Paul HudsonAfter months of work, my new app is finally available to preorder on the Mac App Store. It's called Kickstart, and it has just one job: to help indie app developers make more money on the App Store. How does it do that? Let me explain…
Kickstart takes the lessons from my book Everything but the Code, and transforms them into step-by-step daily tasks that help you ship – it's a complete roadmap from idea to delivery, covering marketing, competitors, building, analytics, press, and more, so you never miss a beat.
Marketing? Kickstart will design your website for you, create TikTok-ready marketing videos for you, build your press kit, and even help you find subreddits where your audience is. It's powered by my Ignite website builder – the whole thing is in Swift.
Competitors? Kickstart will find apps like yours, analyze their screenshots, monitor their search rankings, track their release cadence, and help you research their review sentiment so you can identify weak spots faster.
Building? Kickstart takes my Control Room project and adds a ton of new features to it – the iOS Simulator gains a huge range of superpowers, but Kickstart also tracks Xcode build times, TestFlight feedback, crash reports, and more.
Analytics? You get daily reports straight from App Store Connect, showing you all your sales and subscription revenue, price parity adjustments, sales funnel reports (impressions to views to downloads), and also how your Apple Search Ads are performing.
Best of all, like all my apps Kickstart uses zero tracking or analytics. It uses Apple's Foundation Models and MLX for fully private, on-device AI, but also provides an MCP so you can connect Claude or Codex to the whole Kickstart stack in seconds if you want.
Kickstart breaks down the process of building apps into clear, easy to follow steps, but then it helps you complete those steps right inside the app – finding competitors, making great marketing videos, tracking custom product page results, and so much more 🚀
Find out more here: https://www.kickstart.tools
Boom! If you bought my book Everything but the Code, you should check your email – not only is it the single most popular book I've ever written, but everyone who bought a copy also gets a big discount on Kickstart 😎 https://www.hackingwithswift.com/store/everything-but-the-code
Vincent Friedrich@twostraws Niiice 👏 I was hoping for that after I read your announcement 😄 I’m actually planning to release two new apps soon, definitely gonna try it!
Rob In der Maur@twostraws Kickstarter is absolutely phenomenall. Test driving it for a while and I am hugely impressed.
Curious whether you build the Kickstarter website with Kickstarter.
Curious whether you build the Kickstarter website with Kickstarter.
Mark Boszko@twostraws well that’s handy, because that’s exactly where I am in my App building/release process right now
mural@twostraws wow, this sounds exactly as something I need. I just created my first two apps, and found how hard everything else than code is - reaching audience, validating idea etc. Looking forward to it!
Gary Ash@twostraws If you could rig a bundle with your excellent “Everything But The Code” book, wow! (wouldn’t help me already bought the book)
@GaryAsh I'm on the case, and it will help everyone who bought the book 👍
Thomas Tempelmann@twostraws Clarification please: Is this for iOS app only or does it work just as well for marketing macOS apps?