NativePHP

I Created A $60K/Month Mobile App Builder

May 21st, 2025

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About
Business

Simon Hamp

Founder, NativePHP

$60K

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

NativePHP

nativephp.com

from Dover

started March 2025

$60,000

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

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Who are you and what business did you start?

Hi 👋🏼 I'm Simon, I'm a long-time software engineer. I'm a Brit, but I live on Gran Canaria, which is one of seven Canary Islands, a Spanish archipelago just off the coast of Morocco. I recently (March 2025) co-founded a company called Bifrost Technology, which sells licenses of NativePHP for Mobile, a technology that me and my co-founder, Shane, created earlier this year.

NativePHP for Mobile does something that's never been done before: it allows PHP developers to build native apps for iOS and Android without having to learn anything new. It was an immediate hit, drawing dozens of sales on Day 1 and not stopping since. We're now getting close to $60K/month in steady income just from license sales.

How do you come up with the idea for NativePHP?

I'm a PHP & Laravel developer and I created what became NativePHP with a fellow engineer in the Laravel community, Marcel Pociot. Marcel is famous within the community for being a tinkerer and a bit of a wizard when it comes to projects like this. So with his support, the project got a wide reach. The idea was to enable Laravel developers to build desktop apps that they could easily distribute. And I succeeded. April 1st, 2023 I shared what I'd been working on via Twitter, then Marcel reached out, decided to change the topic of his talk at the upcoming Laracon US in Nashville to talk about NativePHP (instead of AI!) and blew people's minds.

But almost immediately, folks were asking "when mobile!??!?1". This was the obvious next step and we already had our sights set on it. Marcel even found some time to put some proofs of concept together, getting lots of folks very excited about the possibilities. But one clear issue stood in our way: Apple's approval. If we couldn't come up with an approach that could get past Apple's App Store firewall, we were cooked.

In 2024, Marcel shifted his focus to other projects, but I dug in. I started to explore some alternative ways to make things work on iOS and stumbled upon an approach that I believed could work.

Fast-forward to Jan 2025! I submitted my very first iPhone app to the App Store - and the first one in the world built entirely using PHP and Laravel! - and just 3 days later, Apple approved it for distribution.

I was scheduled to speak at the upcoming Laracon EU, so I decided to offer this as a premium package, rather than open source. But to make sure I wasn't going to fall flat on my face on-stage, I started an "Early Adopter" program via GitHub Sponsors. For $200, folks could get the code and see it working for themselves. Amazingly I had over 20 folks sign up in just a few days and this completely impossible thing started making money from Day 1.

The reactions on Twitter blew me away. I've never had a huge audience there, but somehow this thing just grabbed people's attention and fired up their imaginations: "Now, any PHP developer can build mobile apps just like that!"

I've never worked on or come up with a product that has so resoundingly struck a chord with my followers/audience. The signal was the strongest I've ever felt: this is what I must work on.

How did you launch NativePHP and get initial traction?

I was tweeting about my progress in building the tool leading up to Laracon EU, teasing my followers that I would reveal the Apple's decision (good or bad) on stage. The real launch happened on stage in front of thousands of Laravel developers - my tribe - and it couldn't have been a more exciting moment for me.

I was super lucky to be given this platform and even more privileged to be able to speak to dozens of engineers immediately afterwards. There were lots of congratulations - and lots of questions! - but also, to my absolute amazement, lots of sales!

Public speaking is hard, but I was genuinely excited about what I was sharing, and I think that excitement was felt by the audience too. Looking back, the only thing I would change is to simplify my talk even further so that I could spend even more time sharing cool things with the audience.

What was the growth strategy for NativePHP and how did you scale?

I have strongly believed in giving back to this community - which has done so much for me - and to do that in a meaningful and practical way. The lowest-effort, highest reward activity I think we've done is to sponsor engineers, projects and meetups. We're putting our money where our mouth is and handing over real cash to dozens of projects.

It's really hard to measure the impact this has, but I believe on some deep, human level that it goes way beyond "marketing". We're not a brand that's just trying to get our product out in front of our target market; we're members of this community and we're investing in it, like neighbors working together for the betterment of all. And I think other individuals in the community see that and really appreciate it. It's genuine as we've have been consistently and actively a part of the community for a very long time.

I think the lesson here is to play to your strengths. It's going to be a lot easier for you to tap into networks where you've already built up personal trust with individuals. Diving into an unknown market as fresh faces with an unknown product is going to be so much harder. And that just means it's going to be a lot more expensive.

What were the biggest lessons learned from building NativePHP?

The biggest challenge is prioritizing what to do. When I was working on the iOS version of NativePHP, there were so many spinning plates. I had to keep on re-aligning my thoughts to make sure I wasn't letting myself get carried away with unnecessary details. I found that writing things down with a real pen and paper helped me to crystalize my thoughts... and then I'd scratch through things that I just didn't need to do.

I can't explain why, but just having that physical, visual reminder of where my brain got to at one point in time helped immensely in focussing my attention on the one thing I needed to do next.

One of the best decisions I made was to partner up with Shane Rosenthal. We've become good friends over the past year or so, despite being thousands of miles apart. He did something almost no one else I've worked with has done: he saw the potential of what I was working on and he came to meet me (metaphorically) with a ton of work he'd done on Android. This opened a door that I didn't think was going to open for at least another year: if we joined forces, we could release something for both iOS and Android much sooner.

Besides that effort, he showed me a real passion and capability as someone I could build a business with. So I made offered him the opportunity to become a co-founder and here we are. And he's been amazing. Finding yourself a really good partner/co-founder is an incredible level-up for what you can achieve in a fledgling company.

This project also got underway at a really interesting era for tech and software: AI has fully penetrated our working practice. I've had strong emotions about this and how it might impact my career, but I decided to embrace it and that enabled me to move at incredible pace. Shane is of the same mind and we use AI every single day to keep on making both the business and the product better. It's not too late start, and the sooner you do, the better the outcomes will be.

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