Exploring Indie Life: Participating in RevenueCat's Ship-a-ton Challenge

Things have considerably changed over the past few months. I was mostly procrastinating and wasting my potential away for the last year, but some events changed how I lived.

Infinite Motivation

At the end of May, I lost my long-term gig as the startup ran out of funding. I depended on that money to fund my trip to the US and WWDC, and in desperation, I took up a freelance gig that turned out to be the worst since I started freelancing in 2021. I severely underestimated the work required for it, and to sleep well at night, I eventually abandoned the project and paid for the US trip out of pocket.

That sour experience and getting validation from folks who work at Apple on my app left me with one choice: take a bet on myself and go independent for a year.

An external event at the end of June left me with infinite motivation to change myself and everything about myself.

I sold some of my stock investment and calculated that $20,000 in savings would last a year, even if I took a monthly trip to some city in India.

The first thing to change was getting fit. From barely walking 5K steps, I am practising for a 5K run. That is a good start.

The second was to start building and shipping stuff.

And write about it.

Write a lot.

RevenueCat's Ship-a-ton Challenge

In the third week of July, I started working on this mesh gradient app called Meshing. I did it mostly to distract and lose myself in the world of gradients.

I started writing daily on this website, too, and while scrolling through X on August 5th, I saw this post by RevenueCat about a mobile app hackathon.

I am bad at 24-hour or 48-hour hackathons. I cannot sprint. But a 45-day hackathon? That is a marathon I can try to walk.

I was already on the shipping train, having shipped Meshing and LyricsLink on Gumroad. This hackathon meant doubling down on the efforts.

The hackathon has three categories:

• Most Likely to Make Money Award
• RevenueCat Design Award
• #BuildInPublic Award

I know my Meshing app is not the one to make me a millionaire. So, aiming for the first award is something I preferred to avoid. I have an app idea that can be a good contender, but I have no time to hack on it.

#BuildInPublic? I have been doing that since 2019, when it was called Twitter and not X.

I have been doing that since my first app, Gradient Game. My second app, the next year, was called Chroma Game. I knew I could aim for this, and I wanted to get out of my comfort zone for it.

So, I revived my YouTube channel and have been regularly posting there for the past 20 days:

I have been writing every day for almost a month now. I am aligning myself by trying to learn something new while building Meshing and then writing about it. I added this cool rotating gesture a few days ago and then wrote about the RotateGesture in SwiftUI. Win-win!

Also, writing online helped me get a quarter-time consulting gig to stay afloat until next month. I am literally taking a bet that this iOS 18 app will be a success, and I had to hedge this bet in case my delusion is not delusional enough.

I also aim for the RevenueCat Design Award, not for the destination itself, but for treading on this journey of learning UI/UX design. I want this app to have such a delightful experience that people say a designer and not a developer created it.

Moving Forward

There are still 25 days left for the hackathon, and I have finished the app's core functionality. I am going further out of my comfort zone and doing a live stream today to create a Paywall for the app!

This app started as a distraction, but now I am obsessed. I love my app, especially now that the noise effect creates album art like Joji's Glimpse of Us.

The app can literally create art, which is what my artistic soul has ever wanted: to make and live art.