We were repainting our living room a few years ago. You know how it goes: you grab a bunch of color swatches from the store, hold them against the wall, and try to imagine the whole room in that color. It never works. The swatch looks totally different at home than it did under the store lights. We ended up picking a green that looked great on the card but awful on the wall.
So we built a small app where you take a photo of your room and tap to try different colors on the walls. We called it Paint my Room and put it on the Play Store mostly out of curiosity. People started downloading it right away. Reviews came in, feature requests piled up, so we added iOS support and kept improving the color detection. As of today the app has been used by over 3 million people, which is honestly still kind of surreal.
Keeping track of the numbers
The fun part is building the app. The not-so-fun part is the business side. Once you're on both Google Play and the App Store, running ads through Google Ads and Apple Search Ads, and earning ad revenue from AdMob and other networks, you end up with like five different dashboards you need to check. Each one reports differently, some update daily, some with a two-day delay. It gets messy fast.
For a while we just had a spreadsheet where we'd copy-paste numbers every morning. It worked, but it was annoying and we kept making mistakes. We'd sometimes not notice a campaign was burning money for days because the data was scattered everywhere.
We switched to Apps Finboard which basically pulls revenue from Google Play, App Store and AdMob together with costs from Google Ads and Apple Search Ads into one dashboard. So now we just open one page and see profit. Sounds simple but it honestly changed how we run things because we can actually spot when something is off right away instead of finding out a week later in the spreadsheet.
Looking back
The thing that surprised us most is that we never really did any big marketing push. Most of our users found the app by searching for something like "paint color visualizer" or "wall color app". It grew mostly on its own, which is both lucky and a reminder that if you solve a real annoyance people will find you.
If we could go back and do one thing differently, we'd set up proper financial tracking from the start instead of dealing with the spreadsheet chaos for as long as we did. When you can see your real numbers clearly, you make better decisions about where to spend on ads and what features to prioritize.
We're still actively working on Paint my Room and have more updates planned. If you're about to paint a room, give it a try.