Frederick James：AI构建习惯追踪器月入$10K

I want you to meet Frederick.

My name's Frederick James. I built an app that peaked about 13k per month.

A few months ago, he built a little simple app while on vacation. And today, that simple app makes over $10,000 a month. But here's a really important thing I need you to know. His app is not really special at all.

The app is a habit tracker. It's got a focus on premium design.

But the reason you watch this video is because he's going to break down exactly how he grew it to $10,000 plus per month.

There's a bit of a playbook, at least that I used for my app. Number one, you got to have a

So, I asked Frederick to come on and break everything down for us. And in this episode, we're going to dive into the app idea he built that now makes over $10,000 [music] a month, the exact growth channel that's working for him right now, and the exact playbook he's using to do it all over again. I think this one's going to be great. Let's dive in. I'm Gus, and this is Starter Story. Frederick, welcome to Starter Story.

We're super excited to have you here today. Could you tell us who you are, what you built, and what's your story?

Yeah, so my name's Frederick James. I built an app that peaked at about 13k per month. Um, it's hovering around 10k right now. I launched about 3 months ago, and since then, it's given me financial freedom. And I'm currently doing it all again as well with a second app. So, yeah, we're going to dive into the stack that I'm using, some of the marketing bits and pieces, and yeah, hopefully you'll find some of it useful.

All right, Frederick, let's talk about this app business. Could you pull up or share some of your revenue dashboards just to show the audience that this thing is legit?

So, here we go. We can first see this is the overall revenue in the last 90 days. Um, it's done about 25k in revenue. Um, and on ARR basis, we kind of peaked at around just under 100k ARR. Then we come to MRR as well. You can see that we're currently sitting around uh 8,000. The download to paid ratio I have about 7%, which is pretty good for the uh niche that I'm in, which means that essentially 7% of the people that download the app will actually end up buying it.

Also, the refund rate is quite nice as well, 0.7%. This is the Trust MRA listing. Sorry, last 30 days. You can see we've got about 11k. If we go in the last 3 months, we're sitting [music] around 25k.

Okay, so what kind of app did you build? What's the category or niche that it's in?

What I can say is that the app is a habit tracker in the health and fitness niche. It's not really anything special. It's got a focus on premium design and it's got to be like really nice UI. [music] I guess that's the main value proposition for the app.

So, before we kind of get into some of those methods, like how you grew it and things like that, how did you get here? What's your background? How did you get to the point where you're building an app that makes, you know, over $10,000 a month?

I've always been a software developer, really. I was always playing with computers as a kid. And for the past 5 years, I've been living in London working [music] in big tech. And I don't know, I've always been a little bit kind of dissatisfied, I think, with the regularness, right, of like 9-5, all of these things. I had a health scare last year and I realized I needed to pretty much start life maxing, basically. I needed to start, you know, actually taking life by the reins.

And I decided I was going to go all in, pretty much, building this app, sharing the journey on X. That was pretty much what I decided to do.

But how did you come up with the idea itself? Like how did you find,

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you said it's in the health category, habit trackers, you know, there's a million of those. But how did you kind of come up with your idea?

Yeah, so I literally saw a breakdown of an app onboarding. You know, it's quite a common like format of posts on X. And yeah, I just realized that I could like very easily make it, you know, my own angle and then also just add some like really obvious features that were there and improve it. And I think that's that's again like a really good lesson from that. This isn't unique to my app, either, right? I knew I could take this app, make the design premium, add a couple of features and it would likely sell itself.

Like I mentioned, it's in health and fitness, as well. Yeah, I just thought it would probably make money.

So, 2026 has really been the year of building iOS apps. I really don't think that's going to change anytime soon. And so, if you're sitting here wondering, I want to build an app, but I have no idea where to start, I think we have something that could really help you out. At the link in the description below, you can find the iOS apps database. Inside, you're going to find over 50 proven app ideas across a bunch of different categories.

What I think you should do is go through the list, find inspiration, and then start building your own app. So, you can just head to the link in the description and grab it below. All right, let's get back to the episode. So, let's talk about how you built this. Uh what's kind of the build story, build timeline? Yeah, how did you build this 10,000 per month app?

Yeah, the process was kind of in a couple of stages. Uh stage one is to make the mock UI in Figma first. I think this always leads to a way better final product. Um if you draw like a wireframe even of what you want the UI to look like, the agent will have a much higher chance of one-shotting it and you rather than you have to go back and forth and do lots of iterations. The second bit of prep that I like to do is a map out a basic ERD.

Um this is an entity relationship diagram. It's like a data structure. It's how the tables of data how the schemas for your tables interact with one another. Um this is probably, to be honest, today a bit of a relic of the old ways that we used to build software. I then also map out a basic infra diagram. Again, I'm unk I'm showing my age um how the data flows throughout your app and your different services, right? I then also make uh MVP for my App Store screenshots as well in Figma.

I've got a little bit of design chops, but I always hand them off to GPT image to do some final [music] touches and stuff like this. The second stage is that for all the assets in my app, I go to Pinterest and I download a whole load of those, and then I make them my own with uh GPT image uh two. It's actually 2.5 now as well. Um this is free with an OpenAI subscription as well. People love images, right? People love visual nature.

It's more interactive, especially during onboarding. It can really helps to make your app feel much more engaging. I then give all of my mock-ups to uh ChatGPT, who then builds out the whole flow and the UI. Stage three, you then want to do some like AB testing and iterations after you've actually released the app and once the app is live. This can be on the paywalls primarily, but you can also change the pricing, change pricing options.

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You can go as deep as you want really, but I would definitely recommend at least testing a paywall. The back end for all of my apps is [music] Cloudflare. R2 for asset storage is free. I use D1 for my databases. This is [music] just a standard like uh cloud serverless database. Um and then I use Cloudflare workers for any kind of compute. I'm using AppsFlyer right now for my MMP. It's free until 12,000 installs. And then I'm using RevenueCat for the tracking uh for the monetization and the remote paywalls.

ChatGPT for my coding agent. Uh pay $100 a month for that. I've also just got a Claude Pro plan because Opus 5.5 came out and apparently it rips. I'm testing it [music] right now. An interesting one as well is that all of my apps, all my websites, even the subtitles in my videos, use a font that I actually bought. I paid a one-time fee for $300.