Building and marketing a backpacking and hiking planner app

Meet Michael Jones.

This is not a story on how to get rich quickly from building mobile apps. This is a story of Michael Jones who loves adventure, exploration, the beautiful world around him and a good old fashioned challenge.

That all resulted in him launching Don’t Forget The Spoon, a backpacking and hiking planner app.

The story told by Michael Jones

The US Marine Corps, coding, and beer

In the wise words of Captain Kirk from the original Star Trek series “Perhaps man wasn't meant for paradise. Maybe he was meant to claw, to scratch all the way.” I bet a lot of indie developers can relate with this quote, pouring hours into their apps after their “normal” 9 to 5 jobs.

In the spirit of Captain Kirk, my journey doesn't quite begin at Starfleet Academy. Unfortunately it doesn't exist quite yet. My journey starts at the next best place, the United States Naval Academy.

The United States Naval Academy is where I learned to code, and I started my first app while preparing to be an Officer in the United States Marine Corps.

My first app

Like any good future Marine I really liked beer, not just any beer, but really hoppy India Pale Ales. If you are not familiar with the history of the United States Marine Corps, we love pointing out that our organization was founded in a bar…

And so ‘Beer Portfolio’, a website to track all your favorite beers was born. Eventually the website transitioned to a mobile app using Cordova, and that's when I first jumped into the Android and iOS app store.

It felt awesome to release a public app that anyone could download. I wasn't making any money from it, but it was growing and the user base seemed to really love it. As quickly as my app business started, it quickly came to a pause. After graduation from the Naval Academy, I was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant in the United States Marine Corps and very quickly got deployed.

I deployed on what we call a MEU, a Marine Corps Expeditionary Unit. Essentially sailing around the world, ready to respond to a crisis at a moment's notice. While sailing around the world with my Marines there wasn't much free time for coding and building out my side business.

I remember getting 24ish hours off ship in Hong Kong and running into a hotel to get some wifi to fix an expired certificate on my app. It was then that I realized I didn't have time for this in my life at the moment and I eventually shut down Beer Portfolio. It was a bit bitter sweet but I had more important priorities at the time.

Ten Digit Grid

The itch to code and create never faded, but I also loved photography and writing and eventually started to blog about my outdoor adventures on a website called Ten Digit Grid.

The blog surprisingly grew pretty quick and started ranking pretty well on Google. Eventually I had a solid monthly 5k active viewers and growing. I had some Google Ads on it that started bringing in some steady income along with Amazon affiliate links and I was internet money net positive 💲

The blog was steadily growing, but it wasn't going to make me rich. I also realized the crazy adventures I was going on and writing about would eventually slow down when I eventually started a family of my own. The business model of the blog didn't seem to have long term viability. Could I use the blog to jump start another business?

The one and only

Now is probably a great point in the story to also mention that I met a beautiful nerdy electrical engineer (Rachel - now my wife) in a bar in San Diego, California and left the Marine Corps for a civilian job in satellite communications.

When the COVID pandemic hit and we had a little bit more free time, we both started to take Flutter courses online and I slowly got back into coding. It was around this time I realized I had a steady flow of traffic to my blog that was just waiting to be monetized.

I see a lot of people building apps and try to find an audience to market it to. I had the audience, I just needed a product to sell them.

Don’t Forget The Spoon

In February of 2022 my wife and I decided to drive to Yosemite National Park and make a Clouds Rest snowshoe summit attempt (video below).

My best friend and I tried this same hike a couple years before and had to turn around due to poor conditions.

Long story short we had a fantastic trip but we forgot to pack our spoons. Sitting in the snow shivering and trying to eat our dinner with no spoons was not great, and that's when Don’t Forget the Spoon an outdoor packing app was officially born.

Just about 9 months later my first baby was born (my app, not a real baby yet), and I released Don’t Forget the Spoon to the public on November 8th, 2022.

Marketing the app

Launching the app on my blog was great, I had an instant audience to provide feedback. I also launched it on a couple backpacking and hiking forums where I luckily was received with open arms.

The original app was a bit buggy and the original users were awesome and patient bug finders. They supported me through the bugs and offered suggestions along the way.

The app continued to grow organically through the blog, but got a large boost each time I went on another backpacking or hiking trip.

I am able to self advertise the app in every blog post I make. Each detailed trip report I would type up I would then share on Reddit, along with my photography. The blog posts and photography continue to fuel the growth of Don’t Forget The Spoon.

SEO is interesting, not only does my blog drive continued traffic, but a handful of Reddit posts and Reddit comments have eventually been indexed as well and continue to drive traffic to the app.

The last way I drive traffic is straight up cold emailing. I have essentially taken my niche of backpacking and hiking and just search for YouTubers in that niche. On their profile pages a lot of them have public emails. When I reach out, I never ask for a collaboration or anything substantial from them. I just let them know about my app and ask for their feedback since they are experts in the niche.

Through the Youtube outreach I have gotten a handful of new users, a couple shorts made on the app and potentially one large YouTuber who is in the process of making a video with my app featured in it.

Excited to hopefully see this pan out early next year.

The numbers

So that was the long slow winding road that has led to where my app business is today. It's a long slow fun grind.

My MRR is just under $100 a month with revenue avg of about $150-$200 per month when you factor in one time purchases as well. This is just the app and doesn't count affiliate purchases. I am by no means a viral sensation but each and every month I continue to grow and provide value to my users.

Over the past year I have gotten about 55k Active users on my blog. My blog Ten Digit Grid is actually built on forum software for an open source project called Flarum. I highly recommend checking Flarum out if you have never heard of them.

Don't Forget The Spoon just passed its 2 year birthday and I have just under 2k downloads on Android:

The big spike you see in the middle of the Android download graphs was due to Reddit. The fun part was it wasn't even a Reddit post, it was a well placed Reddit comment. That one reddit comment got 210 upvotes!

I was able to make that post due to a free tool called F5Bot. With F5Bot you can monitor key words or phrases on Reddit and get notified when someone posts or comments on them. This is a great way to actually provide value on reddit if you can actually help someone with your product in a non spammy way.

Comments are fantastic and probably where I get a bulk of my users on Reddit, but I do use my photography to promote my blog on there as well. Here is an example post I made using a photo to draw in users' attention. Then I link to the blog in my first comment.

Screenshots

A few screenshots from the app.

In addition to his main app ‘Don’t Forget the Spoon’, Michael also has a small weather app called Don’t Forget The Weather.

His most recent app is a fun real world travel Bingo app called Vaygo Bingo. It encourages Mike and his wife to take more fun pictures. It's part scavenger hunt, part bingo.