Ideation is a subtle art that most entrepreneurs struggle with.

If you’re just starting out, you either have way too many ideas to be able to focus on a single one. Or no ideas at all.

This article aims to help you find a worthwhile idea you can pour your heart into for the next few weeks, months or even years.

There are different approaches to generate new business ideas. However, based on my analysis of 50 products built by bootstrappers, one particular approach stands out from the crowd. And yes, you guessed it, it’s about solving your own problems.

In this post, I’ve tried my best to turn the popular saying of solving your own problems into a practical system you can use to extract problems worth solving from your own life and experiences, in less than an hour.

At the end of the article, I’ll quickly go over the other approaches to finding problems to solve, just in case this one doesn’t work out ( Although, it should ).

Scratching your own itch

The basic premise of scratching your own itch is : If something is frustrating you, it’s probably frustrating a bunch of other people too.

In my opinion, this is still the most efficient way to come up with good ideas and increase your chances of success.

And it makes sense too. By solving your own problems, you’re making sure you have an intimate understanding of the pain points, you know you are solving a real problem and most importantly : you’ll stick with it for way longer, compared to solving someone else’s problem.

What the numbers say

Based on the analysis of 50 interviews of bootstrapped products from IndieHackers.com

67.15% of bootstrappers used this method to come up with their product ideas

The average revenue of products using this approach is $3.1k/month

The median revenue of products using this approach is $25.7k/month

The highest revenue of products using this approach is $500k/month

The lowest revenue of products using this approach is $600/month

How to find your own problems, because it’s not that easy.

If you ever tried to make a list of your own problems, you may have found that it’s not as easy as it may seem. More often than not, you’ll find that the problems you come up with are boring, trivial or not painful enough.

Below is a practical system you can use to deconstruct your life and uncover problems to fix in about an hour or so. You’re going to need some kind of kanban board, I’m using trello but you can use any other similar tool.

Start by creating a new board and go through the steps below in order.

Step 1 : Define your sources of problems

From the list below, pick the sources of problems that you have or had in your life, and create a trello list for each one. The more sources of problems you have, the higher the chance of discovering a worthwhile problem to fix.

• Past and current jobs : Create a list for each job you had as well as your current job, if any.
• Own companies and startups : Create a list for every company or startup you started.
• Current and past side projects : Create a list for every side project you’ve created.
• Current and past hobbies : Create a list for every hobby you had in the past as well as the ones you have today.

By the end of this step, you should have at least half a dozen lists on your board.

Step 2 : Set problem categories for each source of problems

Next, it’s time to categorize the potential problems you can discover. To do so, create a card for each of the categories below and paste the description of the category inside the card. Then duplicate all the cards across all your existing lists.

Feel free to rephrase the category names or add other categories.

• Time intensive tasks : Tasks you felt you spent way much more time on than you should.
• Cumbersome processes : Processes or tasks where you had to use multiple tools, sites and hacks to get done.
• Inefficient processes : Processes or tasks you thought were inefficient.
• Dreadful tasks : Tasks you hate doing.
• Unused tools : Tools you or your boss paid for but only used less than half of the features.

Step 3 : Dig deep and discover your problems

At this point, it’s pretty straightforward, all you need to do is open each card, and ask yourself :

What [category_of_problems] did I encounter at [source_of_problems].

I suggest allocating an hour or two and then just doing the exercise slowly for each card in each list.

Whenever you discover a new problem, add it inside the relevant card using the template below. Or make your own template.

• Name of the problematic task or process
• A more detailed description of your frustration
• Would you pay for someone to do it for you ? [ No, Maybe, Definitely ]
• Is this a problem you’d be proud of solving ? [ No, Maybe, Definitely ]
• Without doing any research, do you think other people have the same problem ? [ I don’t know, Probably, Definitely ]
• Do you know any people who have expressed having the same problem ? [ No, Maybe, Definitely ]

During this process, you might discover problems that may instantly sound like a holy grail.

Your mind ( if it’s anything like mine ) will instantly start thinking of ways to solve the problem and coming up with product ideas. You may want to ditch the trello board and start doing research, finding competitors and sketching UIs. I would advise against that until you have at least 3 to 5 clearly defined problems.

The point is to find a problem worth solving, not just the first problem that may have some potential. I suggest forcing yourself to not leave the trello board until you are finished and picked the one problem you’d like to solve.

For every card with interesting problems that you’d like to get back to when you finish, you can add a label for faster identification. On the screenshot above, I used a green label for problems that I think are very interesting, and purple for those which may be interesting but need more research.

Other approaches to find problems to solve

If you can’t find or solve your own.

There are cases where you may not be able to extract any problems from your life experiences. You might not have much life experience because of your age or some serious condition that forces you to stay home at all times.

In those cases, the approaches below may work for you. I’ll go briefly over each one of them, and link to relevant documents where you can find more information.

Solving other people’s problems

Friends, family and random people on the internet.

This is the most popular approach after scratching your own itch.

You can uncover problems pro-actively by going to your friends, family and community and pestering them with questions about what frustrates them in their professional and personal lives until something stands out.

Or, you can be passive about it and look for what specific groups of people are asking for in forums, social networks, and online communities ( Reddit and Twitter are great for this use case ).

If you’re going down this road, I suggest you start by making a list of groups of people you’d like to help, preferably groups you identify with or like hanging out with. This will give you a starting point instead of just looking for random people with problems. It could be artists, entrepreneurs, dentists ect.

Idea Extraction for B2B markets

Idea extraction is also about identifying a specific market and asking people questions to figure out what they’re struggling with. It is mostly used to determine the problems of other businesses and revolves around cold calling businesses, and hopefully get a few meetings, and maybe even some pre-sales before you start building your solution.

If you’re okay with cold calling, this can be a very effective approach. Dane Maxwell from The Foundation has some excellent material on how to put it into practice, check out this video and this podcast.

Don’t solve problems, just build something fun

If you have some time on your hands, this approach is great!

Don’t solve problems, just get creative and pick some crazy idea that you think would be very fun to play with. Most silly apps ( of which many are profitable ) have started this way.

No business model, no plans to monetize, and no expectations. Just build something you genuinely think would be cool to have. Even better, build something you and your friends would find very cool. You may find out later on that a lot of other people find it very cool as well.

Port existing and popular products to a new platform, And tap into an already existing audience.

There are popular apps on Android that are not available on iOS and vice versa, same goes for windows and macOS.

If you have the skills to build something for one of the platforms, go look for the most popular products on the other platform, and either create an alternative, or reach out to the owner of the product for permission to port it to a different platform. You can make some sort of deal where the owner gets a commission in exchange for help with marketing, win-win.

This indie hackers interview shares some good insights on how to achieve this.

Conclusion

Pick something and get started.

Whatever approach you decide to go with, remember that it is just the tip of the iceberg. No matter what problem you decide to solve at the beginning, you will probably reiterate and pivot a few times before settling down.

Don’t spend months trying to come up with an idea for your next thing. Get started as soon as possible and use the feedback ( or lack thereof ) from your early adopters to advance in your journey.

I suggest setting a limited number of days ( 2 or 3 ) to pick your next problem to solve, and commit to it for a few weeks ( 2 or 3 ). You’ll learn so much more by just shipping something in a few weeks compared to spending all those weeks “brainstorming”.

P.S : I’m currently doing a challenge challenge the #1kB2B challenge where I try to validate and ship B2B products and get to 1k MRR, while blogging about the process every week.

Check it out on the blog : https://othmane.io

Follow me on Twitter @get_eo

Originally published at othmane.io.

Let me start by giving you some context to this story.

Exactly 20 days ago, I started a challenge I dubbed “The Ship Therapy challenge”. I named it that way because it was supposed to be a therapeutic process for me.

Therapy to treat what you might ask ? Well you see, I’m supposed to be a maker, I make digital products for a living and sell them to people & companies ( if I can find any ). Which sounds great, except that I hadn’t “made” anything at all for the past 12 months.

So what my challenge was supposed to treat is a self diagnosed condition I call “Maker Paralysis”, which to me is the equivalent of writer’s block, for makers like myself.

The rules of the challenge are simple : Every 2 weeks, build and ship a new product. And write a blog post about it.

I wasn’t very sure about my ability to do it but frankly I had run out of options. So I announced it publicly on twitter, even though I couldn’t pick a first idea to work on, my exact thought at the time was : I should at least be able to ship a tweet.

Othmane E. on Twitter

So for the past year I haven't been able to ship anything. It has caused me a great deal of anxiety and has affected other areas of my life. To fix this, I'm starting a challenge I dubbed #ShipTherapy, where I publicly ship two new products per month starting from now.

If you’re interested in reading more about the challenge, feel free to check out the earlier blog posts over here.

Where do good ideas come from ?

3 days after that first tweet, I still hadn’t been able to pick a single idea to work on from my long list of previously stored ideas.

I can’t even explain why it took me so long to just pick something, it’s not like I was looking for a perfect business opportunity. All I was trying to do was find something cool to build in less than 2 weeks.

Eventually, while daydreaming about my upcoming failure to follow up with the challenge I set, I thought to myself : Wouldn’t it be nice if I could just buy someone else’s pet project and just focus on sharing it around and doing some marketing ?

I actually could do that, side project marketplaces do exist. But I’d have to spend at least a few thousand dollars to get something even remotely interesting and not some wordpress template from flippa.

And that’s when it hit me : I would LOVE to have a marketplace with cool, cheap, and modern side projects. A place where I can just casually pick up new projects abandoned by their owners.

And as part of the maker community, I know for a fact that almost all of us are constantly starting new projects and shutting down old ones.

After 3 days of painful self doubt, everything clicked in an instant.

I Even came up with the name right away : 1Kprojects.com — Neglected side projects for less than $1000.

Building an MVP in 4 days

Although I still had about a week and a half to ship the whole thing, I loved the idea so much that I wanted it to be done by sunday and shipped by monday. The plan was just to post it on product hunt, write a blog post about the experience, and move on to the next project by the beginning of the second week. Success for me was to be able to ship anything, so shipping it early was an even greater success. But I never actually considered that this might become popular.

So I picked up a simple MVP stack of Laravel & bootstrap 4 to do things fast and clean.

I worked on it non-stop for 4 days. I’m mentioning this because it helped me realize how important it is to be completely immersed in a project with no interruptions. If you’re having doubts along the way and stopping to reconsider, you’re probably not working on the right idea.

I did stop at one point to reconsider the name as I felt like 1Kmvps would resonate more with the community. But then on the last day switched back to 1Kprojects. In retrospect, 1Kmvps probably would not have worked as well.

By the end of the week, I had the code finished and started reading on how to launch on Product Hunt correctly ( This was going to be my first PH launch ).

That’s when it hit me : I had no sellers and no buyers. Why would the buyers sign up if there are no projects ? And why would the sellers sign up if there are no buyers ?

Why pre-launching is essential

I took a step back and realized I should probably not ship this on the first week. Instead I should focus on getting at least a few projects up for sale. I was supposed to write one blog post to keep the 30 people who subscribed a week earlier after my announcement on twitter updated about my progress. Which I did, a few of them signed up as buyers but none signed up as sellers.

Next, I casually shared the project on the best maker forum ever (Indiehackers) and the /r/sideproject subreddit.

That’s when everything blew up. I received so much feedback, upvotes, comments, followers and people reaching out directly that I spent the whole day refreshing indie hackers, and answering new comments and messages.

I had not planned for that kind of response at all! I was hoping one or two people would add their projects for sale, a few more buyer subscriptions, and some feedback and encouragement. Instead, over the course of 24 hours 250 people signed up, 8 put projects on sale, and I received TONS of amazing feedback.

The post got to top of the day, top of the week, and everything was on fire. I was ecstatic, specifically because it validated my original hypothesis about the challenge : Just ship stuff, and things will work out.

With all the feedback and interest, I had to improve the marketplace before the PH launch.

I happily opened sublime text and wrote more code for the next 4 days.

If I had launched directly on PH, I would’ve missed out on all that feedback, and would’ve not implemented a bunch of crucial stuff like displaying projects on the homepage instead of just having a newsletter. I also didn’t have any monetization plan and everything was free, mainly because I didn’t think it would get that much traction and would require at least a few weeks before having enough feedback to come up with the right revenue model. And last but not least, I would not have 250+ subscribers waiting for me to launch and upvote!

I launched on PH at around 3 AM, which was 9 AM where I am based. I sent an email to the subscribers about it, and posted the link on twitter. Then things blew up again, almost exactly the same as with indie hackers but with 3 times more traffic.

The project climbed up to #1 in the first two hours after launch, and it stayed there for the rest of the day. Needless to say, I was mind blown the whole day and the day after.

Embracing weird revenue models, talking to customers and iterating all day long

While trying to figure out a revenue model, I had two obvious options :

• Make sellers pay a listing fee before submitting their projects.
• Implement an escrow solution and get a commission on successful sales.

I felt like asking a listing fee from makers for a potential $1000 sale, with no guarantee that their projects will get sold, was extremely limiting. I felt like I wouldn’t pay it.

As makers, we build primarily because we enjoy building. Selling the whole thing to someone else is never the goal, we want customers to pay for it so we can keep working on it, otherwise we’re happy to just shut it down and move on to something new.

So option 1 didn’t make sense for me at all, even though it is one of the most common models of marketplaces.

As for the second option, it required too much work, and I only had a few days before my self imposed deadline to ship it.

So I went with an uncommon model, but one I would be comfortable with : Sellers can submit their projects for free, but they would have to pay a one time fee of $19 to unlock the messages and contacts of the buyers who made an offer. You only pay the fee once per project, and you get to see all existing and future offers from buyers.

Some of the sellers, didn’t like it. One particular guy even got angry and aggressive over email. But I did believe the model was good, and tried to understand better what made these sellers have a problem with it, while others paid the fee after receiving a single offer.

Turns out, this particular group of sellers felt like they were lured into paying without knowing much about the content of the message. Which made sense.

The first change I did was require buyers to specify their intent, meaning they had to tell sellers if they just had questions, wanted to negotiate, or were ready to buy. And on the backend, I showed the intent to sellers like below :

Next, I wanted to add more transparency to make sure the seller knows exactly what he’s paying for. So I added a preview of every message they get. It looked great :

All but one of the sellers who initially said they’ll never pay the fee, did end up paying and all of them were happy with the results. Yes, even angry aggressive guy, though he didn’t reply to my email for feedback post payment

None of this would’ve been possible if I hadn’t spend the first 3 days post-launch emailing sellers all day and genuinely trying to understand the problems they had. Other users have also suggested cool features like the filtering on the homepage and the projects sold at the bottom of the site.

So instead of going back to code right after launch to build those cool features you have in mind, or starting some marketing campaign, I would suggest just spending a few days talking to your new customers while your project is still fresh in their minds. The most important things to focus on will keep coming up in the majority of the conversations.

Stats, one week later!

This story wouldn’t be complete without a detailed metrics breakdown, so here you go :

• 📈 Subscribers : 1500+
• 👨‍💻 Sellers : 180+
• 🚀 Projects : 100+
• 👥 Offers : 300+
• 💸 Projects sold : 13
• 💰 Sales : 35

Lessons learned

A few people have reached out to me asking for advice, mostly on how to get to #1 on PH. I’m not an expert on the subject but it feels like all you need to do is make sure that a few people are aware of your upcoming launch and you can reach them too support you. This can be achieved by talking about your project on social media while building, and pre-launching somewhere where your audience hangs out.

But the most important lesson I’d like to pass on, is on the effectiveness of constantly running experiments in life and work.

Everything described above has happened because I was willing to experiment and try things outside of my comfort zone. The challenge was an experiment, and I definitely wasn’t confident about it. Same goes for the writing / blogging, the twitter updates, the posts on IH and Reddit, and the revenue model.

If you’re feeling stuck on anything life, commit to doing the least comfortable thing you can think of related to what you’re stuck on.

This mindset has improved my life so much lately, and this is the first time I’ve applied it at work. So I’m really looking forward to do that a few more times.

Let’s keep in touch

This is just the first project of my challenge, and I’m not planning to quit. In fact, I’ve already started coming up with other challenges to experiment with when I’m done with this one.

if you’re interested in that sort of thing, I write about my progress at least once a week over at Othmane.io

I’m also trying to tweet regularly about what I’m working on, you can find me onTwitter ( DMs open ).

And last but not least, if you’re looking for some cool side projects or have some of your own you’d like to sell, make sure you check out 1Kprojects.

Thank you for reading!

This is different.

This is the long story of how I built and grew AppyGEN’s revenue to 6k+/month. And why I started hating it while still working full time on it, and how you can avoid going through the same thing.

AppyGEN is a native Android app builder, designed for internet marketers, or more specifically: non-developers looking to make money online.
It was launched in 2014, and since that time, I’ve done my best to keep it under the radar and basically never talk about it to anyone who was not a potential customer.

Want to read this story later? Save it in Journal.

How it all started

I’ve always loved building stuff. I made my first $1000 at 14, selling remote administration tools to wannabe hackers.

So while pursuing my college degree (in France) and struggling to pay my rent, I started taking remote freelance dev jobs whenever I could. I was making a substantial amount of money for a broke 22 year old, doing what I loved. I even started investing some of it in online poker, heck, I even built a bot to play for me (didn’t work out though).

After saving enough to pay my debts and some more to sustain my lifestyle, I decided that I could do this for a long time. So I went back to my home country (Morocco) where the cost of living was about 5 times cheaper than France.

Fast forward to a few months later, I had amassed enough money to live comfortably for the next two years. But with all my friends working on their 9 to 5 jobs all day, I got bored pretty fast.

So, I decided to start a company (with a friend) and bring the startup mindset to traditional small businesses. I remember thinking : I’ll be the first to do this so I’ll definitely have an edge in the long run. (Spoiler alert : Didn’t work).

We had the bright idea to sell a CRM to doctors who were still using pen and paper at the time (Nope, not even excel). We sold a few copies, but it quickly became obvious that most of them didn’t need our tool, there was no market for our product.

After that, we tried making a cool b2c app startup. We had no experience in mobile dev but it was fun learning everything from scratch. A few months later, we had 10.000+ users on our app, but not enough revenue. Ad revenue was too low to keep us afloat and eventually, we ran out of money to pay the office rent.

With no money and no vision for the future, we were back to square one.

The inception of AppyGEN

One night, in an effort to sharpen his Android dev skills, my partner built a simple app with a list of videos, targeting a specific trending niche.

In a matter of days, we were up to thousands of downloads from all around the world. The RPM (Revenue per 1000 impressions) was high, and almost overnight we started making a good amount of money just from the ads in that single app. So we thought, let’s make more of those apps!

There was no need for us to spend months building an original startupy app, we could just make similarly simple apps and make a ton of money!

And it worked, a month later we had enough money to pay our rent for the rest of the year. I loved automating stuff, especially if it could make me money and save me time at the same time.

So we turned our apps into templates and I made a tool where we could just input the app name, icon and content, click a button, and get a native & profitable app, ready to be published. We used the tool to make dozens of those apps until we ran out of niches to target. Since we had enough money coming in, there was no real motivation to keep doing this.

As an experiment, we’ve decided to turn our tool into a product and sell it to people looking to make money online, and I knew just the place : The Warrior Forum.

We wrote a PDF to teach the process of finding niches to target, monetizing and publishing the apps on the play store. And started selling v1 for a whopping $49 lifetime payment, including updates.

Here’s an old video of one of the early versions :

Embarrassing right? Not to the members of the warrior forum.

They were so used to overpriced bullshit courses that they couldn’t believe this simple, cheap software was helping them make a consistent and recurring revenue in a matter of days!

They loved it and sales skyrocketed.

We’ve updated the tool a few more times and raised the price to $97 per license. I loved reading the reviews and getting emails from our customers saying we’ve changed their lives. I wanted to do this forever, and quickly stopped pursuing the original vision of the company.

On the other hand, my partner who didn’t get to work on AppyGEN or enjoy it as much as I did started losing interest. So I bought his shares, and he went off to do his own thing.

Where’s my recurring revenue ?

A few months later after me and my partner parted ways, sales started dwindling and I had to take another freelance gig to make some extra money.

One day, I was having a conversation with one of AppyGEN’s customers and he shared with me his ad revenue on Skype. This guy had made hundreds of apps in less than two months, and was making 10 times what I was making from the software sales!

I was blown away, and to be honest, I also felt entitled to some of it. And that’s when it dawned on me. Why was I giving away lifetime licenses to a tool that helps you make money every month ?

The answer was simple : I had no real experience in entrepreneurship, pricing, marketing or growth. All I knew how to do was build stuff.

So I dropped my freelance gig, and embarked on a 6 month journey to learn everything about startups & entrepreneurship. As well as sharpen my web development and sysadmin skills. By the end of the learning phase I had a solid plan :

• To turn the software into a SaaS.
• To have a free plan where users could make and monetize apps in exchange for a cut from their ad revenue.
• To have a paid plan for users who want to keep 100% of their ad inventory.

It wasn’t simple. I had to figure out a way to compile native Android apps on the cloud ( emphasis on native ), and handle the ton of traffic pouring in from the apps, in real time.

I also had to keep my promise to the hundreds of early adopters who purchased the lifetime plan when the software didn’t have any server costs, and basically just give them premium features and 100% of their revenue for life ( including the thousands apps guy ).

I stopped selling the desktop software and spent another six months building the web platform. It was an extremely fulfilling experience.

SaaS is hard, making money from free users is even harder

I silently launched a beta to the existing ( lifetime ) customers and they helped me eliminate the bugs I had missed. At that point, I thought it was a done deal. All I had to do was drive some traffic.

Since users could sign up for free, I wouldn’t even have to invest time in converting them to paid users or optimizing the funnel. I’d be sharing their ad revenue and making money wether they upgrade to a paid account or not.

But still, I wasn’t very confident about my ability to manage tons of API calls from every app made through the software. So I decided to soft launch to a small audience of 200 people who had signed up to the waiting list.

This part was only supposed to take a few weeks. Just enough time for the new users to build and publish some apps and make sure that the platform does not break down under heavy load. It ended up taking months before I could get those users to publish any apps at all. There were so many things I didn’t account for, more specifically :

• Cumbersome Onboarding : Getting someone who had no development or app experience from “I want to make money online” to “I just published my first app on the play store” to “I just made my first dollar” was extremely hard to do.

I had to figure out a way to teach users how to :

• Research for profitable niches find or create copyright-free content for their apps
• Create a developer account on the play store ( And convincing them to pay the $25 fee before they made a cent )
• Publish apps and do ASO.

Also, free users lack motivation. I never had that issue with the early adopters, most likely because they paid a price to use the tool. No matter how small that price was, they weren’t going to just drop everything whenever they stumble along the way.

The new users, not so much. At the slightest whim, like “Create an icon for your app”, or “Pay the $25 google play developer fee”, they’d just close everything and disappear.

So I was back at square one again.

After spending almost a year working my ass off, I still had no recurring revenue, new server costs, and a shitload of subtle obstacles I didn’t account for and had no idea how to deal with.

Self-doubt and not changing the world like everyone else

AppyGEN was taking a toll on my personal life. I had previously disabled all my social networks to focus on it, and more than a year had gone by with nothing to show for it.

Reading the successes of other simpler products made me angry at myself, why did I have to go after such a complicated project ? Couldn’t I have just made a to-do list app ?

I also came to the conclusion that AppyGEN didn’t really help make the world a better place like every other startup I read about. It seemed to me like it was just making the play store a worse place, helping non-developers publish hundreds of unoriginal apps that only took away from the visibility and chances of more ambitious apps.

I was myself an app developer once and I could clearly see how my product ultimately harmed other developers. I started hating everything AppyGEN stands for, no matter how much money it continued to make for my existing customers.

But what else could I do ? I had already invested so much of my time into it, and I knew for a fact that it could eventually become a profitable business, plus I needed the money.

I had learned so much in the process of building the platform, and for that I was grateful. There was still a lot to learn too, and I was confident it would serve me well in my future ventures. So I decided to secretly keep working on it.

Whenever someone would ask me what I’m working on, I’d say I’m freelancing. Whenever I’d get a freelancing offer, I’d turn it down saying I had too much on my plate right now. Gone were the days where I would proudly say that I’m building an awesome SaaS.

Onboarding and motivating free users

I did my best to optimize the onboarding process as much as I could. Which was not enough considering the fact that users still had to do some work in order to be able to generate unique apps.

I didn’t want every app made through the software to look the same, and I knew there was no way they would be able to make an income just copying existing or demo apps. They had to invest some time in reading the tutorials, doing research, creating icons and assets, etc.

So I tried a bunch of things like drip campaigns, a concierge service for paid users, a forum, and a bunch of other hacks I had read about in case studies.

Although these things did help decrease churn a little bit, it wasn’t enough. Only about 5% of new users would get to the point where they got value from the software to invest more of their time in building apps and growing their revenue ( and mine ).

You’d think that if you promised someone they’d make a consistent, growing and recurring income, without requiring any upfront investment, they’d be all over it day and night. It wasn’t an onboarding or engagement problem, it was a motivation problem. And it took me some time to figure this out since none of the churned users would answer my emails when I reached out.

Completely burned out and disenchanted, I decided I’d try one last thing before giving up : Gamification.

The idea was to turn the whole thing into a game, where you learn a bunch of stuff about making profitable apps, build your app portfolio, and grow your ad revenue. All at the same time, while having fun and competing with other members.

It felt like the perfect ( and only ) answer to all my problems, so I scrapped about 50% of the existing code and re-wrote it in a way that made gamification an essential and required part of the process.

New users would automatically be assigned a “rank” and two or three “missions” they needed to complete in order to move to the next level, every mission had a step by step tutorial on how to complete it and every time a user gets to a higher level, they’d get rewarded with a new rank and a shiny badge icon.

Users could see their progress in real time and compete for the top 10 spots on the leaderboard, automatically.

It worked great and everyone loved it!

Dividing the onboarding process in terms of “levels” also helped me figure out ( thanks to mixpanel’s analytics ) that anyone who got to level 3 in the first week, would most likely keep coming back, making more apps, and eventually making his first dollar.

It was one of those amazing Aha moments that got me into entrepreneurship in the first place.

Before I knew it, the conversion rate from new user to active user ( level 3+ ) skyrocketed from 5% to 45%. I could finally start driving traffic to the site and working on other things like acquisition and retention.

Growing slowly, quietly and automatically

Eventually, we reached a 1000+ active users and monthly revenue had reached a consistent $3k+/Month for the past 6 months. 70% of it from sharing the ad revenue of free users, and 30% from paid subscriptions.

I couldn’t understand why users who were making a thousand dollars in ad revenue each month, didn’t upgrade their accounts, after all it only costs $25. Turns out, a lot of these users were living in countries where they couldn’t have a Visa card or PayPal account, and just couldn’t pay me even if they wanted to.

In terms of revenue, this worked out fine for me, I’d probably be making a lot less money without the rev-share plan and I wouldn’t have been able to offer the service for free.

Remember earlier when I said I hated what AppyGEN stands for ?
The recurring revenue didn’t fix that, I still felt too self conscious about the whole thing, and I would constantly think about it whenever I was working on it.

It’s hard growing a business you hate, no matter how much money it made or could make. But I couldn’t just ignore it and be contented with the current revenue, hoping it will never drop. It happened once, one of my biggest earners had lost his play store account due to policy violations and overnight the revenue dropped to 2K until the same guy decided to get back at it. So I had to keep a continuous flow of new users at all times.

I sucked at seo and paid advertising, press, social and content marketing were out of the question since it would put me and the software in front of all kinds of readers, and I wasn’t ready for that.

In retrospect, a bunch of my worries were exclusively in my head, but that’s what you get when you spend so much time keeping your work to yourself, convinced that what you’re doing is bad.

Although I still enjoyed adding new features, I still felt bad about sharing it with the world, and acquisition is all about sharing nowadays.

So I came up with the idea to get my users to share it, so that I didn’t have to. To do so, I set up a very enticing referral program :

Users could share their referral link and get a 10% cut of the ad revenue from every app the referred user makes, forever.

For example, if user A brings in user B, and user B makes an app that brings in $10/day, user A would get $1 every day without lifting a finger.
If user B decides to upgrade to a premium account, user A would get a commission every time user B pays his subscription.

And it worked! some users even stopped making apps and focused solely on referring new users.

A few months later, AppyGEN’s revenue doubled to reach $6k+/Month.

Lessons learned

Today, I am actually grateful that AppyGEN is bringing in enough money for me to work on whatever I want. But more importantly, I am so grateful about the hard lessons I learned along the way.

Hopefully, you were able to extract some of those lessons through this post. If not, here are the most important rules you should keep in mind for your next project :

• Making money should never be your main motivation when working on something new.
• Never, ever, keep your work to yourself. Share as much as you can, as soon as you can.
• Build something you’d be proud of 5 years from now.

If you have questions or want to get in touch or want to work with me on something, I’d love to chat. Email me (eothmane.io[at]gmail.com), follow me on Twitter (@get_eo) & Medium (Othmane E.), or leave a comment below.

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