Six Months of Side-Hustle Apps and ¥16,000 Take-Home, Part 2. It Was Not Social Media That Sold My Apps, but the App Store

I spent six months building apps with AI alongside my day job. I cannot code. I released 4 apps, and my take-home for those six months was about ¥16,000. After the MacBook and monthly AI costs, I am roughly ¥600,000 in the red.

I laid out all the numbers from those six months in Part 1. It was not that the apps were failing to reach people; they were not being chosen. So next, I would choose topics that people wanted and borrow credibility. I got as far as writing that, then put down my pen with one question unanswered.

A focus: who I make things for and what I make them for. I find almost anything interesting. Because of that, there is nothing in common across what I have made. So I cannot settle on a focus.

At the end of Part 1, I promised to write about where I would focus and how I would earn credibility. This is the continuation. I wrote it so that you can start here even if you have not read Part 1.

To say it upfront, I decided not to choose a focus. Looking into it, popularity helps sales only when readers and buyers overlap. Mine did not. As in Part 1, I will lay out what I found on the way to that conclusion alongside the numbers.

I Wanted People to Choose My Work Because I Made It

When I put the StratAIX name out there, I quietly hoped people would choose my work because of who made it, not just for the work itself. Even if the topics were all over the place, if people tried them thinking, 'If that person made it,' then my tendency to find almost anything interesting could become a strength in itself.

The numbers were less forgiving. From the end of July to the end of October, people clicked through from my site, note, X, and elsewhere to my app pages 88 times. From September 9 to October 28, within what I could measure, not one person downloaded an app through that path.

I had more or less assumed that people who liked something I made would eventually become interested in the person who made it. In practice, though, that sequence barely happened.

So where does a creator's popularity come from?

StratAIX apps are still available on the App Store.