Building a Profitable App from Scratch SOLO ($1K+ MRR in 1 Month)

It's been a busy week of non-stop coding and shipping. Since launching my latest app, I've just been heads down making improvements, fixing bugs, as well as building a new browser extension from scratch. In this video, I'll show you everything I've been working on and share what's next. As I continue to build and grow my app from these early stages. And if you're curious about how much my users and earnings have grown since launching, I'll share how everything is performing so far throughout the video. A quick recap of

what my app does. I built YouTube Transcripts. io, IO, a simple tool that lets you download thousands of transcripts in bulk from any YouTube channel or playlist. Why? So that I can feed lots of YouTube content directly into my AI agents. After my last video, you guys gave me loads of useful feedback. And this is exactly why I love building in public and sharing my progress. Quite often as founders, when we lock in and build non-stop, you develop what I call founder goggles. You become biased towards your own product and blind to its flaws. As a result, you fail to see your product for what it is, good or bad. So, I feel very lucky to be in a position to receive engagement with the stuff I share online and get unbiased feedback from you guys on my product. And it's been great to see that the app has been steadily growing since launch. I've been getting new user signups every day. And what's more important is that they're actually buying credits to help them download transcripts in bulk. It's probably too early to tell, but I think things are looking good. The fact that users are already willing to pay for such a niche and specific tool is a good sign that I'm addressing a real pain point. Right now, I've crossed over 200 total users and generated just over £1,000 in revenue. Not bad considering it's been less than a month since launch, and I still have a ton more features to ship. And speaking of users, one of the most important things to get right for any app is your signup process. You want users to register and start using your product in as few clicks as possible. Any extra friction in between will just make users bounce and hurt your conversions. And that's why I want to tell you about Clerk. If you're building any kind of app right now, they're a great solution for handling your authentication and managing your users. They let users sign in with a variety of methods like email, Google, GitHub, Discord, and more. And getting started is super simple. You register an account on Clerk, choose which tech stack you're using, follow their quick start guides, and copy and paste their pre-built components into your codebase. I want to mention they also have a really fair pricing model, especially for those of us building apps solo with limited budgets. Their free plan gives you 10,000 monthly active users, which is plenty when you're starting out. And unlike other services, they only charge for users who are genuinely active. This means if someone signs up, never comes back after 24 hours, they don't count it towards your billing. So, if you're working on a project and want to save yourself hours of messing around with authentication, definitely check out

Clerk. Now, for something I'm really excited to share with you guys alongside the bug fixes and improvements I made to my main app, I also built a new browser extension from scratch. This extension will work as a companion to my main web app. Building this has been part of my plan since day one because it just makes sense for the use case of my app and it reduces a ton of friction for the users when it comes to downloading transcripts. With the extension, users can just click a button whilst watching a video and instantly download the transcript without ever leaving the page. There's also a nice bonus of publishing a browser extension because it opens up a whole new marketing channel. If I can get the extension to rank highly on the Chrome web store, it could bring in a steady stream of new users who might never have found my product otherwise. For those of you who are curious about the text stack, I built the extension using WXT, which is one of the newer frameworks for browser extensions. I wanted to try it out because of its simple documentation and it has plenty of ready-made templates, which allows me to build quickly. But another great alternative is Plasmo, which is what I use to build my other extension, Easy Folders. Both are great, but WXT has been working great for me so far, and it will likely be my go-to for building future extensions. And as usual, enjoy this short time lapse of me building and publishing the new extension. Hey. Hey.

So, what will I be working on next? Since my app is still in its early stages, motivation and excitement are at their highest. I have a long list of improvements and features I want to build for both the main app and the extension. And there's nothing more satisfying than just putting your head down building and shipping without distractions. And I know what you're thinking. Why build features that users might not want? And normally I would agree, but in this case I'm making an exception. Since I'm a user of my own product, I think I have a pretty good idea of which features will be useful to have and which ones won't. Plus, when you build something you genuinely enjoy using, it will be so much easier for you to get excited about marketing and sharing it with others, which can be more important than building the app itself. So, after I ship this batch of features, I'll definitely be doing another round of marketing to show off all the new stuff that's been added since the first launch. And if you want to follow along with this journey and keep up with what I'm building, feel free to subscribe. And I'll see you in the next one.