How I Built ANOTHER Profitable App From Scratch SOLO (full journey)

If you're currently learning to code and building your first couple of apps, you probably think that toy projects you've built along the way aren't worth anything. But what happens when you take it all the way and actually try to turn one into a profitable app? That's exactly what I'll be doing in this video. I'll walk you through my entire journey step by step, from brainstorming a painkiller app idea, to building a high conversion landing page and an MVP in a weekend. And finally, to what most solo founders skip, actually executing on the marketing plan to get that first paying customer. So take this as a realistic example of how you can turn the stuff you build in your coding courses into something that can actually make you some money. And of course, I'll be sharing the exact earnings and metrics of my app, so you can see some real results. The first step in building any app is to commit to a good idea. So I started by looking at the types of apps that coding platforms like Scrimba teach their students to build as learning projects. And I came across this project called Polyglot, which caught my attention because it was super simple and easy to understand. It's just a basic translation tool that uses an AI model to translate text from one language to another. But obviously, that's way too simple of an app to realistically sell to anyone and earn any real money. But I was still optimistic that a translation app of some sort could be useful for someone who deals with foreign languages regularly. So next, I brainstormed with my best buddy Claude on how we could turn this simple app into a painkiller product that we can actually sell. And after some back and forth, I had a big idea of something that I could build. At first, I was considering building a browser extension that lets you highlight any foreign text on any website and receive a rich translation so you actually understand the text. But then I realized there are a ton of translation extensions out there and they all offer something similar already. So then I thought to myself, what would I actually find useful and pay for when it comes to translation and foreign languages? And immediately, I thought about the times where I would want to watch foreign YouTube videos but they didn't have any English subtitles. So I would either skip it entirely or just rely on YouTube's translated captions and dubbing features which honestly has terrible UX and is often inaccurate in its translations. To validate this idea, I did a quick Google search to see if there were any complaints about YouTube's translation features. And sure enough, there were plenty of complaints to go through. This was great for me because suddenly, I had an app idea that I was actually excited to build. It scratched my own itch and I knew exactly where to target my marketing once it is built. And courtesy of Claude, I'm naming the app Fluently. Something that's catchy, easy to remember and describes the product perfectly in my opinion. Now, there's no correct way to evaluate app ideas as there are definitely wacky apps out there that go against all best practices and are just printing money. But if you need a simple framework to evaluate your own ideas, try categorizing your app idea into one of three categories. Painkiller, Vitamin, or Candy. Then ask yourself, are people already looking for this type of app? You can check this by measuring search volume on Google Trends or reading through Reddit thread comments or browsing through discussions on niche forums. Second, are people already paying for this type of app? If yes, then it means you have competitors. But they've done the hard part for you which is convincing people to pay for this type of product. You just need to convince them to pay you instead by offering a better UX, improved features, or a fairer pricing model. And finally, can you explain what your app does in one sentence? Because painkiller apps are usually very simple. They address one problem and they do it well. After asking yourself these questions, you should have a clearer picture of whether your app is a painkiller, vitamin, or a candy product. And just to be clear, I'm not saying you should only build painkiller apps. But knowing the difference helps you decide on the best approach for your MVP and marketing plan. Now, before we start building, let me quickly run through my tech stack for this project. It's nothing complex, just the tools I'm most familiar with and can move the fastest in. As the goal is to spend no more than a weekend on building the first version of my app. Obviously, Cloud Code is my primary coding agent these days. I rely heavily on MCPs, skills, and agent teams for my build process. And I pretty much live inside the terminal now when I'm building with some occasional edits through cursor. Ghosty is my go-to terminal for its performance and reliability. And I pair it with some handy TUI apps to make sure I can stay locked in without app switching for as long as possible. For the rest of the stack, I'm using Next.js for the landing page and API endpoints. And Vercel to deploy and host everything in one place. WXT as the framework for the browser extension. ShedCN for the UI components. And Superbase for authentication and the database. Now, I know I just rattled off a bunch of tools for AI agents. But honestly, having access to all this stuff means nothing if you don't have the fundamental coding skills to back it up. And I think that's what actually separates skilled developers from this new wave of vibe coders who rely entirely on AI without really understanding the code it's writing for them. AI is definitely changing how we write code. But the developers who are genuinely ahead and productive are the ones with strong programming fundamentals. And they use AI to amplify the output, not to replace the understanding. So if you're looking to sharpen up your coding fundamentals for your next project, I highly recommend you check out Scrimba. They are known for their interactive and project-based learning approach where you can code directly in the browser and you'll be prompted by the teacher to pause and solve challenges to test your understanding. They're also going well beyond only teaching front-end as they have courses for full-stack, backend, cybersecurity, and even AI engineering. So you can learn how to work effectively with modern LLMs to build your next app. I can personally vouch for them because I've used their platform back when I was working as a full-time software engineer looking to upskill myself with the latest AI tools and frameworks. I took their AI engineering course to learn about the OpenAI API and LangChain in the early days. And their interactive lesson format is genuinely one of the best experiences I've ever had compared to other learning platforms. So if you're looking to level up your coding skills, please check out Scrimba. First link in the description where you can get 20% off your subscription. I'm ready to start building. But before I write a single line of code, I need to scope down what the first version of my app should look like. Otherwise, it's too easy to get distracted adding features that don't solve the core problem. I've mentioned this many times before, but my favorite approach to building the first version of any app is to use the SLC framework. Simple, lovable, and complete. The idea is to ship the smallest version of the app that gives users real value from day one. So here's the vision I had for Fluently. Keep it simple by just having a single translate button embedded into YouTube's video player. When clicked, it should instantly start translating the video into your native language. Make it lovable by making sure my captions are actually better and more accurate than YouTube's own auto-translate feature. And make sure it's complete by having translations work reliably, authentication and payments handled seamlessly, and users can easily reach out for support if they have any issues. People often overcomplicate their landing page. They either do too much and end up with something that's cluttered and confusing and doesn't convert, or they show too little and don't give the user a good enough reason to sign up or purchase. To craft a high conversion landing page, just optimize for these three things and it will get you 90% of the way there. Copywriting, which is what you say. Design, which is how it looks. And social proof, which is why they should care. Your hero section is the first thing people see when they land on your page. Your headline needs to be so clear that any stranger immediately understands what your app does. The best headlines make bold claims, invoke emotions or state direct benefits. Then add a sub-headline below for extra context. Keep it one to two sentences max describing what your app does, who it's for and what problem it solves. And handle common objections in your FAQ section. This is where people will look if they are on the fence. Think of things like money back policies, support options and anything else they'd want to know before buying. When it comes to design, I follow this landing page structure which has proven to work well for SaaS products. Now, you don't need to add every section onto your website. Just pick what's relevant to your app and where you're at. For example, if I'm just launching, I keep it super simple. A hero section with a demo, a section describing how it works, displaying the pricing options and listing out the FAQs. As for the pricing model, I'm keeping it super simple. A free tier to let users try it out. A $9.99 per month option for casual users and a $24.99 per month option for power users who need higher limits. So let's move on to building the browser extension. I wanted the extension to work as seamlessly as possible within YouTube. The main reason being, I personally hate context switching between apps. And second, most competitors require the users to use their separate web app for translations. So if I can build something that just works, natively on YouTube, it would be a great way to differentiate myself. To pull this off, I just needed to inject a content script into YouTube's video player. In my case, it renders a simple translate button on the top right of the video player. And when you click it, it kicks off the translation logic. As for the rest of the UI, I'm using ShadCN components. And here's a quick tip. You can create presets on their website and import it into any project, such as web apps and browser extensions. This is handy because it keeps all your components looking consistent and saves you from making design decisions for every new component you add. As for implementing the translation logic, this was the most time consuming part of the build because YouTube enforces strict rate limits on the API and actively blocks third-party bots and scrapers. So I had to get creative and build my own custom pipeline, which essentially extracts the raw audio from the YouTube video, then passes it to dedicated AI models to transcribe and translate everything into a subtitles format. For obvious reasons, I won't go too deep into the implementation details. As I want to keep that locked down for now. But in the end, I got something that works reliably and produces genuinely good translations. Now that my extension was built and ready, it was time to create the marketing assets for my launch. The landing page was already done. So I just needed to create some visual assets for the Chrome Web Store listing and a product demo to showcase the extension in action. After all that was done, I submitted my extension to the Chrome Web Store and I got extremely lucky as it was approved in less than 24 hours. So that meant I could start marketing it immediately. Since my app is in the B2C category and is a low ticket product, my best bet is to cast a net far and wide to get as many early users as possible. I posted everywhere I could think of, X, Product Hunt, and even my LinkedIn to get that initial traction. My X launch was okay, nothing crazy, but unfortunately, didn't go viral. My launch on Product Hunt was decent, got 85 upvotes, got ranked number 13 for the day, which was nice. And LinkedIn was a flop, but I kind of expected it since I'm not a huge LinkedIn user in the first place. But the platform that made the most sense to me to market on was Reddit. There were many large communities that fit my ideal customer persona and it was where most of the frustration and complaints came from during my initial research. I even created a custom skill to automate the marketing process on Reddit. It gives the agent access to my Chrome browser, autonomously searches for relevant threads to plug my product into and returns a list of links with pre-written responses for me to use. Quick plug, members of my private community, Startup Club, have access to this skill for free, along with many other guides on AI and indie hacking being released every month. It's a community to help solo founders build and ship their apps faster. So if you're interested, check out the link to Startup Club in the description. But since Reddit is quite strict on self-promotion and advertising, it was really hard to get my product out there without getting banned or removed. So I decided to try something different for this launch and that's diving into the world of paid ads. I'll be honest, I had no idea what I was doing going into this and I kind of just winged it for my first campaign. But the process was actually quite simple to get started. You fill in your basic details, select the communities and interest groups you want to target and set your timeline and budget. And of course, I use Claude to help me tweak and optimise my campaign before running it so I'm not just burning through money and hoping for the best. So here's where things currently sit. I've spent over $100 in ads, which got me over 150,000 impressions and over 400 clicks. From those 400 clicks, I got 26 registered users and from those 26 users, five converted into paying customers on the premium plans. And that currently puts me at around $100 in monthly recurring revenue, which is just about breaking even with the ad spend. But for a first ever ad campaign with zero experience, I'm actually not too disappointed with these results. So you might be wondering if you should just run paid ads for an app you've just launched. And honestly, I wouldn't do it. I did it to get the experience and learn the process of running paid ads. But I wouldn't recommend it for most apps, especially if you're just starting out and don't have much budget to spend in the first place. Instead, my advice would be to focus on organic social media marketing and start creating content that directly targets your ideal customer's niche. In my case, it will be creating reels, shorts or TikToks that highlight the pain of not being able to understand foreign content on YouTube and targeting it to people who would benefit the most. For example, anime fans, K-drama watchers or anyone who just consumes a lot of foreign content online. Not only is this the cheaper option, but it forces you to learn important skills like writing compelling hooks, storytelling and content creation. And it's what I'll be doing going forward with Fluently. Because as much as we'd love to think that a good product will just sell itself, the reality is that most of the time we have to learn the art of persuasion and the tactics of getting attention on the internet so people are actually aware of what we're building. Remember at the start of the video, how I said most people think the toy projects they build in coding courses aren't worth anything. Well, all it took was one simple tutorial app to get started as inspiration. Then brainstorming it into a painkiller product and a couple days work to go from zero to our first paying customer. I know the results were nothing too impressive, but I'm still happy to have learned a lot in this process. From overcoming technical challenges to running my first ad campaign. So if you've been stuck in tutorial mode these days, take one of those projects you've already built and ask yourself, what real problem could this solve? And you might be closer to your first paying customer than you think. And if you want to improve your coding fundamentals for your next project, go check out Scrimba. My personal recommendation for anyone wanting to learn how to code.