Hey Reader - Simon here 👋

For a few weeks, I thought Tiny Harvest had finally found its new normal.

Downloads were going up.
Revenue was increasing.
Everything seemed to be moving in the right direction.

Then, almost overnight, it slowed down again.

Nothing had changed about the game.

Just the distribution.

And that taught me one of the biggest lessons I’ve had as an indie developer...

🎥 My Mobile Game Made $5,000… Then Everything Changed

In this week’s video I break down what happened after Tiny Harvest had its first $5k month.

The revenue wasn’t the interesting part.

Understanding why it happened was.

I talk about:

• how Apple "featuring" changed everything
• what happened once that traffic disappeared
• why I’m now spending much more time on building my own distribution channels

👉 Watch the full video​

💭 A few thoughts this week

The last few months have completely changed how I think about indie apps.

For a long time, I thought the app I built was everything.

Now I think it’s more like:

Product × Distribution.

You can build an amazing app.

But if nobody sees it, it doesn’t matter.

Ironically, one of my most successful posts recently wasn’t about React Native at all.

It was a simple post sharing Tiny Harvest’s June revenue.​

It reached far more people than I expected and sparked a lot of conversations with other indie developers.

That reminded me that sharing the journey is part of building the business.

So you’ll probably see a lot more of that from me ✌️

🛠 What I’m building

This week is all about momentum.

For Tiny Harvest I’m continuing to ship:

• QoL improvements and bug fixes
• adding community requested features
• preparing the next seasons before summer vacation

At the same time, I’m treating marketing as part of development.

That means spending way more time on:

• TikTok
• X / LinkedIn
• Reddit
• sharing what I’m learning along the way

I’m also in the middle of transferring all my Android apps to a new Google Play developer account after running into a payment profile issue.

It’s turning into quite the adventure… and might become a future video on everything involved in transferring apps, backend infrastructure, and cloud projects without breaking anything 😅

That’s it for this week.

One thing I’ve definitely learned by now:

Shipping the app is only the beginning.

Getting people to discover it is a completely different challenge!

See you next week,
Simon