I Left College to Build This Niche App (Now I Make $20K/Month)

I built a mobile app that makes me $20,000 per month. This is Ethan. He's 19 years old and a year ago he dropped out of college. It started building apps because my product solved a very specific pain point that no other app solved. It converted very well. But here's what's awesome. The app he built is not designed for everyone. In fact, it solves a very tiny problem for a very niche community. And that might be the secret hiding in plain sight. In the middle of wrestling season, there was a big demand for our app. And now, less than a year later, this niche app has been downloaded thousands of times and made over $20,000 in a single month. So, I asked Ethan to come on to the channel to break down exactly how he did it. And in this episode, we'll dive into the crazy simple niche app that he built, why he didn't go viral and still got thousands of users, and why everyone should be building apps that solve niche tiny problems. This one you cannot miss. Let's dive in. I'm Pat Walls. This is Starter Story. All right, Ethan, welcome to the channel. Tell me about who you are, what you built, and what's your story. Yeah, my name is Ethan and I built a mobile app that makes me $20,000 per month. I launched it in September and over the last 6 months, we've gone from $0 to over $60,000 in total revenue and around $38,000 downloads. Today, I'm excited to share more about the story of how I dropped out of college, discovered Cursor, and scaled my mobile app to over 5 figures. Okay, amazing. Dropped out of college to build an app. This is the future. Before we jump all into it, can you show me what you built? Let's pull up some of your revenue dashboards. This is my app, Cut Coach. It helps combat sport athletes cut weight for their competition or fight coming up. And the way it does it is by creating a sciencebased protocol. Here's our revenue for when we launched the app until the end of January. Right when we launched the app, wrestling season just started. Our revenue, you know, was climbing up as we started to figure out marketing. By that time, we were in the middle of wrestling season. There was a big demand for our app since a lot of the combat sport athletes needed to cut weights in our app's lifetime. We have actually around 39,000 downloads now. It's just crazy how you can build like a pretty amazing business off such a niche idea. Like I think about these bigger apps like Cal AI. This is like a very very tiny version of this for this specific combat sport wrestling. Super cool. We're going to talk all about niche app. But before we do, let's go into your background. How do you even get into building apps? Yeah. So, I started building my first app in the summer of 2024, right before going to university to study computer engineering. My first app took about 6 months to build and was designed to automate parts of my mom's workflow at her job. While I was there, I built another app using only AI tools. That experience made me realize how quickly AI was changing software development. So, I decided to leave university and learn development my own. first few months of 2025, I built several apps but didn't market any of them and realized that this was a mistake. Around that time, I discovered cursor which made it much easier and faster to build apps and this allowed me to shift my focus toward learning sales and marketing instead of only development. Okay, cool. So, this is pretty crazy. I mean, even at 19 years old, you've already covered a lot of the board of what it takes to build successful apps, which is super cool. Obviously, you had some previous apps that you built before. Those didn't work out. How did you find the idea for this app that eventually made $20,000 a month? Ever since I was growing up, I've always competed at a high level in combat sports. I was a provincial judo champion and also a national wrestling champion. And whenever I had to compete in combat sports, I would always have to cut a significant amount of weight in a short period of time. I never knew how to do this properly until one of my coaches gave me a proper combat sport weight cutting plan. Fast forward two years after my short time at college, I was sitting in my room thinking of an app idea that I could relate my passion of wrestling with my hobby of creating apps. And eventually I came up with the idea for Cut Coach. So the reason my other apps didn't make any money was just because I didn't market them. For this app, I just decided to learn marketing right after I finished it and ship this one out as fast as possible so that I can iterate on what users actually wanted. Okay, so you dropped out of school and you kind of had your back against the wall a little bit saying like, okay, everyone can build apps. I can build this stuff with cursor in like 10 minutes. So that's the thing I got to learn is marketing. We're going to talk all about marketing. But before we do, let's talk about the build. You were working on a computer science degree that doesn't teach you how to build good apps that you've built. So how'd you learn? How'd you build it? Yeah, I started building the Cut Coach app in June of last year using Cursor and Chad GBT. It took me around a month to build the MVP and I gave it to my wrestling club to beta test after I finished building it. The first version of the app was basically an app where the coach was supposed to give the wake up plans to the athletes. However, I realized that there was a lot of friction using this concept and my wrestling club didn't use the app. So during July and August, I changed the whole concept of the app to make it so that the app would give the weight cut plans to the athletes instead of the coach. I tested the app's weight cuts on myself and did a whole redesign, which I eventually released in September. Here's what's awesome about Ethan's story. He did not spend years learning how to code. He picked up Cursor, found a very niche problem, and then built an app that made $20,000 in a single month. Ethan is proof that anyone can learn how to do this, and I want to help you do the same. To do this, we just launched the iOS boot camp for free. Inside, we will walk you step by step through how to come up with an idea and turn it into a real app ready to ship to the world. The best part is you don't need any experience to get started because Ethan's journey all started with one decision. Stop thinking and just start building. This iOS boot camp will help you get started right now. And if you're interested, just head to the link in the description to start building your first app for free. All right, let's get back to the episode. Okay, I think this is super cool. A lot of people watching this are probably wondering, I have a niche problem in my life. How do I actually go about building an app and actually getting paid users? So, what would be like your step-by-step process if you had to start over today? Yeah. Step one would be to solve a problem within your hobby. So, solving a problem within your hobby is a very effective strategy because you already understand and enjoy the activity. And this makes it much easier to solve problems other people will most likely experience too. And I basically just asked Chat GPT, you know, what are some good app ideas that I can build within, you know, a specific niche that I choose. This is a very straightforward method. And this AI brainstorm can help you come up with ideas you never even thought. And once you have the app idea, I usually just open Figma and start designing the app right away. And once I figure out the wireframes for the app, I usually go to a popular app and a similar app within the same niche and I look at the layout of their app and I take the elements from it and adapt it to my app. So I don't copy it the exact same because, you know, I'd like to be creative. Try not to reinvent the wheel. Just take what's working from their app, adapt it a little, and change it up. I think that's a great strategy, especially if it's a bigger app. Let's say you are building a language app and you're copying something that Dolingo did. You know that they've run tons and tons of tests. They have a huge team and the reason that they have the onboarding this way or the logo this way is probably something that they've tested over many years. You get to stand on the shoulders of giants and just essentially copy that and then put your later twist on it. So that's great advice. What's the next step? After I create the design in Figma, I code the app straight away. So since cursor can code your app very fast, I usually just tell cursor to create the front end first and make sure the code that I created matches the front end design that I created in Figma and then I start creating the back end. So I use cursor and chat GBT for the development and then I integrate superbase for the database to store all the data and I use Verscell to host the landing page and JavaScript files. I use open AI API for the AI functionality within my app. I integrate revenue cap mix panel superwall for payw walls and analytics. And then if I need to, I'll use cron job for scheduled automations. So you built the app. What about the marketing? What's the next step to building a niche app in 2026? Yeah. So for marketing, I would say to start off with organic posts. I got the ideas from social media pages that were in the same niche as mine, which I then adapted to my app. An example of the first video that I posted organically was a video where I showed what a UFC fighter looked like on a weight cut and what they look like after their wake up. I also added a call to action at the end of the video to give users an incentive to download my app. I noticed that the videos didn't get that many views, but I also noticed that the people that were viewing my posts were very high intent viewers as I noticed around 10 to 15 downloads per day from posts that got anywhere from 200 to 500 views. And I think the reason was because my product was so unique and it solved a very solved. It converted very well on my organic post even though they didn't get that many views. And I think there's a huge opportunity in niche apps like this. You don't need to get millions of views like you think you might need to do if you can get 5 to 10% conversion ratio on views, which is really, really high. Let's dive a little bit more into that because yeah, you can get 10 to 15 installs, but that's not thousands of paying customers. Once you sort of figured out what videos were, what was like the more scalable growth strategy. Yeah, after posting organically, I switched over to influencer marketing. Since my app was in a very niche category, there were not a lot of big influencers to partner with. So, I decided that I would ask small creators to partner with me instead to start off. So, to find influencers, I would basically just scroll on my for you page on Tik Tok or reals on Instagram and I would DM creators asking them to partner. I found that most of the creators that I DM'd said yes to the partnerships. You know, I started off with influencers that got around a,000 to 10,000 views per video. then switched later to influencers that got 20,000 plus views per video. I saw that the influencer marketing strategy was working not only because I had a very high intent audience but also because I had a very unique product. Later I decided to put those influencer videos into paid ads just to see what would happen. And to my surprise, it added a lot of extra revenue and helped us scale much faster and much more efficiently. Okay. Well, thanks for sharing that. want to change the topic a little bit and I want to actually see this app that you built. Could you actually give me a quick demo of what is the niche app that you built that made over $20,000 in a single month? Yeah. So, here's the app and when you open it, it just has the nutrition values that you have to stay within. And each day you can just log your meals here. So, here I'm going to put that I ate some chicken. And as you can see, the app is extracting nutritional values from the chicken and putting it in your daily nutrition goal. And all you have to do to cut the weights for your competition is to simply stay within the limits in the app and make sure you don't go over. And each day, you can also put in your weight so you can track, you know, your progress of your weight going down. And in this screen, you can see the recommended meals for each day. These meals help you stay within your limits. So, you know, you don't go over and miss weights on competition day. Okay. Last question that we ask all founders who come on Starter Story is if you could go back in time to young Ethan before you were building apps as hobbies or you're in college, what would be that one piece of advice that you give yourself or anyone watching this who wants to build a niche mobile app like you? Yeah. One piece of advice I'd give myself would be to follow my own advice. You know, when I was still in high school, I noticed how I would make decisions based on other people's opinions or advice. even though I already knew deep down what the right decision was to make. Because of this, I found myself living the lives that other people wanted rather than living my own life. Now, while I still seek advice from others, I make sure to adapt it to my life rather than letting it control my life. And doing this has helped me feel much more fulfilled and also given me a much stronger sense of purpose in my life. That's awesome, man. Thank you, Ethan, for coming on, dude. Super cool app, over $20,000 a month with a niche wrestling app. I'm excited to see what you build in the future, too. Thanks for coming on and sharing all this so openly. Yeah, thanks for having me. I wonder how many apps there are. Like the fact that there's two in wrestling. Everyone I know who are wrestlers like are super passionate about wrestling, right? And so I wonder if that mean maybe there's something there, you know? 100%. That's why it wouldn't make money if it was pickle ball. For example, pickle ball. It could be old, it could be young. I feel like wrestlers is like really just like high school college. I would say there's definitely an opportunity in high school and college sports where it's like a small community, but everyone's sort of like competing. You know, your parents are probably going to pay for that app or you going to pay for that app so you can make weight for your wrestling competition. You're willing to pay $30 to make weight because if you don't make weight, the cost is way higher. People would be very disappointed in you or whatever it is. So, it's actually a really painful problem for a really niche community and I think that's one of the reasons why it's successful. Yeah, that was cool. But I just think he said this like if you're just kind of excited about this hobby or something, there's probably a lot of people also excited about that and you can go kind of build this niche up. And I don't know if this is right, but like no niche is like too small, you know, like weight cutting for wrestlers. Like that feels like so narrow, but yeah, that's kind of my last takeaway, I think. Yeah. So, if you're watching this and you thought this was cool, check the link in the description. We have a link for our iOS playbook where you'll come up with an idea, build it, and ship it within a couple days. We'll walk you through how to do that with AI tools. I put that link down there. You can click it and get started today. All right. Thanks for watching. We'll see you in the next one. Peace.