In eight months, I've built and shipped over 28 apps. This is Max, a full-time developer who spent years building apps with no success. I had my bike mobile pet project. I really wanted to grow. And I spent so much time on it, like tried different techniques. Nothing worked out. Until one day, he decided to try something different. Instead of trying to build the perfect app, he'd shipped dozens of apps really fast. I have a record one app I've built in two hours. In just eight months, he shipped 28 apps and went from $200 a month to $10,000 a month, all while working his full-time job. Once the app is live, just let it go and move on to the next project. Most people think you need one big app to win, but Max proves that you can be successful with a portfolio of tiny bets. I asked Max to come onto the channel to break down his entire system, and in this video, we'll dive into his step-by-step process for finding ideas that actually can make money, exactly how he ships apps in just a few hours, and his step-by-step playbook you can use to ideate, build, and launch your next app in 48 hours. This one right here is for the builders. You cannot miss it. I'm Bow Walls, and this is Starter Story. All right, Max, welcome to the channel. Tell me about who you are, what you built, and what's your story. My name is Max. I'm father of two, a loving husband, and an iOS engineer in my daily job. During my off-work hours in eight-month time, I've built a portfolio of 28 simple mobile apps that are now bringing me $10,000 monthly revenue. And the total subscribers across all apps is over 1000 subscribers, and the daily users like 4 or 5k across all my apps. And the biggest chunk of revenue comes from the four apps, and each one brings around $1,500, and the rest they generate very small numbers. So basically, there's a clear example of the famous 80-20 rule. We're going to get into that and how you ship these so fast, but first I got to understand how do you even get to this point? What's your background? Are you a developer? How do you get to this point where you're shipping a new app basically every week? I started my career in software engineering as an iOS developer, and that was around eight years ago. And like many of us did, I had my mobile pet project I really wanted to grow, and I spent so much time on it, like tried different techniques, nothing worked out. And then February this year, I came across Adam Slital's video on YouTube, and that literally changed my entire understanding of how to build apps. The old understanding was you have your one project, you have to grow it and just focus all your effort, all your time into it. And then Adam Slital, he showed that you could keep building simple apps. You create one app, one feature, ship it, forget about it, and jump onto another app. So that was something that I've never thought about, and I was so surprised this approach exists. And I'm happy that I went that way. Okay, so you find this new kind of way of thinking about how to approach building apps. Don't have any ego around your idea, ship lots of different things. We're going to get all into that. Before we do, I want to understand, how do you actually find good ideas for apps? Very first step, just to find the right keyword. Basically how I look at it, if a user has a problem, they open the app store and start searching by entering search term or a keyword into the search bar. And here's my process. First of all, my main source of ideas is the well-known AISO tool, Astro. And then I pick a random category or something that I really want to build myself and search for various relevant keywords. I also try looking at areas that might have be closely related keywords that target the same group users, but solving slightly different problems. For example, if you take study apps, you can target physics AI, chemistry AI, math AI. So these are different keywords, but they are related to students. That gives me an opportunity after creating one app to quickly jump into the closely related keywords in just no time. When I do my research, I make sure the keyword has at least 20% of popularity and 60% or 70% difficulty. When I find interesting keywords, I usually check top competitors and look at their monthly revenue, which you could do with a sensor tower or similar tools. My benchmark is at least 100 or 200 euro per month. If the competitor does less, meaning there's not that much money in that market, so there's no worth going there. What Max is doing here is genius. He has this very fine tune system for finding ideas, shipping fast, and then moving on to the next one. If you stick around to the end of this video, he's going to talk about exactly how he does this, which I think you will enjoy, but this whole thing got me thinking. If you love watching people build fast and think big like Max, then I definitely think you should check out The Hustle, who is the sponsor of today's video. The Hustle is a free daily email that makes business news actually fun to read. They cover offbeat stories like Max's every single day, and it's the kind of stuff that will actually inspire you to build and launch that business idea no matter how crazy it sounds. I've been reading The Hustle for years, and it's one of the few emails I actually look forward to opening. It's fast, it's punchy, and it always gives me at least one story to talk about with my friends. Plus, it makes me sound way smarter than I actually am. So if you're building apps looking for your next side hustle or just love discovering business ideas before everyone else, The Hustle is for you. Hit the link in the description, subscribe to The Hustle, and you'll get daily stories to keep innovators like you in the loop with stories on business, tech, and the internet. Thank you to The Hustle for sponsoring this video. Let's get back to the story. Max, that Astro tool seems really cool. Could you just show me like an example of how you'd find an idea? Let's say it's the tree identifier idea. Basically, what I do, I create a temporary app, and then you can add a keyword, and then you go with the tree identifier, and then you bring up the apps, and then you just pick some closely related. This is obviously not the one that we want. This is probably a nice one. And then you look through the keywords, and then you just go popularity. That's just I mentioned, say starting from 20 and difficulty 70. So you see the like wood identification, kind of popular, and the difficulty is very low. I would build that because I probably might target for this keyword and get some good results. And then like I select my keywords that I'll be targeting, add them to selection. And then what I do, I open the app store to see the revenue of this app. And if it's nice enough, like if it's big, then I just go for that. Okay, cool. So let's talk about that. What is your build process? Like how do you build all these apps? And how do you build them so quickly? First, I pick two, three competitors and just study the app and pay close attention to the main feature that closely related to the keyword. So I don't bother with anything else. Then I tell chat gpt or Gemini that I want to build an app for a given keyword, I provide some specific UI UX constraints and ask for a detailed implementation plan. Next, I create a project I drag and drop some UI elements, custom buttons, views, like screens. So instead of building a new setting screen over and over again, I just drag and drop and same with onboarding and paywall. And for some apps, I basically copy like 90% of the code, which gives me like the instant time for the building and the app is shipped like in a couple of hours. Then once the app is ready, I open Figma, create a new project there and the copy screenshots and up icon templates from all projects. And then once I have everything ready, so the app is built, then I finally ask GPD to generate the app description. I fill in all the metadata, make sure they are relevant to the keyword that I've selected originally. And then the app is ready for distribution. And my process usually takes, it depends on the app, some apps might take a week, because like I need to do one thing, the other thing, but I have a record one up, I've built like in two hours from the idea that came into my head till I submitted to review to the app store. Okay, before we finish the video, I wanted to pop in real quick and share how cool I think this whole thing is that Max is doing. Find the idea, build it, ship it, next project. This strategy is genius because building software is changing. When anyone, including your grandma can build an app, how fast you can ship apps really matters. And this is exactly the kind of stuff that we teach inside Starter Story Build. In Starter Story Build, we will not only show you how to build an app with AI, but more importantly, we will teach you a framework that you can use to ship apps over and over again. If you join Starter Story Build in just a few weeks, you will have a real working app. And in just a few months, you might be quitting your job and going all in on building apps. If you've gotten to this point in the video right here, I have a deal for you. Just put code 28apps at checkout for 20% off your next Starter Story Build bootcamp. Our next bootcamp starts this week and this offer won't last forever. So if you're ready to build, head to the link in the description to check out Starter Story Build and remember to use the code 28apps. That's 28-A-P-P-S for 20% off. All right, let's get back to the video. Okay, that's crazy how fast you can ship these apps. I really think there's something there, building and shipping new apps every single week. So for anybody who's watching this right now, I'd love if you just broke down the steps from actually taking an app from Idea to shipping it to the App Store. Break down the exact steps on how to do this if you were starting over today. Always begin with finding strong keywords. Make sure the popularity difficulty is great ratio and make sure the top apps are making real revenue so you want to build apps in the market that pay because I don't want to waste my time on building apps that don't bring any revenue. Step two, study competitors and define the core feature. Review the top apps in the category, analyze them and choose the single core feature that will solve the main user problem better and more efficiently. Step three, plant fast with the AI. Use the AI tool to generate a clear development roadmap. Feature breakdown and UX structure. That removes the guesswork and lets you start building with clarity and speed. I use Corsair or Claude and I just ask them to write down all the screens and all the features and the flaws so I can see the clear picture and I can understand which screens I need to build, which screens I need to copy over from the previous projects. Step four, build lean and ship quickly. Focus on shipping a clean MVP with the only features necessary to deliver value. Step five, release and move to the next build. Once the app is functional, polished enough and live, just let it go. Move on to the next project. Let data decide which apps sync on which float. When you just ship the app, you get this famous up store boost but then over time it fades away and then I see if it keeps going down or it's kind of stabilized or even growing and if the app is not syncing it means it has potential. And the last step, step six, return to winners and scale with ads. So after some time I do revisit apps that show organic traction or retention and for once the ones that float I start improving them, do some polishing, do some bug fixes and add ads. Just to double down on the results and make sure that they grow. And that's pretty much my playbook for the old the apps that I launched. I want to switch topic slightly and talk about tech stack. How do you build your apps? What tools do you use and what languages are they built on? I don't have a lot of tools but here they are. Flutter, this is the framework that I use for the app development. Fastlane, this is the thing that I use for shipping everything fast. Then I use Corsair for AI coding. Firebase, this is everything. This is my apps backend. This is the authentication database and even website hosting. I also use OpenAI and Gemini for image recognition and the AI work. Mixpanel, used for analytics and I use Astro5s and Foxdata for iOS and Android. Okay and on a similar note, I'm curious about costs and margin. You're making over $10,000 a month from over 28 apps. What are the costs to run this whole app empire? Corsair goes for like $20 a month. Fastlane, this is free tool, so $0 a month. OpenAI is a bit costly. It's like $200 a month. Gemini goes for $50 a month. Firebase, even though there's so much going on, it doesn't cost much because I don't really go over the free tier. So it's around $5 to $10 a month. Mixpanel, I'm using a free plan so I don't pay anything. Astro goes for like $10 a month and Foxdata, I'm also on the free plan, so it's $0 a month. Okay, well thanks for sharing that, being super transparent about the numbers. Cool to see how lean you actually run this operation. Last question that I have for everyone who comes on to Starter Story. If you could give one piece of advice to Max just a year ago on what to do, what to work on, or for anyone watching right now who wants to do the same as what you're doing, what would be your advice? The most important advice would be not to be afraid of shipping. Don't waste your time on polishing it up, thinking about adding one more killer feature that would definitely get your ton of users. No, don't do it. Get it ready, box free, just one single feature, ship it and let users tell you what they think about it while you're building another app. That's amazing. Best advice I heard all month, Max. Thank you for coming on, sharing all this. It's amazing what you're doing. I think it might be the future of building apps in software, so super cool to see and I'm sure it's going to keep growing. Thanks for coming on. Thank you. Thank you to Max for coming onto the channel. I think that his approach is really cool. The fact that he did it all while he had a full-time job, he's making $10,000 a month with 28 apps, that just shows you what is happening in the software and app landscape right now. Need to be able to build stuff fast, reuse different components and just try a lot of different things. Building that shipping muscle is super, super important and I imagine that one day he's going to stumble onto a very, very big idea and be able to execute on it flawlessly. Again, this is exactly what we teach inside Starter Story Build. We help you build that shipping muscle. We help you come up with an idea, build it, launch it and get it into the hands of real users. It takes a lot of courage to build something and put it out into the world shamelessly. Alright guys, I hope you enjoyed this episode. Thank you for watching. We'll see you in the next one. Peace.
