This Stupidly Simple App Makes $100K/Month

When I heard about this app idea, I started cracking up because I thought there's no way this thing actually makes any money until I found out just how much it was making. I am 20 years old. I built an app called Go Tall that now makes on average about 100k a month. This is Michael. He's a 20 year old college student who came across his idea inside the comments of a TikTok video. Instead of continuing to scroll, he decided to build the thing and it worked. After two days of launching it, I already had the first sale. I asked Michael to come onto the channel to break this all down. In this episode, we'll dive into his unbelievable app idea that makes $100,000 every month, how he knew before that this was an idea that could blow up, and his advice for finding other mobile app ideas that can make over $100,000 a month. All right, this is one you cannot miss. I'm Pat Walls. This is Starter Story. All right, Michael, welcome to the show. I am super pumped to have you and talk about this super cool app that you built. So tell me, who are you? What'd you build? And what's your story? So my name is Michael. I am 20 years old in college. And last summer, I built an app called Go Tall that now makes on average about 100k a month. So yeah, I'm excited to share about the idea behind it, how I came up with it, and just walk you through my growth strategies. All right, so you're doing 100k per month with a height predictor app. I don't really even, you know, what that means, but we're going to get all into it. I'm super excited to talk about it. But before we do, let's prove this. I want to make sure that this is legit. Would you be able to pull up some of your revenue numbers, your website, show me what the app does, and show me how much revenue this thing's actually making? The premise of the app is more so that it is a height prediction app. And then we try to put, you know, things on there to help like teenagers better optimize their habits. And hopefully through that, they can naturally actually reach their max like potential height. It's a pretty standard subscription. We have a $35 yearly, $5 weekly plan. And then if users don't want to pay that, we have sort of a freemium onto our app where they can still access, you know, different features. This is my apps for connect by sales. This is my daily sales from January till now. This is my super wall of new users broken down by monthly. Yeah, so I have 700,000 downloads on the app store and then a couple hundred thousand on Android as well. So it adds up to be about a million downloads overall. Thanks for sharing that $100,000 a month with an app. You mentioned that you are still in college and you're 20 years old. That's absolutely crazy. So I got to hear how do you get here? Like how do you get to the point where you haven't even graduated college and you have this app that is making over $100,000 a month? Yeah, you know, I was a student at NYU. I was a finance student. I was recruiting for the jobs and I basically got rejected from like all of my dream jobs. At the time, I was really seeing so it was last summer. I was seeing a lot of startups take off on good marketing and I just felt like I could do it myself as well. When I was a teenager, I was developing my own apps even before like AI, but I was just never really good at marketing. And I thought to myself, I had to learn marketing. And so I was just doing any app idea that I could find. This was one of the first ones I thought had potential. And I was like, even if this app failed, at least I would come out with the skills of like how to do marketing. I love Michael's approach to finding ideas and thinking about customer pain points. His idea is proof that literally any app idea can make money if you think about it the right way. But I think one of the secrets behind this app success is simply that it's built in a pretty smart category, which is health and self-improvement apps. I think this is a great place to be building. And it's exactly why I put together the health, wealth, and self-improvement app ideas database. Inside this database, you'll find over 50 successful app ideas in this space. And we'll break it all down, including monthly revenue, startup costs, tech stack, and the real data behind these actually successful businesses. If you're looking for your next idea, or you're looking for a good problem to solve, just head to the link in the description. You can grab the database 100% for free. All right, let's get back to the episode. One of my favorite stories when I hear founders who, you know, suffered some sort of rejection, like you didn't get your dream job you're looking for. So you said, screw it, I'm going to go build apps. Similar story for me is I was working in a job that I didn't like. I just wanted to build something cool. I wanted something different. So that's awesome. Let's move a little bit to the idea, because this idea is crazy. It's almost preposterous, this height predictor app, but it's obviously crushing it. So let's talk about how did you find this idea? And then second, how did you know it was a good idea and worth like throwing everything into? I first saw this idea when I was looking on website, literally websites like a choir.com because I was like, I don't know any good ideas. I want to find a validated idea. And I saw an app that's pretty similar to this for sale for around $20,000. And then I thought to myself, like, wait, actually, this is definitely a real problem. Because I was when I was 13 years old, I was looking up like height calculator on Google or something. So that's when I began like building it. And then I remember like, after two days of launching it, I already had the first sale. And that was also a huge amount of validation. For me, because I didn't even get that many views. And I was like, wow, people really want this. And then the second thing is that on TikTok, if you just look at any sort of height video in general, I would see people saying like, oh, I am six foot, I'm 15. My mom's this height, my dad's this height, people just want to give that information. And I assume like they wanted to get predicted. And so one of my first viral formats was just replying to those comments and predicting their height. Dude, that's super cool. There's two things you mentioned that I think are really cool is that you went on acquire.com and you found an idea that was already proven. You didn't buy it, I'm assuming. And you went and just built it yourself. You've talked to other founders who have done the same thing. So I think that's a super cool little tactic that you mentioned there. But more importantly, what you did is you remembered a personal problem that you had. And then you further validated that because you're a little older now. Then you further validated that by going into actual TikTok comments and further validating that people were experiencing these problems. All good business ideas come from problems. Solving problems. So I think that's super cool. On that note, what would be your advice for other people who are watching this right now who want to find an app that's crushing it like yours? What would be your advice for those people watching right now? I would say there's just like so many more ideas that can be successful that people thought like I feel like a lot of people, they see that some ideas already existing. And then they're just like, Oh, I'm out. You know, like, I'm not going to build this anymore. Whereas even in today's age, like there's still calorie trackers doing 30k a month when you have Cali. I like that. It does not make sense to me at all. And I feel like just seeing that sort of phenomenon happening, it just proves that no idea like has already done before. And you can always try to do the same idea someone else did and still make it successful with your own tweaks and things like that. The other thing you want to make something that really hits with people's needs. I had my TikTok and I would have like 10, 20 DMs a day of people requesting their height to be predicted. People were like, really care about this like height. prediction thing. There's some problems that you can really just see and you're like, wow, this is an actual painful problem. I think the Maslow hierarchy of needs is a really good framework for like, what do people like want? If you think about your app idea, ideally, it can fit into like one of these categories, the more like things that hits the better. So for example, for me, the the height prediction app one, it hits the esteem part because people want to know that they're going to be tall because they want you know, respect from other people height is that and also love and belonging. Maybe they feel like you know, getting tall is the only way they can get like a girlfriend hits two of the five when you think about your app and think about the Maslow's hierarchy needs, you can better think about like, oh, is my app actually going to be useful to people? Okay, so you mentioned something again, we're thinking about apps that have demand, and you clearly had demanded you mentioned something really key here is that like, you notice that people really cared, they cared about their height, they cared enough to send you a DM. A lot of times when we build startups, we build something and then we get no DMS. So that's just such a key insight there that you notice because you're getting those DMS, you notice that people cared. Therefore, it was an app that could make $100,000 a month. So I think that's super cool and kind of low key genius. Let's move on to the growth because obviously anybody can build a height predictor app, you could probably do it in a few hours with my cloud code right now. How did you get this app users and ultimately get it to $100,000 a month? First, it was me just making content myself, it took about a month of just experimentation purely with content. I'm making 10 tech talks every day. So then eventually, I found the format because I only had one format, I had one distribution channel, it's very easy to see the attribution, like I know exactly 100k views equals how many downloads and then based on that, I'm like, okay, now I know I can hire creators for this amount of price with the format, I replicated it myself on like two different accounts, and they both blew up. I had my girlfriend do it too. And like her account blew up. I was like, okay, this is like an easy format, I can like teach anybody. So I just went on DM like 50 people a day to be like, Hey, would you want to make format make this video, it's super easy. And so they were able to they were willing to do it for a very cheap price. Basically, just myself plus a few UGC creators were able to do maybe like 3k a month after I optimized my paywall and scaled a little more, it was about 10k a month. In month five, it was about 30k a month, as I explored even more formats. And after 30k a month, it was simply just putting paid ads to scale over a hundred yeah that's this is the classic playbook that we hear a lot these days now as you kind of crack ugc you figure out what kind of organic content works and then you just put ads behind that content that you know already works and then it works even better with ads so that's super cool thanks for sharing that let's talk about the tech stack what's the tech stack behind this app that makes over a hundred thousand dollars a month yeah i'd say tech stack is very cheap used expo to make it so that's both ios and android super wall for paywalls and then we use adapty as well in order to get advanced payouts since you know apple's payout cycles are brutally long uh and then i use a mmp i use a singular mmp for three cents per install cool simple tech stack okay now i'm excited to see the app i like talking about the idea how you built it the growth all that stuff but now i want to see what this app is can you show me the height predictor app that makes 100 thousand dollars per month and give me just a demo of how it works so we can see what i'm most proud of is the onboarding basically as i'm predicting the height the users kept on giving like more of their own information to the comment because they want a more accurate high prediction and so that just resulted in the onboarding being like super long the more information that you can get the more predictive of the height you could be exactly and then the app actually does in the beginning it didn't but it actually pulls a lot of like research papers to actually give the high prediction so the base is like the cdc data of like you know whatever your doctors gives you at the doctor's appointment but then all these other questions have like links to research studies that we use to adjust your like final height so this is like a puberty quiz this will see like where you are in puberty and that will have a very big effect of like how much you actually are and this paywall has about like a 91 paywall show rate this might be pretty long yeah i'm kind of just skipping over everything because i've seen this like a hundred times and do you have to pay and subscribe for the app to see the the ultimate prediction yes correct so that part is paid but you can do sort of you know stretches you know you can scan meals and you can log your sleep and the whole thing is that your high prediction is going to like change as the weeks go by the more you actually log in on the app since like we can see how much you've been growing it will actually give you like a lot of information about how much you've been growing and like the most accurate high prediction you get them in the door with this high prediction which everyone is excited to see what it is but then you keep them on subscription over what kind of habits can i do to help potentially obviously there's no guarantees you're gonna increase your height it's a lot of genetics and things like that but maybe there are some habits that can help you you know get a little bit more marginal gain from it yeah yeah i'm super happy that like people really finding value all right cool well thank you for sharing the app super cool app simple app i like simple i love simple hopefully you're watching this and you realize it doesn't need to be complicated to make money and have a successful app last question that we ask all founders that come onto the channel if you go back in time to you know younger michael when you're interviewing for jobs you got rejected from your dream jobs you wanted to build something what would be your advice to younger michael before you built this app or for anybody watching this who wants to do the same something that i think would actually be helpful i am from an environment where people are going to do prestigious content and i think it's going to be something that i think is going to be really helpful if they're going to do corporate jobs or if they're going on the startup space they're going raise billions of dollars from vcs onto some solving some really complex problem last summer i basically just got rid of my ego doing this high prediction app gives me zero like social status or anything it's it's a huge like embarrassment i remember i would go to people i'm like yeah i'm building the high prediction app and people are just like yeah like good luck right i feel like there is gems when you're willing to completely let your ego go go make the stupid tick tocks go do the idea that you think has potential even though it's so unglamorous so i feel like at least with my story i think that's what's the example of letting yourself away from that social pressure no that's great advice and it's really cool that you figured that out at such a young age there's a saying i can't remember what it is but in order to be successful you need to uh climb up cringe mountain and you need to make it to the top of cringe mountain and once you get to the top of cringe mountain then you'll be successful and i think that's actually really good advice and clearly it worked for you so thanks michael for coming on dude super cool app so thanks for coming on man thank you so much pat and thanks for asking all the insightful questions i had great time all right gus producer of starter story what'd you think about this one yeah my instant reaction which is why i wanted to have him on the channel was like i always see these there's this guy on twitter i follow it's always just posting random ideas and i'm always like man who are the people behind this app this is one of those ideas i saw and i was like a high prediction app like what is that how does that make money how did he find the idea my reaction is just like just so like unbelievable that people for this but when he described it i was like it makes a lot of sense it's not like it's not out of this world so those are my some initial thoughts when i first saw when he explained what his app did it's like okay that's cool and then i was like that probably maybe does 10k a month like kind of maxed out and he's like oh it does 100k a month i was like oh my gosh like and then you're right i started to put the dots together and think okay well this is a really common problem that all people have they want to be taller you want to be taller the most interesting thing for me was that he actually kind of started by creating content and when he was creating this content on tick tock super easy content to create people were messaging him hey can you predict my height can you predict my height he saw that and he said hey okay it's cool they're asking for me to my height and i can make videos about it that's cool but i think it can be actually even bigger doesn't need to go viral first to know it's going to be something big people just need to care yeah it just reminds me like i i think he said this at the end but like whatever success is like climbing cringe mountain or something like that is what you said and i feel like that is the number one thing that has held me back and probably a lot of people watching is like the inability feel cringe or put themselves out there share an idea and risk essentially risk like feeling stupid or like you know whatever getting hateful comments etc but when you if you can get by that like he was saying at the end doesn't mean you're gonna like always obviously make 100k per month but you're gonna find an idea or read a comment or get a weird dm that leads to xyz thing yeah no it's really easy in hindsight to look back and be like oh that was successful of course it was going to be successful what he mentioned towards the end of our interview what most people don't get is the amount of insecurity and uncertainty when you first have an idea when you first have a height predictor app and people look at you like you're insane to keep going through something like that that's where every founder on our channel shines that's what what it means to be a founder is to push through when nobody believes in you it feels like it's only risk you're not making any money and that's it so on that note if you are looking for ideas like this i think it's amazing to build anything in the health wealth and relationships space people experience so much pain and problems in this space if you can solve those problems i think you can win so if you're curious we put together a list of over 50 ideas in this space you can download them for free right now i put them in the description right now these are real ideas making real money and you can check them out right now all right hope you guys enjoyed this episode we'll see you in the next one peace