This App Makes $35K/Month With One Influencer

Right now, it's easier than ever to build apps, but distribution is harder than it's ever been. Tik Tok, paid ads, Reddit. What do you do? Well, today I think I found the solution. I partnered with one guy and we grew by 10,000%. This is Flo, a solo developer who built a really simple mobile app. But for over a year, he tried everything and barely made a few hundred. I tried doing it all by myself and only made $300 per month. Then something happened that changed everything. In just one year, my entire business completely changed. So, I brought him on to the channel to break it all down. And in this episode, we'll dive into his really simple app that makes over $30,000 a month, why you do not need a Tik Tok army in order to win, and how one smart partnership can change everything for a business. If you're thinking of building an app in 2026, this video is for you. All right, let's dive in. I'm Pat Walls, and this is Starter Story. All right, Flo, welcome to the channel. Tell me about who you are, what you built, and what's your story. I'm Flo. I'm from Germany. I built an expense tracking app called Monai. I launched it around 3 years ago and spent around one and a half years um scaling it to $300 of MR by myself. And then I partnered with a content creator and together we scaled it to over 35K and MR in just over a year. Okay. Wow. So $300 MR in the first year and a half. Then you found an influencer and then it blew up. That's what we're going to be talking about today. I'm super excited. But before we get into that, could you walk me through the app you built, who uses it, and then some of your revenue dashboards to show that this is legit? Yeah, sure. So it's basically a money tracking app that makes the entry a lot more frictionless by using AI to use voice or use automations. Um so that is the main concept and also that it's minimalistic and not bloated like most of the other expense tracking apps. Here you can see we are currently at bit over 35k of MR. We are a subscription based app. We only offer a 7-day trial right now. We used to be premium with AB testing. We figured out that actually uh hard payroll with free trial works best for us. Okay. Well, let's change topics a little bit before we get into how you found this influencer distribution all this. Let's talk about your background. How do you get to this point where you start building apps, start getting excited about the finance category? How do you get here? So, uh initially I actually wanted to study something in the creative space, but eventually ended up studying computer science and in there I taught myself to code iOS apps. Afterwards, I was a mobile UX lead. Yeah, I always wanted to build something myself to fully work on my own apps. So, I kept building side projects next to my job. Um, but none of them had success uh until this one. Earlier this year, I was finally able to quit my job and do this full-time. Okay, cool. So, let's talk about the idea. How you come up with the idea for an app that eventually is doing over $30,000 MR. I initially built the app for myself uh because I wanted to get back into tracking my expenses. I tried many different expense tracking apps over the years and I always quit them again because they were just too cumbersome to use and eventually at this point AI was becoming fairly usable. So I thought of combining these two things and using AI to make it more of a frictionless experience. So my goal was to also ship it as fast as possible because before that I built an app that took me 2 years um and in the end I launched it and and obviously no one cared about it. So, I wanted to improve that and launch it very quickly. I think it took me a month or two to get the first version and then I continuously iterated over it. Let's switch topics a little bit and talk about this distribution topic, right? It's easy to build stuff nowadays. You can build pretty amazing stuff with AI. And when you built it, you got to like $300 MR after a year and a half, which still is amazing to be making money with an app, but it's probably not what you truly wanted. Then something changed and in one year you went from 300 to 30,000 in MR. What was that? What was the big strategy and why are you here today to share it? Basically on a very high level I started to collaborate with a fairly big influencer from Colombia. After we negotiated some terms, he actually reached out to me because he found my socials in the app. And after negotiating, we came up with an agreement and he's now posting three videos per month on his main channel. The first video he posted end of 2024, like within a week, we 10xed the MR and within a month it was at almost 8K. So, okay. Yeah, this is why I wanted to bring you on the channel because a lot of developers or technical people watch this and like you said, you thought maybe I don't have product market fit or something like that. Maybe there's something wrong with my app. the only thing wrong with your app is that nobody was seeing it. And that's what we love to talk about on Starter Story is like building is cool, but distribution. What's the actual strategy here? I'd love to hear just a little bit more of a deeper dive into how this works. How is the influencer partnership set up? I think it's cool that you only have one influencer. You don't have to work with like 20 of them, which sounds complicated. Let's dive in a little bit deeper into it. What's worked for you and and what's the kind of strategy here? Um, so the partnership is largely built on trust. Right now we do of course have a contract. So now we have a percentage of the profits and a fixed monthly retainer. Before we had percentage of revenue and we noticed that doesn't really scale well. What's good about this is since it's profit based, his payout is mostly profit based. He's incentivized to actually do what's best for the app. It's not like a he's my employee and he just delivers the video and calls it a day. but he's like constantly thinking about what to do and how to how to make the greatest videos. So, he's also incentivized there. What's different also to many other people that work with content creators is that we only post three videos per month. They are very high quality. So, we really want to have quality over quantity. So, they are always very storydriven. We don't get millions of views mostly, but those that we get, they do convert at a fairly high rate. So, yeah. Yeah. And he's responsible for coming up with the video ideas. So I don't have to constantly think about new viral video ideas or something. Like he's the creative mind behind it basically. Okay. Cool. I mean this makes a lot of sense to me. I I see a couple themes here. The first one is like quality over quantity. Both in terms of influencers, right? You don't have you have one quality influencer, not 20 of them, and you do three videos a month, not a hundred, and then hope that something hits. The second thing that I think is actually really smart here, as you mentioned, is this guy has skin in the game, right? It's not like you're just pitching them $300 videos to create and they create something quick and it doesn't convert. This person is incentivized to make great videos, which I think makes a lot of sense. I'd love if you could dive a little bit deeper and just show me like what kind of videos are you creating? What's the impact of these videos? I didn't expect you to say that you only do three videos a month. Could you show me what the impact of what a successful influencer can do to a software business? Yeah, sure. I actually built a little tool for that to visualize it a bit better. You can see those small circles where a video was posted. So, you can see this was the first one. It was actually a very simple video. This one, it was just a walkthrough uh of the app. But since his main audience didn't know the the idea behind it yet, it worked quite well. So, this and another video actually got us to 7.8K and 8K MR from the 300 from before. And then another video which was also fairly short, but it also got us another boost of more than 5K to 13K MR. Then we did a lot of testing. Actually, we had a low season there. We didn't get another viral video until June 21, which was when we were invited from Apple to join the DUPDC together. Um, so that made for a really great uh story. And like I said, the videos that we post are mostly story based. That's why also we only post three of them because it takes a long time to create them. But this one in total got us 1.7 million views and grew in plus almost 5K in MR. And then the latest one was a feature that was really wanted by people. And he also made a very nice story behind it and that grew us now to finally over 35K. So, you can see from the beginning to now, we grew by over 10,000%. I absolutely love everything Flo is sharing right now about how he grew this thing. It just goes to show you the power that content can have on your business or your app that you're building in 2026. We've actually talked to dozens of founders right here on this channel who've used similar strategies to grow their apps. So, I decided to put it all together into one free resource to help you get started. The organic short form playbook will walk you through how real founders are growing real apps making real money right now. From how to find viral content ideas to building a content system, this playbook will show you how to think about growth differently. So, if you're ready to grow, head to the first link in the description and download it for free. All right, let's get back to the episode. So, this awesome influencer reached out to you because you have built something cool and you guys partnered together. For a lot of people watching this, they might be thinking, I'm a developer. I'm technical-minded. How can I find someone who's a genius at marketing and video and content? If you were starting over from scratch with a new app in 2026, what would be your playbook for nailing influencer marketing based on everything you've learned? Yeah, totally. I talked to my partner about this and we came up with this playbook. So, step one, finding your aligned partners. So, before reaching out, you should make sure that um the influencers lifestyle, the tone, the audience actually match your product. Um, so what I was looking for in a partnership was great personality, of course, charisma, but also that he connects with his viewers. Um, so he replies to comments, which is very important if you have an app to sell because they will have questions about it. So that was important. And also that he's not purely a tech influencer, but he's also like he's kind of tech and lifestyle. That's why his audience is not just interested in specs of apps or something like that, but they really care about his story, about what he's doing in his life. So that makes it really valuable. Then step two, warm up the relationship. That means you should follow them beforehand. Those influencers usually notice that people are constantly commenting on their videos so they see that recurringly and they see that you actually care about it. Of course, that takes a lot of time. So if you don't have the time, then at least be upfront. Like don't fake that you follow them for a month or something like that. Step three is that you should be very specific with your outreach. So don't just send what a lot of people do. just say, "I love your content. Let's collaborate." That won't cut it. Instead, you should reference a specific video or a specific moment, a joke they made, or something like that. Um, so they actually know, okay, they watch the content. They actually care about what I do. For example, you could say something like, "I really liked how you made such a little detail look so cinematic in that video of whatever that specific product." Step four is connect the dots to your product. after you showed that appreciation, he should see the alignment, not just a transaction. So, it shouldn't look like I want to pay you, make something for me, but he should see that there's an alignment between the both of you. So, for me, there was like his audience clearly values aesthetics and nice tech. And my product, I think, was a perfect overlap for this because it's minimalistic, aesthetic, but still also has the tech heavy side with the AI automations and things like that. Then for step five, I think this one is the most important one. Um, you should acknowledge their value and signal willingness to pay very early on. You should really lead with making it clear that he will get incentivized one way or another. I think that's already sets you apart from the rest. And what could also work really well would be to show examples of products in that niche that already make a lot of money. You can easily look that up on Sensor Tower or other websites. Yeah. So, you could say something like, "I understand the value of what you do. You can reach millions of people with a single video. I would love to have you as a long-term partner and share the profits of the app with you. It might not be much in the beginning, but other apps in that niche make 50 to 100K per month with the right distribution." So, that kind of gives them like a future mental model of what this collaboration could lead to. And there's some final tips. Try to be brief. I think this one is important. And these creators get hundreds of emails per week. So, they don't want to read through a huge paragraph of text. Bonus points if you can send a personalized video where you actually mention their creator's name and their content in that video because that shows actually that you really care about this collaboration. Most people won't do this. So, that's exactly why you should do it. Then, what worked for me is that you should add your social handles on your profile. Like, this is the the first step you should probably do when you build an app. I think this will actually become increasingly important in the future because the popularity of apps is getting bigger and bigger. I feel like so I think more and more content creators will see the value in collaborating with a developer. So if they find nice apps and they see oh okay that's just a single person working on that app. I think that could lead to the influencer actually reaching out to you which would be a lot better for you because then you can also negotiate terms a lot better. And most importantly, which also worked for me, is that you should look into other markets than just the US. I think there are a lot of great content creators also outside. And I think my partner um also makes it clear that it can also work in in any other market as well. Yeah, there's a lot of influencers out there that are US-based or popular, but the influencer that you worked with is kind of tackling the Colombian market. It goes to show that there's a lot of emerging influencers across the world that developers could work with. you're German, he's Colombian. There's so many opportunities and apps are are such a huge growing space right now. So, I guess for anyone watching this, don't just limit it just to the US. Thank you for sharing that playbook. That's amazing. I think it's going to be super useful for people watching this. I'd love if you could just give us a quick demo of your app. What's the app that makes over 30,000 MR? Yeah, so this is the app. It's very minimalistic. Doesn't even have tabs or anything like that. It just shows you what's really important, which is the distribution of your expenses. And below that you see the list. If you want to make a new expense, you can either do it manually or you can use the voice input feature and say something like coffee at Starbucks 50 bucks and it will use that and automatically create the transaction for you. Add tags, add the category and automatically add it to your list. What also works is you can use the Apple Pay automation. So we heavily also use shortcuts integrations to make it even easier. So if you just pay once it gets realized you can see that it was automatically now added to the list. This is more or less it. There's a lot of other things like you can add budgets or if you don't find some feature you can always use the AI reports feature. So you can just simply ask questions about all the finances that you already added which makes it very simple. Like for example you could say I want to save €300 a month on which cost should I cut back? And you can see that it will analyze your your finances and then come up with a plan. Okay, cool. Well, thanks for showing that app. Looks like a really cool app. I love the AI features. On that note, let's talk about tech stack. What's the stack that you built this in? What are all the tools that run this $30,000 plus per month app? Um, I built my apps natively, so I just use Xcode, which is free. I use Cloud Code extensively. I'm paying for the max plan, which is 100 bucks. I use revenue cat to show the revenue stats of course but also most importantly to do AB tests. So for me it's around 400 bucks a month now. Then I use appite for my back end and authentication and database as well. That together is 25 bucks for the AI requests in in the app. I use OpenAI for the easier tasks and Enthropic for the deeper analysis. That is around 200 bucks a month. than Helm. Every iOS developer will know the pain of using apps connect. So this makes it a bit more hassle-free. I bought the lifetime plan which is around 175 bucks. And for design, I use Figma, but just the free plan. Cool. Well, thanks for sharing that. Last question that we ask all founders who come on starter story. You built this awesome business. It's doing over $30,000 a month in revenue. Congratulations. If you go back in time to when you had just started your app or when you're at $300 MR, you couldn't figure out how to crack product market fit, what would be your advice to young Flo or anyone who's watching this who wants to build apps and achieve success like you did? I was very reluctant to start with meta ads because it always looked super intimidating for me and I was always afraid it would be a waste of money or something like that. But what I noticed is my creator can make such great videos. These videos you can use to experiment with mid ads very easily. Um, we just started a few weeks ago and we already see really great results with this. So, I think we could have made a lot more money if we got on that train sooner. Yeah. No, we talked to a lot of founders who are building apps specifically who are crushing it with ads right now. Uh, yeah, you got to figure out the content first. The content that you run on the ads needs to be good. But there's been like two, three, four guys out of a dozen that are building apps where ads are really starting to work and they can pour gasoline on the on the fire and it's working. So that's super cool to hear. Anybody who's watching this, get started. Throw some money on some paid ads and and see what happens. It can't hurt. Thank you, Flo, for coming on to the channel and sharing all this. Congratulations to what you built. It's amazing. Let us know in the comments what you thought of this video. Any other questions? if you want Flo to come back on and maybe share some more things that worked for this $30,000 per month personal finance app, which I think is super cool. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for having me. All right, Gus, producer of Starter Story. What did you think of Flo? Man, I love that guy. Super chill and just like straightforward with his like system. In terms of the story initially, what stands out to me obviously is this one influencer thing. We talked to a lot of guys and this is no shade to them. But I talked to a lot of guys or see on Twitter like spamming Tik Tok dozens of sort of brainy content. He did the exact opposite. That's why I wanted to have him on the show. I thought that was like a different way. So that's that's one thing for me. Yeah. One thing that I like about this is that the skin in the game aspect. Like I'm a little bit skeptical of the influencer strategy of like contact 100 influencers, make a deal with 10 of them, and then one of them works out and helps you grow your business. But that's as far as you can really take it, right? Because then you're going to pay them again and then it gets sort of complicated. When we talked to a lot of these guys that do the influencer playbook, there is usually just one influencer that really crushed it for them even though they contacted a bunch. That's kind of what he did is he had one influencer who has skin in the game, who's taking a share of the profits, who's going to create great content and going to be thinking about the business from an actual growth perspective rather than just recording a video and posting it. So, the influencer for equity thing is something that we've there's a lot of videos on our channel uh that cover that influencer for equity model. I think it's going to get bigger and I think it's really great for people like him who clearly aren't content creators but they're good developers. They can build cool stuff. This I think is going to be big. The other thing I always think about this when guys like this come on the channel is like his app is basically yet another budget tracking essentially for myself. if I'm building something or thinking about something, I'm like, "Oh, it's already been done." And this is just a good example of like, yes, it's obviously yet another budget tracking app. There's obviously some unique things to it that we saw in the demo that were really cool, but that doesn't matter, you know, like what matters is the distribution, which you talk about a ton. And obviously there's the like other markets element like he the Colombian influencer. That's a whole other thing we could could have do into, but that that's what's standing out to me is like it's just another budget tracking app. That's crazy. and it's like 2026 and and people are still making money with this kind of stuff. It's it's awesome. I mean, yeah, there's no clear winner in the budget tracking space. I don't really use something. When he showed me his app, I was like, "Oh, I kind of want to try this out. It integrates with Apple Pay." Like, I use that, so that could be kind of cool. I immediately wanted to try it out. So, I can see the appeal and I can see how uh it would, you know, it could be a popular app. And yeah, as you mentioned, what he did that was really smart is that he didn't build it for people in Germany where he lives or in the US where we live. Uh he partnered with the influencer who uh built it in Colombia of all places. You can and that's great money in Colombia. By the way, there's so much opportunity to build popular apps, build the same exact app in another country because the app store is huge in other countries. and we talked to a lot of founders who crushed it in the early days by targeting other countries. France, Argentina come to mind of a couple videos we did. So yeah, let's put that to rest. The idea that like if it's already been built, you can't build it again. So if you're watching this and you've built something cool, just like Flo did, you'll definitely want to check out our short form content playbook. It is our starter story build playbook where you can go on, it's 100% free. You can see a bunch of different content playbooks that are working. short form content playbooks of the many founders we interviewed on Starter Story. We put it all into one place so you can watch, learn, and see what kind of content that might work for you so you can focus on distribution. I'll put a link to that down there in the description. Hope you enjoy it. Otherwise, we'll see you in the next one. Peace.