本地化克隆应用：从0到月入8万美元的实战复盘

What if you didn't need an original idea at all? What if instead you could reverse engineer apps that are already working? Well, that's exactly what our guest did today and within 12 months he built a million-dollar app.

I launched it a year ago and now it makes over 80K per month.

Meet Tomer. He saw a successful app, realized it didn't exist in his country, and thought, "Can I build this?" So, he did and it worked almost immediately.

We started with only 1K on the first month and since then we grew consistently until the previous month we made over 81K.

I asked Tomer to come on to the channel to reveal exactly how he did all this and in this episode we're going to dive into what popular app he localized, how he built it in just a couple months without being a developer, and the genius marketing strategy that skyrocketed his app to [music] over $80,000 a month. All right, let's dive in. I'm Pat Walls and this is Starter Story. All right Tomer, welcome to the channel.

Tell me about who you are, what you built, and what's your story.

Hey, my name is Tomer and I built a calorie tracking mobile app. I launched it a year ago and now it makes over 80K per month. So, today I'm excited to talk about how I took a super popular app idea in the US and localized it to my local market.

Yeah, Tomer, when I saw what you built I thought, "Oh, that looks like a similar app." A lot of people watching this are thinking, "Oh, I know the app that he built." But it's not that app. But what I thought was cool about it is you took it and you took it down to your own country. Before we get into how you did that, how you found that idea, tell me a little bit more about what the app is, what it does, pull up some of your revenue screenshots, I'd love to see.

Sure, so the app is an AI calorie tracker, similarly to CalorieAI. You simply take a picture of your food and it tells you the calories and macros in seconds. And I've built it specifically for the Israeli market in Hebrew. So, here's the revenue chart from the moment we launched the app in June 2025 until the previous month, April 26. We started with only 1K on the first month, and since then we grew consistently until the previous month we made over 81K.

Okay, I mean, first of all, congratulations. This is amazing. Let's talk about how you get here. What were you doing before? Were you always building apps? What's your background? How do you get to this point where you have an app that's making over $80,000 a month?

Yeah, so before building this app, I was doing marketing for other businesses. I found it extremely boring, and I wasn't really passionate about promoting other people's products, and I wanted to look for opportunities to build my own product. I stumbled upon a podcast with Zach, the founder of Call AI. He talked about how they scaled quickly to over $1 million per month, and [music] I realized that it doesn't matter that the app already exists if no one knows about it in my local market.

And fitness and nutrition is a very big niche, doesn't matter the country or the market. So, I decided that there is enough potential in it, even in a smaller local market.

Okay, cool. Well, I'm also curious on how you actually built something like this. How did you go about building this? How long did it take to build and get to an app that was live in the App Store?

Yeah, so I'm not a developer. I had a little bit of coding experience from high school and stuff I learned by myself, but nothing more than that. Cursor was just released at the time, and I wanted to see if you could actually build software like it was magic with AI prompting. [music] And 2 weeks later after starting the experiment with Cursor, I had a working version with all the main app features work. From the first line of code to being live on the App Store, it was around [music] 2 months total.

The funny thing is that the coding wasn't what took the actual time. What actually slowed the process was waiting for Apple to [music] accept my developer program and passing the App Store reviews.

Yeah, that's something that I hear often from a lot of people who come on here. They say, "Hey, it was quick to build, but then the the part that took the longest was getting Apple to review it." So, if anyone is watching this right now and building something, get it done. Get it shipped to Apple. It might be another month. There's [music] this back and forth and you finally get it approved. So, yeah. I want to switch topics a little bit.

What I loved about what you did is you took this popular app and then you localized it to your country. I'm just curious how you came up with the idea to do this.

Yeah, so it was March 2025 and I was actively looking for an idea. And when I heard the CalA I podcast, it clicked immediately. Although my original plan was to build something big for the US market, the chance to take a proven winner and be the first to localize it to my local market was the simplest zero to one move for me, the way I saw it. And if you're going to localize an app for a small market like Israel, the niche has to be huge.

Cuz the market is small, you can't be in a tiny vertical. So, fitness and nutrition is one of the biggest niches in the world and I happen to know it very well personally. So, it was a perfect fit for me.

Okay, this strategy by Tomer is absolutely genius. Instead of finding some crazy original new idea, he found a proven app and he built a very niche version of it in his country. So, you might be wondering here, okay, how do I do this? How do I find a proven idea just like this? Well, we've got something for you. We've put together our free database of over 30 iOS app ideas that are making real money right now. Inside of this database, you will find all the data that you need. [music] Revenue numbers, business models, starting costs, and much more.

This is all the stuff that you might need to validate your potential idea, your app that could be the next CalBuddy. So, if you're ready to find your idea and get started building right now, just head to the first link in the description, you can grab this database 100% for free. All right, let's get back to the episode. But, I'm curious, does your app do anything differently? Did you realize as you were building it, oh, it needs to do this differently because I'm in Israel?

I'm just curious how similar it is to CalA I.

Yeah, so honestly, it's not a one-to-one clone, but the product itself isn't very different. The same core experience as the other AI color trackers. You point your camera at a meal, you get calories and markers. So, the differences are in the language and a bunch of small modifications to fit how Israelis actually eat and talk about food. That's on the product side. The real differentiation, and I want to be very clear about this because I think a lot of builders are missing it, is the brand and distribution.

Almost anyone can build an app with cursor in 2 weeks, but I think about it like this. If I can acquire a user for half what my competition pays, that means I have more cash flow than they do, and more cash flow means I can outspend them on growth.

I think that's a really good point. It's mostly the same based on the product, but it's widely different based on the language, the content that we're creating, the design, and that makes it basically a different app. It's the It's the same concept, but it's like a plumber here in the US where I live is going to be way different than a plumber out in Israel. So, let's talk about that. A lot of people are building apps right now, and they don't have any users, but you went very quickly from zero to $80,000 a month.

So, walk me through that. What did you do to grow your app so quickly?

Yeah, sure. So, I think that my biggest advantage going in was that I came from marketing. And it's important to say that every channel works. You just see influencers, paid ads, SEO. The que