On October 16 the sales bot in my Telegram posted a line I'd been waiting for: all time, 69 orders, $530.85. After Lemon Squeezy's cut, about $470 of that is mine. One refund in the whole run.
The first commit was September 23. So: 23 days from an empty repo to the first $500, with two apps, no audience, and no ads.
This isn't a "quit your job" post. It's a record of what actually happened, with the numbers, because every post I read before starting was either a victory lap or a theory.
The two apps
Halo turns the MacBook notch into something like the iPhone's Dynamic Island: music with lyrics, volume, a file shelf you can drop things into and grab later from any app, and an island on external monitors too. It's the one that made the money: 66 sales, $500.97.
Halo went from first commit to Product Hunt in nine days. It launched October 2 at $4.99 with a three-day trial and finished #31 for the day with 70 upvotes, which is nowhere near the top and still enough to start selling. With version 2.0 on October 11 I dropped the trial, made it paid-only and doubled the price to $9.99. Sales didn't stop.
Shedi is a disk cleaner for developers. It finds Xcode DerivedData, old simulators, Docker images, every node_modules on the machine and ten package manager caches, says what each item is and whether it's safe, and moves everything to the Trash first. $19.99, one-time, or $27.99 for two Macs.
Shedi took two days. The spec was written on October 13, the app shipped two days later, and it has 3 sales for $29.88 as I write this. The biggest was someone in Minnesota who bought the two-Mac license with the launch code.
Two days is not a typo, and it isn't because I'm fast. By the second app I had Claude writing the Swift while I wrote the rules for what's safe to delete, and I reused Halo's licensing, the site template and the sales bot. The second app is always cheaper than the first. The first one costs you the infrastructure; the second one only costs you the idea.
Where the buyers came from
I run Umami on both sites and tag every link I post with ?ref=. The bot pulls the numbers into Telegram with each sale. Some of what it showed:
Threads beat X by seven to one. On one day in October, halo-mac.com had 169 visitors. 100 came from Threads, 14 from X. Same post, same screenshots, same account age. Threads shows small accounts to people. X shows them to nobody.
Hacker News sent fewer people and better ones. An Ask HN post about building Shedi brought 8 visitors. Two of the three Shedi sales happened that day. I can't prove the HN visitors were the buyers, because the one who paid the most showed up as "direct", but the timing is hard to ignore.
The interactive demo closed a sale. The Shedi site has a demo you can click through without downloading anything. The two-Mac buyer's session, in order: opened the demo, clicked Buy, came back, ran the demo scan, ran the clean, clicked Buy again, paid. The demo exists because I didn't want to make a video. It turned out to be the thing that answers "but what does it actually delete?"
Launch directories work for AI, not for people. The TrustMRR and Vuink listings sent almost no visitors. But when I asked ChatGPT for the best Mac cleaner for developers, it put Shedi first and cited the Vuink listing as its source. Google's AI Mode, on the other hand, doesn't know Shedi exists. Its sources for that query are GitHub READMEs and r/macapps posts, and I have neither yet. That's next.
Half the traffic is "direct". 43 of 68 visitors on Shedi's best day had no referrer. That's people clicking from Slack, Discord, email and in-app browsers. Tagging links fixes some of it. Nothing fixes all of it.
What I'd skip next time
Launch sites that email you. After the Product Hunt listing, support@ got a cold pitch a day: paid listings, "launch films", SEO packages with "link exchanges". None of them sent a buyer. The free listings did.
Tweets as the main channel. Mohit Vaswani, who makes Homy, posted that a six-day-old Medium article with 2K views outsold his tweets with 200K impressions. My numbers are smaller and say the same thing. Long-form where people search beats short-form where they scroll.
Waiting for the first app to be finished. Halo got better after people paid for it, not before. Every feature in the last three versions came from a support email. One buyer wrote that the music glow kept animating after the island closed. That was a real bug, fixed the same day, and his line about the app is now the quote on the homepage.
A free trial. Halo's first week had one; version 2.0 removed it and raised the price, and the sales rate held. A 14-day refund policy does the same job with less code, and in 69 orders one person has used it.
What I'm doing with the $470
Mostly nothing. It covers the domains, the email, and the developer membership. The point of the first $500 isn't the money. It's finding out that strangers in Minnesota, Germany and Sweden will pay for something you made, which is the one question you can't answer by thinking about it.
The next $500 is a content loop: one guide a week on shedi.app, cross-posted to Dev.to and Medium, every link tagged, the bot reporting what moved. I'll write up what that did in a month.
If you've shipped a Mac app and have numbers, put them in the comments. The honest ones are rare.
