Focus On One App Is Bad Advice For Solo Devs

The advice sounds wise. Build one app. Focus. Don't dilute yourself across projects. Every podcast guest, every Twitter thread, every indie hacker post repeats it.

I run nine consumer apps. Klozer, Qvit, Atoast, Hedhuntr, Zerch, Caffeine Club, Gospl, Ledja, FireUp. And I think focusing on one app is bad advice for most solo developers.

The math doesn't work for one app

A consumer app in 2025 has maybe a 1-in-50 shot at finding real traction. That's optimistic. The App Store has 1.6 million apps. Discovery is broken. ASO is a slot machine. TikTok virality is unpredictable.

If you bet your entire year on one app, you're making one pull on the lever. If it doesn't hit, you've burned twelve months and you're back to zero. No data. No portfolio. No second shot built on what you learned.

The single-app advice comes from people who already won. Survivorship bias. The guy telling you to focus on one thing made it work on his fourth attempt, but he's only counting the fourth.

Portfolio compounds in ways one app can't

When I shipped Hedhuntr, I reused the auth flow from Klozer. The push notification stack from Qvit. The onboarding template I'd refined across three previous apps. The app took six weeks instead of six months.

This is the thing nobody tells you. The second app is cheaper than the first. The fifth is cheaper than the second. Code reuse, design patterns, App Store Connect workflow, screenshot templates, support email scripts. It all compounds.

A solo dev with one app pays the full infrastructure cost for one revenue stream. A solo dev with eight apps pays slightly more infrastructure cost for eight revenue streams.

"But you'll do all of them badly"

This is the strongest counter and I'll address it honestly. Yes, some of my apps don't get the love they deserve. Ledja sat without an update for four months. Zerch needs a UI refresh I keep postponing.

But here's what actually happens. Two or three apps in the portfolio do most of the revenue. You can tell which ones within ninety days of launching. Then you focus on those.

Focus isn't a decision you make upfront. It's a decision the market makes for you, and you can only make that decision if you have options.

What the focus crowd gets right

I'll grant them this. If you're building a complex B2B product with a long sales cycle, focus matters. If your app needs deep domain expertise, focus matters. If you're charging $200/month per seat, you need to nail one thing.

Consumer apps are different. They live or die on whether the concept clicks with users in the first thirty seconds. You can't research your way to that. You can only ship and see.

What to actually do

Pick a stack you know cold. Pick a category you understand as a user. Build small. Ship in 4-8 weeks per app. Don't add a backend if you don't need one. Use StoreKit, not Stripe. Use SwiftUI, not Flutter unless you need Android day one. Reuse everything.

After three or four apps, you'll have a portfolio that pays the bills even if no single app is a hit. After six or seven, one of them will probably be doing well enough that you can finally take the focus advice and pour yourself into it.

But you earn the right to focus by building options first. Not the other way around.