| Readwise URL | https://read.readwise.io/read/01kt2ks8m3kje0wg96689c2285 |
|---|---|
| Readwise ID | 01kt2ks8m3kje0wg96689c2285 |
| Date | 2026-03-25 |
| Author | youtube.com |
| Category | video |
\n\nSource: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pp4X58q_0s
But right now, everybody and theirgrandma is vibe coding iOS apps. We evenlaunched an iOS boot camp. But what if Itold you that iOS is not the only placeto be making money.
Something I’ve realized is that mostpeople are sleeping on the potential ofAndroid.
Meet Steve. He’s a guy who built asimple mobile app that makes over$100,000 a month, but almost all of hisrevenue comes from Android. We testedboth platforms and Android performedbetter every single time.
Most people think iOS is the only placewhere you can make money building apps,but Steve proved the exact opposite.
If you’re bootstrapping like we are,Android is actually way better.>> So, I asked Steve to come on the channelto share everything. And in this video,we’ll dive into his crazy simple appthat makes over $100,000 a month. Thesix-step process he used to grow his appfast and why Android apps are still anUntapped opportunity in 2026. All right,guys. This is one you cannot miss. I’mPat Walls, and this is Starter Story. Allright, Steve. Welcome to the channel.
Tell me who you are, what you built, andwhat’s your story.>> My name is Steve. I built a mobile appalmost 18 months ago. And over the pastyear, we’ve bootstrapped it from lessthan 100,000per month. Today, I’m really excited toshare how we grew this to over $100,000a month, primarily on Android.>> Before we dive into that, Android, I’mreally excited to talk about it. Butbefore we do, what’s the app that youbuilt? And can you show me some of yourrevenue dashboards and things like thatto show me that this is legit?>> Journalable is an AI calorie counter.It’s kind of an all-in-one AI nutritionassistant. It tracks your calories, yourmacros. It tracks your weight loss overtime. It gives you insights. So, this isour app. This is our Play Store listing.
You can see the number of reviews, thedownloads. This is almost at a millionjust on Android, which we’re reallyexcited about. So, this is our revenuecat dashboard. In the past 28 days,we’ve made $125,000in revenue with an MR of around 80K,which brings us to just under 1 millionARR in annual terms and just over 30,000active subscribers and around 40,000total subscribers. So, our app is apremium subscription app. We have twomonth subscription packages, a monthlysubscription and an annual subscription.And that’s where all of our revenuecomes from. Around 80% of our users andaround 80% of our revenue comes fromAndroid, and 20% of our users and revenuecome from iOS.
Okay, that’s pretty crazy. 80% of yoursales come from Android. We’re going totalk all about that because I think you’regoing to have some cool stuff on that.But before we do, let’s talk about howyou even get here. How do you get to thePoint where you have an app that’s usedby millions of people? So the way westarted working on this and the way thisapp came to be was that my co-founderand I have both been through our ownweight loss journeys. Personally, I usedto weigh 125 kilos, and I currently weigh80 kilos. So I dropped 45 kilos or 100lb, and I did this by tracking mycalories religiously. During this period,I tracked my calories. I used manydifferent apps, many of our competitors.
So I had a very good idea of theseproducts of the space, and we realizedthat the current state of the space isvery complex. There is no simplesolution to get you where you need togo. So the reason we started working onthis app was to offer the same value toour users. The the best-in-class solutionwith way less complexity. The number onething that we focus on is simplicity, isthe quick and easy experience that weoffer. And so that’s what we try andcapture with our marketing content.
We interviewed someone recently whotalked about that as well is likebuilding something very simple, veryfrictionless. A lot of developerswatching this want to add a millionfeatures. I like the line which is keepit simple stupid even as you mentionedthe time spent on your app was less thanothers, but actually that’s what made itvaluable. I want to dive into the nexttopic here and you mentioned this acouple of times, which is what thishopefully video is about, which isAndroid. A lot of people talk aboutbuilding on iOS and how those users havemore money to spend, where Android is notas much the case. But you did it theexact opposite. So let’s talk about thegrowth of this app. How did you getusers? How did you build it? What wasyour focus?
We are bootstrapped. We have spent onlyour own money since day one. So wedidn’t really have huge budgets to workwith. iOS is way more expensive thanAndroid, right? So the CPMs, the costper thousand views or generally the costper view is almost four times as high oniOS than it is on Android. So beingbootstrapped and being capitalconstrained from day one, we knew thatwe needed a solution. So we decided tofocus a bit on Android initially. So westarted working on Android and you knowobviously the conventional wisdom heresays focus on iOS. That’s where all themoney is. That’s where the success is inbusiness and in subscription apps.
But we went against that for a fewreasons including capital constraint.But also, we got inspired by the revenuecat state of subscription apps report in2025. In that report, it showed thatdespite iOS users being four times asexpensive to advertise to, they onlyconvert at around 20% better thanAndroid. So it made sense for us tostart working on Android and startgetting some subscribers there.
Okay, cool. I really like that. InsteadOf just seeing what everyone’s doing onX and just taking random advice frompeople that talk on the internet, youguys looked at the data. That report isreally telling. And then you looked atthe data from your own ads. You’resaying, “Okay, we can acquire users muchcheaper and they generally convert thesame.” That’s super smart for anyonewatching this. Follow the data, followthe money. That’s great. Intel. What didyou do next once you sort of realized,oh, here’s this opportunity? How did youget it off the ground and actually startgetting users and getting the word out?
We started by launching on Product Hunt.That was our uh day zero marketing anddistribution strategy. We got featuredon the front page of Product Hunt. Itgot us a couple hundred installs. Two ofthose installs converted to subscribers.At which point we knew we had validatedthe product. We knew that we hadsomething that people were willing topay for. We started working on meta adsAnd meta ad campaigns. We saw that wecouldn’t afford to run iOS campaignsbecause we’re bootstrapped and becausewe’re capital constrained. So wenaturally, um, reverted to just runningAndroid campaigns in the states becausewe didn’t have the money. Now, when weran the Android campaigns, we saw thatthey had a conversion rate just as goodas our iOS users. So, we tested both.
Eventually, we tested iOS as well andfound that, you know, Android was way morecost-effective. We also realized that byrunning ads on Android, we get some spillover into iOS. For all of these reasons,the fact that we got initial success onAndroid, and we were getting a couplehits on iOS as a result, meant that wejust doubled down on Android. Wedecided to ramp up our spend and reallyfocus on this platform.
All right. So, ads, that’s a pretty bigstrategy for you and for a lot of otherpeople who have successful Android apps.Can you just explain what ads mean forYou? Is it SEO, Google Ads, or is itAndroid Ads? How does it work? This iseffectively our all-time Google Adsdashboard. We have spent just under$500,000 on ads, and we have made almostthat exact same amount in revenue, whichis attributed to Google Ads. So, revenuedirectly attributed to Google Ads isalmost the same. So, we are effectively100% break-even on this. Ideally, wewould have a way lower return on adspend and a way higher volume. But,because we’re bootstrapped, we’reconstrained by the performance of thesecampaigns. We need them to beprofitable.
Could you just show me an example ofwhat an ad looks like? You can show methe campaign manager or potentially whatit looks like if you’re viewing an adfrom the Play Store or something likethat. I’m just curious what that lookslike or how you set up the campaign andwhat keywords you target.
So, you see this section here? This isUs previewing the ads that we’vegenerated and then it shows up across,as we mentioned, Google’s digital realestate. So, in the display network, forexample, in other ads or in websites, itcan show up like this. It can show up inGoogle search. So if someone’s on Googlesearch on their mobile device, we alsoshow up on YouTube. We’ve got a couplevideos here which also lead people tothe Play Store to install our app, onthe discover network, on the discoverpage, and most importantly on the PlayStore. So, this is our highest performer,
our Play Store ad. It obviously shows upin between other apps, especially if yousearch for one of the keywords likecalorie counter or calorie tracker. Ifyou have an Android device, and yousearch for a calorie tracker on the PlayStore, there’s a very high chance thatwe’re going to be number one for thisreason. So, this is our bread andbutter, the Google Play Ads. Steve’sapproach to growth is genius. He foundJust one channel, Google, and used it toscale his app to over $100,000 a month.
And what I love about mobile apps isthat there are dozens of ways to growjust like this. So, we put together afree guide to help you find thestrategies real founders are using todayto grow their apps. From influencermarketing to building in public, themobile app growth cheat sheet will breakdown seven different tactics you can useto start growing your app today. Justhead to the first link in thedescription to grab it for free. Allright, let’s get back to the episode.
Okay, this is super cool. Uh, you know,we talked to a lot of people who buildapps and they’re doing like UGC and allthis TikTok stuff. What I like aboutyours is that you just run ads. there’sone place where you can do it and thenit goes to all of Google’s digital realestate. This is one of the advantages ofjust focusing in on one platform likeAndroid. You take advantage of Google’sWay bigger advertising network. I wantyou to dive a little deeper into thatinto the playbook for how to win onAndroid, how to win specifically withpaid ads in the Google network. Couldyou walk me through this step by step?
If you were to build another app in theconsumer space, what would be yourplaybook if you were starting over in2026?
Yeah, absolutely. So I’ll tell youexactly what we did and the formula thatanyone can follow. The first thing wedid and the first thing you shouldalways do is to set up attribution andmeasurement. Right? What that means isbeing able to track the events that takeplace in your app and send them toGoogle Ads. What this does effectivelyis it lets Google ads know when a userinstalls the app, most importantly, whenthey hit, let’s say, your paywall andwhen they take any action, eitherstarting a free trial or purchasing yourapp, and if they purchase, the value ofThe transaction as well. So all of thisdata is, and should be, sent to Googleads. The value of this is that Googleads can then optimize the campaigns andoptimize the delivery of the campaignsbased on that data. Second, afterattribution and measurement, you need to
launch install campaigns. Google Adsneeds data, right? It needs data inorder to optimize. First, what we needis install campaigns. You need to startfeeding the algorithm. It needs to startto have a heartbeat. It knows how muchan install costs. It knows what the CPMis in the country, and it can grow fromthere. It’s also good to get a baselineand to have a frame of reference for allfuture campaigns you are going to run inwhichever market you’re targeting. Now,Google Ads app campaigns require 10pieces of copy. So, five headlines, fivedescriptions, and then up to 20 imagesand 20 videos for this initial installcampaign. Ideally, you have all of theseassets. If you don’t have the time, or ifYou just want to run it as a proof ofconcept, then just use stock images.
It’s fine. Use stock images and stockvideos. Yeah, highly recommend it. Justflood the campaign with assets and letGoogle’s algorithm do the do do theheavy lifting. Then the third one is afunction of time, right? And it is theasset optimization phase. Once you havean install campaign running, you need togive it some time. You’re going to belearning, the algorithm is going to belearning what works, what messagingworks, what doesn’t. Start with somelow-cost campaigns, maybe 15a day, and start ramping up from there.
And while you’re doing that, you’regoing to be working on your assets. Soif you started with stock images, startto build your own custom images. Maybetry something with some large text withyour winning copy, but make sure to takebig swings. Don’t optimize little thingslike the color of one image or the fontsize or the font style. Take big swings.
Like have incredibly different uh media,incredibly different assets, images,videos. And then eventually you’re goingto start to see patterns of what worksand what doesn’t work. And mostimportantly, update your Play Storeassets. Right? So that’s where most ofthe win is because Google App Campaignsuse your Play Store assets. Yourscreenshots, your app title, yoursubtitle, your description. Make surethey’re great. Once your assets are in agood place, that’s when you know it’stime for a TCPA campaign or a targetCPA. Cost per acquisition. Once you’vegot the confidence in your assets, it’stime to launch this campaign. In termsof budget for this campaign or theinstall campaigns, you’re always goingto need 10 times your CPI for thebudget. So, if you’re running a CPIcampaign, you need 10 times your CPI.What does that mean? If a purchase inyour app, or let’s say if a free trialin your app costs you 150.
Per day of budget in order to run asuccessful campaign. The reason for thisis that Google’s algorithm needs 10 ofyour target events per day in order tosuccessfully optimize. Once you startgetting some good data in them, after amonth or two, you start to have somepurchases in your app. You getbaselined, you know, your CAC. That’swhen they start to scale thesecampaigns. Again, you you might need toraise money to do this from friends orfamily. Maybe you go the VC-backed route.
Maybe not. Ideally, not increase yourbudgets over time. You need to keepscaling your budgets in accordance withGoogle’s best practices. And veryimportantly, optimize your product. Yourconversion rate needs to constantly beclimbing. By conversion rate, I meanyour subscription conversion rate. Maybeyou optimize your paywall. Maybe youoptimize your business model, yourpricing, you test your prices, optimizeevery single thing.
Rate increases, increase your budgets ofyour campaigns. And the flywheelcontinues. And that’s the playbook.>> Okay, cool. I mean, the thing that Inotice about when you’re talking abouteverything is, it’s always about thedata. Looking at the data, we’re talkingabout campaigns. We’re talking aboutRorowaz. We’re looking at data. Thisentire business was built on looking atthe data, following the data, makingdecisions, changing things. And this ishow you get to a place where you have anapp that has millions of users on an uhplatform that you didn’t expect
would be as big, Android. I think that’ssuper cool. Let’s talk about theopportunity in Android. A lot of peopleare watching this, maybe they’re alreadybuilding an app, and they maybe didn’tthink Android was the way to go. Whatcan you share about that from whatyou’ve learned through building this?>> Something that’s happened over the pastcouple of years is, with the emergence of AI,And the lowering of the barrier to entryfor anyone to release apps. We’ve seenan explosion in the number of appsthat’s been released, especially on iOS.
So, in the past couple of years, five times as many iOSapps have been released on the App Storecompared to only two times as manyAndroid apps.So, on the one hand, thebarrier to entry is way lower. On thesecond hand, most people who are vibecoding apps, and most new apps which arebeing released, are on iOS.
So, if there is saturation in the market, you know,it’s definitely on iOS.So, the opportunities on Android really aregenerally the apps that we know aresuccessful on iOS that don’t have anequivalent on Android.That’s the opportunity. The second opportunity isthe niche problems that individuals havethat previously have not been worthsomeone building an app to solve.
Because of the lowering of the barrierto entry, because of the low cost ofSoftware development these days, thereal opportunities are going to be inthe niche overlap of problems orfeatures that no apps currently solve.
So really, for anyone who’s thinkingabout building an app, I would highlyrecommend seeing the problems that youface in your day-to-day with the currentstate of the apps that you use, with theincumbents, and find a niche.
Find a verysmall problem set or overlap ofproblems that no one has solved.Solve it. Find the other users and find thepeople who face these same sets ofproblems, and you will find some goodrevenues in doing that.
Yeah. So I, I mean, I think that’s supertrue. There’s a lot of things I noticeabout what you’ve built. It’s just aboutgrowing markets. Android, and then alsothere’s some interesting stuff youshared around countries. You’re buildingthis. You’re localizing it to differentcountries. That is just the emergingmassive growing customer base of.
Worldwide customers. We talked to a lotof founders who are shipping appsspecifically in France or South America.There’s a lot of opportunitythere too. One thing that I do want tosee is I want to see your app. Can youshow me the app that has millions ofusers and is making over a milliondollars a year?> It’s very simple. For example, you cantype in what you ate. If I typesomething in like yogurt, granola,blueberries, and almonds, it’ll take asecond and come back with the caloriecount, the macros split by ingredients,and then a total of this meal at thebottom. You can also type in yourexercise. For example, I did 1 hour ofVinyasa yoga. And it also tracks yourcalories that you’ve burnt and keeps thetotals in the bar at the top.Furthermore, you can try with pictures.I can select a picture from my gallery.And what the app is going to do is it’sgoing to transcribe first what it sees.
In the picture, identify theingredients, the portion sizes, and thenit’s going to come back to us with thecalories and macros of each ingredient,and then a total of the entire meal. Andyou can just see at the top you’ve gotyour weekly view. You can see which daysyou’ve tracked this week. You’ve gotyour daily streak. You can track yourweight over time. So yeah, that’sbasically it. Like I said, very simple,very easy to use. No complexity, nosearching in multiple databases. Justtype in what you’ve eaten, take apicture of your plate, and the rest ishistory.
Okay, cool. I mean, super cool, supersimple app, as you said. Keep it simple,stupid. Let’s talk about tech stack fora second. What’s the stack behind thismillion-dollar app?We are very heavily in the Googleecosystem, right? We use Firebase and G4for our back end. We use BigQuery, GCP,Google Play. Obviously, we advertise onGoogle Ads. We effectively work forGoogle at this point. Apart from Google,we use RevenueCad for subscriptionmanagement and we use Open AI for ourback-end AI usage for most of it. Wehave quite a few tools we use for
operations. We use Claude Code andClaude Co-work, incredible tool, 20 per month. We useGitHub Copilot, 30 a month. Fixerfor AI email support, an incredible tool,24 a month. App for ASO,app store optimization, which costs us18 a month.
Uh, thanks for sharing all that. Lastquestion that we ask everyone who comesonto the channel. If you could go backin time and stand on young Steve’sshoulders and give them some advice orgive some advice for anyone on here thatWants to build a million-dollar app, whatwould it be?
One thing which I would definitely dodifferently is that I would startcreating content. I would startdocumenting my journey and get good atmaking content. After living off ofsocial media for almost a decade, I’mI’ve kind of fallen behind almosteveryone in the world when it comes tothis, and it, uh, is a skill we’re missingin the business. So yeah, the piece ofadvice would be to start documentingyour journey and get good at makingcontent. Having some documentation ofthe journey and seeing how much I’vegrown over time and maybe even publiclysharing some of that is something I wishI’d done earlier, and I’m planning onstarting now. So I miss a lot of theskills. I miss a lot of the gauge andcalibration towards social media andcontent creation, which almost all of mypeers and almost everyone else in theworld has. So, it’s a huge weakness ofMine, and uh, yeah, I would change that.
Well, that’s great advice. Document thejourney. That’s what we believe here atStarter Story. And this is maybe thebeginning or a great uh milestone inthat journey of you documenting. Thanksfor coming on and sharing all thisamazing million-dollar Android app. Ithink this video is going to be awesomeand the channel’s going to love it. Letus know what you think in the commentsand thanks for coming on, Steve.
Thanks for having me. It was a pleasure.Congrats to you as well.>> Okay, Gus, uh, producer of StarterStory. What did you think?>> I’ve said this a few in a few of theirvideos, but the best people that wetalked to, or the people that are likecrushing it, they all have like thissystem, you know, whether it’s creatingcontent or, you know, whatever thebuilding process. For Steve, it was thisGoogle, all this Google Google ads, youknow, system. So that’s my biggestTakeaway is like, or my first takeaway Ishould say. I was so impressed with likehis system and just how methodical anddata-driven. I feel like you, you valuethat quite a bit, at least in as I’ve gotto know you, and that obviously makesStar Story and you successful. So Idon’t know, that’s kind of standing outto me as like this, like data driven.
He’s not guessing.
He’s following the numbers, and that’slike I, we’ve seen that a few differenttimes.>> Yeah. This is what I always see withfounders who I know, who are crushing it.Obviously he’s crushing it. He has amillion-dollar app, and you got to getstarted. But then once you get started,you need to look at the data and makechanges based on that data. I think alot of people will want to watch morevideos like that or on our channel tofind other, you know, ideas. And that’sgreat to find ideas online and to seewhat others are doing and get.
Inspiration, but 80% of the decisionsthat you make should be based on yourown data. If users aren’t using yourapp, that is a piece of data that youneed to go change your app. If your appis not converting, you have that data.Look at that, analyze it, maybe put itinto AI, get some action items that youcan do and make the changes and thenlook at the data. It’s this constantday, hour over hour, day over daylooking at the data and makingdecisions. This is what all the veryvery successful founders do. You havethis data. It is this go you have thisgold mine right in front of you. Whetherit’s your Google ads or your TikTokperformance or whatever it is, use thatand make changes and eventually you’llbe successful.
Second thing was obviously the wholelike iOS versus Android thing. I don’twant to say versus, but like thedifference. I loved what he was sayingLike whatever quadrupled and the numberof apps submitted versus Android is onlylike it’s a lot slower. And if you lookon X, which I’m on all the time,everyone’s talking about iOS apps. Andwe even did a boot camp, you know,iOS boot camp that I led, you know,shameless plug. But I was just like,wow, that’s crazy. The numbers herattled off about like how much less isgoing into Android. That’s what youshould do. That’s anyone watching shouldgo like be like, screw iOS. Let me gobuild an Android app and just followthis.
Yeah. There’s a famous story about thefounders of WhatsApp. Everyone wasbuilding iOS apps, but they wanted tobuild a messaging app thateveryone would use because if everyone’susing the app then it becomes the mostpopular. So yeah, they built the iOS app,but they also made sure this is yearsago. It doesn’t apply now, but it’s asimilar principle. They decided, oh, we’reGoing to make sure that it works onevery device, like Blackberries, onlike, random, like, weird OSs. They made itwork on every single one, even thoughthe conventional wisdom was to build aniPhone app at the time because everyonehas iPhones. As mentioned, there arebillions of Android devices out there.
That’s all that you need to know abouthow there’s money to be made there.
Sure, maybe on average, iOS users spendmore, but the world is so big. It’simportant to open up your mind to howyou don’t need to build the best thing,or the most optimized thing. You justneed to build something that capturesvalue, and you can have a million-dollarapp. So, if you guys enjoyed this video,thank you for watching. Let us know whatyou thought in the comments. Would youlike us to bring on more Android devsand talk about this, or would you likeus to go deeper into anything that heshared? I read every comment, and whatyou put in there will turn into futureVideos and future playbooks. So, thankyou guys for watching this one, andwe’ll see you in the next one. Peace.