I Built Two Apps That Make $120K/Month

Everyone wants to find the perfect app idea. So you spend hours researching and scrolling YouTube for inspiration, only to come out of the other side with nothing. But what if I told you there was a better way? Meet Kyle. He finds his app ideas hiding in plain sight. And today, those apps make over $120,000 a month. He doesn't chase trends or shiny objects. He just looks at his own hobbies, his own personal problems, and builds stuff for himself. I think this method is so cool that I asked Kyle to come onto the channel to break down exactly how he does it. And in this episode, we'll dive into his two apps that make over $1 million a year, why your next app idea might be sitting right in front of your face, and his playbook he would follow if he had to do it all over again in 2026. All right, this is one that you cannot miss. I'm Pat Walls, and this is Starter Story. All right, Kyle, welcome to the channel. Tell me about who you are, what you built, and what's your story. Yeah, my name is Kyle Fowler, and I built two apps that make $120,000 a month. I launched Cardstock six years ago, and we went from three guys in a basement making a few hundred bucks a month to five guys traveling all around the world making $1.5 million a year. And today, I'm excited to share more about how I turned my hobbies and passions into a career and how anyone could do the same thing. Okay, cool. Before we get into the two businesses that you built and more into that, I want to understand a little bit more about how these businesses work. And if you could potentially pull up some of your revenue dashboards, I want to show the audience watching here that this is legit. Could you pull up what you built? Yeah, of course. Cardstock is a sports card value scanner. So if you have no idea what the value of your card is, you can use your phone's camera to identify the card. And if you don't know what the value of your card is, you can use your phone's camera to identify the card. Find its value, you can add your cards to your collection, and track their value over time. And it really just helps collectors be able to find valuable cards in their collection and get what they're worth from them. Cardstock is sitting at about 15,000 active subscriptions and up to like 75k monthly recurring revenue. We get about like 13,000 downloads a month. This is a scan them on basically the same app but for Pokemon cards. We launched it only a year ago, but we've been doing pretty good with it. It's been slowly climbing. We're currently sitting at about like 3400 active subscriptions, 17k monthly recurring revenue, about 16,000 new customers a month, which is actually more than Cardstock, which is pretty impressive given how long Cardstock has been around for. I think that's super cool. Let's talk about your background. How do you get to the point where you have two apps making over a year? How do you get to the point where you have two apps making over a million dollars a year? Yeah, it's been a long process. I definitely really always loved anything coding development related. When I was younger, my parents had me doing like coding camps type of things, found my way into an iOS development course, decided it was boring, and was just going to try to make a game on my own, making a little iOS game called Snaken. That was really fun. And then eventually found my way into trying to make Cardstock, trying to just like know that I have a problem and looking for the solution until I found it. And then it grew and grew from there. When I started Cardstock, it was just me and I saw my friends were going to have to work stupid jobs at like Kohl's and a restaurant. So I asked them if they wanted to come help and split the rev three ways, even though there was basically no revenue and they didn't know how to code very much. So I taught them how to do that. We spent like two or three years doing that together where I was, you know, taking 100% ownership, but like, helping them personally, I love Kyle's approach to building. It's proof that the best app ideas come from personal problems that you notice in your own life. But most people just scroll past these potentially great ideas every single day without realizing it. Well, this is exactly why we put together the million dollar problems database. Inside this database, you will find 90 plus business ideas that have real revenue numbers behind each one. The goal of this is to show you real value. Real painful problems and the solutions that solve them that are making over a million dollars a year. Your next app idea might be hiding right here in this database, or it may give you some ideas on what painful problems are worth solving in your life. Nothing to lose by downloading that link right now and getting some ideas. All right, let's go back to the episode. But what I want to dive into a little bit more is the actual build of these apps that you build. How did you actually go about building this? And how'd you turn into something that millions of people have used? So Cardstock is built using Swift and Swift UI, and it uses core data for the storage of stuff. I built it just mostly with Stack Overflow. Eventually, we built out into adding like third party SDKs, like Revenue Cat for subscriptions. When I did got there, I needed a backend server for the card database. So I did that on AWS EC2 server. Walk me through like the actual like timeline of that. Like how long did it take to get to the place where someone actually paid money? I started building in winter of 2019. And so I finished it and gave a Reddit update post about having completed it. And then so I got my first downloads pretty quick immediately. I'd say all in all, probably like six months from idea to completion with like a three month gap in the middle. When I built Scanamon, it was really different from Cardstock because I built Scanamon last year in 2020. I tried to generate it basically have cursors agent generate everything. And it did insanely well. The MVP for Scanamon I made in a day. That takes me to my next topic here. What's like the full tech stack of your two apps? The main things we use are Codex. So like via ChatGPT subscriptions, Notion, Cursor, Slack, Framer for our website, Claude, mainly for code work for me, Supabase, Railway, CodeRabbit. Whisperflow, Granola, a lot of things. Cool. Well, thanks for sharing your tech stack. One reason why I wanted to bring you on the channel is that you built like these really cool businesses from your hobbies. Can you tell me more about how you came up with the idea, validated it and you know, we're confident enough that this could be a business idea that could make a lot of money. The way I thought about it originally is I've been collecting cards since I was a kid. I was just like I want to catalog my cards and I want to sort them and I realized I would have no way to know what card was which if I couldn't physically be with my collection, no matter how well I sorted them and that got me spinning of like, oh, okay. Well, I'm sure I could digitize this and put it on my phone. There's got to be an app for that. And so I went on the app store and there was no app for it. So I was like, well, I want to build one. I've just always wanted to work for myself doing something I love and what better way than solving your own problems to do that. So even though you have a couple really successful apps under your belt, you still can't guarantee success. I think that's a good lesson for anyone watching this that you still have to go through all those learnings to figure out if this thing can actually work. Yeah, basically, regardless of whether you make money after doing all these steps and building your app, publishing it, trying to market it. If you can solve a problem for yourself, the odds are other people have that problem. Now, will they maybe pay for it? Like, I don't know that either way you if you build an app for something you're passionate about, and solves your problem, you've won no matter what, because you've solved your problem. Yeah, I want to dive a little bit more into that. Give me the step-by-step breakdown of like how you would find an app that could potentially make a million dollars a year. Step one is to find a problem or opportunity. Create some sort of notes document or anything in your phone where you can write down ideas. If you don't have problems in your life that you realize you're doing some slow arduous thing, that's repetitive, you are not paying attention. Step two is to determine a solution, the version that solves the problem most minimally. Like what's the quickest solution? Step three, build it. Most people, I think, have been overestimating how hard it is to build apps. And AI just makes them realize that it's actually easy. Once you have a build, you probably want to monetize it. And the best way to do that is with something like Superwall or Revenue Cat. I'm almost certain that the AI could just completely implement this on its own. Nowadays, the AIs can even drive your browser. I've been doing that a lot lately. And so they can probably walk you through all the exact steps to get your Superwall paywall set up. And if not, there's wonderful people you can reach out to. They're probably happy to help you because you making any chance of money helps them make money. So I'm sure their support lines would help, but it's really not that hard. Okay, so that's all on the build stuff, which I think is awesome. How would you think about marketing an app in 2026? What would be your kind of step-by-step there to figure that one out? We've had so much success with TikTok slideshows. They're very simple, they're very repeatable. You come up with a format, you find out what converts, and you find out what gives views, and you find the balance of those two things to drive downloads. And it's very hard to attribute, but if it's the only thing you're doing, it's very easy to attribute. Use Noise, it's a platform that allows you to distribute TikTok slideshows to creators. They receive a template that they post, and you pay per the amount of views they get. You can also start with just TikToks on your own. own account or making a few accounts and seeing if they get enough views and validate it that way. And especially if you have more time to burn, that's a pretty good way to validate it. Let's switch topics a little bit and show off your app. Show me how it works. I'd love to just see like what you built. You could do a quick demo for us. Okay, so you can see when you load the app, you get a vision of your scan, the card it matched, and it'll show you the market value, all the info. You can click on the market value and see more info about the card along with the most recent sales, which is super important to collectors. And then if the app didn't match for whatever reason, you can go edit the info actually and try to identify a card that even wasn't found at all. And then from there, you can add it to your collection and see it within that part of the app. And see all your cards together and the lists and with the values. Okay, cool. I mean, that app is awesome. The last question that we asked all founders to come on Starter Story, what would be your advice to your younger self before you started building or for anyone watching this who wants to build stuff, make money and build cool stuff? I think my best advice to myself in the past would definitely be that people are usually happy to help and share information. People who do something very successfully, love to talk about how they were successful and how they did well. And don't worry about bothering people. And they'll let you know if they're bothered. Well, that's great advice. It's the exact premise behind all of Starter Story. People like you don't have to come on and share how they built their app or how much money their app makes. But they do even though you don't stand to benefit a whole lot from it. You come on here and you share everything that worked and all of our other guests do the same. Thank you for coming on and sharing everything. Let us know in the comments below. If you have any questions, feel free to email us at [email protected] if you're watching this, if you made it to this point, and what you think about these apps and everything that Kyle built. Thanks for coming on Kyle and Sharon. Thank you. Gus from Starter Story. What did you think of Kyle and his two apps that are making over a million dollars a year? Yeah, I think I love his vibe. You know, I think we talked a lot of guys obviously and some of them are like really analytical or really like I don't know. I don't want to say anal but like really like sort of anal about what they're building or how they're finding their ideas. And Kyle was just like, I like I like cards. And I mean, it wasn't so simple as avenues like I like these cards. This is fun for me. I'm having a good time. So that's what I want to do. And I just loved that approach. It's so like, I don't know, feel so approachable. You know, like anyone can think of like, what do I like? And let me see what I can build. And I like I like what he said about some of those things. But yeah, that's kind of my first impression. Yeah, no, it's super spot on. A lot of people we talked to what I noticed, and just in founders in general is like, there's a lot of anxiety, and stuff like that. And I think that's actually like a superpower for a lot of people who are builders. But this Kyle is like, definitely the opposite of that, like, super chill, just like, you know, like, it's not that complicated. I just build this and I market it. And that's what I really like about like his approach is that like, he doesn't overthink things, right? He just kind of says, All right, this is this is what I'm going to do. I'm going to build this and I'm going to do this. This is what I'm doing. Yeah, I think that's why I love I wanted to bring him on is because it feels like something. The way he talked about building and stuff just feels like something really anyone can do. And like, like he said, during the interview, he was just like, Yeah, if you want to go learn it, you can go learn to ask AI, you know, you can read it, read up on some blogs, like you can go do it. Yeah, I mean, building around your hobbies, I feel like right now is like one short window of time, we're building something around your hobbies can actually turn into a million dollars. business. Like, it's kind of hard to do some years ago. And then in the future, when everything's automated, I don't know if it'll be possible. But like, AI has enabled you to have an like, see a problem right now that you're experiencing your daily life, and ship it within a few hours, and then test it in the market. And I think that's like, if you're watching this right now, just try it, just get started, go through your day, write down a few problems, as Kyle said, see if you can turn those into a real thing. If you're trying to do the same, check out the description. Right now we have our database of $1 million problems that are worth solving. You can't think of any problems right now, check that out, you'll find a bunch of problems that are actually worth solving, I would definitely recommend going down there and checking that out and downloading it for 100% for free. Alright, guys, thank you guys for watching. Let us know what you thought about this episode. Otherwise, we'll see you in the next one. Peace.