How One Simple Mindset Shift Turned Three Boring App Clones Into a $35,000/Month Business

Why Your Original App Idea Is Killing Your Income — And What Made Me $35K/Month Instead

Most people building apps spend months locked inside their own heads, chasing the ghost of some brilliant, never-before-seen idea that nobody has thought of yet.

They sketch wireframes at midnight, fill notebooks with “unique” concepts, and convince themselves that the only way to win in the app market is to invent something the world has never seen before.

The truth is, that thinking is exactly what is keeping most people broke.

The moment I stopped hunting for a groundbreaking app idea and started looking at what was already making money, everything changed for my income, my schedule, and my confidence as a builder.

This article is about a strategy used by Samuel Rondo, a former optician with zero coding background who now runs three software-as-a-service apps that together generate $35,000 every single month.

His approach is not glamorous, it is not what startup culture tells you to do, and it is almost embarrassingly simple once you hear it laid out clearly.

But it works, and the numbers prove it beyond any argument.

We strongly recommend that you check out our guide on how to take advantage of AI in today’s passive income economy.

The Guy Who Turned Copying Into a $35K/Month App Empire

Samuel did not grow up coding.

He was not a software engineer, did not attend a top tech school, and did not have venture capital money sitting in his back pocket waiting to be spent on an unproven concept.

He was an optician, someone who helps people with their eyesight for a living, and he had never written a single line of real code before deciding to change his entire life.

What he did have was the willingness to learn, a clear goal to build a specific tool he already wanted, and the discipline to apply every lesson immediately instead of just watching courses for fun.

He taught himself to code through a 15-hour course on YouTube, and his method of learning was different from what most people do when they try to pick up programming on their own.

Instead of watching tutorials and hoping knowledge would just stick, he applied each concept to an actual project he was building at the same time, which made every lesson feel real and worth understanding.

That first project was clunky and taught him what not to do, but it gave him the foundation to build the app business he runs today, which includes a LinkedIn scraping tool, an AI video generator, and a new AI coding tool.

The mindset he developed along the way, specifically around how he finds ideas, is the real engine powering all three of those income streams.

The Rule That Changed Everything: Never Build What Doesn’t Already Exist

Samuel is upfront about the core rule he lives by as an app builder, and it sounds almost counterintuitive the first time you hear it stated out loud.

He will not build something unless it already exists and is already working or at least gaining real traction with paying users.

This rule might sound like it eliminates creativity, but what it actually eliminates is the most expensive mistake builders make, which is spending months building something that nobody wants to pay for.

The profitable app idea he is looking for is one that has already been proven in the market, already has users who are spending real money, and already shows signs of consistent demand that he can step into and serve.

His four filter questions are sharp and practical: Would he use this product himself?

Can he see that it already works in the market?

Is the company behind it growing without spending thousands on marketing, which would signal genuine organic demand?

And is the product simple enough that he can build and maintain it without losing his mind?

If a product passes all four of those filters, Samuel moves forward.

If it does not, he keeps scrolling until he finds something that does, and this disciplined patience is a big reason he has three successful products instead of three failed experiments.

Where Samuel Finds His Best App Ideas

His number one source of app ideas is Twitter, specifically communities built around solopreneurs, indie hackers, and founders who share their progress in public.

These communities are full of builders who post their Stripe screenshots, their monthly recurring revenue numbers, and updates about how their tools are growing, which gives Samuel exactly the validation signals he is looking for.

When a founder posts a screenshot showing real revenue from a real tool, Samuel treats that as the strongest possible proof that a market exists and that people are actively paying for a solution to a specific problem.

He also uses Ahrefs, a widely used SEO and website traffic analysis tool, to understand where a product is getting its users from.

He wants to know whether traffic is coming from paid ads, from organic search, or from a combination of both, because each traffic source tells him something different about how hard it would be to replicate the app’s growth.

If a product is growing through both paid ads and SEO simultaneously, Samuel sees that as an extremely strong signal because it means demand is broad and coming from multiple channels at once.

If a product relies entirely on SEO, he knows it is doable but will require more patience, since ranking in Google search results takes consistent effort over months rather than days.

His final filter is personal, and he takes it seriously: he has to actually like the product.

Working on something you find boring or pointless is one of the fastest ways to lose motivation, and without motivation, even a good idea will slowly die from neglect.

The App That Proved His Strategy: How Story Short Went From Idea to $20K/Month

The clearest example of Samuel’s strategy working in real life is the story of how he built and grew Story Short, an AI video generator for TikTok and YouTube that now brings in $20,000 per month by itself.

He came across a post on Twitter from a founder building a tool that automated the process of posting faceless videos across platforms like TikTok and YouTube.

The numbers being shared publicly were impressive enough to stop him mid-scroll and make him investigate more seriously.

He checked Ahrefs and discovered something that made this particular idea even more attractive: the existing product was getting nearly all of its traffic from Facebook ads.

This was a critical detail because it meant the traffic source was something he could replicate almost immediately by running his own ads, rather than waiting months for SEO to kick in.

He built his version, launched Facebook ads, and Story Short grew fast, not because he invented something new, but because he saw a proven demand and built a cleaner, simpler version of a tool people were already paying for.

The full tech stack he uses across all his apps is Next.js and Node.js for the core development, Vercel for deploying his apps, Stripe for processing payments, Ahrefs for ongoing SEO and traffic analysis, and a tool called Outrank for automating the writing and publishing of SEO blog articles directly to his websites.

Every tool in that stack is real, well-documented, and accessible to someone building their first app with limited experience.

The Three Apps and What Each One Earns

Samuel currently runs three apps, and each one was built using the same core validation method he described above.

Usmus is a LinkedIn scraping tool that generates around $15,000 per month and has approximately 10,000 active customers who use it to pull data and contact information from LinkedIn at scale.

Story Short is the AI video generator built for TikTok and YouTube that earns around $20,000 per month and serves approximately 4,000 customers who use it to automate the creation and publishing of faceless video content across social platforms.

Capacity is a newer AI coding tool that is still in early growth and currently earns around $900 per month with about 50 users, which Samuel is still actively developing and scaling.

The combined monthly revenue from all three is right around $35,000, and the combined monthly costs to run them are roughly $9,000, making this a genuinely profitable operation with real margins.

How Samuel Grows Each App After Launch

Samuel’s growth playbook follows a clear sequence, and he applies the same order of operations every time he launches a new product.

The first step is always paid advertising, either on Google or Meta depending on which platform aligns better with the audience for that particular product.

He treats ads as the fastest way to test whether real demand exists for what he has built, and he does not spend months perfecting his product before running a single ad.

Once he sees real traction from ads, he shifts part of his focus to SEO, because organic traffic from Google compounds over time and eventually becomes one of the most cost-effective growth channels a software product can have.

He also uses faceless YouTube channels as a growth tool, which he built a feature inside Story Short to automate, allowing him to publish daily videos about his products on YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram entirely on autopilot.

The final layer of his growth stack is affiliate marketing, and he has used it for all three of his apps, particularly Story Short, because affiliates create a kind of organic virality where other people are actively motivated to write articles and make videos promoting his product in exchange for a commission.

This four-layer approach — ads first, then SEO, then faceless video content, then affiliates — is what has built the consistent and compounding monthly revenue he now earns across all three apps.

What Samuel Wants Every New Builder to Know Before They Start

Looking back at his journey from optician to $35,000/month app builder, Samuel’s biggest piece of advice is almost shockingly simple.

Stop over-complicating the idea stage.

Go on Twitter, look at what is working, find a product you like that is already making money, clone the idea, build an MVP version of it in two weeks, and run ads immediately to test real demand.

Simple, boring tools that solve a specific problem are consistently the ones that make the most money, and most of the viral startup mythology about needing to disrupt an industry is noise that stops people from building something real.

He also emphasizes launching as early as possible and skipping the non-essential features that most first-time builders obsess over, like password reset pages, complex settings panels, and polished onboarding flows that nobody will care about in the first two weeks.

Launch with the core value, prove demand, then go back and finish the product once you know real people want to pay for it.

And once the product is growing, automate as much as possible using tools like Outrank for content and Story Short for video, so you can focus your time on what actually moves the business forward.

The Mindset That Makes This All Work

What makes Samuel’s story genuinely useful for anyone reading it is not just the tactics, it is the mindset underneath all of those tactics.

He gave himself permission to stop trying to be original, and that permission freed him to actually build something that makes real money.

The market does not reward originality for its own sake.

It rewards useful tools that solve real problems, and whether or not you came up with the concept from scratch is completely irrelevant to whether someone pulls out their credit card and pays for it.

Building a profitable app is not about having the best idea in the room.

It is about finding a proven idea, making it slightly better or more accessible, putting it in front of the right audience through ads and SEO, and staying consistent long enough for the compounding to kick in.

That is a strategy anyone can follow, regardless of background, budget, or technical skill level.

And in 2026, with AI coding tools making the build process faster and more accessible than ever, the only real barrier between you and a functioning app is the willingness to stop waiting for a perfect original idea and start building something that already has proof behind it.

We strongly recommend that you check out our guide on how to take advantage of AI in today’s passive income economy.