Ship Fam – Indie Enterpeneurship, App Dev, Flutter and more!

Hey all! Sorry for the long gap between episodes. This is a quick update letting you know what Luke and I are planning for the pod.

Here's the TLDR:

We're taking a long break while I move out to New York and take a Senior Flutter Engineer position with Betterment, but we'll be back next month. We're going to be coming back in the same feed (so stay subscribed!) but with a rebrand and production value (better audio quality and more!)

Luke challenged himself to build an app for his young nieces over a family reunion. Hear about what he built and how it was so addicting his extended family dubbed it "Luke's Crack App"!

https://kidmoji.app/

https://x.com/luke_pighetti

https://x.com/caseycrogers

This episode is a Luke update where he talks about the Flutter WASM based PWAs (Progressive Web App) he's been building to "vibe check" ideas that come to him and the new ultra-lightweight analytics service he built (and has now published)!

Check out the projects mentioned:

https://struggleswitch.com/

https://unfck.app/

https://lukehog.com/

Luke and I talk to Mike Jones (AKA CodingMarine) about his set of outdoors focused Flutter apps!

https://dontforgetthespoon.com/

https://www.dontforgettheweather.com/

https://twitter.com/codingMarine

Luke walks through his methodology for analyzing successful consumer apps and applies to the viral multi-million ARR "Umax" looks maxing app!

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/umax-become-hot/id6471026798

https://www.hf0.com/

https://twitter.com/caseycrogers

https://twitter.com/luke_pighetti/

We interviewed Matan Lurey-and Engineer working on Impeller on the Flutter team!

We talked to him about the decisions and underlying mechanics driving Flutter, the current state of Flutter shader development, what makes Flutter feel more or less "native", and more!

Links:

https://x.com/MatanLurey

https://x.com/algebrandon (Flutter 3D shader demos)

https://docs.flutter.dev/ui/design/graphics/fragment-shaders

On today's episode, we bring on Sebastian and talk about his indie journey from new grad to six figure ARR with HabitKit!

Links:

https://x.com/SebastianRoehl

https://www.habitkit.app/

Luke and Casey discuss The Dart/Flutter package ecosystem and Flutter's seeming lack of top down leadership or publicly communicated vision.

Flutter Packages:

https://pub.dev/packages/hotspot

https://pub.dev/packages/salomon_bottom_bar

https://pub.dev/packages/flutter_gutter

Kevmoo's Pure Drat Listenable/ValueNotifier initiative:

https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/149466

Casey and Luke swap their software engineering interview stories!

https://x.com/luke_pighetti

https://x.com/caseycrogers

Luke and I discuss why and how engineers are so bad at predicting user behavior and share some counterintuitive tips and tricks we've learned for predicting user behavior and making money off indie apps!

https://x.com/caseycrogers

https://x.com/luke_pighetti

One month ago we set goals for Casey's viral NBA trivia app "Dribble Game". Through ASO and funnel optimization, we were going to 5x it from $100 daily revenue to $500. Hear how it went!

Spoiler alert: Casey is now job hunting.

We also chat about viral Zoomer social apps, the CEO of RIzz, LevelsIO's "EU acceleration" and more! There's a whole heck of a lot packed into this episode that you won't want to miss.

Luke and I riff on "eXtreme Go Horse", a Brazilian coding style we discovered through a youtube video by the Primeagen.

We discuss how experienced engineers so often engage in "bad" practices that beginner engineers are trained to avoid and share instructive and entertaining stories from our respective careers in tech.

Extreme Go Horse:

https://medium.com/@dekaah/22-axioms-of-the-extreme-go-horse-methodology-xgh-9fa739ab55b4

theprimeagen on Sprints and XGH:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_p1Q4c3TF3c

Casey is traveling back from Europe to the land of the free and the home of the brave so this week's episode is a solo episode with Luke giving a status update on his newly launched calisthenics app "Thenics Pro".

Hear about App Store app pre-orders, ads for ASO and gauging product-market fit.

https://thenicspro.com/

https://twitter.com/luke_pighetti

Luke talks about: the solar eclipse, quitting his job at tonal, and the "Waffle House" top-of-funnel experiment that he's currently running with this new exercise app, Thenics Pro.

Download Thenics Pro:

https://thenicspro.com/

Follow Luke and Casey on Twitter:

⁠https://twitter.com/luke_pighetti⁠

⁠https://twitter.com/caseycrogers

We brought on Dmitry Zhifarsky to talk about his premium Dart/Flutter analysis tool "Dart Code Metrics".

We focus on the downsides to open source software and the challenges of monetizing client-side software.

Check out DCM and Dmitry's Twitter here:

https://dcm.dev/

https://twitter.com/_incendial

Follow Luke and Casey on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/luke_pighetti

https://twitter.com/caseycrogers

This is a follow up to last week's episode on Dribble Game-Casey's viral NBA trivia app.

This week's episode focuses on ASO and paywall optimization strategies that Casey got from an app audit with Steve Young from the app consultant firm App Masters. Over the next month Casey intends to implement these ideas and 5-10x Dribble Game's revenue. We'll have a followup episode in May to discuss the results!

App Masters:

https://appmasters.com

Steve's youtube channel (great free content):

https://www.youtube.com/@AppMasters

Luke on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/luke_pighetti

Casey on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/caseycrogers

Casey talks about Dribble Game Trivia, the viral basketball trivia app he built in Flutter with Taylor Stein. The app reached #23 for Trivia on the App Store and has taken Casey 20% of the way to "ramen profitable".

Listen to this episode to hear about how he's gotten there and then tune in to part 2 next week to hear about the ASO and monetization audit AppMasters did on Dribble and the strategies they provided to 5-10x daily revenue!

https://dribblegame.com/install

Luke and Casey talk to Brandon Trautmann, a Flutter engineer at personal finance startup Betterment.

Inspired by #buildinpublic on Twitter, Brandon launched "Lumy", a data-centric companion for the home budgeting app "YNAB".

He talks about launching his first indie app, building an all-local privacy first Flutter stack, and more!

You can check out Lumy and Brandon here:

https://twitter.com/BrandoTrautmann

https://linktr.ee/lumyforynab