The Story of How I Built My First macOS App in Swift—And What Happened Next

It all started when I was traveling around the Canary Islands as a digital nomad. I was looking for a Kanban project management solution like Trello that worked natively on the Mac and stored its data offline on my hard drive. Turns out there wasn’t one that fit my needs.

That was when I got the idea to build my own Kanban app for Mac.

So the first thing I did was to make a list of features I wanted to have in my own Kanban app. I was heavily inspired by Trello, which I had used in several other projects throughout my career as a senior software developer. From this feature list, I created some UI mockups for my Trello alternative app in Freeform.

In Freeform, I made a detailed mockup of each possible view and added notes to it so that I didn’t forget about the functionality that I was expecting to see.

Development

I fired up Xcode and from there began the journey of learning about Swift, SwiftUI for Mac, drag-n-drop delegates, SwiftData, and everything in between to connect all the dots.

Fortunately, I have a lot of experience developing software in general, so learning a new language like Swift was not a problem for me. In fact, I was surprised at how easy it is to learn the Swift language.

After a good 6 weeks of reading and struggling with the Apple documentation & a lot of outdated Swift tutorials, I made it to the first version. I named it Kansolo. An abbreviation of Kanban and Han Solo, a solopreneur from another galaxy.

With the first release, I was able to move my projects from Trello to Kansolo. I am now working from here.

Marketing

Every product needs some kind of marketing to draw attention to the new creation. I decided to share my work on Twitter/X using the hashtag #buildinpublic and on reddit in r/macapps.

Buildinpublic is a huge community of creative people who build apps, tools, and digital products. They gave me humble feedback on my creations and it worked very well.

I also got a lot of feedback on reddit. They mentioned features or points of view that I just hadn’t thought of.

In the meantime, I uploaded Kansolo to the Mac App Store and created all the metadata, screenshots and even a video myself.

I set a fixed price because I personally don’t like subscriptions. It turned out later that I was wrong.

I registered the domain kansolo.app and built a simple landing page with bootstrap and jekyllrb. To support my potential customers I also added a full text documentation with screenshots to this page.

Feedback

With the launch, I got some sales through the Mac App Store and a lot of feedback. Even negative feedback. The internet is brutal ;)

The first and most important negative feedback was this: People want to try before they buy AND they don’t want to pay a lifetime price, they want to buy a subscription. Seems like I’m the only one who doesn’t like subscriptions for business software.

Also, some people expected the app to be available on iOS already. It is not, yet.

Personally, I love working with Kansolo. So my main goal of having my own Kanban app that works the way I expect is achieved.

But from the perspective of making a real product that sells, I have to change and improve it a lot. I am listening to the feedback and working on an update that will change the pricing, fix some bugs and add more requested features.

Until next time 👋