It is really an inspirational post that someone’s first Android app reaches 2 million downloads in just a year. Congrats Ankit for your achievement and we wish to see many such stories from you more often 🙂

Here is what he has posted in his website:

You Don’t Have to Wait For a Great Idea

When I first started learning making android apps, I was still in college and I was barely passing. I never liked going to classes. I didn’t have many friends and the ones I had ,always sought pleasure in demeaning others and laughed at others’ misery. I was just killing time and avoiding facing the reality by playing computer games and thus piling over my misery and loneliness because in the inside, I was desperate to change my condition.

So one day,in September 2013, just like that, I deleted all my games and movies and somehow got into android development. My brother had recently bought a Nokia Lumia phone and I was mesmerized by the way it’s music player looked. The UI to me at that time was really beautiful. I found myself using his phone just to listen to music on it. At that time , I was using an android phone and I tried searching for a music player which was as beautiful as the music player on Lumia and I couldn’t find any.

While searching for music players,thousands of them came up. I noticed so many of them had over a million installs which made me realize that so many people try out music players. It meant,there was a demand for it. It also meant there was a lot of competition. Also I realized, I had no money to advertise the app I will be making. So I had to make something,which is used by everyone,literally everyone. So in the end, I decided on making an app with a simple idea, a huge demand, and not just a beautiful and easy to use app but one of the best in the market !
I ended up making a music player/media player and later called it “La Musique“, a french phrase meaning “The Music”

The development

So I had an app to make but I knew nothing about android development. So ,I did what any one would do in such a situation. I googled it. I googled how to make android apps. I was bombarded with tons and tons of blogs and video tutorials. I chose the The new Boston android tutorials because the guy who was teaching in the videos seemed funny and because I had to choose one. It is outdated now. It is a series of 200 videos each of about 5 minutes. After about watching 30 of them. I realized that I had to begin my project. So I started my project, whenever I used to get stuck, I used to google it, if I couldn’t get the answers on google, I would ask them on Stack Overflow.

I was spending more than 16 hours a day, coding. Everyday I used to get up, ditch college, open my laptop lying next to me on bed,and then straight up open Eclipse( the IDE I use to code on). No brushing of teeth,no washing my face,no brunch just straight to code. I used to order food from a dhaba and then eat on my laptop. Once in a month or two, I would go out for an hour to talk to people so that I could feel normal again. Just before going to bed, I would leave 2-3 problems on Stackoverflow to be solved by others. Instead of reading Facebook feed at bedtime, I used to read online magazines like Entrepreneur , Business Insider and other tech and business magazines where I could find information on how to promote my app. On these websites I not only found how to promote my app, but I also came to know about how to have a mindset of Entrepreneur.

So after 4-5 months of coding, I had a product with a few features but the app didn’t look pretty. I knew I couldn’t design well, because I hadn’t designed any app in the past. So I went to Dribbble and in a period of about one month, I contacted over 200 designers to work for me. I was offering them 40% equity. The reply was always the same, they were all busy to work with some one without cash, or anything to prove his worth. But there was an app to be designed and it had to be beautiful. So I took a break and started freelancing till the time i could find any one to work with me. I freelanced for about 2 months. I earned about 1600$ and saved about 500$ from it. I decided not to hire a designer for the layout of the app , I realized that it was only me who was supposed to do it. It was my dream to make it big,and only I was responsible to make it big.

So I googled up “pretty apps” and looked through their images and studied them thoroughly. I went to various websites which showcased app designs and I came to know about designing apps. I came to know which color combinations look good. What kind of fonts go well with each other. How many fonts to use. What kind of backgrounds to use etc and by June 2014, I finished my app and it was almost ready to be launched on google play.

I would have always thought that I was a bad designer, if  I hadn’t tried.

Read here Ankit’s full article: http://www.iamankitsrivastava.com/2-million-app-downloads-within-one-year-for-my-first-app-without-spending-any-money-on-marketing/