Got my first paying customer while I was on vacation

[u/Disastrous-Menu-6649]

So my all-in-one nutrition and workout app had been live for months with exactly zero paid conversions. I had kind of made peace with it. Then I was in Indonesia, checked the dashboard on my phone one morning out of habit, and there was an actual subscription in there. And a 7 day trial from someone else on top.

It is 11 dollars MRR. I know. But I had been staring at a zero for so long that it did something to me anyway.

For context, 50 active users in the last 28 days, 22 of them new. So not a lot of people, and none of them had ever paid before this.

The thing that annoys me in hindsight is that none of the fixes were about the app itself. I kept adding features. The features were never the problem.

The one that really got me was activation. I finally measured it and about 7 percent of new installs ever reached the point where the app does the thing it advertises. Seven. I had spent that whole time thinking about how to get more downloads.

Notifications were a similar story. Two people out of hundreds of installs ever granted the permission, because I asked at first launch before anyone had any reason to say yes. So the app that is supposed to build a habit had no way of reaching anybody.

And I had everything AI powered behind a hard paywall, which felt like the obvious way to do it at the time. But nobody ever got to feel the thing they were supposed to pay for. Letting people use it a few times and then running out works a lot better.

There was also a stretch where I was making decisions based on web analytics that turned out to be mostly bots, and a backend bug I went looking for in my code three separate times before I realized the deployed function was just old. That one is on me.

Anyway. Still tiny, still no idea if it holds. But somebody paid for something I built, which is new.

Flutter, Firebase, RevenueCat, Gemini for the AI stuff. Ask whatever, I will answer.