# I Built a $10K/Month App in 88 Days

Channel: Starter Story
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g9J_-5w9Nrs
Duration: 19 min
Language: English
Words: 4200
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/g9J_-5w9Nrs

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[0:00] I want you to meet Frederick. My name's Frederick James. I built an app that peaked about 13k per month. A few months ago, he built a little simple app while on vacation. And today, that simple app makes over $10,000 a month. But here's a really important thing I need you to know. His app is not

[0:16] really special at all. The app is a habit tracker. It's got a focus on premium design. But the reason you watch this video is because he's going to break down exactly how he grew it to $10,000 plus per month. There's a bit of a playbook, at least that I used for my app. Number one, you got to have a So, I asked Frederick to come on and break everything down for us. And in this episode, we're going to dive into the app idea he built that now makes over $10,000 [music] a month, the exact growth channel that's working for him right now, and the exact playbook he's using to do it all over

[0:43] again. I think this one's going to be great. Let's dive in. I'm Gus, and this is Starter Story. Frederick, welcome to Starter Story. We're super excited to have you here today. Could you tell us who you are, what you built, and what's your story? Yeah, so my name's Frederick James. I built an app that peaked at about 13k per month. Um, it's hovering around 10k right now. I launched about 3 months ago, and since then, it's given me financial freedom. And I'm currently doing it all again as well with a second app. So, yeah, we're going to dive into the stack that I'm using, some of the

[1:15] marketing bits and pieces, and yeah, hopefully you'll find some of it useful. All right, Frederick, let's talk about this app business. Could you pull up or share some of your revenue dashboards just to show the audience that this thing is legit? So, here we go. We can first see this is the overall revenue in the last 90 days. Um, it's done about 25k in revenue. Um, and on ARR basis, we kind of peaked at around just under 100k ARR. Then we come to MRR as well. You can see that we're currently sitting around uh 8,000. The download to paid ratio I have about 7%, which is pretty good for the uh niche

[1:51] that I'm in, which means that essentially 7% of the people that download the app will actually end up buying it. Also, the refund rate is quite nice as well, 0.7%. This is the Trust MRA listing. Sorry, last 30 days. You can see we've got about 11k. If we go in the last 3 months, we're sitting [music] around

[2:08] 25k. Okay, so what kind of app did you build? What's the category or niche that it's in? What I can say is that the app is a habit tracker in the health and fitness niche. It's not really anything special. It's got a focus on premium design and it's got to be like really nice UI. [music] I guess that's the main value

[2:26] proposition for the app. So, before we kind of get into some of those methods, like how you grew it and things like that, how did you get here? What's your background? How did you get to the point where you're building an app that makes, you know, over $10,000 a month? I've always been a software developer, really. I was always playing with computers as a kid. And for the past 5 years, I've been living in London working [music] in big tech. And I don't know, I've always been a little bit kind of dissatisfied, I think, with the regularness, right, of like 9-5, all of

[2:54] these things. I had a health scare last year and I realized I needed to pretty much start life maxing, basically. I needed to start, you know, actually taking life by the reins. And I decided I was going to go all in, pretty much, building this app, sharing the journey on X. That was pretty much what I decided to

[3:11] do. But how did you come up with the idea itself? Like how did you find, [music] you said it's in the health category, habit trackers, you know, there's a million of those. But how did you kind of come up with your idea? Yeah, so I literally saw a breakdown of an app onboarding. You know, it's quite a common like format of posts on X. And yeah, I just realized that I could like very easily make it, you know, my own angle and then also just add some like really obvious features that were there and improve it. And I think that's that's again like a really good lesson

[3:40] from that. This isn't unique to my app, either, right? I knew I could take this app, make the design premium, add a couple of features and it would likely sell itself. Like I mentioned, it's in health and fitness, as well. Yeah, I just thought it would probably make money. So, 2026 has really been the year of building iOS apps. I really don't think that's going to change anytime soon. And so, if you're sitting here wondering, I want to build an app, but I have no idea where to start, I think we have something that could really help you out. At the link in the description below, you can find the iOS apps

[4:07] database. Inside, you're going to find over 50 proven app ideas across a bunch of different categories. What I think you should do is go through the list, find inspiration, and then start building your own app. So, you can just head to the link in the description and grab it below. All right, let's get back to the episode. So, let's talk about how you built this. Uh what's kind of the build story, build timeline? Yeah, how

[4:26] did you build this 10,000 per month app? Yeah, the process was kind of in a couple of stages. Uh stage one is to make the mock UI in Figma first. I think this always leads to a way better final product. Um if you draw like a wireframe even of what you want the UI to look like, the agent will have a much higher chance of one-shotting it and you rather than you have to go back and forth and do lots of iterations. The second bit of prep that I like to do is a map out a basic ERD. Um this is an entity relationship diagram. It's like a data

[4:56] structure. It's how the tables of data how the schemas for your tables interact with one another. Um this is probably, to be honest, today a bit of a relic of the old ways that we used to build software. I then also map out a basic infra diagram. Again, I'm unk I'm showing my age um how the data flows throughout your app and your different services, right? I then also make uh MVP for my App Store screenshots as well in Figma. I've got a little bit of design chops, but I always hand them off to GPT image to do some final [music] touches and stuff like this. The second stage is

[5:28] that for all the assets in my app, I go to Pinterest and I download a whole load of those, and then I make them my own with uh GPT image uh two. It's actually 2.5 now as well. Um this is free with an OpenAI subscription as well. People love images, right? People love visual nature. It's more interactive, especially during onboarding. It can really helps to make your app feel much more engaging. I then give all of my mock-ups to uh ChatGPT, who then builds out the whole flow and the UI. Stage three, you then want to do some like AB testing and iterations after you've actually released the app and once the

[6:03] app is live. This can be on the paywalls primarily, but you can also change the pricing, change pricing options. [music] You can go as deep as you want really, but I would definitely recommend at least testing a paywall. The back end for all of my apps is [music] Cloudflare. R2 for asset storage is free. I use D1 for my databases. This is [music] just a standard like uh cloud serverless database. Um and then I use Cloudflare workers for any kind of compute. I'm using AppsFlyer right now for my MMP. It's free until 12,000 installs. And then I'm using RevenueCat for the tracking uh for the monetization

[6:38] and the remote paywalls. ChatGPT for my coding agent. Uh pay $100 a month for that. I've also just got a Claude Pro plan because Opus 5.5 came out and apparently it rips. I'm testing it [music] right now. An interesting one as well is that all of my apps, all my websites, even the subtitles in my videos, use a font that I actually

[6:55] bought. I paid a one-time fee for $300. And honestly, I think it's kind of worth it. It helps you stand out a little bit. I'd recommend finding like one font you fall in love with and just buy it, you know? All right, let's get into the growth, which is, you know, I think one of the biggest reasons I wanted to have you on the Story Story YouTube channel. If I'm not mistaken, I think you put an out an X article that said like I'm growing up to 13K per month in like 90 days or something like that, 88 days. I think maybe it was more specific. What I'd

[7:24] love for you to do is if you could break down kind of that growth journey. Maybe let's start with that first, like zero to 5K per month. How did you How did you really start to get traction? Yes, so the marketing. I got started with Apple Ads. This is my breakthrough um on the app. You get $100 free to start. You don't need like a crazy budget. For the Apple Store ads, there's a bit of a playbook, at least that I used for my app. First of all, you

[7:50] should have a cracked App Store page. You can make the screenshots with AI, but you can also hire a designer, right? You can pay someone like 50, 100 bucks, um and it's going to be looking really S tier. This is important because that's going to be what's shown to the users when they're searching, right? That's like your creative uh another platform when you're showing video ads. Number two, you want to set up tracking. You need good attribution for all of these ads. Um it's a few lines of code in your app, and then a few clicks on your RevenueCat dashboard. You're going to set up the campaign in Apple ads. We're

[8:21] going to turn search match off and use the exact keywords only. And the keywords are going to be the names of your big competitors. So, when people are searching for Duolingo, your app comes up as the advertisement. I would go with the Apple recommended max bid to start with. Give it at least like 2 days and then see how that spends. Um if it's not spending like well immediately, don't freak out. Give it a couple of days. If it's still not spending at all after a couple of days, it means that someone else is bidding more than you, and so you need to increase your bid in

[8:51] order to match that. Once you have data, right? Once you've spent the cash, export it from RevenueCat, export it from Apple, put it together, give it to your agent, and tell it to find the best performers. I'd recommend doing this once a day, part of your morning routine. And yeah, that's pretty much the playbook, really. That's the

[9:09] essentials. Okay, so that zero to roughly 5K per month journey was pretty much all Apple ads. And I loved everything you broke down there. We haven't had a lot of people come on and talk specifically about Apple ads, so yeah, thanks for breaking that down. So, let's talk about kind of that next that next stage, that 5K to 10K [music] per month. What did you do the same? What did you do different to finally hit that

[9:30] $10,000 per month? Yeah, so that hockey stick growth, and it came with TikTok ads, and it came in about a week. The first part of it was that I just called in my niche. I found videos that had already gone viral organically, and I remade them myself. I ran pretty much I kept it simple, man. I ran five different formats. I ran five

[9:52] posts on those five different formats. So, just five posts in total, five ads. I gave each of those posts about $50 of ad spend. Um and if they got conversions by the TikTok Ads, or if they were a little bit unprofitable, I just kept running the ads. And I think in the beginning, I think a lot of people miss this part. In the beginning, it's more important that your account understands what users it needs to target. So, if you can loss lead on the account, not loss lead on your app, if you can make if you can be unprofitable to gather signals for the targeting of the

[10:22] algorithms, I generally think that's kind of a good way to go. Obviously, then it's a it's a it's a line as to how much money you're willing to lose, basically. And that kind of is ads in the beginning, paid ads. It's how much you're willing to lose to find that winner. So, pretty much exactly what I said. If they were super unprofitable, I would just stop the ads. Um I'd recommend aiming for profitability on the initial transactions alone. Um a rough calculation you can do to start out with this is take your realized LTV, which is just your total paying customers divided by the amount of

[10:52] revenue that you have, minus the CPA, so the cost of acquiring that user. Get rid of the Apple Store 15%. If you're already on the small business program, you should sign up for that, otherwise you're paying 5% for nothing. Minus your revenue cap, 1%. Um minus the VAT. If you're selling directly to the US, as you probably should when you're getting started, you won't pay VAT. But if you get a subscription from the EU, it's likely you're paying about 20%. That's your basic P&L. I would recommend doing this again, same with the Apple Ads,

[11:18] every morning as part of your routine. So, I got a coffee and my TikTok ad report every morning, and I'd read it just to see these data. And then pretty much I just kept the ads that did well. I gradually increased the budgets by 20% every few days. Don't ever ever ever ever, ever increase the budget on your

[11:34] ads by more than 20% every few days. TikTok themselves say just don't ever do this and they're incentivized for you to spend more money. So, part three, and this is the real inflection point for me, was I used goal-based budget increase and I set a target cost per acquisition. So, I said to TikTok, I want customers at price X and then

[11:54] TikTok takes control of your spending. So, you don't change the budgets every few days. TikTok automatically does it in accordance with what it thinks will get you the most conversions at that particular price point. If your ads hit that target CPA, it will just keep increasing the spend. And this is where the real snowball effect happened. My campaign was running about $200 per day, but once I turned this on, it just went like crazy mode and went up to like 1K spend a day and that's then where it took me from 5K to about 10K in the

[12:23] space of about a week. Yeah, again, I love the detailed breakdown here, I think. Someone watching, hopefully, is going to find this like really, really helpful cuz we've we've had some people on the show who've talked high level about this stuff, but the detail here is pretty cool. And I can I can imagine someone watching this thinking, oh, he's just spending a bunch on ads, he's not actually making any money, which I don't know, maybe that's true or not. But yeah, talk talk to us about like the profitability of this, what the what

[12:43] that looks like. Paid ads take a lot of money upfront. I was not profitable for the first like couple of weeks. You need to have a little bit of risk tolerance when you're going into it because you might not see profit at all. It's not guaranteed. So, when you're spending money, that's one thing to keep in mind. You might burn like, honestly, if it's your first time, maybe up to like a thousand dollars without seeing really any return from that. And then the second part is the ongoing paid advertisements only do not have a high profit margin. Like you're

[13:13] going to be looking at like 30%. Someone we've featured like I said a lot of bad founders who've done influencer deals or UGC and I've seen this other method, paid ads. Why do you think someone should consider doing paid ads versus a different tactic? It comes down to this. You pay for marketing one of a few ways and that is you pay with your time or you pay with your money and that's the only way to get around it. So, if you're having to manage influencers, dealing with influencers, dealing with people that are big on social media is a [ __ ] nightmare, man. You know, running your

[13:43] own UGC armies, like yes, you're going to have high profitability, but realistically, you're going to pay, yeah, with your time or your money and so paid ads is all the way with the money. I think that's a good way to put it. Influencers, like paying for UGC campaigns are somewhere in the middle because you have to manage those UGC people and then all the way on the other end is doing like founder-led content or something like this, right? Where you have to like directly film yourself every single day. I would also say that running an app solely on paid ads is

[14:10] non-optimal for a couple of reasons. Number one, it's very difficult to sell an app if your only acquisition model is paying for the users because it's resting on, you know, a a pretty thin margin. I think ultimately a combination of these approaches is what you should do because if you look at it from a risk perspective, if you're only marketing through one very specific channel and that goes away, for example, if TikTok bans your account for whatever reason, maybe you didn't even do anything wrong, you then lose all of your money. So, not only does it make it more reliable, makes it more sustainable, generally combining all these different approaches

[14:42] is probably the way to go. I think my takeaway as you're talking is just like there is a ton of ways to do it. And so, it's almost like figuring out for you or me as a as a app builder founder, like what can you stomach? So, like you said, one of the questions we always ask people that come on the channel is, if you were standing on your shoulders before you started building this app a couple years ago or for people a lot of people watching who are trying to get started on their first app, trying to [music] get that first momentum, what a what's a big lesson or a piece of advice

[15:13] that you would give to yourself from back then or to someone watching? I think the largest thing is that you need to try everything. You needed to try anything. Outside of the app space, I've done, you know, a ton of different projects. I resold Supreme hoodies when I was like 15. I was drop shipping. I was a music producer, and I was quite a successful music producer, but there's no money in music, so I moved on. Um that's the only real project that really

[15:37] worked out for me with music production. And I think that success really is just failure on a long enough timeline. You know, you've got to be willing to fail and fail fast, and you should want to fail and fail faster. I think entrepreneurship as well is is is a marathon, you know, give yourself the time. It won't happen overnight. You've got to pace yourself for your your

[15:58] physical health, your mental health. Like it's, you know, it sounds a little bit, you know, whatever, but it really is actually true when you're in the position. It it can be a grind, man. And I really don't think there is anyone that didn't fail for many years before they found any kind of success.

[16:14] Frederick, that's great advice, man. Thank you so much for coming on the channel. I'll just say it's been an inspire inspiring for me to watch your journey on X, and super cool to get to meet you and talk to you here. And I hope that, you know, you inspired even one or two people watching this video to to get started and start building your their own app or and start building their own journey. So, maybe we'll have you on when your next app hits, you know, 10K per month or more or somewhere down the line. Thanks for coming on the

[16:36] show. Thank you so much. All right, I just wrapped up with Frederick, and man, I just loved that conversation. I mentioned it on the call, and I have a couple takeaways. One is that there's just there's so many different ways to win in the app space, right? But like he's doing all these paid ads. We've talked to several people, and we will continue who do UGC, influencer marketing, or you can do it

[16:54] all yourself with founder-led content. The spectrum is wide, and again, like I said, one of the reasons I wanted to have him on is cuz he's on one end of the spectrum, and I wanted to honestly, just for myself, I wanted to learn like how he does it and kind of get a little bit into his brain. And obviously, for you as the person watching or the audience watching, I wanted you to kind of get insight into someone who's done the ads-only growth method, um how he did it. Uh my second big takeaway is just how I found him, right? So, you'll probably see in the video that there's a

[17:21] bunch of X videos or articles that he posted on Twitter, X. And, um, I think building in public, like he's doing, is in the unique way that he's doing it is just really, really smart. It's getting him noticed, it's getting him a lot of attention, and I think it's sort of a springboard to whatever he's going to be building next. And so, I know like building in public is like hard, and it's, uh, you can be a little bit of a grind, but if you go follow him on Twitter, which I really encourage you to do, you're going to see how authentic his storytelling is and kind of how

[17:47] unique and I would, for a fluffy term, like human it is. And I [music] think in an age of automation and AI images and fake people, dead internet theory, he like really stands out as like a real person who's building online. And then, yeah, my last, kind of my last takeaway is like, even though I know we didn't reveal the app name, and I'm sure we're going to get a lot of [ __ ] in the comments for that, like he said on the call, it's proof that kind of any idea works. He, like he said, it's just a habit tracker. You can probably go find

[18:16] some of his other apps, and I'm sure he's building in all these like really saturated, quote, saturated spaces, and he and yet he was still able to be successful. So, if you want to start building off of proven app ideas, at the link in the description, you can download our free database of successful, proven iOS app ideas. All right, that's it for this one. Please leave a comment, let us know what you thought about this episode. Hope you enjoyed it. We'll see you in the next

[18:40] [music] one. Peace.

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