Ryan left a $200K product design job to build his own thing.
His first app is a Pomodoro timer. The most saturated, done-to-death app category on the planet.
It makes $18,000 a month.
The twist: when you start a focus session, a little hand-drawn cat jumps on a chair and sits with you. Finish the session and the cat leaves you a gift. Fail it and the cat leaves you trash. (Cat owners know this is scientifically accurate.)
The app is called Cat on Chair, and Ryan built it with his girlfriend Stephanie using AI coding. No dev team. He can't even write code the traditional way.
127,000 downloads. Close to $80K in revenue in 8 to 9 months. Pat Walls got the whole story on Starter Story. Watch it, then I'll break down the numbers and what you should steal.
The App: A Pomodoro Timer With a Cat on a Chair
Cat on Chair does what every Pomodoro app does. Timer starts, you focus, timer ends.
Except here, the timer is a scene. A cat hops on a chair next to your workspace and keeps you company while you work. Tap it (or say its name out loud) and it meows. Each cat has its own backstory and personality. You collect furniture, backgrounds, and new cats the longer you keep showing up, Animal Crossing style.
The numbers Ryan shared on camera:
- $18,000+ in sales in the last 30 days
- Close to $80,000 total in 8 to 9 months
- 127,000 total downloads, 24,000 of them in the last month
- Peak rank: #3 in free productivity apps in Taiwan, #11 across ALL free apps
Pricing is where it gets interesting. The app is free. Pro is $19.99 a year or $29.99 lifetime, with a family plan for up to six people.
→ Most of the revenue comes from the lifetime plan.
Every pricing thread on X will tell you lifetime deals are a trap. Ryan's users are literally choosing to pay him the most money upfront because they love the product that much. When people buy your app the way they buy a game, lifetime works.
From a $200K Design Job to Shipping With AI
Ryan was a product designer at tech startups. Good salary, $200K a year. And he walked away from it.
"I always felt like I'm wasting my potential because I was only doing design works."
Here's the uncomfortable part nobody clips for YouTube: it took him a few YEARS of trying things before this app. Cat on Chair is the first app he ever released. Not the first one he attempted.
What changed? About a year ago, AI coding got good enough to build real iOS apps. Suddenly his design skills stopped being a partial skill set and became the whole package. He designs, the AI codes, Stephanie illustrates.
The timeline, because timelines beat motivation quotes:
- May 2025: starts building. Weeks just to get a basic timer working
- August: first real version, beta tested by dozens of people from RedNote
- August 27: launch. 3,000 downloads in the first week
- September to December: bug hell. Serious stuff, like data not syncing between devices
- December/January: finally stable, then the viral chain hits
Four months from zero coding experience to launched app. Then four more months of unglamorous bug fixing while the world ignored him. That second part is the actual job.
The Idea Came From a Necklace
No keyword research. No "7 AI app ideas" video. Stephanie made a necklace of a little cat sitting on a chair. Ryan loved the name Cat on Chair and decided to build something around it.
Then he layered real thinking on top of the cute origin story.
Cats sit with you while you work. Every cat owner knows that calm. So the app replicates the physical experience of having a cat nearby, digitally. Every good feature came from that one question: how do we make this feel like a real cat?
→ The gift system was inspired by memes of cats bringing dead mice to their owners. Finish a session, get a gift. Fail, get trash.
→ Stephanie is a big Animal Crossing fan, so she pushed for collectible furniture, cats, and backgrounds. That gave people a reason to come back beyond "I should focus more."
→ Users asked to pet the cat. Ryan shipped it.
One user told them that after her cat passed away, she found a similar-looking cat in the app and it felt like seeing her cat again.
You cannot A/B test your way into that. There are thousands of Pomodoro timers, and most are cold, gray utility. Ryan competed on personality in a category where nobody else even tries. If you've got some weird passion you think is "not a real business", I wrote about exactly this: how to turn your hobby into an app.
The Growth: One Instagram Post Doubled Everything Overnight
Ryan didn't run ads. The growth chain looked like this:
- Stephanie already had a following on RedNote from sharing her illustrations. That's where they recruited beta testers and got their first small viral moments
- Instagram accounts that post "aesthetic app collections" started featuring Cat on Chair
- One of those posts exploded past 2 million views
- Someone in Taiwan saw it and shared the app on Threads, where it went viral all over again
That chain doubled downloads AND revenue overnight. It's how the app hit #3 in Taiwan's productivity charts.
Looks like luck. It's not, entirely. The app is so visually distinctive that strangers used it as content for THEIR audiences. The product was the ad. Nobody screenshots a gray timer.
And notice the retention loop underneath: gifts, collectibles, a cat with a name. The app gives you a small reason to come back every single day, which is what turns a viral spike into rank #3 instead of a one-week wonder. It's the same reason lead nurturing strategies outperform one-shot outreach in B2B: the follow-up touches do the converting, not the first hit.
Also worth stealing: Ryan launched in Chinese-speaking markets first because that's where Stephanie's audience was, and is only NOW expanding to English. Most founders fight for attention in the most saturated market on earth by default. (If you're starting from zero audience, here's how founders get their first 1,000 downloads free.)
The Stack: ChatGPT and Three Cheap Tools
The entire operation behind an $18K/month app:
- ChatGPT Pro for all the coding
- RevenueCat for paywall and subscriptions ($200 to $300 a month, scales with revenue)
- An ASO tool at $10 a month
- Droids for the user feedback board (free)
Call it $350 a month in tooling against $18,000 in revenue. Two people, no employees, no office.
Five years ago this app doesn't exist. Ryan would have needed a technical co-founder or $50K for an agency, and the magic (the hand-drawn everything) would have died in translation. The "designer who can't code" excuse is gone. So is the "developer who can't design" one, honestly.
What You Should Steal From Ryan
1. Lean into the skill you already have. Ryan didn't become a great developer. He used AI to unlock the great designer he already was. Pat's takeaway on the episode was the same: whatever your unfair skill is (design, data, an industry you know deeply), build the app only YOU could make.
2. Personality is a moat AI can't copy. Anyone can vibe-code a Pomodoro timer in two hours. Nobody else has Stephanie's illustrations and a cat that brings you dead-mouse-meme gifts. Handcrafted beats feature-complete.
3. Steal mechanics from games, not from competitors. Ryan's advice: pick an app you already use, read all the App Store reviews of the competition, then remix retention mechanics from other industries. Games are the best source because they're engineered to make people come back.
4. Ship into your existing audience, however small. Dozens of beta testers from RedNote beat zero beta testers from nowhere.
5. Expect the boring middle. Four months of bug fixing between launch and liftoff. Most people quit in that window, right before the Instagram post that changes everything.
FAQ
How much money does Cat on Chair make?
Over $18,000 in the last 30 days at the time of the Starter Story interview, and close to $80,000 total across 8 to 9 months. The app has 127,000 downloads, with about 24,000 first-time downloads in the last month.
How was Cat on Chair built without a developer?
Ryan, a former product designer, built it using ChatGPT Pro for the code while his girlfriend Stephanie drew all the illustrations. The rest of the stack is RevenueCat for subscriptions, a $10/month ASO tool, and a free feedback board called Droids.
How does a free app make $18K a month?
Cat on Chair is free to download with paid pro features: $19.99 a year or $29.99 lifetime, plus a family plan for up to six people. Most revenue comes from the lifetime plan, which works because users treat the app more like a game they love than a utility they tolerate.
How long did it take Cat on Chair to become successful?
About a year from first line of code to $18K months. Building started in May 2025, launch was August 27 with 3,000 first-week downloads, and the app only stabilized around December after months of bug fixing. The big viral chain (Instagram to Threads) came after that and doubled revenue overnight.
Get the Next Playbook Before Everyone Else
A designer, his girlfriend, and a cat on a chair. $18K a month.
Every week I dig into stories exactly like this: bootstrapped founders showing real dashboards and explaining precisely how they got there. That's the Profitable Founder Podcast.
