Growing a blog about Swift to 140k visitors per month

Meet Antoine van der Lee.

Antoine is an indie developer from Spanbroek, a small village a little north of Amsterdam, The Netherlands. He lives there with his wife, two sons, 4 chickens, 2 cats, and 1 60-kilos-Bernese Mountain dog. Oh, and he partly build his house himself.

Besides writing Swift, he loves playing golf or playing football with his oldest.

The story told by Antoine van der Lee

Dreaming of speaking

It all started in 2015. I had ambitions, like I always have, large ones, optimistic ones. One of those was speaking at conferences: the idea of flying around the world, the flight and hotel being arranged, and meeting fellow engineers from all over the world was simply a dream.

However, my proposals were almost never accepted so the dream remained a dream.

In 2015, I was working at a local digital agency. I was happy at my job, did amazing national-large scale app projects, but I never had any international reach. I did not have a following on social media and the agency did not have a recognizable name.

Let me be clear: conferences reject talk proposals all the time and this is completely normal, but I truly believed I would make my dream come true by stepping up.

Starting SwiftLee

March 2017 I decided to join WeTransfer, a known name in the international industry. I also decided to start my Swift blog and called it SwiftLee: a combination of my last name and the coding language I write about. The goal was to create a personal brand, combined with the known name WeTransfer to fulfill my dream of speaking at conferences.

May 2017 I started publishing an article every week, every Tuesday. Something I’m still doing today, quite the streak! What happened is pretty wild: developers created an expectation of a new article arriving every week, resulting in rapid growth over the years to now 140K unique visitors every month.

Altogether, I was able to make my dream come true and I’ve now presented in countries like Argentina, Singapore, and many European countries.

Monetizing SwiftLee

August 2019, a friend of mine asked me: why don’t you monetize your blog? I was not close to the 140K visitors I have today, but I already gained quite some momentum.

After contacting a few potential sponsors, I managed to get my first sponsor to pay €750 for three months. While the absolute number is small compared to what sponsorships cost today, it was an important milestone. I realized I could turn my personal brand into a business.

I did not dare to dream about going indie, but I did start to fully focus on growing my brand. I added a newsletter that grew to 20K subscribers today and I launched a Mac app called RocketSim targeting the same audience.

That last point is crucial: being able to target the same audience with all the initiatives I was working on was a major win-win.

I was still working full-time at WeTransfer, so making the most out of my time was an important focus.

Having multiple apps for different audiences means doing marketing, promotion, etc. multiple times. I could now research knowledge for a new RocketSim feature, write about it on SwiftLee, and promote it in my newsletter. Let alone all the promotion I did on my social media accounts that supported the personal brand SwiftLee.

Transitioning to a 4-day work week

January 2023 I decided to transition to a 4-day work week. The growth for SwiftLee, SwiftLee Weekly, and RocketSim created more potential and made it promising to go Indie someday. I needed to validate this potential and decided to increase the time spent on these projects.

Up until this moment, I did everything on the side: during evenings, weekends, public holidays. Small bits of time combined together make you reach larger milestones in the end.

I couldn’t forsee the impact of working one day a week full-focus on my products. RocketSim’s monthly recurring revenue growth statistics:

• In 2022 MRR grew from $80 on January 1st to $1126 on December 31st

• In 2023 MRR grew from $1126 on January 1st to $4501 on December 31st

The impact of the 4-day work week became apparent and even more opportunities arrived. Altogether, it made me realize how much more growth I could make if I would go full-indie.

Going full indie

March 2024, I decided to go full indie. The income of SwiftLee & RocketSim combined were more than enough to pay the bills, not even considering the impact of the extra time I would invest in pushing for new growth.

I’ve had ideas I didn’t start building since I only had 1 day a week available. Focus is key for growth, I did not want to divide my focus over multiple large initiatives. Yet, I did know that I could start creating courses and promote them against the same audience: another win-win.

I already have the audience, I just have to make the course. However, “just make a course” sounds too easy: it takes time. Yet, imagine 1% of the 140K monthly visitors buying my $100 course: that’s $140K extra income per course.

It was clear that I had no excuse anymore to go fully independent and fulfill the potential. It was bittersweet: I had an amazing team at WeTransfer and we did awesome stuff, but I could simply no longer ignore the unleft potential.

I’m a few months Indie now and started developing my first course: From Side Project to Going Indie.

I must be honest: it’s not the best course in terms of potential since I’m targeting a slightly different audience than just Swift developers. However, it is a course that I’m passionate about as I’m able to share all my learnings of the journey that I’ve described in this interview.

I’m getting myself familiar with building courses while helping out fellow creators that dream of going Indie too.

And that’s what makes my journey so amazing: the creators I meet along the way, the creators I get to work with. Being able to help them fulfill their dream of becoming independent is such a motivation driver that I’ve been able to build the course in under 8 weeks.

As I know many of you reading this have that same dream, I’m giving you a 25% discount code using “FAKEMAYO” - or simply use this link.

What’s next?

I’ve been reading a few chapters of the book called Psychology Of Money. One chapter is about Never enough. While I’m certainly not at a point that it’s never enough, I am working towards a balanced life of enjoying more time with my family combined with working on passion projects. Those passion projects will be more courses related to Swift and next-level features for RocketSim.

If you’re working on your passion, your side projects, and considering to go independent one day, don’t hesitate to reach out on X or follow my course on going-indie.com which will soon have a community of indie developers to connect with.

I’m looking forward to helping you on your journey!

Where to follow Antoine.

• X

• SwiftLee blog

• SwiftLee Weekly Newsletter

• RocketSim

• From Side Project to Going Indie course