41:47
When I heard about this app idea, I could not believe my eyes. Hands down, one of the simplest ideas I've ever seen on this channel, and yet it makes over $50,000 a month. I launched at the end of 2025 and went from zero to $50,000 a month in 4 months. This is Jake. He's 24, and he saw a problem that almost everyone has. So, he decided to build an app to solve it, and a few months later, that app has been downloaded over 200,000 times. Building doesn't really matter so much. What really matters is marketing. And so, I prioritized that over everything.
I asked Jake to come on the channel to break it all down. In this episode, we'll dive into the insanely simple app idea and why it works, how he went from zero to over $50,000 a month in just 4 months, and the only two things that matter if you want to build a successful app. All right, let's dive in. I'm Bat Walls, and this is Starter Story. All right, Jake, welcome to Starter Story. Tell me about who you are, what app you built, and what's your story. Hey Bat, thanks for having me on. My name is Jake, and I built an app that does over $50,000 in revenue per month. I launched at the end of 2025 and went from zero to $50,000 a month in 4 months. I'm excited to share more about
how I came up with and validated the idea, how I grew it to over $50,000 per month, and share my overall framework for building and growing apps solo. Okay, cool. All right, well, congratulations. This is amazing growth, and I'm super excited to get into what you built, how you got the idea, all that. But first, show me what app you built. Show me some of your revenue screenshots. I want to see this is legit, and I want to see really I'm curious what you built. Yeah, so the app is called Early. It helps you wake up early. It's an alarm clock app, and sort of the one liner is push-ups that turn off your alarm. It's that simple. That's the main thing that
we push through all of our marketing. That's sort of the novel aspect added on to the alarm app. This is the last 28 days of sales, done a little over $50,000. First-time downloads, a little over 50,000 downloads in the last 30 days. And in 2026, I've done a little over 200,000 downloads. Pretty standard app pricing model, free trial, and then $29.99 a year or $9.99 a month. Okay, awesome. I mean, this is amazing. It's basically an alarm clock app, super cool. I'm doing 50,000 a month really quickly. This is just crazy numbers. So, we're going to get all into that, how you came up with this idea, how you
built it, and how you grew it. I'm excited. But before we do, what's your background? Do you have a background coding up apps? How did you get to this place where you have a $50,000 per month iPhone app? I actually went to school for accounting. I did a 4 years undergrad and a year for my master's. I got my CPA and I worked in public accounting in a big four firm for a little over a year. But I've been coding, I'm self-taught like the last 4 years or so. Had some other businesses in the past, nothing really worked. I realized through all these failures that marketing is the most important thing. I started focusing on building an app as quickly as possible that solved a
painful problem in a simple way. And then following these models that a lot of these other apps were using like influencer marketing is the one that I picked. It's proven to work. And yeah. Okay, Jake's app idea is so insanely simple and this is why I love it. This is the real secret. He did not build something complicated. Instead, he found a painful problem and built a dead simple solution around it. These are my favorite kinds of app ideas and there are way more of them out there than you might think. And I want to prove this. This is why I put together this free database of over 30 successful mobile app ideas. Inside this database, you
will find real revenue numbers, starting cost, tech stack, everything you want to know about what it takes to build these. The goal isn't that you just go and copy these. The goal is that you do your research, get inspired, and maybe even spark your next app idea. If you are ready to start building, just head to the first link in the description and you can grab this database 100% for free. All right, let's get back to the episode. Okay, amazing. I mean, what I love about this is that you didn't have like a crazy software technical background. You're kind of hacking away
at stuff, but what you went to school for was accounting. You were doing some accounting work, but now you have this app, it's crushing it. So, I think one important thing is just the idea itself. This idea that you had where it's an alarm clock that makes you do push-ups or makes you do something is a really cool idea. So, I'm curious, how did you actually find this idea? How did you know it was something that could potentially make $50,000 a month? So, I was having trouble myself waking up early and I started texting my friend the night before like "Hey, I'm going to send you a video of me doing push-ups by 6:00 a.m. tomorrow." And that was to hold me accountable. And so, every night
I would send that text before. Uh it just held me accountable, it was great. And at that time, a lot of other apps were doing well and I saw a lot of people on Twitter sort of doing well with apps and I was at a point where I was sort of brainstorming my next idea and decided this would probably be a great idea. Uh the MVP, the initial scope of project was just an accountability app. So, there was no alarm feature whatsoever. I built the app in 3 weeks and then I realized I didn't know how to market. Uh I thought influencer marketing could kind of maybe work with it, but it wasn't too viral of an idea. So, I took a whole day just to kind of walk, think about it, write on the direction I was going to take and I
had a few paths and decided on the alarm feature. Uh this was right before iOS 26 came out and iOS 26 allowed you to connect your app to the native alarm system on iPhone using alarm kit API so you could build a real alarm app. Up until this point, uh there were a lot of other alarm apps out there, but they were sort of gimmicky and not reliable because they used different uh like app sounds and workarounds to make the quote-unquote alarm. So, now this is possible with the alarm kit API, I figured it would be a good idea. I love this that you mentioned this here is that like it's a little bit of luck and timing involved here is that like before alarm apps couldn't be uh useful
because they weren't 100% reliable. That's really important for an alarm app. But you had already shipped this thing, this kind of like fun accountability idea that was like a kind of a little bit of a gimmick thing that you're doing with your friend. You didn't really have any reason to ship that other than hey, this could be cool if this existed as an app. You had that kind of early app version and then you had this kind of come-to-Jesus moment where you realized that oh, these alarm apps can actually get better. These two things came together. Let's talk about how you actually learned to build something like this. I know it's not the most complex app in the world, but still it's pretty legit. Can you
give me an overview of how long it took you to build it and how you built it? Yeah, so it took about 19 days from my first commit to live on the App Store. I was just getting the MVP out as quick as possible. It actually went out without the alarm feature, funny enough. It was just sort of an accountability app to log your wake up. You'd set the goal the night before. The alarm feature went live about another 19 days after it was on the App Store. So it took a little over a month and then I knew I could build the product, but I didn't know if I knew how to market it. So my framework here was just ship fast, validate the idea as fast as possible, but I wasn't sure if I could get views. And I feel
like that's sort of the most important thing. Building doesn't really matter so much. to build a good product, of course, but getting views is more of the unknown. Started marketing as fast as possible. My first influencer video went live 7 days later. I saw people purchase from that video and at that point I knew the idea was validated and I went to try and scale it more. I did my first $1,000 in revenue 3 weeks after the first influencer video went up and then first 30K month in month 3 and first 50K month in month 4. Yeah, I mean I agree with that is that in this AI world where you can build anything now and you don't really have to be even that technical, it's it's quite easy to build stuff and your focus
on views was really like that and that's a good way to think about it. Before we get into growth and you know, how you did distribution, maybe there's not really like a framework on how to come up with great ideas. It's like ship stuff and think, kind of like you did. So for anyone watching this, what would be your advice for people they're looking for an idea like this, something that can make $50,000 a month, which is like an app you can build. What advice would you have for people watching this that want to do the same as you? Yeah, my framework at this point is just solve a painful problem in a simple way and it should be inherently viral. If it's not inherently viral, the idea
itself, then add some sort of novel aspect to it to make it inherently viral. With AI, there's so much that's possible. If it's painful, people will pay. And if it's simple, it's easy to show the value in content very quickly. If it's something that's going through your head at least once a day, it's probably a really painful problem that you really want to solve. And you're actively looking, even if you don't know that you're looking for a solution for it. If its solution shows up, you're going to jump on it. In college, uh my roommate and I would talk every single night about how we were going to go to sleep early and how we were going to wake up early the next day. It was just
constant. Every single day it was something that we would talk about. Also, this is after the fact, but whenever I talk about the app with people or I show them, they're always they either say, "Oh, I need this." or "I don't need this, but my friend needs this." or "My girlfriend needs this." Uh someone in their life needs it and it's pretty much every single time. So, it's just a very painful problem. I agree with the painful thing. We've talked about that a lot on the Starter Story channel right now if you're watching this and look at all the successful apps, the people that we interviewed just like you. Every app is simple.
Sometimes it's just one main killer feature. This is a very common thing across a lot of the successful apps and the fast-growing ones like yours. Simple makes it easier to focus on distribution and growth and that's the next topic that I want to get into is how did you actually grow this thing? I'm sure there's a thousand alarm clock apps on the App Store right now and growing every single day, but yours stood out. So, how did you do that? How did you go from zero to $50,000 per month? I started out by finding influencers on TikTok and Instagram, just reaching out, sending a ton of DMs early on. And it's a tough start. You get very few responses. And I was trying to find people who were doing like day in the life or lifestyle content where I
thought the app could fit in naturally. That was like a big thing for me was it fit in naturally. It was a really good sell to the influencer. They could continue making their existing videos, except they would get paid for it. A lot of times with influencer marketing, it comes off as too much of an ad. And so, the influencer needs a lot more money and a lot of a reason. It needs to be very compelling offer for them to want to take up a spot on their page. But, if you find people that are already doing content where your app fits perfectly, like an alarm they wake up in their day in the life videos, and then push-ups, which is inherently viral and intriguing as the viewer, then they're more willing to fit it into their
videos. I mean, I feel like influencer marketing, there's so many ways to do it. It's a very broad category. So, it'd be cool if you could show me one of the videos that did well for you, that got a lot of views and converted to a lot of sign-ups. Would you be able to share one of those with me? Yeah, so here's a perfect example video. POV in the life of a college student wakes up, shows the alarm going off, shows the push-ups, and then in the app it's analyzing, and then it turns into a green check and says alarm turned off. It's super subtle, supernatural, and I sort of view it and sort of when I sell it to the influencer, it's like a win-win-win. They get to continue making their videos and get paid for it. I get
downloads for the app, and the viewer gets a solution to a problem that they're having without really watching an ad. It just fits in so naturally. And then, pretty much every single video, if it's shown well, will result in a comment like what's the app name? And then they just respond below, early on the app store. Generally, I pin the comment on Instagram. I love that example because in that video specifically, it shows off your app right away. And then it just feels natural, feels like a day in life video. If you like this influencer, you like their life or their lifestyle, you know,
you might want to try that out too, so you can live a day in life like that. So, I think that's great. A video like that, what is the deal structure? For people watching this, they're probably wondering, how much do I got to pay for something like that? How many downloads does this turn into? Could you give me some of the numbers behind uh a video like that? Uh yeah, generally the deal structure is multiple videos a month, like two to four videos a month with a view guarantee. That's sort of the most important part is that you're paying for the views that you get. And so, I view
it as pretty low risk, honestly. You can sort of cap what you're going to pay and take the risk and then see what the return is Uh quickly once the video goes live. It takes about a day to sort of hit the peak on views and then you see what your returns are. Generally paying around like $2 to $3 CPM uh based on the view guarantee. And then the money's really made on those big videos. It's sort of power law. A lot of videos will sort of do okay. Every once in a while you get a big 1 million view, 2 million, 5 million view video and that's where you really make money.
Okay, so I'm curious. For a video like that, are you able to track how many sales that leads to? Because I noticed that it's in the comments and someone uh we chatted with someone just recently said conversions happen in the comments. But I imagine some people are just are searching for your app and it's not trackable. So how would you track something like that? Use any tools for that or how do you approach that? Yeah, it's extremely difficult uh to measure with influencer marketing. I recommend staying super simple. Just track views and measure spikes is sort of the approach that I take. So I'll track all the videos and I have uh historical data and then when a spike
happens, I'll see you can be pretty sure that video resulted in what you're seeing if you see a spike in views along with a spike in conversions. And so I sort of take that approach. I view it as sort of like a black box. Put in 5K and you get out 10. That worked. You don't know exactly who generated the most profit, but if you see a spike, you can be reasonably sure that video was driving that and then you can sort of measure. But ultimately you're going to lose money on individual creators and you probably won't know who. It's just inevitable. All right, let's let's switch topics a little bit and talk about how you run this thing and what tools you use. I know you're kind of a one-man show here,
built this app, did a lot of the marketing in the beginning. What are all the tools? What's your whole stack to run an app that makes $50,000 a month like this? Uh yeah, solo founder. I have help now. I think it's inevitable. In terms of running uh everything, I use Firebase uh for the database, authentication, and cloud functions within the app. Superwall for paywall and subscription management. Use OpenAI for AI API. I use Mixpanel for in-app analytics. And of course Cloud Code, the absolute best tool for actually building the app. And then for marketing, Grow we for influencer tracking and payments, SideShift for UGC creator sourcing tracking and
payments, Instantly for emails. This is great for sending out mass emails for influencer outreach, Cal for booking meetings, Agree for contracts, and then Google Sheets. I feel like I have to mention sort of run everything through that. And then just general business tools, use QuickBooks for accounting, keeps everything super clean. And then 1Password for password manager. On a personal note, absolute life changer. Could not recommend any more to set up 1Password. All right, thanks for sharing that awesome tech stack. I'd love if you gave me a demo of your app. It's a super cool idea. So, I'd love you could just show me how it works and what it actually
looks like. Can you show me your push-up alarm clock app that makes $50,000 a month? Yeah, so super simple. You just create an alarm, set the time, set it for every day, choose a mission, push-ups, and then I like the birds sound, save the alarm. The alarm goes off when you open the app. It says you need to do push-ups. Just click start. And then it analyzes, and it says alarm turned off. And you can't fake it, say I did push-ups. It actually I wasn't able to see it, but I'm guessing that it did some sort of analysis. Yeah, yeah, like the video and then make sure you actually did the push-ups.
Well, that's it. That's what I love about this app that you built. It's simple. I have to wake up and do push-ups. It doesn't need a thousand features. It's awesome and it's making $50,000 a month. That's amazing. Last question that I wanted to ask you that we ask all founders to come on Starter Story. If you go back in time when you were uh working your accounting job or when you were, you know, just in college thinking about building apps, what advice would you give to young Jake? Or what advice would you give to people watching this that want to build an app like you? Focus on top of funnel only. That is the most valuable skill right now is marketing. There's so many people that can build an app and it's so easy with
AI, but there's not so many people that know how to market and know how to get views. And if nobody knows about your app, it doesn't exist. You can build as many features as you want. When building an app solo, I think it's extremely important that you limit your scope and focus on what's really important, which is solving a painful problem in a simple way. Oops, I should have turned off the alarm. And putting all your effort into marketing. Thank you for coming on, Jake. Dude, love this what you built. It's super cool. It just goes to show that yeah, it's all about distribution. There are million alarm apps out there, but yours making $50,000 a month because of all
this awesome stuff that you've been working on. So, thanks for coming on and sharing. It's going to be an inspiration to everyone watching. Thanks for having me. All right, Gus, producer of Starter Story, what did you think about Jake and Early? Man, first of all, really cool idea. That's one of the reasons I wanted to bring him on is cuz it's just like a such a crazy simple idea, like alarm clock app, crazy. And then just I liked his personality, right? Like sometimes we have guys in here that are like, I don't know, feel like they're really analytical or feel like they've kind of all together, and he just kind of was
like, I'm a normal dude, I just learned how to do this. You can do it, too. Yeah. One thing that he touched on for a second, but I actually thought it was [clears throat] really interesting and might be useful for people that are watching this and looking for business ideas, is that he mentioned that API changed for AlarmKit or something like that, which is I'm guessing some sort of API that Apple exposes to be able to use their alarm functionality. And then all of a sudden, this is now you're seeing all these alarm apps. I had tweeted about one that he had mentioned, and then his came up, and I'm sure there's a bunch more.
Yeah. This is a little thing that I think people who are looking for ideas, look at changes to APIs that Apple or other platforms enable. Usually, there's a slew of apps that will get released when there is a new change in the API. When they expose, for example, something new in the camera. Apple allowed you to programmatically do widgets, or they programmatically do screen times, then you have all these screen blocking apps, right? So, every time there's a new improvement to the API, which there's a lot nowadays because all these companies are shipping faster, there are thousands of business ideas that become easier to build, but there's not there's a short window of time to do it, right? I think
that's an interesting little tidbit. And the other thing I really liked that he said at the end, if you caught it or if you're watching this, hopefully you saw that. What he said he was like, focus on top of funnel only. You know, he said that throughout was like views were the only thing like that mattered. And obviously this video was kind of episode was kind of framed around like the idea and how cool it is, etc., which it is. But man, every time we talk to these guys, I'm just reminded like marketing is like the hardest thing, but the most important thing. And he was really clear about that. It's just yeah, for someone like me, I'm I'm building a few things. I'm like, man, I maybe I should
just stop and just like post on TikTok or whatever, you know? Or figure out the whatever he was talking about with the influencers. Point being like marketing is like the actual secret sauce to almost everybody that we talked to. Distribution, specifically video, organic video content creation, or understanding of video that performs on in algorithms, whether you're doing yourself or you're hiring influencers like he did, is the number one skill you can have right now. Building is easy now, or it's just getting easier every single day, but creating content, putting yourself out there, not only is it hard, but it's scary, and that's why it prevents a lot of people from doing it. But it's the number one skill you can have.
Watch every single Starter Story video, every single person has that skill. And it's it's the biggest skill you can have in the world. So, hopefully if you're watching a Starter Story, you'll realize that. But on that same note, you still need an idea. So, if you check out the link in the description, we will link to our 30 plus mobile app ideas. These are ideas that are generating revenue right now, ideas that you could build. I'll put that link in the description. You can download it right now, 100% for free. All right, guys, let us know what you thought in the comments about Early, the push-up alarm clock app. Otherwise, we'll see you in the next one. Peace.
