A countdown timer makes $25,000 a month.
Not a platform, not some AI agent startup. A timer that counts down while someone gives a presentation.
When I first saw that number I had the same reaction you're having right now. No way. My iPhone does that for free.
Then Pat Walls from Starter Story broke down three of these apps in one video, with the actual case studies behind them, and the logic clicked. Every one of these apps does exactly one thing. Every one of them makes around $100K a year or more. And every one of them was built by one or two people.
Here's the video. Watch it, then steal the playbook below.
Stagetimer: the $25K/month countdown timer
Stagetimer.io is a remote-controlled countdown timer for live events. The speaker sees a full-screen timer. Someone backstage controls it from another device.
That's the whole product.
When Starter Story first interviewed the founders in 2023, it was doing $8,000 a month. Today it's at $25,000 a month. Two founders, zero employees.
So why does anyone pay for a timer when every phone has one built in?
Context. If my kitchen timer fails, my chicken gets overcooked. Annoying, costs me nothing.
If a timer fails at a TED-style event, a speaker runs 12 minutes long, the schedule collapses, and the production company looks amateur in front of a paying client. Same feature, completely different stakes.
→ The feature isn't the product. The risk it removes is the product.
And look at who they sell to. Their homepage doesn't say "a timer for everyone". It says 22,000 video producers and event organizers use it, with Netflix, IKEA, Spotify and SpaceX logos underneath. One tool for one specific buyer.
The growth story is my favorite part, because they had no audience and ran zero ads.
Their first traction came from a single post in r/CommercialAV, a subreddit with 31,000 members. The post got 60 upvotes and 34 comments. That's it. They asked the exact people who run events for feedback on their presentation timer, people replied with feature requests, and a business started.
60 upvotes. I've seen founders spend six months building a Twitter audience to get less signal than that one post.
PDF Shift: an $8,500/month API built in 90 days
Second app. PDF Shift converts HTML to PDF through an API. You send it a web page, it sends back a clean PDF.
You could do the same thing with Cmd+P and "Save as PDF". Manually. Once.
Now imagine you're a company sending 100,000 receipts a month. Nobody is pressing Cmd+P 100,000 times. You pay PDF Shift $249 a month and the problem disappears forever.
The numbers: $3,500 a month at the first Starter Story interview, $8,500 a month now. One founder in Paris, one employee. Built in 90 days.
And here's the detail that should make you feel better about your graveyard of side projects: the founder had 48 failed projects before this one.
48. (I thought my count was bad.)
His growth channel is even less glamorous than Reddit. Quora.
He wrote 72 answers to questions like "What is the best way to create PDF files with Python?" and "How can I convert HTML to PDF in Laravel?". Every developer searching those questions found his answers, and some of them became customers paying hundreds a month, basically for life.
Do the math on a business like this. At an average of $500 a month per customer, you need 16 customers to build a very good life. Not 16,000 users. 16 customers.
→ Niche APIs don't need traffic. They need to be findable at the exact moment a developer has the problem.
PDF Shift gets 10,000 to 14,000 site visits a month, which is nothing by content-site standards. It doesn't matter, because the right handful of developers showed up.
Session: a $100K/year Pomodoro timer from Jakarta
Third app, and yes, it's another timer.
Session is a Mac app that runs Pomodoro focus sessions and blocks distracting websites while you work. Built by Philip Young, a solo founder in Jakarta, Indonesia. It makes $8,300 a month at 95% profit margins.
There are hundreds of free Pomodoro timers. Pomofocus is right there in your browser, free. And Session still clears $100K a year.
Why? Because it's native. The timer sits in your Mac menu bar. The website blocker actually blocks. The onboarding asks what's killing your focus (procrastination, social media, all of the above) and adapts. Free web timers do 60% of the job. Session does the whole job, and people getting paid for deep work will happily pay for the whole job.
Also worth saying: $8,300 a month is a good income anywhere. In Jakarta it's an exceptional one. Building for a global market while living wherever you want is still one of the most underpriced advantages of this game.
The pattern behind all three
Put the three side by side and the playbook writes itself.
→ One feature, done completely. A timer, a converter, a blocker. None of them added a second product. Stagetimer went from $8K to $25K a month by getting better at timers, not by expanding.
→ A business context that raises the stakes. Consumers won't pay to remove small risks. Businesses will pay every month to remove embarrassment, wasted hours, or angry clients. The feature stays identical while the willingness to pay goes up 100x.
→ One scrappy channel, worked properly. A 31K-member subreddit. 72 Quora answers. Not "content strategy across 6 platforms". One place where the exact buyer already hangs out.
→ Solo-friendly economics. Two founders with zero employees. One founder with one employee. One guy in Jakarta at 95% margins. Simple products stay simple to run, which is the part everyone forgets when they bolt on feature number 14.
This is the same lesson I keep hearing from founders on the podcast: the ones who win pick a small, sharp problem and stay on it for years. If you want more proof, I broke down boring business ideas that quietly print money and three apps that hit $10K+/month with zero audience. Different founders, same pattern.
How to find your own "stupid simple" app
If this video gives you the itch, here's how I'd hunt for an idea this week.
Step 1: Look for consumer tools used in business settings. A timer became Stagetimer. A "save as PDF" button became PDF Shift. What free tool do professionals around you abuse daily? That spreadsheet, that group chat, that manual export?
Step 2: Follow the risk, not the feature. Ask: what happens to a business when this tool fails? If the answer costs real money or reputation, you've found budget.
Step 3: Find the room where your buyer already talks. A subreddit under 50K members. A Quora topic. A niche Slack or forum. Post what you're building and ask for feedback. Stagetimer's entire company started with one honest Reddit post.
Step 4: Charge like a business tool. $249/month tiers exist because the value is obvious at scale. Don't price your B2B timer like a $2.99 consumer app.
Step 5: Stay small on purpose. The goal isn't a platform. The goal is one feature so reliable that switching away feels dumb.
None of this needs funding, an audience, or a technical co-founder with a Stanford hoodie. It needs one sharp problem and a year of not getting bored.
FAQ
Can simple apps really make money?
Yes, and the three in this video are live proof: Stagetimer (countdown timer, $25K/month), PDF Shift (HTML-to-PDF API, $8,500/month) and Session (Pomodoro blocker, $8,300/month at 95% margins). All were built by one or two people. The trick is selling the simple feature into a business context where failure is expensive.
How do simple apps get their first users without an audience?
All three used one small channel where their exact buyer already gathers. Stagetimer posted in r/CommercialAV (31,000 members, 60 upvotes on the first post). PDF Shift's founder wrote 72 Quora answers about PDF conversion. No ads, no launch hype, no follower count needed.
Why would anyone pay for an app that free tools replicate?
Free tools do most of the job. Paying customers want all of the job. A phone timer can't be remote-controlled by a production crew, and a free web Pomodoro can't block websites from your menu bar. When the user is a business, "most of the job" is exactly what they won't accept.
How long does it take to build a simple app like these?
PDF Shift was built in 90 days, and that was before AI coding tools. With Claude Code or Cursor today, a working one-feature product is a weeks-long project, not a years-long one. The slow part isn't the code. It's staying focused on one feature for long enough to win the niche.
One more thing.
Every week on the Profitable Founder Podcast I sit down with bootstrapped founders doing $100K to $10M a year and pull apart exactly how they did it, numbers included. If stories like Stagetimer's make something itch in your brain, you'll like the show.
