My App Makes $50K/Month: This Is My ASO Playbook

Right now, thousands of Vibecoders are launching their mobile app, but most of them are making the exact same mistake.

They ship the app and just hope that people will find it.

But the truth is, if your app store listing isn't set up right, then nobody will ever see it, no matter how good your app is.

To prove this, I invited Sebastian, a $50,000 per month iOS app builder, to break down

the exact app store optimization fundamentals that took

his app from invisible to top two in the app

store in this video i had sebastian walk through the three

foundations when it comes to doing aso right

specifically what everyone gets wrong about keywords

a simple a b test that you can run to up

your conversion rate and the single most important thing you

need to do if you want to rank high in the ios app store these are the highest impact things you can do today even this afternoon if you want to get thousands of downloads without doing any marketing at all.

If you've launched an app, you're building one, or you're even thinking about it, do not skip this video.

This is our ASO masterclass. Let's dive in. Welcome to Starter Story Build.

All right, Sebastian, welcome back to Starter Story. We had you on recently.

You built this awesome app and you have some cool things to share today about how you grew it.

But before we get into all that, can you just give me an update about how things are going and what you I'm Sebastian.

I built four apps that together make over $50,000 per month. My main app is HabitKit.

It's a habit tracking app for iOS and Android. I also recently launched a new app called FocusKit, which has been great so far.

My apps cost $500,000 in total revenue in 2025, and I made over $100,000 in January alone.

And today I'm excited to share more about my App Store optimization strategy and show you everything I know.

Wow, Sebastian, when we had you onto the channel, I think it was maybe eight months ago, you were doing like $15,000 a month.

Now your app is making $100,000 a month. You did a lot of amazing stuff, but a lot of this is just being in the right place at the right time.

And I think the right place to be right now is the iOS app store. So that's what we're gonna be talking about today, how to rank in the app store.

We have a bunch of stuff to go over today, but can you let us know, like by the end of this video and all the stuff you're going to share, what are people going to get from our conversation?

Yeah, by the end of this video, you will know exactly

what I did to get my app habit kits ranking in the top three on the US app store for the keyword habit tracker, which is actually one of the most competitive keywords out there.

Okay, cool. I'm excited about this. Before we dive in, can you just give us a high level of what is ASO and what does it mean for your business? Absolutely.

ASO stands for app store optimization. Think of it as SEO, but for mobile apps.

When someone opens the app store and types, for example, habit tracker or fitness app, meditation app.

ASO is actually what determines whether your app shows up at the top of the search results or deep down at position 34 where nobody will ever find it.

About 98% of my users find HabitKit directly through the App Store or Google Play.

I literally do no marketing at all besides that.

Not from Twitter, not from Instagram ads, just people opening the store. Okay, cool. I mean, this is amazing.

There are hundreds of millions of people that are browsing the app store looking for apps and you've kind of capitalized on this where you don't have to spend money on paid ads.

You don't need to do Twitter marketing. You don't need to go on TikTok.

You just did a few things and 98% of your customers came from app store search.

You are the example of someone who has nailed it perfectly.

So I wanted to bring you on to talk about what are the three highest impact, lowest effort things that you can do now that anybody who's building apps could do right now to rank better in ASO and get thousands of free customers.

The most important thing you can do is optimizing your keywords.

ASO is basically the strategic placement of keywords in your apps meet metadata.

This is what Apple and Google use to understand your app and decide when to show it in search results.

The app name and the subtitle are the most important ASO factor. Nothing else comes close to it. Okay, cool.

So what you're saying is you may want to think about what the keywords that people are searching for when you come up with the name.

The name of your app is HabitKit, or it has habit in the name, which is kind of genius. How can someone watching this do the same?

Yeah, so before you actually name your app, you have to go one step back and actually do some keyword research before that.

You need to understand the keyword landscape you're moving in. What do people actually search for in the App Store?

LLMs like ChatGPT or Claude can help you with that. It's a great tool to brainstorm new keywords.

Then you have to validate whether people actually search for those terms.

I use a tool called Astro for that because it's very affordable and it lets you track unlimited keywords, which is perfect when you're building a new app.

Astro shows you a popularity score of your keyword. That means how often do people search for this keyword.