Bro quit his 9 to 5, built 3 apps, and now makes crazy money 🤯 | Starter Story

Samuel Rondo quit his full-time job a few years ago, taught himself to code on YouTube, and now runs three SaaS apps generating $45,000 per month. His story is not about a sudden windfall or a lucky break. It is about a deliberate, iterative process of learning by building, making small bets, and refusing to scale prematurely.

Learning by Building, Not by Watching

Rondo’s approach to learning to code was the opposite of the typical "watch a course, then build something" method. He started with a specific problem: he wanted to rebuild a tool he was already using for Instagram. Instead of first mastering a language, he found a 15-hour YouTube course and applied each new concept immediately to his own project. "Every time I learned something new in the course I immediately tried to apply it to that tool I was building," he says. He argues that passively watching a course is usually not enough because you "end up losing yourself in the languages that you will probably never use and you don't really see why you are learning what you are learning." The key was that the course became a reference, not a curriculum. The real learning happened in the friction of applying abstract concepts to a concrete, self-defined goal. This project-based learning loop—learn a little, build a little, break things, fix them—turned coding from a chore into a passion.