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A solo-built real-time bus/train tracker covering 160+ cities, downloaded 5.2M times, grown to $30K/mo in subscriptions on free App Store keyword optimization (ASO) alone.
John never spent a dollar on ads — pure ASO took a bus app to 5.2M downloads, and one experience, “watching your bus roll toward you on a map, Uber-style,” carries the entire $30K/mo.
Fewer bars = easier, cheaper, or faster for an AI-assisted solo builder. Editorial judgments based on the case details.
Mumigo is a real-time bus and train tracking app covering 160+ cities. It launched in 2017, built entirely by one person — Scottish designer John Makavoy — who started with zero development experience. He reports 5.2M cumulative downloads, 400K monthly actives, 75K ratings, and roughly $30K/mo in revenue, almost all of it subscriptions.
Every user arrived through App Store search, and the cost of that channel was $0. The method has three moves.
The quick-reference card — acquisition channels, replication playbook, and risk map — is members-only.
Join the Unicorn Club — $5/moCancel anytime, in one clickPaste into Claude Code / Codex and get a working version of this product end-to-end.
Two production-grade prompts per idea — a full build spec and an SEO growth plan — plus 10 tailored build specs a week. Members only.
Join the Unicorn Club — $5/moCancel anytime, in one clickEvery claim traces back to a listed source — open any of them and check the number yourself. Timestamps jump to the second each figure is said.
Members read the exact words said here
1:16 · hear it in the videoThe exact line behind each figure is in the Unicorn Club. Read the quote, then jump to the second it's said. Join the Unicorn Club
Data credibility: Numbers self-reported by founder John Makavoy in a Starter Story interview: $30K MRR, 5.2M downloads, 400K MAU, 75K ratings — not independently verified ⚠️. All revenue figures are founder-reported or estimated by the video's creator, unaudited.
The first revenue was ad revenue, and it took two years of downloads to reach any scale. Makavoy monetised with banner ads from the 2017 launch onward, reaching about $8,000 a month, which means the price was set by whatever the ad networks were paying rather than by any decision of his.
Two loops, and each feeds the other. The first is ratings.
The build was the first stretch. Makavoy came from graphic design with no smartphone development experience, started by drawing the screens in Illustrator, and wrote the first versions in Xamarin because C# was what he already knew from web work.
The rest of this breakdown — 8 more sections — is in the Unicorn Club, with every section of all 1,335 ideas: first customers, first dollar, the flywheel, and the silent stretch.
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