How Regular People Make Money With Tiny Apps

Regular people make money with tiny apps by solving one small problem they know well, building a simple version fast, and finding their first users by hand, one by one. No investors, no team, no big launch. Most of them also failed several times before the app that worked.

Here's what that looks like in real life, with two people who started with a normal job and nothing else.

What is a tiny app?

A small piece of software that does one thing well for a specific group of people. Not the next Instagram. Think of a tool that turns screenshots into nice images for social media, a page that collects reviews from your customers, or a better window to chat with an AI. People pay a few dollars a month, or once, because it saves them time or makes them look better.

One person can build and run it. That's the whole point.

How did regular people actually start?

Damon Chen worked at Cisco for eight years. In 2020 he took time off and started building small products. The first four made zero dollars. The fifth was Testimonial, a simple tool that helps businesses collect video reviews from their customers and show them on their website. He built the first version in about two weeks.

It made its first money within a week, and it later passed $1 million a year.

Tony Dinh was a software engineer in Singapore. In 2021 he quit and moved back to Vietnam with some savings. He spent two years building small apps and sharing everything on X. Several of them flopped, including at least five AI projects.

Then, in 2023, he got frustrated with ChatGPT's interface and built himself a better one over a weekend. He called it TypingMind. He made $1,000 the first day he added payments, $22,000 in about two weeks, and $1 million a year within 20 months.

Illustration of failed projects before success: Damon Chen had four failed products before Testimonial, and Tony Dinh had at least five failed AI projects before TypingMind.

Notice the pattern. Neither of them had a genius idea on the first try. They kept shipping small things until one of them stuck. Both knew how to code, but today AI tools can do a big part of that work, as I explain in Can You Build an App Without Coding?

Where did their first users come from?

Not from ads. From doing things by hand that big companies would never bother with.

They built in public. Both shared what they were building on X while they built it: features, failures, even revenue. Tony has said he's not good at marketing, so his whole strategy was simple: every time he added a feature, he posted about it. Over time, the people following the process became the first buyers.
They gave early buyers a reason to jump in. Damon offered his first customers a one-time price for lifetime access. People who believed early got a deal, and he got his first paying users.
They talked to every customer. Damon recorded videos showing people how to use his tool and has said he talks to customers every single day. When Tony started selling to companies, he got on video calls with them one by one.

That's Paul Graham's "do things that don't scale" in practice, which I explain in How to Get Your First 10 Customers. And it's not just them: in a 2026 survey by Supabase, 56% of founders said they got their first customers through their personal and professional network, and 35% by reaching out to people directly.

What can you copy from them?

Start with your own annoyance. Tony built TypingMind because ChatGPT's interface bothered him. If something bothers you every day, it probably bothers other people too.
Build the smallest version that works. A weekend, two weeks at most. If people don't want it, you lose little.
Share the process from day one. Post what you're building, what you learned, what failed. It's free distribution, and it compounds.
Find your first users by hand. Message people who have the problem, help them set it up, ask what's missing. The communities where they talk are the best place to start, as I explain in How to Find Clients on Reddit and Facebook.
Expect some to fail, and keep going. Damon needed five tries. Tony needed even more. The failed ones weren't wasted: they're where the skills and the audience came from.

Sources

Frequently asked questions

Can you really make money with a small app?

Yes. Many people with normal jobs have built small apps that solve one specific problem and charge a few dollars for them. Two well-known examples, Testimonial and TypingMind, were started by one person each and later passed $1 million a year in revenue.

How do small app makers find their first users?

Mostly by hand: sharing the building process on social media, offering early buyers a good deal, talking to each customer and helping them set up. Ads usually come much later, if at all.

What does building in public mean?

It means sharing what you're building while you build it: features, mistakes, lessons and sometimes revenue. People who follow the process often become your first users and spread the word.

Do I need to know how to code to build a tiny app?

Not as much as before. AI tools can now write a big part of the code if you describe what you want clearly. The harder part is picking a real problem and getting it in front of the right people.