This Insanely Simple App Makes $50K/Month

When I heard about this app idea, I could not believe my eyes. Hands down, one of the simplest ideas I've ever seen on this channel, and yet it makes over $50,000 a month. I launched at the end of 2025 and went from zero to $50,000 a month in four months. This is Jake. He's 24, and he saw a problem that almost everyone has. So he decided to build an app to solve it. And a few months later, that app has been downloaded over 200,000 times. Building doesn't really matter so much. What really matters is marketing. And so I prioritized that over everything. I asked Jake to come on the channel to break it all down. And in this episode, we'll dive into the insanely simple app idea and why it works, how he went from zero to over $50,000 a month in just four months, and the only two things that matter if you want to build a successful app. All right, let's dive in. I'm Pat Walls, and this is Starter Story. All right. Jake, welcome to Starter Story. Tell me about who you are, what app you built, and what's your story. Hey, Pat. Thanks for having me on. My name is Jake, and I built an app that does over $50,000 in revenue per month. I'm excited to share more about how I came up with and validated the idea, how I grew it to over $50,000 per month, and share my overall framework for building and growing apps solo. Okay, cool. All right. Well, congratulations. This is amazing growth, and I'm super excited to get, get into what you built, how you got the idea, all that. But first, show me what app you built. Show me some of your revenue screenshots. I want to see this is legit, and I want to see really, I'm curious what you built. Yeah, so the app is called Early. It helps you wake up early. It's an alarm clock app, and sort of the one-liner is push up to turn off your alarm. It's that simple. That's the main thing that we push through, through all of our marketing. That's sort of the novel aspect added onto the alarm app. This is the last 28 days of sales, done a little over $50,000. First time downloads, a little over 50,000 downloads. In the last 30 days, and in 2026, we've done a little over 200,000 downloads. Pretty standard app pricing model, free trial, and then $29.99 a year, or $99.99 a month. Okay, awesome. This is amazing. It's basically an alarm clock app. Super cool. I'm doing 50,000 a month really quickly. This is just crazy numbers. So we're going to get all into that, how you came up with this idea, how you built it, and how you grew it. I'm excited. But before we do, what's your background? Do you have a background coding up apps? How do you get to this place where you have a $50,000 per month iPhone app? I actually went to school for accounting. I did a four years undergrad in a year for my master's. I got my CPA and I worked in public accounting in a big four firm for a little over a year, but I've been coding. I'm self-taught like the last four years or so. Had some other businesses in the past. Nothing really worked. I've realized through all these failures that marketing is the most important thing. I started focusing on building an app as quickly as possible that solved a painful problem in a simple way. And then following these models that a lot of these other apps are using, like influencer marketing is the one that I picked, it's proven to work and yeah. Okay. Jake's app idea is so insanely simple. This is why I love it. This is the real secret. He did not build something complicated. Instead, he found a painful problem and built a dead simple solution around it. These are my favorite kinds of app ideas, and there are way more of them out there than you might think. And I want to prove this. This is why I put together this free database of over 30 successful mobile app ideas inside this database. You will find real revenue numbers, starting costs, tech stack, everything you want to know about what it takes to build these. The goal isn't that you just go and copy these. The goal is that you do your research, get inspired, and maybe even spark your next app idea. If you are ready to start building, just head to the first link in the description and you can grab this database 100% for free. All right, let's get back to the episode. Okay, amazing. I mean, what I love about this is that you didn't have like a crazy software technical background. You're kind of hacking away at stuff. But. School for was accounting, you're doing some accounting work, but now you have this app, it's crushing it. So I think one important thing is just the idea itself. This idea that you had where it's an alarm clock that makes you do push ups or makes you do something. It's a really cool idea. So I'm curious, how did you actually find this idea? How did you know it was something that could potentially make $50,000 a month? So I was having trouble myself waking up early and I started texting my friend the night before. Like, hey, I'm going to send you a video of me doing push ups by 6:00 a.m. tomorrow, and that was to hold me accountable. And so every. Every night I would send that text before it just held me accountable. It was great. And at that time, a lot of other apps were doing well. And I saw a lot of people on Twitter sort of doing well with apps. And I was at a point where I was sort of brainstorming my next idea and decided this would probably be a great idea. The MVP, the initial scope of the project was just an accountability app. So there was no alarm feature whatsoever. I built the app in three weeks and then I realized I didn't know how to market. I thought influencer marketing could kind of maybe work with it, but it wasn't too viral of an idea. So I took a whole day just to kind of walk. About it right in the direction I was going to take. And I had a few paths and decided on the alarm feature. This was right before I was 26 came out and I was 26 allowed you to connect your app to the native alarm system on iPhone using AlarmKit API to build a real alarm. Up until this point, there were a lot of other alarm apps out there, but they were sort of gimmicky and not reliable because they use different like app sounds and workarounds to make the quote unquote alarm. So now this was possible with the AlarmKit API. I figured it would be a good idea. I love this. That you mentioned this here is that like it's a little bit of luck and timing involved here is that like before alarm apps couldn't be that useful because they weren't 100 percent reliable, that's really important for an alarm app. But you had already shipped this thing that's kind of like fun accountability idea that was like a kind of a little bit of a gimmick thing that you're doing with your friend, you didn't really have any reason to ship that other than, hey, this could be cool if this existed as an app. You had that kind of early app version and then you had this kind of come to Jesus moment where you realize that, oh, these alarm apps can actually get better. These two things came together. Let's talk about how you actually learned to build something like this. I know it's not the most complex app in the world, but still, it's pretty legit. Can you give me an overview of how long it took you to build it and how you built it? Yeah. So it took about 19 days from my first commit to live on the app store. I was just getting the MVP out as quick as possible. It actually went out without the alarm feature. Funny enough, it was just sort of an accountability app to log your wake up. You'd set the goal the night before. The alarm feature went live about another 19 days after it was on the app source. It took a little over a month and then I knew I could build the product, but I didn't know if I knew how to market it. So my framework here was just ship fast, validate the idea as fast as possible, but I wasn't sure if I could get views. And I feel like that's sort of the most important thing. You got to build a good product, of course. But getting views is more of the unknown. Started marketing as fast as possible. My first influencer video went live seven days later. I saw people purchased from that video and at that point I knew the idea was validated and I went to try and scale it more. I did my first $1,000 in revenue three weeks after the first influencer video went up. And then first $30K month in month three and first $50K month in month four. Yeah, I mean, I agree with that is that in this AI world where you can build anything now and you don't really have to be even that technical, it's it's quite easy to build stuff. And your focus on views was really, really like that. And that's a good way to think about it. Before we get into the growth and how you did distribution, maybe there's not really like a framework on how to come up with great ideas. It's like ship stuff and think kind of like you did. So for anyone watching this, what would be your advice for people they're looking for an idea like this, something that can make $50,000 a month, which is like an app you can build? What advice would you have for people watching this that want to do the same as you? Yeah, my framework at this point is just solve a painful problem in a simple way and it should be inherently viral. If it's not inherently viral, the idea itself, then add some sort of novel aspect to it to make it inherently viral with AI. There's so much that's possible. If it's painful, people will pay. And if it's simple, it's easy to show the value in content very quickly. If it's something that's going through your head at least once a day, it's probably a really painful problem that you really want to solve and you're actively looking. Even if you don't know that you're looking for a solution for it, if the solution shows up, you're going to jump on it. In college, my roommate and I would talk every single night about how we were going to go to sleep early and how we're going to wake up early the next day, which is constant. Every single day is something that we talk about. Also, this is after the fact. But whenever I talk about the app with people or I show them, they either say, oh, I need this or I don't need this, but my friend needs this or my girlfriend needs this, someone in their life needs it pretty much every single time. So it's just a very painful problem. I agree with the painful thing. We've talked about that a lot on the channel. But the thing that I love about this, too, is the second point was that it's simple. Go back into the Starter Story channel right now if you're watching this and look at all the successful apps from people that we interview just like you. Every app is simple. Sometimes it's just one main killer feature. This is a very common thing across a lot of the successful apps and the fast growing ones like yours. Simple makes it easier to focus on distribution and growth. And that's the next topic that I want to get into is how did you actually grow this thing? I'm sure there's a thousand alarm clock apps on the App Store right now and growing every single day, but yours stood out. So how did you do that? How'd you go from zero to fifty thousand dollars per month? I started out by finding influencers on TikTok and Instagram, just reaching out, sending a ton of DMs early on, and it's a tough, a tough start. You get very few responses. And I was trying to find people who were doing in the life or lifestyle content where I thought the app could fit in naturally. That was like a big thing. For me was it fit in naturally. It was a really good sell to the influencer. They could continue making their existing videos except they would get paid for it. A lot of times with influencer marketing, it comes off as too much of an ad. And so the influencer needs a lot more money and a lot of a reason. It needs to be very compelling offer for them to want to take up a spot on their page. But if you find people that are already doing content where your app fits perfectly, like an alarm, they wake up in their day in the life videos and then push ups, which is inherently viral and intriguing as the viewer, then they're more willing to fit it into their videos. I mean, I feel like influencer marketing, so many ways to do it it's a very broad category so it'd be cool if you could show me one of the videos that did particularly well for you that got a lot of views and converted to a lot of signups would you be able to share one of those with me yeah so here's a perfect example video a pov in the life of a college student wakes up shows the alarm going off shows the push-ups and then in the app it's analyzing and it turns into a green check and says alarm turned off it's super subtle uh super natural and i sort of view it and sort of when i sell it to the influencer it's like a win-win-win they get to continue making their videos and get paid for it i get downloads for the app and the viewer gets a solution to a problem that they're having without really watching an ad like it just fits in so naturally and then pretty much every single video if it's shown well will result in a comment like what's the app name and then they just respond below early on the app store generally they pin the comment on instagram i love that example because in that video specifically it shows off your app right away and then it just feels natural feels like a day in life video if you like this influencer or you like their life or their lifestyle you might want to try that out too so you can live a day in life like that so i think that's great a video like that what what is the deal structure for people watching this they're probably wondering how much do i got to pay you for something like that how many downloads does this turn into can you give me some of the numbers behind a video like that yeah generally the deal structure is multiple videos a month like two to four videos a month with a view guarantee that's sort of the most important part is that you're paying for the views that you get and so i view it as pretty low risk honestly you can sort of cap what you're going to pay and take the risk and then see what the return is pretty quickly once the video goes live it takes about a day to sort of hit the peak on views and then you see what your returns are generally paying around like two to three dollars cpm based on the view guarantee and then the money's really made on those big videos it's sort of power law a lot of videos will sort of do okay every once in a while you know big one million two million five million view video and that's where you really make money okay so i'm curious for a video like that are you able to track how many sales that leads to because i noticed that it's in the comments and someone uh we chatted with someone just recently said conversions happen in the comments but i imagine some people just are searching for your app and it's not trackable so how would you track something like that use any tools for that or how do you approach that yeah it's extremely difficult to measure with influence from marketing i recommend staying super simple just track views and measure spikes is sort of the approach that i take so i'll track all the videos and i have historical data and then when a spike happens i'll see you can be pretty sure that that video resulted in what you're seeing if you see a spike in views along with a spike in conversions and so i sort of take that approach i view it as sort of like a black box put in 5k and you get out 10 that worked you don't know exactly who generated the most profit but if you see a spike you can be reasonably sure that that video was driving that and then you can sort of measure but ultimately you're gonna lose money on individual creators and you probably won't know who it's just inevitable all right let's let's switch topics a little bit and talk about how you run this thing and what tools you use i know you're kind of a one-man show here built this app did a lot of the marketing in the beginning what are all the tools what's your whole stack to run an app that makes fifty thousand dollars a month like this yeah solo founder i have helped now i think it's inevitable in terms of running uh everything i use firebase for the database authentication and cloud functions within the app super wall for paywall and subscription management he's open ai for ai api i use mixed panel for in-app analytics and of course cloud code the absolute best tool for actually building the app and then for marketing crowey for influencer tracking and payments side shift for ugc creator sourcing tracking and payments instantly for emails this is great for sending out mass emails for influencer outreach cal for booking meetings agree for contracts and then google sheets i feel like i have to mention sort of run everything through that and then just general business tools to use quickbooks for accounting keeps everything super clean and then one password for a password manager on a personal note apps.google.com/passwordmanager absolutely life changer could not recommend any more to set up one password all right thanks for sharing that awesome tech stack i'd love if you gave me a demo of your app it's a super cool idea so i'd love you could just show me how it works and what it actually looks like can you show me your push-up alarm clock app that makes fifty thousand dollars a month yeah so super simple uh you just create an alarm set the time set it for every day choose a mission push-ups and then i like the birds sound save the alarm the alarm goes off when you open the app it asks you to do push-ups and then you can see the alarm goes off when you open the app asks you to do push-ups and then it analyzes and it says alarm turned off you can't fake it say i did push-ups it actually i wasn't able to see it but i'm guessing that it did some sort of analysis yeah yeah like the video and then make sure you actually did push-ups well that's it that's what i love about this app what you built it's simple i have to wake up and do push-ups it doesn't need a thousand features it's awesome and it's making fifty thousand dollars a month that's amazing last question that i wanted to ask you that we ask all founders to come on starter story if you go back to the back in time when you were uh working your accounting job or when you were you know just in college thinking about building apps what advice would you give to young jake or what advice would you give to people watching this that want to build an app like you focus on top of funnel only that is the most valuable skill right now is marketing there's so many people that can build an app and it's so easy with ai but there's not so many people that know how to market and know how to get views and if nobody knows about your app it doesn't exist you can build as many features as you want when you're building an app solo i think it's extremely important that you limit your scope and focus on what's really important which is solving a painful problem in a simple way push-ups to turn off the alarm and putting all your effort into marketing thank you for coming on jake dude love this what you built it's super cool it just goes to show that yeah it's all about distribution there are a million alarm apps out there but yours is making fifty thousand dollars a month because of all this awesome stuff that you've been working on so thanks for coming on and sharing it's gonna be an inspiration to everyone watching thanks for having me all right gus producer of starter story what'd you think about jake and early man first of all really cool idea that's one of the reasons i wanted to bring him on it's because it's just like a such a crazy simple idea like alarm clock yeah yeah crazy uh and then just i i liked his personality right like sometimes we have guys on here that are like i don't know feel like they're really analytical or feel like they've kind of all together and he just kind of was like i'm a normal dude i just learned how to do this you can do it too yeah one thing that he touched on for a second but i actually thought it was really it might be interesting and might be useful for people that are watching this and looking for business ideas is that he mentioned that the api changed for alarm kit or something like that which is i'm guessing some sort of api that apple exposes to be able to use their alarm functionality and then all of a sudden this is now you're seeing all these alarm apps i had tweeted about one that he had mentioned and then his came up and i'm sure there's a bunch more this is a little thing that i think people who are looking for ideas look at changes to apis that apple or other platforms enable usually there's a slew of apps that will get released when there is a new change in the api when they expose for example something new in the camera apple allowed you to programmatically do widgets or they programmatically do screen time so you have all the screen blocking apps right so every time there's a new improvement to the api which there's a lot nowadays because all these companies are shipping faster there are thousands of business ideas that become easier to build but there's not there's a short window of time to do it right i think that's an interesting little tidbit and the other thing i really like that he said at the end if you caught it or if you if you're watching this hopefully you saw that what do you say he was like focus on top of funnel only yeah yeah that throughout was like views were the only thing like that mattered and obviously this video was kind of episode was kind of framed around like the idea and how cool it is etc which it is but man every time we talk to these guys i'm just reminded like marketing is like the hardest thing but the most important thing and he was really clear about that and it's just yeah for someone like me i'm building a few things i'm like man maybe i should just stop and just like post on tick tock or whatever you know or figure out the whatever he was talking about with the influencers point being like marketing is like the actual secret sauce to almost everybody that we talked to distribution specifically video organic video content creation or understanding of video that performs on in algorithms whether you're doing yourself or you're hiring influencers like he did is the number one skill you can have right now building is easy now or it's just getting easier every single day but creating content putting yourself out there not only is it hard but it's scary and that's why it prevents a lot of people from doing it but it's the number one skill you can have watch every single starter story video every single person has that skill and it's the biggest skill you can have in the world so hopefully if you're watching a starter story you'll realize that but on that same note you still need an idea so if you check out the link in the description we will link to our 30 plus mobile app ideas these are ideas that are generating revenue right now ideas that you can build i'll put that link in the description you can download it right now 100 for free all right guys let us know what you thought in the comments about early the push up alarm clock app otherwise we'll see you in the next one peace