Every indie developer has a number in their head. For many, that number is 500K a year. Yours might be different — mine is much bigger. The size doesn’t matter. The method does.
Most people treat their number as a dream. Something that happens after enough hard work, enough luck, enough time. That framing is useless. You can’t act on a dream.
So work it backwards instead.
Divide the number
500K a year is about 42K a month. Now divide that by price:
| Price per month | Customers needed |
|---|---|
| $1 | 42,000 |
| $10 | 4,200 |
| $100 | 420 |
| $1,000 | 42 |
Same revenue. Four rows. But these are not four versions of the same business. Each row is a different business, with different customers, different channels, and different daily work.
Each row is a different life
42,000 customers at $1. This is a consumer app. To have 42,000 paying users, you need hundreds of thousands of downloads, maybe millions. That takes distribution: viral loops, app store rankings, a huge audience. Do you have any of those? Most solo developers don’t. This row looks easy because $1 sounds easy. It’s the hardest row on the table.
4,200 customers at $10. Prosumer territory. Better, but still a volume game. You need a steady stream of new users just to replace the ones who churn. At this price, even a small monthly churn rate means hundreds of lost customers to replace every month. Support alone can eat your week.
420 customers at $100. Now you’re in B2B. A business pays $100 a month without a meeting if the tool solves a real problem. This is reachable for one person, if the niche is narrow enough that those 420 companies can actually find you.
42 customers at $1,000. Serious B2B. Every sale involves a conversation. But you only need 42 of them. You could know every customer by name. You could do all the sales yourself, slowly.
Fewer customers is usually the honest answer
For one person, the bottom rows are usually the truth.
Fewer customers means less support. It means one cancellation is a known event, not a statistic. It means churn hurts less, because keeping 42 companies happy is a job you can actually do. It means you don’t need distribution you don’t have. You need 42 conversations a year, not a million impressions a month.
The top rows require marketing machinery. The bottom rows require a painful problem and a working product. One person can build the second thing. Almost no one builds the first alone.
What has to be true
Picking a row is not enough. For the $100 to $1,000 rows to work, four things have to be true:
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A problem businesses already pay for. Don’t invent a budget. Find money that’s already moving — to an agency, a contractor, an old tool, a manual process — and redirect it.
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A channel you own. SEO, a community, content, a mailing list. Something that brings customers without you buying every single one. If your only channel is paid ads, you have a job, not a business.
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Pricing with room to go up. Your first price will be wrong. It will be too low. Pick a problem valuable enough that charging more later is possible.
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Retention. This is the quiet one. 500K a year is not really about finding customers. It’s about keeping them. At high prices and low volume, one lost customer is 2% of your revenue. The product that gets used every week keeps the customer. The product that gets opened once a month does not.
Notice what’s not on the list: a brilliant idea, a big launch, going viral. None of those survive division by twelve.
Pick your row
Here is the exercise. Look at the table again. Not at the row you like — at the row you can execute.
Do you have an audience of millions? Then maybe the top rows are open to you. Most of us don’t. Most of us can write, learn a niche, talk to businesses, and answer email. That’s the bottom of the table.
Pick your row. Then work only on what that row requires, and ignore everything the other rows require. That’s the whole plan.
The number stops being a dream the moment you divide it.