In Your Face App: From 3€ Meeting Reminders to $8,500 MRR in Florence
"Happy Bootstrapping" Volume #29
Martin Höller made a joke app for his colleague who constantly missed meetings. Today, the “In Your Face” app brings in $8,500 MRR. After 20 years of development and five years of freelancing, the 44-year-old now works exclusively on his apps – from Florence, with a 70% founder tax bonus.
This is a summary of Episode 141 of the “Happy Bootstrapping” Podcast (German).
The Origin: “An invite in your face”
“We were already somehow ten people in the meeting room and always had to wait a few minutes for him,” Martin recalls about his colleague. At a company outing, “already a bit tipsy,” he promised the chronically late colleague:
“I’ll make you an app for that. An invite in your face.”
The following weekend, he built the first prototype. On Monday, he installed it on his colleague’s computer. “Lo and behold, he was never late to our meetings again.”
The app shows a fullscreen alert one minute before the meeting: “It actually interrupts your work. You can’t ignore it.” Especially popular with people with ADHD:
“I always get such cool user feedback from people who say the app saved their job.”
The Business Model: From One-Time Purchase to Subscription
Martin started Mac development in 2005 (”the first Mac Mini”) and has been building apps on the side ever since:
2019: In Your Face launch as €2 app
2022: Switch to subscription model
Today: $2.99/month, $24.99/year, or $69 lifetime
“Two-thirds choose the yearly subscription,” Martin explains. The churn rate is “relatively low” – no wonder at three euros per month: “The goal with pricing was that the apps should cost about as much as a coffee per month.”
Distribution channels:
Mac App Store (main channel)
Setapp (”The Netflix for apps”)
The Switch: From Berlin to Florence
After eight years in Berlin’s startup scene (Thalia, Clue), Martin started as a freelancer in March 2020 – with the first lockdown. The move to Italy followed for several reasons: His partner is Italian, the weather is better, and then there’s the tax model.
“For people who haven’t been tax resident in Italy for at least two years,” Martin explains, “70 percent of income is ignored by the tax office.” His total tax rate: 15 percent. With a school-age child or property purchase, this extends to ten years.
“With the tax savings over 10 years, the apartment is paid off,” he calculates. The 150-square-meter apartment in Florence cost just over €400,000.
Support and Development: Family as Team
Since July, Martin’s partner has been working in the business: “She’ll take care of everything related to marketing, communication, and such.” Support runs mainly via email, feature requests are collected in a list: “I can see which feature requests come up multiple times.”
The most frequent request? Windows version. “I’ve already commissioned a proof of concept with a freelancer friend,” says Martin. It should be ready by 2025.
Martin’s portfolio now includes:
In Your Face (meeting reminder)
Chimeful (focus chimes for ADHD)
Traktick (time tracking)
WRDLR (word search)
Numba (learning numbers)
An Apple TV metronome app
“The app is especially good for people with ADHD,” Martin emphasizes repeatedly. He recently launched a newsletter on this topic with others called “Blue Banana Bites.”
Find all apps on his portfolio page.
What I Learned as an Interviewer
I found it interesting in this episode how a relatively simple idea became a sustainable business.
The Italian tax regulation shows how countries actively court digital nomads – 70% tax savings is quite an argument. Martin’s pragmatic approach to leaving freelancing (”my last client project ended in June”) shows that you don’t always have to wait for the perfect moment. His statement “That’s also a learning, that I don’t have to do everything myself” after 20 years as a developer I find remarkably honest.
And that he programmed the iOS 18 app completely on the road while traveling with family for two months shows the flexibility of the solo founder life.
Happy Bootstrapping is a German podcast where I interview bootstrapped founders, indie hackers, and solopreneurs about their startup journeys.
Over the years, I’ve connected with many successful entrepreneurs who have built e-commerce shops, SaaS platforms, mobile apps, content businesses, or hybrid models.
Furthermore I am a bootstrapper myself and growing my DevOps-as-a-Sercice and Web Operations Company “We Manage”.