Since finding out I was going to become a dad, my emotions were a mix of excitement and a sense of feeling woefully unprepared for what’s about to come. Nobody teaches you how to prepare for becoming a father, so you’re left scrambling, trying to research everything you can, only to find everything is designed to help the woman navigate pregnancy.

So I built what I wish I had. Check it out for yourself here.

It seemed like others agreed too. In its first month after launch, the app generated over $22,000 in revenue.

Verified RevenueCat Link here.

No huge team. No years of development. And no guarantee when I started that anyone would actually pay for it.

Here are the five biggest lessons I learned along the way.

1. You Don't Need a Completely Original Idea

One of the biggest misconceptions about building an app is that you need to invent something nobody has ever seen before.

You don't.

Pregnancy apps already existed. Parenting apps already existed. Apps for dads even existed.

The opportunity wasn't creating an entirely new category. It was looking at an established category and asking: is there a specific group of people whose needs aren't being served particularly well?

For me, that was expectant dads.

Sometimes the opportunity isn't a new market. It's an underserved audience within an existing one.

2. Solve A Problem You’re Having

It's tempting to make your product useful to everyone.

Pregnant women. Expectant dads. New parents. Existing parents. Couples.

But the broader the audience became, the weaker the idea became.

So I focused on one person: the guy who's just found out he's going to be a dad and is thinking, What am I supposed to do now?

That decision influenced everything from the features and writing style to the App Store listing and marketing.

Being specific might reduce your theoretical audience, but it makes it much easier for the right person to see your product and immediately think:

"This is for me."

This is the main driving factor for me initially creating the app as I wanted to build something I wish I had when we were expecting. It helps tremendously with motivation when you have a vested interest in what you are building as can relate to the users.

After releasing the app I ran a small amount of paid ads to validate what I’d built was useful for other people too.

3. Distribution Matters as Much as the Product

You can spend months obsessing over features, animations and tiny UI improvements.

None of that matters if nobody discovers your app.

One of my biggest lessons from the launch was that building the product was only half the job. The other half was figuring out how to consistently put it in front of expectant dads.

That meant treating marketing and distribution as part of the product rather than something I'd worry about after launch.

A good product with no distribution is still an invisible product.

That’s why we posted consistently on our social media prior to the launch to build hype and get our brand in front of the right people. Paired with reaching out to news agencies with a story that would be relevant to their users. This consistency paid off as we got featured on the BBC which led to us going viral and a huge spike in downloads.

Influencers in our niche were reaching out and sharing our app, getting free exposure to their already established audiences.

We got subsequent viral videos by cross-posting the BBC interview on different social media platforms. Spread your app as far and as wide as you can.

4. Don't Be Afraid to Charge

Charging for something you've built feels strangely uncomfortable at first.

You start wondering whether people will think it's too expensive or whether you should make more of the app free.

But price is also a test of whether you've created something people genuinely value.

We did some market research by looking into what other apps in our niche were charging and working out a value we felt gave us good value and placed us in strong contention with others without pricing ourselves out of the market.

As always, I would encourage everyone to A/B test their pricing once they hit a volume of users whereby this is possible. Moreover we found that our price was not attractive in other areas of the world and hence adjusted our pricing based on region.

Rather than trying to attract the largest possible number of users, I wanted to build something useful enough that a smaller number of people would happily pay for it.

The first month reinforced something important for me:

Downloads are nice. Revenue is validation.

5. Launch Before You Feel Ready

There will always be another feature to build.

Another screen to redesign.

Another bug you'd like to fix.

Another reason to push the launch back a week.

Eventually, you have to put the product in front of real people.

The version I launched wasn't the version I ultimately wanted the app to become. And that's exactly the point.

Once people started using it, I could see what mattered to them rather than guessing. Real users gave me better information than another month spent polishing things in isolation ever could.

The goal of version one wasn't perfection.

It was learning.

For example we got a large amount of feedback early on from our users that they valued the ability to track upcoming appointments and questions to ask at those appointments as this was a common issue for many of them. This led us to pivot our dev work onto building that feature out first ahead of ones that we assumed incorrectly would be more desired.

The $22K Wasn't the Most Valuable Part

Obviously, generating $22,000 in the first month felt like a huge milestone.

But what mattered more was proving that there was a real audience behind the idea.

The experience changed how I think about building products.

You don't necessarily need a revolutionary idea, a massive team or a product with hundreds of features.

You need a clearly defined person, a problem they genuinely care about, a product that solves it well and a way of reaching them.

Then you need to ship.

I'm still early in the journey, and there is a lot I want to improve. But if there's one thing this launch taught me, it's that you can learn more from one month with a real product in the hands of real customers than you can from six months of wondering whether your idea will work.