I make $10K/month from 28 apps | Starter Story

Max, a full-time iOS engineer and father of two, went from $200 a month to $10,000 a month in eight months by shipping 28 simple mobile apps. He didn't polish a single app into a hit. Instead, he built a portfolio of tiny bets, let the market decide which ones floated, and then doubled down on the winners. His fastest build took two hours from idea to App Store submission.

The keyword-first filtering system

Max does not start with an idea. He starts with a keyword. His main source is an ASO tool called Astro. He picks a category, searches related terms, and filters for keywords that have at least 20% popularity and 60–70% difficulty. Then he checks the top competitors' monthly revenue using Sensor Tower or similar tools. If a competitor is making less than 100–200 euros per month, he skips the market entirely. "If the competitor does less, I mean there's not that much money in that market, so no more going there."

He also looks for clusters of closely related keywords that target the same user group but solve slightly different problems. For example, with study apps, you can target "physics AI," "chemistry AI," and "math AI" separately. This lets him reuse most of the code and screens from one app to the next, cutting build time to hours.

The build process: copy, don't create