Speaker 1It's my first iOS app. It took roughly three weeks. It's currently averaging around $2,000-$3,000 a day.
Speaker 2This is Rasty, and a few months ago, he had never built an iOS app in his life, until he decided to build something to solve a very simple problem. In the first month, the app made just $66. But six months later, it made $41,000 in a single month. But here's the thing, the app he built is crazy simple. I
Speaker 1literally haven't written a single
Speaker 2line, either of code or the text on the web. The reason you want to watch this episode is to learn about how he grew it, which no, it wasn't posting on TikTok, and it wasn't doing any paid ads. I asked Rasty to come onto the channel and actually break this down. And in this episode, we're going to dive into the simple app he built that made $41,000 in a single month, how he's taking on really big competitors in a very crowded space, and the quote, outdated growth strategy that is working really well for him. All right, guys, this is one you cannot miss. I'm Pat Walls. And I'm Gus. And this is Starter Story. All right, Rasty, I'm pumped to have you here on the channel. Welcome to Starter Story. Tell me a little about who you are, what you built, and what's your story.
Speaker 1Well, I'm Rasty Turek. I built Vault Air, which is an iPhone app that encrypts the storage and allows people to store encrypted files and photos. It's my first iOS app, mostly thanks to the coding agents. The first month, it made $66. I got a couple of downloads. It's currently averaging around $2,000 to $3,000 a day.
Speaker 3Wow. Rasty, this is awesome. Off camera before this, you started this in March, so it's only like six months, which makes this even more amazing. But let's talk about Vault Air. Can you just explain what the app is, who your users are?
Speaker 1Well, it's very simple. It's very, very similar to Dropbox with the one caveat that it's essentially encrypted. It's encrypted on device. There's no servers, no shared keys. I have no access to it, neither does Apple or anyone else. And so essentially, there's no way to recover anything. The app is free. In fact, I was going to put it completely free up. And then literally the day before, I just decided that maybe due to some advanced features, if users start sending me support requests, I just don't want to be bothered as much. So I literally just said a few dollars here and we'll see. Honestly, majority of my purchases are for lifetime. I will say a good 60% at this point. They also account for a majority of the revenue north of 80%, I think. And then I just passed 60,000 overall downloads. And one very different thing about this app versus others, a lot of the trendy apps that are very focused on like they have to convert you immediately. So like Call AI, like if they don't convert you immediately, you will never pay. Mine is the opposite. Like I have the lowest conversion day one and have the highest conversion like day 60.
Speaker 2Real quick. What I love about Rasty's story is that his app is crazy simple. One of the reason why it works is that it's just a proven category. People want to download this app and pay for this. An app like this and a founder like Rasty is proof that you do not need a brand new or complicated idea to win, which is why we put together an actual database of simple app ideas like this that are making tons of money right now. Every idea in this database comes with real revenue numbers. These are real apps with real pricing models and growth tactics that you can check out. Just head to the first link in the description. If you want to download this database 100% for free, start browsing, maybe get an idea. And get building. All right, let's get back to the episode. This is really impressive. I mean, especially on an app that, you know, you could potentially use some of it for free. That's really good.
Speaker 3And then finally, could you just pull up your like analytics, revenue dashboards, just show to the audience, you know, this thing is real.
Speaker 1Yeah. So this is the App Store analytics. As you can see, my MRR is quite low because most people opt in for the lifetime points. So daily downloads currently, as I said, around depending on the day. So this is on that huge spike. Yeah. I have no idea. This is the source is Apple search. However, what is weird about it? It doesn't correlate to revenue. See, daily revenue is like hovering around $2,000 these days. It's like slowly increasing. This is what we talked about. Like, as you can see, my download to paid is only 5.47% on day one. But day 35, it actually grows. It's weekly is $1.99. Annual is $19.99. And lifetime is $39.99.
Speaker 2So I mean, these numbers, Rasty, are crazy, like this growth channel that's been working for you that is growing like really nicely, really linearly, you have this amazing download to conversion rate, you're doing over 40,000 a month, this is soon going to be a million dollar per year business. Congrats, it's providing a lot of value to people, which we're going to talk about. But before we do, I want to learn about your background, because I know that you've done startups before. This isn't your first business that you started, but you did way different stuff. So how do you get to this point where you have this awesome $2,000 a day app that you built?
Speaker 1Well, my road is pretty windy. I grew up in Slovakia in a tiny, tiny village of 700 people. After high school, I moved to Boston to work for a security company that got acquired by Google. And so I went to Google, I wrote a chunk of the Gmail or sat on the Gmail team, and then left and started a couple of startups. Mostly the first one started in security because that was my background. Then I moved to entertainment. I built the company. The company got acquired by Amazon, and they use some of the tech to this day. My last large scale. And this is venture funded was PEX, which was kind of a sassy copyright as a service for entertainment, mostly focused on the music. And then we sold that last year.
Speaker 3That's awesome. So that leads naturally into how do you find this idea? How do you build a encryption utility app?
Speaker 1Like if you deal with crypto, a lot of people have wallet keys stored in all sorts of places, and it's very hard to put it somewhere close to the device, but also have it available. This was my solution for it, especially pictures of the sports certificates. And as I said, I was not planning to make this paid. I didn't even know if anyone is ever going to use this. So like I put it out with the idea. It's like I will have it. It will be there.
Speaker 2Yeah. Well, let's talk a little bit more about that growth thing. We talked about this a little earlier before, but you're not spending money on ads. You're not paying people to create content for the app. You're kind of just growing through SEO. And if you go online these days, everyone's saying SEO is dead. SEO is dead. You got to do something else, but this is clearly working for you. And it's. Growing really nicely. So can you tell me a little bit more about that? Like, what's been your approach for this?
Speaker 1Most of the apps in this area are 15 years or older. They have millions of users. Well, a lot of downloads. So Apple prior does them. And like, I will have zero chance to get there, but they completely ignore that because you know, they don't have to, they can have money and they just don't care enough. And so my approach was like, what if I try to pull in every keyword that is out there that essentially points to the same thing as an app store, but on the web. And so my first foray into this was like a basic marketing site, which just outlines of all of the features and then building series of guides that was like, how do I store my photos on iPhone? And when I say I, I literally haven't written single line, either of code or the text on the web. Everything is done by one of the coding agents over time. This is like gaining a lot of authority and with that comes a lot of traffic. And then I focus on the conversion. So, like I. Sell the coding agents, like make sure that the CTA structure does that essentially as the person is somewhere in the article, wherever people are like commonly ending, I want them to be able to go through the app. And so I have around 10% conversion from the web and the web is the majority of traffic at this point.
Speaker 2Wow. So you essentially have a whole content marketing and conversion team that's working for you, but there's not an actual team. You just have some sort of agent running. That's always improving your SEO. Tell me more about how you set up something like that. Like what tools are you using?
Speaker 1It's honestly basic cloud or codex. I wrote this library called gum. It's just open source command line tools with MCP at top of all Google services, including Google search and Google keyword planner. And so what it does it's runs through keyword planner every single morning, looks at all the traffic, identifies keywords that are being surfaced, but not essentially being driven to the site. So like you can see your site was shown 16,000 times for this keyword, but no clicks because you are like number 50. And so then it takes that and optimize creates this guide. And then the guide is essentially published. It takes roughly three to four days for Google to register. And I optimize a lot of internal links. And so the internal links from existing traffic point to the new guides and that how Google essentially prioritizes it. And then you can see the correlation with that essentially growing the traffic and then the traffic I convert into downloads and essentially publishing one a day. And that's it. Google likes the fact that there's like not a lot of content coming, but the content is like high quality. Like I make sure that the content is not such like vomit awards.
Speaker 2I think you mentioned one thing that I really liked is that like, you're actually not publishing that much. Sometimes you'll hear where people will automate their SEO. It's like a bunch of AI slop. They push out a thousand articles in a day, but you actually mentioned that you only do one article a day, which maybe you think that Google really likes that. And I think I want to get you back on the channel, maybe in six months and see where your revenue is, because I think this focus on providing valuable content to a very niche audience, maybe they care a lot about security. They care a lot about this very niche thing that you have. I think this is actually going to benefit you even more because you're going to get start getting shown in LLMs is the more traffic you get, the more Google likes you, the more Gemini likes you, the more AEO search overviews like you, all this attention coming to your app. So I'm excited to see where you are in six months, especially because it's growing so fast already.
Speaker 3Rasty mentioned that you have kind of a light tech stack. A lot This is profit. So what are the tools that you use on a regular basis to run this business?
Speaker 1The app is Swift with UIKit. There's really nothing else. It uses a lot of the iCloud features, but everything is native to the app. I use extensively Codecs and Cloud, and I have also local models that I utilize for myself. But I will say at this point, 99% of the stuff that is left to be done is Cloud waking up every morning and running the guide. And that's kind of it. For measurements, I use PostHog. It's free. So one of the nice things about this is I don't have enough traffic or enough users because they don't measure anything these days. You can really run things for free. There's nothing to break, which is really nice. As long as Apple is up, the app works.
Speaker 2All right. So Rasty, real quick. I mean, we kind of talked about what your app does. It's encryption for your photos, but I'd love to just see it. Can you show me the app that you built that made over $40,000 last month? How does the app work? What does it do? Can you give us a little bit of a demo?
Speaker 1Yeah, it's great. Person makes the pattern. Any pattern opens a vault. So there's roughly 52 billion potential vaults, and then they just add files to it. So what's interesting about this is there's no way to find out how much data or what is in there. And so it actually cumulated to a really interesting story. So on a Friday, I got a call from an FBI agent. They called someone that they believe used the app, opened a vault to record some sensitive information. And so they believe the person done it. And they want my help. And there's no way to figure it out. The app is built such way that I can tell if the person ever had anything in there. And so the agent was pretty upset about it, but that's what the app does.
Speaker 2That's amazing. I mean, that's literally the point is to encrypt it. That's why people use it because no FBI agent can call the founder of the app and get the information. So that's super cool. Last question that we ask all founders to come on to Starter Story. And I know you've built a bunch of awesome startups and you're doing great for yourself, obviously. What advice would you give to someone watching this? Maybe they're about to start their first company or they're about to start an app, like you've built a utility app, even what would be your advice to them?
Speaker 1I mean, start. That's the hardest part, right? Like I have at least two dozen projects that are somewhere in ready, but they're not out there. And as long as they are now out there, they don't exist. And then honestly, like people overthink how things to show be done. Like none of these came out of years of experience because my experience is in B2B and enterprise. And so like, I really didn't know anything about it. I didn't know anything about that. I didn't know anything about this. So if I can learn, anyone can. And so like, as long as you have open mind and you know, how to put one foot in front of the other and every day just be slightly better than the day before and that's kind
Speaker 2of all I care about. Well, that's great advice. Thank you, Rasty, for coming on. Super cool app. Thanks for being so open about sharing it and all your SEO experiments and all that. Super cool. Thanks for coming on. Yeah. Thanks for having me. All right. Gus, co-host and producer of Starter Story. What did you think of Rasty and his app?
Speaker 3When I first talked to him, I knew it was going to be awesome. Do you remember that guy we interviewed a while back? He's from Australia. I know exactly. His name was Mike Hill. Mike Hill. Yeah. Yeah. He did like the seven SaaS. I think the similarities between them, obviously, besides their demeanor was like, I feel like they kind of have a really, it's simple, but not easy, but simple approach to like how they do things. That's what I really liked about everything he was saying was like, you know, all the app guys we bring on are like TikTok and go viral and all that stuff obviously works. We have plenty of examples, but I thought it was cool that he was just like, I do one article a day. I try to like heat up the competition and that's my strategy.
Speaker 2Yeah. That's my first thought. Yeah. The vibe is like, no bullshit. It's kind of just like, I know a guy and I'm not sure how old he is, but let's say he's in his forties. It's the difference between a guy in his forties and a kid in his twenties. You know, he's not coming on here talking about the latest, greatest growth hack. You got to do this. You got to do that. It's more just like put one foot in front of the other. I think there's a lot to learn from this interview. Just seeing how someone like him carries himself, which is a little different than the typical interviews we do.
Speaker 3Yeah, I agree. Yeah. What do you think about like the whole SEO? Yeah. Play that he's doing.
Speaker 2And I think you even said during the
Speaker 3interview, like everyone says SEO is
Speaker 2dead or whatever, you know, what do you think? I still think SEO is dead, whatever you want to call that. But the reason why I think it works for him is that it's super, super niche. It's like a very specific app that does a very specific thing. He's not going to get a million people visiting his website every day. And I think he's probably getting a lot more traffic from recommendations, word of mouth and LLMs than he knows already because he's just letting us know he couldn't really track it down because he doesn't want to put analytics on it because it's privacy focused. Yes. It started with the SEO started with writing the content, but it's actually going to grow a lot more just because he's putting that out there. Yeah. The other thing that I love about his app is that it's so simple. You watch the demo, you were literally encrypting some files. There's not a thousand features that make them easy to market. We have a bunch of other examples like this real actual simple apps that are making money right now. We put them all into a database of all the people that we've interviewed and researched. And found a bunch of cool, simple apps that are making money right now. Check that out in the description right there. It's all free. Hope you guys enjoy. Thank you for watching. We'll see you in the next one. Peace.
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