One Month
It’s been a month since my left arm surgery. The swelling has gone down significantly, and I can take simple showers now, so I’ve been gradually removing the old scabs. I’m doing manual physical therapy 2-3 times a week, practicing flexion and extension movements. However, the area around my elbow is still numb, I can’t fully extend to 180°, and I can barely bend it just past 90°. Recovery is slower than I expected.
Physical therapy is harder than I thought. After each session, my energy drops as if I’ve just finished a workout, and fatigue hits me hard. When I get home, I shower and immediately fall asleep. Right after surgery, it was the acute pain that was difficult. Now the pain has decreased, but my overall stamina seems to have dropped even more. I sleep much more than before. It feels like I only have about 4-5 hours a day when I can actually do something productive.
After Launch
I launched the app on October 2nd. Today is October 14th, so exactly 12 days have passed. Here’s the current situation: 0 downloads, 0 app page views, and naturally $0 in revenue. For the first three days after launch, I spent time thinking about new features I wanted to add and fixing some bugs. At the same time, I shared my blog post on social media and posted about the app. But the response was almost nonexistent. There were no downloads, and the app page view count didn’t move at all.
Then the long Chuseok holiday began. I spent time with family and couldn’t pay much attention to app promotion or marketing. Honestly, I figured people probably weren’t checking the App Store during the holiday anyway. About a week passed like that. After the holiday ended, I started going to physical therapy again, but the fatigue after treatment was more intense than I expected. When I got home, I couldn’t do anything but rest. As a result, I couldn’t properly post about the app consistently or do any real promotion.
Looking back now, the launch timing wasn’t good, and I barely did any marketing after launch. I wrote one blog post, posted a few times on social media, and that was it.
Why Didn’t It Sell?
Without data, I can only speculate. Price might be the issue. $2.99 might feel expensive for a widget app. Or it could be a visibility problem. If nobody knows this app exists, they can’t download it. The timing might have been bad too. Since I launched before the Chuseok holiday, people probably weren’t checking the App Store. Or fundamentally, maybe people don’t need this kind of widget. There are already many good calendar apps, and plenty of people are satisfied with just the iPhone’s default Calendar app.
Honestly, I wanted to drop this app immediately and make a different one. Since I launched it as a paid app, I thought maybe the entry barrier was the problem, so I considered developing a different app that’s free with subscription options. But it’s only been 12 days since launch, and with zero users, giving up immediately felt too premature. I thought it would be better to learn from this situation about what direction or methods to use after launching an app. Even if it fails, I wanted to learn something from it.
This Week’s Attempt
First, I want to find out if price is the problem. So I’ve decided to run a sale from $2.99 to $0.99 for one week, from October 14th to 20th. Is the price too much of a burden for a widget app? Or do people simply not know about this app regardless of price? I hope to get at least some hints from this sale. The original intent of this app was to let users who really need these widgets purchase it once and use it continuously, not as a subscription. That’s why I’m not considering switching to a subscription model yet.
Second, now that there are no more holidays, I’m going to properly try marketing and promotion. I want to share screenshots of how I actually use the app to show how it works. I’ve mainly been posting on my social media accounts, but this time I plan to share on Product Hunt and Reddit as well. Especially on Reddit’s iOS development community and side project communities, it seems like a good place to share this kind of story. Since many people don’t know about the app, I need to increase visibility. Rather than posting once and being done, I’m going to try posting something brief every day this week so people can discover this app.
Lastly, I think I need to properly research whether users actually need calendar widgets. I made it because I personally needed it, but there are already so many calendar apps on the market. In fact, many users might not even use the iPhone’s default Calendar app. My app was meant to leverage its characteristic as a very lightweight calendar widget with minimal additional features, but that might not match what users actually need. If that’s the case, I should either add widgets that people actually need, or frequently show how I use this app myself.
In the long term, I should consider ASO (App Store Optimization) and App Store advertising. I also want to continue learning how to better utilize Claude Code. But my physical condition still isn’t good, so I can only be active for about 4-5 hours a day. So I need to slowly learn things one by one and gradually expand what I can do.
Going Forward
It’s only been a month since surgery. Fortunately, unlike right after surgery, I don’t frequently imagine the accident situation or negative scenarios anymore, but I’m still anxious. Recovery will take anywhere from 6 months to a year. It feels like I’m far from the stable situation as a side project and indie app developer that I originally planned. But even in this situation, by challenging myself with what I can do, I have hope that I might actually grow as an indie app developer. Believing that even if I fail, there will be something to learn, I need to keep going day by day.
App Download:
I Need That Widget
This Week’s Sale: $0.99 (October 14 - October 20)