All tests run on an 8-year-old MacBook Air. All results from shipping 7 Mac apps as a solo developer. No sponsored opinion. Seven apps. Twelve months. One developer. Here's what I'd tell myself at app number one.
Ship earlier than you're comfortable with
The first version of every app I shipped was incomplete. That's correct. The users who buy version 1.0 are telling you what they actually need. No amount of building in isolation produces that signal. The features I was most proud of at launch often weren't the ones users cared about. The features users wanted most were often things I hadn't thought of. Ship, then iterate.
Free tools are more valuable than paid tools at the start
HiyokoLogcat is free and open source. It's driven more paid app sales than any other marketing I've done. A free tool that solves a real problem builds trust and audience. Users who trust your free tool buy your paid tools. The funnel works.
The platform matters less than the problem
I agonized over Gumroad vs App Store, Tauri vs Electron, Rust vs Swift. None of these decisions mattered as much as: does this solve a real problem for a real person who will pay for it? Pick a platform and build. Optimize the platform decision later.
AI makes solo development viable at a scale it wasn't before
I couldn't have shipped 7 apps this fast without AI assistance. Not because AI writes the code — it doesn't, not reliably. But because AI compresses the time between "I don't know how this works" and "I understand this well enough to build it." The bottleneck shifted from "can I figure this out" to "do I have time to build it." That's a better bottleneck. If you're a solo developer who's been hesitant about AI tooling — it's not about replacing your judgment. It's about spending less time being stuck and more time building.
The things that didn't matter
- Perfect architecture on v1
- Comprehensive test coverage before shipping
- Having a large audience before launching
- Waiting until I felt ready
None of these mattered. Shipping mattered. Everything else is refinement.
What actually moved the needle
- Solving a problem I had myself
- Writing about what I built
- Making the free tool good enough that people shared it
- Responding to every user question personally
Small things. Done consistently.
If this was useful, a ❤️ helps more than you'd think — thanks!
Hiyoko Kit → https://hiyokomtp.lemonsqueezy.com/checkout/buy/2c94dd0f-e28a-4a17-8efc-7bd93087d46d
X → @hiyoyok