03 — App Business Desk

The Machine Gun Theory of App Money

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.

Jump to 2:15 — the machine gun approach: build fast, release often, hit by firing consistently.

The monetization half took him a year of fumbling: too scared to charge, then $1–2 one-time purchases nobody bought. The fix was a $10/year subscription with a free trial — 'not the subscription part, not the pricing part, the free trial part' — plus a paywall that interrupts the user's flow with a three-second cooldown. Conversion jumped over 5,000%, and now 1,000+ users a month roll from trial to paid.

Jump to 1:18 — the free-trial pivot that changed everything.