Transcription
All right, good morning. Happy Wednesday. And uh, I wanted to break into the classic developer issue here, which is building and not working on distribution. And I just want to make a quick point as to how important distribution is and how much better things get once that's the focus, um, and that's the target of your activities to build a business.
So, I'm showing you my screen right here, and this was an app that I launched on the 9th of June. It's currently June 25th. June 25th. Um, and in 2 weeks, basically did right around 7,600 in revenue. And this is on like a pretty small uh subscription. So, it's a $25 a month or excuse me, a $25 a year subscription. This isn't a product that's going to make me a lot of money. Um, but it's going to be a really nice just digital product to have in my back pocket that probably generates me close to $10,000 a year or so. And I've also got a way where I think I can double that for next year. And I'll and I'll explain how. Um, so is this going to make me rich? Absolutely not. But does it help grow my surface luck? Absolutely. Um, and so that intrigues me quite a bit.
This app you're going to laugh at because I shouldn't make $1 from this. The only reason I'm able to make money in this is because of the niche and because of the distribution that I have for it and it's such a weird pain point and I'm just lucky to know about this industry to to provide a a fix. My fix or my solution isn't even a web 2.0 O thing. There's no interaction. Um, it's literally just displaying data. It is a website wrapper from the Alaska Department of Fishing Game for fisherman in Bristol Bay. So, I grew up fishing up there every summer. Uh, I spent whatever seven different seasons in the summer up there commercial fishing. And there's a lot going on in that fishery. Um, and I'm not going to get into the fishery cuz that's not what we're here to talk about. But regardless, you know, when you went up there, you're just MIA for a month or two, right? Um, during the time of the fishery, just you you head out on the boat and basically your communication is VHF. Um, there was there there was cell phone, but even then it was just really poor. You didn't really have data and even texting and calling was just always extremely intermittent.
So the ring I the reason I bring it up is because Starlink has brought on this whole market now. um because they've got internet out on the water just like perfect internet, right? And so the Alaska Department of Fish and Game for just themselves and and everyone else who's not out there has always had this site posting, you know, things that are currently going on in the fishery and it's extremely helpful information that fishermen want to know about and but you don't you just like really didn't have access. And then if you're just like obviously you're not out there with a laptop and you're just on your phone using this is just a pain in the butt. Um, so you can see everything about the run stats. Um, you can see what's going on with the current harvest. You can see like the current announcements. So like here's an announcement again reading a PDF on your phone that's not formatted correctly. Not a good time. Um, so there's just a lot of data. Um, and then there's also if we go uh here, these guys have um this helps fishermen understand like how the run's going to continue to look as the season progresses. So like here's what one of those looks like. To the average person, this means absolutely nothing. If you're a fisherman up there, um, it tells you a lot of information. Uh, here's like some sock composition stuff. Um, again, I'm not going to talk about this stuff because it's not what matters. But what matters is that I made $7,600 in 2 weeks. Probably spent less than 40 hours building that app. And I'm going to show you the app that I built.
So, here's all it is. They download the app. There's a paywall. And this is why I'm using Revenue Cat. It's really easy to implement Revenue Cat into iOS and Android. Um, you can just throw it in there. So, as soon as you download the app, the app's free. Paywall instantly. $25 pay it or not. There's no I don't have any fe like premium access, less access, free. No, it's just you either care or you don't pay it or not. Um, and so far I've gotten over 304 subscriptions. So, enough people care. There's about 1,200 boats up there. um, 3,600 to probably 4,000 fishermen. Um, and then that doesn't include like family members, right, of people like watching their uh loved ones out there on the water. So, some of that information that I just showed you on the website is is exactly what you're seeing here, just like displayed in an easy to see way. Um, if you want to see, for example, like current, uh, escapements and stuff, you have that weather. Um, different areas. You've got openings. So, we can check one of these out. So, that's like what one of their openings looks like. Um, here's that port mer data. It's a little bit more interesting. Um, and then here's um like where what districts different fishermen are fishing in. Um, which is really important. They fishermen want to know these things. Um, and then I actually have a little feedback tab here, too. So, you can send something.
Okay. So, what's my point? I spent less than 40 hours on this one. Um, and it seems to be well received. The way it works is how you think it works. I've basically got um these cron jobs set up that basically I have Python scripts running in the background that scrape all their data throws it into my database uh BB run live throws it into my database and we call it a day. Um, pretty sweet and then I just displayed it on the app. Literally spent I would say less than 40. I would say I spent probably a week cuz this was just like a side project. It wasn't anything uh like it wasn't obviously like a main thing. It was just like nights and weekends sort of a thing and I just do two hours here, two hours there, two hours there and uh was able to spit it out there. So pretty sweet.
Okay, so let's talk about the like what's what's next. So in that feedback section, it's been awesome, right? Because some people are going to rip on you and you you know that going into it. Other people really helpful. So, a lot of guys actually said, "Hey, it'd be nice if we just like they didn't use this word, but like, hey, can we have a directory of like all the different services that I need mid-season when like my RSW breaks or I need an electrician or I need a welder or whatever." Oh, so I'm just going to go to those people next year. Seasons are probably a little it's it's just we're too far in at this point for the season for this to probably make sense. I'm gonna grab those guys. I'm say, "Hey, look, I've got, you know, we'll see how the year closes. 3 to 400 subscribers using this app. Um, for 250 bucks, you can just be on the app listed as a service. And I'm going to see if I can wrangle up, you know, 10 20 people. Um, if you could wrangle up, you know, 20 people, which plenty, there's a lot of that. Um, at 500 bucks a piece, that's 10 grand. Get it up to maybe 400. You know, that's a $20,000, you know, AR product. Again, you're not getting rich, but it's a nice thing to have in your back pocket because if you have a 9 to5 where you're only making, you know, 70k or something, 80k, well, it's like, well, that helps, right? That helps. So, and it's fun and I love it. I love fishermen.
Part two is this is one fishery in Alaska. Um, there's so many other fisheries and so probably going to build this out for some other fisheries. Um, all in all, really fun project. I'm probably on, you know, getting towards the end of the revenue on this particular project just because this season ends like around July 25th and so I don't really see me getting too many other downloads. I'm working with some folks who are kind of the top in like newsletter and social media within this uh fishery um still right now. And so we're going to see if we can't push that out to help push it out to a few more folks. But um, yeah, I just want to say like in the real world most of the time you couldn't make $1 for something like this. But this is literally a website wrapper that I built in less than 48 hours or excuse me uh a work week. So pretty fun. Um, it's all I got for this one. Again, it's all about distribution. And it really just hammered home to me like you have to that's the thing to focus on, right? And building code at this point, it's a commodity, right? And I think we have to accept that. And so accept the fact that building code, you're not special anymore. No one cares. It's easy, right? Like I built that entire app and all the web scrapers and everything. I didn't write one line of code. I did not write one line of code. I want to be very clear about I didn't write a variable name. I didn't write an environment variable. I didn't do I literally did nothing, right? I just pointed my I just used Gemini 25 max in claw in cursor pointed it around told it what I needed. I know everything I need. I know my database schema like I've talked about in other videos and we ripped that thing pretty quick. So, uh, pretty fun. Pretty fun.
All right, catch you guys in the next one.