This Simple Habit App Quietly Makes $30K+ a Month

Most habit apps try to motivate you.
Most get deleted in a week.

HabitKit did the opposite. It stayed simple, calm, and boring, and built a real business.

The founder:

HabitKit was built by Sebastian Röhl, a software engineer from Germany.

Before HabitKit:

• He worked a regular developer job

• Quit to try building indie apps

• Built his first app… and it failed badly

• Barely got any downloads

• Eventually went back to his job

That failure mattered. It taught him one thing very clearly:
Complexity doesn’t win. Clarity does.

The insight:

Sebastian used habit trackers himself and found them overcomplicated and guilt-driven.

He wanted one thing: a clear way to see progress.
So he built HabitKit for himself first.

The product:

What it does

• Simple habit tracking

• A clean grid that shows consistency at a glance

• Reminders

• Calendar history

• Data stored locally, privacy-first

What it avoids

• Social feeds

• Gamified pressure

• Forced accounts

• Feature bloat

The grid became the product.

How it grew?

Early growth came from:

• App Store search visibility. Sebastian did a really good App Store Search Optimization

• Clear screenshots

• Strong reviews

• Word of mouth

One turning point was ranking high for key habit-related searches. That single distribution channel compounded over time.

This wasn’t viral growth.
It was quiet compounding.

Mistakes and trade-offs

• His first app failed, completely

• Growth was slow at the beginning

• Revenue depended heavily on app store rankings

• No aggressive expansion into social or enterprise features

But each trade-off protected focus.

Lessons for builders

• Build for yourself first, but finish for others

• Simplicity is a competitive advantage

• Retention beats downloads

• Organic distribution compounds quietly

• A small app can be a real business

The real takeaway

HabitKit didn’t win because it was smarter.
It won because it was calmer.

In a market obsessed with doing more, it chose to do less, better.

And that’s why people keep them.

That’s it for this story.
Keep building.

See ya soon,
Sweekar Koirala

P.S.
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