| Readwise URL | https://read.readwise.io/read/01kt2krxvfg9drr191rnrxmcmz |
|---|---|
| Readwise ID | 01kt2krxvfg9drr191rnrxmcmz |
| Date | 2026-05-28 |
| Author | youtube.com |
| Category | video |
\n\nSource: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nnpz1wsTjBI
Every good business idea is alreadytaken. You’ve heard it. You’ve probablybelieved it. But that is completelywrong.
Me and my brother Daniel havebootstrapped the SaaS from 0 to 50Kmonthly. Meet David. He saw abillion-dollar company that was blowingup everywhere. And instead of thinkingthat he missed his chance, he built atiny version of it. The plan was reallysimple. Find one common pain point andtriple down on it. And just a few monthslater, that business hit 1billion company that he copied, why youdo not need to reinvent the wheel tobuild a successful business, and hisplaybook for starting over if he had todo the same thing again in 2026. Allright, let’s dive in. I’m Pat Walls andthis is Starter Story.David, my man, welcome to Starter Story.
Tell me about who you are, what youbuilt, and what’s your story.>>Hey, thanks for having me. I’m David, andme and my brother Daniel havebootstrapped the SaaS from zero to 50Kmonthly in a space where companiescasually reach 200 million ARR. So I’vebuilt Shipper, which is an AI appbuilder. Essentially, you talk to AI, andit comes back to you with a full app. Ithas all sorts of suggestions for you tokeep going, and it even runs the businessfor you. Our pricing model is verysimple. You pay for credits, which, inexchange, they let you build apps. Ourcheapest pricing plan is $25 a month, andthat’s more than enough to justexperiment and even build a full app,which you can go on to later developfurther.
So you built an AI coding tool. When Isee this, I think of, like, cloud code orlovable. You built an indie or smallerversion of that. I think that’s supercool. Could you show me your stripeDashboards? Show me how much revenuethis thing is making.
So we’re currently at 25.6K MR as youcan see here. Net volume 65K. That’slast month plus what we did this month.AR R is 307K. So the majority of our MRis here, but we’ve migrated Stripeaccounts just maybe a month ago. So asyou can see, this is our old account andit shows from August pretty lineargrowth all the way up to late Februaryto March. So 90% of our revenue comesfrom subscriptions and the other 10%comes from one-off topups. They haveseparate credits called cloud creditswhich allow people to build backends
whereas builder credits let them doeverything else. So even though MR says25K, gross volume is 71K. That’s becauseof all the top ups. We currently havearound 690 paid users and zero freeusers, we don’t offer free plans. Asmuch as we’d love to, we’ve decided it’sbetter to invest the money we’re makingin building a better product for ourPaying users. And this is an expensiveservice to maintain both in terms oftime and money. Okay, cool. I like that.
I like to see that you have hundreds ofpaying customers and zero freecustomers. If you’re doing anythingbootstrapped or indie, focusing on paidplans only. I think that’s super smart.I want to switch topics a little bit andtalk about your background. You built anAI coding tool. You must be like acoding genius. How do you get here andbuild this app that’s doing over $50,000in gross volume a month? So, it all goesback to 2019. My brother and I havestarted building SaaS and all sorts oftools since then. We’re bothnontechnical. We never really like tocode. So, instead, we’ve decided tolearn marketing. Our first real successwas a luxury goods authenticationservice called legit check and that’swhat funded everything that came afterthat. Actually, it got featured in starterstory back then, which is kind of a fullThe circle moment being right now since then,we’ve built, scaled, and even exited, andacquired a few companies.
So, we’ve builtan AI coding app without any codingexperience. David is proofthat you should not invent anything new.You can find a proven idea or niche, it down,build your own version, and it can besuccessful. But to do that, you need tosee what is actually working and whatapps are making money right now. So,knowing that, I wanted to put together afree database of 50 plus AI app ideas,that are making money right now in 2026.
And include real revenue numbers, growthtactics, tech stacks, pricing models,everything, so you can find theopportunity that fits your skills.
If you’ve been struggling to find thatright idea, then this database will makeyour research process ten times faster.If you’re ready to find your idea andbuild it, just head to the first link inthe description, and you can download itfor free. All right, let’s get back toThe episode. Okay, cool. So, you’ve hadsome success under your belt, but thisidea seems like it could be really big.
How did you get the idea to build an AIcoding app? So, it was summer 2025, andwe saw no code and AI app buildersexplode. Just a few examples: Base 44hit 3 million ARR in 6 months. ThenLovable went to 1 million ARR in a weekfrom launch and is now valued at 6billion. We figured owning even 1% ofthe market would be life-changing forus. So, the plan was really simple. Findone common pain point and triple down onit. Okay, cool. I love that youmentioned find one common pain point,triple down on it. If you can even own1% of this massive market, which is AIcoding tools, it could be life-changing.
We’re going to talk more about that, butbefore we do, let’s talk about how youbuild this thing. How do you go aboutbuilding an AI coding tool? It seemsreally complicated.>> We started really small, just us and oneDeveloper, and the first version waspretty rough. It broke a lot, but weshipped it anyway. So, instead ofwaiting for it to be perfect, we justfocused on getting it in front ofpeople. Overall, I’d say the first twomonths were the toughest, but thingsstarting to improve pretty fast. So, bymonth three, we had a working productthat we’re confident with. By monthfour, we moved past just catching upwith our competitors. By months five andsix, we were already shipping featuresthat even our competitors didn’t haveyet. We also kept a close eye on otherplayers in the space, looking at whatworked for them, what didn’t, so wecould move faster and avoid making thesame mistakes that they did. Okay, cool.
So, you built this AI coding tool. Evenif you had a developer or two, that’sstill amazing. This is what’s possiblebuilding products with AI. So, on thatnote, I’m curious like what’s the techstack behind this? We use crisp forCustomer support, Notion for theknowledge base, Frill for our roadmap,and charge for email marketing, Webflowto host our landing page, WordPress forSEO on our blog and PSEO pages. Datafastfor analytics, X Premium and Typeform formarketing, and tools for affiliatemanagement. On the technical side, werely heavily on Entropics cloud models,
GitHub for version control, Vers forhosting, Railway for cloud, and Neon fordatabases. Okay, cool. Thanks forsharing that. Let’s talk about thegrowth. A lot of people watching thisbuild stuff. You could probably go andbuild an AI coding tool right now if youask Claude Code how to do it, but that’snot going to get you users. So, how didyou take this from no users to over$50,000 a month in revenue? In short, wegot our first users through ProductHunt, Reddit, SEO, and then X Twitter.
To this day, we haven’t used any paidchannels at all. We launched our MVP onProduct Hunt in week one, then made ourFirst 50K to $1M.
At the same time, we focused onhigh intent SEO keywords likealternatives to X. How much does X cost?With X being our competitor’s name.Around day 50 of building in public, Xstarted working. Then things wentparabolic. In one or two weeks on X, wemade about $20K in revenue by just dog-foodingthe product. One trick I learned fromRob Haram at SuperX was to always addyour product’s link in the second tweetto squeeze more attention and get thatextra traffic to your website. Yeah,it’s cool that you build in public, youdid all the things the right way, butwhat I really think is cool about thisand one of the reasons why I wanted to
bring you on the channel is that it kindof follows this copy-paste strategy thatI’ve been seeing a lot of people,Execute on really well. You find areally growing market and you simplyexecute them, but you do something justa little bit differently. All you needto do is capture 1% of the market andyou can have a life-changing exit,right? Someone watching this is going,“Oh, okay. Let me go copy, you know,docuign or something like that. But howdo I find what makes it different? Howdid you actually find that out?” So myquestion for you is when you went to gobuild this, what did you find that you
were able to carve out that 1%? What wasthe differentiation that allowed you tohit $50,000 per month with your AIcoding tool? So, most of these otherapps, you can only build websites or webapps at this moment. With Shipper, youcan build websites, web apps, mobileapps, Chrome extensions, and all sortsof bots for apps like Telegram, Discord,you name it. We looked at all of ourcompetitors’ Trust Pilot pages. We lookedat their public road maps and we’veJoined their Discord servers. We werejust looking at what their users werecomplaining about. And we even gotpeople on our customer support chatsaying, "I want to turn this website
into a mobile app." That’s how we cameup with the idea of building mobileapps. We started shipper with a coreidea of eliminating any technical termsbecause even though lovable or base 44were aiming to serve non-technicalpeople, they still had certain partsthat felt kind of scary. Instead, wemade it clear that Shipper transformsyour thoughts and ideas into a livebusiness that can make money with zeroskills required. So from the start wesaw an opportunity to go beyond justwebsites and web apps. This is the thingthat I think a lot of people get wrong.
A lot of people watching this arelooking for that new idea. Instead, golook at massive spaces, big companies,growing companies, and then do theindie thing, the bootstrap thing, andWinning just exactly like you are. Lastquestion that we ask all founders whocome on to Starter Story is if you couldgive your younger self advice before yougot started, what would be your advice?
I start with something you genuinelyknow a lot about or care about. Look ata big industry and ask, “What would thislook like if it was built for peoplejust like me?” That’s where most goodideas come from. Taking what alreadyworks and niching it down to somethingyou really know a lot about. Forexample, maybe you could build aDualingo app, but for learning how tocook. I think another good example isworkout apps turn into a social network.Then you have tools like Kalani, TypeForm, or Intercom. They’re all bigproven products, but you can rebuild asimple smaller version. Look for reviewsand what people comment and dislikeabout those giants and then double downon that. You know, I just keep my headdown and just keep building.
Cool. Well, David, super cool to seewhat you built and I think it’s going tocontinue to grow. So, thanks for comingon and sharing.>> Great. Thanks for having me.
All right, Gus, producer of StarterStory. What do you think about this one?>> Yeah, I think my favorite part of thisguy’s story is the whole like copy andpaste thing. You know, he saw like thisopportunity. How many of these likelovable base 44 have we seen justexploding? And I really like thatmindset of can I get just a smallpercent of this? And I think that’s asmart strategy.>> There’s this guy named Andrew Chen. He’slike a VC. He wrote this essay which islike the reason why inventing somethingnew is so hard is that you have tochange how people behave or interactwith something to do that is a huge bet.
It’s not logical to do this as abootstrapper or someone who’s doingindie. What do you think about that? IMean, yeah. What I think is we’ve talkedto enough people on this channel thatare building like similar ideas. We putout this tweet once that was like everybusiness idea is taken. That’shere’s like a list of 50 ways to makeyour app different. I can understandthat starting something brand new. Yeah,it seems like impossible. The thing isthat you don’t need to execute perfectlyif you are just in a good market or agood niche. It’s hard enough to run abusiness and do everything right. Youcan get some things wrong and still besuccessful if you operate in a spacethat is already growing and popular andhas good margins. If you’re strugglingto find an app idea or a brand new thingto be building, well, you’re in luck.
Because in the description, I’ll putthat down there. There are over 50proven app ideas that you can copy andpaste just like David did here andchange one little thing, see what peopledon’t like about them, and you mightHave something successful as well. So,click that link down there in thedescription if you want to check them out. Otherwise, we’ll see you in thenext one. Peace.