I vibe coded a $12K/month mobile app (Stoppr Breakdown)

0:00I cloned a very successful app, and first month of revenue, I made $5,000. This is David Adias, a guy from France who, up until 6 months ago, had a regular job. That was until he saw an opportunity that most people would miss. I was really amazed by the fact they were making $200,000 per month after 3 months. He came across a mobile app making $200,000 a month, but when he used it, he thought to himself, I think I can build something better. So, in a couple weeks, he vibe coded a one-for-one clone, changed the colors, switched the niche, and just 6 months later, he's gone from zero to $10,000 a

0:35month. I brought David onto the channel to break down his entire playbook. And in this video, we'll dive into the app he cloned and how he validated it was worth cloning, how he built his new app in just a month, and the key change he decided to make to it. And lastly, we'll go over the exact playbook he would use if he had to start over today. All

0:56right, this one is going to be fun. Let's get into it. I'm Pat Walls, and this is Starter Story. All right, David, welcome to the channel. Tell me about who you are, what you built, and what's your story? My name is David. I made an app that makes $12,000 per month. I built that app 5 months ago, and to fund the idea for my app, I cloned a very successful app, and

1:19first month of revenue, I made $5,000. That's awesome. It is something that I've been hearing about recently, taking kind of proven English or American apps and localizing them to different countries. So, I think there's something there. I'd like to just know a little bit more about your app. What does it do? Who uses an app like this, and how does it work? It's a mobile app for women to stop their sugar cravings. My customers are around 13 years old to 25, so like mostly Gen Z women. And we have a monthly subscription, we have a weekly, and we have a yearly with a trial as well. Okay, cool. That's

1:50amazing, and I think what you did is really cool with this app. But before we get into that, I just want to understand some of the numbers behind this. How many downloads? How many users? How much revenue has this made? So, in 5 months, I got 60,000 downloads. Paying customers, it's around 900 people. And I've been working mainly with French influencers because I noticed that there was no one in France doing something like to help women by cutting the complexity process sugar. Okay, my next question is, how do you even get into building mobile apps? I understand you

2:22don't come from a developer background. How do you even find the idea to do something like this? I worked 8 years as a quant trader, so basically, I was helping the traders to figure out which stocks to buy. And then, I discovered some famous indie hackers like Peter Levels and Thibault from Outrank and Jack who made Post Bridge, and I got really inspired by their story because they were able to generate a lot of cash quickly. And 5 months ago, I was watching a podcast on YouTube with the three teenagers, the founders of Quitter. And after month three, I heard like they were making like $200,000 per

2:54month, and I was envious, I was jealous, and that's what got me started to start Stopper. Okay, I want to talk for a second about how David built this app. It was a few months ago, and he used Cursor and a few other tools to clone the app in about a month. But the space is changing quickly, and I want to tell you about a new tool that makes it even

3:12easier and faster to build, Rocket. Rocket lets you go from just a few sentences to a full stack app. Just describe your vision, and in a few minutes, you will get a complete functional app, back-end integrations, and production-ready code, everything. With rocket.new, you can import designs from Figma, just like David did, and integrate with Stripe and Supabase in just a few clicks. 400,000 users from around the world are building with Rocket because it's the simplest way to turn ideas into apps in minutes, and not months. So, if you're ready to finally build your idea faster than ever, check out Rocket at the first link in the

3:50description. Thank you to Rocket for sponsoring this video. I love what you guys are building. All right, let's get back to the video. One of the big reasons I wanted to bring you on the channel, you took a proven app, and you sort of made it 1% different, and now you have a really successful app. So, can you tell me a little bit more about how you found the idea and how you decided to clone that specific idea? The way that I found this idea is from YouTube. I saw those three guys on YouTube, and I was really amazed by the fact they were making $200,000 per month

4:19after 3 months. And then, when I downloaded the Quitter app, I was very pleased by their onboarding, and I did one exact copy of their onboarding because it was so good. Well, okay, cool. That's amazing. On this topic of cloning, you can find an idea, then you can find another niche to put it in. But my question for you is, how'd you know that this niche, quitting sugar, was an app that was worth building and something that people would pay for? How did you validate this? Basically, what I did, I went on Google Trends. I was looking for a keyword such as stop sugar. And because for the past 5 years,

4:50the trend of this keyword is basically going higher and and higher and higher. And then, I checked for the same keywords on TikTok and Instagram, and I saw that there were a ton of women influencers that they were talking about quitting sugar, about stopping sugar. So, I validated by keyword research and by content research on TikTok and Instagram, and that's how I knew that making an app to stop sugar craving was

5:10potentially a great idea. Okay, amazing. So, you validate this idea, what's the next step? Building it. Tell me about how you actually built Stopper. So, my first step was to download Quitter to take some screenshot of each screen. What I wanted to see is basically like how we go from screen one to screen two to screen three. So, I was prompting us Cursor, please make the same screen with the same visual elements, with the same color, with the same image. In 2 weeks and a half, I did one full copy of Quitter. And then, to submit to the first version of the app and to get the

5:38approval from Apple, it that took me 1 week. Cool. I think anyone watching this right now is hopefully getting excited about potentially doing the same. So, my next question for you is, if you were to do this again, to start over from scratch, what would be your playbook to clone a successful app from the App Store in 2025? The first step, that would be to find a very successful app, to check basically that if it's for like a specific niche, and if that app markets for a specific regions and the countries. To confirm the revenue, you have to go to Sensor Tower to have a sense of what the app is making as a

6:09monthly recurring revenue. The second one, you want to uh research on TikTok and Google Trends if it's a niche worth building. Step three, that would be a building the design. So, use a Figma plugin to import all those JPEG screenshots in Figma. You are going to see some discrepancies there and there, but for 80% of all the screen, that's near perfect. There are some websites

6:28like screen.design.com and mobbin.com. So, for example, you will go there, search for a Quitter. You can download all the screenshots from a given app with one click. Step four, I think for most app, that's not needed, but if you need some back-end, the easiest that's Firebase because with Firebase, they manage the connection with Google, they manage the connection with email password, and with the Apple setting as well. Right now, like with the Figma MCP, you can connect your Figma MCP to Cursor. Before, it took me like 1 month to do the MVP. Right now, like with the Figma MCP, that would probably take me 2 weeks. Okay, amazing. Thank you for

6:58sharing that playbook. It's crazy to see how fast AI coding is getting better. I want to change topics slightly to tech stack. Can you break down the full stack that Stopper is built in? What's it built on? To vibe code, I use a Cursor. To check my revenue within the app, I am using RevenueCat. To have some deeper analytics about what my users are doing, I am using Mixpanel. I am using a tool which is called top yappers.com, which is basically a site that scrapes TikTok and Instagram and YouTube to find the exact profile that I need of influencers that worked with other apps before. I

7:30will add the emails that I find from top yappers.com, and then I will feed that into LinkedIn.ai. And then, I have been using since the last week here the ads on Menta and the Spark ads on TikTok. So, Spark ads is a great way to increase the number of views you have for a current real video. Now, on that same note, I'm also curious, what are the costs to run an app like this? What do your profit margins look like? Could you break that down for me? I have the ultra plan of Cursor, which costs $20 per month. On Mixpanel, last month I paid around $100. And for the TikTok Spark

7:59ads, what I've been doing for the past months cost me around $100 per month. So, after 5 months, my profit margin for Stopper is a 35%. Last question that I have for you that we ask everyone who comes on Starter Story, if you could stand on young David's shoulders before you started your app, found this app, cloned it, built it, what would be your advice or for anyone watching this right now? Fastest way to make some money right now is to do one-to-one copy of a very successful app. And when I say one-to-one copy, I mean like you copy each screen, you copy each word. I

8:28changed black by pink, I replaced ideal content by sugar, and then done. Yep, I mean, I agree. I think it's totally okay to copy an app, and actually, I think that's the right thing to do, especially when you're starting out. The only thing that I think that you shouldn't do is don't copy the niche. You don't want to go and take their customers, take everything they did, and put it to a different niche. You're not taking their customers. So, anybody who's watching this right now, I think this is a great framework. Thank you, David, for coming on, sharing everything. For anyone watching right now, let us know in the

8:58comments if you enjoyed David's story, if you'd want him to come back and deep dive more into this cloning playbook. Thank you, David, for coming on. Thank you. Bye-bye. Thank you to David for coming on to the channel. Personally, I love this because he took a successful app, he switched the niche, changed the customer base, and took proven principles such as onboarding flows and a bunch of other things, and basically cloned it into his new app. I think that's super smart, especially if you're starting your first business idea. You want to get to your first 10, $20,000 a month. What I loved even more was that he vibe coded this entire thing

9:30in a couple weeks. And that is the power of building with AI. You can have an idea in your head and turn it into a working app faster than you've ever been able to do before. And this is exactly what we show you how to do inside Starter Story Build. We will guide you step by step on how to use AI to bring your app to life. If you're interested in actually building something and getting off the sidelines, head to the first link in the description and check out Starter Story Build. All right, guys, that's it for this episode. Thank you again for watching. We'll see you in

9:58the next one. Peace.