I've crossed A$100,000 in app sales as a solo developer.
My first sale was US$7.49. I was sitting at my PhD desk working on my thesis.
It was my third attempt at a startup.
Here's how it happened, with the original posts
I've crossed A$100,000 in app sales as a solo developer.
My first sale was US$7.49. I was sitting at my PhD desk working on my thesis.
It was my third attempt at a startup.
Here's how it happened, with the original posts
Before this, I spent 2 years on a project that made $0.
I spent 95% of my time on tests, styling and page load times.
One thought really hit me: I was spending all this time optimising something I didn't even have a single user for.
By the end, I was wondering if I was cut out for making my own apps.
This time, I picked a problem I had myself. Almost every single day.
I was tired of uploading files to converter sites and looking up how to use command-line tools every time I needed to use them.
So I built a drag-and-drop app that converts files locally.
How to Convert. I shared it on Reddit on 4 Feb 2025.
It was scrappy, buggy and a lot of things didn't work. But I didn't want to waste time on it without users again.
About 15 minutes later Stripe pinged. US$7.49.
Someone had actually paid for something I'd made. It was honestly one of the best feelings I've had in my life.
The next day, I posted: “This community changed my life yesterday!”
Here's the screenshot I shared. A$130.20 on a graph that had been flat at zero.
The replies gave me work to do.
Someone asked about shrinking files. Three days after the launch post, I shared a demo making a video 20x smaller.
That became my life for quite a while afterwards: read the comments, build the useful thing, come back and show it.
July 2025: I wanted to make a photomosaic for an anniversary gift.
Naturally, I ended up building an entire tool 😂
That became Pictiler. It turns your photos into a mosaic, entirely in your browser.
It went viral on hacker news. Although, sales are slow, likely because it's not something people really NEED as much
I checked the numbers. Through 7 Oct, roughly A$111,400 in lifetime sales.
The biggest change was learning to ship something scrappy and useful, find out if people wanted it, and keep listening.
To everyone who bought my apps, reported a bug or asked for a feature: thank you.
And to whoever bought that first US$7.49 copy: you changed my life
Before this, I spent 2 years on a project that made $0.
I spent 95% of my time on tests, styling and page load times.
One thought really hit me: I was spending all this time optimising something I didn't even have a single user for.
By the end, I was wondering if I was cut out for making my own apps.
This time, I picked a problem I had myself. Almost every single day.
I was tired of uploading files to converter sites and looking up how to use command-line tools every time I needed to use them.
So I built a drag-and-drop app that converts files locally.
How to Convert. I shared it on Reddit on 4 Feb 2025.
It was scrappy, buggy and a lot of things didn't work. But I didn't want to waste time on it without users again.
About 15 minutes later Stripe pinged. US$7.49.
Someone had actually paid for something I'd made. It was honestly one of the best feelings I've had in my life.
The next day, I posted: “This community changed my life yesterday!”
Here's the screenshot I shared. A$130.20 on a graph that had been flat at zero.
The replies gave me work to do.
Someone asked about shrinking files. Three days after the launch post, I shared a demo making a video 20x smaller.
That became my life for quite a while afterwards: read the comments, build the useful thing, come back and show it.
26 Apr 2025: 500 paying users, without spending a dollar on ads.
I was sharing on Reddit, Hacker News and Threads. X didn't like me much then.
The pitch was simple: your files stay on your computer, and you don't need to learn the command line.
People understood it.
This is the milestone that mattered most to me.
In January, I was struggling to find work and pay rent after 3 years on a PhD stipend.
By May, the app had earned enough to sustain me for the next 8 months.
It bought me time to keep building.
Meanwhile, How to Convert kept growing.
July 2025: 1,000 paying users.
January 2026: 2,200+ people in 77 countries.
Batch conversions, compression, cropping, more formats. A lot of it came from requests on those original posts.
May 2026: I shared ShotGlass.
I'd been jumping between four apps to make each product demo (+ these had expensive subscriptions)
So I built a screen recorder with automatic zooms, screenshots and cinematic 3D scenes.
Making software had given me another problem worth solving.
It had a bigger launch day than How to Convert (and I'm continuing to grow it now)
