Six months ago Max Hirsch had never built a mobile app.
Today Maxed AI does $14,000 to $15,000 a month, just passed 20,000 iOS downloads, and he films himself talking about it 5 to 10 times a day.
That last part is not a side detail. It IS the business. Roughly a third of his revenue comes from people who follow him on X. This is founder led content working exactly the way it's supposed to: you become the distribution, so you don't have to rent it.
Max told the whole story on Starter Story with Pat Walls and Gus. I pulled out every number below.
From "worst intern imaginable" to shipping daily
Max graduated from the University of Michigan and did two finance summers: one in venture capital, one in sales and trading.
His own review of that chapter: "I was probably the worst intern imaginable." He wasn't passionate about any of it.
So he tried building a food review app called Dish Rate. Then he hit the wall every non-technical founder knows: he had no idea how to build it, and the dev quotes ran into tens of thousands of dollars. He gave up.
Around December he started noticing something. People with zero coding experience were shipping real apps. People he knew. His exact logic: if THEY can build apps, I can build apps.
He got set up with a Claude Code subscription and just started typing.
Six months later, he says he hasn't gone a single day without being in his terminal.
The idea: running has Strava, lifting had nobody
Max knew there were 100 lifting apps already. He built one anyway, and his reasoning is worth stealing.
Look at running. Two apps dominate: Strava and Nike Run Club. Everyone who runs knows exactly which app to open.
Now look at lifting. Max and his friends lifted all through college, and everyone used a different app. A few trackers here, a nutrition app there, a spreadsheet somewhere. There wasn't one unified platform people defaulted to.
So he went out and built it.
He also picked a market he actually lives in. Lifting is his favorite thing in the world, which matters when the growth plan is filming yourself talking about the product ten times a day. You can't fake that for a niche you don't care about.
His own admission: "maybe I was a little oblivious to the fact that there were so many apps out there. But I think being naive is good at times."
Crowded market, clear gap in how the category is served, founder who IS the target user. That's a better starting hand than most original ideas.
What Maxed AI actually is (and the real numbers)
Maxed AI is an all-in-one lifting coach. It knows how much you slept, builds a workout program around your goals, and tracks your lifts, nutrition, and supplement protocols. There's a leaderboard (Max is ranked 78th in his own app, which he's annoyed about), a social feed, and Coach Max, a chatbot wired into every screen. Tell it "I'm a bit sick, adjust my volume" and it rewrites your chest and back day.
The numbers he showed on camera, straight from RevenueCat and App Store Connect:
- Close to $14,000 in revenue over the last 28 days, $14K to $15K a month run rate
- 1,000 active subscribers
- Over 20,000 new customers in the last 28 days, over 40,000 all time
- 20,000+ iOS downloads
- 164 App Store ratings
Here's the pricing detail that made me rewind.
His MRR looks tiny on the dashboard, on purpose. Max charges $24.99 a year, upfront. His reasoning: "I don't believe in building an app relying on people to forget to cancel their subscriptions."
That's roughly $2 a month, priced for retention instead of accidental renewals. And he reinvests every cent back into growth.
Step one: hard paywall the app
Max's original monetization plan was genuinely bad, and he admits it. Launch a free app, sell ad slots somehow.
Then he met someone through Instagram who had shipped apps before and got taken under his wing. The first lesson: hard paywall your app. No free tier, partly because every chat with the AI coach costs him OpenAI API money.
If you've read my breakdown of the attention playbook Pat Walls runs at Starter Story, you already know this pattern. The product and the paywall are the easy 20%. Everything after that is distribution.
Which brings us to the part Max actually got right.
Founder led content: the $250-a-day growth engine
Max didn't have the budget to pay 50 UGC creators like the big lifting apps do.
So he became the creator. Five videos a day, then ten. Filming himself talking about the app, the journey, the lifts.
The first hurdle was not tactical. It was the cringe, the fear of your friends passing your video around the group chat. His counter: "most people don't even care."
Then he got systematic:
→ Post daily, watch the hold rate and skip rate on every video.
→ Find the formats that keep people watching.
→ Take ONLY the proven winners and run them as paid ads.
He started with a small ad budget, watched the numbers confirm product market fit, and scaled to around $250 a day. The content doubles as his follow-up machine too. Someone sees a video, follows the journey, and converts weeks later. That slow warm-up from viewer to buyer is classic lead nurturing, except the nurture sequence is his face, every day, for free.
Three months ago he added X to the mix and started tweeting the journey. His estimate: a third of all revenue now comes from people on X who either wanted a lifting app or just wanted to back him.
His take on building in stealth: do the exact opposite. "Show everyone what's working, what's not. Tell them about your vulnerabilities. People are really supportive."
What's working in app marketing right now
Max tried a lot of channels. Here's his current scoreboard.
Skip UGC creators early. Until you know which angles convert, hiring creators is burning money. He only started a clipping campaign (5 creators filming daily, like he does) AFTER his own content told him what works. I wrote about when hiring UGC creators actually makes sense if you're at that stage.
Meta over TikTok. His words: the views are more valuable, the buyers are higher intent, the demographic has a higher willingness to pay.
Clipping is still early. He thinks it's exploded but hasn't peaked, and it's a cheap way to get international exposure and organic downloads.
Founder led content beats everything at his stage, because it compounds for free and none of the 100 other lifting apps can copy his face.
The stack: cheaper than your gym membership
The whole thing runs on a handful of tools:
- Claude Code for building (he lives in the terminal daily)
- Supabase at $20 a month for the backend
- Vercel and Expo for deploys and app updates
- RevenueCat for payments
His conclusion: "The barriers to entry are so low. This is the best time ever to build an app."
I'd push back on one nuance. Because the barrier is low, building is no longer the moat. Gus said it at the end of the episode: Starter Story has interviewed at least three founders with lifting apps. The ideas repeat. The thing you can't replicate is the personal brand attached to one.
The real lesson: go all in on your own name
Max's biggest regret is the half-in, half-out phase.
He built an app but was too afraid to market it, didn't want his name attached, wouldn't film himself. Sound familiar?
His advice now: go all in. Film yourself. Annoy everyone around you because you're obsessed. Document everything, because looking back at the video from four months ago (first paying customer) while sitting at $14K a month is the reward.
Nothing about this playbook is exotic. Pick a product you'd use yourself, hard paywall it, make content daily, promote the winners, tell the story in public.
The hard part is pressing record on video one.
FAQ
How much money does Maxed AI make?
Maxed AI generates $14,000 to $15,000 a month, with close to $14,000 in revenue in the last 28 days shown on Max's RevenueCat dashboard. The app has 1,000 active subscribers, over 40,000 all-time customers, and passed 20,000 iOS downloads, all within about six months of launch.
Can you build a profitable app with no coding experience?
Max Hirsch had never built a mobile app and had minimal coding experience six months before Maxed AI. He built it with Claude Code, Supabase ($20 a month), Vercel, Expo, and RevenueCat. The building part is cheap now. The differentiator is distribution, which he solved with daily founder led content.
What is founder led content?
Founder led content means the founder is the face of the marketing: filming daily videos, sharing numbers and setbacks, and building an audience that converts because it trusts the person, not just the product. For Maxed AI it drives roughly a third of revenue through X alone, and the best organic videos become the paid ads.
Should I run app ads on Meta or TikTok?
Max's experience says Meta. The views are more valuable, buyers show higher intent, and the demographic has a higher willingness to pay. He spends around $250 a day on Meta ads, but only on creatives that already proved themselves organically through hold rate and skip rate data.
I break down stories like this every week on the podcast: bootstrapped founders, real dashboards, and the exact playbooks behind the numbers.
