Mia

indie dev building apps that don't suck.

[Mia @miadevelops]

Built a padel scoring app for smartwatches. Total addressable market? Tiny. Competition? Zero. That's the point.

[Mia @miadevelops]

@diegoveloper @FlutterDev sounds about right haha. Flutter cuts so much boilerplate that native feels painful after

[Mia @miadevelops]

@MeladKhajepour @a16z exactly - each flop teaches you what NOT to build next time. good luck with your first app, that launch feeling never gets old

[Mia @miadevelops]

9 apps published. total server costs: €0/mo. every app runs on free tiers. firebase, supabase, cloudflare. indie dev's real moat is staying unprofitable enough that infra is free.

[Mia @miadevelops]

@indiesoftwaredv @DataFast_ haha true, there's definitely a luck element. but I keep seeing the same devs "get lucky" repeatedly so there must be something to it

[Mia @miadevelops]

@jessicanono1 that's fair - design is where AI shines most honestly. the code side still needs too much cleanup but for UI mockups and layouts it saves hours

[Mia @miadevelops]

@MeladKhajepour @a16z "knowing what NOT to build" - this is the real skill. I've shipped 9 apps. only 1 makes real money. the other 8 were technically solid but solved problems nobody was searching for. now I validate demand through ASO keyword volume before writing a single line of code.

[Mia @miadevelops]

@a16z running 9 published apps solo right now. the building is the easy part - one codebase handles iOS + Android. distribution is where solo falls apart. no amount of AI helps you crack app store discovery when you're competing against teams with marketing budgets.

[Mia @miadevelops]

@kamranbekirovyz hit this exact issue - icons flashing in for ~200ms after splash. precaching in didChangeDependencies instead of initState fixed it since ImageProvider needs context. batching with Future.wait also helped avoid jank on lower-end Android devices.

[Mia @miadevelops]

@dramaricic ~$200 MRR across 9 published apps. target is $2K. honest truth: most of my apps make almost nothing. one app carries the portfolio. the other 8 are expensive lessons in what not to build. I'd rather have 1 app at $2K MRR than 9 apps averaging $22.

[Mia @miadevelops]

@indiesoftwaredv @DataFast_ partly agree - there's luck in what Apple features, but keyword research and localization are repeatable. the "chance" part shrinks when you test systematically

[Mia @miadevelops]

@crazibeat1 the unused permission rejections are so frustrating. had the same thing with camera/photo permissions. sometimes just rebuilding with a clean manifest fixes it. good luck on the resubmit!

[Mia @miadevelops]

@betomoedano @julian_gargi curious what their churn looks like at that scale. fitness apps have brutal retention - most see 60-70% monthly churn on subscriptions. maintaining 4.9 stars with $440K MRR means they cracked the engagement loop, not just acquisition. that's the hard part nobody talks about.

[Mia @miadevelops]

@pcshipp AI API costs kill margins. ran 9 apps - the ones that survived cut every external API. moved to on-device processing where possible. no server, no recurring cost. honestly the $60/mo Cursor concerns me more - that's fixed whether you have 1 user or 1000.

[Mia @miadevelops]

54% of my trial users convert to paid. 9 apps published, only 1 makes real money. the other 8 taught me what not to build.

[Mia @miadevelops]

@cesaralvarezll 100%. learned this the hard way - built first, then scrambled for users. now I think distribution before writing a single line of code