I built an app for a client that makes $400 a month of completely passive income. I literally haven’t touched it in probably three months now. In this article, I’m going to be telling you everything that I learned from growing and building this app so that you can learn how to hopefully do the same for yourself.

Lesson 1. Originality is overrated

For the first two years where I built apps and made, like, absolutely no money from doing it. I think one of the biggest unlocks of me building my Saas and actually making money from it is the fact that I shamelessly copied other people’s ideas. There are so many of these types of tools out there, these AI writing, these AI reading tools, there’s so many of them out there.

Lesson 2. Marketing

In my opinion, marketing is way more important than any engineering that you do in the product, at least in the early stages of the app, when you’re really just trying to get that initial traction.

I’m a software engineer. I love building things. Building features is so fun.

But wanna know what’s not fun? Building features when you have absolutely no users, because it makes you feel. Feel like you’re getting worked in, it makes you feel productive, but you’re not making any money from your app, and you have no users using your app. So what’s the point of building out new features if no one’s using it? And that is where marketing comes into play.

Lesson 3. Freemium tiers

Avoid freemium tiers at all costs. I know some of you might be like, bro, that is so dumb. All the biggest companies in the world, they have freemium tiers and they’re crushing it.

You’re not wrong. But let’s also remember the fact that a lot of these companies that have these forever freemium trials. They also have tons of venture backed money or money in the bank to help fund their product and make up for any lost revenue that these freemium users are incurring.

But if you are somebody like me who’s working a full time job trying to build this app on the side, forever freemium plans are going to kill you. I just found that whenever I had this forever freemium tier, no one would convert or the conversion rate would be so much lower. So I would say remove the complete forever freemium tier and instead move to something like a free trial or something.

Lesson 4. Do not be afraid to charge money

You are one person. You do not have unlimited funds. Most likely, at least then your number one objective in building an app that can make some money month over month is to charge money. That leads me to the fourth point that I want to talk about, which, once again is do not be afraid to charge money for your app.

Money is such a sensitive topic. There’s so much psychology that goes into money, and especially when you’re like an early app developer, you’re like, oh, is my app good enough? Like, should I charge money for it? Well, the only way for you to find out is by charging customers. So please put money out there.

Lesson 5. Avoid subscription plans

The fifth point that I want to talk about is avoid subscription plans if you can, and optimize for one time purchases if possible.

Once again, I know this is kind of sacrilegious in the software engineering space, but trust me, I’ve run a couple of experiments on my app as well. But I’ve personally found, at least with my apps, that the conversion rate for a one time purchase product versus a subscription product is almost double the conversion rate. For example, with my current product that I’m building, I split tested this of a subscription product versus a one time purchase, and I believe the subscription product had like a 0.5% conversion rate, whereas my one time product offering with the same exact price had like a 1.2 – 1.3% conversion rate. So more than double the conversion rate.

Once again, I’m just one data point. I’m sure there’s other data points to refute, but you’re watching my video, where you listen to my opinions and my experiences. So that’s just what I have learned.