No Budget, No Team, No Problem: How Two Non-Devs Got Their “Side Project” Downloaded 100,000s of Times
- Jade Mitchell
- 1 day ago
- 6 min read
These two first-timers taught themselves to code, design, and launch an Apple-favorite recipe tool. See how they built a community of supporters, fans, advocates, and users by leaning on existing social platforms.
The 411 for Developer Marketers
Four story highlights:
Theo Goodman and Julie Dillemann came up with an idea for a recipe app after looking for a ready-made solution to their problem online, and finding nothing.
Theo learned Swift through Udemy, while Julie studied design online. The Code Mentor and Reddit developer communities were essential for their self-directed skills development.
They aimed to get a working app listed on the Apple App Store as their measure of success. Everything after that was gravy.
A casual Reddit post promoting the app sparked viral interest. User feedback and authentic engagement led to Half Lemons being downloaded 100,000s of times, topping App Store charts in multiple regions, and becoming a fully monetized app.
One strategic takeaway:
Theo and Julie had no budget, no team, and only their spare time as a resource. They had to lean on their community for every step of their product development lifecycle, from early market research to beta testing to word-of-mouth marketing.
This turned out to be the best thing they could have done. It allowed them to gain interest and downloads without spending a cent on a single "traditional" ad, helped them improve the live app through user feedback, and empowered them to gather a community of like-minded advocates.
One way to try it for yourself:
Lean into authentic communities early. Theo and Julie didn’t wait for a perfect marketing plan. They shared their imperfect prototype on a platform where they were already getting community support, Reddit.
They didn't ask for downloads: they asked for feedback. That combination of vulnerability, responsiveness, and transparency built real traction faster than polished promotions ever could.
Read the whole story:
Cooking Up the Idea for Half Lemons
If you’ve ever stared despairingly into the fridge at a single bell pepper and a jar of grape jelly, you’ve lived the problem SaaS professionals and cooking enthusiasts Theo and Julie Goodman wanted to solve. They didn’t start out trying to build a business. They just wanted to stop playing the nightly game of "What are we gonna make with this?"
Theo spent most of his career in product management, dreaming up tools that should exist, while Julie still flexes her product marketing chops full-time in the software industry. After nightly kitchen brainstorming sessions turned into frustrated App Store searches, the couple realized that while many people claimed to have had the same idea for an app that solved for leftover limbo, no one had actually built it.
So, determined to do more than just dream, they decided to build it themselves.
“We were both in a place in our lives where we thought, okay, this could be a fun side project. I had been interested in getting more technical in my career. But I had never built anything. I wasn't a developer. I didn't get a degree in that.”
Julie took online design courses. Theo enrolled in a self-paced Swift course on Udemy. They set the bar high for a passion project: They wanted to list the app on the Apple App Store. That, they agreed, was what success would be.
Overcoming the Learning Curve with Developer Community Support
"Learning Swift and building the app was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done professionally," Theo admits. He chose Swift precisely because it was Apple’s modern, native language for iOS development, with a massive, active, and generous developer community and a robust library of resources.
He knew from the beginning that he’d get stuck, often and deeply. He wanted to pick a language that came with lifelines. Forums, documentation, tutorials, video walkthroughs, and fellow devs who’ve seen it all before. In a way, the language wasn’t just a technical decision. It was a social one.
That decision paid off. Bugs. Builds that crashed. Days when nothing worked. Theo leaned on his Udemy coursework, on one-on-one troubleshooting discussions with Code Mentors, and on kind strangers from Reddit willing to hop on a call and look through a gnarly loop or a wonky variable.
"You get used to climbing over walls," he says. "You run into enough of them, you stop doubting that you can get over the next."
Six months later, they had a working prototype. And just three months after that, Half Lemons hit the App Store, Theo and Julie's high bar for success. Success. Champagne.
End of story… right?
Word of Mouth Goes Hard
As trained product marketers, they couldn't resist the temptation to brag just a little about their fully working app. Without thinking about it too much, Theo made a humble post in a "side-projects" subreddit to promote the couple’s achievement and encourage feedback.
While most of the posts on the side projects forum garnered a handful of responses, Theo was taken aback by the hundreds of responses, upvotes, and generally positive, "gah, I wish I’d thought of that" comments that he knew they’d created a winner.
The couple told their friends. Who told their friends. Who told their friends, who told the Apple App Store algorithm. After being featured in the App Store's "Hot Apps" list, and then, "App of the Day" in North America, Half Lemons’ downloads flew through the roof.
Half Lemons scored a top spot on the App Store list again in Australia. And again in Singapore…Downloads soared into the tens of thousands.
Soon, handling user feedback, editorial assets, and app updates became Theo’s full-time job.
Solid Lessons from a Soft Launch
Before a single line of code was written, Theo and Julie had already done something a lot of seasoned builders skip: market research. They’d scoured the App Store looking for a tool to address their nightly meal malaise. Every time they asked friends or colleagues about their idea, they heard a variation of: "Oh yeah, I’ve thought about building something like that!" or, "I’ve always wanted an app like that!" When you start hearing the same idea echo back at you from unrelated sources, it’s usually not just a coincidence. It’s a signal.
Once their prototype was working, they skipped the five-point marketing plan– they didn’t have the budget– and went straight to the people. On Reddit, the same community that had aided Theo in his app-building journey didn’t just react with upvotes. They were asking questions, offering feedback, asking for features, volunteering to test.
Almost overnight, Half Lemons had its own online tribe. Their promotional success wasn’t in planned virality, it was in authentic intimacy. Theo and Julie stayed close to the people who were cheering them on. They responded to every DM. They shipped fixes fast. And in doing so, they turned casual users into ambassadors, and a subreddit thread into a community roadmap.
The More Cooks, the Better
Theo and Julie aren’t resting on their new skills. They have since added two more apps to the mix: "Streak Pulse," an app that helps users build better habits by rewarding them with the psychological reward of "streaks" and "Dinners," which touts itself as a kind of “Tinder of recipes."
Half Lemons is a love story of an app. Not just between Theo and Julie, but between learning to code and learning to listen. It’s what happens when curiosity becomes code, and a side project becomes a full-time hustle. Today, Half Lemons is a monetized app with multiple membership tiers. It’s been featured by Apple, turned users into fans, and its fans have contributed to new features through their feedback.
It’s also an enduring reminder to dev marketers that traditional marketing tactics aren’t always the right way to promote your product. Devs are more likely to get excited about helping to create something and make it better through their contributions than they are to be about picking up a perfectly polished solution off a shelf.
When it comes to perfecting and promoting an app, it turns out there’s no such thing as "too many cooks."
Got a developer story to tell? Drop us a line—we love hearing how things get made.
