I Built a $10K/Month App from My Mom’s Basement

I taught myself how to code and I built two apps that now make me $10,000 a month all from my mom's basement. How did this guy teach himself to code and then build two apps to $10,000 a month? Well, the answer lies in how he spends his time.

I spend 1 hour a day marketing and I generated over 300 million views and made a,000 videos. The secret is Jack Ficks started his journey as a kid working at McDonald's, saving up money so he could start pursuing his dreams of building online. Once he'd saved up enough, he quit his job, dropped out of college, and started building apps from his mom's basement.

And within one year, he started making money. I think the biggest reason most people over complicate building profitable apps is because they're not trying to solve a painful enough problem. I spent almost 2 hours talking to Jack about his apps and how anyone can start building profitable products like him from scratch and on a budget.

Luckily, he shared everything. how he finds profitable ideas, how he scrappily builds products and monetizes quickly, and his 1hour a day marketing strategy that's gotten him millions of views and thousands of downloads. Now, let's get into it.

I'm Pat Walls, and this is Starter Story. Welcome, Jack Frics, to the Starter Store YouTube channel. Tell me a little bit about yourself and what you built.

My name is Jack Ficks. I built two startups that make me $10,000 a month, all from my mom's basement. The first thing I built was Curiosity Quench, a consumer app that helps people scroll less on their phones.

It took me 4 months to build it because I was learning how to code at the time. That now makes me $3,000 a month in monthly recurring revenue, and it's made me over $60,000 in the last year. The second thing I built was a social media scheduling tool called PostBridge.

After four and a half months, it hit $7,000 in monthly recurring revenue and it's made me about $40,000 in the first five months. All right, Jack, can you give me a further breakdown of the businesses that you built? Yeah.

So, Curiosity Quench I built to help people scroll less on their phones by giving them hobbies to do. It charges about $30 a year for the subscription with a 7-day free trial. It has over 100,000 downloads.

And then that led me to build another business which is called PostBridge that helps people basically post social media posts quicker, easier, faster from one place. It is a web application. The starting plan for PostBridge is $9 a month, but now there is a few other pricing tiers.

Cool. Okay. Tell me a little bit about what got you into building online.

Give us a timeline of when things started for you as an entrepreneur. Yeah. So, 3 years ago, I dropped out of college because I realized I did not want to work a job.

I really just wanted my own freedom, my own autonomy to like do whatever I want on my own time. It sounds dramatic, but I would often tell my friends and myself that I would rather be homeless than work a job. Basically, I quit my job at McDonald's.

I dropped out of school in the same few months to pursue a bunch of different businesses in 3 years making a book, selling t-shirts, having a crypto YouTube channel, many other things. I eventually landed on learning how to code. I kind of just went into it head on.

The first thing I went to build was actually Curiosity Quench. Everything broke almost every single time I built it. I just kept putting errors after errors into ChachiPT and eventually had a working product.

But it didn't go like skyrocket growth right away. I still had to keep working on it and find new angles on how to market it, how to get into people's hands. So that was still an ongoing process for many months even after I built it.

Nice, man. Let's go on to ideas, man. I want to get a little bit into the dirty details here.

Can you tell me a little bit about how you find ideas and specifically how you found the ideas for Curiosity Quench and PostBridge? So, I think the best way to find any good idea is to solve your own problems. For Curiosity Quench, my problem was that I was scrolling all day on my phone or at least a few hours when I woke up and there wasn't really any apps that to me were very great.

So, I was trying to tackle it from a different angle. And ultimately, what I came up with was action plans on a bunch of different hobbies. And that's how it led to me making Curiosity Quench the app it is now.

Nice. Okay, cool. So then tell me about the second idea postbridge and how you came across the problem for that and then decided to what to build for it.

So postbridge came to be because I was spending an hour a day marketing curiosity quench and of that hour 30 minutes was spent posting the same content to every single platform. So I went and looked around and there was options to do it for me but they cost like 10 times more than I want to pay. So I thought I could make something better and then I just went and did it at a fair price.

Nice. Okay, let's talk idea validation. What does that look like?

That process. So to me, validating ideas was first asking myself, is it a problem that I would pay for to solve? If I would pay for it, I consider it a lot more valuable and a painful problem.

And if I wouldn't pay for it, I usually don't build it. And then for Curiosity Crunch as an example, I posted a video, 60 seconds on TikTok. I just point and shoot recorded it talking to the camera and 15 people commented saying, "I need this.

This is it. This is good. " So, I kept making videos.

The same thing happened. And eventually, I realized, hey, I should probably make this thing that hundreds of people say they want. All right, let's talk about what everyone loves.

Let's talk about how you build these products. What's your step-by-step process to go from zero to one with a new idea? So, my process is actually pure chaos.

I basically jump into my code editor. I bring up chat GPT or something similar and I just start asking how I should go about building the thing. And in terms of landing page, I have just used like a boilerplate and I have made very small improvements.

I'd go back and edit one section at a time usually and just make it a little bit better week over week. All right, so we talked about how to go from zero to one. But before we get into the growth, I do want to talk about one very important thing that you cannot forget to do before you launch.

Analytics. And yes, this is today's sponsor. But I'm actually kind of nerding out right now because this is one of my favorite tools and I actually use it every day.

And I'm going to show you right now how I use it. So this is Post Hog. And by the way, how freaking cool is their website with this crazy dinosaur thing?

But you can install it on your site with just one line of code. And they have a really generous free plan. Once it's installed, you'll get product analytics, session replay, experiments, surveys, and more.

But my personal favorite feature is AB testing. And I'm going to show you a starter story AB test in Post Hog right now that increased our conversion rate by over 300%. Check this out right here.

This is crazy and why I really recommend using Post Hog. But what I think is also cool is that in Post Hog, you can track the AB test going through the funnel and see how this AB test affects the entire conversion flow. You can also even drill down further and look at conversion rates by source.

So I can see how people convert from Twitter, YouTube, ChatGBT, and a bunch of other places. These AB tests are so important for our business and there's just really not another tool that can actually do this. So, if you want to install Post Hog, which I think you should do, and it's free, just click the first link in the description and tell them you came from Starter Story.

All right, now back to the video. All right, let's talk about your specialty. Let's talk about marketing.

How do you actually get users to these businesses and have them pay money? So my core strategy and it still is this is to do everything through organic to get Curiosity Quench to a 100,000 users was just finding a template that I can repeat over and over and over again. A very funny simple 2x two images caption template.

It's 6 seconds long and having the pinned comment be go download and try our app. And then I would make a mistake even to drive engagement in the comments like astrology and astronomy. If you get those mixed up, people are really going to get angry.

Originally, I created my templates by just making a Cap Cut project and copying and pasting it over. Eventually, this became a bit too slow, so I actually built in like a template creator into my SAS, which is PostBridge. I posted the 2x two template over now 300 times on two different accounts and they've driven 60 to 70,000 signups just through these simple templates that have brought in like hundreds of millions of views.

Okay, let's we're going to do a little deep dive into your marketing. Can you walk through that step by step of just spending 1 hour a day marketing your app? What does that look like?

So, I think anyone can get thousands of downloads to their app or visitors to the website just with one hour a day of marketing with no ad spend. That's a very simple strategy. First, I would open account on Tik Tok and Instagram for my product or a personal page.

Either one works. And I would just scroll on those pages for 2 days, 15 minutes a day each. This is to warm it up so the algorithms don't think you're a bot.

You're a real human being. While you're doing this, when you see videos that have went viral, save them. Do not post content during this time.

Comment and follow people in your niche. So, interact with posts. And then after you've warmed up your account, download Cap Cut.

It's super easy. You can learn it in an hour and you can start posting videos from proven examples that you've seen. You spin them with your app either as a call to action at the end of the video, 3 seconds or less, or don't even put in the video.

Make your caption and your first comment a call to action to go to your thing. The algorithm loves watch time and the easiest way to get like 100% 200% watch time is to make your video 6 seconds long. But what matters more than all that is to make content that people actually watch.

It has to provide some type of value, some type of connection, some type of laugh. It could be entertainment, it could be education, but if it's directly an ad, people are going to scroll. It's not going to work.

So once you find a winning format, double down on it. Just recreate that video in a different way and post it over and over again. Milk it till it's dry.

That's great advice. Tell me a little bit about uh batching up this content. Are you just doing it every day or do you batch it up for the whole week or do you outsource any of this?

Yeah, so I spend 1 hour a day marketing. I post the videos same day. I usually don't schedule them far out just because I can iterate way faster cuz every day I can try something new.

If I'm just batching, I'm going to have the same still content for the whole month that I that don't even know if it works yet. So, every day means you can improve and iterate way faster and you can find a winning template way faster. Agreed.

Tell me about the multiple accounts. You said you had like four different accounts. What does that look like?

Yeah. So, I run three Instagram accounts to split up my videos because I want to try and spread all of them out by at least 3 or 4 hours. I don't want the algorithm to think I'm spamming it.

It's always different videos because if you do post the same videos with the same metadata nowadays, the algorithms are good and they will notice it. So, I wouldn't suggest doing that. I want to go talk about the building in public thing because you seem to be doing a really good job of just sharing your story on Twitter.

You said you posted 300 videos. What would be your advice for people that want to get their first thousand followers on X? I think the easiest way to grow a personal brand is to not grow a personal brand at all.

It's just to build cool things, do cool things, and then like share them. To me, building cool things just means that you're doing something that's tangible, so you can see like you have an output. For me, it was building an app.

And for many other people, it might be something like writing a book or doing something even around their house, like organizing stuff a certain way. But most people aren't sharing the things they're doing in their lives. They're sharing like apherisms and quotes that no one really cares about.

If you just share what you're actually doing in your life, it's probably going to be 10 times more fun for other people to see and they connect with you a lot more. And one thing that I see with people who want to build in public, they're they're maybe a little afraid or fear of failure or fear of putting themselves out there. Is that something that you experienced?

Honestly, I made new social media accounts to get away from all the real life people around me. But the only way you can get over that fear is to just do it and realize that no one really cares. No one cares if you fail or win.

They just kind of are watching on the sidelines most of the time and they're not really paying attention to you. They're paying attention to themselves. They're not thinking you're stupid, you're dumb.

They're just thinking how can I succeed and they're kind of scrolling past your post. Getting over that fear was really big for me to be able to just tweet whatever and people can really feel if you're being authentic or not. We talked a lot about marketing, how to get actual eyeballs on your content.

How do you convert that to paying users? So, I think it's very different when you're trying to monetize something if it's a mobile app or it's a web app. For my mobile app, I made it a payw wall.

They can skip it, but it just offers them a trial for the premium version. And obviously most of the great things about my app are behind that pay wall. Also in mobile apps, what's really important is onboarding.

Basically, before you get to showing that pay wall for them to pay, tell them what the problem you're solving is and how you're going to solve it. Make them get excited about it cuz they're going to be way more primed to actually spend money on your thing when they know it's going to help them. for web, for PostBridge, my SAS.

I did experiment a lot with yearly pricing, but what worked even better for me was a 7-day free trial. There's no free version. You just put your credit card in if you want to try it.

You can cancel anytime. That was really helpful for me. Free trials and 40% discount on yearly or a big discount are two really simple things that I did that drove revenue up a lot.

Tell me about pricing for PostBridge specifically. I mean, there's already a million uh social media scheduling platforms. Why did you win?

I just built it for myself. All the other ones to me were too expensive. I priced it at what I think is fair, and that fair price was something that I was willing to pay, and I still at this price point make a very healthy profit.

So, I can't really complain. Let's talk about retention insurance. So, now that you have paying users, what have you seen works with actually keeping those users coming back every month?

The biggest thing for me was just making a product that is so useful they need it in their everyday life. And that comes I think with the actual initial idea. The problem you're solving initially kind of has to be sticky enough where they're going to value it to pay monthly.

Let's talk about tech stack. What have been the most useful tools and languages that help you run these products on a day-to-day basis? What does your stack look like?

So my tech stack is Nex. js JS mostly and for mobile apps it's react native with expo and I use also a boilerplate to start all my web projects called chipfast from my friend Mark Lou I use superbase for the database every time Apple notes some like Trello board just for my own internal use and like a timer that I have right here to just track that I'm working actually inspired by Pat so every day I just start a timer and I block in I focus on the task one task task that I'm doing and I do that for either 1 hour, 90 minutes or 2 hours at a time and that's helped me a lot to build fast because when you're focused you get a lot more done. Tell me a little bit about the costs or margins to run a business like this.

If you could break those down, it'd be cool. My cost for running these businesses is Twitter API. Uh that costs $200 a month.

The other bills are just hosting the websites, the database. Usually I think it's around $400 a month is what I pay. very good margins like over 95%.

Tell me about what a day in the life looks like. You uh building two different businesses from your mom's basement. So most of my days I wake up pretty early, get 8 hours of sleep.

I try not to sacrifice the sleep. Usually read a bit and go straight to work. Probably 2 to 4 hours focused work.

Then I take lunch and then I work 2 to 4 hours. Again, in the last year, I have developed a more stable routine where I will stop working at dinnertime because then I can sleep better, then I'm excited to work the next day. It's pretty much what I've been doing for the last year and a half.

What are some of the key lessons you've learned in your journey? Looking back, what advice would you give to a younger Jack if you could stand on his shoulder? Mainly to just keep going.

A lot of the times in my journey, I wanted to give up or I was doubtful of myself, but then a few months later, I would figure out that hurdle because I just kept going. And also to solve real problems. Something I wish I really knew earlier was that the easiest way to make a successful business is really just to solve your own problems.

And that was the two things that I did that were successful were both things that I had the problem of and I needed a solution. So, I just went and built them. Now that you made it, you can do whatever you want every day.

You get to build your own products. What would be your advice to someone who wants to own their schedule, be a soloreneur, build cool things? I would say the best advice would just be to keep trying different things even when something doesn't work so you can eventually get through the haze of this isn't going to work out, this is terrible, and make it into something that eventually gets you to that $10,000 a month.

It's not going to happen overnight. It may take 3 4 years. That's probably the average amount of time it takes.

But just the ability to not give up, to keep going is going to be the number one thing. Beautiful. All right.

Thanks, Jack, for coming on Starter Story. I think people are going to love your story. I love what you built and it's only going to grow a lot from here.

So, thanks, man. Jack is the perfect example of how a solo builder can turn a simple idea into thousands of dollars. But that comes with knowing the right information and finding the right problem to solve.

Now, imagine there was a place that gave you all this painful problems to solve, the blueprints for building, and the marketing strategies that turn simple ideas into million-dollar online businesses. Well, at Starter Story, we have a library of over 4,000 case studies and business idea breakdowns where you can access this, all backed by data from real entrepreneurs. So, if you're serious about building a profitable side project like Jack, head to the link in the description and we're going to give you 52 micro SAS ideas so you can get started on your journey today.

Much love and I'll see you guys in the next one. Peace.