I built an app for expectant dads. It made $22K in its first month. Here are 5 things I learned. A while ago, I noticed something that seemed obvious once I saw it. There are a ton of pregnancy apps out there, but the vast majority are (understandably) built for mums. Meanwhile, a lot of first-time dads are basically thinking: “Okay… what am I actually supposed to be doing?” So I decided to build an app specifically for expectant fathers. You can check it out here. The idea was to give dads a simple way to follow the pregnancy, understand what their partner is going through, know how they can actually help, and prepare for becoming a dad. I launched it expecting it to be a fairly small experiment. In its first month, it generated just over $22,000 in revenue. I'm obviously delighted with that, but the process taught me a few things that I think are more interesting than the revenue number itself. Here are the 5 biggest lessons: 1. You don't need an original idea. You need an underserved angle. I didn't invent pregnancy apps. I didn't invent parenting apps. I didn't even invent apps for dads. What I found was a very specific audience that I felt wasn't being served particularly well. That changed the way I think about ideas. Instead of asking, “What hasn't been invented yet?”, I now think it's more useful to ask: “What already works, but could work much better for a specific group of people?” 2. Being niche is a feature, not a limitation. It was tempting to broaden the app. Why not make it for both parents? Why not cover pregnancy AND the first few years? Surely that gives me a bigger market? But “a pregnancy app for parents” is forgettable. “A pregnancy app for dads” immediately tells you whether it's for you. I think narrowing the audience actually made the product easier to build AND easier to market. 3. Distribution is at least as important as the product. This was probably my biggest lesson. As developers/builders, it's very easy to spend another week tweaking an onboarding screen instead of figuring out how you're actually going to get 1,000 people to see it. Nobody cares about the tiny UI improvement if nobody knows your app exists. I started treating distribution as part of building the product rather than something that happens after the product is finished. That mindset shift made a huge difference. 4. Don't be scared to charge people. This one was surprisingly difficult. When you've built something yourself, it's very easy to undervalue it. You start thinking: “Will anyone really pay this?” “Should I just make this feature free?” “Maybe I need more features before I can charge that much.” Eventually I realised I was asking the wrong question. The question wasn't whether I thought the app was worth paying for. It was whether users did. And the only way to find that out was to put a price on it. 5. Launch before you're comfortable. I could have kept building for months. There were features I wanted to add, screens I wanted to improve and dozens of little things that didn't feel finished. But eventually I shipped it. And within a few days, real users taught me more about the product than I had learned in months of building it. Some things I thought mattered didn't. Other things I'd barely thought about turned out to matter a lot. Version 1 doesn't need to prove you've built the perfect product. It needs to give you enough information to build version 2. The $22K is obviously the headline number, but honestly the bigger win for me was proving that people actually wanted this. I went from: “I think this is a good idea.” to: “People I don't know are willing to pay money for this.” Those are two very different things. I'm still figuring a lot of this out, so I'm definitely not presenting myself as someone who has cracked the app business. But this launch has completely changed the way I think about building products. Find a specific group of people. Understand a problem they actually have. Build something focused enough that they immediately understand why it's for them. Figure out distribution early. Then ship the thing. Happy to answer questions about the launch, numbers, pricing, development or what worked/didn't work.   submitted by   /u/Fine-Resource7415 [link]   [comments]