mobile apps · shipping · track competitors marketing and find profitable niches 'meracl'
Barcelona, Spain
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over the last three months my side project grew from $100 a month to $4000 a month (don't ask about the profit margin — it's not great yet).
i put together the questions you have to ask yourself when building an app, or really almost any product.
i don't advise you to answer these questions BEFORE starting any project. many of these questions clear up as you build — you figure something out in the technology, design a creative for Meta, and every little action helps clear up one of these questions. in an ideal scenario, the answers to all the questions should be "yes".
— is there a personal story around the idea? does this idea have some emotional connection to me? some pain of my own that i'm solving with this product? this is important to stay motivated to keep developing the product.
— does this utilise my knowledge in (your area of expertise)? my option is gen ai, and when i'm making tuzik — also the experience of creating together with kids (tuzik is the app i'm building — a voice ai companion for kids that gets them drawing and playing offline).
— is this a product that touches some deep-seated needs, which can cause fear, anxiety, worry, some unpleasant emotions? (then it's a painkiller product, not a vitamin product)
— does this need create a habit or a necessity to return to the product? important for retention.
— do i get an inner spark of excitement when i think about how this product can be promoted through creators? do i get a wow-moment that can be played up through viral reels/videos? this is a virality parameter.
— does this have a large enough market (at least one player making 1m+ a month in the app store)? if there's no market, then two options — the scenario doesn't exist in people's heads and then it's hard to create it, or there's no such need. you can check revenue estimates on sensor tower or appmagic to see if anyone is hitting that volume.
— can you design an ad in meta or imagine a creative that should promote this app? this is an exercise to understand how to fit all the product's value onto a single 9:16 picture
— is this a narrow-focused product that solves a specific user problem, or is it a bit of everything? what narrow problem does this app solve best? can you state what the app is about in one clear sentence? an app is easier to make when it solves one problem.
— can i make this feature better than competitors through ai or my own expertise (for me ux/ui works here — you can almost always make a more convenient and better-looking product)
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despite the many cool features jev has and many future possibilities that this model brings like speed and price, its website (company's website) has a very cool style, typography and copywriting.
build prod, not god
(that's the title of their manifesto, making the case that ai should be fast, predictable building blocks for real code rather than an agi god).
@typesafeai
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tuzik is an ai buddy for parents and kids, a creative assistant for activities together.
it was born out of my daughter leya and my process — sometimes we couldn't come up with what to draw or what to play, so i made a prototype of tuzik, saw that leya got really into it and could spend a lot of time with it — and it's not standard screentime, because tuzik's goal is to come up with activities that happen in the real world — drawing, sculpting, building a pillow and blanket fort.
it can create pictures, tell fairy tales, invent games, answer "why" questions, and see what's happening in the real world.
it speaks almost all languages: spanish, ukrainian, english, russian, and over 20 other languages, i think you can use it for practicing new languages too.
also what i think is an important thing — interacting with tuzik teaches a kid how ai works, because the task of creating a picture is, essentially, creating a prompt, sometimes you need to figure out how to ask tuzik something so he gets it right — all of these are important skills for the future.
share it with everyone who has kids, feedback is really important to me.
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in case you missed
my personal experience scaling my app to 20,000 downloads
i grew aya photo from 100 to 20,000 downloads in 3 months with ugc creators.
the useful part was figuring out what converts, finding reliable creators, and making the numbers work.
i wrote down 10 things i wish i'd known before starting
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i built a grammarly for 2026.
- manual edits instead of rewriting
- no ai-watermarks
- fact checking
- enrich with web search grounding
- follows your style
genue.me/blog/tone/
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