非开发者靠AI工具与AB测试月入2.5万美元的SaaS复盘

I launched like nine months ago and last month we made $25,000.

This is Ben. About nine months ago, he launched his very first app and just last month that app made $25,000. [music]

I never like code one line in my life. So, it was my first app.

But here's the thing. To no surprise, [music] he is not a developer. In fact, he found this idea from just one piece of content. And he turned that one piece of content into a very simple and very viral app idea. It's an app where you can learn a language with songs, train with AI, and practice with people.

The app itself honestly is so genius that I knew I had to have him on the channel, and break down exactly how he did it. So, in this episode, we're going to dive into the app that he built that now makes around $25,000 a month, how he validated that idea from one Instagram post and the really simple playbook he [music] follows to grow his app every single month. This one is going to be fun. Let's dive in. I'm Gus and this is Starter Story. [music] All right, Ben, welcome to Starter Story.

Super excited to have you on the channel. Could you share with us who you are, what you built, and what's your story?

First, thanks for having me, I guess. My name is Ben, and I'm building Canary. It's an app where you can learn a language with songs. I launched like 9 months ago, and last month we made $25,000.

That is amazing. Congratulations. Could you tell us just a little bit about Canary? What's the app? Who are some of your users? How does it work? So yeah, you learn language with songs that you love. Uh for example, like for French or bad for Spanish and you also can like practice with people all over the world. Most of our user are people like trying to learn a language but for some reason like either like Dualingo is not working for them and they want something a little bit more like fun or exciting.

So we got 50,000 downloads so far. We have 2,000 paying subscriber and the business model is pretty simple. We have a premium and also like a premium is like a subscription membership 10 bucks a month or we do a yearly 79 bucks and 60% of our user choose the yearly package. If you've been watching the channel, you'll know that this is the year of consumer apps. And honestly, I really don't think this is going to stop anytime soon.

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All right, let's get back to Ben. Ben, could you pull up your revenue dashboard just to show the audience that this thing is legit? So, we have like 25,000 bucks. That's 28 days. Our MR is almost like 14,000. It's less than the month because again, we're doing like yearly a lot. So we push for the yearly and he had 23,000 active customer for the last month.

I want to understand how do you get here? Tell us a little bit about your background. How do you get to a point where you build this $25,000 per month app?

So I moved to the US 13 years ago and then I started a couple of businesses. I sold one three years ago and then I become like a digital nomad and also become like a content creator. I grew to like 1 million followers across social media. So a year ago I posted a video of me singing in French with the lyrics and the translation [music] and I got like a lot of engagement mostly in term of share in term of like people that following me after this video.

So I thought there is something there. So I created a page just for that. The page really grow like really fast. Now it's like 200,000 followers. I say okay this is like a social proof that people want this kind of content and want to learn with songs. And that's how I'm like I decided to make a MVP for that. you kind of posted something went mini viral and you kind of knew you had something potentially that could you know be turned into an app.

One of the things we're going to see in the comments is oh well of course he had a million followers that's why he's successful. Any thoughts on like someone who may have some skepticism about your app because you are a content creator.

I think it's super helpful to have a community behind you but with my audience I really use it as like a way to prove the concept. Then I created like a page and the page is not about me was not using audience and the page just grow like faster than my own personal page. It got like 200,000 followers under one year. Like having an audience can help but you can also like create an audience from scratch in order to like see if your idea is good and it can go like really viral pretty fast.

Yeah. I mean I think we get that comment all the time. People are going to say, "Oh, you know, he only had success cuz he has followers, but he also worked really hard to like get those followers." So like, you know, it's kind of chicken or the egg to some degree. Tell us about how you built this. What was kind of the build timeline, build process for you to build this app?

I'm not a developer, so I hire like a developer and then about like four months ago, I start to bite code myself and it's been like a game changer for me in term of like speed and just like making like feature quick or getting feedback and changing things on the app directly. The first MVP was maybe a month, but it was really ugly and really bad. But for me, my mindset is just like launch something and get like feedback as soon as possible.

Yeah. I mean I think claude and codeex and all these tools have made it so easy to build you know people like you people like me who don't have kind of that technical background can actually build something that looks good and works on that note what is the tech stack or tools that you use to build [music] this and then some of the tools you use to run the business now

so I'm using Firebase for back end uh it's 200 bucks and Robin cat for subscription and pay testing to 260 uh posal analytics and experimentation It's 250 cloud for bad coding 200 behave for the email 169 open AI on top for like AI feature in app. So it's 150 extra app flyers for install tracking 97 mini chat because now I do like some automation on social media and that's 30 bucks.

Super lean. I love it. So I want to talk about the early days. Now you're making $25,000 a month but how did you first get it off the ground? What were some of the marketing growth things that you did early on to, you know, get beyond that initial validation and actually start to grow your app?

I'm a big believer in like AB testing and even like AB CDE E testing. Like I try to test a lot of things. So I was trying to post in every platform and different content, different format. I also spend a lot of time studing like other apps and listening to like founder podcast. Actually, one of my routine was when I was going to the gym. I was listening to you guys like stat story every day and taking notes on things I should test.

I tried like Google ads after having one of your founder talk about it. I even reached out to some of your guests like Nicole and paid her for like a consulting session to help improve the onboarding and the product. So, basically every day I was trying to learn something, ship something and test something, you know.

Yeah. Well, that's super cool to hear that you got inspiration from Starter Story and even reached out to all those guests because they've come on Starter Story. There's a good chance they're like willing to share a little bit more maybe than other people. Okay. So, you start to get a little bit of traction, improve the product, post about it everywhere. So, then how do you go from that to now you last month you made $25,000?