Building and promoting a life balancing app

Meet Raajprashanth Ravichandran.

Raajprashanth is from India and has been developing software for 14 years. He has worked at three organisations on domains ranging from insurance, banking to set-top boxes.

After his first year as an employee, Raajprashanth decided to develop something on his own. Since then, he has been working on personal projects after his 9-5.

Currently his focus is on RolesTracker.

The story told by Raajprashanth Ravichandran

I personally created a social networking website, a reminder app, a mood tracker app, CRM and ERP tools for two different organisations, and then RolesTracker.

See screenshots from some of my past projects below.

What is RolesTracker?

RolesTracker is about breaking down life into the different roles we play and giving equal attention to each one of them.

But the idea didn’t start this way initially. It started as a todo app with some new ideas in it. Thanks to some brilliant questions from my wife and mother, it went from there to a combination of roles and todos and then finally to an app that tracks the satisfaction of our roles in life.

So, after 6 months of work from the start of 2022, I went ahead and removed the unnecessary features and changed directions.

Building and releasing RolesTracker

Taking the approach of writing code once and building for both iOS and Android, it was either React Native or Flutter. Though being experienced in React Native, I preferred Flutter due to its various advantages.

I completed coding the app around mid of 2023 by working after office hours. Having to also develop the logo, landing page, the assets for App Store and Google Play I wasn’t able to publish the app before December 2023.

Cautious about my old mistakes, this time I got help from good paid services like ThemeForest, Flaticon and AppScreens.

Google Play, which was quite lenient in its process, changed the guidelines in November 2023. Once 20 users download the test version it must be used for 14 days to approve the app. This surprise added further delay in releasing the Android version which happened in February 2024.

Marketing my app

I started posting about RolesTracker on X and reddit initially - mainly on X.

I created a reddit post which gained some response. More than a tool to get users, reddit has been the best tool to get feedback and suggestions on the app. I took them seriously and released updates to support the requests.

I also did some paid advertising with Facebook and Instagram. That didn’t bring in many users through - see stats below.

The real improvement I did was when I ran some SEO tests on the landing page and improved it based on the results. The landing page brought genuine users via Google to the app which was perfect.

I didn’t stop there. Determined to leave no stone unturned, I also wrote my first blog post in Medium titled ‘A Green circle is what you need’ and reposted it Substack and Blogspot - see stats below.

Among the app stores, Apple App Store has been much better compared to Google Play when it comes to bringing in users - stats below. Another lesson learnt is, the more frequent updates I publish the more users I get.

My current user base

I was keen on adding internationalisation and localisation right from the start. I started supporting 11 languages from a wide geography. This enabled me to get users from multiple countries where English is not the primary language.

I was able to cross 100 users by April 2024 with most coming from iOS. The users coming across from 23 different countries became a pleasant surprise out of all.

Please reach out to Raajprashanth. You’ll find him on;

• X

• LinkedIn

• Email

Update August 2024
Raajprashanth just released wybe. A simple way to journal your vibes. You might wanna check it out.