I Copied A Huge App. Now I Make $80K/Month

What if you didn't need an original idea at all? What if, instead, you could reverse-engineer apps that are already working? Well, that's exactly what our guest did today. And within 12 months, he built a million-dollar app. I launched it a year ago, and now it makes over $80K per month. Meet Tomer. He saw a successful app, realized it didn't exist in his country, and thought, can I build this? So he did, and it worked almost immediately. We started with only $1K on the first month, and since then, we grew consistently until the previous month, we made over $81K. I asked Tomer to come onto the channel to reveal exactly how he did all this. And in this episode, we're going to dive into what popular app he localized, how he built it in just a couple months without being a developer, and the genius marketing strategy that skyrocketed his app to over $80,000 a month. All right, let's dive in. Let's go. I'm Pat Walls, and this is Starter Story. All right, Tomer, welcome to the channel. Tell me about who you are, what you built, and what's your story. Hey, my name is Tomer, and I've built a calorie tracking mobile app. I launched it a year ago, and now it makes over 80K per month. So today, I'm excited to talk about how I took a super popular app idea in the US and localized it to my local market. Well, yeah, Tomer, when I saw what you built, I thought, oh, that looks like a similar app. A lot of people watching this are thinking, oh, I know the app that he built, but it's not that app. But what I thought was cool about it is you took it, and you took it down to your own country. Before we get into how you did that, how you found that idea, tell me a little bit more about what the app is, what it does. Pull up some of your revenue screenshots. I'd love to see. Sure. So the app is an AI calorie tracker, similarly to CalAI. You simply take a picture of your food, and it tells you the calories and macros in seconds. And I've built it specifically for the Israeli market in Hebrew. So here's the revenue. Revenue chart from the moment we launched the app in June 2025 until the previous month, April 26. We started with only 1K on the first month. And since then, we grew consistently until the previous month. We made over 81K. OK. I mean, first of all, congratulations. This is amazing. Let's talk about how you get here. What were you doing before? Were you always building apps? What's your background? How do you get to this point where you have an app that's making over $80,000 a month? Yeah. So before building this app, I was doing marketing for other businesses. I found it extremely boring. And I wasn't really passionate about promoting other people's products. And I wanted to look for opportunities to build my own product. I stumbled upon a podcast with Zach, the founder of CalAI. And we talked about how they scaled quickly to over $1 million per month. And I realized that it doesn't matter that the app already exists if no one knows about it in my local market. And fitness and nutrition is a very big niche. Doesn't matter the country or the market. So I decided that there is enough potential in it, even in a smaller local market. OK, cool. Well, I'm also curious on how you actually built something like this. How did you go about building this? How long did it take to build and get to an app that was live in the app store? Yeah, so I'm not a developer. I had a little bit of coding experience from high school and stuff I learned by myself. But nothing more than that. Cursor was just released at the time, and I wanted to see if you could actually build software like it was magic with AI prompting. And two weeks later, after starting the experiment, with Cursor, I had a working version with all the main app features work. From the first line of code to being live on the app store, it was around two months total. The funny thing is that the coding wasn't what took the actual time. What actually slowed the process was waiting for Apple to accept my developer program and passing the app store reviews. Yeah, that's something that I hear often from a lot of people who come on here. They say, hey, it was quick to build. But the part that took the longest was getting Apple to review it. So if anyone is watching this right now and building something, get it done, get it shipped to Apple. It might be another month. There's this back and forth and you finally get it approved. So, yeah, I want to switch topics a little bit. What I loved about what you did is you took this popular app and then you localized it to your country. I'm just curious how you came up with the idea to do this. Yeah, so it was March twenty twenty five and I was actively looking for an idea. And when I had the Kali podcast, it clicked immediately. Although my original plan was to build something big for the US market, the chance to take a proven winner and be the first to localize it to my local market was the simplest zero to one move for me the way I saw it. And if you are going to localize an app for a small market like Israel, the niche has to be huge because the market is small. You can't be in a tiny vertical. So fitness and nutrition is one of the biggest niches in the world. And I happen to know it very well personally. So it was a perfect fit for me. OK, this strategy by Tomer is absolutely genius. Instead of finding some crazy original new idea, he found a proven app and he built a very niche version of it in his country. So you might be wondering, what is Tomer? You might be wondering here, OK, how do I do this? How do I find a proven idea just like this? Well, we've got something for you. We've put together our free database of over 30 iOS app ideas that are making real money right now. Inside of this database, you will find all the data that you need. Revenue numbers, business models, starting costs and much more. This is all the stuff that you might need to validate your potential idea, your app that could be the next CalBuddy. So if you're ready to find your idea and get started building right now, just head to the first link in the description. You can grab this database one hundred percent for free. All right, let's get back to the episode. But I'm curious, does your app do anything differently? Did you realize as you're building it? Oh, it needs to do this differently because I'm in Israel. I'm just curious how similar it is to CalAI. Yes. So honestly, it's not a one to one clone, but the product itself isn't very different. The same core experience as the other AI color trackers, you point your camera at the mill, you get calories and macros. So the differences are in the language and a bunch of small modifications to fit how Israelis actually eat and talk about food that's on the product. The real differentiation I want to be very clear about is because I think a lot of bidders are missing it is the brand and distribution. Almost anyone can build an app with cursor in two weeks. But I think about it like this. If I can acquire a user for half what my competition pays, that means I have more cash flow than they do. And more cash flow means I can outspend them on growth. I think that's a really good point. It's mostly the same based on the product, but it's widely different based on the language, the content that we're creating, the design. And that makes it basically a different app. It's the same concept, but it's like a plumber here in the U.S. where I live is going to be way different than a plumber out in Israel. So let's talk about that. A lot of people are building apps right now and they don't have any users. But you went very quickly from zero to eighty thousand dollars a month. So walk me through that. What did you do to grow your app so quickly? Yeah, sure. So I think that my biggest advantage going in was that I came from marketing and it's important to say that every channel works, UGC, influencers, paid ads, SEO. The question is, which channel is the most efficient for your specific market? For me, it was paid ads. CPMs are significantly lower than in the U.S. So you can run paid ads profitably without a time of testing the capital. So I started the most viral content from similar apps in the U.S. and the most viral fitness and nutrition content in Israel. Based on that, I created the creative and I used them in the ad campaigns that got me to around 20 K per month in four months. And I always knew that once I have the traction and the social proof needed, I'll start working with influencers to create a strong brand that's hard to copy. And I knew that working with big influencers will cost a fortune just for a single story or real. So I came up with a better idea. Partnering with big influencers, they get a percentage of the revenue. And as a result, the incentives are aligned. The more money I make, the more money they make. It also meant that now I have two well channel faces to represent my app. That's what took the app from 20 K to 80 K per month. If you're watching this and you're this far into the interview, this might be one of the coolest things that I've seen anyone that I've talked to on Starter Story do from a marketing perspective. So I'd love if you could just dive a little bit deeper into how that works. And what have you learned after working with these big names? Obviously, they're not building. The apps are probably not super involved with the product day to day. So how does that work? So to make sure that they are on schedule, they're delivering the content that they have to. The entire agreement is based on work timelines. So you want to create an agreement which says how many pieces of content they have to deliver to you and how many filming days or recording days they have to do each month. So I think for me specifically, I got really lucky because I know the fitness niche in Israel super well, and I happen to know the guy personally that then I signed the deal with. So what we did is we have a rev short deal for all the revenue that comes from Israel. But the main thing that I think everyone should focus about here is that you have to get some social proof and to show that the app is working and users are excited and happy about it before approaching these mega big influencers or celebrities. OK, so are you giving like half your business away to these influencers? What if you want to go find more influencers or one influencer doesn't work out? And are you giving away like all your business to these influencers? So another advantage of me waiting to making 20K per month before approaching them is that I can negotiate a better deal and not act like it was from the get go. So they get 50/50. So once you do that, you can get the influencers to agree on much better terms. Yeah, the typical model is, hey, let me pay you per post. But because they are getting a cut of all Israeli revenue, they actually have skin in the game. Maybe they talk about it not just in the one post that they're paid to do. Maybe they talk about it on whatever the TV show they're on or when they're getting interviewed somewhere else. So let's switch topics a little bit and let's talk about tech stack. I know that you mainly built this, but you're not a developer, so Walk me through some of the tools that you used to build this. Sure. So I use Cloud for coding and AI agents across the business, which is $200 per month. I use PostHog for product analytics. It's $20 per month. RevenueCat for subscription management. Superbase for database and storage. It's $35 per month. And Expo for in-app updates. It's $100 per month. And last question that we ask all founders who come on to Starter Story. If you could go back in time, Tomer, to before you had built a successful app, what advice would you give yourself? Or what advice would you give to the thousands of people that are going to watch this and get inspired? So I think the best advice is don't be afraid of what you don't know. You need to have a lot of self-confidence to believe that whatever gets thrown at you, you'll figure it out. Because there will always be setbacks and new things you'll have to learn along the way. And some will look super complex and scary, but you can never allow yourself to become the constraint of the business and be the one holding it back. Yeah, that's great advice. Thank you for coming on and sharing it. I think it's going to become a lot bigger, both your app and this new way of marketing. So thank you, Tomer, for coming on and sharing. Thank you. All right, Gus, producer of Starter Story, what'd you think of Cow Buddy? I mean, the obvious takeaway is you don't need a new idea. Hopefully, people watching don't think like, oh, it's not original or like he's just stealing it. Hopefully, that's not the takeaway. Hopefully, the takeaway is like, oh, so I don't need to like reinvent the wheel, you know, kind of thing. So that's my first thought. Yeah, no. I thought what was interesting about what he said is there are hundreds, if not thousands, of calorie and fitness tracking apps on the app store. And I've personally used 10 of them. And I don't look at those and think like, oh, these are all clones of each other, right? And when he told me that, people think about dieting and food differently in the US than they do in Israel. And therefore, that kind of like defeats the whole argument of this clone thing. Like this app is better for that market than Cal AI because, A, it's in Hebrew, and two, it's for that market. So I think that this is one of like the big opportunities here is, yeah, take popular apps and localize them to other countries. Yeah, I know a lot of our audience, you know, we see that the data, like a good chunk are not just in the US. So, yeah, there's like a huge opportunity for someone watching to think about it for their own place or their own country or their own city or whatever. We talked to a lot of people who kind of have this approach, find a proven idea, like remix it. How long do you think that continues to work? Not just like an apps, but like restaurants or cars or whatever, like so many examples of like just the same thing over and over in the world. That's the work. But anyway, just that's something I'm thinking about. It's like, yeah, well, two things. One is the country's thing is that like the markets are still wide open in lots of countries. So talk to a lot of people on here that continue to mention this. They go, Hey, even when I was just trying to run paid ads, I first started running them in Argentina because I could get better metrics over there. So there's that. And then the second one is that new problems are always emerging. So I think the Cal AI is a good example of that is that AI showed up and now there's this new API where you can scan your food and get like a pretty accurate result. So, yeah, I think this year, 2026 is the time to act in the description down there. We're going to put our database of 30 very, very popular app ideas that you can copy. You can localize to your country or do them somewhat differently. These are proven apps that are making a whole lot of money in their categories, and they're a great canvas to start if you want to build apps and do something similar. So I'll put that down there in the description. I hope you guys enjoyed this episode. We'll see you in the next one. Peace.