Tools: 5 things I learned from building and releasing Hounty

1. Build in Public ## 2. Deploy small changes ## 3. Play store requires 2 weeks and 12 beta testers ## 4. App Store subscriptions are a hassle ## 5. Tech Stack for Solo developers ## So was it worth it? First of all, I can't believe Hounty is actually out! It's been so long since I started a small project that turned out to be a year long crusade and I can't be more proud of crossing this threshold. TL;DR You can download Hounty on App Store for free, the app is written in Flutter and the backend is in Serverless Go + Serverless PostgreSQL. Looking back I can't say I would do many things differently - the lessons I learned had to be learned, but I sure wish I knew a few things sooner. While the idea is great and helps build trust and relationship it really only works if: Same goes for building a community on social networks before the app is ready. When I submitted the new shiny Freemium version for release I made the previous version free and shared a video "Coming soon" with the app preview on TikTok: Five hundreds downloads are amazing! Except these users must've been so frustrated when they didn't find the new AI cleaning planner and were met with completely different design... My point is - advertise what is ready. I've rewritten UI and backend several times and every iteration has taken me weeks up until the moment where I would either get exhausted or paint myself into a corner. It only started to work when I learned to apply what I preach: to refactor as you go. Here's an example: I was working on a sync feature and I wanted to change the logic from log-based storage (all events are stored in one table and then replayed on the device) to an entity-based storage (every entity is stored in it's own table with it's own versioning). At first, I tried rebuilding everything all at once and it got really frustrating and I almost abandoned the whole thing, but then I started moving small pieces: Apparently, this approach suits not only for working in a team, who would've thought?! This one was new for me, my old Play store publishing account was no longer usable - I don't know if it was because it was created in Russia originally or because I did something stupid, but I needed to create a new one to publish and I discovered that I had to find 12 beta testers to test the app for 2 weeks before I could release it. My friends and family are on Apple devices, so it's going slower than I expected. There's a "testercommunity" app and a few communities on Reddit where people support each other, so definitely not a deal breaker, but I chose to focus on App Store for initial launch. Releasing a one time pay version was very easy - it got approved in two days, but the free version with subscriptions took almost 2 weeks of back and forth. First, I didn't add the subscriptions to the release and the app went out with a beautiful paywall and no working subscriptions. A tip here is to check that the subscriptions have all the locales and obligatory fields filled and have status "Ready for review" before you submit a new version. And most importantly to add them to the version before submitting it for review. If you don't see where to do it - your subscriptions aren't ready. Super frustrating. Then, apparently it's obligatory to have a dedicated "Restore purchases" button even for subscriptions, even if you store the subscriptions on user account. Oh and you have to have a link to your terms of services in the description. And after the release subscriptions might be lagging and not appearing on the app store or in your app for 8-24 hours. Joy! Being the only developer and working after hours with a very limited amount of time LLMs are a must, but they need a bit of handholding and depending on choices of language they might need more or less. Anything web-related that looked like React has been a breeze, Flutter was okay-ish after I setup all the scaffold, and yet I am holding myself from refactoring most of it. I managed to make it work with Go, but if I'd do it again - I'd build the backend in Rust. I didn't like Rust compiler barking at me - but I love it keeping Sonnet and Opus in check. Besides, it has great documentation and the only one way of doing things in a majority of cases - which makes LLMs predict the code more reliably. I don't know what comes next yet. Well, apart from Rust rewrite, of course. It's time to send Hounty into the world, look at the data and iterate. It wasn't easy, I'm yet to brag about my MRR, but it has been a fun ride. I built something I'm proud of, users are downloading it and my kids are showing me their perfect before and afters (they clean!). So yes, I think it was absolutely worth it! So, wanna see my clean pics? Templates let you quickly answer FAQs or store snippets for re-use. Are you sure you want to hide this comment? It will become hidden in your post, but will still be visible via the comment's permalink. Hide child comments as well For further actions, you may consider blocking this person and/or reporting abuse - You are building a tool aimed at developers - You have something for them to try - moved the files of one entity into a separate folder, tested, commited, deployed - wrote an abstraction for command pattern, refactored one "submodule" - refactored the rest one-by-one - changed the storage one-by-one