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I made $1 million from the app store with no employees, no marketing budget, and mostly my own code. When I started, I was in debt.
Got evicted and living in my car. A few years later, my apps are generating $70,000
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every month. I'm going to show you for the first time all of my secrets.
There's no secret formula. There's no hidden insights.
It's just about staying in the game long enough to survive. This is how I played the indie app game and won.
And I'll break it down by levels.
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From being broke, the early revenue stages, building a breakout app, acquisitions, and self-funded VC mode. Chances are you're watching this video at level one or level two.
You're either broke or you're in those early stages of
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getting revenue into your business. But don't worry, I'll show you how to upgrade to the next level.
This game is all about staying alive until you reach level three. Building a breakout app.
An app that generates tens of thousands of dollars. And when you see it, you'll
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know. And it will change your life.
It's an app that earns 200, maybe even $500,000 every year. And it's here that you're faced with a choice.
Continue this app thing full-time or maybe turn it into a lifestyle business. When you're earning
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$500,000 a year with passive income, you suddenly have a lot of freedom. I'll step you through my decision process and why I decided to keep going.
The later levels are all about reinvesting your money back into your business, acquiring new apps, and funding your own larger
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projects. You kind of become your very own self-funded venture capital fund, and you finally can work on those bigger projects that you dreamed of with a marketing budget to boot.
In this video, I'm going to show you how you can win at this game, too. I'll show you the business strategies that I used at every
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stage of the game. When you start out, you're probably broke or you're not earning anything from apps anyway.
I started out with nothing. Actually, less than nothing.
I was $200,000 in debt. If you're broke and you have no debt to
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your name, you're actually $200,000 better off than I was. Well done.
You're awesome. You clearly didn't sign a personal guaranur to a company that collapsed and left you nearly bankrupt.
Great. What's your secret?
I had high hopes that I could do this app thing
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successfully, but it felt like a long shot. In 2020, the indie scene just didn't exist, and it really felt like I was going alone in the dark.
Instead of learning to build apps from scratch, I leveraged my existing experience building websites in HTML and
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JavaScript. I used a platform called Cordova, but these days I would recommend something like ionic capacitor.
It's a tool that lets you use JavaScript to build and it works really well. But let me be clear, level one is all about learning, not about the
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revenue. You got to put the time in here.
You can't just fast forward to a million dollars tomorrow. This journey took me 5 years.
But if you're smart, you can do it sooner. You will want to learn as much as you can about idea validation, implementation, and user
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acquisition channels. Think app store optimization, ads, Tik Tok, Instagram, that sort of thing.
I've done a bunch of videos on each of these topics. I'll put a description in the link below.
And the best way to learn, simply start building your own apps. But just remember, some
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of the apps you're going to build during this time won't be great. And that's okay.
It's about building practical skills and learning not only to code, but how to create an actual product. Your metric for success here is your progress between app releases.
Each app
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should push you that little bit further, and you should get slightly better each time you build a new app. That's progress.
But be warned, this process is slow. Really slow.
Too many developers reach out to me a week after they launch their first app saying, "It didn't work.
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I didn't earn any money." The key is patience. Be patient.
Keep going and don't be discouraged by low sales. Your revenue will suck and it might suck for quite a while.
Actually, for me, it took several years before I started to generate any meaningful revenue from my
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apps. Then all of a sudden, you start making some money from your apps.
Congratulations. You've now reached level two.
Kind of. Now you get a taste for that sweet, sweet internet money.
It feels different, doesn't it? Every new sale feels like hardearned money.
Oh,
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look, a notification for a $4 subscription. Amazing.
But don't fool yourself just yet. Don't quit your day job just yet.
There's a long road ahead to go. This is just the beginning.
Surround yourself with people who care about you. It's easy to get sucked into
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this indie world and lose contact with friends and family. Don't do that.
And the grind until you make it mentality, it's kind of overrated. This is a marathon, not a sprint.
And don't go around telling your friends and family you're going to make a million dollars
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building apps because some dude on YouTube told you so. You'll just look like a fool and it gives them ammunition to say, "I told you so." when times get tough.
Instead, focus on what drives you. Why are you building apps?
What attracts you to this game? And don't say
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money. This is not a good enough answer.
It has to be deeper than that. Then explain your passion to those you love.
Let them in. Show them your journey.
Show them what you love about building apps. Ask them for feedback and show them how passionate you are about this
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thing. You'll find a lot more of your friends and family support you when they see how happy it's making you.
Work out your why and focus on that. That sounds great and all, but my app only generates $500 a month.
I can't live off that. I hear you.
Money isn't everything, but
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it's important part of keeping your app business alive. It was this exact point I made a decision to start selling my apps.
An app generating $500 a month is actually worth $12,000 for the right buyer. That's two times the annual revenue.
Overnight, my business model
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changed. I realized to stay afloat, my customers were not the users, but the buyers, the people acquiring my apps.
Create an app a month and sell it for $12,000 and you got yourself a business generating $144,000 a year. And during this phase, you will
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learn a lot about the business side, too. All of a sudden, user acquisition, churn, and retention are important to you because they're important to your buyers.
I've done a whole video on selling apps. I'll put a link in the description below.
And selling your apps actually has a really cool unintended
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consequence. It actually generates a side income.
Sell your app to a nontechnical founder and they'll still need bug fixes and someone to build new features. And guess who they'll call?
You. You get to work on the app that you created, see it continue to grow, and
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get paid for the pleasure of it. It's a win-win.
If you have an app generating 3,000 to 5,000 downloads a month, let me know. I want to buy it.
I pay around about $10,000 to $12,000 per app, even if it's not making any revenue. Level three, you've been learning how to build
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apps. And if you're actually putting the time in and not just cheating with AI, you will be learning what works and what doesn't.
With each iteration, you're getting better and your apps are getting better, too. Then one day, something strange will happen.
An app will take
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off. All of a sudden, the formula of releasing an app every single month and building it to sell has given birth to an app that's generating tens of thousands of dollars.
Don't sell this one. Well done.
You reached level three. Up until this point, the whole aim of
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the game has been to stay alive until you build a breakout app. Some people get lucky and have it happen on their first app, others their 10th.
It happened to me on one of my very first apps, and I didn't even recognize it. It was generating tens of thousands of downloads every single month, and I sold
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it for less than it was worth. I spent the following 3 years trying to chase that lightning in a bottle again.
And just when I was about to give up, I did it again and again and again. In my next video, I'm going to do a deep dive on how to create a breakout app.
The
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features, the marketing, the business model, everything. Subscribe because you don't want to miss out on that one.
Now, my revenue is stable at $70,000 per month. And I've been left with an important question.
Do I continue this business or is this enough? My apps are
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generating a passive income. And if I stop now, they'll continue to produce revenue.
I can live comfortably on this. It pays my rent.
It puts food on the table. We can go on holidays.
Life's pretty good. And if this lifestyle sounds good for you, it's actually okay to stop here.
You don't need to keep
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growing a business for the sake of keep growing a business. And I've recently been visiting why I'm doing this.
Why am I still doing this? Yes, I love building apps.
Yes, I love being creative. And yes, I love making something out of nothing.
But there's a new passion that
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I've unlocked along the way. sharing my journey on here and on X, featuring other indie developers and serving my community.
I can't stop and I won't stop. So, I continue.
This year, I'm reaching level four. This is the stage of the business where revenue is
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reinjected into buying apps and it's a beautiful cycle. Just a few years ago, I was completely reliant on selling my apps to keep my business afloat.
Now I acquire them, which helps me to grow my business and also helps to keep other indie devs in business, too. It's a
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win-win. I'm building my app portfolio at the moment using this method, and I don't see any reason why revenue can't increase to $200,000 per month.
Right now, I'm looking for apps that are under monetized. These are apps getting decent downloads, $3,000 to $5,000 per month.
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And I've been buying these for around about $10,000 to $12,000, even if they're not generating any revenue. And I've had pretty good success with this with one app going from $90 per month to $3,000 per month.
I did a deep dive on how I did it, and I'll put a link in the
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description below. And if you've got apps meeting this threshold that you want to sell, reach out.
I'd love to have a look. Before I purchase any app, I always give you a complete overview of how I'm going to improve it.
Then you can decide whether you want to implement the suggestions or sell it. Congratulations, you've reached level
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five. You now are a successful indie app developer.
Now what? Actually, I don't know.
A million in app sales just blows my mind. I still can't comprehend it.
Over $870,000 of that revenue has occurred in the last
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12 months. Our lifestyle has changed like a little bit.
We no longer worry about the price of groceries or putting petrol in the car or rent. It's quite freeing actually.
And I always wanted to travel the world and this year I finally
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left Australia for the first time. I took the family to the UK and then later took my son to Silicon Valley and in October I'm going to the Formula 1 in Singapore.
Other than that, as far as people in my life are concerned, nothing
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has really changed. I'm still living a pretty normal life.
And if you're getting into this game thinking money is going to change everything, you're kind of right to a degree. It gives you more freedom and lets you work on the things you want to work on.
But it doesn't change the person you are. It just
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amplifies who you were already. If you're motivated only by money, you're going to find out enough is never enough.
Level five is actually about being your own self-funded venture capital fund. Now you can finally work on the projects you want to work on with
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a marketing budget to boot. For me, that's working on my piano app.
It's an app aimed at kids to trick them into learning the piano by turning each lesson into a game. This is my work of passion, and I'm taking my time on this.
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The objective is simple. Create a great quality app that helps kids learn the piano.
And my next achievement, I'm eyeing out app of the day on the app store. So, I'm hoping this app can get me there.