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He uploaded the client spreadsheet he'd been maintaining for years into Cursor and said 'build it' — five months later the Shopify app it became was at $30K MRR
$30K MRR for the app plus just under $40K MRR for services · 122 app users, 38–39 paying · 47 installs against 43 uninstalls in the period shown · $800/mo paid plan, down from $5,000/mo
The build process, in full: "it's literally downloading the spreadsheet as a CSV, uploading it to Cursor, and saying build it. And then identifying all the ways that Cursor got it wrong and saying, we need to fix this, this is the right calculation here."
Fewer bars = easier, cheaper, or faster for an AI-assisted solo builder. Editorial judgments based on the case details.
Jack launched his first e-commerce brand in 2016, selling software and sample packs to music producers — dubstep, specifically. Because it was a software product the margins were enormous and profitability was never in question, and he went from broke university student to, in his words, having more money than he knew what to do with, very quickly. Facebook ads were the growth engine: he put a thousand dollars in and it just worked. He noticed an entire scene had grown up around that — marketers, agencies and gurus all built on running Facebook ads — and figured he had something to contribute. So he started consulting, first for small mom-and-pop agencies, then larger ones. His actual deliverable was information: "good decision-making comes from information," and what he built for founders and marketing teams was accessible spreadsheets — profit and loss views, LTV, cost-of-goods, a ROAS calculator, an ad analyser, a scenario planner. His pitch on those: a real scenario planner from a firm like Deloitte costs tens of thousands and is completely inaccessible, so he made complicated things as simple as possible. Maintaining spreadsheets by hand is slow, so he asked a developer he knew — the person behind Nookazon, an online marketplace for Animal Crossing — to build an app version. The developer flatly refused. Then AI coding tools arrived and he did it himself, having never written code, spending hundreds of hours in the terminal figuring it out. The build took roughly three and a half to four months. Profit AI was approved by Shopify on Christmas Day and launched in December with no customers for the first couple of weeks — just a handful of brands he already knew, beta-testing with free access. By the time of this interview in May it had done $147,000 in total revenue and was running at $30,000 MRR for the app, with just under $40,000 MRR from services alongside it.
Shopify approved Profit AI on Christmas Day and for the first couple of weeks there were no customers at all — "just a handful of brands that I knew that were beta testing the app and getting free access." That list was never cold.
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Data credibility: Founder interview on Starter Story, and unusually well evidenced for this format: the host explicitly asks him to pull up revenue dashboards 'so we can show that this thing is legit', and the founder shares his Shopify partner dashboard on camera. The figures read off that dashboard — $147,000 total revenue to date, 122 app users, 47 installs against 43 uninstalls — are platform-generated data rather than recollection, which is why we grade this as hard data. Be clear about the limits, though. The $30,000 app MRR, the 38–39 paying customers, the just-under-$40,000 services MRR, the $5,000-dropped-to-$800 pricing history and the 3.5–4 month build time are all spoken, not shown. The services revenue in particular is off-platform and unverifiable, and it is larger than the app revenue. We are reading a transcript, so we cannot independently confirm what was on screen — only that a dashboard was displayed and described. The founder is identified only as 'Jack' and the product as Profit AI for Shopify; verify both before publication. No country or city is stated for the founder anywhere in the transcript (Miami and New York are mentioned only as a customer's offices), so region is left unset rather than guessed. Two figures quoted by the host about other people — a Shopify plugin founder named Eric Kos going from ~$200K/month to over $1M/month, and an unnamed founder doing $1M/year on Klaviyo reporting — are third-hand and are included only as context for why the host rates e-commerce tooling, not as verified entries.
The first paid plan was $5,000 a month, and it found "only a couple takers that were, you know, businesses that we were already working with" — so the first real dollars were an existing consulting relationship agreeing to pay for software instead of hours. That price did not survive contact with the Shopify App Store.
Three things compound here, and one does not. The compounding parts: the Shopify App Store listing keeps producing installs with no marketing attached to them, the consulting reputation keeps producing referrals, and every agency that signs drags a portfolio of stores in behind it.
The quiet stretch was the build: three and a half to four months of it, non-technical, starting from a refusal. He asked a developer he had met, the person behind the Animal Crossing marketplace Nookazon, to build the thing, and "he just basically refused."
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