Marcus Friberg

Spare time Indie iOS developer from 🇸🇪 Starting building in public and sharing my journey from the fall 2024. Follow me for insights and my ups and downs 🚀📈

[Marcus Friberg @FribergDev]

Hourli 2.0 is now live.
One of the biggest changes in this version is making it much easier to get started.
You can now begin for free and track your first client right away, without committing upfront. The idea is simple: let the value come first.
At the same time, I’ve added support for widgets and Live Activities — so your work is always visible, whether you’re on your Home Screen, Lock Screen, or using the Dynamic Island.
This release is a step toward making Hourli feel less like an app you open, and more like a tool that stays with you throughout the day.
Would love to hear your thoughts — especially if you bill for your time.

[Marcus Friberg @FribergDev]

Thank you, I actually think so too, at least for someone who tries to get traction for apps on a very tight budget. Please feel free to share the post, I have few followers and im sure it can be useful for more please.

ill try to explain a bit more in detail, because my ChatGPT app turns slow with to many long conversations so I use to clean it. But ill try to explain in more detail here.

First, I gave ChatGPT basically all my App Store meta data that I have in the English version, title, subtitle, description, keywords. Then I carefully explained the idea customer, for me that was "freelancers, small business owners and consultants" who want's to track their time, either for making invoicing easier, providing deeper details to clients to be transparent or just wanted to log how much work goes into what projects to get better data for decisions on where to spend their time.

With that explanation, I asked it to generate lists of around 50 keywords or phrases for countries with percentages of people matching the kind of users im providing for, prioritizing markets where the population would appreciate a localized app and also markets that are usually forgotten (markets where people may not prioritize ads = lower cost per tap).

Brazil was the first I wanted to try out, after looking at astro data for keywords, lots of people, fairly easy to rank, can get good results even with a small ads budget. And most of my competition had only English localization in their apps, at least I think none had Portuguese (Brazil), so it would give me a good conversion boost because they feel "this app is for me".

You may have another audience for your app, but generally look for this

* Fairly good iPhone penetration (kind of equal, not very poor countries)
* If the average person has bad English, its very good, giving a localized app a strong position compared to competitors.
* If competitors of your app does not localize for this language, it's to your advantage
* And of course, Astro should show that there is some traffic for relevant keywords and they should be fairly easy

If you check 5-10 countries like this and ignore the markets that you most of all want to rank on (US, UK, Germany, France, Canada etc.) you should be able to find quite some possibilities out there.

Best of luck, ill be posting more when I see more results, im just starting out with this strategy.

[Marcus Friberg @FribergDev]

Rankings starting to move in the right direction, finally 🤩

Still not there but getting closer
#buildinpublic #iosdevs

[Marcus Friberg @FribergDev]

A couple of things, and ill share it with you, but it will be some text :)

First, what I've done before, without any success.

Been trying to run Apple Ads, been targeting the most attractive markets like US, UK, DE, FR and so on. High ads prices and it's hard to rank, would have to run ads for quite some time to buy the downloads I need to start ranking organically. So, for economic reasons I always had to pull the hand brake before I actually got anywhere with organic ranking. Been throwing a few hundred bucks at this a couple of times now, probably spent $2000 or so in total without any meaningful result (that's a lot for me when digging into my own pockets for it)

So I described my app in detail for ChatGPT, including its audience with some personas. Then asked it to generate some lists with keywords for a couple of markets that people just usually don't care about (no localization, no region specific pricing etc.) Ran those list in Astro for each region, and found one where I had some very relevant keywords that was like 20+ popularity and 15- difficulty. Then I wen't all in on that market, not with money, but effort. Fully localized the app, and also the screen shots, not just the text in the screen shots but also the app screenshots used the localized app version. Then, I set upp an apple ads campaign for just that market, with just a few of those keywords and I used exact match and only $10 per day as budget. About what I can afford if I want to be able to run it until I start ranking organically.

The big difference is that now, it seems possible and affordable to actually run the ads until I have enough downloads and usage to start ranking top-10 organically. Before, I could like empty my bank account and move from #197 -> #172 or something 😂

[Marcus Friberg @FribergDev]

@twostraws Will absolutely do 👍🏼👏🏻

[Marcus Friberg @FribergDev]

Time and time again, I find new features in Kickstart by @twostraws that makes me smile 😊 Just localised my app into a couple of more languages and decided to actually go the extra mile with my screenshots for those markets as well. Was not looking forward to mounting 10 screenshots for 6-7 languages into bezels and exporting them. But what do you know, Kickstart lets me screenshot directly into the bezel I wanted. Saves me lots of boring work 😀 If you're an iOS developer, don't miss out on this candy.

[Marcus Friberg @FribergDev]

Two years of building part time and it's been looking kind of like this for quite some time now. Not always been as consistent as I should, but still, been putting some hours into it.

🚀 New goal by the end of 2026 is $1000 MRR.

Im going to stop doing the same thing expecting a different result now, I got a new plan that i'm going to try out first, gonna turn my distribution plan around 180 degrees and aim for the smaller markets first.

👇🏼 If anyone tried this out, please let me know how you are progressing. I will share my results here on X.

[Marcus Friberg @FribergDev]

@seanallen_dev Sorry to hear this Sean. Your course has helped me out for sure, my time tracker Hourli would not have been the same without you opening my eyes to Swift Charts. I hope you find what you are looking for soon. All the best 🙏🏼

[Marcus Friberg @FribergDev]

@CaptainKramer_ @twostraws Sure thing 👍🏼

[Marcus Friberg @FribergDev]

It's been a pretty slow start, slower than I expected but im getting there. Im sure that Kickstart by @twostraws will contribute to continued growth, this is just the beginning 🚀

#buildinpublic #indiedev

[Marcus Friberg @FribergDev]

@eleftherios_b @JacobSobolev @twostraws Oh, interesting idea, did not think those existed, but what's in it for them, commission or how do you provide value for them?

[Marcus Friberg @FribergDev]

@SebastianRoehl @JagCesar Amen, i forgot to press that one as well 😂

[Marcus Friberg @FribergDev]

Added Portuguese (Brazil) 🇧🇷 as the first localization after English. It’s a large audience but less targeted and hopefully easier to getting started to rank as well.

Is this the right move for an app targeting freelancers, consultants and small business? ⏱️ will tell.

#buildinpublic #iosdev #timetracker

[Marcus Friberg @FribergDev]

Awesome 😎

[Paul Hudson @twostraws]

My new Mac app is out today! It's called Kickstart, and it has just one job: helping indie app developers make more money on the App Store. It is *packed* with features, many of which are completely free. Get it here: https://t.co/goZKtAPPuW

[Marcus Friberg @FribergDev]

@Avi_Dev29 @twostraws Incesibly easy in Kickstart, just connected kickstart to App Store Connect API, and Apple Ads API, fetched my apps and there was a nice feature to check my pricing in different regions vs the Base (Default) using different indexes and then update my pricing.

[Marcus Friberg @FribergDev]

@twostraws Looking forward to it 🙌

[Marcus Friberg @FribergDev]

@Aivars_Meijers Nice Icon 🤩 It’s inspiring to see your journey Aivars 💯

[Marcus Friberg @FribergDev]

I would say it depends... benefits of Flutter or React Native is one code base = one skill to maintain. But that does not equal less code in every situation. Especially if you want to give it a somewhat native look and feel, it may require some platform specific code in your cross platform code base that will make it larger than two separate native apps. The latest development in AI I would say also points in the favor of going with Swift & Kotlin rather than a larger write once debug everywhere code base. I would only go with a cross platform framework today if I had an app containing lots of business logic that I did not have to write again in another language. But that just me.