Speaker 1Over the last 28 days, we're at like $14,000, $15,000 a month.
Speaker 2This is Max. In just a few months, he completely changed his life by building apps. And he did it all without any technical experience at all.
Speaker 1Six months ago, I had never built a mobile app.
Speaker 2With just an idea and his phone, he grew this simple app to over $13,000 a month.
Speaker 1There were a few different apps that people were using. There wasn't really one unified platform. So I just went out and built it.
Speaker 2So we asked Max to come onto the channel and break down exactly how he did it. And in this episode, we'll dive into how he did it without knowing a single thing about coding, his simple marketing strategy that you can do for free, and the really simple app idea that now makes over $13,000 a month. This one is going to be good. Let's dive in. I'm Gus. And I'm Pat. And this is Starter Story. All right, Max, welcome to Starter Story. Excited to have you here. Could you tell us who you are, what you built, and what's your story?
Speaker 1Yeah, thanks so much for having me. Really excited to be here today. I'm Max, founder and CEO of Max AI. Six months ago, I had never built a mobile app and had very minimal coding experience. Today, I built one of the fastest growing lifting apps on the market, Max AI. And I'm seeing a really strong growth trajectory.
Speaker 2That's awesome, Max. Congrats. I'm excited to talk about how you did this, how you found the idea, and how you grew it. But before we go there, let's talk briefly about Max AI. What is the app? Who are your users? And then pull up your revenue dashboards to kind of show it to the audience.
Speaker 1Max AI is really your all-in-one health and fitness coach. It knows exactly how much you slept last night. It builds you a workout program tailored just for you and your goals. It allows you to track your lifts, track your nutrition, and even track all your supplement and peptide protocols. So, you know, this is kind of an overview of the app store here. We're up to 164 ratings, which is really exciting. So, looking at our revenue cat here, over the last 28 days, we're, you know, nearly $14,000 in revenue. Over an entire month, we're at like $14,000, $15,000 a month. You'll see here the MRR is low. That's because I don't believe in building an app relying on people to forget to cancel their subscriptions. So, we just charged an upfront $24.99 yearly fee, which is just really $2 a month. So, looking at some of the other statistics here, we actually hit 1,000 active subscribers, which is super exciting. And the new customer growth is over 20,000 in the last 28 days. Over 40,000 all time. We just hit 20,000 iOS downloads as well. So, really scaling, and we're reinvesting every single cent we're earning into growing the business.
Speaker 2A question that's coming to mind is, there's a dime a dozen lifting apps, fitness apps. You kind of just described sort of an all-in-one, you know, health app, which I'm sure there's millions of those. What do you think makes yours, like, different?
Speaker 1I think building this agentic coach is a step in the right direction to differentiate us. So, the Max Coach is wired to every component of the app. So, you never have to leave one screen to do anything. To check your sleep, to, you know, adjust your workout program, to see workout tutorials. All of it can be from one page. And, you know, being able to do founder-led content has brought on so many. You know, a lot of people are starting to be subscribers to the app to, you know, follow along the journey and feel like they're a part of something.
Speaker 2Yeah, I really love everything that Max is breaking down for us right now. And it got me thinking about something. Once you have customers, they're the most valuable part of your business. Knowing who they are and what they want is what's going to keep your business going. But a lot of founders have this information scattered everywhere. In their email, in their notes app, in different spreadsheets. And that is exactly why I want to tell you about HubSpot's CRM. With HubSpot's smart CRM, it puts all your customers' information in one place. And it actually updates itself, so you know exactly what's going on with your customers all the time. Using the link in the description, you can actually get started 100% for free. So if you want to finally figure out what's going on with your customers, just head to the link in the description and check out HubSpot's CRM. All right, let's get back to Max.
Speaker 3So Max, super cool app. Before we get into how you came up with the idea for this app, what I want to understand is a little bit more about your background. So how long have you been building apps and how did you even get into this and find out that this was possible?
Speaker 1I graduated from the University of Michigan. I spent two summers in finance, one in venture capital, one in sales and trading. To be completely honest, I was probably the worst intern imaginable. I was not passionate about the work I was doing. So I started building a food review app called Dish Rate. And then I realized I have no idea how to build this. This isn't possible. I'd have to pay tens of thousands of dollars in development to get this thing live. So I gave up. And then, you know, sort of around December, January, I started seeing people with zero coding experience building apps. People that I knew if they could build apps. I could build apps. So one day I got set up with a Claude Code $15 membership and just started typing. Six months later, I don't think I've gone a day without being in my terminal and working with Claude as much as possible.
Speaker 3That's awesome. So easy to build now. And we just talked to so many people on this channel that start open a Claude, start chatting with it and see what comes out. The question that I think is maybe even more important to understand here, how did you come up with the idea for that app? How did you know it was something that could potentially make money and even be a really successful app?
Speaker 1I wasn't naive to the fact that there were 100 other competitors already out there. But I wanted to build something I was actually passionate about. And lifting is my favorite thing to do in the world. My friends and I lifted all of college. But I noticed an interesting pattern. Strava and Nike Run Club are really the two dominant players when it comes to running. It felt like lifting that there was a gap there. That there were a few different apps that people were using. And maybe I was a little oblivious to the fact that there were so many apps out there that had, you know, so many years of experience. But I think. Being naive is good at times also.
Speaker 3On that note, now that you've had some experience, you have a production app that's used by thousands of people. What does the tech stack look like right now? Like what are the main tools that someone should be using if they're building apps? And how much does that cost you every month?
Speaker 1It's pretty inexpensive. I have Cloud 20X. I have Superbase, which I'm paying $20 a month for. I'm paying for Vercel and Expo to help deploy my app and submit updates and all of that sort of stuff. And then I use Revenue Cat for my payments. So my advice would be to anyone, the barriers to entry are so low. This is the best. This is the best time ever to build an app.
Speaker 2Yeah, I love what you said there that the barrier to entry is really low. Almost anyone can download Cloud, start typing and start building out their idea. And because that's so accessible or easier now, like you said, that's not really the moat anymore. So let's talk a little bit about how you go from zero to $10,000 a month.
Speaker 1I knew nothing about this X community now that like completely gives you the keys on how to build an app to $10,000 a month. I thought I was going to launch a free app and somehow make money from, you know, monetizing off. Selling ad slots. Fortunately, I met someone through Instagram that had some experience building apps. And he kind of took me under his wing and told me like the direction that apps are heading and you need to hard pay while your app. So hard pay while was step number one. I think the step from there was marketing. And I didn't have a big budget to go pay 50 UGC creators to go make videos for me like a lot of the other big lifting apps. So I figured what's the easiest way to do that? It's to film myself. So I started filming every day, five videos, 10 videos, getting over kind of that initial cringe and fear. You know, your friends sending you around and laughing at you because the reality is most people don't even care. And then I started really understanding what formats are working. I would look at all of the videos I posted and analyze, you know, what's the hold rate, what's the skip rate. And then I started running the best performers as paid ads. So I started on a low budget at first, but as I started to see that there really was product market fit, I started to slowly up the budget. And, you know, now we're spending around $250 a day on paid ads and finally starting a side shift campaign to get, you know, five other people like me that can make videos every single day as well.
Speaker 2Nice. That's awesome. And when we talked before this interview, you told me a little bit about how you've kind of tried a lot of things when it comes to marketing and growing your app. So for people watching, what would you say is working right now or not working right now when it comes to trying to grow an app, trying to market an app like yours?
Speaker 1I would say we don't really have the scope defined of your app yet. And you don't understand what features are going to drive downloads. It's very early on. I would avoid hiring UGC creators. You're going to need to know the exact direction. I mean, the angles that are going to work before you want to burn money doing that. And then I would say right now, Meta is much better than TikTok. I think the views are more valuable. I think they're higher intent buyers. I think the demographic is better and they just have a higher willingness to pay. So beyond that, I think clipping has really exploded. It's still early enough on the wave that you can make a lot of money for your mobile app doing such. This is a great way to get international exposure and a great way to get organic downloads.
Speaker 2Earlier, you said something about you sharing your journey online. So tell me a little bit more about that. Like founder-led content, how that's been so important for you, what the impact of that has been.
Speaker 1It's been incredible. I've gotten opportunities I can never imagine. Even just being on this show here is a real honor. And I think people love passion and people love authenticity and they want to follow along. So three months ago, I started tweeting and it's unbelievable. I mean, I'd say roughly a third of my revenue is from people on X, which is so crazy that are just following my journey. And, you know, we're looking for a lifting app or just want to support me. I think there's a misconception on X that people are going to copy your idea and you have to build in stealth. I would argue the exact opposite. Be as public about it as possible. Show everyone what's working, what's not. Tell them about your vulnerabilities. People are really supportive.
Speaker 3Kind of a side note, but I think building your personal brand is one of the most powerful things you can do. But I want to switch topics a little bit because I'm curious. You don't have a huge background in software development. You don't have a huge team building this app. I'd love if you could give me a short demo of the app. What does the app do? How does it look? Could you show us right now?
Speaker 1Okay, so this is the homepage for the app. Here, so you see your schedule, today's workout, and you see three pillars here. Really, your save templates, which are, you know, workouts that you've saved. You can see your leaderboard rank here. I'm unfortunately 78th and I've already lifted twice this week. So a lot of really competitive people on the app and it's very inclusive for everyone. But the main thing we're working on is this chat bot, which I have here, and you can text it every single thing and it'll adjust your workout program depending on, like I said, I'm a bit sick here, adjust my volume. So it adjusted my chest and back day and I asked earlier to build me a protein pack made me a recipe. with all of the ingredients I had available. So I have that saved here. And then the social feed, that's a ton of fun, holds us accountable and I think makes us competitive too. So I'm always a supporter of a good, healthy competition. So yeah, that's really what the app looks like.
Speaker 3Thanks for sharing, looks awesome. The last question that we ask all founders to come on here, if you could have any advice for anyone watching this who wants to build apps, maybe they just are about to graduate college, thinking about going to college, what would be your piece of advice that you've learned through your journey so far?
Speaker 1I would say, I went in with this kind of like half in, half out approach. I built an app, but I was too afraid to market it and I didn't wanna attach my name to it and I was too afraid to film myself. So the best advice I could give you is go all in, film yourself, annoy the crap out of everyone around you because you're so obsessed with it and document your journey because it's gonna be really fun to look back on and see all the progress you've made. That's some of the most rewarding things I've done here is just being able to look back at videos from four months ago when I got my first paying customer and being all excited to now doing $14,000, $15,000 a month.
Speaker 3That's amazing. That's some amazing advice, Max. What you've done is proof of what can happen in just a few months when you go all in, build something and yeah, scream from the rooftop. So thanks for coming on. Thanks for sharing. And yeah, man, I'm excited to see what you do.
Speaker 1Awesome. Thanks guys so much. Really appreciate you having me on and can't wait to come back on again someday.
Speaker 3All right, Gus, producer and co-host of Starter Story. What'd you think of Max and Maxed?
Speaker 2Max and Maxed. That's funny. I just loved kind of his vibe and energy. So I liked that about him. I think my big takeaway is just that you don't really need like, a crazy, unique idea to be successful.
Speaker 3I can't even remember all the lifting apps specifically of people we've talked to. I think there's been at least three, which just goes to show you that none of these app ideas are complicated. People go to the gym, they lift weights and they want something to be able to track that. But the one thing that you can't replicate is personal brand. That is the one thing that I would recommend anyone to do, even though it feels like you want to keep it more close to the chest. On that note, if this interview, was enough proof for you that you don't need a crazy idea to build something, get users, start making money online. And we've interviewed hundreds of people that have done this. And if you click the link in the description, you will find a list of many of those app ideas. These are app ideas that are actually making revenue right now that you can go in, you can check out, maybe find something that's interesting to you. Just click that link, you can get it 100% for free. All right, guys, we'll see you in the next one. Peace. ♪ Pain and pain ♪
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