| Source | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcgRJfbl300 |
|---|---|
| Readwise URL | https://read.readwise.io/read/01kw1f0bj0sc5y6ysce8xyvvxw |
| Readwise ID | 01kw1f0bj0sc5y6ysce8xyvvxw |
| Author | Adam Lyttle |
| Category | video |
| Site | YouTube |
| Published | 2025-05-14 |
| Saved | 2026-06-26T07:58:42.752000+00:00 |
| Tags | adam-lyttle, app-development |
Readwise Summary: This video teaches beginners how to make their first $100 on the App Store in 30 days by building simple apps and using smart monetization like free trials and paywalls. It emphasizes picking ideas you know, researching demand, and using tools like Xcode and ChatGPT to help with coding. When you launch your app, Apple gives you a temporary boost, so it’s important to release it right and focus on getting users to subscribe quickly.
Maybe you’re new to coding, or perhaps you’re looking for a career change as an independent app developer, and now you’re looking for ways to actually make that dream a reality. I’ve done a bunch of videos on scaling your app business, optimization, and even growth hacks. But I’m often asked, “How do I even get started?” In this video, I’m going to share the secret strategy for making your first $100 on the app store within 30 days. But first, why? Building your
own app portfolio is for me one of the easiest and fastest ways to financial independence. I started this journey burnt out, in debt, and barely even able to afford rent. And within 4 years, not only did I pay all my debts down, but now I’m thriving, building generational wealth for my children, but best of all, I have the freedom and flexibility to work on what I want when I want. But it hasn’t always been like this. It took
around two years of experimentation before I could even think about quitting my freelance work and then another two years before I finally paid down my debts and made it. This is the strategy I would use if I had to start all over again and needed to earn my first $100 from the app store. Some people think coding is the most important skill, but it’s not. Coders will enter this game thinking it will be easy. They
have the technical skills needed to build something. So it just seems logical, right? But the people who make the best independent app developers are actually those willing to learn a completely new skill set. Building apps from scratch is more than just the technical skills or the practical steps. There’s market research, usability, marketing, front end, backend, niche targeting, pricing, but most of all, there’s determination and grit. The
secret is simple. Start small and start just outside your current skill set. Never coded a day in your life. Don’t make the next Uber. Don’t even try to reinvent AI. Lower your scope. Other developers will tell you to think big and change the world. But the truth is, one of the first apps I ever built was a simple to-do list app called Just for Today. You set yourself a list of tasks to complete just for today, and whatever’s not completed gets reset
tomorrow. It’s based on the principles of Alcoholics Anonymous. Just focus on one day at a time. And it was targeted at others who are finding life chaotic and overwhelming. It’s gone on to generate over $800 from over 17,000 downloads. This was the perfect project for me at the time. A simple app that helped me learn the basics of persistent data, user interactions, and exploring a novel idea. But along the way, I also
got a taste for success, actually releasing the app, and generating my first dollar. If the scope was bigger, I probably just would have given up. Don’t compare yourself to other developers. Especially, don’t compare yourself to other developers who have been building for years. Be like Alex S. Earlier this month, Alex reached out for some assistance building an app that uses Gemini Flash 2.0 image generation. He was just starting out building his own products and was inspired to give this
thing a shot. The idea, a simple image generation app for interior home design. The issue, Alex coding skills are limited. His day job is in dev ops, which means he’s the guy making sure code gets from a developer’s laptop to a live website or app safely, smoothly, and on time. He’s not actually writing the code, which is actually perfect for building your own apps. As Alex points out, he knows what he wants with the
advances of LLMs. And it’s become a DevOps dream come true. For tech guys like us, LLMs are like having a superpower. We know how things work. We know how to ask, and we know how to debug. And that’s it. With the advances of tools like Chat GPT, you can now pick up coding easier than ever. And if you’re totally new and you’ve never written a single line of code in your life, all you have to do is simply download Xcode, create a new project,
and start experimenting. Think about what you want to add to your app, and then ask Chat GPT to provide the code. But you’re going to need an Apple developer account to actually release your first app. It costs $99 for an annual subscription, and then you can release as many apps as you like. Next step in creating your first app that generates $100 is finding an idea. It’s got to be simple. It can’t be complicated. And it has to be something you can build within a few weekends. If
you’re anything like I was, when you’re first starting out, you’re also juggling family, an existing job, and all of other life’s commitments. If you focus on an idea that’s too ambitious, too big in scope, or requires too many intricate details, you’re just setting yourself up for failure. Here’s a list of the first few apps that I built on my independent app development journey. A to-do list app, a squat counter app, a positive
quotes app, an angel numbers reference app, and an intermittent fasting tracker app. I went on to exit three of those five apps, generating well in excess of $100,000 to my independent app career. They were nothing revolutionary and nothing amazing. The best place to find ideas is to focus on your own life and your own interests. If you build something you like, you’ll be more inclined to actually finish the thing. If you build something you know nothing
about or in a niche you have no business in, you’re just setting yourself up for failure. That’s like me building an app about fashion. I have no idea about fashion, and I’m not about to pretend I do. My inspiration comes from my own hobbies, my own curiosities, and mostly from my family. This app, Draw Pop, was inspired by my daughter. She saw my app that turns people into cartoon characters and asked me if she could draw one of her own. Within a few hours,
I had a working prototype and another product to release. The best part, I was inspired to build this. The moment it was done, I showed her and she spent ages drawing pictures and experimenting. My motivator was to see that smile on her face. And the byproduct was an app that I can now market and generate revenue from. But before I started building, there was one step that I had to do first. market validation.
Validating whether this idea is even worth pursuing in the first place. You’re not limited by costs. It’s actually dirt cheap to build your own apps. Now, you’re limited by your time. If you’re new to app development and you have other commitments, then you’re really limited by time more than ever. So, it’s important to make sure every minute of productive time is spent actually building something people will want. Luckily, this is now a solved
problem. Within 15 minutes of research, you can quickly find out whether an app idea has any demand and how much competition is already targeting it. Use a tool like Astro to research keyword ideas. Just type in what you think people will be searching for. Look for keywords with a popularity over 40 and competition under 60. It’s a good place to start. I’ve done a whole series on app store optimization where I go a lot more in depth and share the secrets and strategies that have worked well for me.
I’ll put a link in the description below. Then an app that’s going to generate revenue needs to have inapp purchases. It’s kind of a requirement. A strategy that’s worked well for me in the past has been to release apps for free for 6 months. This strategy is based entirely on targeting keywords I want to rank for and focusing only on user acquisition. But this video is called how to make your first $100 from the app store within 30 days. Telling
you to release your app for free just won’t cut it here. It’s all about getting your first taste of building an app that actually generates revenue to prove to yourself it’s actually possible and to have some of those small wins. Once you’ve launched your app, come back to my videos and check out my strategy on building your app portfolio to $10,000 per month. For now, let’s focus on what will actually generate revenue today. You’ve built your app and it
works well. Now, what you have to do is make it annoying to use by interrupting the user experience with payw walls and locked features. Don’t worry, this is a pretty common practice on all modern apps. We live in the only industry where it’s our job to actively make our customers annoyed enough to purchase the full version. There are a few different strategies for monetizing your app. But what I found works best for me is the premium model with a free trial. This is
where you offer some features of your app for free. If user wants to access the rest of the app, they have to start a free trial. Do you need to build new features or functions into the app to justify a payw wall? No. A todo list app could simply have the number of lists limited. When the user wants to add more, they’re simply prompted to upgrade to unlimited lists. Or in the case of an intermittent fasting app, the basic time frame is free. Unlocking more advanced
time frames or customizing the time frames are unlocked behind a payw wall. Creating a free trial option is a must. More people will be prepared to start using the premium version of your app if you have a grace period of a few days for them to try it out. There’s a nice way to get the balance right here. I opt for a weekly subscription of $7.99 a week with a 3-day free trial and an annual subscription for $24.99 a year with no free trial. Why does this work?
I actually don’t know, but it does. My suspicion is a week feels like less of a commitment than a year. Most people are not calculating the annual price of their weekly subscription. They’re calculating a week of usage. And if they like what they see, they can always switch to the annual subscription. From my experience, under 10% of subscriptions opt for the annual plan straight away. And you also get the added bonus of having an offer you can
present to the user before they’ve even tried your app. This is called the onboarding process. It’s where you reinforce to the user what your app does and how it’s the solution that they’re looking for. You put a free trial on this screen and you’ll find a large percentage of people signing up to your app will sign up from here. No free trial, no signups. It’s that easy. Why would someone want to pay for an app they’ve never even used? Which leads me
to the final step, profit. With the help of this video, you have successfully built an app with your skill set after finding the idea, validating what people are actually using, and adding monetization. Now, the crucial part, release it onto the app store and make your first $100. But how do you market your app? How do you stand out from the competition? And how on earth do you find your first paying customers?
Luckily for us, Apple has this covered. When you launch your first app, they will artificially boost your exposure for a week. If you submit your app right, you will get a boost in the number of people who will see your app, download your app, and ultimately sign up for free trials. But listen carefully because making your first $100 in the first 30 days of your app going live relies on this step. Using the keyword research you did before, you need to put
the keyword first on your app title, followed by the name of the app. Why? Apple’s boost isn’t from the app store rankings themselves. It’s from the recommended search list in the app store. When someone types intermittent fasting, it won’t show a recommended list of possible search results. No, no, no, no, no, no. It actually shows a list of apps with the words intermittent fasting first in the title. Go check it
out. Try it for yourself. It works every time. When you launch, Apple will put you in the top spot for days. The result? Free traffic, free users, free downloads, free trial signups, free revenue. You can expect anywhere from 20 downloads a day to 1,000 downloads a day depending on the popularity of the keyword and the competition in the niche. If you follow this guide and added the pricing suggestions before, all you need is four annual
subscriptions to make $100 or 13 weekly subscriptions. If you target the right keyword and you’re getting 100 downloads a day, it’s really that easy to pull this off. But don’t think the success lasts forever. Once your app store boost disappears, so will your free traffic. There’s a whole bunch of videos that I’ve created on growing your app portfolio and expanding from there. Go check it out.