I don’t think you understand how good your videos are because the way you’re talking about your process and retention and seeing things and launching your own app will actually help a lot of us when we’re replying & applying to companies and this is a real world experience that we don’t get from a Boot Camp or course because it’s not talked about how people use different metrics and how they actually find the metrics with specific targeting indicators
Really appreciate that Angelica :) Super cool to hear this perspective, really inspires me to make more content like this. Let me know if there is anything else you would like to see in the future!
Your channel and this video is the type of content that is missing from the indie app developer community. Super helpful and I appreciate not having to watch someone make their coffee 😂
Thank you for the kind words! 🙏 And I may have one or two coffee scenes in some of my earlier videos 😂 took me some time to figure out it wasn’t as integral to the story telling as I thought
Just read your latest email. Thank you so much for not forgetting the Android users. Have been following your work since the very beginning and can't wait for the Android version!
Thank you guys for all the support and for watching 🙏 Just wanted to make a note about tracking retention (also mentioned in the video): a much better way to track it is a retention curve or a retention graph but with the limited timeframe of this beta I had to find a different way to monitor it. If you have the luxury of a long timeframe, definitely use one of those instead :)
I am so glad I found you and I’m finally excited to use your app to help my life. Look I can’t tell you how hard it’s been to mentally think of everything and feel overwhelmed with school, family, running a business and on top of taking of your self. I fully support your company and hope to see more from it.
I'll be launching my MVP for my app (to streamline woodworkers business processes & management) in the coming weeks & this video was SUPER timely. Amazing video & so glad I subscribed ❤
Man right when I’m finding my footing in mobile programming and choose to build out a budgeting app your videos pop up! Had a bit of anxiety seeing how nice your app looks and how fast you’re iterating but everyone’s on their own journey. So let’s both create awesome budgeting apps!
That’s the right mindset! 🙌 Would love to see what you’re working on when you release it, I’ve spoken to so many budgeting app builders ever since I started making these videos and it’s wild how many different ways there are to build one. Happy to trade notes and help in any way I can :)
You rock 🤘 thanks for this video, really awesome work! I’m logging transactions for more than 10 years. Using Money Lover app. The key feature I’d need to migrate to the new app is import data with csv file
I'm really impressed by the rapid development while keeping your design so clean. As a Flutter developer (cross platform) I got to admit you make me soooo jealous of those beautiful home & lockscreen widgets! I got my own app from last year with 7000 registered users by now, and I'm revamping a website in the same niche as the app currently (which I quit my job to pursue fulltime). Always click your videos first thing when they pop up, as they are both so calm (yet nicely paced) and very similar to what I wish to produce in the future for my own products. Would love to connect and have a virtual coffee one day if you'd be interested to speak with another dev!
What a great video. Following this series of videos has definitely helped shift my mind on how i plan on working on my personal project when i close school. This will be my roadmap to real life implementations and how to make a project better with user feedback
Just a quick feature suggestion that I'm finding useful in my current budgeting/spending app: add a trip option that allows me to add transactions for a certain trip I'm doing, in order for me to know how much I've spent during that trip. That may not be a essential feature, but I find it super useful. The UI looks amazing btw. As other people said, I love how you are explaining the entire beta test workflow, which provides extremely useful information for other fellow developers like me who are still in the academy world where these things are never faced. Can't wait to try the app!
Super interesting! App just launched btw :) there is a feedback board where people are upvoting features, you should definitely add this. I think others would resonate!
The main feature that I would implement in the app is a plus button in the home screen widget to create a new log. Personally I always use that way for creating my tasks in todoist and definitely gonna help with the retention imo.
I have been following along in these app dev videos, and I have learned so much from watching them. I love how you go through the behind-the-scenes process of creating your apps. Your content has inspired me to create videos and work on my own vlog series to create an app from start to finish. I just uploaded my first video and discovered how much work goes into making a video like this. Also, onboarding is definitely something I will focus on in my app :).
Congrats on the first video, huge respect man 🙌 just checked it out and its sooo good for a first video Keep it up for sure, we need more people in the space :)
We have come to a dark age, where developers will rely on LLMs to compute a distribution rather than using a simple text template with a few deterministic if conditions... It is still a sick app, congrats for your nice work!
I stumbled across videos about Luna, and it looks like exactly what I've been looking for to do my budgeting, I really can't wait for the app to release :)
WOO 200th like :p. Great video as always. I can’t wait to be taken off of the waitlist to test Luna out. Even though my internship actually ends in 2 weeks my spending doesn’t. 😂
I have joined your waiting list. I would love to use the budgeting app. I have tried a lot of budgeting apps, and one common issue I found is the lack of calculator integration when entering the spent amount. It would be really nice if we could directly calculate a few amounts in that field itself. For example, $100 + $20 = $120.
Replied to you on Twitter! :) But for anyone reading this, 100% will be exploring something like this^ I've seen great apps like Venmo and Strong (fitness tracker) do something similar and will see if i can nail the UX
A trick to make the users remember to log the expenses is integrate with the shortcut to when the user use the Apple Pay appear something in the screen to then log the expense
Here are my feedbacks: 1. Name should be asked on sign up 2. Sign in with apple id is needed. 3. When adding the expense, put a title on top "Add Expenses" 4. Always show "Create New Category" option on the expense category selection page. 5. Last selected Category must always be selected by default. 6."Just this week" & month can show an arrow that shows only that week or month. (Highlights the day's transactions were made)
Really appreciate you taking the time to share this Rohit! Will add a few of these for sure + add these to the feedback board so other people can upvote on them :)
Just found out about your channel immediately after I uploaded my first "making of an app" video - and mine looks so amateur compared to yours now haha. Lots to learn, thanks for the inspiration!
Whaaaat just checked our your last video and I'm thinking the opposite over here haha You did such a good job with the b-roll, was engaged the entire time 🙌 also love the big font you chose for the "day four" texts!
@@lululucaschae got re-recommended your video today and saw it blew up a bit more 🙌🙌 knew this would happen haha, the quality was just way too good. Keep it up man
10+ notifications per day is kinda crazy 🤪 Sometimes I even delete apps which irritate me with the notifications. I’d prefer even less than 1 per day. Something like 1 per week on Sunday morning
I was curious how many people would select this option haha So far out of 400 people, 20 people selected the 10+ notifications 😱 Will make this very customizable in the future!
Maybe another video 👀 Actually used the local push notifications for iOS (so no specific tool, just what Apple provides which is a few lines of code). But in the past I've also used Firebase push notifications for other apps and recommend it :) thanks for watching!
I have an observation around your goal for the app. "To help you curb spending". People who download an app to help them curb spending will probably drop off quickly. If a user is not already in the mindset of budgeting, downloading this app in particular will not change that. This user will likely set a goal for $50/mo on coffee, and when they go over budget, they'll just say "meh". I wonder if you notice this same thing for your calendar app. People that stick around are probably people who already used a different planner tool. All that to say, a better goal for the app is more pragmatic: to track your spending. Just a thought there, I'm sure most people know this and its a well documented idea. I went into the building of my budget app thinking I'll get people who don't want to budget, to budget. But, I can't even get my close friends to use my app because they're not budget-people. So I changed my goal. The app is now aimed at people who already budget and want to keep doing it.
First thanks for taking the time to write this, really appreciate well thought out observations like this one 🙏 I think you're spot on here and there is a very high chance the goal will change in the long run. But since the problem/goal is a pretty personal one to me I'm gonna keep trying for a while to see if I can solve it :) There are a few more ideas I want to try out before fully pivoting the goal, but once that list is exhausted I'll probably adjust it a bit Thanks again for sharing your experience!
Do you plan on adding bank integration with Plaid? I think you mentioned you wanted to keep it all manual to help stay accountable. YNAB does it well by sending you a notification when there's a transaction to categorize. There's a trade off between making it too auto-pilot-ey for the user, and allowing them to forget to log a transaction. BTW, I'm also working on a budget app that's now in beta and you're helping me think about things I never would have before, like tracking retention and figuring out where users drop off. Its funny seeing someone else run into the same issues. Looking forward to testing Luna.
I think I definitely will add it but make it super optional + similar to YNAB. But holding off as long as possible :) Also that’s awesome you’re working on one too! Are you integrating plaid?
@@raroque Yes I have plaid integrated. It was a pain though. And, there are a few flows I haven't implemented yet. When a user stops paying, you need to tell Plaid to stop charging you for their connection. Or sometimes Plaid disconnects from the user's account (user changed their password or something else) and you have to give the user a way to re-authenticate with plaid. These aren't part of the MVP, but need to be close follows. This is a must-have for me. I rely on auto import because, at least when using YNAB, every single transaction needs to be accounted for or your balance sheet is off. I'm building something similar to YNAB so that's why plaid integration was part of the MVP. For Luna this likely isn't a problem because it doesn't look as strict as YNAB.
Your content is so helpful to me. But i want to give you a suggestion, plzz use names of the apps with logo. I feel this is something not okay to know people about your apps but they don't know the names of the apps you'r working on. Names in descriptions is a separate thing but names in video is more helpful and for audience. Thank you!
Do you mean things like the YNAB and Copilot apps? If so, I think this is a great suggestion and will definitely do this next video :) (Thanks for watching!)
I'll try my best in this comment but might make a separate video about this! Luckily the analytics were super easy, Posthog has great docs and it ended up being like 5 lines of code to install and then every time I track something its 2 lines of code in the function I want to track There is probably ~200 lines of code total for all analytics in the app :) Firebase security rules are very basic so far and its set so that only the user logged in can read/write their own data. User data is stored at /users/{userID}/transactions{transactionID} for example I have it set so that the user can only access data that matches their userID Hope that helps :)
@raroque Do you only use Swift or do you also use cross-plat frameworks like Flutter/React Native? Wouldn't Swift limit your user base to Apple only? 🤔 Also, it would be helpful to have a video or an answer on if you have always been a Software Engineer or did you learn Swift by yourself while being in non-SE role and what was that journey like. I am trying to go solopreneur but as a Product Manager learning React Native with only Python background has been a steep curve full of dumpster fires. I am wondering if I should switch to Swift.
Swift only for now :) It does limit to Apple only basically and thats been a huge issue for Ellie. I've tried to use both Flutter and RN but just couldn't get into it. Will be trying again with Flutter for Luna android though! And yes will 100% make a video about my journey/how I got into software + what I would do if i was starting over 👀 Personally I would actually go Swift, for some reason I feel like the learning curve is *slightly* lower. There is just so much with RN/Expo that can feel overwhelming (packages, ejecting, etc...) compared to Swift
Recently found your channel and videos, this looks awesome! I’ve been searching for a budgeting app, but i’m interested in self hosting the server that the app connects to. Do you have any plans on supporting self hosting?
It's annoying to be on the waiting list for it and know that 97 out of 100 users wasted that opportunity 😢 Very nice feedback from the people that uses it tho! I know it will be amazing, can't wait to use it!
Wait you let the users make a request to chat gpt every time? You don’t cache the response for each range of income and just serve that? I have an AI app I’m working on and that’s how I handle it so I can limit costs to OpenAI
Every time! but the cost is super low even with GPT-4o (happens basically once per user at sign up) Unfortunately can’t cache it bc the categories are usually different per user + I’m adding more inputs (age, location) 🥲 but if things were more fixed this would be a great idea
@@raroque nice. I just uploaded a short of my app if you want to check it out on my page. What’s your payment subscription model? I still haven’t implemented that yet. Just seems like a huge pain
Hi there , Isn’t there any way that I can download Luna and beta test it without having to wait for its release ? I would really love to try a budgeting app which doesn’t look bland for once ! Thank you .
@@raroqueport to Android? So are you not using native SwiftUI or UIKit? Bc if you used native then the “porting to Android” part is a huge undertaking lol
Ah ya sorry about that! Going to focus heavily on figuring out the feature set on iOS and then once I’m happy I’ll be porting it over to desktop and Android