Speaker 1What if you could change your life in just six months and what if all it took was a simple idea and the willingness to put in the work? Well, I want you to meet Lino.
Speaker 2I launched my first app, AppMax, about five months ago and now we're on pace to hit 60k this month. And I didn't even know how to vibe code. I didn't even know how to prompt.
Speaker 1Six months ago, he had never built an app before in his life. And in fact, he'd never even written a single line of code. But he just started learning from people in the app space, shipped his first app. And today, that app that he built is about to hit $60,000 a month.
Speaker 2Our product is super niche, which is why I think we're performing extremely, extremely well.
Speaker 1So I asked Lino to come onto the channel and break down exactly what he built and how he did this. In this episode, we're going to dive into his dead simple app that now makes $60,000 a month, how he went from zero users and no distribution to thousands of downloads, and his very simple advice for how to build a successful app in 2026. Guys, this one, you are not going to want to miss it. Let's dive in. This is Starter Story. All right, Lino, welcome to the channel. I'm pumped to have you on here. Let's get into it. Tell me about who you are, what you built, and what's your story.
Speaker 2So I'm Lino Leighton. I launched my first app, AppMax, about five months ago, and now we're on pace to hit 60k this month. Today, I'm excited to share more about the process of how I was able to scale these kind of numbers in such a short amount of time with literally zero coding experience and absolutely not technical at all.
Speaker 3Let's get into the business and the app itself. So just explain what AppMax is in a few sentences, and then pull up your revenue cat dashboards to show off the revenue and show us that this thing is legit.
Speaker 2So AppMax is basically an app to help people achieve their best abs. And basically what we do is we have users fill out some basic info about their fitness journey, and we tailor them a custom apps plan specifically for each user alongside pre-made training programs and workout programs specifically targeting their abs. Okay, yeah, so our monthly revenue is just about $55,000 this month, and we currently have 16,000 downloads in the past 28 days, and we have just over 3,000 active paying customers. Cool. So how do you come up with this app idea? Yeah, so actually I was back in February, and I went to the gym with all my friends. Everyone kept comparing about who has better abs. They're like, oh, I have better abs than you. I have better abs than you. And I was thinking, like, everyone cares about their abs. And then I started to do a little research, and I found out that if someone wanted to get abs in 2026, there was absolutely no place for them to go. So I thought of a good solution where why don't I make an app that helps people achieve abs and help them get visible abs? Yeah, and that's basically how I came up with AppMax.
Speaker 3All right, what I love about Lino's story is that he changed his life in just six months. He found a really smart category, built his simple app, and now today that app makes $60,000 a month. And the way that app works is that it makes $60,000 a month. And the way he found his app idea was really simple. He looked at stuff that was already working and kind of remixed it for 2026. And that's exactly why we put together this free database of iOS app ideas that are already making money. Every idea in this database comes with real numbers, revenue, pricing models, growth tactics, all from real app founders that have built successful app businesses. So if you're looking for your next app idea, it might be hiding right here in this database. Just head to the link in the description and grab it 100% for free. All right, let's get back to Lino.
Speaker 1Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it. I appreciate it. I appreciate it. I appreciate it. I appreciate it. I appreciate it. I appreciate it. I appreciate it. And I remember 2010, 20 years ago when I was a kid just like watching TV, they would have these ads for like five minute abs and you'd buy some sort of device or some sort of workout thing. Back then it was like Bowflex or something like that, but they would market it specifically for if you want abs for the summer, you're essentially doing this in, you know, a modern social media way. So I think that's amazing. That's actually a super, super smart insight. If you went and just built the total website, you're going to be able to buy a whole bunch of apps. You're going to be able to work out tracker. Yes, there are successful versions of those, but it's way better to niche down. The next thing I want to ask you about is how you built this. Cause we were chatting earlier. You're 18 years old. You have no technical background. You told me you don't know anything about how to build apps for the people that are watching this on here. I want to hear in just the five, six months that this app has grown and become successful. How did you actually build this? What was the actual build journey? How did you originally build it? What tools did you use and how'd you build this thing?
Speaker 2Yeah. So I originally built this in lovable, back in February. And this is when I didn't even know anything about apps. I didn't even know what revenue cat was. I didn't even know what an onboarding was. And I spent two months manually prompting this old project in lovable. After two months, I was ready to launch. And just before launch, I was like, there's absolutely no way I can release this. This is, this is terrible. So I decided to rebuild the entire thing back in Rourke. And this is when I started to get onto X and starting to follow all these other successful app founders. And I, I picked up a lot of great advice about not only how to vibe code, but also some like onboarding tactics, how to market all like the insider advice you need that is working for their apps. I put that advice and put it towards my app. And I was able to build app max V2 basically in Rourke in one month. And I was ready to ship. And then after the first month, we did just over $7,000 in revenue.
Speaker 1Could you walk through like what your actual tech stack looks like right now? Like if you had to start over, what's the tech that you're using? What tools?
Speaker 2I keep it super simple. I have super base for authentication. I use work max for the development. I use sensor tower basically for competitor and idea research. I use sign.com for creator contracts and agreements. And I use post-hoc for internal analytics.
Speaker 1Okay. So you mentioned something earlier, you use sign.com for creator contracts. I'm guessing that maybe how you've grown this thing. Cause you know, anybody can build an ad maxing app, but is it going to get any downloads? If you don't do any, marketing or advertising, probably not. So let's talk about this first. I want to hear from you when you just created the app, how did you go from zero to the first 10 K per month? What was the overall marketing strategy and what really like worked for your app?
Speaker 2I started running UGC with these big influencers in the fitness niche, which was probably one of the biggest mistakes I've ever made. We were blindly going into this. We didn't even have a winning format or a winning content strategy to give these influencers before spending thousands of dollars for each video. So that's probably the biggest mistake. And so alongside that, we were also running faces, Tik TOK slideshows, which I was manually posting on my own. The big UGC deals alongside these Tik TOK slideshows helped us get up to three to 4k in revenue. But the problem was our margins were terrible. We were running at like five to 10%, which is why I came up with the idea. And we partnered up with a big fitness influencer on social media in return for some equity, which helped us get the ground running off the start, which I would recommend to any inexperienced founders. I think that's actually really
Speaker 1smart instead of going to all these little creators and making these small deals and maybe one of them works, but most of them don't. You just said, screw that instead. I'm just going to find an equity partner who has some skin in the game. And then all the ads are essentially free and they have like more incentive to actually make this thing work. So that's pretty much the secret to how you got to 10k. Go find someone with distribution who is good at social media content. Then how do you take it from 10k? I think that's a good question. I don't know if that's the right way to put it. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know.
Speaker 2Yeah. So basically we cut out every single UGC deal, every influencer deal, and we started to double down on what was working for us. And we found out that our meta ads were running at like a two, two to 2.5 X ROAS and are extremely profitable. So we just started doubling down on meta ads. And we only stuck with our one big creator that we gave equity to, and he would just create content for us. And we would just run paid ads behind it strictly through meta ads. And we only stuck with our one big creator that we As well during that process, we decided to take all of our creatives from meta and move them over to TikTok ads alongside that. And for some reason they performed five to six X better, the same exact creatives were able to, we were able to get four to five X ROAS on the same creatives, mainly because on TikTok, it targets a younger audience and meta is more of an older audience. So our target user is anywhere from 15 to 30 years old. And with TikTok, we were able to resonate and target with that specific user extremely well.
Speaker 3What I want to ask you is, you know, you've done this so fast in the past six, seven months, you went from zero to almost 60K per month and obviously growing more. There's lots of people who watch this channel who, you know, want to change their lives as fast as you did. If you were starting over, trying to find an idea, build it, what steps would you take to make that happen all over again?
Speaker 2Yeah, so first thing hands down is to get inside of the X app community and start following these top founders there. All these founders give out so much sauce and advice there for literally five years. And I think that's what's going to happen. And I think that's going to happen for the rest of my life. And I think that's what's going to happen for the rest of my life. Then I would go on to sensor tower and start looking up some ideas you have for apps and start trying to find the hot niche right now. The way to find this is by looking up potential app ideas in there. And if there are a ton of apps in that niche consistently doing over 10K a month, then that's a niche you want to build in. Yeah. So step two is post before building. Once you have your app idea, if you want to validate it even more before we even start building it, I would make a faceless TikTok page and start promoting your app through organic TikTok slideshows and start posting three to four times a day. However, if you're not a fan of TikTok, since your app is not built, instead of giving them a CTA on a specific slide, I would replace the CTA with comment app and I'll send it to you. Like for example, if you're building a calorie tracking app, the first slide would be five ways to improve your life. Let's just say slide one, walk 10,000 steps a day. Slide two, work out seven times a week. Slide three, eat extremely clean. Slide four, use this app blank to help you blah, blah, blah, comment app, and I'll send you it. And if you're posting three or four, three or four of these a day, and after seven days, you start seeing a bunch of comments, people commenting, app. That means there's serious demand for this product. And now you're able to spend the time and build the product and go all in because the idea is 100% validated. Step three, ship in seven days. I would build out the product in Rourke or whatever tool you prefer. And I would try to ship in seven days or less. The biggest mistake I see is founders overly obsessing over the product and spending two to three months to launch, which I personally experienced myself. You can always improve the product later after launch. Just try to get it out there and start optimizing for your metrics and start marketing and start bringing in revenue before you start adding that extra leaderboard feature or the extra sound app. Yeah. So step four, I would look for micro influencers. Now, once you're in the app store, now what I would do is look up keywords in your niche on Instagram and TikTok and try to find smaller creators who have 500 to a thousand followers who post consistently. I would reach out to them and pay them like a hundred dollars. For 10 videos and have them test out a bunch of different hooks, formats, and CTAs for my app. The goal would be for this is just to find your winning content style before putting any serious money behind it. Step five would be scale marketing. Now, once you found out which style performs the best, I would start running a UGC campaign either through side shift tribe, or you can even manually source creators and manage them separately, which I would highly recommend. For UGC, I would highly recommend hiring a VA on Fiverr, which is extremely inexpensive. And have him cold DM hundreds of creators in your niche who freight your criteria. And for me, my criteria was anywhere from five to 50,000 followers. They post consistently, they show their face and they have an active comment section. Those are all like the checklists. Now, once you're sitting at around 10 to 15 creators posting consistently, and you have a bunch of creatives, now you can start running paid ads behind those creatives. So once your UGC and paid ads are stable and profitable, I would go back and completely revamp the product and try to make it correct where you can hire a. developer or a product engineer or something along those lines. Now you can obsess over the product once your marketing is stable and you're at five to 10 K per month.
Speaker 1Okay, cool. Well, you know, thanks for sharing that playbook. What I'm curious to see is the actual app that you built. I'd love to see the app max app, how it works, what it does, how fancy it is. Would you be able to show me the app that made over $50,000 a month?
Speaker 2Yeah. So if you go over here, you're actually able to scan your ads and get a whole breakdown. You know, like your lower app score, your body fat percentage, and find out like exactly what's holding back your apps, whether it's body fat percentage, whether it's a must, your lack of muscle. And then from here, we have a bunch of pre-made workout plans and training programs. You can follow me personally. I've been following the summer app shredder, which is like a 30 day plan that you can follow to help you get shredded for the summer. Yeah. So that's pretty much app max, super simple. And I was actually the first one to come up with this idea, believe it or not. And there's zero competitors in this. It's kind of crazy.
Speaker 1You mentioned that, you know, you were the first to come up with this app idea. Here's the thing. Anybody can build an app max app, right? Building it is not the hard part. Hopefully if you're watching this video right now, you're on YouTube watching this and you've made it this far and you understand that the secret sauce has nothing really to do with how you built it. It's, it's the marketing strategy. It's the distribution. It's everything that you figured out at such a young age. So my last question for you, if you could give some advice to the people watching this right now, trying to figure out how to build an app max app, how to build an app max app. How to not only just build apps, but actually build an app that is crushing it and making a lot of money like yours. What would that advice be?
Speaker 2This kind of goes for any business. It's simply just do not give up and stop comparing yourself to all these people you see on social media who are doing six figures, seven figures. Don't compare your level two or your level three to someone else's level and just focus on your path and what's ahead. And what's the next step for you? You're going to go through some tough times where you literally think your life is over. Like my experience, I thought my life is over looking back on it now. It was no big deal, but you just have to keep going. And as long as you never give up and you show up every day and you continue getting better, it's physically impossible for you to lose. Like it's physically impossible for you to lose as long as you simply just never give up and get better every day and keep on showing
Speaker 1up. Well, that's great advice. Lino, you're crushing it. You're not even in college. Sure. You decided not to go to.
Speaker 2I dropped out after my first semester of freshman year, actually.
Speaker 1So yeah, you, you realize that. You can do this, watch a YouTube video, go on X, meet with founders, and you can build stuff that changes your life in six months, which is what you did. Hopefully people watching this are still watching this by now to show that this is possible. Lino, what you built is awesome. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for sharing everything so openly, even though you probably have a few copycats.
Speaker 2Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1All right, Gus, producer and co-host of Starter Story. What'd you think about Lino and the app, Max app? I hope people can really start to understand
Speaker 3through all of our interviews, there's so many app ideas out there that like are making money. It's, it's, it's so crazy to me. It's just like an app. Max idea seems just so like almost unbelievable. And yet he's still very successful and he's so young. And so those are some of the things I'm thinking about is like, man, you can really make money with anything.
Speaker 1No, I agree. It's, uh, it's not that complicated, you know, like, um, there's not some crazy marketing strategy to take away from this. It's just like take action, move forward. If someone like Lino, who's 18, 19 years old, didn't go to college, not technical. He can do it going online and learning, watching videos like Starter Story and going on X and connecting with founders and building an app that maxes your abs out. You know, there's nothing, there's nothing complicated here other than this guy just isn't scared to take action and put himself out there and, and fail.
Speaker 3Yeah. That's what he said to me on the phone when I, when I talked to him and I told him, I asked him a little bit more about his background. He was just like, yeah, I saw, I thought, I thought this was cool. Like I thought I saw these people sharing these apps on X and I thought, man, this is really cool. I want to do that too. And he just kind of went for it. And I thought that was, I was really impressed with that.
Speaker 1The other thing that I think is kind of cool about his app is that, uh, it is like a recreation of a marketing concept. That's as old as time, which is to get overnight abs, right? Like everyone wants abs. Everyone wants abs for the summer. There's going to be a summer every year and everyone wants to go look good at the beach. And whether it's a, uh, you know, a VHS that you buy online or an app that solves that problem, that problem will never go out of style. So I think that's cool. There's tons of more ideas like this. As I mentioned earlier, we have our iOS app ideas database, which you can click through right now. If you will click that link in the description and you can see a bunch of iOS app ideas that are making money or could potentially make a bunch of money. You go and execute just like Lino did. So I'll put that in the description. Thank you guys for watching. We'll see you in the next one. Peace.
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