I Make $50K Per Month Working 5 Hours A Week

0:00This is Teemo. He built a mobile app that makes over $50,000 a month, but here's the crazy part. He only works on the app 20 hours per month. Currently, I'm traveling the world and I'm only working 20 hours per month on this app. While most founders are working 80-hour weeks just to get a few downloads, Teemo found a way to build an app that grows essentially on autopilot. And it's all

0:23thanks to one little secret. Essentially, what we are doing is I asked Teemo to come on the channel to break it all down. And in this episode, we'll dive into his app that makes over $50,000 a month on autopilot, the most underrated growth channel that is working right now, and his step-by-step playbook that you can copy right now for your business if you want to do the same. Let's dive in. I'm Pat Walls, and

0:49this is Starter Story. Teemo, welcome to the channel. Tell me about who you are, what you built, and what's your story. My name is Teemo. I'm 23 years old, and I built a mobile app that makes more than 50K per month. [music] Me and my brother launched the app a little over a year ago, and over the last 13 months, we've gone from zero to more than 90K in downloads and more than 260,000 in revenue in total. That allowed me to quit my job after only 6 months, and currently, I'm traveling the world and I'm only working 20 hours per

1:20month on this app. That's actually crazy what you just mentioned, and I want to go back to that real quick. 20 hours per month, not per week, per month. So, I'm excited to talk about that. But before we do, let's talk about the app you built. What is the app that you built, and could you pull up some of your revenue dashboards to show

1:37this is actually legit? The app is called Chart Detector AI. And the concept of the app is pretty simple. It's AI chart analysis app. So, you can just take a picture of a stock chart or a crypto chart, and AI will analyze it and give you some directions here how the stock chart will go. We are currently at $56,000 per month, and we are getting around 13 to 14k in downloads every month. Regarding user numbers, we did in total close to 40 million in total impression and over the last 30 days we did a total of 7.8 million in views and that's for pretty cheap price. Currently we have two main

2:14plans that we are offer. One is a weekly plan that is $12.99 per week and one six months plan that is $59.99 every six months. We also have a hard paywall. We don't offer any free trials or something like that. If you watch a lot of Starter Story videos, you'll notice that a lot of the people who come on to here they have this hard paywall. So there's something there and then you mentioned also that you have a six month plan. I think that's genius. This is the very first time I've heard of someone doing that there but sounds like you split tested it and it worked. So I love that. But I

2:47do want to understand how do you get to the point where you have this app is doing over $50,000 a month? Do you have a technical background? What's your background look like and how do you get here? Before I started this app I was working a 9-5 as a software engineer at a big car brand in Germany. So I started this whole thing with my brother and we both always wanted to start a business and tried a lot of different businesses but mobile apps were the first thing that really worked out and allowed us to quit our jobs and pursue this full time,

3:16yeah. As I've been saying, 2026 this year is the year of iOS. I think it's a huge opportunity. So I'm curious, how did you come up for the idea for this app? I know you had previous ideas before that didn't work out. How did you come up with the idea for this one and then how did you know it was something that could

3:34eventually make $50,000 a month? Back then it was pretty fresh this new feature from ChatGPT that you could upload images. So the first initial idea was just a Telegram bot that could analyze some stock charts with AI. Then we got the first initial idea to turn this Telegram bot into a mobile app. I love that. It reminds me of an interview we just did. They were building stuff and then all of a sudden a new feature came out in one of the big AI APIs, which created this new wave of apps and they caught that wave. It sounds like it was something similar

4:06when ChatGPT released its new feature. So, I want to switch topics real quick and talk about distribution because you figured out something where you only have to work 20 hours per month and your distribution is essentially solved. Could you tell me a little bit more about that and how this app went from zero to $50,000 a month? Essentially, what we are doing is paid ads. So, with paid ads, always the main goal is that you pay less for downloads than you earn from an average user. For example, when you spend $1.50 per download and you earn an average of $3 per user, then you have a 2x ROAS. When

4:40you reach that level, then you have built money-printing machine and the main goal is to spend as much as possible in ads to make more money. I love everything Tino is breaking down right now. I think this is such a smart and underrated way to grow your app in 2026, but this is just one of dozens [music] of channels that you can use to grow your app. Well, to show this to you, we put something together and it's called the mobile app growth cheat sheet. Inside of this cheat sheet, you will find seven different strategies real app founders are using to grow their apps right now. [music]

5:14So, if you're serious about growth and distribution, then you should definitely check out that link that I'll put there right in the description. It's 100% free to download, so what do you have to lose? All right, let's get back to the episode. Okay, cool. Could you just break down a couple of like the TikTok ads that are

5:30working for you? For example, that is one of our best videos we had. It's pretty simple. We are just mainly showing the app itself, how a user is using the app. This ad alone generated us over $15,000 in revenue and got close to 5 million views. Thanks for showing that, showing some of your highest performing TikTok ads. I want to talk about one thing that I know is going to come up in the comments. If you're all you're doing is running ads, are you actually profitable and how

5:56profitable is this? Yeah, sure. I recently did a tweet about this and I made in April $43,700 and we have a total profit margin of around 25% after all of our costs. So, the majority of the cost is the ad spend, around $20,000 in ad spend and the Apple fees, around 15% and made a total profit of around 11 and 1/2

6:21thousand dollars. I think actually these numbers are pretty standard, especially for people that are running paid ads. The the benefit of paid ads is that you don't spend a whole lot of time on it. If you were to actually break down your numbers, you're essentially making $500 per hour. Let's talk about the playbook on how others can do this because I know a lot of people watching this are thinking, "Well, I've tried it to create some content. It was really hard. It took a long time. I didn't make any money. I want to run ads profitably like you." What would be your playbook if you had to start over, build a new app and

6:50successfully run paid ads like you do if you're starting over in 2026? The first step is to make sure that your app is ready for paid ads. The first thing is improving your onboarding. Focus on selling the actual outcome of the app, not the features, not really the benefits, the actual outcome that your app solves. And I also would highly recommend to put a lot of social proof in your onboarding so that the user have more trust in you as a business. I would definitely use a tool like Screens Design to analyze onboarding flow of other successful apps. Also, regarding pricing, I can highly recommend having a

7:25hard paywall with no free trial. That works the best in combination with ads because you get immediately your money back. So, the next step is that you create your TikTok Business Manager account. Really important topic in ads is tracking. Especially really important that TikTok gets a lot of data from you on which people bought in your app. For this you need MMP. For that I would

7:49recommend to use a tool like AppsFlyer. After that, integrate AppsFlyer. I recommend you to hire a freelancer on Upwork to do this for you because it can be a really complex topic and there's a lot of stuff that you can misconfigure that in the end can cost you a lot of money. So, in the next step you need to set up your ads. What I can recommend is that you need to have at least six videos to start your first TikTok Ads campaign. You may be asked why? It's mainly because the TikTok algorithm needs to get some opportunities to test

8:21different videos on different audiences. Setting up the whole campaign is pretty simple. We use a concept called Smart Plus campaigns. These type of campaigns uses a smart AI-powered algorithm from TikTok that is trying to find the best audience for you and also the whole topic of budget allocation is also completely handled by by the Smart Plus campaign. Another important topic is your optimization goal. So, the optimization goal is essentially an instruction that you give to the TikTok

8:51algorithm on what he should focus on. So, a lot of people are trying to optimize on app installs. I would recommend to optimize on subscription events because then only if a user downloads your app and also pays you money, TikTok gets a good signal about it and good data back. And I would recommend to set the campaign budget to at least $50 per day. We saw the best results with $50 per day. Regarding the targeting, we always have a pretty broad targeting. The only thing that we select in our targeting is the country we want to advertise in. Also, additional pretty good tip, a lot of people first want to

9:29advertise in the US, but what we saw when we tested a lot of ads in other countries is that you have a lot better return on investment in other countries. When you start your campaign, it will first get into a learning phase. The learning phase essentially is a quick time that is around 7 days where TikTok tries to test all of your videos on different audiences and tries to find your ideal audience. It's pretty important that you don't change any

9:54settings of your campaign in that time. Now, I'll give you a little bit more insights on how you can monitor your campaigns and how you can scale them. So, what we do every week is we monitor our ROAS. If it's stable and profitable, we will increase our budget. If our ROAS is not profitable, we will create some new videos and put them into the campaign. Also pretty important thing to know, don't increase your budget too fast. There's like a rule that you should not increase your budget more than 20% every 3 days. Otherwise, your ads will go back into the learning phase and a lot of times the ads get

10:30unprofitable. There's also creative fatigue. This means that when you spend too much money on one video, that it will die because too many people saw your ad. So, to prevent this, you always need to have a constant pipeline of new videos. Thank you for sharing that super detailed playback on TikTok paid ads. Hopefully people watching this will give this a shot cuz I think this is genius what you're doing. Let's switch topics a

10:57little bit and talk about tech stack. You built this basically between you and your brother, you guys built everything. What's the tech stack that runs your app that makes over $50,000 a month? Our app is built in React Native and Expo. For our whole back end, we use Supabase. For all of the coding, we use Cursa AI. For actual infrastructure, we

11:18use Bot Me AI as our AI behind our app. Additionally, we use RevenueCat for all of our paywalls and subscription handling. Also a pretty essential part, AppsFlyer for all of our TikTok data tracking, and we use CapCut as our video editing software, and TikTok Ads. Currently, we are spending around $18,000 per month there. Cool. Well, thank you for sharing. Last question that we ask everyone who comes on Starter Story. If you go back in time before you had this very successful app, what would be your advice to young Timo, or for anyone who wants to build super cool, simple app like yours and only

11:58work 20 hours a month? I would tell you I recommend you to start now the execution, because I always watched too many YouTube videos and procrastinated, and I thought I was productive. So, it's really important that you build up this momentum and start putting the work in. Then you will see some results. Well, that's great advice. Thank you, Timo, for coming on and sharing. Awesome business you built. 20 hours per month, super cool. Let us know in the comments what you think about Timo's app. Uh

12:26thanks for coming on and sharing. Inspiring many. Thank you very much. All right, Gus, producer of Starter Story. What do you think? I've actually been getting a lot of like TikTok ads for apps. And my first thought is this approach seems just like a lot simpler. It just makes me think like, "Oh, is this the next chapter of

12:42like how to promote apps online?" I think this is going to become a lot bigger. At first, this whole UGC thing was like completely new. And ads were like more traditional. But now you're seeing everyone who created all this organic content, or they're paying influencers, the next logical step that's going to happen is that you run them on paid. But what's so genius about this is it's doing all the work for you. Sure, you're going to take a little bit less on the profit. His profit margins, which he was awesome

13:09that he shared, was 25-30%. He's putting capital to the business so that he can go work on other things. So, he can have a lifestyle, so he can travel. And I think we're going to start seeing this a lot more. So, I will put a link down there to our mobile app growth cheat sheet. It shows you seven different growth strategies that you can try for your app based on real people that are building real apps and these are strategies that are actually working for them. So, check that down there in the description. You can watch that one 100% for free. Let us know what you thought about the TikTok

13:38playbook. Hope to see you in the next one. Peace.