I Grew My Mobile App to $20K/Month: Here’s My Entire Playbook

After ~3 months of building Christian apps nobody wanted, found PrayScreen (blocks your phone until you pray), studied its design, features and distribution, and built a better version. Start-over version: find niches with apps above $50K/month using Sensor Tower revenue estimates, pick an app you like and improve it substantially, and code it in under 2 weeks (hard limit).

Skip mock-ups. Laid out the best onboarding screens from apps he liked and from competitors in one Canva file (also browse Screens.design), chose the strongest screens and applied them to his own app, then went straight to coding.

No authentication and no database: all data is saved on-device so users never spend time signing up and there is no database bill. He accepts that switching phones loses data, calling it a niche case.

Not knowing what worked, tried many formats, posting ~40 times a day across 12 accounts; once a format starts to work, put all energy into it. Start-over rule: copy the working formats in your niche and post at least 20 times a day, and don't touch the app while obsessing over distribution.

Copied a top competitor's format: a girl reacting, with a demo of the app. Too broke to pay creators, he had his girlfriend (now wife) record the reactions. Posted twice a day on TikTok and Instagram; hooks only started working after ~40 posts, then he spammed the winning hooks.

Once the reaction format worked, reached out to friends and hired another UGC creator to run the same format on her own TikTok and Instagram accounts. It was hard to get her account going; after 14 days one video broke out at ~20K organic views.

Hired an influencer after organic started working; no details on who, cost or format.

First paid-ads attempt optimized campaigns for downloads rather than trial starts, while the onboarding was short (5 minutes) and weak.

Rebuilt the onboarding from ~5 minutes to ~15 minutes; longer is better as long as each step adds value and tells a story. Start-over rule: iterate on onboarding 'like a maniac' until download-to-trial conversion is at least 10% before running paid ads.

After the onboarding rebuild, restarted paid ads on Meta at $20/day optimizing for trial starts.

TikTok campaign with no audience controls, only location set to US, using his top-performing UGC girl-reaction videos as creative. Started at $20/day; after seeing $4 per trial on a ~$50 yearly plan, put ~$4,000 (all his savings) into the ads.

Found Matthew, a 15-year-old UGC creator, while scrolling TikTok; hooked by his first 3 seconds, DMed him and started working together. His organic videos hit ~10K views each consistently. Put TikTok Spark Ads behind his videos, then increased ad spend regularly each week: ~$6K in November, ~$9K in December, now ~$360/day. Rule: only boost organic videos that already have 10K+ views; prefers TikTok Spark Ads over Meta.