Speaker 1I want you to meet Frederick. My name is Frederick James. I built an app that peaked at about $13,000 per month. A few months ago, he built a really simple app on vacation. And today, that simple app makes over $10,000 a month. But here's a really important thing I need you to know. His app is not really special at all.
Speaker 2The app is a habit tracker.
Speaker 1It's got a focus on premium design. But the reason to watch this video is because he's going to break down exactly how he grew it to $10,000 plus per month.
Speaker 2There's a bit of a playbook, at least, that I used for my app.
Speaker 1Number one, you've got to have a. So, I asked Frederick to come on and break everything down for us. And in this episode, we're going to dive into the app idea he built that now makes over $10,000 a month, the exact growth channel that's working for him right now, and the exact playbook he's using to do it all over again. I think this one's going to be great. Let's dive in. I'm Gus, and this is Starter Story. Frederick, welcome to Starter Story. We're super excited to have you here today. Could you tell us who you are, what you built, and what's your story?
Speaker 2Yeah. So, my name is Frederick James. It's hovering around $10,000 right now. I launched it about three months ago. And since then, it's given me financial freedom. And I'm currently doing it all again as well with a second app. So, yeah, we're going to dive into the stack that I'm using, some of the marketing bits and pieces. And, yeah, hopefully, you'll find some of it useful.
Speaker 1All right, Frederick, let's talk about this app business. Could you pull up or share some of your revenue dashboards just to show the audience that this thing is legit?
Speaker 2So, here we go. We can first see this is the overall revenue, last 90 days. It's done about $25,000 in revenue. On an ARR basis, we kind of peaked at around just under $100,000 ARR. And then we come to MRR as well. You can see that we're currently sitting around $8,000. The download-to-paid ratio, I have about 7%, which is pretty good for the niche that I'm in, which means that essentially 7% of the people that download the app will actually end up buying it. Also, the refund rate is quite nice as well, 0.7%. This is the trust MRR listing. Sorry, last 30 days, you can see we've got about $11K. If we go in the last three months, we're sitting around about $25K.
Speaker 1Okay, so what kind of app did you build? What's the category or niche that it's in?
Speaker 2What I can say is that the app is a habit tracker in the health and fitness niche. It's not really anything special. It's got a focus on premium design and kind of like really nice UI. I guess that's the main value proposition for,
Speaker 1yeah. So before we kind of get into some of those methods, like how you grew it and things like that, how did you get here? What's your background? How do you get to the point where you're building an app that makes over $10,000 a month?
Speaker 2I've always been a software developer, really. I was always playing with computers as a kid. And for the past five years, I've been living in London, working in big tech. And I don't know, I've always been a little bit kind of dissatisfied, I think, with the regularness, right? Of like nine to five, all of these things. I had a health scare last year, and I realized I needed to pretty much start life maxing. Basically, I needed to start, you know, actually taking life by the reins. I decided I was going to go all in, pretty much, building this app, sharing the journey on X. That was pretty much what I decided to do.
Speaker 1But how did you come up with the idea itself? Or like, how'd you find, you said it's in the health category, habit trackers, you know, a million of those. How'd you kind of come up with your idea?
Speaker 2Yeah, so I literally saw a breakdown of an app onboarding. You know, it's quite a common like format of posts on X. And yeah, I just realized that I could like very easily make it, you know, my own angle. And then also just add some like really obvious features that were there and improve it. And I think that's, again, like a really good lesson from that. This isn't unique to my app either, right? I knew I could take this app, make the design premium, add a couple of features, and it would likely sell itself. Like I mentioned, it's in health and fitness as well. Yeah, I just thought it would probably make money.
Speaker 1So 2026 has really been the year of building iOS apps. I really don't think that's going to change any time soon. And so if you're sitting here wondering, I want to build an app, but I have no idea where to start. I think we have something that could really help you out. At the link in the description below, you can find the iOS apps database. Inside, you're going to find over 50 proven app ideas across a bunch of different categories. What I think you should do is go through the list, find inspiration and then start building your own app. So you can just head to the link in the description and grab it below. All right, let's get back to the episode. So let's talk about how you built this. What's kind of the build story, build timeline? How did you build this? This 10,000 per month app?
Speaker 2Yeah, the process was kind of in a couple of stages. Stage one is to make the mock UI in Figma first. I think this always leads to a way better final product. If you draw like a wireframe even of what you want UI to look like, the agent will have a much higher chance of one shotting it and rather than you have to go back and forth and do lots of iterations. The second bit of prep that I like to do is I map out a basic ERD. This is an entity relationship diagram. It's like a data structure. It's how the tables of data, how the schemas for your tables interact with one another. This is probably, to be honest, today, a bit of a relic of the old ways that we used to build software. I then also map out a basic infra diagram. Again, I'm unk, I'm showing my age, how the data flows throughout your app and your different services, right? I then also make MVP for my apps or screenshots as well in Figma. I've got a little bit of design chops, but I always hand them off to GBTImage to do some final touches and stuff like this. The second stage is that for all the assets in my app, I go to Pinterest and I download a whole load of those and then I make them my own with GBTImage 2. It's actually 2.5 now as well. This is free with an OpenAI subscription as well. People love images, right? People love visual nature. It's more interactive, especially during onboarding. You can really help to make your app feel much more engaging. I then give all of my mockups to ChatGPT, who then builds out the whole thing. The whole flow and the UI. Stage three, you then want to do some A/B testing and iterations after you've actually released the app and once the app is live. This can be on the paywalls primarily, but you can also change the pricing, change pricing options. You can go as deep as you want, really, but I would definitely recommend at least testing a paywall. The backend for all of my apps is Cloudflare. R2 for asset storage is free. I use D1 for my databases. This is just a standard cloud serverless database and then I use Cloudflare. Cloudflare workers for any kind of compute. I'm using AppsFlyer right now for my MMP. It's free until 12,000 installs. And then I'm using RevenueCat for the tracking, for the monetization and the remote paywalls. ChatGPT for my coding agent, I pay $100 a month for that. I've also just got a Cloud Pro plan because Opus 5.5 came out and apparently it rips. I'm testing it right now. An interesting one as well is that all of my apps, all my websites, even the subtitles in my videos use a font that I actually bought. I paid a one time fee for $300 and honestly, I think it's kind of worth it. It helps you stand out a little bit. I'd recommend finding like one font you've fallen in love with and just buy it, you know?
Speaker 1All right, let's get into the growth, which is, you know, I think one of the biggest reasons I wanted to have you on the Starter Story YouTube channel. If I'm not mistaken, I think you put out an article that said like, I grew my app to 13K per month in like 90 days or something like that, 88 days. I think maybe it's more specific. What I'd love for you to do is if you could break down kind of that growth. The journey, maybe let's start with that first like zero to 5k per month. How did you how did you really start to get traction?
Speaker 2Yes. So the marketing I got started with Apple ads. This is my breakthrough on the app. You get $100 free to start. You don't need like a crazy budget for the Apple store ads. There's a bit of a playbook, at least that I used for my app. First of all, you should have a cracked app store page. You can make the screenshots with AI, but you can also hire a designer, right? You can pay. Someone like 50, 100 bucks and it's going to be looking really S tier. This is important because that's going to be what's shown to the users when they're searching, right? That's like your creative another platform when you're showing video ads. Number two is you want to set up tracking. You need good attribution for all of these ads. It's a few lines of code in your app and a few clicks on your revenue cat dashboard. You're going to set up the campaign in Apple ads. We're going to turn search match off and use the exact keywords only and the keywords are going to be the names. Of your big competitors. So when people are searching for Duolingo, your app comes up as the advertisement. I would go with the Apple recommended max bid to start with. Give it at least like two days and then see how that spends. If it's not spending like well immediately, don't freak out. Give it a couple of days. If it's still not spending at all after a couple of days, it means that someone else is bidding more than you. And so you need to increase your bid in order to match that once you have data, right? Once you've spent the cash. Export it from revenue cat, export it from Apple, put it together, give it to your agent and tell it to find the best performers. I'd recommend doing this once a day, part of your morning routine. And yeah, that's pretty much the playbook, really. That's the essentials.
Speaker 1Okay, so that's zero to roughly five K per month journey was pretty much all Apple ads and I loved everything you broke down there. We haven't had a lot of people come on and talk specifically about Apple ads. So again, thanks for breaking that down. So let's talk about kind of that next, the next stage, that five K. To 10 K per month. What did you do the same? What did you do different to finally hit that $10,000 per month?
Speaker 2Yeah. So that hockey stick growth, it came with TikTok ads and it came in about a week. The first part of it was that I just scrolled in my niche. I found videos that had already gone viral organically and I remade them myself. I ran pretty much, I kept it simple, man. I ran five different formats, around five posts on those five different formats. So just five posts in total. or five ads. I gave each of those posts about $50 of ad spend. And if they got conversions by the TikTok ads or if they were a little bit unprofitable, I just kept running the ads. I think in the beginning, I think a lot of people miss this part. In the beginning, it's more important that your account understands what users it needs to target. So if you can loss lead on the account, not loss lead on your app, if you can make if you can be unprofitable to gather signals for the targeting of the algorithms, I generally think that's kind of a good way to go. Obviously, then it's a line as to how much money you're willing to lose, basically. And that kind of is ads in the beginning. Paid ads is how much are you willing to lose to find that winner? So pretty much exactly as I said, if they were super unprofitable, I would just stop the ads. I'd recommend aiming for profitability on the initial transactions alone. A rough calculation you can do to start out with this is take your realized LTV, which is just your total paying customers divided by the amount of revenue that you have minus the CPA. So the cost of acquiring that user get rid of the Apple store 15% can already on the small business program. You should sign up for that was you're paying 30% for nothing minus your revenue cap 1% minus the VAT. If you're selling directly to the US, as you probably should when you're getting started, you won't pay VAT. But if you get a subscription from the EU, it's likely you're paying about 20%. That's your basic P&L. I would recommend doing this again. Same with the Apple ads. Every morning is part of your routine. So I got a coffee and my TikTok ad report every morning and I'd read it just to see the status. And then pretty much I just kept the ads that did well. I gradually increased the budgets by 20%. Every few days, don't ever, ever, ever, ever, ever increase the budget on your ads by more than 20% every few days. TikTok themselves say just don't ever do this and they're incentivized for you to spend more money. So part three, and this is the real inflection point for me was I use goal based budget increase and I set a target cost per acquisition. So I said to TikTok, I want customers at price X and then TikTok takes control of your spending. So you don't change the budgets every few days. TikTok automatically does it in accordance with what it thinks will get you the most conversions at that particular price point. If your ads hit that target CPA, it will just keep increasing the spend. And this is where the real snowball effect happened. My campaign was running about $200 per day, but once I turned this on, it just went like crazy mode and went up to like 1K spend a day. And that's then where it took me from 5K to about 10K in the space of about a week.
Speaker 1Yeah, again, I love the detailed breakdown here. I think someone watching hopefully is going to find this like really, really helpful. Cause we've, we've had some people on the show who've talked high level about this stuff, but the detail here is pretty cool. And I can, I can imagine someone watching this thing, you know, he's just spending a bunch on ads. He's not actually making any money, which I don't know, maybe that's true or not. But yeah, talk to us about like the profitability of this, but what that looks like.
Speaker 2Paid ads take a lot of money upfront. I was not profitable for the first like couple of weeks. You need to have a little bit of risk tolerance when you're going into it because you might not see profit at all. It's not guaranteed. So when you're spending money, that's one thing to keep in mind. You might burn, like, honestly, if it's your first time, maybe up to like a thousand dollars without seeing really any return from that. And then the second part is the ongoing paid advertisements only do not have a high profit margin. Like you're going to be looking at like 30%.
Speaker 1Somewhat. We've featured a lot, like I said, a lot of bad founders who've done influencer deals or UGC and obviously this other method paid ads. Why do you think someone should consider doing paid ads versus a different tactic?
Speaker 2It comes down to this. You pay for money. You pay for marketing one of a few ways, and that is you pay of your time or you pay of your money. And that's the only way to get around it. So if you're having to manage influencers, dealing with influencers, dealing with people that are big on social media is a fucking nightmare. You know, running your own UGC armies like, yes, you're going to have high profitability, but realistically, you're going to pay with your time or your money. And so paid ads is all the way with the money. I think that's a good way to put it. Influencers like paying for UGC campaigns is somewhere in the middle because you have to manage those. You see people and then all the way on the other end is doing like founder like content or something like this, right? Where you have to like directly film yourself every single day. I would also say that running an app solely on paid ads is not optimal for a couple of reasons. Number one, it's very difficult to sell an app if your only acquisition model is paying for the users because it's resting on, you know, a pretty thin margin. I think ultimately a combination of these approaches is what you should do, because if you look at it from a risk perspective, if you're only marketing through one very specific channel and that goes away, for example, if TikTok bans your account for whatever reason, maybe you didn't even do anything wrong, you then lose all of your money. So not only does it make it more reliable, makes it more sustainable. Generally combining all these different approaches is probably the way to go.
Speaker 1I think my takeaway as you're talking is just like there is a ton of ways to do it. And so it's almost like figuring out for you or me as a as an app builder or founder, like what can you stomach? So like you said, one of the questions we always ask people. That come on the channel is if you were standing on your shoulders before you started building this app a couple of years ago or for a lot of people watching who are trying to get started on their first app, trying to get that first momentum, what's a big lesson or a piece of advice that you would give to yourself from back then or to someone watching?
Speaker 2I think the largest thing is that you need to try everything and you need to try anything outside of the app space. I've done, you know, a ton of different projects. I resold Supreme hoodies when I was like 15. It was drop shipping. I was a music producer and I was quite a successful music producer, but there's no money in music. So I moved on. That's the only real project that really worked out for me was music production. And I think that success really is just failure on a long enough timeline. You know, you've got to be willing to fail and fail fast and you should want to fail and fail faster. I think entrepreneurship as well is is is a marathon. You know, give yourself the time. It won't happen overnight. You've got to pace yourself. Your your physical health, your mental health, like it's you know, it sounds a little bit, you know, whatever. But it really is actually true when you're in the position. It can be a grind. And I really don't think there is anyone that didn't fail for many years before they found any kind of success.
Speaker 1Frederick, that's great advice, man. Thank you so much for the channel. I'll just say it's been an inspire inspiring for me to watch your journey on X and super cool to get to meet you and talk to you here. And I hope that, you know, you inspired even one or two people watching this video to to get started. And start building their their own app and start building their own journey. So maybe we'll have you on when your next app hits, you know, 10K per month or more or somewhere down the line. Thanks for coming on the show. Thank you so much. All right. I just wrapped up with Frederick and man, I just loved that conversation. I mentioned on the call and I have a couple of takeaways. One is that there's just there's so many different ways to win in the app space. Right. But like he's doing all these paid ads. We've talked to several people and we will continue to talk to people who do UGC influencer marketing. Or you can do it all yourself with founder content. The spectrum is wide. And again, like I said, one of the reasons I want to have him on is because he's on one end of the spectrum. And I wanted to honestly just for myself, I wanted to learn like how he does it and kind of get a little bit into his brain. And obviously for you as the person watching or the audience watching, I wanted you to kind of get insight into someone who's done the ads only growth method, how he did it. My second big takeaway is just how I found him. Right. So you'll probably see in the video that there's a bunch of X videos or articles that he posted on Twitter X and I think building in public like he's doing. Is in the unique way that he's doing it is just really, really smart. It's getting him noticed. It's getting him a lot of attention. And I think it's sort of a springboard to whatever he's going to be building next. And so I know like building in public is like hard and it's it can be a little bit of a grind. But if you go follow him on Twitter, which I really encourage you to do, you're going to see how authentic his storytelling is and kind of how unique and I would for a fluffy term like human it is. And I think in an age of automation and images and fake people dead. Internet theory, he like really stands out as like a real person who's building online. And then, yeah, my last kind of my last takeaway is like even though I know we didn't reveal the app name and I'm sure we're going to get a lot of shit in the comments for that, like he said on the call, it's proof that kind of any idea works. He like he said, it's just a habit tracker. You can probably go find some of his other apps and I'm sure he's building in all these like really saturated, quote, saturated spaces. And he and yet he was still able to be successful. So if you want to start building off of proven app ideas. At the link in the description, you can download our free database of successful proven iOS app ideas. All right. That's it for this one. Please leave a comment. Let us know what you thought about this episode. Hope you enjoyed it. We'll see you in the next one piece.
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