u/No_Associate_844

I hit 25k/mo last month on app #10. I'm completely solo, and wanted to share how I did it and how helpful it was outsourcing my whole communication layer to an ai.

step 1: build one app

stop running 5 apps in parallel. its dopamine, not strategy. I did this for 2 years, none of them worked. the moment I locked in on one app and refused to switch, I started seeing real numbers within 6 weeks. if you dont know what to build, take an app that already works in your niche, add your twist, ship in 14 days. you dont need an original idea, you need a finished one.

step 2: obsess over distribution

this is where 99% of solo devs die cause they suck at it. the product is fine, the marketing is the bottleneck. I tried all 4 channels (own content, influencers, ugc, paid ads). they all work. what nobody tells you is the actual hard part isnt picking a channel, its replying to all the dms each channel generates. people will tell you to send 100 dms a day to influencers. now imagine 100 to influencers, 100 to ugc creators, the follow ups, the contract back and forth, stripe stuff, apple rejection appeals, brand partnerships pinging you on telegram. its 5 hours a day of pure inbox, when you should be thinking on improving the product to get to pmf.

I tried a few setups for this and nothing stuck. eventually landed on folk, an ai that lives inside imessage/telegram/discord and actually acts on my context. wired in notion (creator pipeline), stripe, gmail, apple connect.

now it:

• runs first round influencer + ugc qualification through dms with the script I wrote, only escalates to me when someone passes
• texts me a 7am brief with revenue, churn, anything on fire
• routes my discord and slack pings by urgency
• doubles as a coding orchestrator, I can text it a spec while I'm in line at chipotle and itll open the pr for me to review later

it isnt magic. setup was maybe 30 mins, but the discord integration is still a bit flaky. that said, going from "I cant scale because I cant reply to people" to "I sleep through 4 hours of creator timezones and wake up to qualified leads" was the biggest revenue jump I've ever had. roughly 4x in 2 months.

step 3: onboarding

short version: make it 12-15 minutes long, build it like a 3 act story (problem, core feature use, paywall), mirror the users answers back to them. read cialdini. dont let chatgpt design your onboarding from scratch, the patterns are too obvious now.

step 4: scale

once you hit 10k/mo the bottleneck is operations, not product. this is where solo devs cap out. they dont stop scaling because the app stops working, they stop scaling because their inbox stops working. solving for that is what got me from 10k to 25k.

honestly the most undersold tool in this whole space is having something that handles human attention for you. building got commoditized 2 years ago. distribution got commoditized 1 year ago. the last moat is operational throughput as a single person.

happy to answer questions, will share my onboarding canvas if anyone wants it.