Just hit 15K DAU on my app as a solo developer - AMA! I…
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Just hit 15K DAU on my app as a solo developer - AMA!
I build and maintain kumamap.com https://kumamap.com \- Japan Bear Incident Map. I shared here several months ago about the explosive growth and my worries about spiking Netlify costs and a lot of good people recommended that I move from Netlify to Cloudflare. It took me a weekend to plan and execute but it was the single best decision I have ever made for this app. I can now deploy 10-12 times a day on weekends, not worry about bandwidth, requests, and stupid deploy credits. Just focus on shipping and testing with my users. Netlify is seriously a big blocker for anyone who wants to achieve scale.
I also migrated from Firestore to D1 & R2 and I only now pay 5 dollars for a paid Cloudflare Workers account and the app is generating 200 USD a month. D1 is so cheap I don't really know how Cloudflare makes money. But that enables me to just create super useful features for my users and I don't worry about file storage, or how many rows I read and write from the db. Just focus on building.
Some numbers:
* 15K DAU
* 2 minutes average session duration, meaning 500 hours spent every day on this app
* 75% Japanese users - a market that is very hard to penetrate
* $0 spent on ads. All organic growth
* $200/month revenue with $5/month in costs
I'm a solo developer handling everything. Data pipelines, SEO, UI, design, backend, customer support, content creation, marketing. I extremely love this way of developing though. I have a feature idea in the morning and I can ship it by noon. A bug gets fixed immediately. I don't have to spend countless hours in meaningless meetings with designers, PMs, other engineers. No ego fights with others. PURE JOY. Even if I didn't make any money from it, the pure joy of building and shipping and seeing many people use it brings an indescribable level of excitement and joy to my life.
I also want to shout out Claude Code because without it I don't think I could pull this off as a side biz. Not good at design? Just ask it. Want feature ideas? Ask it to scan the web for you. 1 engineer can now build and maintain a whole product. I couldn't imagine having this kind of speed 2 years ago.
It's also a great learning opportunity. There are things you simply can't learn while working in a large company doing the usual product development cycle. I handle bot banning, rate limits, race conditions, edge cases, security, bundle size, page speed, caching, product analytics - things that you wouldn't get exposed to unless you own a product or work in a small team at a startup.
So if you have any questions, happy to answer!
#programming #technology #dev
source
I build and maintain kumamap.com https://kumamap.com \- Japan Bear Incident Map. I shared here several months ago about the explosive growth and my worries about spiking Netlify costs and a lot of good people recommended that I move from Netlify to Cloudflare. It took me a weekend to plan and execute but it was the single best decision I have ever made for this app. I can now deploy 10-12 times a day on weekends, not worry about bandwidth, requests, and stupid deploy credits. Just focus on shipping and testing with my users. Netlify is seriously a big blocker for anyone who wants to achieve scale.
I also migrated from Firestore to D1 & R2 and I only now pay 5 dollars for a paid Cloudflare Workers account and the app is generating 200 USD a month. D1 is so cheap I don't really know how Cloudflare makes money. But that enables me to just create super useful features for my users and I don't worry about file storage, or how many rows I read and write from the db. Just focus on building.
Some numbers:
* 15K DAU
* 2 minutes average session duration, meaning 500 hours spent every day on this app
* 75% Japanese users - a market that is very hard to penetrate
* $0 spent on ads. All organic growth
* $200/month revenue with $5/month in costs
I'm a solo developer handling everything. Data pipelines, SEO, UI, design, backend, customer support, content creation, marketing. I extremely love this way of developing though. I have a feature idea in the morning and I can ship it by noon. A bug gets fixed immediately. I don't have to spend countless hours in meaningless meetings with designers, PMs, other engineers. No ego fights with others. PURE JOY. Even if I didn't make any money from it, the pure joy of building and shipping and seeing many people use it brings an indescribable level of excitement and joy to my life.
I also want to shout out Claude Code because without it I don't think I could pull this off as a side biz. Not good at design? Just ask it. Want feature ideas? Ask it to scan the web for you. 1 engineer can now build and maintain a whole product. I couldn't imagine having this kind of speed 2 years ago.
It's also a great learning opportunity. There are things you simply can't learn while working in a large company doing the usual product development cycle. I handle bot banning, rate limits, race conditions, edge cases, security, bundle size, page speed, caching, product analytics - things that you wouldn't get exposed to unless you own a product or work in a small team at a startup.
So if you have any questions, happy to answer!
#programming #technology #dev
source
| 3,000 mlx | |
| 6 | |
| 0 |