my shipkaro journey to $10k MRR - #2

here i am with 2nd edition of newsletter at the end of month 29th Oct. i launched MyDiary on 1st Oct and GenZ app on 13th Oct, so with the goal of launching new app every 2 weeks, it’s supposed to be a #shipkaro day, i know.

well, the original plan was the 31st Oct for the new app I am working on, believe me I have the date set in my project management ticket, but looks like i am going to miss a few days in launch. but rest assured, that app is coming in few days and you’re going to love it, at least that’s what i hope for.

that app is about cleanup. i see so many people with slow phones all the time, and biggest reason is almost full storage of the device. how innovative. but cleaning and deleting all those stupid whatsapp images and memes takes ages and becomes boring, so boring that we never bother cleaning at all, hence the slow devices 😂

so here’s a crazy plan. i want to make this cleaning from a boring task to a fun interactive and really trying to make “addictive” experience. i have already started up work, so do keep following my build in public updates for next few days and you are going to see really interesting videos about that app. here’s the first one for the raw prototype.

looks cool right. it’s going to be cooler than that actually. wait and watch.

that’s the question of the week i must say. i got this so many times that it has literally made its way to the newsletter. good job folks. you see, i have been an android developer (native) my whole career of 12 years now, so the question was so obvious here.

my tech stack right now is native android development with jetpack compose, and a simple mvvm architecture. i don’t get obsessed with architectures, and all that clean code crap. i prefer shipping rather than beautifying the code and solve the bugs in production, that’s more fun honestly and costs the “literal” money 😂

MyDiary AI uses ElevenLabs for transcription, Supabase for authentication, databases, RevenueCat for subscription management, Firebase and PostHog for analytics, and OpenRouter for other AI features. i can change the model OpenRouter uses from my server. currently MyDiary AI is using Mistral model for questions and cleaning generations.

after the gallery cleaning app, i plan to move to flutter so i can hit the apps on both android and iOS and hope to make more money from the shipkaro. wish me luck please.

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i am a big fan of claude code. i am just obsessed with it. sorry what? how do i change the code? sorry? it doesn’t have editor? what? have i seen claude code VS code extension?

yes, yes, yes and 100 more yes. i know about all these, and yes i am stupid that i am using claude code. i am crazy that i am still in a terminal rather than pressing my way through tabs in cursor or cline or roo code or kiro code or whatever.

i am a developer, ok. and i am very very comfortable in terminals, in fact i love them. claude code is the perfect tool for me. it lets me use my own environment and doesn’t botch-down upon me through extensions and does the work i ask it to do. there, i said it now. are you happy now.

about a week, i did gave this new Amazon’s tool Kilo Code. don’t get confused with kiro code, i got confused a lot. kiro code is a VS code extension. Kilo with the letter “L” is the IDE by amazon. it has one interesting feature called as spek driven development. in software engineering, that’s amazing thing. so i tried it for a week, and i tried to build a product with it (web product actually) and i didn’t like it.

claude code is still way for me, but yesterday i have started playing with GML 4.6 (obviously on claude code cli). why? hell it’s cheaper than claude. if it works, it works, if not, claude is always there for me. will share about this experiment in next week newsletter then.

i got this interesting suggestion that i should share my insights too in this newsletter and not become a news tv channel about updates of my shipkaro apps. i think that’s fair, otherwise i would definitely be bored by writing updates over and over again.

so going to put one of my life experiences every week here until i run out of them someday. so here’s the first one.

few years ago, i was working on this map-based android app. it had a text field to write an address, and that app would search the addresses and suggest auto-completions. like all the uber careem map apps do right. well i was naive back then. i implemented this in a way that on every key stroke, it was searching for addresses.

oh boy, was that beautiful. users loved the fast auto-completions. some even gave us 5-star reviews. and then about 2 weeks later of getting live, my manager sent me an email. it was google cloud billing email. i was shocked to see a $14,287.32 due for google maps api. and then i realized that i didn’t write good code here.

for a case like that for auto-completion suggestions text field, you should always implement debounce (at least) and even add caching mechanism and maybe rate-limits so users don’t abuse your app.

why i am sharing about this here today? almost all apps are relying on AI model APIs, so debounce and caching are really really important in those cases to save you from crazy bills like this. and yes i know you are wondering what happened next?

well it was a 5000+ employee company running in Canada, so my manager was like “let’s optimize the calls so we don’t pay this much to maps alone”. and i put the new update within few days and learned a very very expensive $14000 lesson of my life. and now you have learned that too, so happy API calling 😊

what you mean what’s next? 🤣 obviously see you in the next week’s newsletter where i will share more updates about shipkaro stuff. meanwhile do follow me on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Threads wherever you are

and if you are thinking about any SaaS or app idea, hit that ship button so hard that it explodes

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