I've Shipped 7 Mac Apps as a Solo Developer. Here's What Actually Moves the Needle.

All tests run on an 8-year-old MacBook Air.

I've shipped 7 Mac apps solo over the past year. Different price points, different audiences, different distribution strategies.

Here's what I've learned about what actually matters — and what I wasted time on.

What actually moves the needle

Writing about the build process.

Articles about how I built something consistently outperform product announcement posts. A post titled "How I implemented AES-256-GCM encryption in Rust" gets more organic traffic than "Introducing Hiyoko PDF Vault." Every time.

Showing the dev build.

Screenshots of unfinished UIs get more engagement than polished product screenshots. An 8-year-old MacBook Air running a dev build is more credible than a Studio Display mockup.

Solving a real problem you have.

Every app I shipped started from personal frustration. Adobe's pricing. Android file transfer being broken on macOS. The motivation comes through in the product — features that exist because you needed them.

What I wasted time on

Perfecting the landing page before shipping.

I spent a week on a landing page for an app that had three users. Ship first. Polish later.

Chasing Product Hunt ranking.

Product Hunt is a one-day spike. I've had launches that ranked well and converted poorly, and launches that ranked low and converted well. The correlation is weak.

Building features nobody asked for.

I've removed more features than I've added in the past 6 months. Every removed feature is one less thing to maintain and explain.

The distribution reality

No App Store. Gumroad direct. No code signing yet — below the revenue threshold for the Apple Developer Program.

The "open anyway" dialog on first launch costs conversions. I know this. But the users who care about the problem enough to click through a security warning are the users who stick around.