From a Student Project to a Livelihood: Dominik Sobe and HelpKit

A First App That Helped Pay the Rent

In 2018, Dominik Sobe was a university student who wanted to become a management consultant. While leading a student consulting organization and preparing for consulting firm interviews, he wanted to gather the material scattered across expensive textbooks and awkward websites into a mobile app. He was teaching himself to program at the time, and turning what he was studying into a product of his own looked like good practice. That is how he started building CaseTools, an app for preparing for consulting interviews.

The first version took about four months to finish. Actual coding accounted for roughly a month and a half, and the rest went into talking with consultants and reading materials to write the content that went into the app. The first payment came in the fourth week after launch. Sales grew little by little after that, and at one point the income was enough to cover his rent during his university years. The software he had built was starting to carry part of his living costs.

Sobe figured that nine more apps like it would be enough to live on. Building a minimum living base through HelpKit actually took about three more years. He kept up his studies in the meantime. He finished a bachelor's degree in business and economics in 2020, and that same year moved to Lisbon to start a master's program.

Slow Sales on the Next Product

One of the next products was StorePreviewer, a tool for checking how an app would look in the App Store before it was actually submitted. Sobe built it alongside his master's program, spent three months on it, and then told about 80 people who had shown interest that it was out. At first no one replied. About two weeks later, a customer who bought the annual plan appeared, and then two more customers paid.

Growth stayed slow after the first sale. In a note he left in June 2021, he explained that over two months three subscribers had left and three had joined, leaving revenue essentially flat. He had 24 lifetime paying customers by then, but only eight retained subscriptions. He also wrote that a full-time master's program limited the time he could put into the product.

HelpKit Starts with Two Preorders

Running several products created a new kind of friction. Replying to every customer inquiry one by one was a heavy time burden for a solo developer, and customers wanted their problems solved without waiting long for an answer. He was already keeping his business documents in Notion, so he wanted to write help content there too and present it to customers in a form that looked good. That need produced the idea for HelpKit, which turns Notion documents into a customer-facing help site.

This time he did not start building right away. Earlier projects had taught him that an idea that looks appealing at first can lose its pull over time. He let the idea sit for about two months, and when he still wanted to solve the problem, he drew screens in Figma and prepared a product landing page. It was an attempt to check buying intent before finishing software that actually worked.

In July 2021, Sobe introduced HelpKit from a Twitter account with about 300 followers. He offered a one-year license for $39 as a preorder, and the reaction to the post brought more followers. Yet not a single person bought in the first week. Two orders came in the second week, and no further sales came the week after.

Sobe's original threshold for starting development was ten preorders. The result fell short, but along with the two orders came a long supportive email that described the product's potential in concrete terms. Seeing that response, he decided to go ahead and spent about 30 days building a minimum viable product. He had not met the validation bar he had set, and he invested time once more on the strength of limited customer response.

The division of work in HelpKit was clear. Customers write help content in the Notion they already know, and HelpKit serves it as a customer-facing site with its own domain and branding. That structure let him skip building a document editor and focus on a help screen and search that make it easy for customers to find answers themselves. Embedding a help widget in a website also let visitors check relevant documents before sending a separate inquiry.

Growing Small Revenue into a Living

In November 2021, Sobe disclosed that HelpKit had passed ten paying customers and reached $241 in monthly recurring revenue. It was a small scale for carrying a living, but customers buying annual plans had appeared. Earlier he had spent months building alone and then been disappointed by the lack of interest on launch day; this time he kept sharing the development process and missteps on Twitter and Indie Hackers. People who learned about the product through those notes and recommendations from Notion users helped him win early customers.

He also reworked how he greeted customers. At first he contacted everyone who signed up for the free trial directly for opinions, but replies were thin for the time spent. Sobe spent a day writing an onboarding sequence of five emails sent during the trial. By asking users to reply when they needed help, he cut the effort of reaching out from scratch each time while still getting customer responses.

When a large company sent an inquiry, it sometimes asked for features that did not exist or were not even on the roadmap. Sobe offered a short call in those cases, listened to what problem they wanted to solve, and explained what he could offer now and what was planned. Some customers signed up after hearing the explanation even without the feature they had asked for. He learned that a deal could start without adding every request to the development schedule.

On February 28, 2022, HelpKit had 51 paying customers and $1,020 in monthly recurring revenue. That was the result of about five months of operation, and at that point he had not even formally launched HelpKit on Product Hunt. A thousand dollars a month was an important goal for Sobe, but in a reply on the same post he explained that revenue would need to be a little higher to sustain himself comfortably. Even after passing his initial goal, he was judging separately whether he could stake his living on it.

On April 16 that year he recorded $2,000 in monthly recurring revenue and more than 90 customers. The first $1,000 had taken about five months, while the next $1,000 took about a month and a half. The help documents customers were running through HelpKit also passed 3,000. Customers using the product for real work and the documents they published were growing together.

Looking back on this period, Sobe named as a key choice the decision not to touch other products and to focus on HelpKit. He held back the urge to start a new project and spent his time improving a product that was already getting a reaction. He also explained that many of the flaws and missing features he had worried about in advance did not turn into actual customer problems. When deciding where to spend limited working hours, issues customers actually raised took a larger share.

A Workplace Secured Before Graduation

On June 16, 2022, HelpKit reached more than 130 paying customers and $3,000 in monthly recurring revenue. Sobe wrote that at this level he could make indie hacking his main work. He was still in school at the time, and the same post mentioned that he still had to finish his master's thesis. Before finishing his studies, he had secured a base for continuing his life on a product he ran himself.

Long hours were part of the process. In an August 2022 post, Sobe looked back on the time he spent learning to code and building products and wrote that he worked 10 to 12 hours a day. He also mentioned that working without rest brought him close to burnout. Once he could choose when and where he worked, the remaining task was not to let those early excess hours harden into a daily routine.

Even after the business settled, conversations with customers kept changing the product and the price. Sobe had priced HelpKit low at first, but some customers said it was too cheap for the value it delivered. Their feedback fed into the process of adjusting the pricing. Understanding what customers were paying for became more important than holding on to the price he had set at the start.

In an interview published in July 2025, HelpKit was described as a business with about $10,000 in monthly revenue and more than 400 customers. Its customer base included universities and large companies. A tool built to solve the customer support problem of apps he ran alone had grown into a service providing help for many organizations. Even after passing his original living goal, he kept improving the same product and carrying the business forward.

Sobe's path shifted little by little from the moment he sold his first app. As an experiment that made small income grew into something that could support his living, he was able to choose product development as his main work. Before he had even finished his master's thesis, a workplace of his own awaited him after graduation.