How to start making money with apps (what I told an intern dev)

Hey everyone!

Today a dev who's still an intern sent me a message. He said he felt embarrassed to ask in the group, but wanted to know: how did I start making apps that generate revenue? He has his own projects, but doesn't know where to start selling.

I replied right there on WhatsApp, and rereading it later, I realized it had pretty much everything I wish I'd heard when I created my Apple developer account. So I decided to organize it here.

First, the truth: our first app didn't earn a single cent

It took me years to find time to launch anything. Our first app was AbaetéFest, an events and tourism guide for Abaetetuba, a city in Brazil's Pará state. Today about 17,000 people use it.

Financial return? Zero.

I'm not saying this to discourage anyone. I'm saying it because having users and having revenue are different things, and nobody tells you that in the beginning.

What generates returns is exposure

The rule I keep in mind all the time is simple:

More people seeing it, more people downloading it, more people buying it.

And out of all the people who see what you're offering, only a small slice will pay. I work with something between 1% and 5%, which matches the market's conversion rate benchmarks: around 2-3% is average and 5% is already considered excellent. It sounds trivial, but it changes how you plan everything.

Look at the funnel of my workout app now that more people are reaching it:

1. 78 people: started onboarding
2. 34 people: reached the paywall (43.59%)
3. 3 people: bought (3.85%)

So work the math backwards. If I want about 20 people paying, I need something close to 1,000 people starting onboarding. And to get 1,000 people into onboarding, a lot more people need to have seen the app somewhere.

That's why the real work isn't just the code.

Solve a pain point (imaginary or not)

To generate revenue you need to solve a pain point, whether it's real or imaginary. It's usually something tied to body, mind, performance, desires, or fears.

The path I follow:

1. Find a niche.
2. See which are the top apps in that niche.
3. Try to steal a slice of them, knowing there's a crowd trying to do the same thing.

Before starting anything, I do research like this:

This workout app, Befit, launched a year ago. According to the tool's estimates, it makes about $160,000 a month with about 50,000 monthly downloads, and 94% comes from Brazil. These are estimates, not official numbers, but they serve one purpose: proving that people are paying in that niche. If nobody's paying for the top apps, it's unlikely they'll pay for yours.

Consistency: the pot of gold is on day 120

This is the point that most separates those who succeed from those who don't.

Create the social media accounts, go on Reddit, and promote your stuff every single day. A lot of people give up on day 30. But sometimes the pot of gold is on day 120 or beyond, after doing that every single day without a break.

This is the YouTube channel tied to the workout app:

Look at the chart. From June to August it's almost a flat line on the floor. I started being truly consistent in August, posting every day without fail. From then on, things started to take off. More engagement and, consequently, more people seeing it.

It's not easy. It's incredibly tedious to think about and maintain several social media accounts at once. What helps me:

• A password manager, so I don't get lost among so many accounts.
• AI to the max to optimize this content work.
• Varied formats: video on YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram, guides in post form, and posts comparing my app with similar ones.

The ideal today is to go after things that create viral hooks, whether through text, video, or photo. But hooks that drive traffic to the app, not just likes.

Metrics on everything you ship

Everything you put out there for other people to use needs metrics. And I'm not just talking about an admin panel.

It's about adding tools that help you build dashboards and understand app usage, onboarding, and everything else:

• PostHog, which is where that funnel chart above came from
• Google Analytics
• Himetrica

And learn the search side too: Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. Organic traffic is the traffic you don't pay for.

The dev who messaged me said something great: he had a widget to see plan quota usage, and 5 people gave feedback. He guessed that about 40 had used it. With metrics, you don't guess.

What about ads?

You can use paid traffic later, running ads to understand the audience. But let me tell you how my first one went.

My first R$ 300 went to TikTok Ads. Return: none.

Afterward the reason became clear. The audience TikTok delivered to me was mostly Brazilian and used Android. The app at the time was iPhone-only.

It hurt, but that's the cost of understanding things and not depending on third parties. You learn by making mistakes.

The difference between us and the big players is that they have money to spend without suffering for it. More money, more ads, more people seeing it, more people paying. That's how the digital machine works.

Don't compare yourself to people making $10k a month

Look for people who started from a point similar to yours. Those making $10k a month are a tiny fraction of all the devs in the store.

And many of them have a churn problem. If the ad machine stops, new users stop coming in.

There are some good cases on Twitter I've followed from the start. This one from Gabriel Buzzi tells how a baby registry app for first-time moms went from 15,000 users to a thousand subscribers in under 2 months. It's a cool story, but it's worth looking at the context: his co-founder has about 200,000 followers. With an audience, it gets a lot easier.

Others I like to follow:

• The people behind Visor, a personal finance app
• Real Oficial

I see myself as quite different from them, but you can take something good from how they did things over the past year, which changed their lives. The idea is to abstract the skeleton and apply it to your own context.

I'm also in Binhara's community, where there's a group of people making money and sharing tools and ways to run ads. And if you want a video to get started, this one from Arthur Spalanzani is good: I built a PROFITABLE app in 72 hours. After that, look for other channels about how to be profitable with apps.

In summary

1. Exposure generates returns. Only about 1-5% of those who see it will pay.
2. Solve a pain point and research whether people are already paying in that niche.
3. Consistency every single day. Day 30 is where most people stop.
4. Metrics on everything, from the very first user.
5. Ads only after understanding the audience. My R$ 300 can attest to that.
6. Compare yourself to those who started from your point, not the 0.1%.

And most important: the sooner you start, the better it can be. That doesn't mean it will be, but if I had started the day I created my Apple account, everything could have been different.