A few weeks ago, I launched a side project. Here are the numbers.

70% of the Total Revenue was in the first 3 days, thanks to being on the front page of Hacker News.

I’m almost always working on a side project. Usually it just ends up on my GitHub profile or my portfolio, but every now and then I take it a little further. Primitive started out like any other project. I hacked on it for a couple weeks in September and hosted it on GitHub under a MIT license. It’s command-line driven and cross-platform. But, people seemed to really like it, so I figured it was a good candidate for further exploration. Taking note of my wife’s recent spending was just the extra kick in the butt I needed to do it.

So I set out to turn Primitive into a native macOS application with a nice GUI so I could sell it in the app store. I kept the core logic in Go and wrote the GUI in Objective-C. I spent about 10 days on it and it was looking good enough for an initial release. I bought a domain and carefully crafted the Primitive for macOS website, knowing that sexy examples were crucial. I submitted the app for review and was delighted when it was approved within one day — much faster than in my previous experience, although it’s been a while since I’ve done any iOS or Mac development. The timing was just right for a Tuesday morning post on Hacker News… Show HN: Primitive for macOS.

Woohoo, front page. And it stayed there for about 24 hours, wow!

Bandwidth usage on my Linode instance peaked at 100 Mb/s!

After the 30% Apple tax, Primitive has brought in $5990 so far. 70% of that was in the first three days. Recently, I’m getting about $20–30/day. Not bad! I could probably be doing more to promote the app, but I’m not really sure how. (Perhaps a post-mortem on Medium? Haha!)

The Hacker News bubble.

I received several feature requests after launching. So, I released v1.1 one week after launch, including a really cool “drawing mode” that makes the app more interactive and user-driven. I still have a backlog of features to implement. I doubt implementing them will make much difference in sales, but they’re still interesting and I want to provide a top-notch product, so we’ll see if I can get some of them in the app.

Google Analytics numbers for primitive.lol — typical shark fin viral peak.

Money is nice, but perhaps the best part of all this has been the overwhelmingly positive feedback. Excellent ratings in the app store and fan mail make it all worthwhile. It’s easy to be overly critical of one’s own work, and I often look back at my projects with an eye toward what I could’ve done better, but it seems like I made something that people really do like.

This is where it’s at.

By the way, I wasn’t really sure what price tag to put on the app. My initial thinking was “definitely under $5” since it’s fairly limited in utility, but after scoping out other prices in the store and thinking about my audience, I decided that $4.99 vs. $9.99 probably wouldn’t cut sales in half. So that’s what I went with. I wanted to maximize profit but I also wanted my customers to feel good about their purchase. I kept this in mind as I developed the GUI, trying to make the initial up-front experience easy and gratifying. Also, I did a Black Friday sale and dropped the price to $5.99 for a day. Sales did go up, but it wasn’t a huge event by any means.

Rank History is sort of all over the place.

I’ve asked myself: “Should I pander to Apple and add touch bar features, in hopes that they will feature my app?” But I haven’t yet. I also considered running an ad on Twitter, but, meh.

In the end, this is just yet another side project. I’ve already mostly moved on mentally, thinking of the next project. That’s just my style, I guess. Until next time…

Thanks for reading!

https://primitive.lol/