Monetizing Your Side Project
summary
A playbook with concrete numbers and tactics: an app (Mealime) hits 1 million installs and $50,000/month and grew via ASO that drove 1,000 downloads per day while a newer app (Clearful) only gets 50–100/day; RevenueCat reports ~17% of apps reach $1k MRR. Start with tight positioning, spend half your time on acquisition channels (ASO, ads, content, tools, PR, social, community), use subscriptions (monthly + annual at 50% discount with trials), A/B test paywalls (can 2–4x revenue), and track install→trial (3–7%), trial→paid (~37%), install→paid (~2%).
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chapters (21)
- 0:00Monetizing side projects
- 1:25Revenue of $1k/month
- 2:07Pirate metrics for growth
- 3:10Product positioning
- 5:57User acquisition strategies
- 7:19App Store Optimization
- 9:49App Store Ads
- 11:34Content marketing
- 12:57Engineering as marketing
- 14:01Press and PR
- 15:24Social media growth
- 16:49Building app community
- 18:14Onboarding best practices
- 21:49Monetization strategies
- 23:13Subscription models
- 26:07Testing paywalls
- 29:18Retention strategies
- 31:23Nudging active users
- 33:12Referrals and reviews
- 34:13Pirate metrics summary
- 34:55Closing business thoughts
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