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How Lukas is growing his goal tracking app

Author

Jakob Jelling
October 23, 2024

Meet Lukas Lauerer.

Lukas is a 17-year-old student living close to Munich, Germany. He has been into coding for more than four years.

Right now his focus is on GoalKit. An app to help you reach your goals.

Photo of a young and an old man looking directly into the camera. The old man is wearing glasses and has grey hair. Other people in the background.

Lukas Lauerer with Tim Cook (in case you wonder, it’s Lukas on the left)

The story told by Lukas Lauerer

About two years ago (2022), while on vacation, I discovered a book called App Kid that inspired me to try out iOS development. Thanks to a coincidence, I got my hands on an old MacBook Pro. With my previous experience in other programming languages, it was quite easy for me to get started with Swift, but developing design skills took quite a while.

In the spring of 2023, I discovered the Apple Swift Student Challenge and started working on my first big project. Despite having only a few weeks, my project ‘Milestone’ won 🥳

In 2024, I've participated again with my second app, MemoKit which also won the award.

Both of these apps are now available on the App Store (and soon a third). For this story, I will focus on GoalKit, previously known as Milestone.

The idea behind GoalKit

First, I want to say that while there are multiple similar apps now, when I initially developed the app, there was nothing similar.

The intention behind GoalKit is quite simple: It is an app that helps you track your (life) goals, break them down into smaller steps, and track progress daily. The user can choose between 4 types of goals and add up to two goals for free (or an unlimited number with a paid plan).

Developing GoalKit

I started developing GoalKit in February 2023. It was ready to launch in November 2023, but there were some legal problems, mainly because I was a minor. So it took a few more months, and then I was finally able to launch my first-ever iOS app publicly on January 14th, 2024.

All of my apps are developed in my free time, as I am still a student.

From the beginning, I posted about the progress on X (example below), which helped me get some feedback on the design and features. Over the following months, I've added more and more features and started growing a small X audience.

The first weeks af launch

The launch itself went fairly well.

I initially got more downloads than I thought, but fewer sales. After the first three weeks, the stats looked pretty promising, though. The feedback I got in the first weeks was very positive, and thanks to many feature requests, the app continues to improve.

Below some stats from launch month.

Various metrics on a black background. The heading says: "GoalKit - launch month". The metrics are Downloads, Goals Created, Worked on Goals, Active Subs, One-Time Sales, and Proceedes.

GoalKit metrics

15K downloads in 24 hours

Do you know how to get thousands of downloads fast? Neither did I until I saw someone on X explaining exactly that. You just have to give it away for free 😅

There is a website called AppAdvice. If you meet some requirements, you can get your app featured for one day, but for this time frame, people need to be able to get the full version of your app for free (forever).

After thinking about it, I decided that even though you give away thousands of free PRO licenses, it's still worth it because you will get reviews, feature requests, and the App Store algorithm will also take notice.

That worked - and went kind of bananas. See stats below.

A graph and some text on a black background. The text says: "The last 30 hours have been so crazy! @goalkit_app has been ranking in several countries in the last hours and more than 10,000 (!!!) people downloaded the app"

Download after being listed on AppAdvice

The downloads have been quite constant for the last few months, and I've been getting about 30-50 downloads per week. The app itself has about 20-30 daily users.

A graph and some metrics on a white background. The heading says "Dashboard". The metrics are Daily Users, Sessions, Events, and Avg. Duration.

App Store download stats

The business model

The app has a free and a paid version (freemium). The full version is named PRO and you can either buy monthly, annual or one-time access. I am still actively exploring how to price each of them. Currently the price is about 2 dollars a month, 8 dollars a year or 18 dollars for the one-time purchase.

Why no hard paywall? I wanted the app to have a free version so that everyone could easily try it out before signing up for anything.

And now what?

For the last few months, I've been mainly focusing on improving the App Store appearance and the app itself.

I've tried multiple kinds of marketing (X Ads, App Store Ads), but couldn't find anything that works out yet.

Currently, I am mostly focusing on releasing my third app called FinanceKit, but when I have some time to spare, I am working on a new design for the App Store screenshots and an improved design language for GoalKit (examples below).

Screenshot of to mobile phone. The text below one phone says "New FullScreen View". The below the other phone says "New Compressed Mode".

New GoalKit design

Screenshot of to mobile phone. The text below one phone says "Version 1.6". The below the other phone says "Version 2.0".

New GoalKit design

Contact information for Lukas Lauerer

Lukas’ projects

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