How Jack Friks built two apps to $10K/month as a solo founder

Executive overview

Most aspiring builders waste time on ideas no one will pay for. Jack Friks solved his own problems — phone addiction and slow social media posting — and turned each into a profitable app within months of learning to code.

Two apps, $10K/month, 95%+ margins, run from his mom's basement. The entire marketing engine costs one hour a day and zero ad spend.

Solving a problem you personally would pay to fix is the fastest filter for viable ideas.

From McDonald's to $10K/month

• Dropped out of college and quit McDonald's to pursue online businesses
• Spent three years trying different models: books, T-shirts, crypto YouTube, before landing on apps
• Learned to code by feeding errors into ChatGPT and iterating
• Built Curiosity Quench (scrolling-reduction app) in four months while learning — now $3K/month, 100K+ downloads
• Built PostBridge (social media scheduling) in four and a half months — hit $7K/month in MRR

Finding and validating ideas

• Best filter: would you personally pay to solve this problem?
• Curiosity Quench came from his own hours-per-day phone scrolling habit
• PostBridge came from spending 30 of his 60 daily marketing minutes copy-pasting posts across platforms
• Validation before building: posted a 60-second TikTok; 15 people commented "I need this" — kept posting, kept getting the same signal
• Only built once demand repeated across multiple posts

Building from zero

• No structured process — opens code editor, opens ChatGPT, starts asking how to build the thing
• Uses a boilerplate (ShipFast) to start web projects; improves landing page one section at a time
• Stack: Next.js for web, React Native with Expo for mobile, Supabase for database
• Total monthly costs ~$400 (hosting + DB) plus $200 Twitter API — margins above 95%

One-hour-a-day organic marketing

• Warm up a new TikTok/Instagram account for two days: 15 min/day scrolling, saving viral videos, commenting and following in niche — no posting yet
• After warm-up, use CapCut to spin proven viral formats with your app as a subtle call to action (end-card or pinned comment, not mid-video ad)
• The algorithm rewards watch time; 6-second videos can hit 100–200% watch time easily
• Find one repeatable template, then post it over and over — "milk it till it's dry"
• Post daily rather than batching: daily iteration finds winning formats faster
• Runs three Instagram accounts to spread posts 3–4 hours apart and avoid spam signals; always uses different videos with different metadata

Converting views to paying users

• Mobile: paywall on launch with a 7-day free trial; gate the best features; use onboarding to prime users before they see the paywall
• Web/SaaS: no free tier — credit card required for trial, cancel any time; 7-day free trial outperformed heavy discounting
• Yearly pricing with a ~40% discount is a reliable revenue lever alongside free trials
• Retention comes from the original idea being sticky enough that users need it daily

Building in public and personal brand

• Grow a personal brand by doing interesting things and sharing them — not posting quotes
• Made new accounts specifically to escape social pressure from people he knew
• The cure for fear of posting: realise no one is watching as closely as you think
• Authenticity is detectable; audiences connect with real progress, not performance