InquisitorJax

We're a couple of dads sharing our journey about bootstrapping our indie businesses while still prioritizing our young families.

Currently I manually track my tasks (and time spent) in an excel sheet, and ZipBooks (free) to submit invoices. It does take a bit of time to collate the tasks and time to the invoice every month.

oh.... and one more important thing. The trick of REALLY switching off when you are with family. It doesn't count when your brain is off in lala land at the dinner table. Difficult to do, but essential.

I'm in the middle of doing just that. Not earning $$$ yet. I think they key thing here is patience and persistence. That, and make sure your priorities are right: Family always trumps business.

I have a wife and 3 small kids - practically I can get somewhere between 50 - 70 hours a month in on my current project. The only time my family misses me is for 4 hours on Saturday morning. The rest of the time I'm working, is when the family goes to bed - typically from 10 in the evening to 1 in the morning. Tapering down from 8 or 9 hours of sleep a night to 5 or 6 hours of sleep takes some getting used to - took me about 3 months.

Just keep chipping away at it, and make sure to speak to potential customers from day 1.

The other thing that will really help is finding someone who shares your vision. One other person doubles the speed of delivery. Not an easy thing to do though (I'm still looking)

Don't waste time on things that are not product and customer communications (investors / marketing etc.)

Oh, and be sure to love what you do - if you're after some financial reward then you're only going to burn out.

my 2 cents.

If you want cross platform that compiles down to native - and gives you the option to extend with native-specific functionality - then you can't beat Xamarin - specifically Xamarin Forms. https://www.xamarin.com/forms