Quiting Apple to go independent

Alex Styl is an ex-Apple Android developer who left his 9to5 job to go indie. He shares his learnings and some priceless tips on how to do it yourself.

This is the first guest post for the Effective Android newsletter. Alex Styl shares his perspective on why he left the stability of a full time job to become independent, and gives valuable tips about how to pick the right project, what mindset to have when working on it, how to grow an audience, speeding up delivery, and more.

Let’s go for it. Thanks for sharing with us Alex! 🙌

My backstory

Working for myself is something that I always wanted to try. I am a person that loves building apps and I would describe myself as creative. I have always romanticized the idea of making a living off my own products, but I never seriously pursued it.

My background is mostly technical. I have been building Android apps for the past decade and have a Masters degree in Human-Computer Interaction (tech + human psychology + user experience). My love for building products made 9to5 jobs non-fulfilling. The more I climbed the career ladder, the less happy I became. Why do I need to focus on development when I love designing, user research, understanding real world needs, etc? That's way too constraining for spending the majority of my day to day living.

The pandemic accelerated a few things for me. One of them was the lifelong dream of making my own living. This is the reason why I quit my high paid job as an Android Developer from Apple to try out my own ventures. (PS: Yes, Android Developer at Apple. I was working on the Shazam Android app. PS2: Yes, Apple owns Shazam).

From Developer to Entrepreneur

There is a mind shift that needs to go through. You keep hearing this phrase "Build it and they will come" but that can't be further from the truth. It is really hard to take a product off the ground at first and it needs constant marketing attempts. Building a product (whether that is an app or website) is not enough. And working alone is something that you need to take your steps very carefully.

Entrepreneurship is often described as a journey. You need to come to terms with your own limitations and advantages. You also need to put ego aside. And it is often an emotional rollercoaster with lots of uncertainties. It has a lot of emotional highs and lows. And this is something not many people talk about.

You cannot possibly predict how good (or bad) a product will go. You might think that you have made the solution to humanity's problems and people will pay good money for it. In reality though, it is not up to you to decide if your product is good or not or whether people will buy it.

What type of projects can you work on?

This is also something you need to figure out on your own. There is no 'recipe' that something works as the market changes all the time. Look about what is happening with AI and profile photo generators such as Lensa, AvatarAi.me or ProfilePicture.Ai. Right now this is the big trend but tomorrow something else will be.

My 2c here is to find the tools and platform that works best for you and find an audience that has money to buy your products. For independent creators, it probably makes more sense to charge a good amount ($50 per piece), otherwise it won't make financial sense.

No matter what you are building, whether it is an app, a website, a blog, a book, videos, etc, you want to be able to focus on the product you are creating and make shipping as simple as possible. Make it dead simple to ship and update or new content.

Think about it like this. If you are focusing your energy and time on anything else (such as tooling, clean code, architecture, refactoring etc) your product does not improve. People don't get more value, and you won't be getting paid for it. As developers, this is counter intuitive as we are paid all our lives exactly for that. It's a habit it's hard to break but it is something I want you to be conscious about.

In terms of what to build, the sky's the limit. Figure out what you are good at, and what you can do non-stop. This will give you an advantage over others. My personal advantage is being really good at building Android apps. I have been doing this for a decade now. At the same time, I am really good at explaining complicated concepts to people and I find it fun to do. I have done multiple public talks on technologies and design and have written tons of articles over time. This is something fun to me but others hate doing it. That's how I ended up writing ViewToComposable.com. It was fun to write and made about $4,000. The book still makes some sales every now and then but it has stagnated as it is normal for books.

It took about 6 months to figure this out about me though. I would have never believed that something that is easy and fun for me to do could make a business.

At the same time I love building apps. I don't want to go 100% full on content and tutorials as this is not fun for me. If something is not fun for me, I will lose interest quickly and move on to the next thing. However, producing content is a great way to attract people's attention. So there needs to be a balance.

I recently published my latest app called Ubidrop. It brings the solution to something I have always faced with my Android phone and that's making file transfers from Android to desktop dead simple. So far my customers seem to love the solution and have received a lot of positive feedback with feature requests about it. Ubidrop has made almost $2,000 in revenue and it's 2 months old.

Ship more, increase the chances

Imagine you run a bakery and you sell the most incredible bread. Unless people become aware they can buy this amazing bread from you, they would never come to your store to buy it. With physical stores, people walk in front of it and they are aware there's this great bakery I can buy bread from. Digital products have the same. You need to make people aware of you (your store) and your products.

There are multiple ways of doing this. One way would be by building multiple products and seeing what works best. Try out as many things as possible and see what works and what doesn't. They say that shipping is a muscle and I agree. The more you build, the easier it becomes. You find your flow and tools that work best for you to make it simpler.

I tend to work with Jetpack Compose a lot. Because of that I have a lot of code that I reuse across my projects. At the same time I share my learnings about Jetpack Compose on composables.co. That way everyone wins.

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