm excited to earn some knowledge in the domain. I understand this in concept, but I don't yet have the hard earned experience of going through it, failing, and finding what works.

The idea of getting my download and revenue numbers up from what is essentially zero injects a lot of energy into this work. I have an idea of what I think will work. I'll try it, see if it works, then try and try again until I figure it out.

Have I mentioned I love the act of figuring shit out?

This next endeavor feels like a big one. Big as in, the part of this process that actually helps me find a way to make a living doing this.

The Long View

Speaking of making a living, I'd like to acknowledge a luxury I have - the luxury to take the long view.

A core belief of mine is that everything in life compounds. The longer you do something, the greater the returns. The power of compounding is most evident in finance, but it applies to relationships, skills, career, and in my specific case, internet reach.

A compound-growth curve: slow at first, then it takes off

Why does this matter?

If I didn't have a day job and had to use this building work to make ends meet, I'd be making decisions to find success right now. Right now as in, today. The pressure of needing something now means, by definition, a short sighted view and in turn short sighted decision making.

Thanks to this luxury of getting to take the long view, I get to make decisions that I think will pay off in the long run. SEO takes a year or more to start to work. ASO (App Store Optimization) takes months or years.

This luxury grants me patience.

If I needed to eat tomorrow, I'm more likely to shell out thousands of dollars for marketing that might not even work. Instead, I take the longer route which has a more sustainable big picture - it's less expensive and has a higher ceiling. It's just slower.

This is a life principle of mine - take the long route to reap the benefits of compound growth. I've done it with my career, I'm doing it with my finances, I do it with my health, I do it with my relationships, and I'm doing it with this project.

Let's move on to what I did in June.

The five apps: 1000 Spanish Words, FIRE Projection, Films Shelf, Scorecard for Yatzy, and Ripe

June's Work

1. Shipped Ripe, app #5

  • An app that tells you what produce is in season where you are
  • Genuinely useful for Carla and me in the kitchen
  • My most aesthetically pleasing work so far

2. Shipped new versions of all four other apps (Yahtzee, Films Shelf, 1000 Spanish Words, FIRE Projection)

3. Overhauled how every app makes money

  • Moved Films Shelf off the free-with-ads model to a hard paywall
  • Move FIRE Projection from freemium to a hard paywall (30-day free trial, then monthly or annual subscription)
  • Moved 1000 Spanish Words from a one-time purchase to a subscription (30-day free trial, then monthly or annual subscription)
  • Built questionnaire-style onboarding funnels (1000 Spanish Words, Films Shelf, Ripe) to increase conversion

4. Learned what makes an app feel high quality, and applied it everywhere

  • The tiny details: haptic feedback, buttons that scale when pressed, a handful of barely-perceptible styling decisions.

5. Built a way to actually reach my own users

  • Found out I had zero reachable users: Apple gives developers no customer data so I couldn't communicate with users
  • Built the plumbing in all apps so when a new user gives me their email in onboarding they automatically get a personal note from me

6. Added feedback and feature-request forms into every app's settings menu

7. Consolidated everything onto one website

8. Started on distribution: the FIRE SEO

By the Numbers

Here's June across all five apps:

Can't see the numbers? Read them on my site: https://www.bbmaxwell.dev/blog/month-5-june-2026

Impressions = times an app showed up in the App Store.
Clicks = taps through to the app's page.
Downloads = installs.
Revenue = my cut after Apple's.

3,000 impressions is the baseline, and honestly it's bigger than I expected — a lot of people browse the App Store. Every stage of that funnel is something I can grow, and there's so much surface area for improvement it excites the shit out of me.

All-time through June: 126 downloads, $52.42 in revenue.

What's Next

Now what?

Sales. Marketing. Distribution. Growth. It's got many names.

Get my work in front of people and convince them to buy it.

Turn $3/month into $50/month.

That's what's next, and I expect it to take a while with bits of progress, setbacks, and lots of learning moments along the way. If I'm lucky, over the next year I'll learn enough to exercise meaningful creativity and maybe make a buck.

The internet is unfathomably huge, and to find success only requires skimming a few eyes off the top. Like a couple thousand out of the hundreds of millions of people on the App Store. It's a fun problem to crack.

Now to be clear, I barely know what I'm getting into. I have borrowed knowledge of most of these concepts. I've learned them mostly from reading. Now I get to earn some of my own knowledge and learn through experience, which is the only way to meaningfully learn.

Earned vs borrowed knowledge is an important differentiation to make.

If you haven't done something, your intellectual knowledge is useless. It's borrowed from someone else. It isn't the same to "know" something you have never experienced yourself.

It's not fun to admit this because you almost always end up lowering your self-appraisal. Do it anyway. As Richard Feynman put it: "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool."

So that's what's up with this work. I made the things, now I figure out how to sell the things.

My Ask of You

My ask of you: I need people to use these apps. If any of these 5 are interesting enough for you to want to try, tell me please. I'll send you a code so it's free. You using the app is far more important to me than $10 of revenue.

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