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This app is making $2,000 PER DAY

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Oct 18, 2026

Rasty built and launched his first iOS app in 3 weeks. And today, that simple idea makes $41,000 per month. The secret? Well, he didn't dance on TikTok or spam Instagram. No, his old school approach is much simpler than that. This episode is about how a founder built something absurdly simple, out-marketed much bigger players, and built a successful app.
Free database: simple apps making millions: https://clickhubspot.com/b4qr

Say hi to Rasty: https://x.com/synopsi
Check out Vaultaire: https://vaultaire.app/

🔔 Follow the Second Channel: @StarterStoryBuild
🏁 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.

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It's my first iOS app

It took roughly three weeks

It's currently averaging around 2 000 to 3 000 a day

This is Rasty and a few months ago

he had never built an iOS app in his life

until he decided to build something

to solve a very simple problem

In the first month the app made just 66

but six months later it made 41 000 in a single

But here's the thing the app he built is crazy simple

I literally haven't written a single line

either of code or the text on the web

The reason you wanna watch this episode

is to learn about how he grew it

which no it wasn't posting on TikTok

and it wasn't doing any paid ads

I asked Rasty to come onto the channel

and actually break this down

and in this episode we're gonna dive into

the simple app he built that made 41 000 in a single month

how he's taking on really big competitors

in a very crowded space

and the quote outdated growth strategy

that is working really well for him in 2026

All right guys this is one that you cannot miss

I'm Pat Walls

And I'm Gus

And this is Starter Story

All right Rasty I'm pumped to have you here on the channel

Welcome to Starter Story

Tell me a little about who you are

what you built and what's your story

Well I'm Rasty Turek

I built Vultair which is an iPhone app

that encrypts the storage

storage and allows people to store encrypted files and photos

It's my first iOS app mostly thanks to the coding agents

It took roughly three weeks

The first month it made 66 got a couple of downloads

It's currently averaging around 2 000 to 3 000 a day

Wow Rasty this is awesome

Off camera before this I said you started this in March

so it's only like six months

which makes this even more amazing

But let's talk about Vultair

Can you just explain what the app is who your users are

Well it's very simple

It's very very similar to Dropbox

with the one caveat that it's essentially encrypted

It's encrypted on device

There's no servers no shared keys

I have no access to it neither does Apple or anyone else

And so essentially there's no way to recover anything

The app is free

In fact I was going to put it completely free up

And then literally the day before

I just decided that maybe due to some advanced features

if users start sending me support requests

I just don't want to be bothered as much

So I literally just set a few dollars here and we'll see

Honestly majority of my purchases are for lifetime

I will say a good 60 at this point

They also account for majority of the revenue

north of 80 I think

And then I just passed 60 000 overall downloads

And one very different thing about this app versus others

a lot of the trendy apps that are very focused on

like they have to convert you immediately

So like CalAI like if they don't convert you immediately

you will never pay

Mine is the opposite

Like I have the lowest conversion day one

and I have the highest conversion like day 60

Real quick what I love about Rasty's story

is that his app is crazy simple

One of the reason why it works

is that it's just a proven category

People want to download this app and pay for this

An app like this and a founder like Rasty

is proof that you do not need a brand new

or complicated idea to win

which is why we put together an actual database

of simple app ideas like this

that are making tons of money right now

Every idea in this database comes with real revenue numbers

These are real apps with real pricing models

and growth tactics that you can check out

Just head to the first link in the description

If you want to download this database 100 for free

start browsing maybe get an idea and get building

All right let's get back to the episode

That's really impressive

I mean especially on an app that you know

know you could potentially use some of it for free

That's really good

And then finally could you just pull up your like analytics

revenue dashboards just show to the audience

you know this thing is real

Yeah so this is the App Store Analytics

As you can see my MRR is quite low

because most people opt in for the lifetime buttons

So daily downloads currently as I said

around depending on the day

So this is And

And that huge spike

Yeah I have no idea

This is the source is Apple Search

However what is weird about it

it doesn't correlate to revenue

See daily revenue is like hovering

around 2 000 these days

It's like slowly increasing

This is what we talked about

Like as you can see my download to paid

is only 5 47 on day one but day 35 it actually grows

It's weekly is 199 annual is 1999

and lifetime is 3999

So I mean these numbers Rasty are crazy

Like this growth channel that's been working for you

that is growing like really nicely really linearly

You have this amazing download to conversion rate

You're doing over 40 000 a month

This is soon gonna be a million dollar per year business

Congrats

It's providing a lot of value to people

which we're gonna talk about

But before we do I wanna learn about your background

because I know that you've done startups before

This isn't your first business that you started

but you did way different stuff

So how do you get to this point

where you have this awesome 2 000 a day app that you built

Well my road is pretty windy

I grew up in Slovakia in a tiny tiny village of 700 people

After high school I moved to Boston

to work for a security company

I got acquired by Google and so I went to Google

I wrote a chunk of the Gmail or sat on the Gmail team

and then left and started a couple of startups

Mostly the first one started in security

because that was my background

Then I moved to entertainment

I built a company

Company got acquired by Amazon

and they use some of the tech to this day

My last large scale one

and this is venture funded was PEX

which was kind of a sassy copyright as a service

for entertainment mostly focused on music

and then we sold that last year

That's awesome

So that leads naturally into how do you find this idea

How do you build a encryption utility app

Like if you deal with crypto

a lot of people have wallet keys

stored in all sorts of places

and it's very hard to put it somewhere close to the device

but also have it available

This was my solution for it

especially pictures of IDs birth certificates

And as I said I was not planning to make this paid

I didn't even know if anyone is ever going to use this

So like I put it out with the idea

It's like I will have it

It will be there

Yeah

Well let's talk a little bit more about that growth thing

We talked about this a little earlier before

but you're not spending money on ads

You're not paying people to create content for the app

You're kind of just growing through SEO

And you know if you go online these days

everyone's saying SEO is dead

SEO is dead

You got to do something else

but this is clearly working for you

and it's growing really nicely

So can you tell me a little bit more about that

Like what has been your approach for this

Most of the apps in this area are 15 years or older

They have millions of users a lot of downloads

So Apple prior does them

and like I have zero chance to get there

but they completely ignore web because you know

you know they don't have to

They can have money and they just don't care enough

And so my approach was like

what if I try to pull in every keyword that is out there

that essentially points to the same thing as an app store

but on the web

And so my first foray into this

was like a basic marketing site

which just outlines of all of the features

and then building series of guides that was like

how do I store my photos on iPhones

And when I say I I literally haven't written a single line

either of code or the text on the web

Everything is done by one of the coding agents

Over time this is like gaining a lot of authority

and with that comes a lot of traffic

and then I focus on the conversion

So like I tell the coding agents

like make sure that the CTA structure

that essentially has the person is somewhere in the article

wherever people are like commonly ending

I want them to be able to go through the app

And so I have around 10 conversion from the web

and the web is the majority of traffic at this point

So you essentially have a whole content marketing

and conversion team that's working for you

but there's not an actual team

You just have some sort of agent running

that's always improving your SEO

Tell me more about how you set up something like that

Like what tools are you using

It's honestly basic cloud or codecs

I wrote this library called Gum

It's just open source command line tools

with MCP atop of all Google services

including Google Search and Google Keyword Planner

And so what it does

it runs through Keyword Planner every single morning

looks at all the traffic

identifies keywords that are being surfaced

but not essentially being driven to the site

So like you can see your site was showed

16 000 times for this keyword

but no clicks because you are like number 50

And so then it takes that and Optimize creates this guide

and then the guide is essentially published

It takes roughly three to four days for Google to register

and I optimize a lot of internal links

And so the internal links from existing traffic

point to the new guides

and that's how Google essentially prioritizes it

and then you can see the correlation

with that essentially growing the traffic

and then the traffic it converts into downloads

And essentially publishing one a day and that's it

Google likes the fact that there's like

like not a lot of content coming

but the content is like high quality

Like I make sure that the content is not

such like vomit of words

I think you mentioned one thing that I really liked

is that like you're actually not publishing that much

Sometimes you'll hear where people will automate their SEO

It's just like a bunch of AI slop

They push out 1 000 articles in a day

but you actually mentioned that you only do one article a day

day which maybe you think that Google really likes that

And I think I wanna get you back on the channel

maybe in six months and see where your revenue is

because I think this focus on providing valuable content

to a very niche audience

maybe they care a lot about security

they care a lot about this very niche thing that you have

I think this is actually gonna benefit you even more

because you're gonna start getting shown in LLMs

as the more traffic you get the more Google likes you

the more Gemini likes you

the more AEO search overviews like you

all this attention coming to your app

So I'm excited to see where you are in six months

especially because it's growing so fast already

Rasty you mentioned that you have kind of a tech stack

A lot of this is profit

So what are the tools that you use

on a regular basis to run this business

Well I mean the app is Swift with the UI kit

There's really nothing else

It uses a lot of the iCloud features

but everything is native to the app

I use extensively Codex and Cloud

Cloud and I have also local models that I utilize for myself

but I will say at this point

99 of the stuff that is left to be done is Cloud

waking up every morning and running the guide

and that's kind of it

For measurements I use Postdoc

It's free so one of the nice things about this

is I don't have enough traffic or enough users

because they don't measure anything

These days you can really run things for free

There's nothing to break which is really nice

As long as Apple is up the app works

All right so Rasty real quick

I mean we kind of talked about what your app does

It's encryption for your photos

but I'd love to just see it

Can you show me the app that you built

that made over 40 000 last month

How does the app work

What does it do

Can you give us a little bit of a demo

Yeah it's a great person makes a pattern

Any pattern opens a vault

so there's roughly 52 billion potential vaults

and then they just add files to it

So what's interesting about this

is there's no way to find out how much data

or what is in there

and so it actually accumulated

to a really interesting story

So on a Friday I got a call from an FBI agent

They caught someone that they believe used the app

opened a vault to record some sensitive information

and so they believe the person done it

and they want my help

and there's no way to figure it out

The app is built such way that I can't tell

if the person ever had anything in there

and so the agent was pretty upset about it

but that's what the app does

That's amazing

I mean that's literally the point is to encrypt it

That's why people use it

because no FBI agent can call the founder of the app

and get the information so that's super cool

Last question that we ask all founders

to come on to Starter Story

and I know you've built a bunch of awesome startups

and you're doing great for yourself obviously

What advice would you give to someone watching this

Maybe they're about to start their first company

or they're about to start an app

like you've built a utility app even

What would be your advice to them

I mean start

That's the hardest part right

Like I have at least two dozen projects

that are somewhere in me ready

but they're not out there

and as long as they are not out there they don't exist

And then honestly people overthink

how things should be done

None of these came out of years of experience

because my experience is in B2B and enterprise

and so I really didn't know anything about this

So if I can learn anyone can

And so as long as you have open mind

and how to put one foot in front of the other

and every day just be slightly better than the day before

that's kind of all I care about

Well that's great advice

Thank you Rasty for coming on

Super cool app

Thanks for being so open about sharing it

and all your SEO experiments and all that

Super cool

Thanks for coming on

Yeah thanks for having me

All right Gus co host and producer of Starter Story

what did you think of Rasty and his app

When I first talked to him I knew it was gonna be awesome

He reminded me of do you remember that guy

guy we interviewed a while back

He's from Australia

I know exactly who he was

His name was Mike Hill

Mike Hill yeah

He did like the seven sass

I think the similarities between them

obviously besides their demeanor

was like I feel like they kind of have a really

it's simple but not easy

but simple approach to how they do things

That's what I really liked

about everything he was saying

was like you know all the app guys we bring on

are like TikTok and GoViral

and all that stuff obviously works

We have plenty of examples

but I thought it was cool that he was just like

I do one article a day

I try to like heat up the competition

and that's my strategy

Yeah

That's my first thought yeah

The vibe is like no bullshit

It's kind of just like I don't know

a guy I'm not sure how old he is

but let's say he's in his 40s

It's the difference between a guy in his 40s

and a kid in his 20s

You know he's not coming on here

talking about the latest greatest growth hack

You gotta do this you gotta do that

It's more just like put one foot in front of the other

I think there's a lot to learn from this interview

just seeing how someone like him carries himself

which is a little different

than the typical interviews we do

Yeah I agree

Yeah what do you think about the whole SEO play

that he's doing

I think you even said during the interview

everyone says SEO is dead or whatever

What do you think

I still think SEO is dead whatever you wanna call that

but the reason why I think it works for him

is that it's super super niche

It's like a very specific app

that does a very specific thing

He's not gonna get a million people

visiting his website every day

and I think he's probably getting a lot more traffic

from recommendations word of mouth and LLMs

than he knows already

because he's letting us know

he couldn't really track these things

because he doesn't wanna put analytics on it

because it's privacy focused

Yes it started with the SEO

it started with writing the content

but it's actually gonna grow a lot more

just because he's putting that out there

The other thing that I love about his app

is that it's so simple

You watch the demo you're literally encrypting some files

There's not a thousand features

They make them easy to market

We have a bunch of other examples like this

Real actual simple apps that are making money right now

We put them all into a database

of all the people that we've interviewed and researched

and found a bunch of cool simple apps

that are making money right now

Check that out in the description right there

It's all free

Hope you guys enjoy

Thank you for watching

We'll see you in the next one

Peace

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