| Readwise URL | https://read.readwise.io/read/01kt2ksm34s1vwqyavqwfzyqc3 |
|---|---|
| Readwise ID | 01kt2ksm34s1vwqyavqwfzyqc3 |
| Date | 2026-01-18 |
| Author | youtube.com |
| Category | video |
\n\nSource: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBjcmMhXSDk
I launched my app six months ago and nowit makes over 20,000 a month. Guys, this is
an episode that you cannot skip. I’m PatWalls, and this is Starter Story. Realquick, before we get into the interview,guys, now is about to break down what’sactually working right now when it comesto building and growing an app in 2026and beyond. And if you’re ready to buildyour app, I put a link in thedescription right there where you canget started right now building yourthing. I’ll talk about that a little bitmore later, but let’s get into theinterview. All right, Matt, welcome toThe channel, tell me about who you are,what you built, and what’s your story.
My name is Mal Baron, and I built aChristian app that makes over $20K amonth. In only six months, I haveaccumulated over 58K downloads, 6.7Kreviews, and a 4.9-star rating on theApp Store. All right, Mal, before we getinto that, what you built andeverything, first, I would love if you couldshare a little bit about your businessmodel. Pull up some of your revenue andanalytics so we can really see thisthing.
My app is called Prayer Lock. Itbasically just blocks your phone untilyou pray. When you try to open one ofthem, we ask you questions andbased on that, you get a dedicated AIgenerated prayer. You recite it andyou’re good to go. You can scroll away.It’s a subscription-based app. I charge9.99 a week.
In terms of monthly revenue, we closedDecember at 15Kand October was 23.6.
Our total proceeds have been $41,000. So,my app right now probably has one of thebest onboarding rates in the world. Ourreview rate is over 12%. We have 6.7Kratings with less than 60K downloads. InNovember, Prayer Lock reached number 22in the reference category. Okay, cool.Well, thanks for showing your dashboardsso transparently, showing you all thenumbers. That’s amazing. We’re going toget into how you built this, grewthis, and even a little bit of paid ads,which I’m excited about. But before, Iknow you started it this year, which isinsane that it’s grown this much. I’dlove if you could give me a little bitof background on how you got here, howyou decided to start building apps. Howdid you get to this point?
I actually don’t come from a techbackground. I actually majored infinance, but I discovered the originalCodex model back in 2022 when I saw thatI completely fell in love with AIand technology and I decided that’s whatI wanted to do for the rest of my life.So, I taught myself about AI, about howto code. I have been building tech andI have been in the AI business ever since. Back inJanuary of 2025, I was actually buildingan adult content AI app, but when Ifinished it, I felt completely disgusted and disappointed with myself.
So, I decided to make the weirdest pivotin history and turn to the Christianspace to try to reconnect with my faith.After about 3 months of buildingapps nobody wanted, I came across thisapp called Praycreen that blocked yourphone until you prayed. With the newinsights I had, I looked at the design,features, and the way theyexecuted their distribution. Irealized I could do a betterjob than them, and that’s how PrayerLaw came to life.
That’s awesome! The mostinteresting thing I heard isthat by doing this, you were able to getcloser to your customers and trulyunderstand them, which led to thismassive success you’re now seeing.I think there’s a little secretthere. I want to switch topics alittle bit and get into the building ofthis app. You did this yourself, right?How did you do that?
I built Prayer Lock back in June.
Cursor and Chat GPT, that’s it.With Cursor, I mainly use Sonnet as mydaily driver, and then I use Chat to askquestions and apply simple code changeswith the Mac desktop app. It took me 3 days to code the app andover a week to actually get it approvedon the App Store. Honestly, it’snever been easier to build an app thannow. That’s insane that you built it inbasically 3 days. Obviously, there wereprevious apps before, and you probablyhad tried and had starts and stopsbefore, but once you found your ideathat you really felt confident about,you were able to build it in basically 3days.
Do you have any tips for anyonewatching here on how other people, maybewith a little experience, or maybeno experience at all, can build appswith AI in 2026? First of all, what Ialways say is do not design anymock-ups. Instead, study the best appsin your niche and study the best apps inother niches with tools like screensdesign, and just go straight into coding.In my case, I actually created a Canvafile where I laid out all of the bestonboarding screens of the apps I likedand of my competitors.
I just chose the best onboarding screensand applied that to my own app. Also, I triedto use different tools for differentpurposes. For example, I used Cursor asmy daily driver, Codex CLI, which Ilove for more complex tasks, and ChatGPTfor questions and easier problems. Thereason you want to do this, at leastif you’re in my position, is that I was broke.
So, you don’t want to be wastinghundreds or thousands of dollars ontokens. In doing this, you willdiversify your token expenditure, right?Another thing is do not try to oneshotyour apps. AI isn’t there yet where youcan just say, “Hey, make me amobile app. Make no mistakes. Don’thallucinate like that. That won’t workat all.” What AI is really good at doingis if you break down your app intoblocks, then you canoneshot a feature or a design or a screen.
Next, authentication honestly isn’t evenneeded for modern apps. For instance, myapp doesn’t have authentication or adatabase, and I’m printing money. Thereason I made it this way is for tworeasons: I wanted to reduce friction asmuch as possible. I don’t want my usersWasting time on signing up, and theother reason was to save costs. There’sno reason to pay for a database when youcan just save it all on the device. Andpeople might say, “Hey, when Iswitch my phone, I’m going to lose myinformation.” Nobody thinks about that.
Literally, that’s a veryniche case. So Ma’s story isincredible. He built and grew his app to$20,000 a month in just a few months. Ifyou stick around to the end, you’regoing to get the full story on exactlyhow he did it. But before we get there,I do want you to think about the appthat you’ve been meaning to build. Youprobably already know how to use theseAI tools or tried them out. You followedtutorials and probably even built piecesof different things. But what usuallystops people from actually launchingisn’t the building part. It’s pickingsomething that’s actually worth
finishing and then taking it all the wayto real users that can give you realmarket feedback. Well, that’s exactlywhat Starter Story Build is designedfor. In just a few days, you will choosean idea that makes sense, build it endStructure, momentum, and other buildersare doing it alongside you. If you’re tiredof half-finished projects, well, the linkis in the description if you want to getstarted right now. All right, let’s getback to the interview. I’m going toswitch topics now to the growth becauseeveryone knows who’s watching this.
You’ll read all the comments. They’llsay, "Okay, you don’t talk about themarketing enough. Building stuff is easynow, but as I understand, you were thebuilder, the marketer, and the growthperson. You did all this by yourself.What I want to understand is how did youactually grow this thing and get users?"In the beginning, I didn’t know whatworked. So, I literally just tried abunch of different formats and I startedposting around 40 times a day on 12different accounts. Volume reallymatters here. What ended up working forme was the classic, you know, GC girlreaction video with a demo on it. That’swhat one of my biggest competitors was doingand they were just killing it with it. Iwas broke so I couldn’t pay for clips. Icouldn’t pay for another creator. So, Ijust told my girlfriend at the time, nowmy wife, to help me record some reactions.
Herself, and she honestly killed it. Westarted posting twice a day. It wasn’tuntil after 40 posts that I finallyfound a hook that worked, and I knew Ijust needed to spam that on both TikTokand Instagram. When you start seeingthat a format starts to work, put allyour energy into that. That alone, withonly that account, I was getting around10K views a day, which was all I neededto get to my first 1K a month. Withthat, I immediately reached out to myfriends, and I wanted to scale this. Ihired another UGC creator. It washonestly very hard to get her account.
This other creator’s account was going onboth TikTok and Insta. But after 14days, we finally cracked one video whichorganically got around 20K views.Knowing how views convert to downloadsis very tricky. In my case, 10K views aday was getting me around 200 to 300downloads a day. But this is becausethis specific format is very optimizedfor downloads. With those two accounts,my wife’s account and this othergirl creator, I was now doing 1.5K inJuly and 2.4K in August. What’s coolabout that, as you said, is that I thinka lot of people think, okay, I have to bePosting on TikTok, YouTube, and X builds your personal brand, but no, you only need to really be on one platform. For you, it was TikTok or Reels. Then you really only need one format that you just create lots and lots of videos over and over again. So, I think that’s a great lesson. Once you started getting organic to work, what was next? Because obviously you were doing like 2k a month, but now you’re doing $20k. So, how do you get there?
I hired an influencer. That flop didn’t go well. But after that experience, I said I want to try something else. The only other route was paid ads. When I tried them, I completely failed. I optimized for downloads instead of trials. I had just a very bad onboarding process. It was trash.
I upgraded my onboarding from 5 minutes to 15 minutes. Generally, the longer your onboarding is, as long as it’s adding value and telling a story, the better. I immediately saw my organic conversion rate increase more than 3x without paid ads. With my new knowledge, I said, “You know, let’s try this again.” I now have a better conversion rate. I started with Meta and began spending $20 a day.
Respectable, decent results. 20 a day only. Theresults were way better. They wereinsane. I was getting 50. I said, you know what? Let’s goall in. I’m going to throw all mysavings into this—around $4,000 into theads. That’s when I closed October at10K only with these UGC reaction videos.
Now, with a little more budget scrollingon TikTok, I came across Matthew, this15-year-old UGC creator. Theminute I saw the first 3 seconds ofhis video, I was like, I need to workwith him. So I reached out and westarted working together, and he veryquickly organically got us to consistent10K views per video. I was thinking ofhim as only a UGC creator. But you know,one day I decided, you know what, maybeI should try Spark Ads on his videos aswell to see how this does.
The results were absolutely insane. With his videos,I started getting $3 per trial started,and I realized, hey, I can get into debtand pay all the debt completely with mynext Apple payoff. So, I threw another6K into ads into his videos, which gotus to 15K for the month of November.Following the same strategy, increasingthe ad spend regularly each week, weclosed December at 20K, and we’reprobably going to close January at 40K amonth. Well, on that note, for anyonewatching this, if they were startingover with an app or had an appthey’re ready to start growing,what would be your playbook if you hadto start over in 2026?
If I was starting over in 2026, this is exactly what Iwould do. Step one, look for niches withapps doing over 50K a month, use SensorTower to get a revenue estimate for theapps. And then step two, find an app youlike and improve it substantially. Stepthree, code it out in less than 2 weeks.This is very important. Set that as yourlimit because otherwise you’ll want toimprove the product. I’ve been there,trust me. Step four, do not touch yourapp. Obsess over distribution.I haven’t touched my app in over 3 months now.
Just copy the working formats in yourniche and start posting at least 20times a day. That’s what you shouldaim for. Step five,iterate on your onboarding like crazy.Be a maniac. Improve the onboardinguntil you have at least a 10%download to trial conversion rate. Later,you want to do paid ads, and you needat least a 10% download to conversionrate. Step six, place ad spend on yourorganic videos doing more than 10kviews. For this, I recommend TikTok Spark Ads more than Meta or anyother platform. I love that playbook.Hopefully, a lot of people watching thiswill go and do the same. We didn’treally talk too much about what your appdoes. I really wanted to make this aboutthe build, the growth, and the paid ads.However, I would love if you could give me alittle demo of what your app does, howsimple it is, and how it actually works.
Super simple. You just go into the app,you choose the apps to block, just blockeverything, and then you go into thehome screen. When you try to openone of your apps, you’ll realize thatthey’re blocked. So, you open it, and itprompts you to pray. That will open upThe Prayer Lock app asks you two questions. How’s your relationship withGod today? You indicate it. And then,how are you feeling today? Based onthat, you’re going to get an AIgenerated prayer that you have to recitein order to unblock your apps. And onceyou’re done reciting your prayer, you
press, “I’ve prayed today.” You choose yournext block schedule, which can be theautomatic next block schedule, or youcan customize it for 50 minutes oran hour. Once you’re done, you get yourstreak. Finally, you receive a very beautifulBible verse of the day, and you can doomscroll away or use your phone as youwish. It’s insane that such a simpleapp can make so much money, but that’ssomething I’ve learned. The key is insimplicity and actually adding valueto your users.
Now, I’m curious, how didyou actually build this app? Could youwalk me through your stack and then alsosome of the tools you use to grow and runpaid ads as well? Cursor for coding anddevelopment costs 20 a month.
For quick design iteration, it’s 10 a month. Superwalldefinitely for paywalls and revenueanalytics, which is 20 cents perconversion. Then Singular as your MMP,which is basically the software that youuse to make paid ads. That’s 5 cents perconversion after 15K free conversions.And then for all my backend services andhosting my web pages and everything, Iuse AWS, and that’s around 9 amonth. Yep, that’s pretty much it. Thatkind of brings us to the next question ofprofits and how much are you actuallyspending on ads to grow this thing.Could you walk me through some of that?
Yeah, of course. So, paid ads aredefinitely a little pricey, but they areprofitable, so it’s worth it. So, rightnow, I’m spending 20K, Ispent around 1.88.Thanks for sharing that and being supertransparent, showing me all those paidAds numbers. Last question that we askall founders who come on to StarterStory: If you could go back in time to sixmonths ago, before you started your appor even before that when you were tryingto figure out what idea could actuallywork, what advice would you have foryoung Mao or to anyone watching thiswho wants to build apps in 2026 andreally crush it like you?
I wasted years building stuff nobody wanted.The reason is that you have somuch to learn. So, literally, do not wastetime trying to build the app of yourdreams at first. Instead, improve analready successful app. Add yourpersonality. Copy others’ distributionstrategies. And only once you’veacquired some experience with apps anddistribution, then jump onto even moreambitious things.Thanks, Ma, for comingon. This is amazing! It’s super cool tosee that without a crazy developerbackground, you were able to build something,figure out content even if you didn’thave a content background, and then dopaid ads, which you didn’t even havebackground there. That’s the reality in2026: This is possible. Yourstory is amazing and it was so awesome.
It’s great to have you on and share all of this. Ithink people are going to love it.>> Thank you. It was my pleasure. Thanks toMao for coming on. This is an amazing story.I really hope you are still here watching this right now. If you are,you’re one of the OGs. This is one of those stories that happened just afew months ago, so you know what he’s saying is working right now. It’s notoutdated information. This is super helpful. It shows the power of apps andhow fast apps can truly grow. He built it without developer experience. Hecreated content without content experience. And then he started crushing paid adswithout experience. He learned all these things on the fly. This is the power of AI tools, not just forbuilding, but for learning and for executing.
If you’re ready to build your app, again, shameless plug, definitelycheck out Starter Story Build. If you’re serious about actually buildingsomething, want to come up with a good idea, execute it, and ship it toreal users to get real feedback, that is the only thing that matters.If you’re serious about it, check it out. I put it in the link in the description.
Get started on your app right now.That’s it for this episode. Thank youguys for watching. We’ll see you in thenext one. Peace.