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He copied a $200K/month vaping app screen by screen, swapped vaping for sugar and English for French, and hit $12K/month in five months.
60,000 downloads in 5 months · ~900 paying customers · 35% profit margin · a first, separate cloned app made $5,000 in its first month
"I changed black by pink, I replaced ideal content by sugar, and then done." His literal advice: "Fastest way to make some money right now is to do one-to-one copy of a very successful app… you copy each screen, you copy each word" — then move it to a niche and a country the original ignores.
Fewer bars = easier, cheaper, or faster for an AI-assisted solo builder. Editorial judgments based on the case details.
David Adias spent eight years as a quant trader, telling other traders which stocks to buy. Six months before this interview he still had that regular job. He got pulled into the indie-hacker world through Peter Levels, Thibault from Outrank, and Jack who built Post Bridge, and then watched a podcast with the three teenage founders of Quitter, a quit-vaping app. They said that by month three they were making $200,000 a month. His words: "I was envious, I was jealous, and that's what got me started to start Stoppr." He funded the attempt by first cloning a different successful app, which made $5,000 in its first month of revenue. Then he built Stoppr: same product idea, same onboarding, different addiction, different country. Five months later Stoppr does $12,000 a month with 60,000 downloads and around 900 paying customers, at a 35% profit margin. The headline on the Starter Story video says $12K/month; the intro narration also says "zero to $10,000 a month," and David himself states $12,000 in the interview. Nothing was audited and no dashboard is shown on screen — this is a founder talking on camera.
The first users came from French wellness creators, and the selection step is the part worth copying.
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Data credibility: This is a Starter Story founder interview. Every number — $12,000/month, 60,000 downloads in five months, ~900 paying customers, 35% profit margin, the $5,000 first month on his earlier cloned app — comes from David Adias speaking on camera. No Stripe, RevenueCat or App Store Connect dashboard is shown, and nothing is independently verified. Note a small inconsistency the video never resolves: the narrated intro says he went 'from zero to $10,000 a month' while David states $12,000 in the interview. The $200,000/month figure for Quitter, the app he cloned, is thirdhand — David heard it on a podcast with Quitter's founders. Tool costs (Cursor $20/mo, Mixpanel ~$100/mo, TikTok Spark ads ~$100/mo) are his own figures and do not include what he pays influencers, which is never quantified. The video is sponsored by Rocket, an app-building tool, and promotes Starter Story's paid program, so the framing is commercial. The 'stack, costs and margins' details are the founder's; any interpretation of them is marked as our read.
The first revenue was not Stoppr's. To fund the attempt David cloned a different successful app first, and it returned $5,000 in its first month, which paid for the next build.
The loop that pays here is narrow and mechanical: pay a creator, watch which video performs organically, then put Spark ad money behind that exact video rather than a branded one.
David compressed the dead stretch rather than enduring it. The gap between deciding and knowing was about a month: two and a half weeks rebuilding Quitter screen by screen in Cursor, then a week waiting on Apple review, and he reckons the Figma connection into Cursor would now cut that to two weeks total.
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