Turn a plain app into a push-up alarm using Apple's new alarm API

Pat Walls… but what you went to school for was accounting. You're doing some accounting work, but now you have this app. It's crushing it. So I think one important thing is just the idea itself. This idea that you had where it's an alarm clock that makes you do push-ups or makes you do something, it's a really cool idea. So I'm curious. How did you actually find this idea? How did you know it was something that could potentially make $50,000 a month?

Jake Glacer… my friend the night before like, "Hey, I'm going to send you a video of me doing push-ups by 6:00 a.m. tomorrow." And that was to hold me accountable, and so every night, I would send that text before. Uh it just held me accountable. It was great. And at that time, a lot of other apps were doing well, and I saw a lot of people on Twitter sort of doing well with apps, and I was at a point where I was sort of brainstorming my next idea, and decided this would probably be a great idea. Uh the MVP, the initial scope of the project, was just an accountability app, so there was no alarm feature whatsoever. And I built the app in three weeks, and then I realized I didn't know how to market. Uh thought influencer marketing could kind of maybe work with it, but it wasn't too viral of an idea. So I took a whole day just to kind of walk, think about it, write on the direction I was going to take, and I had a few paths, and decided on the alarm feature. Uh this was right before iOS 26 came out, and iOS 26 allowed you to connect your app to the native alarm system on iPhone using AlarmKit API, so you could build a real alarm app. Up until this point, there were a lot of other alarm apps out there, but they were sort of gimmicky and not reliable because they use different like app sounds and workarounds to make the {inaudible} alarm. So now that this was possible with the AlarmKit API, I figured it would be a good idea.

Pat WallsI love this that you mentioned this here is that like it's a little bit of luck and timing involved here is that like, before alarm apps couldn't be useful because they weren't 100% reliable. That's really important for an alarm app, but you had already shipped this thing, this kind of like fun accountability idea that was like a kind of a little bit of a gimmick thing that you're doing with your friend. You didn't really have any reason to ship …

Pat Walls… growth and you know how you did distribution, maybe there's not really like a framework on how to come up with great ideas, it's like ship stuff and think kind of like you did. So for anyone watching this, what would be your advice for people that are looking for an idea like this? Something that could make $50,000 a month, which is like an app you can build. What advice would you have for people watching this that want to do the same as you?

Jake GlacerYeah. Uh my framework at this point is just solve a painful problem in a simple way, and it should be inherently viral. If it's not inherently viral with the idea itself, then add some sort of novel aspect to it to make it inherently viral. Uh with AI, there's so much that's possible. If it's painful, people will pay, and if it's simple, it's easy to show the value in content very quickly. If it's something that's going through your head at least once a day, it's probably a really painful problem that you really want to solve, and you're actively looking even if you don't know that you're looking for a solution for it. If that solution shows up, you're going to jump on it. In college, uh my roommate and I would talk every single night about how we were going to go to sleep early and how we're going to wake up early the next day. It was just constant. Every single day, it was something that we would talk about. Also, this is …

Pat WallsI agree with the painful thing. We've we've talked about that a lot on the channel, but an- a thing that I love about this too is the second point was that it's simple. Go back into the Starter Story channel right now if you're watching this and look at all the successful apps from people that we interview, just like you. Every app is simple. Sometimes it's just one main killer feature. This is a very common thing across a lot of the successful …