I cloned 3 apps and now make $35K/month

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I cloned 3 apps and now make $35K/month

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Jul 26, 2025

This is how Samuel Rondot built 3 apps that are making a total $35K per month, by copying already successful projects.

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Follow Samuel's journey: https://x.com/samuelrdt

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0:00 - Intro
0:53 - Who is Samuel Rondot
1:11 - How Samuel taught himself coding
1:58 - Framework for learning coding
2:43 - Samuel's ideation strategy
3:45 - Validating an idea
5:11 - How Samuel copied his apps
6:26 - Discover real-world design inspiration
7:28 - Samuel's businesses breakdown
8:02 - Marketing strategy
9:49 - Tech stack
10:29 - Costs & margins
11:02 - You don't need to innovate
11:34 - How to start building apps
12:55 - Turn your idea into a real-world app

Chapters

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Transcript

Chapters

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No tools listed for this business.

My name is Samuel and I run three apps making 35 000 a month

You might think you need to come up with a completely new idea

but I just met a guy who does the exact opposite

His strategy is simple

One find an app that's working and two make it 1 better

If it's already successful I know it's validated

But don't be fooled

He's not just copying and pasting

And in this episode he breaks down his meticulous method

for finding winning ideas and turning them into successful apps

We'll get into where the best ideas are hiding in plain sight

how to validate fast so you don't waste months working on a failed project

and the playbook for researching and replicating successful apps

that you can put into practice today

All right let's dive in

I'm Pat Walls and this is Starter Story

All right welcome Samuel to the channel

Thanks for coming on

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

So my name is Samuel Rondeau

I used to have a full time job that I quit a few years ago

and I taught myself to code on YouTube

And now I run three SaaS apps that are making me 35 000 per month

Okay cool

So before we get into all your apps and how they grew

you said that you actually taught yourself how to code

How did you do that

And could you break that down for us

So actually I used to be an optician and I had the zero coding experience

At the time I wanted to rebuild a tool I was using for Instagram

but this time I wanted to build it myself using code

I ended up following a 15 hour course on YouTube

and every time I learned something new in the course

I immediately tried to apply it to that tool I was building

So if you just watch a course most of the time it's not enough

because you end up losing yourself in the languages that you will probably never use

and you don't really see why you are learning what you are learning

But yeah it all started like this

I followed a YouTube course and it quickly became a passion for me

Cool

All right

right Well for anyone watching this today who wants to learn how to code how to build apps

what would be your advice

What would be your framework or playbook on how you'd get started

If I were 18 years old now I don't think I would learn to code the traditional way

I would probably just use AI coding tools

And with AI today you can literally build like 90 of most apps

So my framework today would be one pick a real project

Two ask ChatGPT what you need to learn to build it

So for example you go on Google or on Twitter and you find a product you like

and you take a screenshot of that page and you ask ChatGPT

how can I build just the landing page to start

And three build step by step asking ChatGPT for help at each roadblock

I would of course ask him to use modern technologies like Next js Node js

That's awesome

What I really want to talk about is ideas and finding successful ideas

You have multiple successful products

and you share with me your strategy for how you found those

Could you tell me a little bit more about that

I'm someone a bit lazy and I don't have unlimited energy

So I have one rule that is really crucial for me

is to never build something that doesn't already exist

and isn't already successful or at least getting some traction

So this way I reduce my chance of failure and I increase my chances of success

Usually to find products ideas my number one source of ideas is Twitter

especially around communities like Solopreneur IndieHacker BillionPublic etc

And then I look for things that are working or products that I personally like

Here are my four keys filters

Number one I would use it myself

Number two I can see that it already works

And three they are not spending thousands on marketing

meaning there is a true demand

And four the product is simple enough to maintain

If a product passes this filter then usually I'm confident towards building it

Okay let's go a little bit deeper on that

When you come across ideas online what is the actual criteria that you're looking at

What are some of the numbers and websites and things that you look at to know

if this is worth building and if this is validated

So first the most important thing I look for traction

The best signal you can find on Twitter is when founders

share their MRL screenshot or Stripe screenshot

I know that sounds basic but honestly

it's the ultimate proof that the tool is working and that people are paying for it

Second I analyze how they are getting their customers

So I use Ahrefs to check their traffic sources

So are they getting customers only from ads or are they also ranking on SEO

If they are growing with both ads and SEO

that's a very good sign because it shows a strong demand

and it's usually easier to replicate their success

If they rely mostly on SEO it can be harder because SEO takes time

but it's still doable if I'm patient

And third I check if the product is technically something I can build and maintain easily

I don't want to build a product that will make me lose sleep maintaining a complex backend

Simplicity is very important for me

And finally I ask myself do I actually like the product

Because there's nothing worse than working on a product you don't care about

If I don't enjoy using it myself I won't have the motivation to keep going long term

So in short traction first analyze traffic sources

check if I can build it easily and make sure I like the product

That strategy is cool and it's amazing to have it kind of all boiled down

But I want to hear how it actually applied to your actual apps that you built

How did that strategy specifically work

So actually the first real app I built was User Optimist

And at that time I didn't use that strategy and it was a mistake

mistake because I ended up building an email finding tool

that had for competitors big names like Apollo LameList and stuff like that

And it was so difficult to maintain

So after User Optimist I really decided to build something that would be easier to maintain

And that's how I ended up building StoryShort

So I saw a post from a guy building a tool to automate

posting faceless video on YouTube TikTok etc

And the numbers were crazy

So I started to investigate is it hard to build

And where is the traffic coming from

The really good thing with this one is all the traffic was from a Facebook ad

which means I can replicate it literally in a week

week because Facebook ads you just have to start it and you have the traffic

So I went for it

I built the tool launched ads and StoryShort AI grew very fast

So with StoryShort it was 100 the process I described earlier

I validated the idea

I saw there a clear demand

It was a simple product and it was a market I was personally interested in

All right before we finish talking about how Samuel grew his apps to 34 000 per month

let's talk about something a lot of solo founders struggle with design

You've got a working idea

You know it solves a problem

problem But suddenly you've wasted hours taking screenshots

just to figure out how to make your app look good

That's where Mobbin comes in

Mobbin is the world's largest library of real world mobile and web app designs

Over 1 7 million people from Airbnb designers to indie devs

use it to find inspiration study flows and build smarter not slower

You can search thousands of actual product screens by keyword flow or even style

Whether you need an onboarding flow paywall layout or just a clean signup form

Mobbin shows you exactly how the best apps do it

So you don't have to start from scratch

Whether you're building your first app or your 10th it's a massive time saver

Just click the first link in the description to check out Mobbin

Thank you to Mobbin for sponsoring this video

All right let's get back to Samuel

All right

So I mean on that note can you break down

the three different businesses that you built that are all successful

OK so I built usertimis co

It's a LinkedIn scrapping tool that is making around 15 000 per month

and has around 10 000 customers

I have storyshow ai which is an AI video generator for TikTok and YouTube

that is making around 20 000 per month

and has around 4 000 customers

And Capacity so which is brand new

It's an AI coding tool that is making currently 900 per month

and has around 50 users

OK that's awesome

So we talked about the ideas

We talked about the framework for finding ideas

Let's talk about what everyone wants to hear about which

once you find the idea how do you grow the business

What growth strategies are you using and how do you know which ones to do

So I always start by running ads

It's always the first thing I do

So I do it on Google and Meta depending on the product

Sometimes it's better on Google sometimes it's better on Meta

It's the fastest way to validate and test the market

And as soon as I get some traction with ads

I move to the second part of the growth which is SEO

I think too many apps rely only on ads and never got a single visitor from Google

Of course SEO takes time but once it works

it's almost free traffic and it compounds

I also use faceless YouTube channels to grow my apps

I even created a feature inside StoryShort for this

The idea is that StoryShort will automatically publish daily

UGC style video about your product on YouTube channels TikTok and Instagram

You can create multiple channels that talk about your product every day on autopilot

So depending on your niche this can bring crazy results over time and it works really well

And finally I do affiliate marketing

I did it for all those three apps especially on StoryShort

It's super important because not only does it bring clients at a fixed cost

but it also creates variety because I have many people doing YouTube videos about StoryShort

writing articles so it brings SEO results

And people are more likely to share your product if they earn a commission

So in short my growth stack is one start with ads

Two build SEO as soon as there's traction

Three use faceless YouTube channel to drive attention also on TikTok and Instagram

And four run an affiliate program to boost

variety and get customers at a fixed price

All right cool

Well on a similar note let's talk about tech stack

I know you don't come from a software engineering background

but what stack do you build your apps in and how do you deploy these

So all my apps are built with Next js and Node js for the coding part

I use Ahrefs for the SEO analysis

And I use also AI tools for writing articles so for the SEO

So I was using SEOptal which is really great

But now I just switched to a new one called Outrank so

It really automates the writing of articles post it automatically on your blog

And I use Vercel for deploying my apps Stripe for payments

And yeah that's it

That's great

On a similar note people who are watching are probably wondering

OK you're telling us how much money your business is making but what's the profit

What's the cost to run this business and how profitable are these

Well use Artemis cost me around 4 000 per month

And StoryShort cost me around 5 000 per month

So it costs a bit less than use Artemis because use Artemis

you have to run instances to automate many things

So it's quite expensive

And capacity I can't tell yet but it will be quite expensive

because we have to run instances to deploy a website each time

Cool

You built a bunch of successful businesses

Some things have worked some things haven't

What did you learn while building those businesses that surprised you

What really surprised me is that you don't need to innovate

You just need to see what is working on AX in communities and forums

and build your own alternative your own version of a product

If you like the product and see that it's working

just clone the idea build an MVP in two weeks and launch ads immediately

I think people always overcomplicate this

but simple boring tools are what make the most of money I think

Great

And last question that I ask everyone who comes onto the channel

if you could go back in time and stand on Samuel's shoulder when you were an optician

what advice would you give him to get started to build apps and make money online

My first advice would be of course to use AI coding tools

At that time there was no coding tool

but today you can use so many AI coding tools

that I think that I wouldn't have learned to code

Two would be spend time learning Google Ads and Meta

even X Ads and there are many ads you can learn

Three launch as soon as possible

Skip the boring parts of building a SaaS like the password reset pages setting pages

Just launch the minimal basic products and run ads to test demand right away

Once you get traction focus on SEO

It will bring compounding free traffic over time

And even if one day you want to sell the tool

having SEO traffic is also very valuable

And automate as much as you can

Use automation tools like Outrank StoryShorts etc

to automate posting article creation as much as you can

Finally once you have growth and customers coming daily

I would finish the product bring new features etc

All right Well that's great advice

I love your strategy I love the business that you're building

Thank you for coming on the channel Samuel

And I hope everyone watching this learn something

and are going to build cool stuff because of it

Thanks for coming on

Thanks Pat

I love Samuel's story because it goes to show that

you don't need to invent a brand new idea

You can go find something that's already working

and just make it a little bit better

With the right process and the right approach

anybody can build something successful

An inside Starter Story build will show you how to build apps the right way

In just two weeks you'll find an idea

build it with AI and ship it out into the world

Over 1 000 people have already joined and shipped their first apps

So if you want to finally bring your idea to life

head to the link in the description and check out Starter Story build

Thank you guys for watching

We'll see you in the next one

Peace

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