From 'this annoys me' to the first sale — with AI

Starting point

I wear Bose QC Ultra headphones at my Mac all day — noise cancelling, three modes. When I’m in deep focus, I switch to Immersion — music in, world out. Then a call comes in, and I want to hear my own voice and the surroundings, so I switch to Aware. After that, back to Quiet. This happens constantly throughout the day.

The problem: every switch requires pulling out my phone, opening the Bose app, waiting for it to connect, and changing the mode. Every single time. Bose has no Mac app — none. There are tools for AirPods, for Sony too, but nothing for Bose. At some point, this really started to annoy me.

What I did

I asked Claude whether you can control Bose headphones directly from a Mac. The answer: yes, via Bluetooth Low Energy. Bose uses a proprietary protocol — BMAP. Not documented, but not rocket science either. Send a few bytes to the right place, and the headphones do what you want.

That’s how BoseControl was born. A macOS menu bar app — menu bar icon, one click, switch modes. Quiet, Aware, or Immersion. Plus battery indicator and keyboard shortcuts. One Swift file, ~600 lines, 64KB download. AI wrote the code, I tested and iterated.

Where to sell?

I had a working app but no plan for where people would find it. So I asked Claude: where do Bose users with Macs who have the same problem hang out?

The answer was specific: r/bose on Reddit — a community that discusses exactly these kinds of gaps. r/macapps — people actively looking for native Mac tools. Hacker News for the technical angle.

A user from r/bose reached out and offered to test with their Gen 2 headphones. It worked — so the app now supports both generations. Product development via Reddit DMs.

The real effort

The code wasn’t the challenge. The real effort was everything around it: Apple Developer Account, code signing, notarization — so macOS opens the app without warnings. Then setting up Lemon Squeezy as a store, defining pricing, building a landing page, writing launch posts. The setup takes longer than building the app.

Total: ~10 hours. Not days, not weeks — hours.

First sale

$10 from Brooklyn, New York. Someone I don’t know paid for something I built in a few evenings. It’s never been this easy before.

The math

Because I was curious myself about when this breaks even:

The Apple Developer Account costs $99 per year — that’s the only fixed cost. GitHub Pages is free, Lemon Squeezy charges no base fee, just 5% + $0.50 per sale. From $9.99, I net about ~$9.00.

Without counting my time: 11 sales per year cover the costs. Counting my time — 10 hours, conservatively valued at €50/h — I need about 71 total sales to break even. Everything after that is profit.

71 sales sounds like a lot. But that’s a one-time number, not annual. After that, the app just needs to run and be maintained occasionally — in case Bose changes their Bluetooth protocol, which is unlikely since their own app uses the same one.

Status: March 2026

One sale, 70 to break even. Maybe the first one was a lucky buy. Maybe not. Right now it’s about staying visible — keep talking to the community, incorporate feedback, make sure people find BoseControl when they search for exactly this problem.

And if it works: a path to passive income, built in 10 hours with AI.