I’m finding myself more and more attracted to the idea of building small apps as a solo dev.

I work full time for a company I love, but I will always make things on the side. In the past, this has meant building large scale applications, the kinds you would normally expect to find working at a startup. Graphite Docs was my first. It started small, then it grew into a complex, permissioned, encrypted collaboration platform. I then built a blogging platform and a finance app. I’ve built dozens of apps, many of which were probably too large of a scale for a solo dev.

I’m now building Perligo, and I can see the writing on the wall. If I listen to my backlog, this thing is going to grow to be too big, too complex for me to manage as an indie. I have not yet launched out of alpha, but I am happy with the product now. My former MFA cohort uses the app and is happy with it. So, this means I might just leave it alone, even at the risk of it not being something people will pay for.

I’ve started working on smaller apps. I have a new one on iOS and macOS coming out soon. I feel like the constraints of small apps are better suited to indies, but the upside is, as you’d expect, much smaller.