I Built a $100K/Month Android App

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I Built a $100K/Month Android App

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Mar 26, 2026

While everyone else fights over iOS, 92% of Steve's mobile app revenue comes from Android. This is his exact playbook.

Get our free Mobile App Growth Cheat Sheet: https://clickhubspot.com/dkn

Follow Steve: https://x.com/stevehoyek

Check out Journable: https://www.journable.com/

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🏁 We're hiring: starterstory.com/jobs

This video is an educational case study of this founder’s experience. It is not financial advice and does not guarantee any income or results. Every business is different and your results may vary.

Chapters:

0:00 - Everyone is sleeping on Android

1:05 - Founder intro

1:25 - Business overview and metrics

2:40 - Finding the idea for Journable

3:54 - Android vs iOS

5:42 - Growth overview

6:56 - Google ads strategy

7:38 - Ad example

8:43 - Mobile app growth tactics

9:16 - The Android playbook

14:11 - Android app ideas

16:44 - How Journable works

18:05 - Tech stack

19:07 - Start documenting your journey

20:31 - Pat and Gus reflections: what we learned

Chapters

Stack

Transcript

Chapters

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No tools listed for this business.

Right now everybody and their grandma is vibe coding iOS apps

We even launched an iOS bootcamp

But what if I told you that iOS is not the only place to be making money

Something I've realized is that most people are sleeping on the potential of Android

Meet Steve

He's a guy who built a simple mobile app that makes over 100 000 a month

but almost all of his revenue comes from Android

We tested both platforms and Android performed better every single time

Most people think iOS is the only place where you can make money building apps

but Steve proved the exact opposite

If you're bootstrapping like we are Android is actually way better

So I asked Steve to come onto the channel to share everything

And in this video we'll dive into his crazy simple app that makes over 100 000 a month

the six step process he used to grow his app fast

and why Android apps are still an untapped opportunity in 2026

All right guys this is one you cannot miss

I'm Pat Walls and this is Starter Story

All right Steve welcome to the channel

Tell me who you are what you built and what's your story

My name is Steve

I built a mobile app almost 18 months ago

And over the past year we bootstrapped it from less than 1 000 in revenue up to 100 000 per month

Today I'm really excited to share how we grew this to over 100 000 a month primarily on Android

Before we dive into that Android I'm really excited to talk about it

But before we do what's the app that you built

And can you show me some of your revenue dashboards

and things like that to show me that this is legit

Joinable is an AI calorie counter

It's kind of an all in one AI nutrition assistant

It tracks your calories your macros it tracks your weight loss over time

it gives you insights

So this is our app

This is our Play Store listing

You can see the number of reviews the downloads

This is almost at a million just on Android which we're really excited about

So this is our revenue cap dashboard

In the past 28 days we've made 125 000 in revenue with an MRR of around 80k

which brings us to just under 1 million ARR in annual terms

and just over 30 000 active subscribers and around 40 000 total subscribers

So our app is a premium subscription app

We have two subscription packages a monthly subscription and an annual subscription

And that's where all of our revenue comes from

Around 80 of our users and around 80 of our revenue comes from Android

and 20 of our users and revenue come from iOS

Okay that's pretty crazy

80 of your sales come from Android

We're going to talk all about that

because I think you're gonna have some cool stuff on that

But before we do let's talk about how you even get here

How do you get to the point where you have an app

that's used by millions of people

So the way we started working on this and the way this app came to be was that

my co founder and I have both been through our own weight loss journeys

Personally I used to weigh 125 kilos and I currently weigh 80 kilos

So I dropped 45 kilos or 100 pounds

And I did this by tracking my calories religiously

During this period I tracked my calories

I used many different apps many of our competitors

So I had a very good idea of these products of the space

And we realized that the current state of the space is very complex

There is no simple solution to get you where you need to go

So the reason we started working on this app

was to offer the same value to our users

the best in class solution with way less complexity

The number one thing that we focus on is simplicity

is the quick and easy experience that we offer

And so that's what we try and capture with our marketing content

We interviewed someone recently who talked about that as well

building something very simple very frictionless

A lot of developers watching this want to add a million features

I like the line which is keep it simple stupid

Even as you mentioned the time spent on your app was less than others

but actually that's what made it valuable

I want to dive into the next topic here

And you mentioned this a couple of times

which is what this hopefully video is about which is Android

A lot of people talk about building on iOS

and how those users have more money to spend

spend where Android is not as much the case

But you did the exact opposite

So let's talk about the growth of this app

How did you get users

How did you build it

What was your focus

We are bootstrapped

We have spent only our own money since day one

So we didn't really have huge budgets to work with

iOS is way more expensive than Android right

So the CPMs the cost per thousand views

or generally the cost per view is almost four times as high

on iOS than it is on Android

So being bootstrapped and being capital constrained from day one

we knew that we needed a solution

So we decided to focus a bit on Android initially

So we started working on Android

And you know obviously the conventional wisdom here says

focus on iOS

That's where all the money is

That's where the success is in business and in subscription apps

But we went against that for a few reasons

including capital constraint

But also we got inspired by the Revenue Cat

state of subscription apps report in 2025

In that report it showed that despite iOS users

being four times as expensive to advertise to

they only convert at around 20 better than Android

So it made sense for us to start working on Android

and start getting some subscribers there

Okay cool

I really like that

Instead of just seeing what everyone's doing on X

and just taking random advice from people that talk on the internet

you guys looked at the data

That report is really telling

And then you looked at the data from your own ads

You're saying okay we can acquire users much cheaper

and they generally convert the same

That's super smart for anyone watching this

Follow the data follow the money

That's great intel

What did you do next once you sort of realized

oh here's this opportunity

How'd you get it off the ground

and actually start getting users and getting the word out

We started by launching on Product Hunt

That was our day zero marketing and distribution strategy

We got featured on the front page of Product Hunt

It got us a couple hundred installs

Two of those installs converted to subscribers

at which point we knew we had validated the product

We knew that we had something that people were willing to pay for

We started working on meta ads and meta ad campaigns

We saw that we couldn't afford to run iOS campaigns

because we're bootstrapped and because we're capital constrained

So we naturally reverted to just running Android campaigns in the States

because we didn't have the money

Now when we ran the Android campaigns

we saw that they had a conversion rate just as good as our iOS users

So we tested both

Eventually we tested iOS as well and found that

you know Android was way more cost effective

We also realized that by running ads on Android

we get some spillover into iOS

For all of these reasons the fact that we got initial success on Android

and we were getting a couple hits on iOS as a result

result meant that we just doubled down on Android

We decided to ramp up our spend and really focus on this platform

All right

So ads that's a pretty big strategy for you

and for a lot of other people who have successful Android apps

Can you just explain what ads means for you

Is it SEO Google ads or is it Android ads

How does it work

This is effectively our all time Google ads dashboard

We have spent just under 500 000 on ads

and we have made almost that exact same amount in revenue

that is attributed to Google ads

So revenue directly attributed to Google ads is almost the same

So we are effectively 100 break even on this

Ideally we would have a way lower return on ad spend and a way higher volume

But because we're bootstrapped

we're constrained by the performance of these campaigns

We need them to be profitable

Could you just show me an example of what an ad looks like

You can show me the campaign manager

or potentially what it looks like if you're viewing an ad

from the Play Store or something like that

I'm just curious what that looks like

or how you set up the campaign and what keywords you target

So you see this section here

This is us previewing the ads that we've generated

And then it shows up across as we mentioned Google's digital real estate

So in the display network for example in other ads or on websites

it can show up like this

It can show up in Google search

So if someone's on Google search on their mobile device

we also show up on YouTube

We've got a couple of videos here

which also lead people to the Play Store to install our app

on the Discover network on the Discover page

and most importantly on the Play Store

So this is our highest performer our Play Store ad

It obviously shows up in between other apps

especially if you search for one of the keywords

like calorie counter or calorie tracker

If you have an Android device Pat

and you search for a calorie tracker on the Play Store

there's a very high chance that we're going to be number one for this reason

So this is our bread and butter the Google Play ads

Steve's approach to growth is genius

He found just one channel Google

and used it to scale his app to over 100 000 a month

And what I love about mobile apps is that

there are dozens of ways to grow just like this

So we put together a free guide to help you find the strategies

real founders are using today to grow their apps

From influencer marketing to building in public

the mobile app growth cheat sheet will break down

seven different tactics you can use to start growing your app today

Just head to the first link in the description to grab it for free

All right let's get back to the episode

Okay this is super cool

You know we talked to a lot of people who build apps

and they're doing like UGC and all this TikTok stuff

What I like about yours is that you just run ads

There's one place where you can do it

and then it goes to all of Google's digital real estate

This is one of the advantages of just focusing in on one platform like Android

You take advantage of Google's way bigger advertising network

I want you to dive a little deeper into that

into the playbook for how to win on Android

how to win specifically with paid ads in the Google network

Could you walk me through this step by step

If you were to build another app in the consumer space

what would be your playbook if you were starting over in 2026

Yeah absolutely

So I'll tell you exactly what we did and the formula that anyone can follow

The first thing we did and the first thing you should always do

is to set up attribution and measurement right

What that means is being able to track the events

that take place in your app and send them to Google Ads

What this does effectively is it lets Google Ads know

when a user installs the app most importantly

when they hit let's say your paywall

and when they take any action

either starting a free trial or purchasing your app

And if they purchase the value of the transaction as well

So all of this data is and should be sent to Google Ads

The value of this is that Google Ads can then optimize the campaigns

campaigns and optimize the delivery of the campaigns based on that data

Second after attribution and measurement

you need to launch install campaigns

Google Ads needs data right

It needs data in order to optimize

optimize First what we need is install campaigns

You need to start feeding the algorithm

It needs to start to have a heartbeat

It knows how much an install costs

It knows what the CPM is in the country and it can grow from there

It's also good to get baseline and to have a frame of reference

for all future campaigns you're going to run

in whichever markets you're targeting

Now Google Ads app campaigns require 10 pieces of copy

so five headlines five descriptions

and then up to 20 images and 20 videos

For this initial install campaign

ideally you have all of these assets

If you don't have the time

or if you just want to run it as a proof of concept

then just use stock images

It's fine Use stock images and stock videos

Yeah highly recommend it

Just flood the campaign with assets

assets and let Google's algorithm do the heavy lifting

Then the third one is a function of time right

And it is the asset optimization phase

Once you have an install campaign running

you need to give it some time

You're going to be learning

The algorithm is going to be learning what works

what messaging works what doesn't

Start with some low cost campaigns

maybe 10 a day 15 a day

and start ramping up from there

And while you're doing that

you're going to be working on your assets

So if you started with stock images

start to build your own custom images

Maybe try something with some large text

with your winning copy

but make sure to take big swings

Don't optimize little things like the color of one image

or the font size or the font style

Take big swings

Have incredibly different media

incredibly different assets images videos

And then eventually you're going to start to see patterns

of what works and what doesn't work

And most importantly

update your Play Store assets right

So that's where most of the win is

Because Google App Campaigns use your Play Store assets

your screenshots your app title

your subtitle your description

make sure they're great

Once your assets are in a good place

that's when you know it's time for a TCPA campaign

or Target CPA Cost Per Acquisition

Once you've got the confidence in your assets

it's time to launch this campaign

In terms of budget for this campaign

or the install campaigns

you're always going to need 10 times your CPI

for the budget

So if you're running a CPI campaign

you need 10 times your CPI

What does that mean

If a purchase in your app

or let's say if a free trial in your app costs you 15

you need 150 per day of budget

budget in order to run a successful campaign

The reason for this is that Google's algorithm

needs 10 of your target events per day

in order to successfully optimize

Once you start getting some good data in them

after a month or two

you start to have some purchases in your app

you get baselined you know your CAC

that's when it starts to scale these campaigns

Again you might need to raise money

to do this from friends or family

Maybe you go the VC backed route

Maybe not

Ideally not

Increase your budgets

Over time you need to keep scaling your budgets

budgets in accordance with Google's best practices

And very importantly optimize your product

Your conversion rate needs to constantly be climbing

By conversion rate

I mean your subscription conversion rate

Maybe you optimize your paywall

Maybe optimize your business model

your pricing you test your prices

optimize every single thing

As your conversion rate increases

increase your budgets of your campaigns

and the flywheel continues

And that's the playbook

Okay cool

The thing that I notice about

when you're talking about everything

is it's always about the data

Looking at the data we're talking about campaigns

we're talking about ROAS we're looking at data

This entire business was built on

looking at the data following the data

making decisions changing things

And this is how you get to a place

place where you have an app that has millions of users

on a platform that you didn't expect

would be as big Android

I think that's super cool

Let's talk about the opportunity in Android

A lot of people are watching this

maybe they're already building an app

app and they maybe didn't think Android was the way to go

What can you share about that

from what you've learned through building this

Something that's happened over the past couple of years

is with the emergence of AI

and the lowering of the barrier to entry

for anyone to release apps

we've seen an explosion in the number of apps

that have been released especially on iOS

So in the past couple of years

five times as many iOS apps

have been released on the App Store

Store compared to only two times as many Android apps

So on the one hand

the barrier to entry is way lower

On the second hand

most people who are vibe coding apps

and most new apps which are being released are on iOS

So if there is saturation in the market

you know it's definitely on iOS

So the opportunities on Android really are generally

the apps that we know are successful on iOS

that don't have an equivalent on Android

That's the opportunity

The second opportunity is the niche problems

that individuals have that previously

have not been worth someone building an app to solve

Because of the lowering of the barrier to entry

because of the low cost of software development these days

the real opportunities are going to be

in the niche overlap of problems or features

that no apps currently solve

So really for anyone who's thinking about building an app

I would highly recommend seeing the problems

that you face in your day to day

with the current state of the apps

that you use with the incumbents and find a niche

Find those very very small problem sets

or overlap problems that no one has solved

Solve it

Find the other users and find the people

who face these same sets of problems

and you will find some good revenues in doing that

Yeah so I mean I think that's super true

There's a lot of things I noticed about what you've built

It's just about growing markets Android

And then also there's some interesting stuff

you shared around countries

You're building this

you're localizing it to different countries

That's just the emerging massive growing customer base

of worldwide customers

We talked to a lot of founders

who are shipping apps specifically in France

or South America

There's a lot of opportunity there too

One thing that I do want to see is

I want to see your app

Can you show me the app that has millions of users

users and is making over a million dollars a year

It's very simple

For example you can type in what you ate

If I type something in like yogurt granola blueberries

and almonds it'll take a second

second and come back with the calorie count

the macros split by ingredients

and then a total of this meal at the bottom

You can also type in your exercise

For example I did one hour of vinyasa yoga

and it also tracks your calories that you've burnt

and keeps the totals in the bar at the top

Furthermore you can try with pictures

I can select a picture from my gallery

and what the app is going to do

is it's going to transcribe first

what it sees in the picture

identify the ingredients the portion sizes

and then it's going to come back to us

with the calories and macros of each ingredient

and then a total of the entire meal

And you can just see at the top

you've got your weekly view

You can see which days you've tracked this week

You've got your daily streak

You can track your weight over time

So yeah that's basically it

Like I said very simple very easy to use

No complexity no searching in multiple databases

Just type in what you've eaten

take a picture of your plates and the rest is history

Okay cool

I mean super cool super simple app

As you said keep it simple stupid

Let's talk about tech stack for a second

What's the stack behind this million dollar app

We are very heavily in the Google ecosystem right

We use Firebase and GA4 for our backend

We use BigQuery GCP Google Play

Obviously we advertise on Google ads

We effectively work for Google at this point

Apart from Google

we use Revenue Cat for subscription management

and we use OpenAI for our backend AI usage for most of it

We have quite a few tools we use for operations

We use Cloud Code and Cloud Cowork

Incredible tool 100 a month

OpenAI Premium for general purpose usage 20 per month

We use GitHub Copilot 39 a month

We use CodeRabbit

That costs us 30 a month

Fixer for AI email support

Incredible tool 30 a month

N8n for operations automation 24 a month

month App Follow for ASO App Store Optimization

That costs us 180 a month

And we use Webflow for our website our landing page

which costs us 18 a month

Thanks for sharing all that

Last question that we ask everyone who comes onto the channel

If you could go back in time and stand on young Steve's shoulders

and give him some advice

or give some advice for anyone on here

that wants to build a million dollar app what would it be

One thing which I would definitely do differently

is that I would start creating content

I would start documenting my journey

and get good at making content

After living off of social media for almost a decade

I've kind of fallen behind almost everyone in the world

when it comes to this

and it is a skill we're missing in the business

So yeah the piece of advice would be

to start documenting your journey

and get good at making content

Having some documentation of the journey

journey and seeing how much I've grown over time

and maybe even publicly sharing some of that

is something I wish I'd done earlier

and I'm planning on starting now

So I miss a lot of the skills

I miss a lot of the gauge and calibration

towards social media and content creation

which almost all of my peers

and almost everyone else in the world has

So it's a huge weakness of mine

And yeah I would change that

Well that's great advice

Document the journey

That's what we believe here at Stutter Story

And this is maybe the beginning

or a great milestone in that journey of you documenting

Thanks for coming on and sharing

all this amazing million dollar Android app

I think this video is gonna be awesome

and the channel is gonna love it

Let us know what you think in the comments

and thanks for coming on Steve

Thanks for having me

It was a pleasure

Congrats to you as well

Okay Gus producer of Stutter Story

What did you think

I've said this in a few other videos

but the best people that we talk to

are the people that are crushing it

They all have this system

whether it's creating content

or the building process for Steve

All his Google ads system

So that's my biggest takeaway is like

or my first takeaway I should say

I was so impressed with his system

and just how methodical and data driven

I feel like you value that quite a bit

at least as I got to know you

And that obviously makes Stutter Story and you successful

So I don't know that's kind of standing out to me

is like this data driven

He's not guessing he's following the numbers

And that's like we've seen that a few different times

Yeah this is what I always see with founders

So I know who are crushing

obviously he's crushing it

He has a million dollar app

and you got to get started

But then once you get started

you need to look at the data

and make changes based on that data

I think a lot of people will want to watch more videos

like that are on our channel to find other ideas

And that's great to find ideas online

and to see what others are doing and get inspiration

But 80 of the decisions that you make

should be based on your own data

If users aren't using your app

that is a piece of data that you need

to go change your app

If your app is not converting

you have that data look at that analyze it

maybe put it into AI

get some action items that you can do

and make the changes and then look at the data

It's this constant day hour over hour day over day

looking at the data and making decisions

This is what all the very very successful founders do

You have this data

you have this gold mine right in front of you

whether it's your Google ads

or your TikTok performance or whatever it is

use that and make changes

and eventually you'll be successful

The second thing was obviously

the whole iOS versus Android thing

I don't wanna say versus but the difference

I loved what he was saying about

what do you say iOS has whatever quadrupled

and the number of apps submitted versus Android

is only it's a lot slower

And if you look on X which I'm on all the time

everyone's talking about iOS apps

And we even did a bootcamp

iOS bootcamp that I led shameless plug

But that was just like wow that's crazy

The numbers he rattled off

about like how much less is going into Android

That's what you should do

Anyone watching should go like

screw iOS let me go build an Android app

and just follow this

Yeah there's a famous story

about the founders of WhatsApp

Everyone was building iOS apps

but they wanted to build a messaging app

that everyone would use

because if everyone's using the app

then it becomes the most popular

So yeah they built the iOS app

but they also made sure this is years ago

it doesn't apply now but it's a similar principle

They decided oh we're gonna make sure

that it works on every device

on like Blackberries on like random

like weird OSs

They made it work on every single one

even though the conventional wisdom

was build an iPhone app at the time

because everyone has iPhones

As mentioned there are billions

of Android devices out there

That's all that you need to know

about how there's money to be made there

Sure maybe on average iOS users spend more

but the world is so big

It's important to open up your mind

into how you don't need to build the best thing

or the most optimized thing

Just need to build something that captures value

and you can have a million dollar app

So if you guys enjoyed this video

thank you for watching

Let us know what you thought in the comments

Would you like us to bring on more Android devs

and talk about this

or would you like us to go deeper

into anything that he shared

I read every comment and what you put in there

will turn into future videos and future playbooks

So thank you guys for watching this one

and we'll see you in the next one

Peace

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