From Idea to First Dollar: A Guide to Building and Selling Your App |

In this article, we're going to be going over everything that you need to know to think of an app idea, build it, and sell it and market it on the internet to make your very first dollar off of an app that you built. Over the past several years, numerous apps have been built, and through a few small changes, it's possible to start actually making a couple hundred bucks, and now a couple thousand bucks with the latest products a month of recurring revenue off of the apps that are built.

Often times when getting business or entrepreneur advice, it's a lot more helpful and more actionable when there's someone that's a lot closer to you in that entrepreneurship game. This guide is from the perspective of someone much closer to you than the other people on the internet that are making 30, 50, or $100,000 a month of recurring revenue. This is just a guide from a random person on the internet that loves to build apps, make money off of them, and market them on the internet. So, I hope you find this article useful. Let's just get into it.

Step 1: Coming Up with an App Idea

Let's be very straightforward with this: you don't need to come up with a new idea. Just copy what already exists out there. One of the most common questions that gets asked is how do you go out and validate your idea. If you read a lot of other startup articles, particularly from sources like Y Combinator, they often tell you to go out and talk to your customers, do user interviews, iterate quickly, see what they want, and does your product really solve a problem. And that's all really good advice, especially if you're trying to build a billion-dollar company that has huge room for growth.

However, if you are struggling to make your very first dollar on the internet, you don't need to go through all that because you should just go out and build out a product that already exists out there. By just building out an idea that already exists, the other people have already done the hard part of validating that market for you. You don't need to validate your product; you know that it's validated.

Some of you are going to have a little bit of an ego, just like many do in the beginning, where you're like, "um but it's not original, how am I going to differentiate it from all the other products out there?" No, stop. Drop the ego. That doesn't matter. Originality is dead. It does not matter, especially in the early stages.

Something that's always been really funny in software businesses compared to other businesses is that whenever you say that, "oh, I'm going to build XYZ app," someone's always really quick to say, "um that actually already exists." And then you're like, "okay, why can't there be two apps to the same existing solution?" That's almost like saying if someone wants to open up a hamburger restaurant and someone's like, "actually, McDonald's already exists, you actually can't make them anymore." No, there can be multiple restaurants that provide hamburgers. Similarly, if there's one problem, there can be multiple apps that solve that problem.

It's a great strategy to copy an idea first and then iterate and differentiate it later on with your features. For example, many successful AI-powered meeting recording tools that record and transcribe meetings were built because their creators saw other AI meeting recording apps and tools out there making a ton of money and realized there was a big market for it. In the beginning, you can just rebuild what the other apps were already doing. Over time, you can slowly differentiate it by adding a particular new feature, like a meeting co-pilot that listens in on meetings in real-time and answers questions from those meetings based on information you upload. That's a brand new feature that other apps might not have. But that differentiation doesn't really come until you build out that base version of the app and start making money.

The result of just copying an idea that already exists is that on launch day, you might be able to scale to a significant monthly recurring revenue within a week or two because the market was already validated. You knew people wanted to buy this product because other people have already validated that market for you. Go out on the internet, go to like Twitter, Reddit, or even just scroll through your TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube feed. You're going to see certain apps marketing towards you, and if you find those particular apps interesting and you think that you can rebuild them yourself, just get after it and rebuild that same particular app.

Step 2: How to Build Your Application

Now, some of you reading this article will have a little bit of coding experience, and some of you will have no coding experience. While the experience level of the people reading this article might vary in terms of their development skills, the advice here applies to literally anyone from all skill levels, from beginner to expert.

In terms of building the apps out there, there's so much confusion about what's the best tech stack. "Oh, should I do Remix? Should I do Svelte? Should I do Next.js? Is Next.js too much hype?" There's so much noise and nuance around that topic. You should just ignore all of it. When you're picking your tech stack, just pick a tech stack that has the most developer support out there. You don't want to be using a tech stack that not that many developers use, and then when you run into a bug, no one can really help you out. Even the LLMs can't help you out because they are trained off of the data out there on the public internet, and if it's not that popular, you're going to get less developer support.

Recommended Tech Stack:

Web Applications: The most popular tech stack out there for building web applications is Next.js. Is Next.js perfect? No, not really, but it is one of the most popular, if not the most popular, web development framework for full-stack app development. Don't get lost in the weeds, don't get stuck in analysis paralysis of trying to pick the best framework or best tech stack out there.
Hosting: To host your Next.js application, it's recommended to use Vercel. Once again, Vercel is not perfect; it can be expensive, but it is the easiest path forward. You should just optimize for ease of use rather than the "best" solution. Right now is not the time to be a tech nerd. You can save your tech nerdiness for another time.
Mobile Applications: If you want to build a mobile application, it's recommended to use Expo, which is based on React Native. You can build cross-platform apps for both iOS and Android using one unified codebase. While some might argue for Capacitor.js or building two separate native applications in Kotlin and Swift, Expo has a really great developer community, and often times, most people just want to build an app for both Android and iOS. Expo is the easiest solution to do that. But then if you're building an app just for iPhones or just for Android, then building with Swift or Kotlin is pretty valid as well. It's a good option, but Expo is more than enough for most cases.
Backend Provider: For your backend provider for both your mobile application or your web application, it's recommended to use Supabase as your backend provider of choice. The reason for recommending Supabase is the fact that it has a ton of products built into one. It's almost like an all-in-one solution because it helps handle authentication for you, handles databases for you, and handles storage for you. Those three things right there are going to be the vast majority of your application, and it is really convenient and also very affordable to have one platform handle all of those aspects of your application for you. But really, the biggest reason for using Supabase is the fact that it is really popular in the developer community, so there is a ton of support. The community is super active, so you're going to be able to find solutions for common bugs that you might run into.
Payment Processing: In terms of how to handle payment processing, just go with Stripe. It is the most popular one, it is very straightforward to use, and probably has the best developer documentation and the best developer tooling out there. Don't worry too much about using other providers like Paddle or Lemon Squeezy. While some people might bring up merchant of record and tax liability for international sales, let's be honest, is that really your biggest issue? Is international tax compliance really the thing that is top of your mind? Probably not. So just stick with Stripe; it's easy and has great developer tools.

Quick Recap:

If you're building a full-stack web application, build it using Next.js and deploy it on Vercel.
If you're building a mobile application, build it using Expo to build on both iOS and Android at the same time.
For your backend storage and authentication, use Supabase.
For payment processing, use Stripe.

A last bonus tool that isn't necessarily required but is very, very helpful is PostHog. PostHog is a really useful tool that lets you track events to see how your users are actually interacting with your application. So when users click on a certain button or take a certain action, you can track that event so you can see if users are actually using certain features of your application or not. And then it also has other really useful features like session recording, which lets you see exactly how users are really using your application. Also, it has support for letting you do experiments, A/B testing between different experiments or new features you're launching to see how it improves or hurts your app. So eventually, when you get to that stage where you do want to experiment with tracking how your users are using your app or running experiments, you should really use PostHog as your default for that.

Step 3: How to Market and Sell Your Product

This is where most developers get tripped up because a lot of developers can build a product, but they don't know how to market and sell a product. There's literally an infinite number of possibilities of ways to market your application, and we definitely won't be able to go over every single one of them out there, but we'll go over some of the most popular ones.

Organic Social Media Marketing

First off, let's talk about social media marketing, particularly organic social media marketing. Kind of like how it was said in the first section of this article in terms of how to come up with an idea for your application, it was suggested to scroll through media, see what apps are being advertised to you, and just rebuild those apps. Similarly, if you want to go out and make social media content to market your app, it's highly recommended to go through social media, find other accounts, other app accounts that are marketing their app, and literally just copy their format. Chances are if the format works for them, it's also going to work for you. It's a viral format. Be shameless about it. Don't have an ego about originality. That doesn't matter. It really doesn't matter. Once again, do not care about the ego. Put the ego away. You don't need to be original. Just copy the content that works for other software app accounts and literally remake them, repurpose them, and just do the same format for your app.

Reddit Advertising

Another nice form of social media marketing is Reddit advertising. This one is really interesting where you kind of just lurk around Reddit to see where people are posting about their problems, and you can just go in and then add, type in your product or the app that you built as a potential solution to that problem. When it works well, it works really, really well. But at the same time, Reddit is usually pretty strict about moderating these communities, or the community mods are really strict about making sure like self-promotions are not allowed, so they might delete your comments, and you might get banned from certain subreddits. It is still a very valid solution, and a lot of people do it very, very well. There are actually certain tools that exist out there that actually help you monitor Reddit for certain keywords such that if you are looking for a certain keyword for your application that you want to market on, they will then send you every single post that pertains to that particular keyword, and then you can go in, comment your solution, and try to help out there. Really useful.

With Reddit, your mileage may vary. Some people are much more skilled in the social media aspect of things like making articles on TikTok and Instagram, but Reddit is really nice because it has a much lower barrier of entry. It's literally just a text post, whereas with TikTok and Instagram and social media marketing, it requires video editing and video production, which can get a little bit harder compared to just writing a post on Reddit. And the great part about Reddit marketing is the fact that it still has very big viral potential if one of your posts goes viral on Reddit. And at the same time, you can comment on a lot of other posts that already exist out there that aren't necessarily viral, but because Google and other search engines love Reddit so much, often times what's going to happen is you're going to find certain threads on Reddit being recommended on Google for a particular problem, asking for a solution to a particular problem. And as long as your comment exists in there, there's going to be a chance that someone goes to that Reddit post, sees your comment with a link to your product, and then they're going to visit your website from that Reddit post. So Reddit is super, super powerful. It's highly recommended to do something where you leave a lot of comments on a lot of posts promoting your tool, plugging your tool, such that sure, people that are on Reddit will natively find it there, but even more importantly, people that go search that problem from Google and end up on the website can then see that solution as well from your comment.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

And on this topic of Google loving Reddit and recommending them in the search results is a good transition into the marketing topic of search engine optimization. Search engine optimization is basically figuring out ways, maybe writing blog posts or doing guest blog posts or commenting on Reddit posts to make sure that your app comes up on Google and other search engine results. This is a great marketing solution, just the only downside is the fact that it has a lot less viral potential compared to Reddit marketing or TikTok and Instagram marketing, and it's definitely a much longer-term investment that can be super useful for you, but you're not going to get as many short-term rewards in the future.

Influencer Marketing

Now, kind of going back to social media, another great example of social media marketing is influencer marketing, basically just doing brand deals with influencers. Now be careful, this is very, very expensive because some influencers can ask for a ton of money, and it's going to take a lot of time to find the influencers and negotiate back and forth with these creators. But it must be said, when you find the right influencer, it can really take your product from zero to 100 really, really fast. But it's also really difficult doing these brand partnerships and these influencer brand deals because it's really hard often to find the right creator-product fit for your product. But it is a very valid marketing solution, and if it works well, you can go from 0 to 100 super quick, and often times you'll be able to see results instantly the minute the creators make a post that advertises your product.

Once again, there's no one solution fits all for all types of products out there. But if one had to choose just one or two marketing tactics to advertise certain software products on the internet, it would be to index super heavily on short-form content on platforms like TikTok and Instagram to market your product, as well as Reddit. Those two marketing strategies are going to be the ones that provide you the most return on investment in terms of time put into it. It's going to be instant, quick results often times because you'll be able to get a super quick signal to see if your post is going viral or not, and you can then validate your idea super quickly and hopefully get your very first customer and your very first transaction.

That is the complete A-to-Z guide on how to come up with an app idea, build it, and market it on the internet to hopefully help you make your very first dollar with your very first app that you developed.