Creating an app as a solo developer can be highly rewarding – imagine finally seeing your vision come to life and experienced by people around the world. Yet it’s a huge undertaking for one person or even a small team, which is why we spoke to three developers about creating their apps from scratch.

Frederik Riedel helps people spend less time on social media with his app OneSec, his friend Leo Mehlig made the daily planner Structured to ensure he took enough breaks from coding and former lawyer Kai Koch changed gears to become an app creator and co-founded the emotions coach Ahead.

They talked to us about their journeys to becoming app developers and shared their insights into bringing ideas to life in the app universe.

Leo: I started coding when I was 14 and I met Frederick shortly after – we were both Swift Student Challenge winners. That was a great motivation. I was 15 or 16 years old and I was meeting with other developers and Apple engineers, asking them questions. I felt I wanted to be part of that community.

Frederik: I would have never studied software engineering without the Swift Challenge scholarship because before I was just thinking of creating apps as a hobby or a side project. Meeting other professional app developers motivated me to continue on that path. It made feel that I can earn a living from making apps.

Kai: The reason I went into app development is that you can build very large products both in terms of impact and revenue with very small teams. Sometimes, when I see large app companies that have like 500 engineers, I always wonder what do all these people do!

Leo: I did everything in the beginning: the design, the coding, the customer support, the marketing... It took me almost three years to have my first employee.

Frederik: The biggest struggle when you work on your own is when something doesn’t work and you can’t figure out why. I always try to build apps that are somehow related to myself, so they either solve a problem that I have or they are related to a hobby that I have. If you don’t have a relationship with your project, you’d give up more easily.

Leo: A great challenge for an indie developer is the limited amount of time, especially if you’re working on your own or with a small team. You have to focus on what’s important and think, “should we do this feature?” The product becomes more focused, which in the case of consumer apps is usually a good thing.

Kai: The beauty and the crux of a small team is that you have to focus on the things that have the highest impact. That way you don’t create too many things and don’t need to maintain features that nobody uses.

Kai: I’m of the opinion that you should charge for a product. That’s a good way of understanding whether people really like what you do – it helps you build for those who are willing to pay and not necessarily focus on features that only free users want.

Frederik: Working without investors brings you freedom and that’s really the best way to go because you have full control and flexibility. Start charging money as Kai recommended right away because that gives you the flexibility financially to continue working on it and it’s a great indicator to see if people are willing to pay for it and sets the expectations that it’s not a free app.

Frederik: When you notice that you are overworked or you cannot really move forward anymore, take a break or just say, “OK, this is a problem I cannot solve today.” But it’s also very easy to ignore yourself. There have been times where I would work something like 80 or 90 hours per week just because everything is moving forward so fast that you kind of feel you have to use that momentum.

Leo: I’ve built an app that encourages you to take breaks and that reminds you that there’s a limited amount of energy. When I’m not focused, I try to stop working and go outside or do something else – it’s much easier to go for a run and then go back and fix a bug.

Kai: If you have an idea, and you love it but it doesn’t work, you might try to massage the data to make it work. Then you’ll get very frustrated because people don’t love your idea as much as you do. Try to find the easiest way to prove a hypothesis and, if it’s not proven, maybe it’s not the right time for it or you might have the wrong hypothesis.

Leo: Sometimes failure is good because you often learn something from it. Our apps are sort of our babies, right? We grow them and we love them. If one thing you make doesn’t work, it doesn’t mean that you did something wrong or you’re a bad developer. Don’t get too attached to it.

Frederik: You have to be very honest with yourself and if you notice that something doesn’t make sense or you’re not able to build something to the degree where it becomes useful, you have to cut the ropes very early and start something new.