The First App I Ever Built Makes $25K/Month

I went from a college student who had never built anything in his life before to creating my first project with over a h 100,000 users and making $25,000 a month. This is Ken. He's 21, [music] still in college. And just 5 months ago, he shipped his very first [music] app idea to the world. I used Cursor to build the entire project. Took me about a week to build everything. What I love about his app idea is that it's dead simple. It's not some crazy trend or viral idea. It's just a useful tool for a very niche audience, which is why it's already making him $25,000 [music] a month. If you have a tiny little problem, there are at least thousands, [music] if not tens of thousands of people out there with the exact same problem that you have. I asked Ken to come on to the channel to share everything. And in this episode, we'll dive into the incredibly simple app that he built, what everyone gets wrong about finding a good app idea, and his advice for how to go from idea to revenue in just a couple months. [music] All right, let's dive in. I'm Pat Walls, and this is Starter Story. All right, Ken, welcome to the channel. I'm stoked to have you on here. Tell me about who you are, what you built, and what's your story. Yeah. So, my name is Ken and I went from a college student who had month in under 5 months by just vibe coding and posting on social media. Today, I'm excited to share more about how I was able to turn my hobby into a money-making machine and how it grew so fast. This is crazy. Usually, people don't get this lucky. They don't they don't hit it right on their first try, which is one of the reasons why I wanted to bring you on. super cool app that you built and it's absolutely crushing it in 5 months. Let's talk about that. Can you explain the app that you built in a few sentences and then can you pull up your revenue screenshots to show that this is actually making $25,000 a month? Yeah, for sure. So, Tone Adapt is a website and a mobile app for guitarists that allows any user to sound like their favorite song in under 30 seconds. Every guitar, amp, and pedal board sounds slightly different or has slightly different settings. Tone Adapt bridges the gap between guitarists and their gear telling them exactly how to set up their rig to sound like any song they want. We have different tier subscriptions. So, we have weekly prices for $10 a week and we have annual plans for around $60 a year. Yeah. So, we launched originally as a website and then we also have a mobile app as well. So, combined revenue between the website and the mobile app, we've done over $25,000 in the past [music] four weeks. Yeah. So, the last four weeks on the Stripe dashboard, you can see we've done around $115,000 in revenue. Uh, this is the past 4 weeks on the mobile app. You can see we've done [music] another $14,000 and have over 397 active subscribers all in the past month since we've launched the mobile app. So, this is my growth in the past 3 months. We've done $45,000 on the website and we have 1,400 new subscribers in the past 3 months. Okay. Amazing growth. I mean, to do this all in 5 months is crazy. That's super fast. last year around this time you hadn't even started this app which is super cool. So let's talk about that. How do you even get to the place I real I I you told me earlier that you're in college. How do we even get to the place where you've built an app that's making over $25,000 a month while you're in college? Yeah. So as a completely normal college student majoring in CS at San Diego State University. I began learning the guitar about a year and a half ago and I was immediately obsessed. I was playing the guitar almost every day. And in the fall, I began doing UGC content for brands to make some extra money on the side, which really opened up my eyes to the power of social media and taught me how to create viral content that gets attention. All right, cool. I like that. You usually don't hear you hear about people building apps, but typically you don't hear as much about people who are creating content and then they want to build an app. So, I think that's super cool. How did you then get the idea for this app? And then how did you know that it was something that could actually crush it? Yeah, so at the time I was struggling to get internships. So, I went looking for a project to put on my resume. And loving the guitar at the time, I began brainstorming pain points that I faced while playing the guitar. And I realized I was using chat GPT at the time to figure out how to get guitar tones, but it wasn't really all that accurate. And I talked to other guitarists on Reddit, on Instagram, mainly in comment sections, and many of them had the exact same problem. But there was no real solution out there. So, I knew if I had the problem and a few other guitarists I know also had the problem, there's probably millions of others out there that have the exact same problem. I love this app that Cayenne built. Why? Because it's simple and it solves a problem that he [music] personally experienced. But here's the thing. Even if you build the best idea in the world, people still need to find it. And that's why I put together this free guide called $1 million Attention. It's a massive resource packed with real examples and strategies [music] for getting eyeballs and attention on your product, which is the most important thing you can do in 2026. The goal of this resource is to help you stop building in silence and start getting your idea out there in front of real [music] people. So, if you're building something and you're ready to actually grow it, just head to the link in the description to get started for free. All right, let's get back to the episode. Nice. So I I love that you built it from a place of like, hey, this is something cool that I could build that's useful for me. I think that's always the best type of apps to build. It's like a almost like a personal curiosity like could I make something better than chat GBT. So for anyone watching, that's always a great reason to build an app, which is I need [music] this, I have this problem. Let's talk about how you went ahead and built it. So you had this idea. How did you actually build it? And how long did it take to build the app? Yeah. So, I had the idea for a few months actually. Over Thanksgiving break, I had some free time and I decided to build V1 since it was literally the first thing I had ever built. Took me about a week to build everything and get everything working properly. Nowadays, I would say the same project would take me a couple hours to build. And yeah, every line of code was vibe coded. Not a single line of code has been written myself. So I use Superbase for my database and Versell for hosting and analytics. Mail gun for emails. Uh Stripe for payment processing. And then for APIs, I use the OpenAI API and the Tavly web search API. And then I use Cloud Code to do all of my codew writing. And yeah, this is the web app stack that allows you to ship a web app tonight and get someone to pay for it as soon as possible. For the app, I also use REL for all of the backend API routes. I use Superbase for the database as well. And then I use Revenue Cat to track all my payments and subscriptions. I use Superwall for payw walls and AB testing different experiments. And it is built in Swift natively. [music] I mean, it just goes to show you how fast you can build stuff now. You just said screw it. I'm going to build the iPhone app now after I've built the web app. And you built it really fast. And the mobile app you built has done over 15,000 in the last month, which is just super crazy to think about. But I'm sure just building it didn't make all the customers come, right? Anybody can build a guitar app right now. they may not make a single dollar. So, let's talk about growth. How did you actually get users for this app? How'd you get your first users and how'd you kind of scale it out? Yeah, for sure. So, my marketing approach was dead simple. The first video I actually ever posted about Tone Adapt went viral overnight. And I realized quickly it's not just about one viral video, but it's about repeating that process consistently and turning that attention into real paying subscribers. So, my marketing approach was very simple. I posted on social media three times a day, reposted across as many platforms as I can, Instagram, Tik Tok, YouTube, Facebook, and I put my face behind the brand immediately to build trust with users from day one and have them almost feel like they are joining the journey with me as I [music] continued to make improvements to the app, add more gear, and make the entire thing better. When formats converted, I scaled those formats aggressively. You mentioned one thing that I thought was interesting is that you decided to put your face behind the brand immediately. Were you not like embarrassed to like put your face out there and like be super cringe or like had you already done that or what are your thoughts and advice for people who might be thinking of doing the same? Yeah, so the first video I posted was honestly super embarrassing. All of my friends saw it. Some of them were making fun of me a little bit, but once you get over that first video and it's on the internet for everyone to see, you realize it doesn't actually matter. And every video after that first one, there's no embarrassment anymore. Okay. And on that note, all your friends that saw your cringe video, I'm sure they were thinking, I kind of want to do the same. I want to build an app. I want to make money online. I want to build something cool around a hobby that I picked up like guitar, which I think is super cool. If you were to start over based on everything that you've learned in the last 5 months, you have this really successful app and you had to start over right now based on everything you know about content building everything. What would be like your playbook to finding another app idea like this or just advice for anyone out there who's watching this who wants to do the same? Yeah. So, I would tell them to pick a hobby or a niche that they already know. Pick something that you do every day or every week yourself. For me, that was learning the guitar. I've had been playing the guitar almost every day for over a year before I thought about building tone adapt. I think this matters because you understand and face the exact pain points that you're trying to solve without doing any market research. Technically, you are your own customer that you're targeting and you understand your niche better than anyone else. Yeah. I think a lot of people underestimate like how like cool of little hobbies or passions or interests that they have and they don't even think [music] that there could potentially be like a business idea there and they think oh I don't have any passions. I don't have any hobbies. But if you do have something that you enjoy let's say it's not guitar but it's um you know running or something like [music] that. How would you go and find an actual app worth building around that [music] hobby? Yeah. So in whatever hobby that you have in your life, there could be a tiny little pain point where there's no solution or a slow process or inaccurate results, any convenience at all, you can make something out of that and that's a business opportunity. So I came up for the idea for tone adapt simply because I was using chat GBT to get tones and there was no real product that was doing the same thing yet. There's a lot of people out there. So, chances are if you have a tiny little problem, there are at least thousands, if not tens of thousands of people out there with the exact same problem that you have. I talked to a lot of people, they have maybe an idea, but they almost have this like obsession with perfection and they build all these features and uh it ends up being this like thing that doesn't even really work that well. What would be your advice around that? Yeah, I'd say ship V1 on the web right now. You can ship a web app today and get someone to pay for your product by tonight. If you ship on the internet, don't spend hours picking a logo. Don't polish anything. Just build something, put it on the internet, and charge money for it. You'll be getting revenue from day one and feedback for improvements when you eventually build out the mobile app. I'd say post about it every single day on social media. This is where I see so many people quit. They build an amazing product. It looks beautiful. It solves a great problem, and they never get anyone's eyes on it. Commit to boasting three times every single day for at least a month and I guarantee you will make money and get users. Show your product solving something in real time and you might not go viral on day one, but you'll figure out which formats convert and which don't. If you aren't posting your product for people to see, then nothing [music] else here matters. You honestly don't even think about what you're posting. Any content is better than no content at all. Every time you post content, someone is seeing it and someone will be willing to go and use your app. Once you find a piece of content that works, this is where it gets a little bit easier. uh your first piece of content that converts is now your template for everything else that you're about to do. Remake it 50 times with tiny variations. Hire UGC creators to copy that exact same format 60 times a month. Put money behind it on meta ads and Tik Tok ads. Once you find this format that converts, you need to ride it until it dies. That's [music] the entire formula. You need to post relentlessly till you have one winner. Take that one winner and pour gasoline on it until it doesn't work anymore and then repeat. All right. So, I mean, one thing that I love about this kind of playbook that you shared is just posting content every single day. There are a million tone guitar tone and tune apps. I'm looking on the app store right now, but yours shows up after the sponsor results as number two for the keyword guitar tone. And there's a lot of reasons why, but I think one of them is that you've just been sharing it so much on social media. Like you mentioned, two to three clips a day. That is going to make you stand out in the sea of guitar tone apps. And as AI coding gets even more easy, there's going to be even more of them. So, how do you stand out creating content? On that note, I would love to actually see this app. I was about to download it, but maybe you can give me a quick demo of how it works and I'd just love to see cuz I used to play the guitar. Uh I would have loved to have this back in the day, but uh yeah, give me a quick demo of what it does. Yeah, for sure. So, this is Tone Adapt and this is the main page that users will be using. Down here, the user will input whatever guitar that they play on and whatever amp that they play on. We have over 1500 guitars and 2,000 amps in the database. So, most users are covered. Down here, you could add any built-in amp effects or any pedals that you might have as well. And then you will look up whatever song that you want to sound like. For example, if I want to get the tone of Hotel California by the Eagles, I'll come down here and search it up. And then you click research. And you can see in under 30 seconds, you will get the entire original gear that the original artist used to record the song. uh his guitar, pickups, amp, and it'll estimate the amp settings that the original artist was using on the record. It'll also show you the entire effects and pedals section as well. And then this is the main selling point for users. We adapt the guitar tone to the user's gear. Uh so you can see we'll recommend presets that the user should use because that's what they have on their amp. We'll show them the pickup choice and we'll show them how to set up their amp to sound just like the song. You can see the adjustments between the original song and uh the user's gear. We also show them how to set up their signal chain and other amp effects as well. This is awesome. I mean, I think it's super cool. We've talked to a few founders who do just tools that help in the music industry or music production process. Like, we interviewed this one guy. It's more event production, but he has like a timer for being on stage. We interviewed another guy who does AI generated music videos for artists so they can save on music video costs. There's all sorts of cool ideas. So, if you're watching this and you are passionate about music or instruments or or something in that space or you can even be out of that space, there's just so many cool ideas like this that clearly can do well, this app, you're making over $25,000 a month, which is awesome. The last question that we ask everyone who comes on to the channel is if you go back in time before you decided to build this app and obviously it worked out great for you, what advice would you give to your younger self or to anyone watching this who wants to do the same? Yeah, I would tell you to start posting on social media today. It doesn't have to be for a specific product or you don't have to be selling anything. Just start posting on social media. It will open up so many doors for you. I think it's the most valuable skill that anyone can have in today's world. Yeah, I agree. I mean, we talked to so many founders on here. Feels like eight or nine out of 10 founders. I asked, "How do you grow?" Tik Tok, Instagram, social media. It's the number one skill to grow. So, you might as well, even if you hate it, you might as well figure it out and learn it because that's how businesses grow these days. Thank you, Kayen, for coming on and sharing everything even though you didn't have to. Appreciate you coming on and inspiring the world with this awesome business idea. Thank you guys. Gus, producer of Starter Story, what do you think of Ken and this guitar tone tuner app that he built? I know. So simple, right? I mean, that's kind of the like that's my takeaway is like, man, what a cool like little idea, you know? I used to play guitar in college. I actually taught myself how to play guitar. I used to use this website called like it was like freeguit guitarlessons.com and that's how I learn taught myself. So I know it's different but it just reminds me like man there's like riches and niches, right? Like his is his isn't even like a learn guitar app. It's just like a match the sound. [laughter] So anyways, I'm just super impressed. He just seems like a chill dude. Yeah. I don't know. Those are I'm rambling, but those are some thoughts. Yeah. I know you mentioned something smart I thought which was it doesn't teach you how to use the guitar which is like a crazy app like you know that that would be like a really ambitious project it's just something that helps you match the tone that's simple you could build that pretty easily I bet you could go build it right now I think that sometimes people doubt that's such a small idea can make a lot of money and that's one of the reasons why I really wanted to do this interview is he pulled up his revenue dashboard and showed it right there are enough guitar players out there that want to match their tone and need to solve that problem enough to pay for it that that is enough And this is the change that's happening right now in this world, which is you can build that so easily now with AI vibe coding tools. Someone like him who didn't have a whole lot of experience as long as you have an idea because you can just build it. Yeah. Just it's a good reminder that like any you know I don't want to say like any idea is a good idea as long as it solves like a painful problem even if it's just for you like he said there's a good chance someone else out there has probably had the same feeling or like man I wish this existed. That's probably that's what he said, right? And um it's just a good reminder. I don't know like the like AI coding has made it so like you can kind of create any idea really fast and that's it's a really it's really cool you know I think that's really cool. Yeah. And right now we're on this like AI can create anything that's really cool but what's going to happen is a lot of everyone's going to be able to build anything and there'll just be this flood this sea of apps. I'm sure it's already happening right now but it's going to be cra way crazier in 1 2 5 years. So why does his app win? Well, it was his content he had created, right? One to three Tik Toks or Instagrams that he was posting every single day. And he actually had a background in UGC. So, I would go and look at his channels and see the type of content that he created. Go all the way to the end and look at the first one that he created. And on that note, we have our million-doll attention guide that I wanted to share with you. This has a bunch of examples and strategies for how to get eyeballs and attention on your product. If you want to get it, this is the stuff that matters. Ideas are important, but getting attention in this sea of AI generated tools is the most important thing that you can do. So, click that [music] link in the description if you want to get that guide right now. It's 100% free. Let us know what you thought about this episode. Otherwise, we will see you in the next one. Peace.