Happy Monday, everyone!

It’s Josh again! Last issue was a Wednesday, last Monday was nothing at all, and this one is on time. We’re getting there 😅

And this is the issue I’ve been waiting for. A couple weeks ago I introduced you to Robin and Michelle and said the whole point of following journeys is that we get to check back in later. Well… they both wrote in! Wins and bruises in the same email, and I’m so glad we get to read them together.

My own stuff? Both Shipaton apps are still in that stage where I keep telling myself “it’s close” 😅 More on that when there’s something you can actually tap.

Oh, and Shipaton has officially started! My feeds are already filling up with people building in public and I cannot wait to watch all of it 🚢

🧭 Journey check-ins

Robin Kanatzar

Robin (@RobinKanatzar) had a couple of weeks that nobody plans for. There were wildfires and evacuations near her in France, and she wrote to me from temporary evacuation housing.

She kept working through it. Updates for MyCommute, plus ASO work on both MyCommute and her Blackjack trainer. She worked with an ASO expert to figure out which markets and keywords to go after, so now instead of blindly targeting 30 countries she can focus on the 5 to 10 where she can actually rank.

And now she waits.

Now I’m at the hardest part: waiting. Hopefully here in 2-6 weeks, I’ll see a boost in app store rankings and organic downloads. Fingers crossed!

Her update this weekend had the news I was hoping for: the fires near her are contained, and she and her home are safe 🤍 I’m so glad.

On the app side, MyCommute downloads are ticking up, but everybody is perfectly happy on the free plan, so she’s adding analytics this week to figure out how to make Premium worth it. Or as she put it: “Users are great, but a few paid users are even better!”

And now she’s trying to turn those weeks into something useful for other people. While she was living it, she couldn’t find a fire tracker that gave her the alerts she actually needed, so she started building one. She’s cleaning it up now to enter in Shipaton’s Peace Prize category.

Hopefully someone else out there living near a wildfire will find it useful, too. Wish me luck!

Follow Robin’s journey →

Michelle (Saku Studio)

Michelle (@miesvdakker, of Saku Studio) hit €400 in revenue over the last 28 days 🥳

It’s still not enough to cover all the bills, but it’s a nice milestone and a good sign that things are moving in the right direction.

But the same email also had a rough first in it. On July 23 she got her first ever refund request. No message, no explanation, just gone.

That honestly bummed me out… It’s something I’ll have to learn to let go of, because I’m sure more will come eventually. 😉

Everybody talks about your first bad review. Nobody talks about the first refund 🥲

She and Joost also launched Bloei, their pregnancy nutrition app, and they’re really proud of it. Getting it in front of people has been the hard part. They built a dedicated website for the first time and reached out to a bunch of media outlets, and now they’re after the thing that actually helps at this stage: real feedback from real users. They’re giving it away free to anyone willing to share their thoughts, so if you’re pregnant or trying (or you know someone who is), go grab it and tell them what you think. That’s a genuinely useful thing you can do for a fellow indie in about ten minutes ❤️

And she’s in Shipaton too! Her new app is called Mica, she’s building it a proper website this time (taking the Bloei lessons with her), and she’s hoping to get a TestFlight out soon for early feedback.

Follow Michelle’s journey →

⭐ A familiar face just shipped

Chad Etzel was in issue #60. That was 2021, back when he was the Sticker Doodle guy. Five years later he’s still at it, and he just shipped something new 🥳

🚀👾🚀 NeoCam is officially LIVE on the App Store!

Turn your iPhone into a powerful 8-bit camera. Pixelate. Dither. Shoot. It’s Game Boy Camera for the modern age.

NeoCam pixelates and dithers your camera feed live, so you’re framing the shot already seeing the 8-bit version instead of filtering it afterward. It comes with five palettes (1 Bit, 2 Bit, GamePal, Mermaid, and Hope) and three sliders for exposure, pixelation, and dither strength.

My favorite part: you can make your own palettes and browse thousands that other people have made, everything from CGA to Game Boy. A whole little palette scene, inside a camera app 😍 It also does the small stuff right, like using the Action button or an AirPods stem as a shutter, and letting you re-edit a shot later without losing the original.

It’s free, and NeoCam Plus is a one-time $5.99 (no subscription in sight!) for library imports, higher quality exports, more aspect ratios, and no watermark. Go give it a download and go make some wonderfully crunchy pixels 👾

📬 Look at me

More of you sent in things you shipped, and I love this section more every week. Here’s what landed:

SeqTimer by Dominik Muggli. An interval timer where you build named, color-coded steps into repeatable groups and run them hands-free with Live Activity, Dynamic Island, and audio countdowns. It’s his first app! And he built it for a reason a lot of first apps exist: everything else was either a subscription or locked to one specific purpose, and he just wanted something simple and flexible 😌

VariAlarm by Nhat. If you’ve ever scrolled a wall of alarms trying to remember which one is for tomorrow, this one is for you. Calendar-style recurrence (every N weeks, only between certain dates, skip or move one without touching the rest), groups of alarms you can drop onto a day, and automation rules built with App Intents that schedule alarms straight from your calendar events, all visible from Widgets and Live Activities. Stever Robbins called it “the alarm Apple should’ve built,” which is a heck of a thing to have said about your app 🔥

Bird Chimes by Ensar Baba. The Apple Watch has that lovely little chime on the hour and the Mac never got one, so Ensar made it: a menu bar app that plays one of 18 real bird recordings every hour (or every 15 or 30 minutes), with Quiet Hours, and it politely shuts up during Focus modes. Free for your first 10 chimes. Such a delightfully specific thing to build 😊

Dicom Viewer by Ed Cafferata. A free app for viewing DICOM medical images (X-rays, CT, MRI, ultrasound) right on your iPhone or iPad, with everything staying on device. No account, no cloud upload. He wrote the DICOM parser himself in Swift with zero dependencies 🤯 and you can go read it, because it’s open source. Version 2.1 adds a cine player for multi-frame studies, Window/Level presets, a series navigator, and frame export.

Compact Contacts by Çağlar Serdar. If your address book is big enough that going card by card in Apple’s Contacts feels like a slog, this gives you a dense, sortable table over that exact same system database. Fast local search, columns you pick, Saved Views, keyboard-friendly editing, and no extra account or sync service. Version 1.1 adds bulk editing that previews what’s about to change, which is the right way to do bulk editing 🙌 One-time $12.99.

Building or updating something? Send it to lookatme@indiedevmonday.com and it might show up here.

👀 Who should we follow next?

Nominations are always open. If you’re building something (your first app or your fifth, a game, an open source project, anything at all) I’d love to hear about it ❤️

Hit reply and tell me:

  • What you’re building
  • Where you are in the journey
  • What you’re hoping to do next

I’m not looking for polished success stories. I’m looking for the ones that are still being written.

Thank you to everybody who made it to this footer! And thank you especially to Robin and Michelle for sending the honest version instead of the highlight reel ❤️

See you next Monday 👋