Speaker 1Last year, I launched BrainRot and since then have scaled from about 10k a month to now about 400k a month.
Speaker 2This is Yoni. A year ago, he built an app to simply solve his own problem. And to his surprise, it started to take off. He had no clue that this app would turn into a business that changed his life. And today, his app BrainRot makes an astonishing $400,000 a month. But beyond the incredible success, Yoni has a wealth of knowledge when it comes to building apps. Because he's tried every trick, tactic, and strategy in the book. And so I wanted him to come on the channel to share how he did it and how you can do it too. So in this episode, we're going to dive into the app that he built for himself that now makes $400,000 a month. His simple approach to finding good app ideas. And the exact steps he would take if he was starting over with apps in 2026. This one's going to be awesome. Let's dive in. I'm Gus and this is Starter Story. Hi Yoni, welcome. I'm a Starter Story man. Super excited to have you on the channel. Could you tell us who you are, what you built, and what's your story?
Speaker 1Thanks for having me, Gus. I'm stoked. Love the channel. My name is Yoni Smoliar and I built a mobile productivity app called BrainRot that does about $400,000 a month in revenue. And I have a co-founder called Brock Anderson who is the GOAT. So shout out to Brock. And last year, I launched BrainRot in the summer of 2025. Since then, I've scaled from about $10K a month to now about $400K a month.
Speaker 2Yeah, Yoni, this is such an awesome story. So let's talk about BrainRot. For the people who don't know what it is, what is BrainRot? Explain what it is in a few sentences and maybe a little bit about who your users are, the kind of people that use this app.
Speaker 1It is a gamified screen time app. It is a play on the word BrainRot, obviously, and has a cute digital pet brain that rots the more time that you spend on your BrainRot app. BrainRot is a subscription app. We mostly sell annual subscriptions. We've had about a couple million downloads and about $400,000 in revenue, $150,000 something. It's a really cool app for people who want to learn more about BrainRot.
Speaker 2So let's talk about BrainRot and how you get here. What were you doing before BrainRot?
Speaker 1My story, I was a corporate software engineer, and I was always this kind of like aspiring hustler. Like I always wanted to try little businesses and nothing that ever took off. So I started making content along the way, just telling my story. And eventually that began to resonate with some people. I built up a little bit of a following online. Then I was looking kind of for a new project or something and eventually came up with this idea for BrainRot. And I built that summer of 2025.
Speaker 2I love everything that Yoni is breaking down for us. He has an amazing story, and I think you're really going to enjoy the rest of this episode. But before we get there, it got me thinking. If you're inspired by Yoni's story or any of the other app founders that we've had on the channel, I bet you are itching to start your own thing. So the question is, are you ready to build? To help you get started, we put together this free database of over 100 business ideas that you can start for less than $500. This free database is packed with data and information. All the stuff that you need to validate an idea and go start building. Again, it's 100% free to download. Just head to the link in the description. All right, let's get back to the episode. What inspired you to do that? What inspired you to start making all those daily vlogs or whatever you were doing?
Speaker 1Honestly, I was pretty deeply into this indie hacker space. I was into the starter story, Pat Wall's story. People like Peter Levels, these kind of tech Twitter guys who had this inbuilt distribution. And every time they would launch a new website or a new product, they would already have users from day one. So I wanted to do this. I wanted to start telling the story of the entrepreneur behind the scenes to stop being a shadowy figure who just moves in silence and just to put myself out there and see what happens.
Speaker 2You kind of already mentioned this, but, you know, you started making this content and sucked you a little bit into your phone. Tell us a little bit more of that story of coming up with the idea specifically for BrainRock.
Speaker 1I was just addicted to my phone. I was on Instagram and YouTube and Twitter and all this stuff all the time. And of course, I could have downloaded an app blocker. I wasn't the first to come up with this concept, but I had this idea. What if a brain? The more you brain rot, the more you brain rot. And nobody had come up with this app yet. So I was like, wow, you know, I'm a genius. And I was so excited. And I think this is an important point is I was excited enough to drop everything and go heads down on this for a month.
Speaker 2So you've been this app in a couple of weeks. Tell us about the early growth. How did you get this thing off the ground? And then that first zero to 10K per month. What's that growth story?
Speaker 1I think I had a bit of an unusual story, which is that I had amassed like some hundred thousand or hundred fifty thousand followers on Instagram. Before the launch of the app, I just was keeping it kind of suspenseful. So I was I'm building an app, sign up for the wait list. I was kind of building the suspense. And then when I launched, it did about ten thousand dollars, I think, in the first day.
Speaker 2That's an amazing launch. So how do you take that and turn it into where it's at today?
Speaker 1One core point that is less talked about than it should be is understanding how your users use the app. So if you launch the app, you now have some live traction and you have data on what your users are doing and you can begin to over time understand who are your power users and who are your casual or average users. And you really, really want to know and understand those power users. So you need to start looking at the analytics. And this was something that was a big unlock for us. Another thing is that every app is different. Every business is different. Every founder is different. You should double down on what's working for you. If something is working, try to do ten times more of that thing for us, the thing that enabled early growth was influence. Our content and paid ads. And so we just simply scaled what we knew and that's what allowed us to grow. Another thing I'll say is if you are alone, I highly consider getting a co-founder. So when Brock and I partnered as co-founders, it was a huge force multiplier for the business and really allowed us to take off.
Speaker 2Thanks for kind of sharing some of those things earlier. You said you were working kind of a regular full time job software engineer. At what point does this thing get big enough where you're really thinking about, should I do this full time? Like what was the decision point? And then tell us kind of the story behind that.
Speaker 1So I did a lot of soul searching on this at the time and was really waiting for a moment when the leap felt less risky. What's the right time? Is it a number? Is it a date? I think ultimately the truth is that everything is risky. Staying in a job that makes you unhappy is risky. Letting your dreams fade is also risky. So at the end of the day, I think it's just a level of discomfort that you're willing to tolerate. Have enough runway. There's some practical considerations, but you can get a different job. It's not that deep.
Speaker 2Such an amazing story. So there's lots of people who watch Starter Story who are getting started or looking to build their first idea. So a question we like to ask to founders like you, if you were starting over, what would you do or what would you avoid if you were building apps here in 2026?
Speaker 1Number one is to find a problem space that is genuinely exciting to you. I think building apps or building a business is so difficult. And if it's not something that. Is truly exciting to you, that it's the first thing you want to do in the morning and the last thing you want to do at night, you're going to give up when it gets hard. Inevitably, it will get hard. Step two is build a team. If you are swinging for your first entrepreneurial win and you have swung multiple times before solo, I think that you would benefit from not going alone. There's too much work to go alone as a solopreneur. So I highly, highly recommend you either bring on a co-founder, somebody who complements your skills well, or you build a team by using your equity, which is. Currently worthless. Step three, I recommend understand exactly what your users are doing in your app. Analytics should be sampled and sent to some kind of analytics provider like Mixpanel or post hog, and you should let Claude or Codex have at it and really understand what your users are doing. Understand the activation moment, understand which cohorts are your most active, your most obsessed users, and try to get all the rest of your users to exhibit those behaviors. Step four, I would say iterate. An experiment relentlessly small experiments. What if I take this slide out of the onboarding and move it over there? Or what if the user has seized this thing before that thing, all these small little experiments that you can then measure the outcome of nine out of 10 of the times it will not move the needle, but one in 10 times it can be trajectory changing for distribution. I'll say different audiences provide different amounts of value to you. So understand which of your users you're able to acquire more cheaply from. Maybe one acquisition channel than another, and how much revenue those users by comparison generate for you. And lastly, I'll say understand there's often a significant delay between your inputs and the results of those inputs. So if you're doing all the right things for weeks on end or months on end, you may find yourself in a position where you are now reaping the fruits of your labor from the last months, and you feel like you're doing good, and then you start to get complacent. Don't let yourself get complacent because the work that you put in today. Are your results in the future.
Speaker 2Thanks for kind of walking through those four or five steps there of how to think about, you know, building apps in 2026. We like to ask people this from time to time, like, what are some good ways to approach like finding an app idea for someone watching who doesn't really know where to start or, you know, feels like, oh, there's a ton of that's already been done or how do I find my thing?
Speaker 1Great question. I would say ultimately, this depends on your experience level as an entrepreneur and your goals with the app. So I don't recommend building in hyper-competence. I don't recommend building in hyper competitive spaces like that if you're taking your first swing and don't build a super app with many, many features and that try to solve many use cases for many people build a simple utility app that has a core function that solves a core problem for a core user and build something that you really understand or that really solves a problem for you. Don't chase trends or copy apps to try to make a quick buck, be a power user of your app, literally use it every day and be brutally honest with yourself about it. Also, I recommend either building something very high LTV or something that a user would actually open on their phone every single day. Maybe not shocking. The best advice is to build something actually valuable for users.
Speaker 2Cool. Yeah, I think I love that advice. So what's the tech tech behind BrainRock?
Speaker 1We use Mixpanel for analytics. We use Firebase for analytics and experiments. We use Supabase for internal tools and tracking. We use Superwall for our paywalls. We use AppStack for paid ads attribution. We use Cloud Code and Codex for various coding and internal business stuff. And we use Upwork for finding contractors and freelancers.
Speaker 2Okay, Yoni, we've been talking about BrainRock. Let's see it. I would love to see a quick demo of BrainRock, how it works.
Speaker 1You can take a look inside BrainRock. You'll see it's just this kind of digital pet brain in his environment. Currently 97% health. You can see what time I've spent on different apps this morning. There are different blocking rules that you can set to block different apps at different times. You can see some statistics about your screen time usage and what apps you're using on what days and stuff like that. And the core functionality is when you try to open a BrainRock app, like in this case, I'll open Instagram. You see a little message and you will have to go through this little flow. In this case, I'm getting a FaceTime from my brain. I have to go through this little experience. It just adds a little bit of friction into using the app that is enough to get you to change your habits.
Speaker 2All right, finally, Yoni, question we like to ask. Every founder who comes on Starter Story, if you were standing on your shoulders, you know, a couple of years ago as you were starting to build BrainRock, or for someone watching who's just getting started, what would be your final piece of advice?
Speaker 1I would say that there are a lot of ways to feel busy while doing nothing meaningfully productive. The goal of all of this is not to grind like a rat and always be busy and always be on the computer and unavailable. A lot of actions yield maybe a 1%, but there are some changes that are a 20% change or a 50% or 100% change to a system. And your job as a founder is to find those decisions and then delegate or forget about them. And I think that's a really important thing to keep in mind when you're starting out as a founder, is to never forget about all of the small stuff.
Speaker 2That's great advice, Yoni. Thanks so much for coming on Starter Story. It was a pleasure to have you. Leave a comment for Yoni, say what's up. Yeah, man, thanks for coming on
Speaker 1the channel. Thanks for having me.
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