My first hackathon
I'm participating with my new app which is almost ready
Hey, listen!
I’m nearly to launch a new app!
RevenueCat announced a cool hackathon.
Am I even a developer if I never ever participated in one?
We keep getting cursed with bad weather every time I write the newsletter
This makes easy staying at home at the computer though 😅
I’ve been pretty focused in coding last weeks.
This is bad for solopreneurs, as is it supposed for us to do marketing, marketing, marketing, marketing…
It is never enough marketing.
For Jobs’ sake, I just want to build new things!
But there is one thing that I like more than coding new apps.
I like to eat — yeah, I have that weird habit.
So my last weeks, or even months were a mix of mixed feelings.
I wanted to build my next app, SurfBuddy, long time ago.
But marketing and support for WrapFast and growing an audience are super time consuming.
Yes, binging Twitter, YouTube, watching the UEFA Euro, Olympics and MotoGP also has something to do…
I needed it to stay alive as a sane human being, though!
Nevertheless, in the last weeks, I found the proper mood and focus to have quite a lot of long coding sessions in a row.
And out of nowhere, I found an extra motivation to keep me on track:
The RevenueCat’s Ship-a-ton
If you don’t know what the hell RevenueCat is, it’s the company with the most damn cool swag in the entire world.
Apart from that, it’s an SDK and platform that simplifies A LOT integrating purchases, subscriptions, trials, paywalls, etc… in your apps.
Turns out they announced a hackathon shipaton for indie hackers.
Anyone launching apps in this period until September 18th can participate.
The only condition is having at least one purchase in the app integrating their SDK.
This is for sure a thing that I will do, as I had it done in all my apps so far…
There’s no way I’m not participating on this!
Also the prizes are quite succulent. There are 3 categories, and in each one they give:
1st Place: $5k + featured in San Francisco billboards
2st Place: $2.5k
3st Place: $1k
So with my motivation turned on over9000, I’m finally near of launching my new app.
If you follow my journey on Twitter, you probably know about it.
If you don’t, I’m building an Apple Watch and iPhone app for competitive surfers.
This is the niche of the niche of the niche, because it is for:
Surfers
Who compete
Who own an iPhone
Who own an Apple Watch
Who have the LTE version
It is pretty narrowed down so maybe it is doomed to fail.
However, this time I’m solving an app that properly solves a real world problem.
During competition heats, surfers stay updated about the ongoing scores through PAs on the shore.
This is annoying because a lot of times they don’t hear properly the scores, or they are duck diving and don’t get the information.
There’s also a priority board on the beach indicating who is the athlete with preference to ride the next wave.
Depending on the surf break, you can be pretty far from the shore. With the breaking waves noise, wind and if there are rough conditions, you miss a lot of info.
I’m solving this with my app SurfBuddy.
It communicates surfers with their coach/friends/family on shore.
Everything sent from the iPhone/iPad is reflected in realtime on athletes watches.
I have already the MVP fully functional and it works damn good.
It wasn’t pretty straightforward, as I had to deal with technical limitations from the watchOS side, regarding realtime communication.
But the result is way faster than I expected!
I’m working in completing the watch UI and putting the finishing touches on the iPhone app.
Hopefully, I can launch next week and apply with it to the hackathon.
I hope you appreciate this time spent away from coding to make sure I don’t miss my commitment to the newsletter 😙
See you on next week!
Juanjo