84: HabitKit – Sebastian Röhl

Sebastian Röhl:

So I posted the screenshots, got a lot of engagement, I got new motivation and inspiration and put all my energy into building this new app and released it after two months of building. The launch was much more successful than Liftbear, of course. I think the first day I instantly had $150 of revenue, which was super cool for me at that time. So great indicators that this app could be a success someday.

Charlie Chapman:

Welcome to Launched. I'm Charlie Chapman, and today I'm excited to bring you the developer behind the cross platform habit tracking app HabitKit. Sebastian Röhl. Sebastian, welcome to the show.

Sebastian Röhl:

Hi, Charlie. Thanks for having me.

Charlie Chapman:

I guess I should say welcome back to the show. So a little bit of background for everybody listening. Earlier this year I was very excited. I was like, "I'm bringing Launched back." I started recording episodes. I did one with a couple different people. I had one with Klemens Strasser and that came out. And then we recorded an episode, I did some live episodes, and then the summer hit and my job got crazy, I was traveling a bunch. And that was when I realized I was wrong and I don't actually have time. I have time to record this show, but I don't have time to do all the editing. And unfortunately, this one sat as the next episode in my queue for like eight months. I was like, "I need to finish editing this episode."

And that's what eventually led to where this show is at now, which is it was acquired by RevenueCat, and now I have a team of people who edit the episode for me, which is amazing. But I was sitting on this episode that we recorded in early spring, and it kept feeling worse and worse that I was going to put something out that was super old, but I was going to do it. But then a couple weeks ago you released a new app and I was like, "This is the perfect opportunity to just rerecord this episode." And I got my fancy new lighting and we have much better editors doing it. So I think this will be really good. But yeah, I appreciate you doing this with me twice.

Sebastian Röhl:

Yeah, thanks for having me back. I was already second guessing myself. Was I too boring at the first time?

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, it was just a dream. But no. No, so we are here and I'm super pumped. I'm really excited. Last time our main focus was your, I think, marquee app, HabitKit. I think that's probably mostly what we'll actually still be focusing on, but FocusKit, your new app, that just came out how many weeks ago was it at this point?

Sebastian Röhl:

It was actually on Saturday, so just five days-

Charlie Chapman:

Oh, wow. Less than a week.

Sebastian Röhl:

Yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

Okay, yeah. So we're hitting the iron while it's hot, something like that. But before we get into that, I actually have a new opening segment I want to try out on the show because I tend to get very excited about the backstories of apps, and then we just sort of organically roll into talking about the app, but we never explain what the app is. So before we even start with the backstory, I want you to give us the elevator pitch for your app. In your case, both of your apps. So let's start with HabitKit. How would you describe HabitKit to somebody who you only have a brief period of time to explain what it is to them?

Sebastian Röhl:

Okay. HabitKit is a habit tracking app for iOS and Android, and it helps users to build and maintain their daily habits, and it visualizes the user's consistency with a grid-based interface. So you have this title-based grid chart. It's basically a calendar, and each tile in this grid represents a day in the year, and the tile is colored based on whether the user completed the habit for that day or not. And that's a pretty cool visualization for consistency and progress, and users get really motivated to see their grid slowly becoming filled with colors.

Charlie Chapman:

Yes. It's a very compelling visual.

Sebastian Röhl:

If you're a developer, you probably know the visualization from GitHub's contribution graph.

Charlie Chapman:

Yes, exactly. And then FocusKit, what's the elevator pitch for that?

Sebastian Röhl:

FocusKit is a super simple Pomodoro timer app. So if you don't know the Pomodoro technique, it's basically a strategy to dissect your work day into designated focus sessions and break sessions. So you start with a 25 minute timer, where you completely focus on the task that's before you, that's on your to do list. And after you are done with these 25 minutes of focus, a new timer starts with five minutes of break, for example, where you can go and have a break, make a coffee or grab a tea. And after that it repeats, you start again with a 25 minute timer of focus. And yeah, this strategy really helps people to focus more deeply on their work and not get distracted by social media or something like that.

Charlie Chapman:

Definitely something I should be using more of. So let's get into the story behind these apps then. And the way I usually kick off this show is with three questions to kick us off, which is where are you from? Do you have a formal education related to what you do? And then let's talk about what your career was leading up to HabitKit.

Sebastian Röhl:

Okay. Yes, I live in Germany, in a western part of the country. It's a smaller town north of Cologne. And I do have a formal education. After school, I studied computer science here in Germany. Did my bachelor's degrees in computer science and my master's degree in software engineering. And after that I started a pretty boring software development job at a middle-sized company here in a bigger town next to my hometown.

Charlie Chapman:

What stack were you generally in? Was this enterprise, software, backend, front end, what kind of stuff?

Sebastian Röhl:

Oh yeah, this was enterprise software. We were doing custom software for businesses like enterprise resource planning stuff. Pretty boring. We were using C# and .Net and Azure for hosting on the cloud and stuff like that. And for the front end, we were working with Angular and Electron. The topics were pretty boring at this job, but it was great for the first entry into the software development career because there were a couple of cool people, I made friends there, and I learned a lot. Yeah, so the topics weren't that interesting, but I really learned a lot.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, it's hard to beat working with people directly to learn from. My first job out of college was at a insurance claims processing company, so also very exciting.

Sebastian Röhl:

Super boring, I say.

Charlie Chapman:

But it's like having a couple people that you work with that you can learn from. And in those cases, you spend your time thinking about code and architecture and dealing with problems versus what I personally find more interesting, like product design and even the marketing side and all this stuff, which is good. But it's like, for me at least, it was definitely helpful to have a stronger foundation in good software practices when you're working on boring stuff so that when you get to the more fun stuff, you're building on top of something a little more stable.

Sebastian Röhl:

Yeah, they say when you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room, right?

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah.

Sebastian Röhl:

I definitely wasn't the smartest person in this room when it comes to programming, so that was a great opportunity to really learn a lot.

Charlie Chapman:

So from that environment, how did you end up into the mobile development space?

Sebastian Röhl:

So when I was back at university, I already discovered the indiehackers.com community. I saw all these cool people like Peter Levels building their businesses, building in public, and sharing their revenue. And yeah, that was super inspiring to me. And I always thought to myself already back in university that I wanted to do this someday and build my own business. And I wasn't really into mobile apps or something like that. I just wanted to have my own business.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah. Indie Hackers is a little more like web oriented, right?

Sebastian Röhl:

Yeah. It's more like React and stuff like that maybe. But I didn't really want to go all into indie hacking full-time directly after university, so I decided to pick this boring job and first learn a little bit. Yeah, but I still had this thought of going full-time on my own business at the back of my head. And after three years of working at this company, I decided to quit my job completely and set myself a deadline of 12 months so I could bootstrap this business.

Charlie Chapman:

Did you already have a project or business going at that point, or was that just a, "I'm going to quit my job and then start something?"

Sebastian Röhl:

Yeah, it was the latter.

Charlie Chapman:

Wow.

Sebastian Röhl:

Yeah. I had no good idea, I had no business idea or something like that. I just created and I knew I wanted to make something for myself, but I didn't know what exactly, and it wasn't that important. Because I only had ... The first ideas that I had were something like doing a workout tracker or habit tracker, these are the things that I personally find interesting, and these topics are in my case best suited for mobile apps, and that's why I decided to do mobile apps instead of web development or stuff like that.

Charlie Chapman:

Okay. And if I remember correctly, you went the Flutter route, right? So you're a web developer at this point, and when you decided to do a mobile app, you have a plethora of options in front of you. Why did you choose Flutter over doing something native or doing something with React Native?

Sebastian Röhl:

It wasn't really that intentional. I already did a Flutter course when I was still at university, so I knew a little bit about it, and I thought it was interesting that you could have this one code base and deploy to multiple platforms. That was the main part of the decision, actually, and I didn't second guess it.

Charlie Chapman:

Okay. So then what did you end up building? Where did you go from there then?

Sebastian Röhl:

My first app was Liftbear. It was a workout tracker. So at this time I was pretty into fitness and weightlifting and I usually only built apps that I want to use myself. This was my interest at that time and I thought, "Okay, you tried a lot of other workout trackers and none of them could really satisfy your needs or match your requirements." And yeah, that's why I decided to just make my own version of it. So yeah, I learned Flutter and just started building. I had no real plan. I used the app daily myself and added feature after feature, and yeah, I just started.

Charlie Chapman:

What was the differentiator than other apps you had used? Is the main thing that it maps to the brain of Sebastian and anybody who happens to map to that same brain? Or was there some core mechanic that was unique?

Sebastian Röhl:

Yeah, I think it was just this specific combination of features and statistics that I wanted to have in this app. So it wasn't really about some distinct feature or core mechanic that nobody else had. I just wanted this unique combination of features and that's why I decided to make my own version of it.

Charlie Chapman:

Okay, so you built that and then did you do any beta testing period or did you just build it and then ship it out there?

Sebastian Röhl:

I just built it and ship it out. I only had 12 months because I set myself this deadline, so I had no time for a beta test. Everything had to be done quickly. So yeah, after I think one month already, I shipped the first version to the App Store.

Charlie Chapman:

Did you do any kind of marketing or was it just get the thing in the app store so people can hopefully find it in some way?

Sebastian Röhl:

When I started to develop this app, I also started to build it in public on Twitter back at that time, and that was my only channel of marketing. Yeah, so if you want to call that marketing, building in public, there it was. Besides that, there wasn't really some greater marketing strategies that I applied. Maybe that's the cause that the app wasn't really that successful.

Charlie Chapman:

Okay, that was what I was going to ask. What happened? Because I'm assuming at some point in your 12 months this worked out, but it sounds like at least at the beginning it did not?

Sebastian Röhl:

Yeah, so of course, if you are starting out, you build in public, you have, let's say, 100 or 200 followers on Twitter and you release your first app to the app store, nobody cares about it. So you get the initial one week boost from Apple in the App Store ranking, but after that, everything falls down. But I persisted, I was consistent. I started to make updates for the app, I added new features, tried improvements, incorporated user feedback I got for roughly six months, I guess. So it was a pretty long time. But after this six months, I was so burned out because I got two users per day maybe, and ... The app is still live and right now it makes $150 MRR.

Charlie Chapman:

Pays for your developer license.

Sebastian Röhl:

Yeah, it pays for that, but not for cost of living here in Germany.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, so you spent a month building it, six months working to try and grow it without a lot of progress there. By my math, that leaves you like five months left on your 12-month deadline. So what's the play? And you're burnt out?

Sebastian Röhl:

Yeah, I was pretty demotivated and burnt out. And I was talking to my girlfriend about this issue and I was second guessing the whole decision to quit my job and she said to me, "Hey, you should maybe start a new app, try something different. Maybe this workout tracking Liftbear thing doesn't work out. Try something new." And yeah, I did exactly that and came up with this idea for HabitKit. I had already had the idea for the app back in 2019 when I was still in university, so it was all the time at the back of my head.

Charlie Chapman:

What was the idea in its proto idea phase?

Sebastian Röhl:

Yeah, I just wanted a habit tracker with this GitHub contribution graph.

Charlie Chapman:

Basically, "I love this graph. I want to see that for whatever habits I'm trying to build."

Sebastian Röhl:

Yeah, exactly. That's what I wanted to have. And yeah, I started developing HabitKit at that time and I still did the build in public thing. And when I posted the first screenshot of the app with the overview where you see the grids, the post was pretty huge in terms of views and engagement and likes for my standards back at that time. So that was my first indicator that this new app that I'm currently building could be more successful than Liftbear.

Charlie Chapman:

Even just you describing both of these right now, there's a very clear visual, but even descriptive distinction for this app versus other habit tracking apps, whereas Liftbear is kind of a muddled story. So even ignoring how you acquire users, all that stuff, just the story itself, you can see why HabitKit and this one visual would take off a little bit more.

Sebastian Röhl:

Maybe it was also important that most people in my Twitter audience back at that time were also developers and they knew the GitHub's contribution graph.

Charlie Chapman:

Instant recognition of that. Yeah, exactly.

Sebastian Röhl:

And they instantly see it, recognize it, and want it as well. Maybe that was a huge factor as well, but who knows? Yeah, so I posted the screenshots, got a lot of engagement. I got new motivation and inspiration and put all my energy into building this new app and released it after two months of building. The launch was much more successful than Liftbear, of course. I think the first day I instantly had $150 of revenue, which was super cool for me at that time. Yeah, so great indicators that this app could be a success someday.

Charlie Chapman:

And what do you attribute the difference? Just on the launch itself, why was it more? Had you built a bigger following? Did the following that you have, were they just more interested in this, you think, than Liftbear? What do you think was the main differentiator there?

Sebastian Röhl:

Yeah, I think I built a bigger audience because the first screenshot of the app actually got so much traction and I got so many new followers because of that. That's why the launch itself was also much more successful. I think that was a huge part. In terms of other marketing efforts, I didn't do anything different, actually. It was mainly still build in public and hope for the best.

Charlie Chapman:

Obviously it's a much better launch than Liftbear, but still not going to cover cost of living in Germany based on my understanding of cost of living in Germany.

Sebastian Röhl:

No, still not, exactly, yeah. So I used the last three months of my free year to develop more updates for HabitKit, make the app better, and it grew definitely, but not to the extent that it could sustain my lifestyle here in Germany. And yeah, this had part of my story. I had to go back to my old job after the 12 months were over. I had some friends back at the company and they were excited to have me back, so it felt natural to go back there and do my app business on the side. I actually decided to only work four days and have Fridays for my indie app business so I could do some progress there.

Charlie Chapman:

One thing we haven't talked about either is what was your business model for either of these apps? Were they paid upfront or were they ... I believe they're subscription now, but what was it at the beginning?

Sebastian Röhl:

All my apps have a free plan so you can use it without any costs, and then they have a monthly subscription, an annual subscription, and a lifetime plan.

Charlie Chapman:

Okay. And was there a bunch of thought that went into why you chose those or is it like that's the standard and I was just going to follow what I see other apps doing?

Sebastian Röhl:

Yeah, okay, when I started Liftbear, I actually only had the subscriptions because it was my first app and I was super scared about costs for Firebase, because that was my backend at that time. And I read all the scary stories about people having bugs in their apps producing some loops where they produce a lot of database reads and whites. So I was scared about that and I decided to only do this subscription model and don't offer a lifetime plan. And for HabitKit, I actually decided to scrap this whole backend thing and just do a local database on the user's device and keep everything local, no authentication, no cloud sync, no backups, nothing. And that's why I decided to add a lifetime plan there.

Charlie Chapman:

Was the lifetime more popular than the subscription or vice versa? How did that break down?

Sebastian Röhl:

I'm not really a numbers guy and I rarely crunched the numbers and take a look at the statistics and see what's more popular. But yeah, definitely a lot of people really, really despise subscriptions and they hate it and they are so gracious about developers offering a lifetime plan. So maybe that's a huge part of HabitKit's success as well. But I can't prove it with numbers.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, that's fair. Okay, so HabitKit came out, did okay, but not enough, so now you're back working a almost full-time job, but it's not like it's on the back burner. You're spending at least a day a week and probably nights and weekends keeping pushing on it. What were you pushing on? I'm guessing your goal at this point was to grow the app to the point where you could go full-time indie on it. Is that accurate?

Sebastian Röhl:

Yeah, that's accurate. Yeah, that was the end goal, yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

So then what were you doing to try and make that a reality? What were the sort of things that you tried?

Sebastian Röhl:

Yeah, so basically I just kept improving the app and told people on Twitter about it and shared about my development progress and built it in public. So that was all I did, actually. I think I experimented a little bit with ads on Instagram or tried to produce some blog content where I wrote articles about habit tracking and stuff like that, but nothing was really successful. The most important part to HabitKit's success was when I was two months back at my job again, HabitKit suddenly started ranking for the keyword habit tracker.

Charlie Chapman:

Ah, suddenly, not like you were doing a bunch of stuff with ASO, keyword stuffing, it just all of a sudden started ranking well?

Sebastian Röhl:

Yeah, exactly. Out of the blue. I still remember being at a friend's wedding and I had the RevenueCat app on my phone and it suddenly started buzzing and I was making so much money on this one day, I didn't know where all this sales came from, and knew after two days or something like that, that I started to rank in Germany, UK, and Poland for this keyword.

Charlie Chapman:

Whoa. So it was a sudden moment. Was this Apple or this was just on one of the platforms, I'm guessing?

Sebastian Röhl:

Yes, I think it was first Apple and shortly after that, Google started to put me in the top 10 for this keyword as well. I have no idea why.

Charlie Chapman:

And it wasn't tied to like an app update or changing of your name or anything?

Sebastian Röhl:

No, I had no viral posts. I didn't do an update to the metadata.

Charlie Chapman:

That is crazy.

Sebastian Röhl:

I still have no idea why. Of course, over the first four or five months of the app, I tried many different things in terms of ASO, changed the keywords and the app title and stuff like that, but it was not really tied to this exact moment. So it was a couple of months later.

Charlie Chapman:

Man, that is very interesting. Obviously what also plays into this is you are continuing to push on the product itself. So I'm guessing you're getting good reviews through all of this.

Sebastian Röhl:

Yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

So more downloads, each download having a ... Not each download, but your reviews being high and that correlating along with your downloads, all that feeds into these algorithms. But it's kind of crazy that both of them around the same time ... It almost makes me think somebody wrote a viral post, but I guess you would've seen that before the ranking changed. It really does sound like it's just straight up both app stores rankings around the same time, their algorithms must have changed or something about ... Yeah, it would have to be their algorithms changing. Something changed that caused your app to move up in the rankings and now you're taking part in that massive stream of people who are searching for the word habit tracker.

Sebastian Röhl:

Yeah. It definitely felt like I crossed some threshold after months of building and suddenly I'm in the top 10 for this keyword.

Charlie Chapman:

And I guess ... I don't know if you're using one of the trackers, but it's also possible that you had been slowly rising in that rank and the threshold you crossed was actually just going from like 11 to 10 or 5 to 3 or whatever it is that gets you above the fold, so to speak, where there's a very noticeable sudden change in the amount of traffic you get.

Sebastian Röhl:

I don't know, actually. I should check it. I should go back to app figures and check it. That's a good idea. But I think I was ... Don't let me lie, I think I was in top 20 in Germany and then it suddenly jumped to place 3 or something like that.

Charlie Chapman:

Wow, okay. So yeah, I mean, we've talked about on this show quite a bit how a small ASO change can be a radical difference on ... It's a huge difference on your top of funnel, like the inbound amount of people who end up seeing your app. And if you've done the work to make this app store page enticing enough, and then the app itself enticing enough that they continue to use it, and then the paywall or whatever enticing enough that people are like, "Yes, this is worth paying for." And then you obviously ... It works all the way down. But if you've done all that work before, a sudden change in the top of funnel can just be a night and day difference for your business. And I'm going to guess going to number three on the word habit tracker was absolutely that kind of story.

Sebastian Röhl:

Yeah, that was super crazy that got so many downloads and it actually started producing revenue and the MRR increased, and after a while it started growing and growing and I kept improving the app, and I think after six or seven months back at my old job again, I was really considering quitting again. That was really weird, and I actually decided to do it, and since 2024, I'm back at full-time indie hacking.

Charlie Chapman:

Okay, so you've had like a year, year and a half of full-time, and your focus is primarily, or was until more recently, primarily on HabitKit?

Sebastian Röhl:

Yeah, totally.

Charlie Chapman:

We'll get into FocusKit here in a second, but up until that point, what were you doing to HabitKit to try and grow it from there? And were there things that you did that moved the needle?

Sebastian Röhl:

Yeah, so maybe it's a little bit boring, but still I was building in public and improving the app, accumulating ratings and reviews and answering user feedback, improving the app and gained a better ranking on the App Store after a while and in more countries. For example, December of last year, HabitKit was featured in a YouTube video of a big influencer. And after that, I only started ranking for the term habit tracker in the US App Store. Before that, it was only in UK and Germany and Poland and stuff like that, but not on the US App Store. And suddenly ranking there was also a huge impact.

Charlie Chapman:

You said building in public a lot. Do you think that the building in public contributed meaningfully once you had already gotten all this top of funnel traffic? Or was it more the continuing to push on product that moved the needle?

Sebastian Röhl:

So for the beginning, building in public was super good. So without it, I wouldn't have generated this first amount of downloads and ratings and stuff like that. So it just started the ball rolling. So that was super important. But after a while, after I had this organic funnel through the app store with all the downloads coming from these keywords, building in public wasn't really about ... It wasn't really about distribution for my app. It was just building an audience, a brand for myself and just for fun. Many people write to me and say they think my story is motivating and inspiring, and they started building their own apps because of my story, because when I can do it, everybody can do it. That's why I've kept building in public.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, that's awesome. And I will link to it in the show notes, but obviously you're on Twitter and you talk about things there, but you also have a Substack where you write longer form articles about what you're up to. Is it a monthly dev log? Is that what you call it?

Sebastian Röhl:

I actually do it weekly. Every Sunday, I try to write about what I did this day to move the needle on my App Store business.

Charlie Chapman:

It's just a great resource for ideas. I don't know, it's like we were talking about at the very beginning. If you start out doing this indie thing, you don't have coworkers. It's hard to get the world knowledge from other people, and resources like your Substack are really great for stuff like that, I feel like.

Sebastian Röhl:

Yeah. But I also got some feedback recently, some people started thinking that my content was maybe a little bit boring and I thought so myself because it's natural, when you build the same app for three years and you just make some micro optimizations to it and release an update or a bigger feature every couple of months, isn't really that interesting for people to follow along. And that's why I decided to start a new app as well.

Charlie Chapman:

Oh, so that was the motivation for you doing your new app was just to do something a little more interesting?

Sebastian Röhl:

Yeah, yeah, it was mainly to motivate myself. It's nice to see a new project and try out new technologies because I actually didn't develop FocusKit with Flutter. I used native technologies, SwiftUI. Yeah, so learning new stuff was really important for me for this project. I wanted to motivate myself and find new inspiration for my app business and keep my content more interesting for people on X and my Substack.

Charlie Chapman:

So you had a goal then. It sounds like the impetus for doing a new app was you want to try out new technologies and build something different and interesting. So how did that lead you to where you ended up with FocusKit? What was the start of that app, I guess?

Sebastian Röhl:

While I was still developing update for HabitKit, I really developed some bad work habits and I often got distracted and switched tabs to X every two seconds, especially with the rise of AI where you have to wait for the agent to actually code the feature, you keep switching tabs to social media or YouTube. And yeah, that's really a productivity killer for indie hackers and bootstrappers and solo founders, because if I'm not doing the work, nobody does. So yeah, I discovered the Pomodoro technique and it really helped me to improve my work habits and focus on the tasks that were on my to do list and improved my productivity so much. I tried a couple of focus timer apps on the app store and I had, again, this feeling of none of them really suits my requirements for an app like this. So again, I decided to build it my own, make my own version of it, and have fun along the ride and learn something new.

Charlie Chapman:

Is there a specific thing that you couldn't find one that was doing that you liked and that was sort of the foundation for how you built FocusKit?

Sebastian Röhl:

No, you can't put the thing on it exactly. But I have a very specific design test. I like my app toned down and have everything clean, if you want to call it like that, dark and clean and minimalistic, and I couldn't really find that on the App Store, and I wanted to fully lean into the iOS 26 liquid glass style. And yeah, I didn't find it on the app store, and that's why I decided to-

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, and FocusKit, even more than HabitKit, it's black and white. It's very minimalistic. I wouldn't call it simple. I mean, it is simple, but you've got a lot of glows and gradients and there's a lot of stuff going on. It's not totally basic, but it's extremely minimalistic in terms of its style. I guess this was after iOS 26 was announced. Was that why you decided to go with learning SwiftUI and native code? Was it because you wanted to use Liquid Glass?

Sebastian Röhl:

Yeah, that was a huge part of it. Liquid Glass was a huge reason. Flutter doesn't really support it. I think there are some weird hacks or third party packages that you could use, but none of them are production ready. So yeah, I decided to go all in on the native side. And one thing that always was interesting to me was that you can use SwiftData and have it synchronized to all the other user's devices with iCloud, and that's something that you can't easily do with Flutter as well.

Charlie Chapman:

Okay. But I guess that also means that this is not a cross-platform app. Not just not a cross-platform framework, but you're not going to release this on Android unless you go and rebuild the whole thing in Jetpack Compose and Column?

Sebastian Röhl:

Yeah, it hurts a little bit to tell people on X when they ask about the Android version, to tell them that it will probably never come. I only do an Android version if the app becomes really popular.

Charlie Chapman:

To dial it back a little bit then, you mentioned that you chose Flutter more or less out of inertia, like you had used it before and, all right, let's give this a shot. When I first remember following you, it felt like you were a big fan of Flutter and how that helped your app. And if I remember correctly, at one point Android was a bigger platform for you than iOS, or at least they were on the same level. Is that true?

Sebastian Röhl:

For some time in my journey, both were at the same level, but right now iOS overtook Android by a lot.

Charlie Chapman:

As things grew, okay. The idea of going pure SwiftUI, I mean, it makes a little more sense now that you said that part of the goal here was you just wanted to learn something new, but how do you feel like ... Here in 2025 after building and releasing an app in SwiftUI, how do you feel about the landscape of Flutter versus native, I guess?

Sebastian Röhl:

Yeah, so if you want to develop a new app and you have all the requirements for it and you already know that you need to support many native frameworks, like you want home screen widgets, lock screen widgets, live activities, shortcut support and stuff like that, then I wouldn't go with Flutter, to be honest, because sure, you can add this to the app, but you will always have to find weird hacks or fixes for certain problems, use third party packages that have certain solutions to implement that. So yeah, if you have these requirements, I would always go for native. But if you don't have these requirements, I would still go for Flutter because if you don't want these native capabilities, you basically get two apps for the same code base, and that saves a lot of time and potentially generates a lot of money.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, okay. That's interesting. So I guess maybe even to make this a little more explicit, if you went back and you were building FocusKit right now with a business mindset, like you don't care about learning a new tech stack or something. In fact, you know both tech stacks now, what would you choose?

Sebastian Röhl:

Yeah, I would still choose SwiftUI because I have all these ideas for native capabilities that I want to support.

Charlie Chapman:

And that's worth giving up on the Android revenue and the pain in your heart every time somebody tweets you asking when the Android version's coming?

Sebastian Röhl:

Yeah, that's very worth it. Absolutely, yeah. If you want to build a good app and not just a mediocre app, it's definitely the better solution.

Charlie Chapman:

Interesting. So do you think going forward, that's more where you're going to focus your energy?

Sebastian Röhl:

Yeah, I think so. I really like the direction Apple is going with their ecosystem. I absolutely love the Liquid Glass style. I see so many posts on X hating on it and I can't wrap my head around it how you can hate it. I love it so much. It looks absolutely fantastic.

Charlie Chapman:

I'm a sucker for shiny, interesting flourishes. There was nothing that made me more sad in my early Android days than whenever you locked it, it did the TV off animation. That was like the coolest thing in the world and then they got rid of it. And maybe now I would be like, "This is so annoying that I have to see this every single time." But I just love that stuff. And Liquid Glass feels like a whole operating system filled with obnoxiously fun, little flourishes like that. And yeah, I've been using it for, I don't know, how long has it been? Six, eight months at this point. I'm certainly not tired of it, personally.

Sebastian Röhl:

And personally, I only use Apple devices. I have an iPhone, I have an Apple Watch and a MacBook. I'm home at the Apple ecosystem and it always felt weird to me when I had to find weird hacks for my home screen widget implementation in HabitKit. I just wanted it to work out of the box.

Charlie Chapman:

So what does that mean for HabitKit going forward? I imagine that's ... You're not going to take away the Android app, I assume. So are you just going to have a Flutter code base that you'll have with you for a long time now?

Sebastian Röhl:

Yeah, I think I'm in for the long ride with Flutter in this app. I'm not sure. I don't think it makes sense to rewrite it. I thought about it, actually, to do the iOS part with SwiftUI, make a completely new version with the Liquid Glass look, and have the Android version still be on the Flutter side and keep the old look there, but I think that's not worth it. But I have no idea.

Charlie Chapman:

Okay, so with FlutterKit ... I mean, it just released, so this is your first app in, I think, is it three years since HabitKit came out? Is that right?

Sebastian Röhl:

A couple of months after I released HabitKit, I also did a smaller app called WinDiary, which I usually don't mention anymore. Yeah, it was such a big disappointment in terms of engagement and revenue and downloads that I rarely talk about it.

Charlie Chapman:

FocusKit is the first big thing you've done in a long time.

Sebastian Röhl:

Yeah. It's the first big thing that I'm really interested in.

Charlie Chapman:

So I guess the two questions are what did you do in preparation for this? I can already make a guess based on everything else we've said. And then how did that launch actually go?

Sebastian Röhl:

Of course, I built it in public and I shared-

Charlie Chapman:

There it is. ...

Sebastian Röhl:

I shared everything about it on X. I started sharing revenue numbers and download numbers again after the launch. So everything is public. That's pretty exciting. So with an audience as big as mine, you would think that I would have unlocked some form of easy mode when launching new apps, but it actually isn't that easy. I made $300 in revenue now. I get a couple of sales every day. But it's not like the app explodes and I get so many downloads and it instantly ranks for the main keyword on the App Store.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, I mean, it's one of those things where it's like the amount of searches happening on the App Store, the amount of zeros in that measurement compared to the amount of zeros you could possibly have, even as a large influencer, is dramatically different. So yeah, it doesn't surprise me that you can't just run the same playbook if your main source of top of funnel users was ASO from having a tech developer audience.

Sebastian Röhl:

Yeah. But basically I'm trying the same strategy. I'm building in public, I keep improving the app, I incorporate user feedback, and I try to gather as much ratings and reviews on the App Store as possible. And yeah, it's a slow and long grind and I hope it reaches at least half of HabitKit's success in the future.

Charlie Chapman:

Awesome. Well, that is cool. I'm excited to keep following along in this new app journey. I don't think I was following you when HabitKit first came out, so I came in a little later in that story, so this one's fun to see. Honestly, just as a iOS developer, it was fun from the very beginning watching a Flutter developer start playing around. And I'm used to React Native or Flutter developers when they come into iOS, usually people are just horrified when they first open Xcode or look at some of the interesting decisions Apple makes that are different than what you're used to. But you seem to be pretty into it from right out of the gate.

Sebastian Röhl:

Yeah, I actually don't use Xcode. I code everything in Cursor.

Charlie Chapman:

Oh, wow, okay, that's fair. But you still have to open Xcode to hit the little triangle.

Sebastian Röhl:

Of course, yeah. But that's enough.

Charlie Chapman:

That's fair, that's fair. All right, so before we wrap up, though, I need to ask you the question that I ask everyone in this show, which is what's a person or people who've inspired you in your work that you'd recommend others check out?

Sebastian Röhl:

First, I wanted to say Klemens Strasser, but you recently had him on the podcast, so I will-

Charlie Chapman:

No, that's the perfect one. You should go back, listen to that episode of this here podcast, give it a rating and review, like and subscribe, I don't know, all the things I'm supposed to say.

Sebastian Röhl:

Yeah, I love everything that he does and I love the episode and.

Charlie Chapman:

Klemens is also just a great person. Just a very, very fun person to hang out with.

Sebastian Röhl:

Yeah, absolutely. I have to meet him someday. And because he isn't an option now, I would go for Adam Little. He is an interesting iOS developer and he has a portfolio of many smaller apps, I think, and he has a YouTube channel as well and shares everything he knows about distribution and ASO, and it's really interesting. Would love to see him here.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, I need to get him on. I met him at WWDC earlier this year. Very cool guy.

Sebastian Röhl:

But you're sure you didn't met Sean Allen?

Charlie Chapman:

I'm sure I made that same joke. For anybody who doesn't know, him and Sean Allen, they both have very similar facial hair, we'll say that. And on Twitter, it's crazy how often you'll mix them up when you see their little profile picture. And I'm sure I made that joke and I'm sure he rolled his eyes in a like, "Never heard that before," look.

Sebastian Röhl:

Very good.

Charlie Chapman:

But yeah, I do need to get him on. He's great. And yeah, Adam is like ... He's kind of like that indie app developer, YouTuber person, but he really, really dives into the business side of things.

Sebastian Röhl:

Yeah, absolutely. I think he crunches numbers much more than me.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah. I definitely think that that's true. Well, where can people find you and your work?

Sebastian Röhl:

Yeah, sure. You can find me on X. I'm sure you can link it in the show notes. And my Substack, I think it's called Building An Indie App Business on X and LinkedIn.

Charlie Chapman:

All right. Thanks for listening. You can find show notes over at launchedfm.com and all the other episodes, including the one with Klemens Strasser that we just talked about. Thank you so much for listening. You can find more Launched at launchedfm.com, and you can find me on pretty much all the social medias. I'm @_chuckyc on Twitter, or Charlie M. Chapman pretty much everywhere else. And of course, huge thanks to RevenueCat for making this episode and all future episodes of Launched possible. I'll see you all again in two weeks.