Kyle Fowler - How I make $42k/mo passively with simple no-code apps (copy me)

Kyle Fowler made $700,000 from two apps he built in college. The crazy part? Cardstock generated $10K a month passively for two straight years—while he traveled, studied, and barely touched the app. Now both apps pull $41K in monthly recurring revenue, zero VC funding, just ASO tactics and a friend he hired from Wendy's.

In this episode of The Superwall Podcast, Kyle breaks down how two weeks of keyword research turned into years of passive income, why he hired his friend Jacob from Wendy's instead of a marketing agency, and how they're now scaling to 7,600 TikTok posts per month using a platform that costs $1 per thousand views. Joseph digs into the exact ASO strategy, the repeatable TikTok format that drives "what's the app?" comments, and Kyle's philosophy that every growth channel probably works—you just have to commit long enough to figure it out. Watch the full episode here.

• Two weeks of Sensor Tower keyword research that held the #1 App Store ranking for "baseball card scanner" for 2-3 years straight
• The Reddit validation method: 12-15 replies in r/baseballcards before writing any code, $60 in revenue on launch day
• Why switching from $4.99 one-time purchase to $5/month subscriptions exploded revenue from $10K to $30K+ monthly
• The exact TikTok slideshow format: 3-5 seconds of desirable card + in-hand app scan + value reveal = repeatable viral content
• How Noise platform lets them generate 7,600 posts per month across 150+ creators at just $1 CPM ($2,600 for 27 million views)
• Kyle's "learn it yourself first" hiring philosophy: why he mastered TikTok before bringing on Jacob, then replicated the entire playbook for Scanémon ($9K MRR)
• The "everything works" mindset that most founders miss—stop channel-hopping and commit to one until you crack it
• Why bootstrapping forced better decisions: no VC cash meant learning each channel deeply instead of throwing money at agencies
• How being "overly on Twitter" and the Consumer Club Discord accelerated his learning through founder-to-founder knowledge sharing

Whether you're trying to crack ASO in an underserved niche or scale organic TikTok without burning cash on agencies, Kyle's playbook shows exactly how two simple apps hit $41K MRR through relentless iteration and picking one channel at a time.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Intro
• 2:58 Cardstock origin story & Reddit validation
• 6:04 Launch day results, early revenue & first ASO wins
• 16:04 Kyle’s ASO playbook & keyword strategy
• 22:23 Cracking TikTok: hiring Jacob & the card-scanning format
• 33:00 From indie dev to CMO: marketing mindset & channels
• 36:45 Launching Scanomon & expanding into Pokémon cards
• 41:02 Scaling with TikTok slideshows, Noise & UGC
• 53:58 Community, learning from others & closing remarks