Back to Full-Time Indie, With a Fresh Start and a Co-Founder

A year ago I paused full-time indie dev and went freelance. The blog has been quiet for longer than that, and I owe anyone still following me an honest reset post about where things stand and where they are going.

Short version: I am fully indie again, I am moving my primary bet from iOS apps to web SaaS, I am building a product called ReleaseRocket with my wife, I picked up DJing on the side, and I am writing from Zagreb now instead of Munich.

Longer version below.

The Year Away#

A year of full-time freelance gave me two things I needed. The first was stable income while we wrapped up the move back to Croatia from Munich, five years after leaving. The second was time to open our LLC (d.o.o. in Croatia) properly and plan the next chapter without running on fumes.

There is a "we" in this story that matters, and I should name it. A few months before the move, my wife quit her job in Munich and decided to build the business with me instead of looking for another one. She spent years as an Android developer and then engineering manager at Visa (yes that Visa) in Munich. So this was not a leap from nothing. It was a deliberate switch from a real career to a co-founder seat. That decision, more than any of the others, is why this next chapter gets to be a two-person build rather than a solo one.

On paper the move is clean. In practice it was much harder than I imagined. The logistics, the paperwork, resettling, getting a real life running again in a new city after years away. It took months and a kind of emotional energy neither of us were fully prepared for.

The first few months of 2026 added another layer. The remote full-time job started piling on unexpected problems on top of the move, and the combined fatigue pushed my exit plan forward by a lot. What I had penciled in as "eventually back to indie" turned into "I need out now."

I gave notice in mid-March and my last day was in early April 2026. After that, my wife and I spent a few weeks in Novalja on Pag island to decompress. Not a vacation. More of a retreat before I let myself open the laptop again.

Why I Am Not Going Back to iOS as My Main Bet#

I had a good run on iOS. Itemlist, my flagship inventory tracker, currently brings in around $1K a month. Steady, but not passive. Every iOS app needs regular maintenance just to stay at that floor. I shipped QRGenie, which now has 21,000+ downloads and a 4.8 rating across iPhone, iPad, and Mac. I shipped BarcodeCraft, MacImgAI, and a handful of smaller experiments. The App Store was my entire world for years and I know every corner of it.

And none of those apps are going to suddenly take off, either. They work, they are steady, and I will keep maintaining them. But I do not see a realistic path where one of them becomes the breakout that carries the next chapter. What is changing is that my next real bet will not be another iOS app. It will be on the web.

A few reasons.

Apple owns your business. I do not mean that in a dramatic way. I mean it mechanically. You do not have a customer list, you have an audience Apple lets you talk to. You do not have a distribution channel, you have a shelf Apple lets you stand on. One policy change, one mis-applied review, one account flag, and everything you have built on that platform can be suspended while you wait on a support email. Most indie iOS devs have a story about this, and I have been close enough to those stories to respect the risk.

The $1K MRR wall is real, and a lot of it comes down to niche. I think part of my own ceiling came from picking a niche too small to scale a consumer iOS app past a certain point. The bigger niches that would have changed the math also tend to be flooded with scam apps and shady competitors, which is a market I never wanted to compete in.

What I actually want is the boring set of things I have been watching other founders have for years. I want to own the distribution, the billing, and the customer relationship. I want to bill my customers however I want, without platform constraints. I want to change pricing without submitting a build. I want to ship on a Tuesday afternoon. Web SaaS gives me all three.

That is the pivot. It is not "iOS is dead." It is "iOS as my primary business bet is not the right fit for me anymore."

There is a feeling I want to name. The iOS indie chapter did not end up as happy as I had hoped going in. I am still grateful for it. Apple gave me a real career, and the people who paid for my apps gave me a real business to learn from. The pace from here is just slower than in the first few years.

What I Am Building Instead: ReleaseRocket#

ReleaseRocket is an AI-native release and changelog tool for B2B software teams. It takes the work of turning git commits into a real public-facing changelog and release notes, and handles most of it for you. Pricing is a single tier at $19 a month or $190 a year, with a 7-day free trial.

My wife is the engineer on this one. She writes the code, with the help of Claude Code. I run product, marketing, and UX. This split is honestly one of the quieter reasons I am excited. For the first time since going indie I have a co-founder who cares about the thing as much as I do, and we have spent enough years in the same house to skip most of the typical early-stage friction.

On the stack side, we built ReleaseRocket on top of Supastarter, a Next.js SaaS boilerplate that gave us auth, billing, team accounts, and much more on day one. Both my wife and I come from mobile development, so landing in a production-grade web stack without having to wire every piece from scratch was a real lifesaver. That link is an affiliate link, and it is also an honest recommendation.

The audience fit matters too. I have spent the last few years building in public, writing developer-focused content, and running Indie Dev Diary threads with real revenue numbers. The people who follow me are overwhelmingly developers and indie founders. That is exactly who ReleaseRocket is for. I am not switching audiences, I am giving them a product that sits closer to the work they already do.

More on the product itself in future posts. For this one, the important thing is: this is where the next serious chunk of my attention goes.

The Side Thing: DJ Glanz#

At the start of 2026, I enrolled in DJ Akademija in Zagreb and spent Q1 learning the craft properly. Even before finishing the course, I played my first real gig. Linea Bar, Valentine's Day 2026, back to back with Fran Bušić (DJ Buške), in front of about 200 people. The gig was the after-party of an international Catholic conference held in Zagreb that week.

Near-full recording of the set:

Since then I have played two more. A warm-up set outside the Croatian Sports Museum at the end of February, and a Vuzmenjak gig (the local name for a traditional Easter bonfire night) in Draga Svetojanska near Jastrebarsko in early April, back to back with Franjo Uzelac (DJ Franz), a friend from DJ Akademija whose home village it is.

Next up: a Sunset Brunch in Vidalići on Pag, July 1, back to back with Franjo again at the Garden of Dionysus. First Adriatic gig.

I want to be honest about why this exists. It is not a "I secretly want to be a DJ" story. DJ Glanz is a side thing. Part creative outlet, part diversification. Building software and reading a dance floor use completely different muscles, and any hours I spend building the second muscle come back to me as sharper taste in the first. It is also a second skill with its own income path, which is cheap insurance against any one platform deciding it does not like me anymore.

The overlap is more real than people expect. DJing is iteration, taste, and reading the room. So is indie SaaS. I do not think those are unrelated crafts.

Back Home, Back at the Desk#

There is a reason this reset is only possible now. Croatian cost of living is meaningfully lower than Munich or most of Western Europe, and that lower floor is the structural reason I can bet on something that takes time to compound. The Novalja weeks closed out the old chapter. Being back at my own desk in Zagreb, with my own roadmap, opens the new one.

I am starting this chapter rested, not burned.

What This Blog Will Be Now#

Most of what I write here going forward will be about building a SaaS. ReleaseRocket build-in-public with real numbers, specific decisions, and the messy parts that only fit into a long-form post rather than a thread. I am not committing to a schedule. I will post when I have something worth saying, and skip when I do not.

Mobile app building will still show up. Everything I learned shipping iOS apps does not turn off just because the main focus shifted, and some of the most useful posts I can write are about the crossover: what carries from iOS indie life into B2B SaaS, and what absolutely does not.

Expect occasional posts on moving back to Croatia, building a company from Zagreb, and what the returnee entrepreneur scene actually looks like on the ground. Expect occasional DJ Glanz color too, because this blog is supposed to be me, not a product site.

The blog itself moved too. I migrated dabo.dev off Hashnode to a self-hosted Next.js setup built on Shipixen, the same tool I used for QRGenie's marketing site. Posts are MDX, hosted on Vercel, with Resend for the newsletter and Plausible for analytics. Shipixen wired up all the boring infrastructure on day one (typography, OG images, sitemap, RSS, syntax highlighting), so I could focus on the writing. It is built by Dan Mindru, a great indie developer whose work has been an inspiration to me. The same own-the-distribution argument I made about iOS apps applies to publishing. That link is an affiliate link, and it is also an honest recommendation.

No AI-generated filler. No hustle culture. No 10x productivity threads. If you subscribed years ago for iOS app lessons, the through-line is still the same. An indie trying to build a real business without a boss. The surface just changed.

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