Why Your 40th App is the One That Finally Prints

If you've spent any time in the entrepreneurial hell-holes of Twitter, you've probably noticed something strange. Scroll for two minutes and you'll see "Day 2 of my app launch and I'm at $40k MRR!" sitting right next to "It wasn't until my 40th launch that I finally found profit." Meanwhile, someone's checking in from Bali letting us know on day 2 of quitting their job they hit $8k for the month. Hell yea good shit bro.

I'm writing this as much for myself as for you, trying to make sense of what the hell is going on. After spending 2.5 months building Border Times , I think I'm starting to understand something important: the "40th app" advice isn't about persistence or luck. It's about the very real skills and infrastructure you can only learn by doing it wrong several times first. Bali guy somehow hit the go-juice right past all this but sail on my brother.

For me, right now, these are my major hurdles: 

• organic social reach (who sees my product)
• marketing proficiency (how well is my message coming across)
• code infrastructure (the tech problems of building)
• business operations (pure logistics like LLC, accounting, communicating channels etc)
• SEO and backlinks (the time trials of creating SEO able web content)

In my opinion, the coding barrier has been very well minimized due to the prevalence of great AI augmented coding tools. What remains are four different mountains you need to climb, and each one has its own learning curve that takes real time to master. The reason it takes so many attempts isn't that you're failing - it's that you're learning are many completely different disciplines at once, and most of us can only really level up one or two per attempt.

The Social Media Puzzle (And Why Copying Doesn't Work)

Let me start with the most humbling realization I've had: your app could be incredible, and nobody will ever see it if you don't have an audience. Right now I'm sitting at about 100 followers on X, which means my reach is essentially zero. But here's what makes it more complicated—even if I spent the next six months mastering X and growing a following there, my actual target audience isn't on X at all. People who frequently cross the US-Mexico border are mostly on Facebook, and they primarily speak Spanish.

This creates an interesting challenge that I didn't anticipate: even when you solve the problem on one platform, you haven't really solved a wholistic problem. They all take time to grow. You've just completed one level of a much longer game. What I've realized is that social media isn't just about showing up - it's about understanding the mechanics of each platform, learning what resonates with different audiences, and building genuine connections over time.

The advice out there is wildly contradictory, which initially frustrated me until I realized something: it's contradictory because people are at different stages of the journey. When you have zero followers, the "post 50 replies a day" advice makes sense—you need volume to find what works. When you have 10,000 followers, the "just be genuine and provide value" advice makes sense because you've already figured out what resonates. The problem is that both groups are giving advice without acknowledging which stage they're describing.

What I'm learning is that social media is a skill with a real learning curve, just like coding or design. Your first hundred posts will probably miss the mark. You'll see people copy viral tweets word-for-word and get zero traction, while seemingly random genuine posts blow up unexpectedly. The key insight I'm taking away is that reach compounds exponentially—when you're starting from zero, you have nothing working in your favor yet. But once you start figuring out what works for your specific audience, that knowledge becomes reusable. The second app launch won't start from zero because you'll have already built that foundation.

Infrastructure: The Hidden Curriculum

This is where I expected to have an advantage given my engineering background, but I still got humbled by just how much setup work is required before you can build anything user-facing. What I've discovered is that there's a massive collection of "one-time costs" that you pay on your first serious app, and they're genuinely difficult the first time through—not because they're conceptually hard, but because they're full of gotchas that you only learn by hitting them.

The list looks straightforward on paper:

• Choosing your tech stack
• Implementing authentication
• Setting up OAuth providers
• Building networking layers
• Passing app store review
• Adding push notifications
• Integrating analytics
• Implementing deep linking

Each one sounds like a checkbox you tick off. In reality, each one is a rabbit hole that can consume days or weeks.

The Authentication Deep Dive

Let me walk you through just one to illustrate why this matters: authentication. When I started implementing login for Border Times, I thought it would take a few days. How hard could letting people log in possibly be?

What I discovered is that you need completely different OAuth implementations for web, iOS, and Android. Then Google OAuth works fundamentally differently between iOS and Android, so you can't just port your implementation. If you want to support Facebook (which many users prefer), you'll need to navigate their developer dashboard, which seems deliberately designed to be confusing.

Then comes the fun part: the App Store rejected my initial submission because I only had Google OAuth - apparently you need to offer multiple login options. The OAuth providers themselves sometimes won't fully approve your integration until you're in production, but you can't go to production until you're approved. And this is all before dealing with the actual client-server complexity: token management, automatic refreshes, secure caching, bearer tokens, and all the security features you didn't know you needed.

Here's what I've realized though: this isn't wasted time. Every hour I spent wrestling with OAuth configuration is an hour I'll mostly never have to spend again. My next app will launch with auth already working because I'll just copy my implementation. The infrastructure problems that killed my momentum on app one become trivial copy-paste tasks on app two.

This is why you see so many successful indie hackers selling "boilerplate" and "starter kit" products for coding. Check any #buildinpublic creator with over 10,000 followers, and there's a good chance they're selling some version of their stack. It's not a cash grab - they genuinely solved these problems the hard way once, and now they're packaging that knowledge to save other people months of pain. Once I get my templates dialed in, I'll probably do the same thing. For people coming from a marketing background this could genuinely be a worthwhile subscription fee if it solves their hardest challenges. It's actually a smart business model because you're selling something with real value: time.

What I'm Learning (And What I'd Do Differently)

The most valuable lesson from these 2.5 months is about scope. Border Times tries to solve a real problem, but it's also trying to do community features, real-time tracking, multiple languages, and complex mapping. If I started over today, I'd ruthlessly cut that down to just the core value proposition—real-time wait times—and ship it as a simple web app in two weeks instead of two months.

Speaking of web apps, that's the second major insight I've gained: mobile apps have so many more barriers to entry than web apps. There's no app store review where someone can arbitrarily reject months of work. No 30% platform cut. No push notifications or deep linking to implement. You can deploy updates instantly instead of waiting for approval. And the templating ecosystem for web frameworks is much more mature than mobile development. Plus coding tools are on another level for web as opposed to mobile, where they still struggle.

The third lesson, and this might be the most important one, is about audience building. What I should have done is spend time building an audience before building the product. Writing tweets and making videos takes time, but it doesn't require infrastructure. You can start on day one. By the time you've spent a few months building an audience and talking about the problem space, you'll have a much clearer sense of what people actually need. And when you finally ship, you'll have people who already care about what you're building.

Why the 40th App Actually Works

Here's what I think is really happening with that "40th app" wisdom everyone keeps sharing. It's not that you need to fail 39 times to get lucky on attempt 40. It's that by your 40th app, you've separated all these different skills into individual lessons.

• App 5 taught you how to handle infrastructure
• App 12 taught you what marketing angles actually work
• Apps 20 through 25 helped you build an audience
• App 31 taught you to ruthlessly reduce scope and ship quickly

Each app is a chance to level up one or two specific skills while applying what you learned from previous attempts. The code infrastructure from your early apps becomes reusable boilerplate. The marketing lessons compound into intuition about what will work. The audience you built doesn't disappear between projects—they're there for your next launch. Eventually you've leveled up enough different skills that they all come together, and suddenly everything clicks.

That's why it takes multiple attempts. There are simply too many different disciplines to master simultaneously. But the beautiful thing is that progress is cumulative. Your 40th app isn't starting from scratch—it's standing on the shoulders of 39 previous learning experiences.

Moving Forward

I'm still early in this journey with Border Times. I don't have all the answers yet, and I'm probably wrong about half of what I've written here. But that's exactly why I'm writing this publicly—I learn faster when I'm thinking out loud and getting feedback from people who are in the same position.

What I do know is that each of these barriers—social reach, marketing, infrastructure, operations, SEO—becomes easier to handle the second time around. The first app teaches you the lessons. The second app lets you apply them. And by the time you get to that mythical 40th app, you're not just trying harder or getting luckier. You're operating with accumulated knowledge that can only come from experience.

If you're working on your first, third, or tenth app right now, I'd love to hear what barriers you're hitting. What's taking longer than you expected? What turned out to be easier than you thought? Let's figure this out together.

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P.S. If you frequently cross the US-Mexico border, check out Border Times. It tracks real-time wait times using data from actual crossers. I'd love your feedback on what we're building.