Six Months of Building Side-Hustle Apps with AI: 9 Ideas, ¥16,000 Take-Home, and a ¥600,000 Loss. What I Learned About Why My Apps Were Not Seen or Chosen
It has been six months since I started building apps with AI alongside my day job.
Here are the results first. I planned 9 apps and released 4. The fifth is under review as I write this. My take-home for six months was about ¥16,000. After the MacBook and monthly AI costs, I am roughly ¥600,000 in the red.
'AI has made building easy, but reaching people is hard.' Every time I open X, I see some version of that take almost daily. Honestly, I am tired of hearing it. I worked as a marketer for 10 years. What I want to say is that without writing about why they do not reach people, the observation is not useful to anyone.
In this article, I look back over the past six months in chronological order and check my own numbers and public data every time I hit a wall. A small spoiler: there was only one moment in those six months when I broke through. That one time taught me everything I was missing.
The Plan I Made in March, and Reality at the End of October
Before I started, I wrote a strategy memo. Set beside where I am now, it looks like this.
| March plan | Results by the end of October | |
|---|---|---|
| Releases | 1 per month, 3 to 6 by year-end | 4 released |
| Revenue | More than ¥10,000,000 a year from a side business | Take-home pay: about ¥16,000 |
| Fixed costs | Less than ¥5,000 per month | A loss of about ¥600,000 from the MacBook and AI costs |
| Posting | 20 posts a month on X, and 1 note post in release months | 6 note posts from March to May. I kept posting on X through August and reached 862 followers. Even so, I could not attract more readers |
On the other hand, this is what I put out into the world with AI over those six months.
| What I made with AI and put out into the world in six months | Count |
|---|---|
| Released apps | 4 (plus 1 under review). Store pages in up to 18 languages |
| App Store screenshots | 523 |
| App Store preview videos | 64 |
| Promo videos published on YouTube | 38 |
| My own site, strataix.net | 148 pages (5 app pages in up to 18 languages, plus 73 pages of terms and privacy policies) |
| Press releases | 6 (in 10 languages at first, then 18) |
| PR emails | About 780 |
| note posts | 6 |
| Automation systems running behind the scenes | 15 |
| Record of work built up with AI (commits) | 2,323 |
That is how much I put out on my own alongside a full-time job, without knowing how to code. When it comes to making things, AI has genuinely made it possible for one person to do the work of a small studio. What I lacked was money and readers. I will look at where that gap came from, one step at a time.
Why PR went nowhere in Japan, the two weeks when it sold only in Germany, why about 780 emails led to just 3 pieces of coverage, the real reason it was seen but not chosen, and the near-resigned conclusion I reached about 'copying.' The full account of those six months is published in Japanese on note.
Read the rest on note (in Japanese) →The second part is now published too.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
The apps mentioned in this article are still available on the App Store.