In this issue
01 — App Business Desk · Cover story
From a 2-Day MVP to $340K a Month
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.
02 — App Business Desk
The Alarm Clock That Demands Push-Ups
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.
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.
04 — App Business DeskSubscribers
$10K a Month Is Just $333 a Day
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.
05 — App Business Desk
Simplicity Is a Feature. It Costs $250K a Month.
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.
06 — App Business Desk
10 Committed Customers Before One Line of Code
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.
Workshops
Included with your subscriptionShip a paywall in a weekend
Build the free-trial paywall from Adam Lyttle's playbook: placement, the 3-second cooldown, and pricing that converts.
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The gotcha-feature sprint
Find and prototype the one feature a stranger understands in 3 seconds — Isenberg's 90% of distribution, applied to your idea.
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300 DMs → 12 customers
The Once validation engine: commitment metrics, cold outreach scripts, and knowing when you've earned the right to build.
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Letters
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