u/AmazingPitch7533

Hi all,

Launched my first app 2 weeks ago, did soft launch announcement with a linked in post, got a handful of users that gave helpful constructive feedback. And I made some iterations/updates based on that feedback. gearing up to do more of a marketing/distribution push now that I feel more confident after updating. happy, excited, nervous, uncertain, etc. for whatever lies ahead...

Spent a lot of time on this puppy, but haven’t had any eyes on it from the dev community… just a few beta testers while building, friends, + some new initial users.

Would be of great help to get some dev feedback / anyone who has experience building and shipping their app(s) to the app store. design, concept, + any distribution tips ?

App website is: closurebilling.com

Any feedback helps!

Quick context: I work in film/production/digital marketing as a freelance producer. So like some of you (maybe), every week I'm logging hours, building out invoices, sending them off, chasing the ones that don't get paid. It's the chore that happens after the actual work is done, and it’s always a pain in the ass. I’ve typed the opening line, "Apologies for the delay here" more times than I'd like to admit when sending my invoice…

So a few months back I started building a tool for myself. Not as a startup, just… something I could use to mitigate this headache. iOS app, voice-first. The core idea: I log work via voice as I go (on the spot after a job, end of day, whenever) and at the end of the job / project / month / whatever my billing cycle is, I tap a button and it pulls all those logs into a polished invoice that gets sent and tracked. So instead of sitting down Sunday night trying to remember what I did 3 weeks ago, the work is already logged and the invoice basically builds itself. Figured other freelancers & contractors probably have the same gripe, so I kept going. Built for the various ways we invoice (retainers, hourly, day rate, flat fees, mixed bag of all the above, etc).

Dev background: this is my first shipped app. I've been messing with code and AI tools for the last year or so, never shipped anything until now. Taught myself what I needed and used AI as a coding partner throughout. Call it "vibecoding,” call it "self-taught dev who uses modern tools," the line has gotten blurry and I've stopped caring which side I'm on… 500 hours of late nights is 500 hours of late nights.

A few things I learned along the way that might be useful for other non-dev builders:

• Beta testers were essential, but not for the reason I expected. I'm a working freelancer with multiple different kinds of invoices going out at any given time, so I had a pretty good handle on how this works across the board. The value wasn't "they showed me how freelancers invoice." It was that they caught small ideas and details I'd completely overlooked from being too deep in the build. Stuff that was obvious once said, but invisible to me because I was inside it. A handful of real users with their own perspectives caught things my own freelancer brain couldn't.
• Scope creep was the hardest part of shipping. I kept telling myself "I can ship this next week" for like 8 weeks straight. There was always another bug to fix, another small thing to optimize, another edge case to handle. The real decision point was: do I run a public beta for another couple months while I build out planned integrations and then ship? Or do I ship now while the app is genuinely solid on its core function and build the integrations into the post-launch roadmap? Realized I was optimizing for hypothetical users before validating real ones would pay. Shipped. Will build the rest based on actual user feedback instead of my own assumptions.
• "Voice-first" sounded simple in theory and turned out to be a massive build. Voice in, polished invoice out, how hard could it be? Then you actually start building it. Multiple billing styles, different cadences, retainers vs hourly vs day rate vs flat fee vs combinations of all of them. Multiple clients per user, multiple projects per client, sometimes multiple projects running simultaneously for the same client. Edge cases on top of edge cases. And a voice flow that has to be forgiving enough to handle however a real human actually talks about their work. Ended up being 100k+ lines of code (frontend + backend) across 750+ git commits. Whole thing was an exercise in creative problem solving way beyond what I thought I was signing up for.
• I built it twice. Spent the first ~6 weeks building a functional, decent-looking but incomplete version in React Native. Started there because I thought that was just… what you did. Cross-platform, common practice, the "right" choice. I'd genuinely never heard of SwiftUI. Didn't know Apple had their own native language. But the more I worked on the RN version, the more I realized the UI I actually wanted was iOS-native, and once I stumbled onto SwiftUI and saw what it could do, I knew I had to switch. Knew I was launching on the App Store first anyway, so it made sense. Had to basically start from scratch on the frontend (kept most of the backend). Painful in the moment, but the rebuild was significantly better than v1. New ideas, better architecture, cleaner UI decisions, all because I'd already learned the hard parts the first time around. So now I've got a fully built SwiftUI version live, and a 65% built React Native version sitting in the wings that I'll finish and launch on Android down the line, lol. Nothing wasted.
• AI is a tool, it doesn't have to be a feature. This isn't an AI app, just an app that uses AI for the one thing it's genuinely good at. I picked one job for it (extracting structured data from messy voice notes). Whisper + GPT-4o handle that. The rest is just code. Use AI where it earns its keep, skip it where it doesn't.

Shipped a few days ago, got a handful of real users in, and the early feedback has been genuinely constructive which has been awesome to keep iterating on.

Whether anyone actually pays for it is TBD. But I use it every day, which was the whole point to begin with, and worst case I learned A LOT.

Hi All,

Recently soft launched my first iOS app after a handful of months of development. I had a small group of beta testers throughout (people who would actually use the app) to provide me with constructive feedback. And the launch has gotten me a small amount of real users in the door and I’m already getting great (and constructive!) feedback to keep iterating off of.

I still think I’m a few months out from really honing it in based on user feedback + adding a few planned integrations before I do more of a hard launch/marketing push.

What I’m missing/lacking is an experienced developer(s) eyes and constructive criticism, specifically with help dialing in UX and overall simplifying the experience for newcomers while retaining the core functionality.

The app is for independent professionals / SMBs and is in the fintech / business / productivity lane.

Would love some eyes on it if anyone has the time and experience to provide constructive feedback. Happy to DM a TestFlight link. Any feedback would help!