My name is David. I made an app that makes $12,000 per month. This is David Adias, a guy from France who up until six months ago had a regular job. That was until he saw an opportunity that most people would miss. I was very amazed by the fact they were making $200,000 per month after three months. He came across a mobile app making $200,000 a month, but when he used it, he thought to himself, I think I can build something better. So in a couple weeks, he vibe coded a loan, changed the colors, switched the niche, and just six months later, he's gone from zero to $10,000 a month. I brought David onto the channel to break down his entire playbook. And in this video, we'll dive into the app he cloned and how he validated, how he built his new app in just a month, and the key change he decided to make to it. And lastly, we'll go over the exact playbook he would use if he had to start over today. All right, this one is going to be fun. Let's get into it. I'm Pat Walls, and this is Starter Story. All right, David, welcome to the channel. Tell me about who you are, what you built, and what's your story? My name is David. I made an app that makes $12,000 per month. I built that app five months ago and to fund the idea for my app, I cloned a very successful app and first month of revenue, I made $5,000. That's awesome. It is something that I've been hearing about recently, taking kind of proven English or American apps and localizing them to different countries. So I think there's something there. So I'd like to just know a little bit more about your app. What does it do? Who uses an app like this and how does it work? That's a mobile app for women to stop their so-called cravings. My customers are around 13 years old to 25, so like mostly GenZ women. And we have a monthly subscription. We have a weekly and we have a VRE with a trial as well. Okay, cool. That's amazing. And I think what you did is really cool with this app. But before we get into that, I just want to understand some of the numbers behind this. How many downloads, how many users, how much revenue has this made? So in five months, I got $60,000. The paying customers is around 900 people and I've been working mainly with French influencers because I noticed that there was no one in France doing something like to help women by cutting the complexity process sogar. Okay, my next question is how do you even get into building mobile apps? I understand you don't come from a developer background. How do you even find the idea to do something like this? I worked 8 years as a quant trader. So basically, I was helping the traders to figure out which stocks to buy. And then I discovered some famous indie hackers like Peter Levels and Thibault from Outrank and Jack who made the post bridge. And I got really inspired by their story because they were able to generate a lot of cash quickly. And five months ago, I was watching a podcast on YouTube with a street teenager, the founders of Critter. And after month three, I heard like they were making like $200,000 per month. And I was envious, I was jealous. And that's what got me started to start. Okay, I want to talk for a second about how David built this app. It was a few months ago, and he used cursor and a few other tools to clone the app in about a month. But this space is changing quickly. And I want to tell you about a new tool that makes it even easier and faster to build rocket rocket. Let's you go from just a few senses to a full stack app. Just describe your vision and in a few minutes, you will get a complete functional app back end integrations and production ready code, everything with rocket.new. You can import designs from Figma, just like David did and integrate with Stripe and Subabase in just a few clicks. 400,000 users from around the world are building with rocket because it's the simplest way to turn ideas into apps in minutes and not months. So if you're ready to finally build your idea faster than ever, check out rocket at the first link in the description. Thank you to rocket for sponsoring this video. I love what you guys are building. All right, let's get back to the video. One of the big reasons I wanted to bring you on the channel, you took a proven app and you sort of made it 1% different. And now you have a really successful app. So can you tell me a little bit more about how you found the idea and how you decided to clone that specific idea? The way that I found this idea is from YouTube. I saw the triggers on YouTube and I was really amazed by the fact they were making $200,000 per month after three months. And then when I downloaded the Twitter app, I was very pleased by their onboarding. And I did one exact copy of their onboarding because it was so good. Well, okay, cool. That's amazing. On this topic of cloning, you can find an idea, then you can find another niche to put it in. But my question for you is, how did you know that this niche, quitting sugar, was an app that was worth building and something that people would pay for? How did you validate this? Basically what I did, I went on Google Trends. I was looking for a keyword such as stop sugar. And because for the past five years, the trend of those keywords is basically going higher and higher and higher. And then I took for the same keywords on TikTok and Instagram. And I saw that there were a ton of women influencers that they were talking about quitting sugar, about stopping sugar. So I validated by keyword research and by content research on TikTok and Instagram. And that's all I knew that making an app to stop sugar-crediting was potentially a great idea. Okay, amazing. So you validate this idea. What's the next step? Building it. Tell me about how you actually built Stopper. So my first step was to download Quitter to take some screenshot of each screen. What I wanted to see is basically like, oh, we go from screen one to screen two to screen three. So I was a continuous cursor. Please make the same screen with the same visual elements, with the same color, with the same image. In two weeks and a half, I did one full copy of Quitter. And then to submit the first version of the app and to get the approval from Apple as I took me one week. Cool. I think anyone watching this right now is hopefully getting excited about potentially doing the same. So my next question for you is, if you were to do this again, to start over from scratch, what would be your playbook to clone a successful app from the App Store in 2025? The first step that will be to find a very successful app to check the key that if it's for like a specific niche and if that app markets for specific regions and countries. To confirm the revenue, you have to go to sensor tower to have a sense of what the app is making as a monthly recurring revenue. To step two, you want to research on TikTok and Google trends if it's a niche worth building. Step three, that would be building the designs to use the Figma plugin to import all those GPAC screenshots in Figma. You are going to see some discrepancies there and there, but for 80% of all the screen, that's near perfect. There are some websites like screendesign.com and mobin.com. So for example, you will go there, search for a Twitter, you can download all the screenshots from a given app with one click. Step four, I think for most app that's not needed, but is some backend, the easiest, that's a Firebase because with Firebase, they manage the connection with Google, they manage the connection with email password and with the Apple setting as well. Right now, like with the Figma MCP, you can connect your Figma MCP to cursor. And before it took me like one month to do the NGP right now, like with the Figma MCP, that will probably take me to it. Okay, amazing. Thank you for sharing that playbook. It's crazy to see how fast AI coding is getting better. I want to change topics slightly to tech stack. Can you break down the full stack that Stopper is built in? What's it built on? To write code, I use a cursor to track my revenue within the app. I am using revenue cat to have some deeper analytics about what my users are doing. I am using a mixed panel. I am using a tool which is called topyappers.com, which is basically a size that's crap TikTok and Instagram and YouTube to find the exact profiles that I need of influencers that worked with other apps before. I will add the email that I find from topyappers.com. And then I will fit that into linkedy.ai. And then I have been using since last week, the ads on Menta and Spark ads on TikTok. So Spark ad is a great way to increase the number of views you have for a current video. On that same note, I'm also curious, what are the costs to run an app like this? What do your profit margins look like? Can you break that down for me? You have the ultra plan of Curthor which costs $200 per month. On mixed panel last month, I paid around $100. And for the TikTok Spark ads, what I've been doing for the past month, cost me around $100 per month. So after five months, my profit margin for Stopper is 35%. Okay, amazing. I think it's totally okay to copy an app. And actually I think that's the right thing to do, especially when you're starting out. The only thing that I think that you shouldn't do is don't copy the niche. You don't want to go and take their customers, take everything they did and put it to a different niche. You're not taking their customers. So anybody who's watching this right now, I think this is a great framework. Thank you, David, for coming on, sharing everything. For anyone watching right now, let us know in the comments if you enjoyed David's story. If you'd want him to come back and deep dive more into this cloning playbook. Thank you, David, for coming on. Thank you, Madai. Thank you to David for coming on the channel. Personally, I love this because he took a successful app. He switched the niche, changed the customer base and took proven principles such as onboarding flows and a bunch of other things and basically cloned it into his new app. I think that's super smart, especially if you're starting your first business idea, you want to get to your first $10, $20,000 a month. What I loved even more was that he vibe coded this entire thing in a couple of weeks. That is the power of building with AI. You can have an idea in your head and turn it into a working app faster than you've ever been able to before. This is exactly what we show you how to do inside Starter Story Build. We will guide you step by step on how to use AI to bring your app to life. If you're interested in actually building something and getting off the sidelines, head to the first link in the description and check out Starter Story Build. All right, guys, that's it for this episode. Thank you again for watching. We'll see you in the next one. Peace.
