Making 100 Apps: Launching the Magpie Project

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A Project to Build 100 Apps in One Year

One day, a thought suddenly occurred to me: I have so many app ideas I want to build, yet the number of apps I’ve actually built and released is very small.

I got into the path of programming because I found it appealing that I could build whatever I wanted myself—but in reality, I wasn’t building things for one reason or another.

So I made a decision. I set a target number of 100, gave myself a deadline of this year, and resolved to freely build all the things I’d always wanted to make.

Rules

  1. It doesn’t have to be a grand service. Even something with just a simple feature is OK, as long as it’s useful. But it must be released publicly.
  2. The result can be a mobile app, a web service, or any other form—it doesn’t matter.

A Personal Opinion

What are the odds that you build a single service and it becomes a success?

Before asking that question, let’s consider: what does “success” mean for a service? A service used every day by people all over the world? A service that generates a lot of revenue? A service that implements a new and ingenious idea?

If even just one person finds the app I made useful, that could also be called a success. And personally, I consider that a truly wonderful “success.” In that sense, if you make something but don’t release it to the world, no one can use it, so there’s no value in terms of “usage.” From that perspective, I think releasing the services you create to the world is important.

Of course, the number of users and the conversion rate can’t be ignored either. Those metrics are closely tied to revenue, and earning money is necessary for survival in modern society.

However, accurately judging and predicting market demand is extremely difficult. And even if you predict market demand and spend months or years carefully developing a product to bring to market, there’s no guarantee of success.

Conversely, there are plenty of programs in the world that someone made on a weekend evening out of boredom, yet ended up being used by many people.

Taking that into account, I decided to make my strategy to develop something I personally feel I need as quickly as possible and release it to the world. Since I felt I needed it myself, I can at least expect one person to find it useful. The market’s reaction upon release is unpredictable, but if I repeat the process quickly and often, then probabilistically I should be able to launch many services that get a good response in the market.

I can’t yet know whether my strategy will work well, but I’ll find out by quickly building 100 apps this year.

A Note About the Project Name

To build a web service, you need a domain. As it happened, I saw a magpie while taking a walk in the park, so I bought the domain kkachi.apps and named it the “Magpie Project.”