This legend from Scotland built a $30k/month iphone app? 💀 | Starter Story

John, a solo developer from Scotland with no prior coding experience, built a bus and train tracking app called Vomigo that now serves over 160 cities, has been downloaded more than 5.2 million times, and generates roughly $30,000 per month in subscription revenue. The app has around 400,000 monthly active users. This summary focuses on how he made those decisions, what operating principles guided him, and the strategic tradeoffs he navigated along the way.

Starting from zero: learning to code by building

John had no background in software development before starting Vomigo. He worked in a completely unrelated field and taught himself to code specifically to solve a problem he encountered: the existing public transit apps in his area were unreliable and poorly designed. Rather than learning programming in the abstract, he learned by building the app itself. This meant he made mistakes, wrote inefficient code, and had to redo large sections, but it also meant he was solving a real problem from day one. The key principle here was that he did not wait until he felt ready. He started building before he knew what he was doing, and the app evolved as his skills improved.

The solo founder tradeoff: speed versus scale