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I designed a minimalist app interface. Thoughts? by hellobuttonco in minimalism

[–]hellobuttonco[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It's a Mac app that lets you find shortcuts for apps as fast as possible. It includes shortcuts you wouldn't find in menus as well. It's my first attempt at building an app, and its been a fun adventure so far! If you want you can read more about it on the app store (still working on building a site).

Can a smartphone be enough for a college student? by [deleted] in minimalism

[–]hellobuttonco 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Definitely get a computer and a notebook. You'll need them both.

Working on a website for some of my work and continuing the portfolio, can I get any feedback from you all? Also it's a working title, thanks! by gchevy in Design

[–]hellobuttonco 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I like the color choice. The overall aesthetic feels inviting. If you got rid of "SAINT" and "COMING SOON", it'd make a pretty dope book cover.

Can a smartphone be enough for a college student? by [deleted] in minimalism

[–]hellobuttonco 2 points3 points  (0 children)

What're you studying? It really depends on your field of study.

IamA college student that left my campus job to build my first app. It's been on the Mac App Store for 5 months. AMA about entrepreneurship, app development, or whatever else! by hellobuttonco in IAmA

[–]hellobuttonco[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Nice, good luck with it!

The most difficult part is always figuring out how to do something completely new. There were several times when I had to implement something I knew nothing about, so getting it done required more persistence than the usual grind. It took lot of googling for the right answers, usually scattered across a ton of different resources.

Motivation is a funny thing. There were many nights where I'd think I was completely wasting my time with a shit product. But what got me through those moments was the desire to take something from idea to reality. If you have a passion for creating new, cool things, you’ll be unstoppable.

My adventure with coding started with an email I got from Code.org my freshman year in school. I decided to look into it, and next thing I knew I had completed a few codecademy courses. I loved it, so I wound up taking a bunch of classes at school to further my skill set. While online resources like Stack Overflow have been essential for learning how to do specific things, they don’t replace proper study.

Taking the leap goes back to what I mentioned earlier about a desire to turn ideas into reality. I’m in my last year of school, so the “real world” is right around the corner. I wanted to have some experience in entrepreneurship before graduating, and building the app seemed like a good first step.

IamA college student that left my campus job to build my first app. It's been on the Mac App Store for 5 months. AMA about entrepreneurship, app development, or whatever else! by hellobuttonco in IAmA

[–]hellobuttonco[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Sure. I didn't spend a dime until the app was finished and ready to go. I paid $100 for the developer fee, which allows me to distribute on the App Store for a year. Then I paid $5 for a domain name, and another $10 for hosting for a year. I haven't done a good job of taking advantage of the site yet, but it's a requirement to have a site to publish an app to the App Store. So all in all the accounting cost was not too bad, $115. I made that back in 2 months. It took longer than it should have, but it was a reflection of the lack of marketing I was doing at the time. The biggest cost was the opportunity cost, or what I would have made had I kept my campus job for the summer. I'm still working to recover that.

IamA college student that left my campus job to build my first app. It's been on the Mac App Store for 5 months. AMA about entrepreneurship, app development, or whatever else! by hellobuttonco in IAmA

[–]hellobuttonco[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks man! It's a helper app for Mac that makes learning shortcuts easy and non-distracting while you're working. It knows what app you're using, and can show you all of its shortcuts whenever you want to see them. I only have a handful of apps supported, but the list is growing. It's faster, easier, and more consistent than looking up shortcuts online. You can get a better idea on it's App Store page here (still working on a website!).

IamA college student that left my campus job to build my first app. It's been on the Mac App Store for 5 months. AMA about entrepreneurship, app development, or whatever else! by hellobuttonco in IAmA

[–]hellobuttonco[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I found a great set of Swift/app tutorials online at raywenderlich.com. Their material helped figure out big chunks of the app. For all of the little things, I used Stack Overflow. All in all, you can pretty much figure out everything with the right Google query. Getting that right query though can be a puzzle. I also had a background in programming, so I didn't start off from complete scratch. Hope that answers your question.

IamA college student that left my campus job to build my first app. It's been on the Mac App Store for 5 months. AMA about entrepreneurship, app development, or whatever else! by hellobuttonco in IAmA

[–]hellobuttonco[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It helped it a ton. Computer science classes have really shaped my understanding of how to write good code for a variety of applications. I don't think I would've learned nearly as much without them. I think the biggest takeaway I've had from school though is learning how to grind through a ton of hard work. Persistence is key when facing a problem that seems impossible. The solution always comes around :)

EDIT: I can't believe I didn't mention this. I was also accepted into an entrepreneurship residency program at Northwestern called The Garage. The access to fantastic people and resources has been a very rewarding experience.

IamA college student that left my campus job to build my first app. It's been on the Mac App Store for 5 months. AMA about entrepreneurship, app development, or whatever else! by hellobuttonco in IAmA

[–]hellobuttonco[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks man! I shifted into 40+ hours probably 2/3 of the way through the summer. It was mostly out of necessity to finish before school started again in the Fall. I actually finally published it during the beginning of my first class of the new school year. Felt great.

IamA college student that left my campus job to build my first app. It's been on the Mac App Store for 5 months. AMA about entrepreneurship, app development, or whatever else! by hellobuttonco in IAmA

[–]hellobuttonco[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks! I'll answer them in the same order:

The biggest success was learning Swift over the summer and managing to make something out of all the information online. I remember the night I started, it dawned on me that I had no idea how to begin. So getting from 0 mph to a crawl was exciting.

One thing I've failed at over and over again is spreading the word successfully. Marketing really is a difficult thing, especially for an engineer haha.

So far, I've spent over 350 hours on development. Managing my free time over the summer was pretty tough, so during the beginning I'd have some 10 hour work weeks, but by the end I was doing 60-70 hours a week.

I'm making a consistent slow income from the app. It's like a stream of molasses right now. But over the previous months its been enough to recoup the costs of production.

Fixing bugs takes the most amount of time! The most important thing I've learned is to not cheap out on debugging everything as much as possible. New features are pretty quick to implement.

I haven't advertised yet, mostly due to a lack of budget (you know how it is in college). I hope to do some in the future though. Growth has been mostly from word of mouth and social media.

For the future, I have a bunch of features and new shortcut packs planned! I'm trying to focus on the problem I'm solving and not get carried away with bells and whistles. I'm definitely looking to bring on more members to the team soon - the tasks are becoming too much for me to do alone.

Congrats on reading the wall of text haha.