Frederick James built a habit tracker. One of the most saturated app categories on earth.
Roughly 90 days later it peaked at $13,000 a month.
He had no audience and no viral launch. His entire Apple Search Ads strategy fits on a sticky note, and his first $100 of ad budget was free (Apple hands it to you when you open an account).
He broke the whole thing down on Starter Story with Gus, dashboards on screen. I pulled out every number and every setting so you can run the same play.
Watch the episode, then let's take it apart.
The app is deliberately boring
Frederick won't even name it in the episode. He just calls it "a habit tracker in the health and fitness niche."
Here are the numbers he showed on his dashboards:
- $25K revenue in the last 90 days
- Peaked just under $100K ARR, around $13K in the best month
- Sitting at roughly $8K MRR at recording time, $11K revenue over the last 30 days
- 7% download-to-paid conversion
- 0.7% refund rate
The idea came from a post format you've seen a hundred times: an app onboarding breakdown on X. He looked at it and thought, I can rebuild this with premium design, add the obvious missing features, and it will probably sell.
That's the whole origin story. He saw something that already worked and built a nicer version of it.
His background helps explain the execution speed: five years as a software developer in big tech in London. A health scare last year pushed him to quit waiting, go all in, and share the journey on X. Three months after launch, the app was paying his bills.
The part worth stealing is the distribution.
The Apple Search Ads strategy: $0 to $5K a month
Most indie founders treat paid ads like a rich-company sport. Frederick's first growth channel cost him nothing to test: Apple gives you $100 in free credit when you start with Apple Search Ads.
His playbook, step by step:
1. Fix your App Store page first. Your screenshots ARE the ad creative. When your app shows up as a sponsored result, that's what people judge. He makes his own in Figma, but says you can pay a designer $50 to $100 and get something S-tier.
2. Set up attribution before spending a cent. A few lines of code in the app plus a few clicks in RevenueCat. If you can't see which keyword produced which subscription, you're just donating money to Apple.
3. Turn search match OFF and bid on exact keywords only. This is the core of it. And the keywords are not what you'd guess: they're the names of your biggest competitors. Someone searches for the Duolingo of your niche, your app appears above it as the ad.
4. Start at Apple's recommended max bid and wait two days. If the campaign isn't spending after a couple of days, don't panic and don't touch the creative. It means someone is outbidding you. Raise the bid until it spends.
5. Export your data every morning. He pulls the Apple report and the RevenueCat report, hands both to an AI agent, and asks it to find the best performers. Coffee plus ad report, every single day. That's the routine.
That loop alone took the app from $0 to about $5K a month.
One thing worth adding: paid search works a lot better when the organic side of your App Store listing is already pulling its weight. Sebastian from Habit Kit grew a habit tracker to $50K a month mostly on App Store optimization, and the two playbooks stack nicely.
TikTok ads: $5K to $10K in about a week
The hockey stick came from TikTok, and the setup is almost embarrassingly simple.
Frederick scrolled his own niche, found videos that had already gone viral organically, and remade them himself. Five formats, five ads, about $50 of spend on each.
Then the part most people get wrong.
In the beginning he let slightly unprofitable ads keep running. On purpose. The account needs data to learn who converts, so you loss-lead on the ad account (not on the app) to feed the algorithm signal. The ads that stayed badly unprofitable got killed. The decent ones got budget.
Two hard rules from the episode:
→ Never increase an ad budget by more than 20% every few days. TikTok itself tells you this, and as Frederick points out, they're incentivized to let you overspend. If even they say don't, don't.
→ Aim for profitability on the initial transactions alone, not on projected lifetime value. If the first purchase doesn't cover the acquisition cost, be very suspicious of your own spreadsheet.
The real inflection point was switching to goal-based budgeting with a target cost per acquisition. Instead of adjusting budgets by hand, he told TikTok "I want customers at price X" and let the platform control the spend. The campaign went from $200 a day to about $1,000 a day on its own, and revenue went from $5K to $10K a month in roughly a week.
If you want a second data point on this channel, Tibo ran a different version of the same play: TikTok ads for apps took his product to $50K a month while he works 20 hours a month.
The math nobody shows you
Frederick was refreshingly blunt about the ugly parts.
He was not profitable for the first couple of weeks. His estimate: if it's your first time running paid ads, you might burn up to $1,000 before you see any return. Zero guarantees.
And the ongoing margin on a paid-ads-only app is around 30%. Not the 90% software margin people brag about.
His quick P&L for one subscription:
- Realized LTV (total revenue divided by total paying customers)
- minus the cost to acquire that user
- minus Apple's 15% cut (sign up for the Small Business Program, or you're handing over 30% for nothing)
- minus RevenueCat's 1%
- minus VAT, around 20% on EU subscriptions (sell to the US first and you skip this)
Whatever is left is yours. At 30% margins, a $10K month is a $3K month.
So why do it? His framing stuck with me: you pay for marketing with your time or your money, and there's no way around it. Managing influencers and UGC creators is (his words) a nightmare. Filming founder content yourself eats your week. Paid ads is the pure money end of the spectrum. The same tradeoff shows up in B2B by the way: you can cold-email for months, or you can build lead nurturing strategies that convert the people who already know you. Time or money. Pick one consciously.
One more warning from the episode: an app that only grows through paid acquisition is hard to sell, because the whole business rests on a thin margin and one channel. If TikTok bans your account tomorrow (even by mistake), your revenue goes with it. Combine channels.
The stack behind the app
For the builders, here's everything Frederick runs, with costs:
- Figma for mock UI before any code. A wireframe gives the coding agent a much higher chance of one-shotting the build.
- ChatGPT as his coding agent, $100 a month. He also just added a Claude plan because Opus 5.5 came out ("apparently it rips").
- GPT Image 2.5 to remake visual assets he finds on Pinterest, free with his OpenAI subscription.
- Cloudflare for the whole backend: R2 for asset storage (free), D1 for the database, Workers for compute.
- AppsFlyer for mobile attribution, free until 12,000 installs.
- RevenueCat for subscriptions, paywalls and revenue tracking.
- A $300 font, one-time. Every app, website and video subtitle he ships uses it. Cheap brand consistency.
He also still draws an entity relationship diagram and an infra diagram before building. He jokes that it's a relic of the old ways. I'd call it the reason his agent-built apps don't collapse at 10,000 users.
What I'd steal from this story
Three things.
Boring ideas with premium execution beat clever ideas with average execution. A habit tracker. In 2026. Making $10K a month. Because the design is better and the ads are dialed in.
Treat ad management like a morning habit, not a project. Coffee, export the reports, let an agent find the winners, adjust one thing. Ten minutes a day compounds faster than a heroic weekend of "fixing the ads."
Fail faster on purpose. Before this app, Frederick resold Supreme hoodies at 15, tried dropshipping, and spent years as a music producer. His line: success is just failure on a long enough timeline. The app that worked was built on everything that didn't.
If you're at this stage yourself (first app live, first dollars in, no idea what to scale), this is exactly the kind of founder we break down every week on the podcast.
Listen to the Profitable Founder Podcast
FAQ
How much do Apple Search Ads cost to start?
Apple gives new advertisers $100 in free credit, so you can test your first campaign with zero budget. Frederick James started with that credit, used Apple's recommended max bid on exact-match competitor keywords, and only raised bids when the campaign stopped spending. Expect to invest a few hundred dollars before the data tells you anything reliable.
Do Apple Search Ads work for small indie apps?
Yes, and they're arguably better suited to indie apps than Meta or Google ads because the intent is so high: people searching the App Store are already looking to download something. Frederick grew his habit tracker from $0 to about $5K a month on Apple Search Ads alone, bidding only on competitor brand names with search match turned off.
What is a good download-to-paid conversion rate for a subscription app?
Frederick's habit tracker converts 7% of downloads into paying subscribers, which he calls pretty good for health and fitness. As a rough benchmark, many subscription apps sit between 2% and 5%, so if you're below 2% the problem is usually your paywall or onboarding, not your traffic.
Should I start with Apple Search Ads or TikTok ads?
Start with Apple Search Ads. The free $100 credit, exact-match keywords and high intent make it the cheapest way to learn whether strangers will pay for your app. Once you have a converting App Store page and real attribution data, layer on TikTok ads to scale, the way Frederick went from $5K to $10K a month in about a week.
