Max's 28-App Micro-App Portfolio

01The Full Story: From "Perfect One App" to "Ship 28 of Them"

Max is an iOS engineer with a day job. Like a lot of indie developers, he used to be fixated on "polishing one app until it's good enough" — and ended up grinding on one or two projects for ages with almost no revenue to show for it. The real turning point was flipping his mindset completely: stop betting on any single app, treat every app as a one-shot bet, keep the winners and throw the losers away. Over roughly 8 months he shipped 28 small apps that each do exactly one thing — the archetypes being photo-based identification of trees/bugs/rocks, or single-purpose student tools like physics AI, chemistry AI, math AI. Together the 28 do about $10,000/month, 1,000+ paid subscriptions, and 4-5K daily active users. But look at the structure: only 4 apps actually carry the revenue, at about $1.5K/mo each (a textbook 80/20 rule — here a 28-to-4 version); the other twenty-plus make almost nothing. These numbers come from Max's own account in a Starter Story interview, with no dashboard screenshots, so discount them as founder-reported. Even so, the real value of this playbook isn't "how much he made" — it's that it turned the most mystical step in indie development, deciding what to build, into a repeatable keyword-selection system.