What you get out of developing an app

About 7 years ago my brother Christoph and I decided to build an app together as a side project - because how hard could it be if you know how to program?

What looked like a promising idea turned out to be the start of building multiple apps. Each made it to production, like häpps - Yay! 🎉 But guess what? None of them went viral and we didn't make a single penny with them.),

So, was it worth it? Totally! And here's why.

What it's worth

Even though we were already decent software developers when we started, I am sure we would never be in our current positions without building apps together. We both work as software architects, full-time developers, consultants, and product owners.

Bringing our ideas to life was much more complex than we would have thought. Building from scratch to product, and not just working on some unfinished side projects, was completely exceeding our usual skillset as software developers.

We did everything along this way on our own, from:

• frontend to backend

• wireframing to infrastructure

• product decisions to legal requirements

• user experience to software architecture

• distributing flyers to hiring freelancers

• creating marketing texts to interviewing people

• starting projects to stopping them before losing our sanity and dignity

• and so much more

When we started, we didn't have any idea of most of these things. And behind every door we opened, we encountered another world of complexity. It was and still is a constant journey of learning new things.

But after opening many of those doors, my view of my job and skills has changed. Having insight into all these topics helps me to keep an eye on the big picture, appreciate what it takes to make a product successful, and learn what I'm good at and where I should get help from others.

Actually, we did earn money with it

I now have a good full-time job where I can apply all the things I have learned on a daily basis. And talking to most of my colleagues, not many can look back on such a range of experiences that is not only focused on the tech side.

Although we didn't make any money directly from the apps, we earn money from this experience in our jobs now. Because we use it to help other people. And this effect is a long-lasting one, even if AIs might replace our jobs very soon. So although we have put hundreds of hours of work into the venture, we are sure it has actually paid off.

Welcome to Appventure Time!

Learning things by doing them yourself is invaluable. But we faced many challenges along the way where we would have been happy to take a shortcut, avoid dead ends and not find them out the hard way.

That’s why we've decided to share our experiences and the lessons we've learned on this journey. We want to share our decisions about technical issues, business issues, fuck-ups, personal learnings, and much more. For example:

• Why we did not choose a cloud-native infrastructure and what we did instead

• The real costs to develop and run our app

• App launch - expectations vs reality

• Approach and challenges of implementing a real-time chat with push notifications

• Coping with legal requirements & support

• and much more!

So join us as we explore the world of app building and all the fun and challenges that come with it. 😊
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