This year my goal was to build 3 apps and make a lot of money with them, and now it’s July and I’ve made a grand total of $0.00 😅. I’ve always been someone very focused on making a lot of money, and that’s why making money with apps was a goal for this year, but it hasn’t worked out so far.

My first app built from scratch all the way to the stores was Stamp. I built it with a friend in less than a month during my company’s break, picked a niche I love which is travel, and decided to create an app that generated a personalized map of the countries the user had already visited. And you could add photos, comments about the country, and the coolest part was being able to share on social a little video with the map or a little globe showing the countries and how many places you’d traveled. The app looked beautiful, people always complimented the design and how fun it was to share and all that, we were super excited about the app thinking “we’re going to make some money with this,” “our first app and we’re already going to hit solid numbers.” But that’s not what happened 😅, the numbers weren’t great, we had 600 downloads, people started the trial and after 3 days they canceled, nobody converted to a paid plan.

And I think the two things we got wrong were, both founders were technical and knew nothing about marketing and distribution, and the decision to put a relatively expensive monthly plan on an app people don’t need and wouldn’t use every day because it’s travel, which most people do 1x/2x a year, I think that was the big mistake. On top of not marketing it at all, months after shutting the project down I keep thinking about how much I could have done differently. In these past months I’ve studied more about marketing, distribution, and product, which were the areas where I was weaker because of a very technical background. We could have started the app charging a lower lifetime access price to attract more users, we had a feature that would have been really easy to turn into viral TikTok and Instagram videos by hiring niche UGCs. And only after that, add more features that actually helped travelers day to day so a monthly subscription would make more sense.

After Stamp failed I decided to get out of the house a bit and meet more people, went to some happy hours, meetups, and ended up becoming friends with a guy who was building a really cool travel app, where you told it where you wanted to go, for how many days, and answered about your tastes, preferences, what you didn’t like and all that. And the app generated a 100% personalized itinerary based on that person’s tastes. I loved the idea because it lined up so much with what Stamp could have been, and he ended up inviting me to be CPO and build the app together. As I said before, I was really focused on learning more about the areas I didn’t own yet, and the one I liked most was product and I had told him that, and that’s why the invite came. Besides him as CEO, we had a perfect team with developers, two people focused on marketing, and me as the product lead. I immediately thought, “there’s no way this goes wrong this time, we have a perfect team that clicks, people fully focused on marketing, we can ship anything now,” but I was wrong again 😅.

Our team was really good, we had excellent engineers, our CEO was also a designer and programmer so when we needed him he always figured it out, we had our marketing team focused on creating content for TikTok and Instagram to warm up the accounts so when we launched the app we’d have at least a small audience. Our videos had solid reach, in a month we got more than 200 followers, 12k likes, and several videos with thousands of views. And our product was really good (modesty aside), polished design, we had everything to make it work this time, every gap that had made Stamp fail was either filled with what I’d learned through studying during that time or with other teammates who were super capable.

But if you were great, the team was perfect, what went wrong? Our plans weren’t to stay a trip generator forever, we planned for Toma (yes, that’s the name in Portuguese, “Toma” is slang for “here, take it!”, which gave us a lot of fun ideas for viral content) to become the last travel app travelers would need. Beyond generating the itinerary, we were already working on the product side to build a feature where you could do your whole trip in the app, from generating itineraries to booking hotels, flights, and experiences, all without leaving the app. I was already interviewing people in the niche to understand how to build that the best way, until this bomb dropped: “Introducing TikTok GO: A new way to discover and book experiences on TikTok”, TikTok simply launched the feature we were planning as the future of our app, and it hit us like a bucket of cold water. How is our app’s distribution channel building a feature that is going to swallow us 🫥. Some teammates completely lost steam after that, some of us still wanted to keep going (me included), we might never become a giant company making millions because TikTok would shrink our profit, but it was still a really cool app, we’d do it differently, closer to users, something more organic you know, plus we had a really nice work environment, I could easily have worked with that team for many years. But since some people checked out we couldn’t keep the project going, we tried thinking of other app ideas but nothing connected the team like before, because we all love to travel so it was something we did with real energy, and that’s how another app I tried to build died.

And here we are today, after two failures this year trying to make money through apps, I took some time to rest, reflect on everything that happened, and then decided I’m going to stop chasing something just because it might make me money (even though both apps were about things I really love, not only for money but also for fun), I’m going to try to build something now just for fun, because I like it and to learn new things, taking off that pressure that it only counts if it makes money. This third app is going to be the turning point, instead of focusing on how much money I’ll make, I want to focus on how much I can learn and enjoy while doing it. Right now I work for a company abroad, I already make a good salary, why keep chasing money forever instead of doing something simply because I like it, because it’s fun, or because I want to learn something new? I think that shift is going to make all the difference now. And I’ll be sharing in the next posts what the next steps are, everything I want to do, but short version the goal now is kind of to do Build in Public and Learn in Public, writing about everything I’m learning, showing the work and how I’m doing it.