Six weeks ago I posted a video on Reddit when GainFrame hit $2,500 MRR and figured $10k was a few months away. $10k is where this turns into a business that could help support my family and maybe replace my job someday. Today I’m at $2,374. I kept waiting for a better number to post and it never came.
GainFrame is the iPhone app I built to compare my gym progress photos. It hit $1k in monthly recurring revenue while I was in Portugal for a month of paternity leave this summer. I’d go to bed excited about the half hour I might get to work on it the next morning. A month after hitting $1k, I posted an update at $1,920.
I was posting about it on my blog, Reddit and X the whole way. People started asking me for help with their own apps, sending advice, offering to help market mine. It was easy to come up with something I wanted to try when I had people to talk it over with and the numbers kept going up.
In Portugal I pushed updates on 25 of our 30 days. Since going back to my full-time job it’s 9 of the last 30. Some nights I’m wiped. Other nights I have an hour and leave the laptop closed anyway. I could spend the whole evening on the app, I just don’t know what I’d change tonight that would make a difference to revenue.
Search traffic is still growing. Google sent the site almost 64,000 clicks in the last four weeks, up 28%, and over half of them went to my free body visualizer. You put in your height and move a slider to see what different weights might look like. For a lot of people that might be all they came for.
Across the whole site, I can trace at least 13 paying customers back to Google in those four weeks. I’d love to ask them what they were looking for when they landed on the site and what made them decide the app was worth paying for. If I’m going to get to $10k, I think a big part of it is figuring that out and giving more of the other visitors a reason to do the same.
I’m a lot less sure about the creators I’m paying to post slideshows on TikTok and Instagram. Last week their views jumped almost 6x. New paid subscriptions across the whole app went from 19 to 21. I can’t tell which of those buyers saw a clip, or if any of them did.
When I first tested GainFrame, people on Reddit saw my gym photos and asked what app I’d used. That’s how I found over 100 beta testers. About 25 of them kept sending me bugs and asking for things they wanted the app to do. Those conversations gave me plenty to work on.
My only plan right now is pretty basic. Go through GainFrame with my own gym photos like a new user would, and ask a few users to walk me through what they do with theirs.
I miss going to bed with an idea I can’t wait to try in the morning.
Have you had an app stall right when life got busy? If you came close to quitting and you’re glad you didn’t, what got you excited to work on it again? I could use a story like that right now.