From $10K a month on the App Store to starting over: Will Baker

Will Baker started trying to make money online at around 16. Dropshipping. Depop. Selling Instagram likes and followers. Not a plan. A sequence of experiments that each pointed somewhere new.

University came next, then crypto, then leaving university because of crypto. Freelance web design. Mobile apps. Web apps. A personal brand. Each thing led to the next thing.

He learned these things along the way.

Why mobile apps worked, and their tradeoffs

Will is positive about mobile apps, despite the headaches.

He found them relatively quick to build, enjoyable to work on, and easier to promote with profitable ads than web apps. The audience and knowledge he built discussing mobile apps gave him the material to eventually move toward web products.

The tradeoffs are real.

• Apple pays out on roughly a 45-day delay. Stripe pays in about three days, with lower fees. When you're trying to reinvest early earnings into ads, that gap matters more than most people expect.
• Keep your app name private. Will shared his app's name publicly and was subsequently suspended by Apple. He sees it now as a clear tradeoff: public-brand growth versus product protection. He'd protect the product.

The audience and knowledge from apps outlasted the apps themselves. People were still emailing him about his mobile-app articles long after he'd moved on.

How he got his first $1,000-$2,000: Reddit

When asked what he'd do with a $1,000 starting budget, Will's answer is not paid ads.

His answer is Reddit.

For his gym app, which rated a person's physique from a photo, he went to r/fitness and r/gym and found people already asking for physique ratings. He gave them the result his app produced. The output carried a watermark. That made the product visible while directly answering a request the user had already made.

The mechanism is simple: match an existing request to a demonstrable product result.

He estimates his first $1,000-$2,000 came from this approach. Conversion was strong. The practical ceiling: promotional activity eventually led to bans.

Don't fund a large creative-testing process before you know anyone wants what you're making. Find the people already asking for the result.

What came after Reddit

Will tried user-generated-content campaigns and large influencers. Large influencers didn't convert for him.

What worked better: US students creating videos on fresh accounts, rather than paying primarily for someone else's existing audience.

Even that didn't turn a profit immediately. He's open about the possibility that people-management wasn't his strength at the time, and doesn't claim the channel universally fails.

Testing ads with a few thousand dollars showed him a viable route, but Apple's payout delay meant he couldn't reinvest fast enough to scale. He built a pitch deck and raised from friends and family. His target was $10,000 per month. He put together around $20,000 in budget to bridge cash flow and accelerate ad testing.

His recommended sequence:

• 1.Get early customers through direct community work.
• 2.Experiment with ads once there's more capital to test with.
• 3.Finding winning ads costs money. Plan for that before you start.

When to quit a product

Will resists giving a universal number. Products fail for different reasons and no cutoff applies cleanly across them.

His actual signals:

• Loss of confidence in the idea.
• Poor use of his time.
• No longer enjoying the work.

His practical suggestion: try a few pivots first. If the product still isn't working after that, let it go.

His sharpest test is positioning: can you explain the product in one sentence? If not, he expects difficulty getting it in front of people and making sales. If the explanation requires a paragraph, the problem often isn't distribution. It's clarity.

The ability to stop a project is a skill. It develops with experience. Most people learn it the hard way.

How he built a recognizable personal brand

Three things worked together.

An unusual profile picture. He chose a game-related image deliberately, so people would associate it with him visually. Recognition came from both the image and his personality.

A clear point of view. He thinks people remember someone willing to express an opinion. His reference point is associating a person with a strong view, not controversy but a recognizable position. Something people connect to a name.

Useful expertise in an underserved area. Most of his peer group discussed organic content and UGC. Will wrote about paid mobile-app advertising, a comparatively underserved subject. He became useful where others weren't covering ground.

Expertise and useful explanations remained valuable beyond the original products. People kept coming back to the articles.

What he's building next

A food YouTube channel. He plans to upload a few times weekly and sees it as a slowly developing experiment. It is something he genuinely enjoys, with the possibility of building something around food and entertainment over time.

No revenue figures here. No proven model yet. Just the next experiment.

This seems about right, given how he got here.