The Timeline Times

I manually studied 30,600 iOS apps making $20k-100k/mo+, the recipe is stupidly easy

Only around 1.7% of apps in the iOS App Store make $20k/mo+.

That's still more than 30,000 apps.

I've spent a stupid amount of time studying them manually. No AI summaries, no giant scraped dataset. Just looking at what these apps actually sell, how they onboard users, how they market themselves and why people keep paying.

I've also lost $300k+ making expensive mistakes of my own.

And the annoying part is that most of those mistakes were completely avoidable.

So if you can't afford to spend years and hundreds of thousands of dollars figuring this stuff out yourself, you probably can't afford to ignore what is already working.

Mobile apps are especially interesting right now because the hardest part used to be building them.

You needed Swift. You needed developers. An MVP could take months. Then you still had to somehow get the thing through the App Store.

That's changed.

Claude Code, Shipper and the rest of the AI coding wave have made building dramatically easier.

Which means the advantage moved somewhere else:

Picking the right idea. Shipping fast. Getting people to pay. And

How I scaled two apps to $240,000/yr with paid ads

My first app made $20,000 in a single month after I did this one thing:

I started running paid ads.

Before that, I was doing what most app founders do.

Posting organic content and hoping something would go viral, looking for influencers to promote the app, and relying on distribution methods I couldn’t really control.

Paid ads completely changed the way I looked at app growth.

Because once you learn how to spend $1 and consistently get more than $1 back, growth stops feeling like luck and starts feeling like a math problem.

And math problems can be solved.

Over the last couple of years, I’ve built and scaled multiple mobile apps,

13 improvements to make buying and selling mobile apps easier

buying a mobile app comes with a lot of questions.

you need to find a business that fits your budget, understand how it makes money, get answers from the owner, and work through the acquisition.

selling brings its own challenges: presenting the business clearly, answering buyer questions, negotiating terms, and keeping the deal moving.

between august 6 and september 6, I shipped these 14 improvements to www.whatsthe.app.

1. find apps that actually fit your buying criteria

browsing becomes much more useful when the listings reflect what you’re looking for.

someone buying their first android app under $20,000 has different requirements from someone looking for an established ios subscription business.

the buyer dashboard now lets you save your budget, preferred platforms, categories, revenue models, and minimum earnings

We got 75M+ views in 6 months. This is how we run social with Muse, GrokBot now (Step by step tips)

Over the past 6 months, we hit 75M+ views across X, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, and TikTok.

Part of that is luck. Most of it is a content marketing system we built with Helena, our favorite AI marketer.

On top of that, we now use Muse and GrokBot to supplement specific pieces of the workflow (research dumps, platform-specific trend monitoring). The full loop still runs through Helena. She is the most-advanced agent we built for marketers: 100+ curated marketing skills, 3,500+ integrations, 100+ custom tools, brand guardrails, multi-channel ops. Muse and GrokBot are sharp generalist assistants. Helena is the marketing specialist.

(If you enjoy this article, like and repost! It helps a ton ❤️)

The Numbers At a Glance

LinkedIn: 600K+ views
Instagram: 45M+ views
YouTube: 10M+ views

Why Your App Idea Sucks

We review hundreds of applications at Trot. Founders pitch us their app, we decide whether to fund it, build it, and market it in house.

Most get denied for the same reason: the idea was dead before a single line of code got written.

Not because the founder was lazy. Not because they couldn't execute. Because they picked an idea that was never going to work, and no amount of execution saves a dead idea.

This is the filter. Here's what we keep seeing in the deny pile, and what we'd build instead.

1. Stop building Cal AI clones

Cal AI exited for roughly $50M. Great idea, great execution, right place, right time.

The second that exit hit the news, hundreds of copycats flooded the market. Every week another founder pitches us an AI calorie tracker like they're the first person to think of it.

Here's the problem. You're not competing with Cal AI anymore. You're

DaVinci MCP + Astra + Skills - How to setup a local influencer factory

If you're reading this you've been chosen by the algorithm gods. Use this knowledge wisely.

Here is DaVinci MCP + Astra one shotting 100 Hook + Reaction style UGC videos in 8 seconds:

As you know, Astra has lived up to it's hype and is insane at content creation/world building. Here's a diagram it made about our ai influencers:

It coordinates work and write hooks (custom skill trained on our hook library) + combines with the reaction library (which I am open sourcing - download 1000+ reaction videos for free from here ), and DaVinci MCP handles the edits. Here's how to use it:

1. Grab the free reaction videos bucket