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Sarah Pearl built Stella, an AI manifesting app, on top of an audience of billions of TikTok views. Two months after launch: 12,000 paying subscribers and $350K in monthly recurring revenue. The playbook is distribution-first, product second.
Peace and love doesn't build empires. Pain does, quite frankly.
Jake, 24, built Early — an alarm you can only silence by doing push-ups on camera. Nineteen days from idea to App Store, $50K a month by month four. The lesson is uncomfortable for builders: the product was the easy part.
Building doesn't really matter so much. What really matters is marketing. So I prioritized that over everything.
Adam Lyttle has made $800K shipping deliberately silly apps — squat counters, fish identifiers, card scanners. His two rules: fire lots of small shots, and never underestimate a free trial.
The portfolio reads like a joke and pays like a salary: push-up counter cloned into squat and plank counters, a vegan-ingredient scanner reborn as fish and insect identifiers, a Pokémon card scanner respawned for Yu-Gi-Oh. Total: $800K in sales, peaking at $70K a month. Every app shares code with the last one; every release is an experiment, not a bet.
Greg Isenberg's breakdown of the AI-app gold rush is the closest thing to a syllabus this space has: one gotcha feature, one niche you love, one Instagram brand page, and influencers before ads.
10K a month, when you break it down, is like 333 bucks a day.
Anton spent 15 years and six failed startups learning one thing: everyone can build a product. Letterly — a speech-to-well-written-text app — wins by being obsessively simple, and prints $250K a month doing it.
Everyone can build a product. There are really few that are very simple and easy to use.
Brian Shin's disposable-camera app Once hit $20K a month in 83 days. The unfashionable secret: he refused to build until ten real events, with real dates, had committed to using it.
Stop overthinking and just launch. All of your assumptions may go to nothing once you launch.
— End of Issue 1 —
How apps actually make money — playbooks from the people shipping them.
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