jordanmorgan10

Hi HN,

Living around a few college coaches, I discovered some common pain points around saving drills and planning+running a practice. The crossover of those pain points with youth coaches was similar.

So, I built an interactive practice planner and drill library into my indie basketball coaching app, Elite Hoops[1].

I built it around three verbs, "Plan", "Run" and "Build":

Plan Practices/Workouts/Tryouts: Use the drill library to be a source of building blocks for practices, tryouts and workouts.

Run and Share: Run practices from your phone (complete with automatic drill progression) or export plans as PDFs to share/print. Build them up from your drills, piecing them together like lego pieces.

Build Your Drill Library: I included 200+ preloaded drills, or coaches can create their own, complete with descriptions, focus areas, and videos. This was key because a lot of coaches find drills they like on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube or fill-in-the-blank, but they save them all over the place. Now, they've got one spot for all of them.

For some fun technical aspects, I wrote up some SwiftUI details[2] on my own blog. And, I have the marketing post with feature details as well[3].

Anyways, I feel like basketball software usually isn't that exciting, so I'm trying to sneak into the niche with some (sigh, I know) innovative approaches. If you’re a coach or know someone who might find this useful, let me know what you think, always open to thoughts/feedback.

Thanks for checking it out! Jordan

[1]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/elite-hoops-basketball/id64437... [2]: https://www.swiftjectivec.com/Eight-Fun-SwiftUI-Details-In-P... [3]: https://elitehoopsapp.com/basketball-practice-planner-for-io...

Hey HN - Around May 2022, I made a thread here about my early (access book series over iOS)[1]. It was kinda popular (at least, by my own standards) so now that I (finished it)[2], I thought I would update everyone on how it went.

I ended up selling 2,050 copies while in early access. That number changes a bit, since some of those were from companies who bought team packages. Looking back, I don't think I would ever start another book series again. It was a massive task that ate up virtually all free time. If I hadn't of put a deadline of promising updates for the series every two weeks, I would have (no doubt) fizzled out. Writing this series, though, taught me a very valuable lesson in opportunity cost. I was put on this earth to eat pizza and ship iOS apps, but I simply couldn't do the latter while writing the book series. There just wasn't time, and that's been a very hard part of all of this for me. It's a big part of my identity, and I find so much joy in it.

In the end, I feel very proud to have finished this thing up, though. I'll update it going forward when new versions of iOS come out. I like to think I've built up enough trust at this point (shipping 55 updates on schedule, never missing one update cycle) over the years while it was in beta, so I think folks know I'm good for it. Logistically, I ended up switching from Gumroad when they changed to a flat 10% fee over to Lemon Squeezy. It's a newer platform, and I'm mostly happy with it. My biggest pain point is that I can't do bulk sales for companies (trust me, I've tried) but other than that, it's nice.

Tooling wise, I wrote the whole thing in Ulysses. I've really grown to enjoy that app, and it's still the best place to write in my opinion.

If you have any other questions on the topic, how I marketed it or absolutely anything else, I'm always happy to answer questions.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31534988 [2]: https://www.bestinclassiosapp.com