Summary
Starter Story talks with Rasty Turek, who built Vault Air, an encrypted file and photo storage app for iPhone, in roughly three weeks despite never having made an iOS app before. He credits coding agents for most of the work and says he wrote no code or website text himself.
The app earned just $66 in its first month but later reached $41,000 in a single month and now averages about $2,000 to $3,000 a day. Turek shares details such as more than 60,000 downloads, pricing of $1.99 weekly, $19.99 annually and $39.99 for lifetime access, and a lifetime plan that accounts for the majority of revenue. He also notes an unusual conversion pattern, with the lowest conversion on day one and the highest around day 60.
The discussion focuses on growth. Rather than TikTok or paid ads, Turek uses an SEO strategy run by coding agents such as Claude or Codex. He built an open-source command-line library called gum, with MCP access to Google services including Search and Keyword Planner, which checks keyword data every morning, spots queries where the site gets impressions but no clicks, and publishes a new optimized guide daily. He reports roughly 10% conversion from web traffic. It is a concrete look at how a solo founder competes with long-established apps.
📺 Source: Starter Story · Published October 18, 2026
🏷️ Format: Interview
