The story of how I build my successful microstartup ACrypto, a cryptocurrency app.

These are the things that I did and grew it to $4000/month.

1/ Around 2017, a good friend of mine introduced me to Bitcoin. I was very fascinated by cryptocurrency and started investing in small amounts.

2/ Everything worked out fine the first week, as I was new to everything, but then in the second week, I started to realize there were so many issues. It wasn't easy to trade or even manage cryptocurrency.

3/ Along the way, I realized that I was not the only person who had been facing such problems, and I decided to publish it on the Google Play Store. I set a goal and built an MVP in the least time possible.

4/ I decided to build an Android app, as I have been an android developer for five years. I took a week's holiday, sat at home coding nonstop, and released the MVP after seven days.

5/ I wanted to build every feature at once, but my product-manager intuition kicked in and I cut down the features to the top three that I thought would be the most important (and without which the app would be useless).

6/ One of the mistakes people often make is to overthink and take too much time to get products out.

7/ I started sharing it within my company, and it was an instant hit. Nail down the ASO (SEO for apps). This is one of the hardest parts, and it can easily increase your downloads exponentially or break you down completely.

8/ I also shared it with friends and colleagues on the company's slack channel, Facebook and Google Plus Communities.

9/ Customer Support is easily ignored by most, but it's by far the most powerful tool for app growth as well as product growth. So what I used to do was answer each and every email. I used to get over 1,000 emails per month.

10/ I know, it was insane, but I enjoyed solving and replying to user issues. Along with that, I used to attach a closing questionnaire asking users to give a review on the Play Store if they liked the app. Trust me, this di wonders.

11/ Instead of starting directly with a paid subscription option, I released all the paid features with a small banner stating "This is a PRO feature and it requires payment soon.". with a remote switch I kept the price as low as $1.99/month

12/ I could test, improve, and make the app robust, and get it ready for subscriptions. You need a lot of testing to do this, as it's in the financial space and I was just a single person and I could turn on paid features at any time, and I could do so based on usage.

13/ After three weeks, crossing 10k downloads, I enabled the paid feature and the subscriptions came from left, right, and center. My strategy paid off and cemented my belief in ACrypto's future potential.

14/ Necessity is the mother of all inventions. For the iOS app, I had to learn Swift. One of the biggest pains was mastering auto layouts in XCode, but I managed to do it all and release it in 35 days sharp and it got a 70% growth rate in a month. Yes, I was surprised myself.

15/ One of the best decisions I made was to monetize early on instead of waiting until the app had a lot of users. Trust me, it's not at all easy to start charging once you have a large user base. Monetize early on if you are providing a value-added service.

16/ ACrypto has more than 150K users and 1M monthly sessions and it's fully automated. Of course, the whole cryptocurrency market took a hit and I have moved on to my other micro startups but it was my first success in a long time. https://acrypto.io/ 

17/ One of the things that really helped me was catching the uptrend in the crypto world and riding this wave. If I'd waited for six months to start, I doubt I'd have found the same kind of success.