Employment to 14 bucks: 2025 in Review

As is common this time of year, we sit back, look at the past twelve months and reflect. Well, some of us do. I know plenty of people who switch off at 10pm and go to bed. Just another day. That's fine, and I get it.

For me, while I don't celebrate the new year like I used to in the pre-children era, I do acknowledge it. I stay up to see it in. It's a reset, a fresh start, a time to make changes where needed. The best time to start something is now, but second best is a new year. I'll be making some changes in 2026, but those are health related rather than project related, so I'll keep them private for now.

Going Solo

As you may or may not know, I left full time employment on 31st August 2025 to go solo. While it's great not being interrupted with questions while trying to focus on getting things done, and it's nice not having to change the same thing repeatedly because the ticket stakeholder kept shifting scope every other iteration, I've worked more hours per week than I ever did before. I went from 37.5 hours to 60 hours a week. Expected, really. You have to do everything yourself.

Work life balance? Forget it.

I've always struggled with that particular juggling act. When you enjoy what you do, you don't see it as a job, and the lines between work and life blur. I find myself wondering if I bite off more than I can chew. Four apps in four months? Madness.

You often see YouTube developers with their "let's create 20 apps in a year" videos. I don't want to be one of them and never intended to be. I have disdain for those who push out a multitude of rubbish in a short period hoping something sticks. I'd like to think the apps I've built were built to serve a purpose and built well. Not just sitting back watching AI work its magic and publishing the results to the App Store.

That said, I create the websites for each app too. I'd like to think the effort I've put into each of them shows.

The Kanodo Rejection Saga

Before I continue, some updates on my Kanban app, Kanodo. At the time of writing, it's still pending App Store review. It's been rejected multiple times, and I've had to clean up a few issues along the way.

Issue 1: App Entitlements

The review team asked why com.apple.security.files.downloads.read-write was enabled in the app's entitlements. I was under the impression this was needed, so I responded:

The app includes an attachment export feature that allows users to save card attachments to their local filesystem. The Downloads folder is used as the sensible default location for these exports. Users can change this to any other folder via Settings > Attachments > Default Download Location. The entitlement is required to enable this default behaviour without requiring users to manually select a folder before their first export.

Issue 2: Entitlements Again

My response was rejected. Apparently com.apple.security.files.downloads.read-write isn't needed for this. Easy enough. I removed it from the entitlements, created a new build, and resubmitted.

Issue 3: App Window Accessibility

Rejected again. This time related to app window accessibility. When a card window is open and you close the main Kanodo window, there was no way to get back to the main window other than through the dock icon menu. The fix was simply adding a "Show Main Window" option to the Window menu. Resubmitted.

Issue 4: Preview Videos

Rejected again. This time it was just the App Store preview videos. I had three of them, but all three started with a 2-3 second intro fading into the demo footage. I did the same for AudiBar with no problem. I'm not sure why this is suddenly an issue.

I was told the videos did not show how the app looked or how it functioned. My response:

I don't quite understand the rejection. The three video previews show the app being used. It quite clearly shows users what the app looks like and how different aspects of the app work. Please elaborate with specifics, because the rejection makes no sense. If you are basing your decision on the first 2-3 second intro, then I have to ask: why were my other apps with similar intros not rejected?

Current status: pending review with that response.

Christmas Eve Crunch

During the weeks leading up to Christmas, I managed to complete the website for Kanodo along with the user guide. Christmas Eve, while everyone else was out doing last minute gift hunting, I was recording demo videos for YouTube and the App Store. During recording I came across a few small niggles, so I got them fixed and resubmitted during the rejection stages I mentioned earlier.

I work too much. Christmas Eve and there I was, working until 2am into Christmas Day. Up at 7am. Did someone mention work life balance?

2025 Statistics

Before we get into website and app stats, don't laugh. I didn't expect anything remotely mediocre at this point, let alone okay, great, or amazing. The websites and apps have barely been live for four months, let alone the whole year. I've done zero marketing and promotion for anything.

Bear those things in mind as you chuckle to yourself.

Website Visitor Stats (Fathom Analytics)

I use Fathom for analytics, and unfortunately ad blockers prevent the JavaScript from loading. I have no problem with this, but it doesn't give a true representation of actual visitors. We can only collate what we can.

Google Search Console

To give a complete picture, here are the stats from Google Search Console for the whole year.

App Stats (App Store)

These stats are for the whole year, even though nothing was published until October. Note that Chronode will always have a different trajectory due to being self published, as it can't be sandboxed for the App Store.

As I mentioned, nothing is impressive and I never expected it to be. The interesting thing for me is AudiBar. The smallest and easiest to build of all the apps, yet it had sales without any marketing or promotion. I'm not sure if this was simply due to it being the first published app and having more exposure time, or whether people genuinely found it useful. We'll see what 2026 brings after I've applied some promotional effort.

January 2026: Marketing Month

Four months of building, zero months of telling anyone about it. That's going to change in January.

I've never been comfortable with self promotion. The introvert in me would much rather build things quietly and hope people somehow find them. But "hope" isn't a marketing strategy, and sitting at $14 total revenue makes that painfully clear. If I want this solo thing to work, I have to actually tell people these apps exist.

So I did what any developer would do: bought a Udemy course. For £15 I got "The Complete App Marketing Course", which I discovered after checkout was published in 2017 and never updated. Half the platforms mentioned don't exist anymore. But there was enough useful foundation to work with, and with Claude's help researching what's actually current and effective in 2024 and 2025, I put together a ten section marketing plan.

The guiding principle throughout: market with integrity. No fake reviews, no inflated numbers, no misleading tactics. Just honest promotion of things I genuinely built to solve real problems.

I've written up the full plan in a separate post covering ASO, review prompts, Product Hunt (the pragmatic backlink only approach), Reddit strategy, and everything else. If you're a solo developer figuring out the same stuff, it might save you some research time: My App Marketing Plan for 2026

Next Project

In previous posts I mentioned I was undecided on what the next project would be and what platform it would target. iOS mobile app? Web based app using Laravel? I've decided I'm a little burnt out on Xcode and SwiftUI for now. I'm getting back into Laravel, as PHP is my main programming language of choice. It's what I know best.

One of the main reasons for returning to Laravel is that I don't want to be left behind. As with any language and its associated libraries, frameworks, and ecosystems, things change rapidly. New tooling comes along. Best practices improve. I don't want to come back to Laravel in a year's time and find that much has changed beyond the core fundamentals.

My next project is a Laravel and Livewire (TALL stack) web app I've called Exoden. A simple and secure invert management system for hobbyists and collectors. I've kept tarantulas and scorpions over the years and recently got back into it again. I found the current solutions for managing collections of such animals complicated, convoluted, and sometimes sporting UI that's bad and outdated. I'm going to offer a simpler, cleaner, and more elegant approach.

Check out the landing page if you're interested.

Wrapping Up

So that's 2025. Four apps built, three submitted, one approved, fourteen dollars earned. Not exactly retiring to the Bahamas just yet.

But the foundation is there. The apps exist. The websites are live. The SEO is already showing signs of life with decent search positions for sites that are only a few months old. January is when the real experiment begins: can honest marketing, applied consistently, turn "people don't know these exist" into "people are actually buying these"? I genuinely don't know. But I'm about to find out.

Happy New Year to those celebrating, and a respectful nod to those who think it's just another Wednesday.

To my small but mighty customer base: thank you for taking a punt on an unknown developer. Every download and sale this year genuinely mattered. To fellow solo devs in the trenches: may your 2026 have fewer App Store rejections and more organic traffic. We'll get there.

Until next time, happy new year. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to play 7 Days to Die. Oh wait. I gave the PC to my nephew. Marketing it is then...