Six months of side-hustle app development with ¥16,000 take-home pay, part two. It was the App Store, not social media, that sold them

I spent six months making apps with AI as a side hustle alongside my day job. I cannot write code. I released 4 apps, and my take-home pay for those six months was roughly ¥16,000. After the MacBook and monthly AI subscription costs, I made a loss of roughly ¥600,000.

I laid out all six months of figures in part one. It was not that the apps had failed to reach people. They simply were not being chosen. So next I would choose subjects that people wanted, and borrow credibility. I had got that far, but put down my pen with one question still unanswered.

My focus: in other words, who I was making things for, and why. I find almost anything interesting. That is why the things I make have nothing in common. And that is why I cannot settle on a focus.

At the end of part one, I promised to write next about how I would define my focus and earn credibility. This is that continuation. I wrote it so you can start here even if you have not read part one.

To say it upfront, I decided not to define a focus. Once I looked into it, popularity only helped sales when readers and buyers overlapped. For me, they did not. As in part one, I will lay out what I looked into on the way to that conclusion, alongside the figures.

I wanted people to choose me as the maker

When I put the StratAIX name on my work, I quietly hoped to be chosen not for the things I made, but for being the person who made them. Even if the subjects varied, if people gave something a try thinking, 'If he made it, then...', my habit of finding almost anything interesting could become a strength just as it was.

The figures were not so kind. From the end of July to the end of October, there were 88 visits from my site, note, X and so on to my app pages. Between 9 September and 28 October, within what I could measure, not one person downloaded an app by that route.

I believed, almost as a given, that people who liked a work would eventually become interested in the person who made it. In reality, though, that sequence hardly happened at all.

So where does a maker's popularity come from?

StratAIX apps are still available on the App Store.