用AI开发猫主题番茄钟应用，月入1.8万美元

I am obsessed with finding niche apps that make money, and today I have one to show you that will blow your mind.

With the help of AI, we built an app that makes over 18K a month now.

Meet Ryan. He's a normal guy who quit his designer job and decided to start building apps.

I left my 200K job to build my own business.

And the first one that he built already crossed $18,000 a month. And when he showed me what this app does, I knew I had to bring him on to the channel. In this episode, we're going to dive into the ridiculously simple app idea that's making him $18,000 [music] a month, exactly how he found this idea and built it 100% with AI, and his advice for building apps that stand out from the rest. All right, this is one that you cannot miss.

Let's dive in. I'm Pat Walls, and this is Starter Story. Ryan, welcome to the channel. I'm pumped to have you on here and talk about this super cool app that you built. So, tell me who you are, what you built, and what's your story.

Hi, I'm Ryan, a product designer turned to indie developer. I left my 200K job to build my own business. It took a few years, but with the help of AI and my girlfriend, we built an app that makes over 18K a month now.

Okay, cool. You're a solopreneur with the help of your girlfriend, you were able to build an app that makes $18,000 a month. Let's see it. What is the app that you built? And then also, if you could pull up some of your Stripe screenshots to show that this is legit.

So, the app is called Cat on Chair. [music] It's a Pomodoro timer for cat lovers. Uh we didn't want to build another boring, cold productivity app. We want to have some fun. So, for this app, it's not just a regular timer, but when you are start focusing, the cat will jump on the chair and just be there with you. And once you are done, the cat will leave you a gift. Overall, we crossed 127K downloads. And for our sales, we made close to 80K for span of 8-9 months.

In the last 30 days from April 13, we made over 18K. That's our sale. And in terms of first time downloads, it's around [music] 24K downloads. It is a free app. Everyone can download it, use it. And but we have many pro features. And our lifetime plan is $29.99. And our annual is $19.99. We also have a family share, which people can buy it and there is up to six people. Most of sales come from the lifetime. So at the peak, we hit rank three for free productivity apps and rank 11 for all free apps in Taiwan.

All right, cool. So one thing I love about your app is it's super fun. It's like designed really well. I can see why it potentially went viral and you had all this word of mouth. So we're going to talk more about that. But before we do, let's talk about your background. Have you always been building apps? Were you working a job before? How did you get to this point where you have an app that's doing almost $20,000 a month?

Yeah. So this is actually the first app we released. So I was a product designer at various tech startups. [music] But I always felt like I'm wasting my potential because I was only doing design works. So I quit my job and tried to build something on my own. And so about a year ago, AI coding became a viable option for building iOS apps. And it [music] was always my dream to ship one. So I just decided to try.

I love the app that Ryan built. I think this is super cool. Why? Because it's proof that you do not need a complicated app to make [music] real money. All you need is an idea and the right tools to ship it. And this is why we launched the iOS bootcamp, which is our free program where we will help you come up with an idea, build it with AI, and get it ready to ship to the App Store. If you join this bootcamp, within a few days, your app idea could be live and ready to make money.

So if you are finally ready to start building, just head to the first link in the description, click that, and you You started on your app for free. All right, let's get back to the episode. That's super cool because hopefully there's a lot of product designers on here watching this right now that maybe two, three, five years ago weren't able to build things cuz they weren't technical. But you, because of AI coding, you were able to take your really great design skills and now actually build stuff.

So, let's talk about this. Can you give me the timeline of how long it took to build this and exactly how you built it, what tools you used?

I started around May 2025. It actually took a while for us to get the first version up and running. So, after a few weeks, we finally got a simple Pomodoro timer done. Then we started fleshing out the concept and the mechanics, like how to show the cat animations. By August, we finally had the first version ready. We invited dozens of people on RedNotes to beta test it. We spent about a month gathering feedback, fixing bug, iterating on it.

The app launched August 27th. We had about 3,000 downloads in the first week, but wasn't really a smooth sailing. There were so many bugs [music] even after a month of testing. Some of the bugs were pretty serious, like data not syncing between devices. It wasn't until around December or January that we had a relatively stable version. During that time, we had a few small viral moments on RedNotes, but the app truly took off when some Instagram influencers started sharing app collection posts featuring us.

And one of them exploded and hitting over 2 million views. From there, someone in Taiwan saw it, shared our app on Threads where it went viral all over again. That chain of events essentially doubled our downloads and revenue overnight.

That's super cool. And as I understand it, this is mainly for Chinese and Taiwanese markets. Is that where most of your users come from?

That's correct as for now. It was mainly because my girlfriend had a RedNotes of before sharing her illustrations and so she had some followers there already. So, that's where we started in the beginning, but now we are definitely targeting more to the English audience or pretty much worldwide.

That's super cool. You know, we talked to a lot of founders who build apps for US market or even just English market. That shows just how big the world is in building apps. We're going to get to that, but before we do, I'm just curious what tools you used to build this cuz you were a designer. You didn't know all the lay of the land in terms of developer tools. What were the actual tools that you used to build this and turn it into something that's used by hundreds of thousands of people?

Yeah, right now I'm mainly use ChatGPT Pro plan for the coding part. I'm also using other tools like RevenueCat which is super popular paywall and subscription management tool. It costs around 200 to 300 depends on our revenue of the month. is an ASO optimization tool. It costs uh, $10 a month. There's Droids, just a user feedback board. It's free.

Okay, cool. One reason why seems like your app blew up, you just built something really cool. People loved it. They shared it organically. They shared it through word of mouth. You don't hear about that as much anymore. So, I'd love to talk about how did you actually come up with the idea for this and how did you know it could be something that hundreds of thousands of people would potentially use it. How did you have the conviction to go all in on this cool cat on chair Pomodoro timer idea?

The idea actually came from a necklace my girlfriend made. It's a a little cat sitting on a chair. I named it cat on chair and I really loved the name. So, I knew I had to use it to build something around it and everyone knows cats love curling up beside you while you work. As cat owners, we especially know there are something so calming, healing about those moments. So, having a cat sit on your chair while you focus just [music] made the perfect sense.

I girlfriend is a big Animal Crossing fan. So, she suggest we should add some customization to t

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