I Built Two Apps That Make $120K/Month

A lifelong card collector wanted to catalog and sort his cards and look them up away from the physical collection. He searched the App Store, found no app for it, and built one himself. He recommends keeping a notes doc of slow, repetitive tasks in your own life and building the most minimal solution.

Pick a slideshow format, find which versions get views and which convert, and balance the two to drive downloads. Use Noise to send the slideshow template to creators, who post it and are paid per view. Cheaper start: post slideshows on your own TikTok account or a few accounts to validate before paying creators. Attribution is hard unless it is the only channel you run.

After finishing Cardstock, posted a Reddit update announcing it was complete (implying earlier progress posts). No subreddit or post details given.

Took the Cardstock sports-card scanner model and built 'basically the same app, but for Pokémon cards' (Scanémon) in 2025. Had Cursor's agent generate essentially everything; MVP done in one day.

When Cardstock made almost nothing, invited two friends (headed for retail/restaurant jobs) to help and split revenue three ways, even though they barely coded. Taught them to code and worked together for 2-3 years while he kept full ownership.