I built three apps that makes $8K a month of completely passive income. I literally haven’t touched it in probably three months now. In this article, I’m going to be telling you everything that I learned from growing and building this app so that you can learn how to hopefully do the same for yourself.
I think I built 6 or 7 different apps and none of them made money, and every single one of them failed. But in the past few months, I’ve built a couple of more apps and I’ve had a different approach and a different strategy on how I built and marketed these apps. And now I finally have my own app that makes $8K a month of completely passive income.
Like, truly, it is so passive. I haven’t touched this app in probably like six months. But I still get users, people still pay for the app, and I still get a couple hundred bucks put into my bank account every single month.
In This Article:
Lesson 1. Originality is Overrated
For the first two years where I built apps and made, like, absolutely no money from doing it. I think one of the biggest unlocks of me building my Saas and actually making money from it is the fact that I shamelessly copied other people’s ideas. There are so many of these types of tools out there, these AI writing, these AI reading tools, there’s so many of them out there.
I was not the first to market, and I will proudly say that I was not the first person to build any of these tools. But I think as somebody that’s working a full time job, and if you’re trying to pursue this as a side hustle, you should actually be pursuing these ideas that have a validated use case, that have a validated market. And that’s what I did.
I saw all of these AI reading, AI note taking tools, and I figured, you know what? Some of these people are making tons of money off of these tools. There’s absolutely no reason why I can’t do the same. So I shamelessly looked at the market, saw what was working, and just did the same.
The product is a little bit differentiated with the note taking and reading built into one.
Lesson 2. Marketing
In my opinion, marketing is way more important than any engineering that you do in the product, at least in the early stages of the app, when you’re really just trying to get that initial traction.
I’m a software engineer. I love building things. Building features is so fun.
But wanna know what’s not fun? Building features when you have absolutely no users, because it makes you feel. Feel like you’re getting worked in, it makes you feel productive, but you’re not making any money from your app, and you have no users using your app. So what’s the point of building out new features if no one’s using it? And that is where marketing comes into play.
And that is where I had a little bit of competitive advantage, because I know how to do social media on TikTok, on Instagram, and on YouTube as well. So what I did differently was I figured out the type of content that I was gonna make and the type of people that I wanted to target. And specifically for my tool, I wanted to target college kids because I knew that I could make content specifically cater towards college kids that could go viral with college kids.
And that was my competitive edge angle that I went for with my marketing. And in my product, you can check out the Instagram and TikTok account here and here, and you can see all the content that I built. And as you can see, all of my marketing content was specifically geared towards going viral amongst college kids.
I had two primary series that did that.
Number one was this one series where it was like, if college X was honest, so if Harvard was honest, if Stanford was honest, and I knew that this type of content would do well, because what school somebody went to is a huge part of their identity for college. So of course they would want to see what some random stranger on the Internet is going to say and roast about their school.
And the other video series that I did that would talk more directly about the product was this one series where I found the most ridiculous articles on the Internet. Like, I found this one article where I talked about what type of doctors cheat on their spouses. The most crazy article.
There’s a very organic and natural integration of my product, showing what the product does in this type of content that was also geared to do pretty well on social media, too. So from this entire segment talking about marketing, I want to say that distribution and marketing is so important from your product, especially if you’re an engineer, which chances are if you’re watching my channel, you are an engineer or someone that’s technical. Do not get lost in building endless features without marketing.
Marketing is important. Distribution is so important, and actually, for me, I’ve changed my thesis where I do not build a product unless I can figure out the distribution strategy first. So I pick an audience, which for my Saas was these college kids.
Because I knew how to get into the minds of these college kids. I knew what their pain points were, and I knew how to make content around their lives to go viral. I knew that that was my competitive edge.
So if you are trying to build your own app as well and grow it, you need to figure out who your audience is and what your competitive advantage is, what your strategy is to market it to these people, whether that be on social media redder or other groups out there in the world. Whatever that marketing strategy may be, you need to figure out what your advantage is and what your strategy is to grow in that target demographic.
Lesson 3. Freemium Tiers
Avoid freemium tiers at all costs. I know some of you might be like, bro, that is so dumb. All the biggest companies in the world, they have freemium tiers and they’re crushing it.
You’re not wrong. But let’s also remember the fact that a lot of these companies that have these forever freemium trials. They also have tons of venture backed money or money in the bank to help fund their product and make up for any lost revenue that these freemium users are incurring.
But if you are somebody like me who’s working a full time job trying to build this app on the side, forever freemium plans are going to kill you. I just found that whenever I had this forever freemium tier, no one would convert or the conversion rate would be so much lower. So I would say remove the complete forever freemium tier and instead move to something like a free trial or something.
Give someone a free trial for a week or a couple of days, depending on your product, just so that they can experience what the full product is like. And then once that free trial is over, just block off the access and be like, hey, if you want to use this product, you should pay for it. Because if you are a solo app developer, you have to remember you are not a big company.
Lesson 4. Do not be Afraid to Charge Money
You are one person. You do not have unlimited funds. Most likely, at least then your number one objective in building an app that can make some money month over month is to charge money. That leads me to the fourth point that I want to talk about, which, once again is do not be afraid to charge money for your app.
Money is such a sensitive topic. There’s so much psychology that goes into money, and especially when you’re like an early app developer, you’re like, oh, is my app good enough? Like, should I charge money for it? Well, the only way for you to find out is by charging customers. So please put money out there.
Don’t be afraid to do it. You have to get signal early on if someone is willing to pay for your app. Because once again, if you are a solo app developer trying to build a side hustle, does it really matter if your app can get tons of free users, but you can’t get a single one of them to convert to a paid user? Not really.
I know that there’s a lot of differing opinions about this, but my two cent is you got to charge money. Charge for your product.
Lesson 5. Avoid Subscription Plans
The fifth point that I want to talk about is avoid subscription plans if you can, and optimize for one time purchases if possible.
Once again, I know this is kind of sacrilegious in the software engineering space, but trust me, I’ve run a couple of experiments on my app as well. But I’ve personally found, at least with my apps, that the conversion rate for a one time purchase product versus a subscription product is almost double the conversion rate. For example, with my current product that I’m building, I split tested this of a subscription product versus a one time purchase, and I believe the subscription product had like a 0.5% conversion rate, whereas my one time product offering with the same exact price had like a 1.2 - 1.3% conversion rate. So more than double the conversion rate.
Once again, I’m just one data point. I’m sure there’s other data points to refute, but you’re watching my video, where you listen to my opinions and my experiences. So that’s just what I have learned.
I think nowadays people are just so exhausted with subscriptions and people really prefer the one time purchases. I know, at least for me personally, and anecdotally, whenever I see a subscription product out there, I’m always like, oh my, really? Another subscription that I have to add month over month? Whereas if something is a one time purchase, I’m like, okay, I’m just gonna purchase it. It’s fine.
I own it forever. Or I know exactly what I get and what I don’t get. So that’s just my two cent.
And I know within the SaaS space and the tech space, everybody is like, oh my God, what’s your MRR, bro? What’s your monthly recurring revenue, bro? Mrr or Dai? It’s like, yeah, you’re not wrong. But also, one time purchases are just so, so good. Just leave the ego at the door.
Do not be an MRR obsessive person. Just look for revenue. Revenue is great too.
And I think you can get way higher conversions with the one time purchase over a subscription, at least in my experience.
Those are some of the lessons that I learned from building apps for two years, completely failing, and then finally, within the past six months, building an app that actually makes real money month over month.
Conslusion
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