743: $1,000 a Month with Simple Vibe-Coded Apps

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It's been crazy, Nick. I'm honored to consider you a friend and to be a listener as well, so I'm super honored to be back.

I'm excited. Hopefully it won't be, uh, nine years before the next, uh-

[laughs] For real

... appearance here. Now, you shared a couple, uh, examples of apps that on the surface look pretty straightforward, making 500, 1,000, 2,500 bucks a month. A frequency generator app for, I don't know, binaural beats or healing or something like that. A JPEG to PDF converter seems pretty straightforward. Ones that are, like, relatively simple ideas, but how are you coming up with this stuff? 'Cause it's like, I wanna build what I wanna build, but it's like, no, no, no, I wanna... Instead wanna go where there's some level of demand versus just building something and putting it out there.

Distribution is the name of the game. And Nick, I love this quote, "First time founders focus on features. Second time founders focus on distribution." So to answer your question, I just look at what people are searching for. Look, I know a lot about ASO, which is just SEO for the App Store, and so I just see, hey, what are... And I'm gonna break down all the tools I use that are free, and you can do keyword research, figure out what people are searching for, then you build an app because that's the quickest path to revenue, and that's all we're trying to figure out. And that's what we've discovered is distribution is just so hard that that should be the number one thing you think about versus, like, adding more features to an app.

Yeah, less is more. Kind of w- like what's the one single problem that it solves, it sounds like.

Yeah. I mean, all the apps I sent you, they solve just one single problem. The more niche you can be, the higher likelihood that people are gonna pay for your app. And so for that frequency generator app as an example, like, you can do a sleep sounds app. Like, people use it for sleep sounds to sleep or either focus. You can go after those keywords, or you can be more niche. So what I say is like, okay, sleep sounds or focus sounds, focus timer, or