This Simple Note-Taking App Makes $20K / Month (and How You Can Build Your Own)

Coming up, I'm going to break down how a simple Notepad [music] app makes over $20,000 a month [music] and the AI tool that you can use to build something similar. Stay tuned. What is up app nation? It is Steve P. young, founder of appmasters.com, the place you go when you want action-packed content related to helping you grow your app downloads and more importantly those revenues. And the theme of 2026 and frankly the theme of 2025 has always been about distribution. If you can nail distribution, I don't care if you have the crappiest app. I don't care if you have the crappiest onboarding. Don't care if your payw wall is not fully optimized. Distribution solves all these problems because the other things I just mentioned, they can be fixed pretty easily, whereas distribution is the hardest piece of the puzzle to completely get right. So without further ado, let's get into this app flow. All

right, here's the app. It's called Notepad. It's been launched since 2013. So again, the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The next best time today. Look, it helps having launched 12 years ago because it gives you the ASO juice and this is what the app does primarily very well is you can see on sensor tower there's no ad supported channels here. It's purely organic and I'll break down some of the keywords it ranks for here through at Magic. You can see similar revenue numbers around 20,000. And so I like to show you two different tools just so you can get a sense of the accuracy of these particular tools, right? All right, let's get into the app flow. Super simple, by the way. And I know what you guys are thinking. Pretty archaic designs as well, but hey, it works, right? That's what I'm saying.

Distribution solves everything. Welcome to Notepad. Let's customize. Choose your theme. Super simple. Choose your font. enable iCloud features. I love this. You're starting to trickle in premium features. So, this is awesome. And then, like I said, here's the payw wall. Not a lot of fancy stuff here, right? It's $15 for yearly plan and then 30 bucks for lifetime. Again, is this the best looking payw wall? Nope. Can it be improved upon? Absolutely. But at the same time, it's getting 40,000 downloads, right? Across multiple platforms have said 40,000 downloads a month. It can make a lot more money because it's only getting about 50 cents per download, but at the same time, distribution is great. So, this is a great app to try to acquire.

Distribution's great. The onboarding is decent. The payw wall needs some help, right? All right. Let's get into the app itself. It goes through some tool tips here. create a new note, access all the settings, and then hit the plus button to start a new note. Could the UIUX be better? Absolutely. But at the same time, again, distribution solves all problems. And then the I think I had created a a note here and then I got hit with this ready to hide the ads upgrade. And you know what they can do if they really wanted to do was just add a banner ad right here. make it a little bit annoying so that people want to buy. It's up to you in terms of user experience. Personally, that's what I would do and then people are willing to upgrade to buy the ads.

Another monetization idea that I've seen work really well is just have an inapp purchase just to remove the ads, right? You might not give away a lot of things, but the monthly probably not that interesting. So, I'd probably change this monthly into a one-time purchase of just remove ads. like you don't get the premium features, but you remove the ads. We've seen those do pretty well, so you can charge more than what you get on the monthly because most monthly users are crap users. All right? They're just testing out the product. They end up leaving most of the time anyways. And so, I rather do something sneaky with the monthly or something clever with the monthly gear than just charging a monthly fee, right? Okay. Now, if you want to create something similar, like I said before, the best time to plant a tree, the best time to build an app was 12 years ago. the next best time right now. Really think about distribution and

how you can leverage it. I'm going to break down the distribution of this app first. Let me go to app figures right now. Here it is. So you can see I just put notes which is got a lot of traffic. Insane, right? And this app ranks number two for notes. And so when I click on it, I'm going to go here to app figures into keyword ranks. You can see now this is just sorted by rank. You can see most of the keywords and this is what I've been saying all along. Look, if especially in this crowded space of notes and notepad and notetaker apps, again, you want to launch a long time ago, but the next best time is to find these keywords that have this five traffic. And so I'm going to say 1, two, three that have around 30 search traffic, three keywords. Everything else is all five, right? Everything else is all five. And so we can even say, hey, we only want to see ranks of one. And I can sort it that way. And here are the

results. Look at look at all these keywords. Now again, they rank number two for notes. and notisen and note and notes for iPhone which is amazing because they're right behind Apple and so this is the blend that I would try to do try to find two to three keywords with this is the hardest part by the way but you try to find two to three keywords with search traffic of around 30 and then next best thing is find all the five level keywords and the other thing is you know we've seen some clients do this as well where they'll be ranking number two for a very generic term. You don't want to be number two for another branded term. So like I don't want to be number two for calm. It's not going to help. I don't want to be number two for headsp space. It's not going to help.

You know, ads might help there. But if it's a generic term like meditation or notes, one of our clients is number one for a lot of big generic terms, but it's also number two for a lot of big generic terms as well. And they're doing half a mill just purely organic. And so it does work being number two for a highly generic term. You want to be top three, but if you can be number two for a highly generic term, that's also the next best solution than being number one, right? Okay. Now, you got to check out this. I know there's a lot of AI app builders. Here's one of our favorites.

This is a a partner of ours as well, but I want to kind of show it off to you. So, I had this idea of, and shout out to Andrew Warner who came who gave me this idea through his newsletter, but I had an idea. I was like, what if I wanted to build a notetaking app that syncs directly with notion? And so, I can have all my notes in notion so I can search for it and all that stuff and then at the same time just have a simple note-taking app that I can jot down some notes on my iPhone. So, I went to emergent, right? Our tool emergent chat.

I'm going to kind of break down. I've already got I've already built this app, but I'm going to kind of break down just my prompts and just how easy it is. As someone who's really really bad coder, I know how to do it, but I'm just terrible at it. Just like you developers who are terrible at marketing, I'm terrible at developing. So, here it is. Build a simple note-taking app that is similar to the default Apple Notes app, but every note is also sent to a notion. So, and I put the website in there, a notion board. And they came up with it. They're like, "Hey, do you have the API integration? You know, what do you want?" So, they're asking me all these questions about it. Sync behavior. Do you want it to autosync? I was like, "Yes." "Do you want a simple list view?"

Absolutely. Then I say, "Answer a bunch more questions." And then that's pretty much it. That's all I've answered, right? So, here's the cool thing about this. You can try it out on their mobile app. All right. Here's the really cool part. You can test out the app. You don't need anything fancy. They have their own app. I'm going to scan this QR code right here. Open an Expo. I've got the app downloaded already for you guys.

Here it is. It's opening it up. Here it is. Right now, you can see I've got the updated shopping list, milk, eggs. There's some errors that I'm have to debug, but not a problem. It's AI. I can figure it out. But the check this out. So, I'm going to go to my notion board right here. And boom. It's already here. Isn't this so cool? Like look, I could have gone simpler. I decided to test emergent and try to see if they can sync with another tool. And look, not even a developer. I was able to pick a board and then send it off right here. And that's how simple it is. Now, with AI, I think it's going to make it a lot easier for everybody to build, right? Just like I showed you. And the second thing is distribution is going to be key. So, if you don't know distribution, you don't know marketing, either learn it, hire somebody, but I personally would try to learn as much as possible. But I love this. And I think with tools like

emergent, they're going to allow any one of us to become a creator. So, look, this was a simple app. I don't know if anybody wants this, but I want it and that's good enough for me. And that's where it's going to be. Maybe we'll have these smaller apps where it's like, look, I just want this for myself. So the website super simple emergent.sh emergent.sh it's going to be linked up into your favorite podcast app and YouTube video and then the chat is super easy. I was still on the free plan when I was doing this and you get five free credits every day. So if you're cheap or you just want to test out the platform, you can just use the five free credits to build your first app. I did this with just the free plan. I come back the next day to optimize to fix any bugs that might exist. But a really great tool with just two prompts was able to automatically sync a notes app to a notion board. So,

thank you Emergent for reaching out to us and for being a partner on this video. Go check it out. It is emergent.sh. [music] And if you need help with distribution, check out our website as well atmasters.com. and make sure you hit [music] that subscribe button. All right, till next time. I'll see you on the next video.