# My Apps Make $36K/Month: Watch Me Build One in 17 Minutes

Channel: Starter Story Build
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COblC3XvuZo
Duration: 17 min
Language: English
Words: 3792
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/COblC3XvuZo

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[0:00] Right now, the most important thing you can do is build and ship apps fast. But most people don't even know what does it really mean to ship fast. I needed to find this answer, so I invited Max, one of the fastest builders I've ever met, [music] to share his exact process for building and shipping apps fast in 2026. Over the past year, Max has built and shipped over 30 [music] apps that make a combined $36,000 a month. And over the next 30 minutes, you're going to see his exact process for [music] building and shipping apps fast. In this video, we're going to go over how to research $10,000

[0:34] a month ideas with a single keyword, how to set up a real project for success, and we will come out the other side of this video with a real working app ready to ship to the world. If you're thinking about building apps in 2026, this is the video. Let's dive in. This is how I

[0:51] build from Starter Story. Real quick, before we get into this episode, I think this is one of the best times ever to be building and shipping apps. If after watching this, you get inspired to build, well, we have a free resource linked in the description below to help you build your first app. We'll talk a little bit more about that later,

[1:11] but for now, let's get into the episode. All right, Max, welcome to Starter Story Build. Tell us who you are and what you built. Hey, I'm Max. I've built a mobile app portfolio of almost 40 mobile apps. Most of them were built while I was working full-time at 9:00 to 5:00. And starting this year, I'm going fully indie to build more apps and other cool stuff. Okay, Max, I'm super impressed by you. We're going to walk through your actual build process. Can you dive in

[1:34] and show me the first thing that you do? Okay, the first step is keyword research. So, let's start with that. For the keyword research, I usually use ASO, but you can use any ASO tool of your choice. It doesn't really matter. So, before starting research, you usually want to have an app idea. But if you don't have anything, you can just think about any like category, any area, or even go to X Twitter and just browse, see what other people do, see if there's something interesting comes up. For this video, I had an app idea that I really wanted to build. It's another AI identifier. So, the app is called Stamp

[2:06] Identifier. it does, it just scans a postage stamp and send it to AI and ask for its value and some interesting historical insights. So, what I do, I'll just tap add keyword. So, let's uh type in Stamp Identifier. And let's add it. Okay, so right now, we see it's actually has a good popularity and difficulty, which tells us that there might be some interesting apps in this category. And what I usually do, I just open the

[2:35] competitors and just look through them. So, I pick the first one. It has a like 2,000, almost 3,000 ratings, so pretty big. Hit that button and uh it'll pull up all the keywords uh that kind of relevant to this app. And what I do, I just set the popularity, I just uh filter out uh not popular keywords. And also, I don't want to target uh any difficult keywords, so I just set it to 60. And since uh there's a plenty of keywords, not everything is related to our app. Since we're targeting stamp, then we just type stamp and filter out

[3:08] the keywords that related to the stamp. Let's just add these ones and uh these ones, too. And so, we're adding them. The the ASO tool brings us all the data about these apps, so we can filter by popularity and see which one is the most popular. Let's take a look at the competitors for this particular keyword. You can see that this one is basically the name of this first app, so you cannot use it because it's been already used by by this app, so App Store won't allow you. Second one might be interesting again, uh but uh this one is taken as well by the app, so

[3:41] we cannot really use this particular keyword. And if we just look through the other ones that left, I don't like this one with these columns. If you look just at the Stamp Identifier itself, and we bring up all the competitors, we can see that it's kind of a competitive keyword, but if we look through the each app that uses this keyword, we can see that there's only four apps that have ratings more than 100. You can see that the release date is almost for all of them 2025. So, it says that the app is very new. We can technically target and kind of win some traffic if we make a good

[4:13] app. So, by looking at this keyword, I think I'm happy with it, and I consider the keyword research is done. Uh and the reason that we go for keyword first because the keyword is actual like a problem that user wants to solve. So, when they want to identify like trees or stamps in this example, they go into the App Store and search for the Stamp Identifier. So, it means that uh this is what their problem is. Okay, cool. I really like that strategy. Obviously, billions of people use iOS apps or just apps in general, and 75% of app downloads on the App Store start with a search. So, this is really,

[4:47] really smart. I love this. What's the next step? Next step is the project setup. So, over time of building many apps, I've come up with the SDK like the boilerplate code that I use for building all my projects. It saves me a lot of time and I don't need to redo basic things that I've done once. So, basically, I have my dependencies set up. I have like onboarding and the paywalls. This is what I use and I'm just reusing it over and over. Um I reuse some internal stuff like uh dealing with onboarding, uh setting the premium. For anyone who's watching this who's wondering, okay, how

[5:18] do I set up something like this? You can just go online. Uh there's lots of boilerplates out there. You can look up iOS boilerplate, Android boilerplate. What I love about this is that apps are generally the same. You're going to have onboarding, you're going to have paywall, you're going to have setting you're going to have payments, you're going to have trials. If you do this, you don't have to focus on the tech, you can just focus on the most important stuff. That is super cool. Once you have the boilerplate set up, Max, what do you do? Once I have a boilerplate set up, the next thing I do, I just send the

[5:45] Claude prompt and ask it to create the actual app. Okay, so here's my prompt. It mostly varies from app to app a bit, but mostly, this is what I use for kind of most of the apps to get started. So, I I ask it to [clears throat] build main feature screen for the apps, camera, gallery, identification, collection history, and just wire it up in the main

[6:07] tab screen. Make sure it all compiles. So, I just paste it in, hit enter, and wait until it's done. Cool. What Max is doing right here is awesome. He already has the boilerplate, and now he's working on the core features, the core functionality. And what's amazing about this is that he could just use one

[6:22] prompt. His prompt was two sentences. So, we're fast-forwarding to this right now while Claude is doing its thing and building the app. And now it is done right about now. All right, so Claude code has done its thing. It is fully compiled, and we're about to look at the first version of the app. How did it do? Right, so I've just run the app, so I'll just briefly go through the screens Claude has built. The thing that you see is the onboarding. It's very simple,

[6:46] straightforward. It has uh three steps. As you tap through the steps, uh it changes illustration. It's just to make it nice, engaging. And once you hit finish the onboarding, you you jump into the paywall. I really focus on the onboarding and then the paywall because as everyone knows, the most amount of subscriptions comes from the onboarding. The paywall is very simple. You can see it has four different paywall titles. It has the icon, the pro badge, limited access. So, for almost all of my apps, I use the combo of weekly subscription and yearly subscription. Some apps that are single use, I do put lifetime instead of

[7:21] yearly because most people, they just use it once or twice. Try to charge them a bit more. I usually put free trial on the weekly, so this is my setup. Once the onboarding is done, close the paywall, and there you go, you just land into the app. What I love about Max is he has a system for building [music] and shipping apps. And I know that many of you watching this are ready to build, too. So, our team put together a free resource to help you build and ship your first iOS app in [music] just a few days. On day one, you'll learn how to spot a viral app idea. By day three,

[7:54] you'll have a working prototype you can share with anyone. And by day seven, you'll have actually shipped your app to test flight on the App [music] Store. Once you have this system down, you'll be building and shipping apps as fast as Max. So, if you're ready to build, head to that first link in the description to

[8:10] start building today [music] for free. All right, let's get back to the episode. Okay, so this is the app. So, the first app, it's the camera. It scans the stamp and it analyzes it. Since I'm building on the iOS simulator, it doesn't have camera, so that's why I have this honor. But I have these two buttons which you could bring up the library. I can select any stamp and just uh hit the nice button and just send the data to OpenAI or Gemini, AI of your choice, and then ask for value and some historical insight. And there you go, you've got it. You do ask for review because it's

[8:39] very important to wait for this aha moment when the user get the satisfaction, they get the result. display this review dialogue if the API call fails. I only show it for successful API calls. And here, there you go, here's the data for the app. Here's the history screen. You can see other historical scans that you have. Here's the collection. You can add all the stamps that you scanned and you see what the total value of your collection is. And this is the settings. This is very simple screen that I'm reusing everywhere in all of my apps. So, this

[9:05] is the app. I mean, this is amazing. We're probably less than 20 minutes into this video. We came up with an idea, we built really, really nice app here. Obviously, you had some boilerplate set up because you've built a bunch of apps, but anybody watching this can do the same by using these AI tools to build something. But here's the thing, the building is easy

[9:21] now, and we're showing this right here. Why are you successful with shipping 30-plus apps and doing over $30,000 a month? I'm guessing it's less to do with the building and more to do with the ideas and the marketing around it. So, what's the next thing that you do to make sure that your app gets downloaded, it gets paying users? What do we do

[9:39] next? Okay, the app is built. So, the next step, most important and my most favorite one, is the visuals. Let me share you my Figma file. First of all, I start with a small color palette. So, it's very small. The main thing that I do is find the accent color for the app. And what I do, I ask Claude or any AI, I just explain what my app does. Just ask if there's any nice colors that reflects to this type of the app. And also just some kind of different shades to have something to work with. Once it's done, then I'm going to the app icon. So I

[10:08] have this kind of setup ready. As you can see, it has the right width and height, which is what required by App Store and Google Play Store. When it comes to icon design, well, it usually depends. Sometimes I have the idea in mind. So for this case, I had idea of the post mark and with a magnifying glass over it. So what I did, I found simple icons and paste them into like Gemini asking to make it nice. Really depends. Sometimes I just go into like Gemini and just ask to give me some ideas because I don't have any ideas. So in this case, I come up with this icon

[10:37] and it shows the post mark with magnifying glass. So very descriptive. It shows what the app does. Okay, what I do, I just copy these files and export them and use them into my app. Then once the icons are ready, the next thing what I do is the screenshots. And this is again very important part. What I do, I go to Astro and take two three four different competitors, usually the ones that have most like ratings, that are big ones, and just copy their screenshots. I put them on the side and I don't blindly copying them. I just want to understand what values they highlight. Maybe there's something

[11:08] interesting, some features, something I could reuse. But I do have my own style, which I'm kind of happy with. This is what I follow. I have the app screenshots ready and I have app screenshots for the iOS and for the Android. So the sizes are perfectly fit, so I don't need to adjust change anything. What I do, I just select the files and then upload them into the App Store. Okay, cool. I mean, this is amazing. You can design it in just a few minutes with Figma. You're using AI tools like Gemini to help you come up with logo ideas and then even take some logos and sort of change the colors and

[11:38] make them look cool. So that's cool you can use AI to do that. And then you're getting inspiration from already successful apps. These apps have already spent some time working through their screenshots that they put on their App Store. Well, you're getting inspiration from that and saving a lot of time. I think that's super cool. And as you mentioned, this is the stuff that you don't want to automate Just a little bit of design work learning how to use Figma can go a long way here and you're proof of that because your apps make over $30,000 a month. Yeah, you can do it in just a few minutes. Let's get this thing

[12:05] on the App Store. I think we have pretty much everything ready to go. How do we do that? Okay, the last step is submitting to the App Store. But before we do that, I just want to mention one thing, the ASO research doc that I usually build at the start like during my creation of the boilerplate code, I ask Claude to generate ASO research. And what this thing is, the high-level overview of the app itself, a topic. Claude generates lots of different information. I don't use everything about it. It's nice to have it for just reference. If you want to market the app afterwards, you want

[12:35] to use something like some data for filling up App Store metadata. So this doc is very nice. Like I said, I don't blindly follow it, but what I usually use it for, the onboarding titles. So it generates nice titles for the onboarding that I showed you previously. And if I don't like them, I usually ask to reorganize it. Next thing is nice the paywall feature list. It brings me that four paywall titles that I put in my paywall. And also use the screenshot title section. But I don't blindly copy these titles. It just gives me an idea what I could use. This is just for me to

[13:04] have some inspiration and some idea what to put into my screenshots. Okay, so here's the App Store Connect page. So the app is almost ready to be submitted. So the last thing before we submit, we usually set up app metadata. So first thing, very important, is the name and subtitle. So this is what kind of drives the traffic. So this is what actually makes ASO work. When it comes to the name and subtitle, I don't rely on the ASO research doc. This must be done manually. What I do, I just go back to Astro and I look at the keywords that we have and then I just try to come up with

[13:37] kind of name. So since I selected this keyword, I want to put this exact keyword into the name. This is what I do. Then I do the same thing with subtitle. So I just add the keyword. And if you have keywords, try to not to duplicate them. Next thing that I do manually as well is the keyword list. This is again very important because you want to stuff as many keywords relevant to your app. In this example, there's not that many keywords relevant to stamp identifier, so I had to find something kind of close related like appraisal, find a coin, stamp antique, another stuff. But you don't need to fill up all

[14:08] the 100 characters. Again, you don't want to repeat all the keywords that you put in name and subtitle. You just can put as many keywords relevant to your app as you have. And the last thing required for the metadata, and this is done by AI, it's the description. As far as I know, App Store ASO algorithm doesn't pay that close attention to the description. What I do, I ask Claude to stuff it with the keywords, but make it natural. So don't make a AI mess, don't make a slop. Just make it natural, readable and try to put as many keywords as possible. Okay, and once metadata is

[14:39] filled up, you have the screenshots ready, you have description, title, subtitle. Now it's time to hit that blue button and submit app for review. Okay. And it's done. It's done. That's amazing. Just 5 10 years ago, you needed a team of four people to build a good iOS app like this. You needed a designer, you needed a developer, you needed a product manager, you needed a back-end engineer. Look, we just built an app that could potentially make thousands of dollars per month. Max is proof of this because he's shipped over 40 apps to the App Store and this is his process. I asked Max to come on to the

[15:13] channel and share his exact process. Well, you just watched it right here. We may have skipped over a little bit of the technical stuff, but that stuff doesn't matter anymore because you can use tools like Claude code like Max showed us to build stuff. Everything comes back back down to the idea, right? When we started this, it was about finding a good keyword, finding inspiring apps, using tools like keyword research tools like he did to find apps that could work. Max, would you have any other words of advice for anyone watching this who wants to also ship apps as fast as you do, try things, throw stuff against the wall. What would

[15:43] be your advice to anyone watching this? Okay, the key point is to find the right keyword that is not overcrowded and has some potential. I know it's not easy because there's plenty of apps and the thousands [music] of apps being released weekly to the App Store. But it takes time. I've done my research as well. There are some keywords. They might not have huge traffic, but they do have some potential. So don't miss out, try to find them and build the app. And once you found the keyword, make sure you build a good quality app. I know there are plenty of AI slop apps and just make

[16:13] sure that your AI slop is just better. And once you build it, just ship it as soon as possible to validate the idea. And remember one thing that ASO is crucial, essential for your app growth, but nowadays with the thousands of apps being there flooded the App Stores, it's not [music] enough. It's foundation. Think of it as a basement for the building. If you want your app growth, give it fuel growth with ads or some social media marketing like TikTok or Instagram. Beautiful. Well, thank you for coming on, Max, and showing us your process. My favorite part about you is that you shipped like 40 apps while you

[16:45] had a full-time job. After work, you're shipping apps. You're shipping an app a week is proof that you can do this. Now you're doing this full-time. You're still shipping lots of apps and I love your content. So if you want to follow Max, we'll put a couple links in the description where you can follow him on X and see some of his content. Thank you

[17:00] for coming on, Max, and sharing this. The future is for the builders. We'll see you in the next one. Thank you. Thank you for watching How I Build with Start a Story. If you guys enjoyed this, put a comment down there. What do you want us to cover next? Who do you want us to interview and show their process of building? Otherwise, we'll see you in

[17:13] the next one. Peace.

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