The Lazy Method: How I Build $10K/Month Apps

0:00How long does it take to build a successful business? You might think 80-hour weeks, posting content every day, and grinding for years, but what if I told you there was a different way? I've built two iOS apps that make me over 10k a month. My goal is to maximize the amount of money I can make while minimizing the amount of effort

0:18required. This is Will, and he takes a different approach to building. He calls it the lazy method, and with it, he's built two apps that make over $10,000 a month that don't require a whole lot of his time. Lazy maxing to me is just finding the easiest possible way to get what I want

0:37done, right? I wanted to know how he actually does this, so I asked him to come onto the channel to break everything down. And in this episode, we're going to dive into the two apps that he's built, why he only needs to spend a few hours a week on them, and his advice on how to pick the right ideas like these so that you can live the life that you want. This

0:56one is going to be fun. Let's dive in. I'm Pat Walls, and this is Starter Story. All right, Will, welcome to the channel. Tell me about who you are, what you built, and what's your story. Hey, my name is Will. I've built two iOS apps that make me over 10k a month. My goal is to maximize the amount of money I can make while minimizing the amount of effort required. So, it allows me to like enjoy the time that I have to play Roblox and go to the gym and meet

1:22friends and stuff. I'm pumped to have you on here. I'm excited to hear how you build apps the lazy way. But before we do, what apps do you have and would you be able to pull up your revenue dashboards? Yeah, absolutely. So, my first app is Overlow. It's a pretty simple fitness app. You just log your reps and stuff, and it's kind of targeted towards building muscle. But you have this main feature where you scan your body and you get a result. My second app is a looks maxing app, which is a very similar concept. You scan your face, get results, and you get told how to improve

1:50your facial appearance. Glowly's doing around 10k, and then Overlow is doing like $800 a month passive. Okay. These apps are super cool. Let's talk about your background. How did you get to this point where you have two apps making you over $10,000 a month the lazy way? Yeah, so when I was 16, I was trying out all sorts like drop shipping, [music] selling likes and followers. Then I eventually after uni moved on to crypto startups or a crypto project specifically in NFTs. Thankfully, I found freelance web design which allowed me to

2:23sell my skills to people to make money. My freelance skill is really what accelerated me being able to invest in startups like quite rapidly and testing new ones and eventually find something that worked. Okay, cool. What I'm excited to talk about is how to build businesses in 2026 the lazy way. I talked to a lot of founders who spend 12-hour days building

2:43their businesses, maximizing their time. Sounds like you did things a little bit differently. Before we get deep into it and your approach to building businesses, what is your lazy strategy? How have you been able to build these businesses to over $10,000 a month the lazy way? Lazy maxing to me is just finding the easiest possible way [music] to get what I want done, right? That's why I'm so attracted to paid ads cuz I did try UGC, [music] influencers, and it involved a lot of like getting my hands dirty and managing them, managing payments and [music] whatnot. And it was very hard to sort of see the attribution of when the content

3:17was actually bringing in subscriptions. That's why I'm so attracted to paid ads. [music] The thing I like about ads is that I can just make a few winning ads, throw them out, and basically live on them for the next four or five months. So, I think a lot of people watching this feel the same way. It's like they like

3:31to work on a lot of different things. You seem maybe like you get less attached to your apps. You're willing to sell them. Tell me a little bit more about that. Yeah, so the goal for me with building apps [music] and getting monthly revenue is to sell them to somebody that can scale it far higher than I can, maybe with a UGC program or something. For me, all I want to do is validate that something works and get it to enough revenue that I can sell it and then continue [music] doing that same process over and over which I think is the most

3:59fun part. Okay, cool. And that's one thing that I think is cool is you kind of know what you want. Show us an example of how you were able to lazily build and grow your company and hit $10,000 a month. Yeah, absolutely. I think the best part about 2026 or you know, AI is that you can just make content for practically free. I can create like 10, 20 different

4:20videos and start them into the mixer. And as you can see here like all of these are sort of variants of the same format and they're all getting very good CPAs. This is like a subscription campaign so it's costing me like [music] $16 per subscription. My LTV per paying user is around about 30, 35 dollars so that's a very good CPA. If I get good CPAs, fantastic, I've got a winner and repeat the process cuz that's what ads is really about. It's almost like a

4:43lottery. Personally, I love Will's approach. It's different but I love it because it's simple, it's straightforward and really anybody could do it. But I know if you're watching this, you might be thinking, I still don't know what to build. Truth is is that there's a ton of ideas on there. You just got to pick something but how do you pick? We've put together a database of over 30 successful app ideas that are making over $10,000 a month right now and inside you will find real revenue, pricing models, [music] starting costs and tons of details based on real founders that we've interviewed on Starter Story and thousands of

5:15founders that we have talked to and researched. If you are ready to find an idea that actually works based on real data, just head to the link in the description [music] and you can grab this database 100% for free and check it out. All right, let's get back to the episode. Okay, cool. I want to go even deeper on this. How would you go about finding a good app idea and then building it the lazy way so that you can either sell it one day or not have to

5:39spend 14 hours a day working on it? The greatest part is that it's super simple, right? You likely already scroll Instagram, already scroll TikTok. That's all data right there screaming at you of the things that people want and are interested in. That goes for both like your app idea and your content. I think that's where my design angle comes in, which is that designers tend to take something that's already working and improve it as opposed to inventing a new

6:04idea from scratch. I think that's a great point is when you look at a lot of the apps and people stuff that people build on Starter Story, it's usually not a brand new invention or workflow. It's usually like a new design take on a popular app. I think that's a great tip. What would be

6:19your next step? The next step is making sure that you're selling something that people want. I will not work on an app unless it has a clear viral feature that explains itself in essentially one screenshot. [music] And in order to get somebody interested in your app, you have to be selling them a product that gives them a

6:39transformation, right? I agree with that. Let's talk about once you build the app, what what are like the most important things that you think about? There's multiple parts of the funnel. The first being the advert that somebody sees. The second is in-app. Once you've got them in the app, it's your job to try and increase the conversion amount as much as possible by selling them the story during an onboarding process. For my app, I use 12 to 15 steps in the onboarding. By the time they hit the paywall, I can give them a a sort of personalized insight and therefore conversion rates increase massively because the user feels that the app is

7:13actually working for them at that point. All right. Well, how to learn paid ads and get to a point where you have an ad that is actually working and is profitable? So, the most important thing for me with uh specifically TikTok ads is creating content that feels native to TikTok. So, the type of ads that I make are basically trying to clone what's people are interested in on TikTok, which is things like memes and talking to the camera format and things like that. And then you want to hook them, which means basically not mentioning your app within the first sort of 3 to 4 seconds, then

7:45[music] you can start to introduce your app in the video, but you want to keep the app as subtle as possible. You kind of want to sew it in as part of the story from the beginning to the end. Just show your core like viral feature in action and try and wind it into a story as a full video. Once you find a winner, or once I find a winner, I just scale it. I just scale the spend by 20% every 3 days until eventually it caps

8:10out, right? I quote, "Well, thank you for sharing the playbook for building a laser way." I think it's awesome. You have two successful apps. You've had many other apps that you've built. What's your tool stack? I like to keep a super lean tool stack. Firstly, RevenueCat just for tracking subscriptions. Secondly [music] is Cloud CLI. Thirdly, it's AppsFlyer, which is a

8:30mobile measurement partner. All right. Well, I love it. Simple tech stack. It's not about the tools you use, but how you use them. What would be your advice on how to make it? How to build apps and make money online? I think what I would tell myself is to just start simple, right? And have small wins and build myself up to that eventual moment. Being active on Twitter, absorbing information from people that are already successful. I also believe it's never been a more important time to build a personal brand. I believe that because it's the only thing that AI can't really come for. If you build a personal brand, you

9:02kind of have your own sort of moat. While you're scrolling Twitter and you're learning and making successes, absolutely post about it because you can build your own audience and connect with others a lot easier. I 100% agree with that and hope that you continue to share your story. So, thanks for coming on, sharing this. I think it's going to inspire a lot of people and uh hopefully we'll see you when

9:21you're at $100,000 a month. Thank you very much for having me. Gus, producer of Starter Story. What do you think of this one? I think that idea is so like attractive, I think, to people. It's like, "How can I make money, but I don't want to work that hard, you know?" And I think I liked his approach of saying like when he said, [music] "I could run all these campaigns. I could hire all these influencers, but I don't want to deal with all that. I'd rather make a few pieces of content myself, put them on ads, and see if they work. [music] I would rather do that, you know, than try

9:51to like hire out a bunch of people." Yeah. Yeah. Bill Gates says, "I'll choose a lazy person to do a hard job because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it." And I love that because I [clears throat] think a lot of people watching this, including me, will find likes to do things the hard way. So, learn everything, do everything. But, sometimes there's these little moments or pockets of things that you can kind of do things the easy way. And I think paid ads is one of those things right now with AI is allows you to uh generate ads and uh come up with hooks, [music] write

10:27scripts, analyze ads. You can even use Claude to like manage your browser and do your ads. This is a great moment in time right now where you can use AI to do those sort of things that were not possible, those heavy lifts. And that's probably not going to last forever. I don't think you should do everything lazy in your business, but I do think there's some things that instead of having to do all this work, you can do

10:51it the lazy way. Yeah, for sure. Do you think ads are like a faster way to like really validate your idea kind of thing? I don't think that's exactly what Will was saying, but you know, he was kind of saying like I spin up all these ads, I see which one's working, [music] and I just scale that one, and the ones that

11:08don't, I kill. No, from what I understand, it ads are never a good way to validate an idea. He didn't even need to validate the ideas because they were similar to popular apps in categories, fitness, looks maxing, these sorts of things. [music] So, for him, it was more about just validating if the ads were good, if the actual creative and videos were good enough. [music] So, he kind of skipped that whole part and I think that's again, that's kind of the lazy way. So, he's like, I don't get too attached to my app ideas and I'm building them to sell them. It's very

11:44different approach to the hard way. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, [music] I guess that makes sense. Yeah, you're right. He he'd already kind of validated them, so he it was just more about with the creative work. Yeah, and I think the number one thing that he did, right? We talked about it is that he built apps that were already validated. I think that is, especially if you're trying to build your first

12:03app. Probably good to just pick things in categories that already work. In the description, right down there, I will put our database of proven validated mobile app ideas. In there, you can see a bunch of examples of apps, [music] how much money they make, how they built them, how they grew them, how they scaled them. You can take that, you can put it into Claude, into Chat GPT. It's all free, you can download it right there. You'll see that in the description. I hope you guys enjoyed

12:27this one. We'll see you in the next one. Peace.