I start looking into this idea I stole from some dude who pitched me but couldn’t afford to hire me. It sounded promising, so I put a minimal landing page on the web on a few forums to see if I could collect any emails and OH SHIT people are signing up faster than I expected. Like wtf, this shitty landing page with its even more shitty app icon took like an hour to make and its already having more success than my last app. Because I wanted the idea to prove itself to me before committing huge time to it, the first version of the app took me like 1 week to build and functioned as minimally as possible. I even got some beta testers set up to see if I could get them to pay for the in app purchases I had to see if it had financial viability. I put it on the App Store. First month it did $800. Not bad for garbage product. I’m still freelancing, now broken up with ex and single, and thought I’d move into this sexy apartment I could barely afford in a trendy neighborhood because I wanted the exact opposite of my current housing situation. I’m thinking, just a few more iterations of this app and I can stop freelancing and do this shit full time. Age 25

I finally outsource the design for a kickass app icon, update the app store screenshots to be suave and give the app design a facelift. Boom, we doing $2.5k/month now boys, and the app itself is beginning to have a natural growth rate every month. I must have some fucking poverty fetish because against my better judgement, I stop freelancing and put myself in another financially tight space. I work pretty hard for a few months, and start my own App Entrepreneur mastermind with a weekly meet up to compensate. The mastermind was some good experience, but I made some mistakes: no one in the group was as experienced as I was in the app space so I think it was negatively influencing my decision making in some cases, plus I may have figured out how to find success but still have like no experience scaling a business. I began playing the bullshit game “How annoying can I make my app so that users are forced to pay”. I also made another app that I felt I made half assed as an attempt at a money grab and it was financially a flop again. The most I made scummy decisions the more I felt like a scum plus it only had small effects on my monthly revenue. So I’m like, okay, I need some principles and vision to guide my business, one of the tenants being “Only make products that you’re proud of”, and I sure as fuck wasn’t proud of shaking the lunch money out of my customers. So I took out all the ads in the app and cleaned up all the annoying prompts to pay and made the app better. Ya, I was making less short term, but users were giving way better reviews and felt like I overall improved my brand for the long term. With these new commandments in mind, I start building a pro version for my app. Life is good again. Age 26 (me irl)

Apple tends to pay out at the end of the month, and this is the first month that number broke five figures for me. I realize this isn’t really that big of a deal and I still get a lot of “wtf dude you’re a good programmer, you could be working for Facebook and live in SF and make at least 2 times that” from friends. And it doesn’t feel like a big deal. Other that a brief few minute celebration, its business as usual. I’m learning to outsource more and I’ve built pretty good social skills in attempt to make some deep meaningful relationships with more people. But change is steady and slow. And I definitely have a seven figure state of mind, so I'm really just getting started. I still occasionally struggle from shifting from a scarcity mindset to an abundance mindset. I have to convince myself that its okay to spend money on things like a new car (though I got a Honda fit, keeping it economical y’all). As dumb as it sounds (And I know its fucking dumb), I only got health insurance when I realized I was getting tax penalized for not having it. Not sure why I felt the need to write this. When I was 21, working on my blog, I loved going to the Wayback machine and looking at all the early versions of big name websites (Gamespots early version was absolutely dreadful). I found it oddly comforting that even the big boys once had ugly websites with bad writing. So Maybe that’s the point of this post. To show that, even though I’ve still only had small levels of success, once my life was an ugly website with bad writing. Hope this helps even 1 person :D