@starterstory: I just chatted with a founder who built two apps that pull in $120K/month by scanning trading cards. Meet Kyle. He launched Cardstock in 2019 after realizing there was no app on the store to identify and value his sports cards. Six years later it’s at 15,000 active subs and $75K MRR. Then last year he basically cloned it for Pokémon cards. He called it Scanemon, vibe-coded the MVP in a single day using Cursor’s agent, and it’s already at 3,400 subs, $17K MRR, and pulling in MORE new customers per month than Cardstock. His whole idea engine is dead simple: build for your own hobbies. He’s been collecting cards since he was a kid. He had the problem himself. He looked on the App Store. Nothing existed. So he built it. His tech stack is lean too: Swift + SwiftUI, Core Data, an AWS EC2 backend, RevenueCat for subs, and Cursor + Codex + Claude doing most of the heavy lifting now. Marketing? Zero ad spend. Just TikTok slideshows on repeat through UseNoise.

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Saturday 27 June 2026 15:57:45 GMT