I'm Going to Make a $100k App From Scratch

I’ve seen this concept a lot in the gaming community. Basically, you start from scratch and build something impressive in a short amount of time to prove that it’s not as hard as everyone thinks it is. I love gaming videos styled this way. In one series I watched, the guy managed to make enough money in-game to exchange it for two free weeks of membership, a seemingly difficult task that he proved to be easy.

I also saw this challenge a guy was doing on TikTok where he drove UberEats every day for a month to see how much money he could make. He made $8k–very respectable. He also proved that it’s not as hard as you think to make that much per month.

I’m at a crossroads right now—I’m ready for a new project and working on some little things here and there. It occurred to me, why don’t I try to do this with an app? I’ve been making apps for 6 years at this point. I know a thing or two. Most of my time in the past two years has been devoted to iterating on my existing products, not building new ones.

Hashtag Expert has taken the majority of my attention recently, though I’ve been losing interest in working on it. It’s just not as fun as it used to be. I built it as a side project in college and it ended up being my full-time job for 2+ years. I haven’t built a new product from scratch in a while. I’ve also believed in my head this whole time that I could make a new app and get it to decent revenue in a relatively short amount of time. People have doubted this—was it luck or skill that enabled me to make some moderately successful apps? Probably a mix of both, but I’ve always felt that it was mostly skill.

I think I’m going to act on this. Here’s the idea—set an ambitious goal and complete it in under 6 months, and then document the entire journey. I’m thinking something along the lines of this:

In 6 months, I will build an app and earn $100k in profit from it. To complete the challenge successfully, I must have a bank account with a $100k balance on it that is 100% from the new app. I will document the entire journey and be as transparent as possible.

Who knows, in a week I might decide this is a shitty idea, but it could be a lot of fun. I’ll report back in a week.