[
  {
    "i": 0,
    "speaker": "Rasty Turek",
    "text": "It's my first iOS app. It took roughly three weeks. It's currently averaging around two, three thousand dollars a day."
  },
  {
    "i": 1,
    "speaker": "Pat Walls",
    "text": "This is Rasty. And a few months ago, he had never built an iOS app in his life until he decided to build something to solve a very simple problem. In the first month, the app made just sixty six dollars."
  },
  {
    "i": 2,
    "speaker": "Pat Walls",
    "text": "But six months later, it made forty one thousand dollars in a single month. But here's the thing. The app he built is crazy simple."
  },
  {
    "i": 3,
    "speaker": "Rasty Turek",
    "text": "I literally haven't written a single line either of code or the text on the web."
  },
  {
    "i": 4,
    "speaker": "Pat Walls",
    "text": "The reason you want to watch this episode is to learn about how he grew it, which, no, it wasn't posting on TikTok and it wasn't doing any paid ads. I asked Rasty to come onto the channel and actually break this down."
  },
  {
    "i": 5,
    "speaker": "Pat Walls",
    "text": "And in this episode, we're going to dive into the simple app he built that made forty one thousand dollars in a single month, how he's taking on really big competitors in a very crowded space and the, quote, outdated growth strategy."
  },
  {
    "i": 6,
    "speaker": "Pat Walls",
    "text": "That is working really well for him in twenty twenty six. All right, guys, this is one you cannot miss. I'm Pat Walls and I'm Gus. And this is Starter Story."
  },
  {
    "i": 7,
    "speaker": "Pat Walls",
    "text": "All right, Rasty, I'm pumped to have you here on the channel. Welcome to Starter Story. Tell me a little about who you are, what you built and what's your story."
  },
  {
    "i": 8,
    "speaker": "Rasty Turek",
    "text": "Well, I'm Rasty Turek. I built Vault Air, which is an iPhone app that encrypts the storage and allows people to store encrypted files and photos."
  },
  {
    "i": 9,
    "speaker": "Rasty Turek",
    "text": "It's my first iOS app, mostly thanks to no-code. It took roughly three weeks. The first month it made sixty six dollars. I got a couple of downloads."
  },
  {
    "i": 10,
    "speaker": "Rasty Turek",
    "text": "It's currently averaging around two to three thousand dollars a day. Wow."
  },
  {
    "i": 11,
    "speaker": "Gus",
    "text": "Rasty, this is awesome. Off camera before this that you started this in March. So it's only like six months, which makes this even more amazing. But let's talk about Vault."
  },
  {
    "i": 12,
    "speaker": "Gus",
    "text": "Can you just explain what the app is, who your users are?"
  },
  {
    "i": 13,
    "speaker": "Rasty Turek",
    "text": "Well, it's very simple. It's very, very similar to Dropbox with the one caveat that is essentially encrypted. It's encrypted on device. There's no servers. No shared keys. I have no access to it, neither does Apple or anyone else."
  },
  {
    "i": 14,
    "speaker": "Rasty Turek",
    "text": "And so essentially there's no way to recover anything. The app is free. In fact, I was going to put it completely free up."
  },
  {
    "i": 15,
    "speaker": "Rasty Turek",
    "text": "And then literally the day before, I just decided that maybe due to some advanced features, if users start sending me support requests, I just don't want to be bothered as much. So I literally just said a few dollars here and we'll see."
  },
  {
    "i": 16,
    "speaker": "Rasty Turek",
    "text": "Honestly, majority of my accounts for majority of the revenue north of 80 percent, I think. And then I just passed 60,000 overall downloads. And one very different thing about this app versus others, a lot of the trendy apps that are very focused on like they have to convert you immediately."
  },
  {
    "i": 17,
    "speaker": "Rasty Turek",
    "text": "So like Kali, I like if they don't convert you immediately, you will never pay. Mine is the opposite. Like I have the lowest conversion day one and have the highest conversion like day 60."
  },
  {
    "i": 18,
    "speaker": "Pat Walls",
    "text": "Real quick. What I love about Rasty's story is that his app is crazy simple. One of the reasons why it works is that it's a proven category. People want to download this app and pay for this."
  },
  {
    "i": 19,
    "speaker": "Pat Walls",
    "text": "An app like this and a founder like Rasty is proof that you do not need a brand new or complicated idea to win, which is why we put together an actual database of simple app ideas like this that are making tons of money right now."
  },
  {
    "i": 20,
    "speaker": "Pat Walls",
    "text": "Every idea in this database comes with real revenue numbers. These are real apps with real pricing models and growth tactics that you can check out. Just head to the first link in the description."
  },
  {
    "i": 21,
    "speaker": "Pat Walls",
    "text": "If you want to download this database 100 percent for free, start browsing, maybe get an idea. Get building. All right. Let's get back to the episode. This is really impressive."
  },
  {
    "i": 22,
    "speaker": "Pat Walls",
    "text": "I mean, especially on an app that, you know, you could potentially use some of it for free. That's really good."
  },
  {
    "i": 23,
    "speaker": "Gus",
    "text": "And then finally, could you just pull up your like analytics, revenue dashboards, just show to the audience, you know, this thing is real."
  },
  {
    "i": 24,
    "speaker": "Rasty Turek",
    "text": "Yeah. So this is the App Store analytics. As you can see, my MRR is quite low because most people opt in for the lifetime plan. So daily downloads currently, as I said, around the beginning of the day."
  },
  {
    "i": 25,
    "speaker": "Rasty Turek",
    "text": "So this is on that huge spike. Yeah, I have no idea. This is. The source is Apple search. However, what is weird about it, it doesn't correlate to revenue. See, daily revenue is like hovering around two thousand dollars these days."
  },
  {
    "i": 26,
    "speaker": "Rasty Turek",
    "text": "It's like slowly increasing. This is what we talked about. Like, as you can see, my download to paid is only five point four seven percent on day one. But day thirty five, it actually grows. It's weekly is one ninety nine."
  },
  {
    "i": 27,
    "speaker": "Rasty Turek",
    "text": "Annual is ninety ninety nine. And lifetime is thirty nine ninety nine. So, I mean, these numbers, Rusty, are crazy like this growth channel that's been working for you."
  },
  {
    "i": 28,
    "speaker": "Pat Walls",
    "text": "That is growing like really nicely, really linearly. You have this amazing download to conversion rate. You're doing over forty thousand a month. This is soon going to be a million dollar per year business. Congrats."
  },
  {
    "i": 29,
    "speaker": "Pat Walls",
    "text": "It's providing a lot of value to people, which we're going to talk about. But before we do, I want to learn about your background because I know that you've done startups before. This isn't your first business that you started, but you did way different stuff."
  },
  {
    "i": 30,
    "speaker": "Pat Walls",
    "text": "So how do you get to this point where you have this awesome two thousand dollar a day app that you built?"
  },
  {
    "i": 31,
    "speaker": "Rasty Turek",
    "text": "Well, my road is pretty winding. Pretty winding. I grew up in Slovakia in a tiny, tiny village of seven hundred people. After high school, I moved to Boston to work for a security company that got acquired by Google."
  },
  {
    "i": 32,
    "speaker": "Rasty Turek",
    "text": "And so I went to Google. I wrote a chunk of the Gmail or sat on the Gmail team and then left and started a couple of startups. Mostly the first one started in security because that was my background."
  },
  {
    "i": 33,
    "speaker": "Rasty Turek",
    "text": "Then I moved to entertainment. I built the company got acquired by Amazon and they use some of the tech to this day. My last large scale one. And this is VenturePoint."
  },
  {
    "i": 34,
    "speaker": "Rasty Turek",
    "text": "venture-funded was Pex, which was kind of a sassy copyright as a service for entertainment, mostly focused on music."
  },
  {
    "i": 35,
    "speaker": "Rasty Turek",
    "text": "And then we sold that last year."
  },
  {
    "i": 36,
    "speaker": "Gus",
    "text": "That's awesome. So that leads naturally into how do you find this idea? How do you build a encryption utility app?"
  },
  {
    "i": 37,
    "speaker": "Rasty Turek",
    "text": "Like if you deal with crypto, a lot of people have wallet keys stored in all sorts of places and it's very hard to put it somewhere close to the device, but also have it available. This was my solution for it, especially pictures of IDs."
  },
  {
    "i": 38,
    "speaker": "Rasty Turek",
    "text": "And as I said, I was not planning to make this paid. I didn't even know if anyone is ever going to use this. So like I put it out with the idea. It's like I will have it. It will be there."
  },
  {
    "i": 39,
    "speaker": "Rasty Turek",
    "text": "Well, let's talk a little bit more about that growth thing."
  },
  {
    "i": 40,
    "speaker": "Pat Walls",
    "text": "We talked about this a little earlier before, but you're not spending money on ads. You're not paying people to create content for the app. You're kind of just growing through SEO. And, you know, if you go online these days, everyone's saying SEO is dead."
  },
  {
    "i": 41,
    "speaker": "Pat Walls",
    "text": "SEO is dead. You got to do something else. But this is clearly working for you and it's growing. Really nicely. So can you tell me a little bit more about that? Like what's been your approach for this?"
  },
  {
    "i": 42,
    "speaker": "Rasty Turek",
    "text": "Most of the apps in this area are 15 years or older. They have millions of users. Well, a lot of downloads. So Apple prior has them and like I have zero chance to get there."
  },
  {
    "i": 43,
    "speaker": "Rasty Turek",
    "text": "But they completely ignore them because, you know, they don't have to. They can have money and they just don't care enough. And so my approach was like, what if I try to pull in every keyword that is out there that essentially points to the same thing as an app store, but on the web?"
  },
  {
    "i": 44,
    "speaker": "Rasty Turek",
    "text": "And so my first foray into this was like a basic marketing site with just outlines of all of the features and then building a series of guides that was like, how do I store my photos on iPhone?"
  },
  {
    "i": 45,
    "speaker": "Rasty Turek",
    "text": "And when I say I, I literally haven't written a single line, either of code or the text on the web. Everything is done by one of the coding agents. Over time, this is like gaining a lot of authority. And with that comes a lot of traffic."
  },
  {
    "i": 46,
    "speaker": "Rasty Turek",
    "text": "And then I focus on the conversion. So like. The coding agents like make sure that the CTA structure does that essentially as the person is somewhere in the article, wherever people are like commonly ending, I want them to be able to go through the app."
  },
  {
    "i": 47,
    "speaker": "Rasty Turek",
    "text": "And so I have around 10% conversion from the web and the web is the majority of traffic at this point."
  },
  {
    "i": 48,
    "speaker": "Pat Walls",
    "text": "Wow. So you essentially have a whole content marketing and conversion team that's working for you, but there's not an actual team. You just have some sort of agent running that's always improving your SEO. Tell me more about."
  },
  {
    "i": 49,
    "speaker": "Pat Walls",
    "text": "How you set up something like that?"
  },
  {
    "i": 50,
    "speaker": "Rasty Turek",
    "text": "Like what tools are you using? It's honestly basic cloud or code. I wrote this library called gum."
  },
  {
    "i": 51,
    "speaker": "Rasty Turek",
    "text": "It's just open source command line tools with MCP at top of all Google services, including Google search and Google keyword planner. And so what it does, it runs through keyword planner."
  },
  {
    "i": 52,
    "speaker": "Rasty Turek",
    "text": "Every single morning looks at all the traffic identifies keywords that are being surfaced, but not essentially being driven to the site. So like you can see."
  },
  {
    "i": 53,
    "speaker": "Rasty Turek",
    "text": "Your site was shown 16,000 times for this keyword, but no clicks because you are like number 50. And so then it takes that and optimizes creates this guide. And then the guide is essentially published."
  },
  {
    "i": 54,
    "speaker": "Rasty Turek",
    "text": "It takes roughly three to four days for Google to register. And I optimize a lot of internal links. And so the internal links from existing traffic point to the new guides and that's how Google essentially prioritizes it."
  },
  {
    "i": 55,
    "speaker": "Rasty Turek",
    "text": "And then you can see the correlation with that essentially growing the traffic and then the traffic I convert into downloads. And essentially. I'm publishing one a day and that's it. Google likes the fact that there's like not a lot of content coming, but the content is like high quality."
  },
  {
    "i": 56,
    "speaker": "Rasty Turek",
    "text": "Like I make sure that the content is not such like vomit awards."
  },
  {
    "i": 57,
    "speaker": "Pat Walls",
    "text": "I think you mentioned one thing that I really liked is that like you're actually not publishing that much. Sometimes you hear where people will automate their SEO. It's like a bunch of AI slop."
  },
  {
    "i": 58,
    "speaker": "Pat Walls",
    "text": "They push out a thousand articles in a day, but you actually mentioned that you only do one article a day, which may be, you think that Google really likes that. And I think I want to get you back on the channel maybe in six months and see where your revenue is."
  },
  {
    "i": 59,
    "speaker": "Pat Walls",
    "text": "Because I think this focus on providing valuable content to a very niche audience, maybe they care a lot about security. They care a lot about this very niche thing that you have."
  },
  {
    "i": 60,
    "speaker": "Pat Walls",
    "text": "I think this is actually going to benefit you even more because you're going to get start getting shown in search is the more traffic you get, the more Google likes you, the more Gemini likes you, the more AEO search overviews like you, all this attention coming to your app."
  },
  {
    "i": 61,
    "speaker": "Pat Walls",
    "text": "So I'm excited to see where you are in six months, especially because it's growing so fast already."
  },
  {
    "i": 62,
    "speaker": "Gus",
    "text": "Rusty, you mentioned that you have kind of a light tech stack. A lot of this is profit. So what are the tools that you use on a regular basis to run this business?"
  },
  {
    "i": 63,
    "speaker": "Rasty Turek",
    "text": "Well, I mean, the app is Swift with UIKit. There's really nothing else. It uses a lot of the iCloud features, but everything is native to the app."
  },
  {
    "i": 64,
    "speaker": "Rasty Turek",
    "text": "I use extensively Code and Cloud, and I have also local models that I utilize for myself. But I will say at this point, 99% of the stuff that is left to be done is Cloud waking up every morning and running the guide."
  },
  {
    "i": 65,
    "speaker": "Rasty Turek",
    "text": "That's kind of it. For measurements, I use Pods. It's free. So one of the nice things about this is I don't have enough traffic or enough users because they don't measure anything. These days, you can really run things for free."
  },
  {
    "i": 66,
    "speaker": "Rasty Turek",
    "text": "There's nothing to break, which is really nice. As long as Apple is up, the app works."
  },
  {
    "i": 67,
    "speaker": "Pat Walls",
    "text": "All right. So Rusty, real quick, I mean, we kind of talked about what your app does. It's encryption for your photos, but I'd love to just see it. Can you show me the app that you built that made over $40,000 last month?"
  },
  {
    "i": 68,
    "speaker": "Pat Walls",
    "text": "How does the app work? What does it do?"
  },
  {
    "i": 69,
    "speaker": "Rasty Turek",
    "text": "Can you give us a little bit of a demo? Yeah, it's you make a pattern. Any pattern opens a vault. So there's roughly 52 billion potential vaults, and then they just add files to it."
  },
  {
    "i": 70,
    "speaker": "Rasty Turek",
    "text": "So what's interesting about this is there's no way to find out how much data or what is in there. And so it actually accumulated to a really interesting story. So on a Friday, I got a call from an FBI agent."
  },
  {
    "i": 71,
    "speaker": "Rasty Turek",
    "text": "They called someone that they believe used the app, opened a vault to record some sensitive information. And so they believe the person did it and they want my help. And there's no way to figure it out."
  },
  {
    "i": 72,
    "speaker": "Rasty Turek",
    "text": "The app is built such a way that I can't tell if the person ever had anything in there. And so the agent was pretty upset about it, but that's what the app does. That's amazing."
  },
  {
    "i": 73,
    "speaker": "Pat Walls",
    "text": "I mean, that's literally the point is to encrypt it. That's why people use it because no FBI agent can call the founder of the app and get the information. So that's super cool."
  },
  {
    "i": 74,
    "speaker": "Pat Walls",
    "text": "Last question that we ask all founders to come on to Starter Story. And I know you've built a bunch of awesome startups. And you're doing great for yourself, obviously. What advice would you give to someone watching this?"
  },
  {
    "i": 75,
    "speaker": "Pat Walls",
    "text": "Maybe they're about to start their first company or they're about to start an app like you've built a utility app even what would be your advice to them?"
  },
  {
    "i": 76,
    "speaker": "Rasty Turek",
    "text": "I mean, start. That's the hardest part, right? Like I have at least two dozen projects that are somewhere in me ready, but they're not out there. And as long as they are not out there, they don't exist. And then honestly, like people overthink how things should be done."
  },
  {
    "i": 77,
    "speaker": "Rasty Turek",
    "text": "Like none of these came out of years of experience. Because my experience is in B2B. And enterprise and so like I really didn't know anything about this."
  },
  {
    "i": 78,
    "speaker": "Rasty Turek",
    "text": "So if I can learn anyone can and so like as long as you have open mind and you know how to put one foot in front of the other and every day just be slightly better than the day before. And that's kind of all I care about."
  },
  {
    "i": 79,
    "speaker": "Pat Walls",
    "text": "Well, that's great advice. Thank you, Rusty for coming on. Super cool app. Thanks for being so open about sharing it and all your SEO experiments and all that. Super cool."
  },
  {
    "i": 80,
    "speaker": "Rasty Turek",
    "text": "Thanks for coming on."
  },
  {
    "i": 81,
    "speaker": "Pat Walls",
    "text": "Yeah, thanks for having me. All right, Gus, co-host and producer of Starter Story. What did you think of Rusty and his app?"
  },
  {
    "i": 82,
    "speaker": "Gus",
    "text": "I talked to him. I knew it was going to be awesome. He reminded me of Do you remember that guy we interviewed a while back? He's from Australia. His name was Mike Hill. He did like the seven steps."
  },
  {
    "i": 83,
    "speaker": "Gus",
    "text": "I think the similarities between the obvious besides their demeanor was like, I feel like they kind of have a really it's simple, but not easy, but simple approach to like how they do things. That's what I really liked about everything he was saying was like, you know, all the"
  },
  {
    "i": 84,
    "speaker": "Gus",
    "text": "app guys we bring on are like TikTok and go viral and all that stuff obviously works. We have plenty of examples. But I thought it was cool that he was just like, I do one article a day, I try to like heat up the competition."
  },
  {
    "i": 85,
    "speaker": "Gus",
    "text": "And that's my strategy. That's my first thought."
  },
  {
    "i": 86,
    "speaker": "Pat Walls",
    "text": "The vibe is like, no bullshit. It's kind of just like a guy and I'm not sure how old he is, but let's say he's in his 40s. It's the difference between a guy in his 40s and a kid in his 20s."
  },
  {
    "i": 87,
    "speaker": "Pat Walls",
    "text": "You know, he's not going on here talking about the latest greatest growth hack. You got to do this. You got to do that. It's more just like put one foot in front of the other. I think there's a lot to learn from this interview."
  },
  {
    "i": 88,
    "speaker": "Pat Walls",
    "text": "Just seeing how someone like him carries himself, which is a little different than the typical interviews we do."
  },
  {
    "i": 89,
    "speaker": "Gus",
    "text": "I agree. What do you think about like the whole SEO play that he's doing? And I think you even said during the interview, like everyone says SEO is dead or whatever, you know, what do you think?"
  },
  {
    "i": 90,
    "speaker": "Pat Walls",
    "text": "I still think SEO is dead, whatever you want to call that. But the reason why I think it works for him is that it's super, super niche. It's like a very specific app that does a very specific thing."
  },
  {
    "i": 91,
    "speaker": "Pat Walls",
    "text": "He's not going to get a million people visiting his website every day. And I think he's probably getting a lot more traffic from recommendations, word of mouth and ref."
  },
  {
    "i": 92,
    "speaker": "Pat Walls",
    "text": "Then he knows already because he's just letting us know he couldn't really track these things because he doesn't want to put analytics on it because it's privacy focused."
  },
  {
    "i": 93,
    "speaker": "Pat Walls",
    "text": "Yes, it started with the SEO which started with writing the content, but it's actually going to grow a lot more just because he's putting that out there. The other thing that I love about his app is that it's so simple. You watch the demo, you are literally encrypting some files."
  },
  {
    "i": 94,
    "speaker": "Pat Walls",
    "text": "There's not a thousand features. They make them easy to market. We have a bunch of other examples like this real actual simple apps that are making money right now."
  },
  {
    "i": 95,
    "speaker": "Pat Walls",
    "text": "We put them all into a database of all the people that we've interviewed and researched and found a bunch of cool, simple apps that are making money right now. Check that out in the description right there. It's all free."
  },
  {
    "i": 96,
    "speaker": "Pat Walls",
    "text": "Hope you guys enjoy. Thank you for watching. We'll see you in the next one. Peace."
  }
]