Coding a Profitable Whop App From Scratch with AI (full guide / solo / beginner friendly)

When it comes to building profitable apps, by far the most painful struggles I face is coming up with the app idea itself and how to actually market it to get paying customers. In this video, I'll be challenging myself yet again to show you exactly how I built a profitable app from start to finish, all in just a few days. I'll share my entire thought process of picking an app idea that actually has users ready to pay, as well as taking you through a simple framework for building apps that are useful and functional from day one. I launched my apps on a new and underused platform, which you can also take advantage of right now to get your first few paying customers. And as always, if you stick around until the end, I'll show you my total earnings and stats from this entire process, so you can get a sense of some realistic results. Quick disclaimer, I'm partnering with W for this video. They approached me to test out their new app marketplace and challenged me to ship something that generates revenue for myself and their members. Since I'm always down to create a new income stream for myself, it was a no-brainer to take on this challenge and test my skills. So, what exactly is WAP is a huge platform that helps people launch their online businesses and form communities around all kinds of interests. And what I'll be building in this video is called a app. These apps are basically extensions for communities and can pretty much do anything you want it to, whether it's to provide extra features for community members or streamlining internal operations for community owners. But before we write a single line of code, we need to eat the frog and actually do some research to measure the demand for the type of app we want to build. All app ideas will tend to fall into two categories: business focus apps or community focused apps. Will the app be targeted at community owners or the members? For owners, how could my app save them time, get them more members, or improve their everyday workflows? And respectively for members, how could my app improve their overall user experience on the platform? These are the questions I had to answer first when brainstorming on what to build. And luckily, also has some really good examples of some successful apps in their documentation, and it's what I used to help me guide my decision. After deciding on who to build for, I did some quick market research to measure the demand from my ideal customers. I just searched around the community explore page to see how many communities matched my app's niche, and I found hundreds of them. So, I saved all of the search results for later so that in the launch phase, I know exactly who to reach out to once the app is ready. But before going any further, I also went on the W app store to scout out any potential competitors because there's no point building something that already exists with no differentiation. And luckily for me, there was zero competition for my app idea. And I think this is because the W app store is still quite new. And from what I can see, most devs are still figuring out what to build as there are currently less than 100 apps on the W app store, but over 110,000 creators and over 10 million users. So, at this point, I was ready to start planning what the SLC version of my app would be. So, here's what I want to build. A simple but useful content generator for social media that helps with generating ideas, catchy titles, and full voiceover scripts. And what makes it actually useful and not just another AI rapper is that I wanted to actually scrape and reference content that is trending right now. Personally, I would actually use this app for my own YouTube workflow. And for community owners, their members will get access to a better tool which will give them better results which results in better retention and ultimately more revenue. Then for the members, they save days of research and scripting for what could be done in minutes using my app. So, it's a win-winwin for everyone. Now, let me quickly break down how I plan and build the early versions of my app using the SLC framework. Simple, lovable, complete. This framework is what helps me ship something that is useful and functional from day one without overthinking. How do I keep my app simple? Well, make sure it only does one thing and one thing well, and that's generating viral content ideas based on what's actually trending, not just guesswork. How can my app be loved by users? save them days of work by offering a useful feature that automates the process of research and scripting into their workflow. And how do I know my app is complete at launch? Well, all features should just work and the app actually does what it promises. This means ironing out the bugs and doing some manual testing of all of the possible user journeys. Now that I have a clear idea of what I wanted to build and confidence in my marketing strategy, it was time to finally start coding. I

didn't want to spend too much time setting things up from scratch, so I cloned a project template straight from WP's GitHub repo, which helped me get a working app running in minutes. The template handles all of the SDK integrations. This just means all of the core features like authentication and payments will be configured for you so that you can just focus on building your app. So, I would highly recommend using this as well for your own projects to get started quickly. And if you're using AI tools like Claude Code or Cursor, then I suggest using the MCP servers and LLM docs to help you build and debug faster. To save you time, I'll link all of the guides, resources, and documentation I've personally used from start to finish. So, feel free to check the description if you need help or get stuck. With that said, here's a snapshot of the entire tech stack and tooling I used to build my apps. I won't go too much into the technical details of my apps, mainly because I don't want my apps to be cloned right away. But more importantly, I want this video to be more focused on the ideation and marketing stages since for us builders, coding and shipping is usually the fun and easier part. But actually, coming up with a good app idea and getting paying customers is where most of us struggle. So, what did I ship in the end? I launched not one but two simple yet useful apps onto the app store. One app specializes in short form content for platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and Tik Tok, whilst the other focuses on more long form. Both apps still tap into my custom backend, which fetches current trending content and topics and feeds them into the AI to help generate its responses. And sure, I could have combined everything into one mega app. But for the sake of keeping my apps simple and focused, I wanted to keep them separate and measure how each performs individually. Now that my apps

are live on the app store, it's time for the moment of truth and try my best to secure the first few paying customers. My marketing strategy was simple. Perform mass cold outreach to all of those community owners I collected during the initial market research stage. You can now see why it was important for us to do this work up front before writing any code. Most developers skip this and then wonder why they can't find customers after they launch. But by then it's already too late. Initially, I was naive and I was about to literally message hundreds of community owners one by one telling them about my apps. But in true programmer fashion, this whole process screamed for automation. And honestly, I'd have more fun spending a few hours building a tool to help me automate a task rather than actually doing the task itself. So, that inspired me to go on a small side quest to build a cheeky browser extension that sends custom outreach messages to all community owners that match a given search query. and it worked like a charm. I may or may not share this extension within my private community. Feel free to check it out if you want to join a community of solo founders or if you need some personalized advice on building and growing your apps. When it comes to doing cold outreach, I understand the appeal of just copy and pasting the same message to every user because it's quick and easy and you think it's just a numbers game, but the truth is this doesn't build trust and it just gets you ignored. What I would do instead is put in some extra effort to craft some personalized and valuedriven messages to not only increase the chance of getting a response, but also converting them to a paying customer. I made sure each message was tailored to the specific community or to the owner themselves. And I kept the tone of the message super casual and informal, the exact same way I would text if I was helping out a friend. I would then insert some key benefits and outcomes that could be achieved with my app to persuade them to try it. And finally, I will just include a simple CTA directly linking to my app on the app store. All right, let's get into how the app performed and the total earnings because I know that's what you're really here for. To quickly explain my pricing model, my apps operate on a simple tiered subscription plan where owners can choose the plan that best matches their community size and receive a set amount of generations per month. After one week of launching and marketing, I managed to gain subscribers across all of the paid tiers. And I even got a couple owners opting for the higher ticket $99 per month plan, which totaled up to over $400 in revenue and an optimistic figure of $391 in MR, assuming nobody churns the next month. My app also reached top five for most installs in this category with it being used in over a 100 communities already. and it also came second place for being most addicting, which is just a fancy way of saying people are actually using the thing. Overall, I'm very happy with these results considering the short amount of time I spent on building and marketing. And it's nice to know I now have another income stream to rely on. And truthfully speaking, I was a bit skeptical at first when taking on this challenge and just thought it'll be something fun to film for content. But now after putting in the work and seeing the results, if you can ship something useful and do the marketing, I think there's actually huge potential to build lots of mini profitable apps on the app So