Indie Interview: Florian Vates
Can you tell us more about yourself and what led you to become an indie maker
My name is Florian Vates, I’m 31 years old, married with 2 kids (2,5 years and 6 months) and full time Senior iOS Developer / Mobile UX Lead at LOOP. I’ve been an iOS developer since 9+ years and still loving every second of it.
I’ve always had the dream to have my own apps on the App Store at some point but never really acted upon it.
After it became clear that Facebook is no longer very popular for the younger generation and all my friends left, I noticed there was a need for a platform that does what facebook events used to do. We used to always plan our parties, birthdays and get togethers on there but now everyone had different messengers. So after a long time just talking about it, I gathered a couple of friends and we’ve built CORDI together. Even though, after we finally released, we didn’t have too many users, it was the kick off for my journey. During this time I also started listening to the indiehackers podcast which just inspired me even more to build my own apps and grow them to hopefully eventually work full time on them.
With all the learnings from the mistakes i’ve made while working on CORDI I decided to do it right and start over. I dusted off my Twitter account back in Juli ‘23 and started to build my new app MonAI in public.
This changed everything for me. The awesome community instantly got me hooked. It also unveiled that I genuinely love helping people to easily learn something I’ve learned myself the hard way.
How did you come up with the idea? How do you generate ideas for your apps or projects, and how do you identify the problems or needs your app can address?
My apps always solve my own problems. I believe if you build an app for yourself, your intrinsic motivation will make it way easier to stay motivated.
How I came up with CORDI, I’ve already explained in the intro. My expense tracker MonAi was born because the AI hype was super fresh and I wanted some project to play around with the new tools and at the same time, everything got more expensive, so I wanted to keep track of my spendings again but all other apps didn’t cut it for me because it’s just too cumbersome to enter. So I just built my own.
The first version of Mindr, I already had running on my phone for a year with the name “CoffeeKit”. I used it to track the maintenance of my espresso machine. I always thought that it could be useful for a wider range of tasks as well but never really wanted to do more with it. With the motivation of my new #buildinpublic journey and the release of iOS 17, just around the corner, I dropped everything and polished my - back then super hardcoded - version of “CoffeeKit”.
To be honest, I don’t really validate my ideas too much. My motivation is always to build it for me and if someone else can benefit from it, even better.
How is your day-to-day app development workflow look like?
Because I have a full time job + a young family + volunteer at church quite a lot, not to mention hobbies, my time is fairly limited.
Nonetheless, I try to spend at least one hour per day to work on some of my side projects.
Due to the limited time, I have to be super effective. My experience with app development definitely helps to not waste too much time coding so the biggest variable is prioritization. I use a kanban board to keep track of my open topics which I then check of one by one. My workflow is not ideal yet but It keeps on getting better.
However, often I’m not too strict with it. After all I still want to enjoy what I’m doing and if I don’t feel like working on something right now, I’ll just shift as I see fit. Working at an agency for more than 9 years definitely helped learning how to prioritize and be efficient.
How do you launch and market your app?
I try to launch very soon. I learned this the hard way with CORDI which I only launched after building and rebuilding it for 2 years. So now I put a very great emphasis on the MVP.
My launch and marketing efforts currently solely consist of building in public on Twitter (X).
For 2 of my apps I also launched on Product Hunt with limited success. MonAi was at my very beginning and i only had a handful of followers on Twitter so I only had organic upvotes and landed on the 25th position. Mindr was already more successful ranking in the top 10.
In the near future I also want to play more with ASO and twitter ads.
To be completely honest, marketing is the thing I know the least about and it still feels like a black box to me so I’m hoping to get better at it with time.
What are the future plans for your app?
I still have plenty of features planned for MonAi and Mindr. I like to make my apps very user centric, that’s why I include a feature request feature so my users can vote for their favourite features. I think that’s a win win situation. I don’t build features no one wants, and users love being part of shaping the app.
Long term, I want to keep on building new apps, I still have plenty of ideas in the pipeline.
Do you have any interesting lessons learned or tips for other indie makers?
I had a mini series “Lessons learned” a while back on twitter with a couple of things i’ve learned while I created CORDI. Feel free to check it out in detail.
I think the list of things I learn is going to grow with time, but here are the things i’ve learned so far. These are by no means any revolutionary new insights but just things that I learned myself along the way.
🚀 build fast, fail fast, continue. I spent way too much time building my first app. The feature set was way to extensive and I felt it’s never good enough to launch. Just get it out there, get feedback and iterate if you see potential. If not, let go and focus on the next one.
🙌 Don’t get discouraged by failure. I failed big time with CORDI, wasted 2 years building non stop, but I wouldn’t want to miss it. You will probably learn more from your failures than from your successes, so treat them that way. Being active on Twitter for a bit now, I saw a lot of tweets from very successful indie hackers that showed how many apps / SaaS they’ve built and how little actually showed success. Chances are high that you won’t be the exception.
🧱 If you’re just starting your journey, i’d recommend starting with a very small and simple app. Don’t try to build the next facebook right away. It’s going to be way easier to define your MVP for a small app and you will have a fairly fast turn around which will be highly motivating. Also it won’t be as terrible if it fails. Most of the time, the simplest apps are the best apps anyway.
📢 Build in public! I think there are very few reasons not to build in public. As well as it being super motivating, you’ll get great feedback very early on and will already have interested users right after the launch.
💰 Unless you intend to create an app that should be completely free as a way of marketing, you should always have an idea how to make money with the app. If you can’t think of a way how the app will generate money (but you want to), it might not be the right idea to begin with.
⏳ Perfectionism is deadly. Don’t get me wrong, I think having a polished app that works and feels great is good, I’m all for it. But up to a certain limit. If you go down the rabbit hole too deep, it’ll cost you too much time for very little ROI. You can always fine tune later. Chances are, that the thing you’re polishing right now will not exist anymore very soon. Especially in the beginning of your MVP, things often change. This limit will also vary based on your skills. If you’re a beginner and every little animation will cost you hours, you might want to go easy on them for the MVP
👨💻 If you’re a beginner and don’t already work in the field, try to get in contact with an experienced developer. Nothing will teach you faster than learning by doing and getting feedback. Learning by doing is great, but without feedback, you might be going down the wrong path for quite some time until you realize that this is not the way to do it. When I started at my full time job, I was a complete beginner. I partnered up with an extremely talented senior and built the apps for work together with him and this was a game changer!
🏃♂️ Baby steps. If you have a goal in mind, set yourself small achievable milestones you can actually reach in a fairly small time frame. This will be super motivating because you see a clear progress and will get you where you want to be over time.
Looking back, are there any decisions or actions you regret not taking before or during the development and launch of your apps? Is there anything you would have done differently?
This overlaps a bit with the lessons learned but I definitely regret not building in public for CORDI and also that I didn’t have an idea how to monazite it.
Are there any other products that you are particularly proud of? Could you share some details about them
I already mentioned my apps in the other questions but I think I’m most proud of MonAi. AI just fascinates me and it just works really well in my opinion. I also put a lot of emphasis on a really clean and nice UI and a lot of attention to detail. Even though it’s not my most successful app as of now, I’m very proud of it.
Are there any indie makers or creators whose work you admire and follow closely?
As a matter of fact, you Khoa, were one of the first bigger indie devs on Twitter I started following and as I saw your indiegoodies, I thought that I would love to be featured there at some point. So thanks so much for making that little dream come true so fast. I’m really honoured!
In general, the whole community is absolutely great, super helpful and full of amazing talent, great ideas and feedback. Just to name a few:
Sebastian @SebastianRoehl is a person I truly admire. He’s super inspirational and such an exceptionally nice guy, he’s everything i love about the indie community in one person.
Joe @mistermeenr also fits the same category with the added bonus that I absolutely love his weird sense of humor. He also builds unbelievably beautiful stuff 😍
Jack @jackcornetpat is someone I met very early when I was SUPER tiny on Twitter. Ever since we kind of hold each other accountable in a really fun way and now even started to collaboratively work on a project together. He’s a great, very talented guy with a bright future ahead of him.
Fabian @fabiangruss is one of those people where every post is just a complete banger. He has a lot of experience in the field and brings building in public to the next level. I love following his journey and I bet we’ll see a lot more from him.
Jordi @jordibruin is definitely worth a follow, he’s so creative when it comes to app ideas and his 2-2-2 method is legendary.
Matthias is super inspirational to me. He shows how you can go from an idea to building an actual startup. All in public. He’s such a great and helpful guy and he’s also German, which makes it so much more relatable for me.
Last but not least, Andrew @degisner is a really talented developer that i can really relate to. He’s also very much into beautiful UI and great UX. Definitely give him a follow if you want to be inspired.
Could you recommend any specific tools or resources that you believe are helpful for other indie makers, especially those just starting out?
HabitKit helped me a lot to stay motivated and keep my streaks, both for growing on Twitter as well as making time for coding. What i really like about it (apart from the really nice GitHub style UI) is that it’s not too strict. I usually go to bed after midnight so it still lets me track my progress for yesterday.
If you want to do ASO I would definitely recommend tools like Shipmunk. Im not very good at it yet but it makes it very easy to find, track and compare keywords.
I think if you’re starting out, the best way to learn is to build something and get it out there. Learn from the feedback and continue until you’re where you wanna be.
Thanks for reading til the end. Hope you enjoy the interview as much as we did.
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