I'm a high school student who builds apps. Here's everything I've dealt with so far.

Hey everyone!

My name is Manuel and I'm a high school student and founder of @Nomadful (nomadful.io), a mental health app available on iOS, and coming soon to Android. Working on this app for the last year has been an enlightening experience for me and I couldn't be more grateful for all the acquired knowledge, so I've made a short recap for this project, on a one-challenge-one-milestone basis.

1. Registering a company and maintaining a business: being underage makes this process insanely difficult. For context, I live in Mexico and I'm 17 years old. To register a company here, I would've had to make any of my parents one of the owners, and then they could entitle a minor to own a share of that company. I wanted a little more independence and flexibility, so ended up registering a business in the UK, where I own an address. Furthermore, registering the company in the UK was nearly 6 times cheaper compared to Mexico and I pay 10% less taxes.

2. Signing up to developer programmes: this was everything but seamless. After about two months with back and forth conversations with Apple, we finally came to an agreement where my mom basically signed and provided documentation on my behalf. After that, paying the application fee was a nightmare. I only had credit cards from Mexico and they wanted a UK card, but after various tries, their payments portal finally accepted my card.

3. Finding time between school and weekends: school itself is already demanding here, and I had lots of projects coming up almost every month, and most of the times I thought my weekend was free, it didn't turn out to be the case. I often work on the project during vacation.

4. There are some things I still can't do: being patient is definitely the hardest challenge. I still can't publish the app on android, open a bank account, or cash out my earnings. But in the end, I've learned that I'm just 6 months away from solving these issues, and I know being patient will pay off.

This is my journey with Nomadful, so if you'd like to support this project, please make sure to check the app's website, which is at the top of this post. Or check it out on the App Store, just search for "Nomadful".

As always, any type of advice is welcome, and I can't wait to hear your thoughts on this.

Thanks!