Eighteen months. That is how long Flo, a solo developer from Germany, spent trying to grow his expense tracking app Monai. He tried everything developers try. Social media. App Store optimization. Reddit posts. Word of mouth. At the end of those eighteen months, the app was making $300 a month.
Not $300 per day. $300 per month. Total.
Then he made one partnership decision with one influencer in Colombia. Twelve months later, the app crossed $35,000 MRR. That is a 10,000% increase. The app did not change much. The audience did not find it organically. What changed was a single structural arrangement — and most coverage of this story has completely missed what made that arrangement actually work.
Table of Contents
- The Problem Was Never the Product
- How the Partnership Actually Started
- The One Structural Decision That Made It Work
- What the Growth Actually Looked Like
- The Non-US Market Angle Nobody Talks About
- Flo's 5-Step Outreach Playbook
- What I Learned From This Startup Story
- Key Takeaways
- FAQ
The Problem Was Never the Product
Flo built Monai because he was frustrated with every expense tracking app that existed. They were all too complicated. Too many tabs, too many menus, too much setup before you could log a single transaction. He wanted something minimal — just what matters, nothing else.
The technical side was not the challenge. Flo had been a mobile UX lead professionally. He knew iOS. He deliberately chose to ship fast this time — a previous app had taken two years to build before launch, and nobody cared about it. With Monai, he got the first version out in a month or two, then iterated continuously.
The app had real differentiators. Voice input — say "coffee at Starbucks, five dollars" and the transaction gets logged automatically with the right category and tags. Apple Pay integration that detects a payment and adds it to your list without any manual entry. AI reports that let you ask questions about your own spending patterns. And a deliberately minimal UI that showed only what you actually needed to see.
None of that was enough. After eighteen months of building and trying to grow it, Monai was making $300 a month. The product worked. Nobody was finding it.
This is the part that most technical founders get wrong. They spend a year debugging distribution problems as if they were product problems. More features. Better onboarding. Lower price point. The assumption underneath all of it is that if the product was better, people would find it. That assumption is usually incorrect.
How the Partnership Actually Started
Flo did not cold email a hundred influencers and hope one of them responded. The influencer reached out to him.
This matters. Flo had put his social media handles directly in the app — a small decision with a significant consequence. The Colombian creator found the app, saw that it was built by an individual developer, and reached out directly. That inbound contact immediately changed the negotiating dynamic. Flo was not a developer desperate for distribution. He was a builder with something worth covering.
The influencer was not a tech-only creator. His audience was a mix of technology and lifestyle — people who cared about his personal story, his life choices, what he was using day to day. Not spec-focused early adopters. Ordinary people who trusted his recommendations because they felt connected to him as a person. That audience profile is what made Monai a strong fit. A minimal, aesthetically clean app that actually helped you understand your money — that kind of product lands differently with a lifestyle audience than it does on a pure tech channel.
They negotiated terms. Signed a contract. And the first video went live at the end of 2024.
The One Structural Decision That Made It Work
Here is the part of this story that almost nobody has examined carefully.
Most influencer deals work like this: a creator charges a flat fee or a percentage of revenue for each video. They make the video, post it, collect payment, move on to the next client. Their financial incentive ends when the video goes live. Whether it converts or not, they got paid.
Flo tried percentage of revenue first. It did not scale well. The problem with revenue-based deals is that the creator gets paid based on top-line numbers — before costs, before what actually matters to the business. Revenue can look healthy while the business is barely profitable.
They switched to percentage of profit plus a fixed monthly retainer. That one change restructured the entire incentive dynamic. Now the influencer's income was tied to the same number Flo cared about. If Flo did well, the influencer did well. If the app grew expenses without growing profit, both parties felt it. The creator was no longer a vendor delivering a service. He was functionally a co-owner of the outcome.
The behavioral difference was immediate. The influencer started thinking about the business, not just the content. He came up with his own video ideas. He responded to comments from viewers who had questions about the app. He cared whether the videos converted because his own income depended on it. Flo did not have to manage him the way you manage a contractor. The incentive structure handled it.
Three videos per month. Not thirty. Not a hundred shorts hoping something goes viral. Three story-driven videos, each one taking significant time to produce, each one built around a narrative that the creator's audience would actually connect with. Quality over volume. That discipline is harder to maintain than it sounds — the instinct when growth is working is to do more of it. They kept it at three.
What the Growth Actually Looked Like
The first video the creator posted was simple. A walkthrough of the app. No elaborate production, no scripted drama. Within a week, MRR went from $300 to over $3,000. Within a month, it hit $7,800. That is roughly 25x growth from a single piece of content.
A second video pushed it to $8,000 MRR. Then a third video — shorter than the others — added another $5,000, bringing the total to $13,000 MRR. Then a slower period. The growth was not a clean upward line. There were months with no major videos, and MRR held steady without a big new spike. This is normal with content-driven growth. The baseline rises after each video, but the spikes require new content.
In June, Apple invited Monai to participate in WWDC — their annual developer conference. The creator built a video around that event, framing it as a story about an indie app getting recognized by Apple. That video reached 1.7 million views and added nearly $5,000 more in MRR. The story element was everything. It was not a product review. It was a human narrative about a developer from Germany building something that Apple noticed.
The most recent video covered a highly requested feature launch. Same story-first approach. By then the app had crossed $35,000 MRR, representing a 10,000% increase from where it started.
Flo also ran A/B tests on monetization throughout this period using RevenueCat. He found that a hard paywall with a seven-day free trial converted better than a freemium model. The premium option they had previously offered was generating less revenue despite more sign-ups. Numbers like that only become clear when you have enough traffic to test against — distribution made the optimization possible.
The Non-US Market Angle Nobody Talks About
Flo is German. His influencer is Colombian. The primary audience that drove Monai from $300 to $35,000 MRR is largely Latin American.
Most indie developers building apps in 2026 are still thinking in terms of US markets first. English-language App Store, US pricing, US influencers who charge US rates and compete for US audience attention. That market is real, but it is also saturated. Every developer building a budget app is targeting the same pool of English-speaking users and the same roster of English-language tech influencers.
Latin America represents a smartphone user base of hundreds of millions of people. App usage is growing faster there than in North America. Influencers with large, loyal followings in Colombia, Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina charge a fraction of what comparable US creators charge. And the competition for their endorsement from other app developers is almost nonexistent — because most developers are not looking there.
This is not a theoretical opportunity. Flo proved it works. A German developer building for a Colombian audience, monetizing through Apple's subscription infrastructure, generating $35,000 a month. The geography of this story is as important as the influencer strategy itself.
Flo's 5-Step Outreach Playbook
Flo outlined exactly how he would approach influencer outreach if starting from scratch. Not general advice — a specific sequence.
Step 1 — Find aligned partners, not just big ones. The influencer's lifestyle, tone, and audience need to actually match your product. Flo was looking for someone with charisma, genuine connection with viewers, and a mix of tech and lifestyle content — not pure tech reviewers. Pure tech audiences care about specs. Lifestyle audiences care about whether something fits into a real person's life. For a consumer app, that distinction matters enormously.
Step 2 — Warm up the relationship before reaching out. Follow them. Comment on their videos consistently. Creators notice recurring faces in their comments. If you do not have time for this, at least be honest about it — do not pretend you have been following them for months when you have not. Faking engagement is obvious and immediately destroys the trust you are trying to build.
Step 3 — Be specific in your first message. Reference a particular video. A specific moment or joke they made. Something that proves you actually watched it. "I love your content, let's collaborate" gets deleted. "I noticed how you made that small detail look cinematic in your video about X" gets read. The difference between these two messages is whether you treated them as a person or as a distribution channel.
Step 4 — Show the alignment, not the transaction. After the specific reference, show them why your product fits their world. Not "I will pay you to promote this." More like "your audience cares about aesthetics and clean tech — this app was built for exactly that kind of person." The creator needs to see that this is a natural fit, not a paid interruption to their regular content.
Step 5 — Signal willingness to pay, and show the upside. This is the most important step according to Flo. Make clear early that they will be compensated, one way or another. Then show them what other apps in the category make — tools like Sensor Tower have this data publicly available. Give them a mental model for where this could go. "Apps in this niche make $50K to $100K a month with the right distribution" is not a promise — it is a picture of the possible outcome that gives them a reason to take the partnership seriously.
One more thing. Keep the message short. These creators receive hundreds of emails per week. A long paragraph about your app and your vision and your roadmap will not get read. If you want to stand out further, record a short personalized video using their name and referencing their content. Most people will not do this. That is exactly why it works.
What I Learned From This Startup Story
The detail I keep coming back to is the switch from revenue share to profit share. It sounds like a minor contract adjustment. It is actually a complete redesign of the relationship. Revenue share means the creator is a vendor. Profit share means the creator is a stakeholder. Those two arrangements produce completely different behaviors in the person you are working with, and Flo figured that out early enough for it to matter.
The other thing that stands out is the geography. There is a pattern in how developers talk about distribution — they talk about TikTok, about Reddit, about Product Hunt, about reaching US tech influencers. All of these channels are fighting for the same pool of attention. Flo went somewhere different without any grand strategy. He just partnered with the person who reached out to him, and that person happened to be Colombian. The outcome was a Latin American user base that most of his competitors are not even thinking about.
The uncomfortable truth in this story is that Monai is, as one observer put it, yet another budget tracking app. There are dozens of them. It does not have a monopoly on any feature. It is not technically superior in any obvious way. What it has is distribution that its competitors do not. That is the whole game. The product has to be good enough that people do not regret the download — but beyond that threshold, distribution determines who wins, not the product itself.
What I am less certain about is how repeatable this is. Flo benefited from being reached out to — he did not have to figure out cold outreach. That initial inbound contact changed the negotiating dynamic and possibly saved months of trying to get a creator's attention. Most developers will not get that lucky. The playbook Flo shared is solid, but it assumes you can get a response in the first place. That first reply is the hard part, and it is the part where most of this advice falls short of telling you exactly what to do.
Key Takeaways
- Monai went from $300 to $35,000 MRR in one year with one influencer posting three videos per month.
- Revenue share did not scale. Profit share plus a fixed retainer did — because it aligned incentives properly.
- The influencer handles all creative direction. Flo does not brainstorm video ideas. That division of labor is structural, not accidental.
- Story-driven content converts at higher rates than app walkthroughs, even with fewer total views.
- Adding your social handles to the app itself is distribution infrastructure — it is how the influencer found Flo in the first place.
- Latin American markets are underserved by indie developers. Large audiences, lower influencer rates, minimal competition for creator partnerships.
- A/B testing monetization only becomes possible at scale. Distribution unlocked optimization that was not available before.
- The tech stack for a $35K/month app: Xcode (free), Claude Code ($100/month), RevenueCat (~$400/month), Supabase ($25/month), OpenAI + Anthropic for AI features (~$200/month), Helm (~$175 lifetime).
FAQ
What is Monai and what makes it different from other expense tracking apps?
Monai is an iOS expense tracking app built by solo developer Flo from Germany. Its main differentiators are voice input that automatically categorizes transactions, Apple Pay integration that logs payments without any manual entry, and a deliberately minimal interface. Most expense apps have too many tabs and features — Monai was built around the idea that friction is why people stop using tracking apps. The AI reports feature also lets users ask natural language questions about their own spending patterns.
Why did profit share work better than revenue share for the influencer deal?
Revenue share pays the creator based on total income before costs. This means the creator gets paid whether the business is profitable or not, and has no incentive to think about the business beyond making the video. Profit share ties the creator's income to the same number the founder cares about. When costs rise, both parties feel it. When profit grows, both benefit. This creates genuine alignment — the influencer thinks about what will actually help the business, not just what will generate views.
How do you find influencers in non-US markets for an app?
The same way you find US influencers — search YouTube and Instagram for creators in your niche in the target language. Spanish-language personal finance and lifestyle creators are relatively easy to find, and many have substantial followings. Tools like Sensor Tower can show you what apps are performing well in specific markets, which helps you understand where there is appetite for your product category. The key advantage is that competition for these partnerships from other indie developers is much lower than in the English-language market.
What was the total monthly cost to run Monai at $35K MRR?
Based on what Flo shared: Claude Code ($100/month), RevenueCat around $400/month at that scale, Supabase for backend and database ($25/month), OpenAI and Anthropic API costs for AI features (around $200/month), and Helm for App Store management (a one-time $175 lifetime purchase). Figma is free. Xcode is free. Total ongoing infrastructure costs are roughly $725 per month for an app generating $35,000 in revenue — before the influencer's profit share and retainer.
What is the biggest mistake Flo says he made?
Not starting paid advertising sooner. The influencer content was generating high-quality video that converted well — and that same content could have been used as ad creative for Meta ads from much earlier in the growth journey. Flo started paid ads only recently and saw strong early results. His advice: once you have content that converts organically, test it as paid creative immediately. Do not wait until the influencer partnership is fully proven before layering in paid distribution on top of it.
If you found the distribution angle here useful, the Soulmate Customs story covers a different approach to content-driven growth — $1 million in 11 months with zero ad spend, built entirely on organic short-form video. And if you are thinking about which business model to start with before worrying about distribution, the piece on digital products that realistically pay in 2026 breaks down the options with actual revenue ranges.
The specific next step from Flo's story is not "find an influencer." That is too vague to act on. The specific next step is this: put your social handles in your app or product right now, before you do anything else. That one action is what made the influencer reach out to Flo instead of the other way around — and that inbound contact changed everything about how the partnership started. Do that first. Then work the outreach playbook.