The Road to My First App Launch — Business, Domain, Site and Costs

Prologue

   Raising two kids, at some point I simply felt the money going out month after month. I inherited nothing to speak of, and I have no talent at all for investing, so there was nothing put aside either. I envied the people around me who were generating extra wealth from rent and the like, and I spent a lot of time wondering how I could build an asset of my own that would bring in a second income.
   By chance I came across a blog post by a solo app developer who had quit his job once his released apps passed 300. In an era where generative AI services are everywhere, it seemed entirely possible to do this alone, with no designer and no product manager.
   When I think “this is it,” I tend to move fast. I used the scraps of time after work and started building an app right away. Polishing it took far longer, but the app I put together in three hours once I made up my mind is ‘Spin the Bottle’. It will be on the App Store and the Play Store shortly.

Spin the Bottle

Registering the business

   Having decided to start, I wanted to do it properly. I registered as a sole proprietor, and the hardest part by far was the business name. After days of turning it over I settled on ‘Fadongkwon Soft’. The train of thought went like this.

• My kids’ names don’t share a generational syllable, but both begin with ‘Ryu’ (류).
• Street Fighter, the game I played at the arcade as a kid, has a character named Ryu.
• One of Ryu’s special moves is the fireball, which we called ‘padongkwon’ (파동권) in Korean. (Hadou~~ken)
• Since I’m a dad, I could have left the English ‘Pa’ as it was, but
  I changed it to ‘Fa’ to bring out the Father/Family meaning.
• And that is how Fadongkwon Soft was born.

Buying the domain

   This goes without saying, but ‘Fadongkwon’ is a word I coined myself, a Korean word spelled out phonetically in English, so nothing stood in the way of getting the domain. My first goal was to release one app a week… but my day job is being an employee and my side job is being a dad, so there was only so much time left for the ‘side job of a side job’. I gave a lot of ground and revised the goal to one app every two weeks.
   At one app every two weeks, that works out to roughly 25 apps a year. And to get to 300 apps I would need something like 12 years. So instead of going with whoever was cheapest today, I weighed renewal prices and a few other things and bought the domain at dynadot.

Building the website

   I had no ambition to build anything grand, so at first I planned to put the pages together in Notion and forward the domain there. But I couldn’t find a template I liked, and even the well-organized ones felt like Notion rather than a website.
   I looked at other services such as WordPress and modoo.at, but there were limits to shaping them the way I wanted. At the same time I had no desire to build the site “well” enough to justify paying for web hosting, so I used dynadot’s page builder and put together a simple main page and not much else.
   Then, while getting ready to release the app (a separate privacy page is required when you register on the Play Store…), I tore it down once more and landed on the current version, built on GitHub Pages.

• No separate web hosting needed,
• it can be a website and a blog at the same time, and
• I don’t have to carry ads I never asked for from a free service.

That last one won me over more than anything.

Getting ready to launch

   I wanted to publish the apps through the business rather than as an individual. I gathered what I needed from all sorts of places and worked through the missions one by one.

The to-do list will keep getting updated, so I’ve split it into its own post
and this post will not be updated any further.

• Hire an assistant (ChatGPT — 29,000 KRW/month)
• Register the business
• Buy a domain ($12.99/year)
• Build the website
• Open an Instagram account for promotion
• Add AdMob ads to the app
• Get a D-U-N-S number, needed to register apps on the App Store and Play Store as a business
• Enroll as a Google developer ($25, one time)
• Register the app on the Play Store (in review)
• File for mail-order sales registration (통신판매업 신고, 45,000 KRW/year)
• Enroll as an Apple developer ($99/year)
• Register the app on the App Store
• Register and get review for the paid, ad-free version on the App Store and Play Store
• Add AdSense ads to the website

Written out as a list it looks simple, but most of these were things I had never done before, and they took much longer than I expected.

Up-front costs

• ChatGPT — 29,000 KRW/month
• .com domain — $12.99/year
• Google developer enrollment — $25
• Apple developer enrollment — 129,000 KRW/year
• Mail-order sales registration license tax — 45,000 KRW/year
• Online course on Inflearn — 290,000 KRW

• Year 1 — about 880,000 KRW (at an exchange rate of 1,450 KRW per dollar)
• Year 2 onward — about 560,000 KRW

   Apart from the Google developer fee and the course, all of it recurs every year. So roughly 560,000 KRW a year goes in as running cost, and how much of that comes back, and whether there is any profit on top, is something I’ll find out as I go.