My mobile app made $800K in 365 days | Starter Story

Louis, a Canadian software engineer who had spent years building apps that went nowhere, decided to try something different with his next project. Instead of building first and marketing later, he studied TikTok comments to find a real problem, created content to validate demand, and only then wrote a single line of code. The result was Glow, a makeup app that hit number one in the App Store's Lifestyle category and generated roughly $800,000 in its first year. The episode walks through his full playbook: how to mine TikTok for ideas, how to warm up and post content, how to engineer viral loops, and why he treats the app as a "capitalistic endeavor" rather than a passion project.

Finding the idea by reading comments, not building features

Louis's earlier apps failed because he built them for himself and only started marketing after they were finished. For Glow, he reversed the order. He and his co-founder picked the makeup niche because it was obviously large on TikTok, then spent time reading comment sections on popular makeup videos. The comments revealed what users actually wanted: a way to see how a makeup look would appear on their own face without buying and applying products. That observation became the core of the app.