<p><b>Startup description</b></p><p>My product is an iOS app that turns every energy drink you scan into a collectible while tracking your caffeine intake. Scan the barcode, the app identifies the drink, logs the caffeine, and drops it into your collection with a rarity tier based on how few other players own it. On top of that sit points, ranks, streaks, leaderboards, friends, DMs, clans with chat, tier lists, home-screen widgets, and Apple Health–informed stats like half-life and bedtime cutoff.</p><p>I built it solo and launched it in June 2026 off a TikTok account that reviews energy drinks (1,408 followers, 139.8K likes, four videos over 100K views, all organic). 3,361 people installed it, 2,825 of them scanned at least one drink (84%), and 40,526 drinks have been scanned. Paid subscriptions switched on in mid-August 2026, so the revenue history is three weeks old and already at $97 MRR. I'm selling because I've built what I set out to build and I'm moving on. The funnel, not the product, is what needs an owner: collector retention is 68–79% at week 1 and 37–45% at week 4 across every cohort, and installs ran 400 a week when I was posting.</p><p><b>Key highlights</b></p><ul> <li>Revenue: $97 MRR three weeks after subscriptions went live (2026-08-21), doubling from $48 to $97 in eight days as the first trial cohorts converted. 24 paying subscribers plus 2 lifetime purchases, zero refunds and zero paid churn to date, 44% trial-to-paid, 85% gross margin, $0 customer acquisition cost. Six App Store IAPs already live and approved with a tuned paywall engine reaching 33% of active users.</li> <li>Profit: Roughly breakeven today at ~$88/mo hosting against ~$82/mo net revenue. The hosting cost is a diagnosed write-ahead-log issue that's fixed in the next build; once it ships, compute steps down to ~$40/mo and the business nets ~+$510/yr on today's MRR before any growth.</li> <li>Users and retention: 3,361 installs, 2,825 collectors, 40,526 drinks scanned, 2,271 signed-in users in the last 30 days. 84% of installs scan at least one drink. Collector retention is 68–79% at week 1 and 37–45% at week 4, consistent across every cohort since July. 33.4% App Store page-to-download conversion.</li> <li>Distribution included: The TikTok account that built the audience comes with the sale: 1,408 followers, 139.8K likes, four videos over 100K views, all organic. 220 users self-reported TikTok as how they found the app. Also included: the landing page with share cards, the Instagram handle, and a live brand partnership with Orka (2× points, tracked promo code).</li> <li>Product: Barcode scan to instant collectible with rarity tiers, points, ranks, streaks and leaderboards, plus real caffeine tracking with Apple Health integration (half-life, bedtime cutoff, tolerance and crash insights). Friends, DMs, clans with chat, global chat, tier lists, widgets, profile cosmetics. Hand-curated caffeine catalog refined over 290+ user requests. Nine releases shipped in eleven weeks.</li> <li>Handover: App Store transfer eligibility verified (all versions live, all IAPs approved, no blocking entitlements). Supabase, Clerk, RevenueCat, PostHog (~1M events) and Netlify transfer as projects. Backend healthy at 99% cache hit and 3% CPU. Fully documented, solo-built, with 30 days of handover help including the Sign in with Apple migration.</li> </ul> <p><b>Team</b></p><p>One person: me. I built the app, the backend, the catalog, the marketing, and the TikTok. No employees or contractors. I'll do 30 days of handover, including the Sign in with Apple user migration that an App Store transfer requires.</p><p><b>Tech stack</b></p><ul> <li>SwiftUI iOS app (~180 Swift files, live as v1.6).</li> <li>Supabase (Postgres + row-level security + edge functions) for the backend.</li> <li>Clerk for auth (email, password, Sign in with Apple, Google). RevenueCat for subscriptions with six approved App Store IAPs.</li> <li>PostHog for analytics (~1M events).</li> <li>Netlify edge functions render share cards on landing page.</li> <li>Barcode lookup via a hand-curated caffeine catalog with Open Food Facts and Nutritionix fallback.</li> <li>A finished, unshipped creator-code system (server-driven promo codes with per-creator revenue attribution) is one SQL migration from live.</li> </ul> <p><b>Marketing and growth</b></p><p>One channel, zero spend. I posted energy-drink content on TikTok from the dedicated account and put the app name in the bio.</p><p>Results: four videos over 100K views, 139.8K total likes, and installs that peaked at 555 in a single week and held around 400/week through August.</p><p>When new users are asked in-app how they found it, TikTok is the top answer by a wide margin (220), followed by friends (123) and App Store search (21). The App Store listing converts 33.4% of product-page views to downloads, so the store page is already pulling its weight.</p><p>I also landed a brand partnership with Orka Energy Water (2× points on their cans, a promo code they track), which is the template for more.</p><p>What I never did: paid ads, influencer deals, or Android. When I stopped posting in late August, installs fell to ~129/week within three weeks. That's the whole growth story: the audience responds to content, and the content stopped.</p><p><b>Revenue and profit</b></p><ul> <li>MRR is $97 three weeks after subscriptions went live on 2026-08-21, up from $48 on 9/02 and $81 on 9/07 as the first trial cohorts converted.</li> <li>That's ~$1,160 ARR, ~$990 net of Apple's 15%.</li> <li>Lifetime bookings are $479 gross because that's all the paid history there is.</li> <li>Plan mix: 13 monthly at $4.99, 9 yearly at $29.99, 2 on discounted deals, 2 lifetime ($39.99 and $79.99).</li> <li>CAC is $0, all organic.</li> <li>LTV isn't measurable yet because no subscription has reached its first renewal (the first ones land 9/21–9/23).</li> <li>Churn to date is zero paid cancellations and zero refunds; 5 of the 24 have auto-renew switched off and will lapse at period end, which I'm telling you up front.</li> <li>Trial-to-paid is 44%; checkout-to-paid runs 50–62%.</li> <li>Costs are ~$88/mo (Supabase Pro on Medium compute ~$80, Apple Developer ~$8), so it's roughly breakeven today and ~+$510/yr once the next build ships and compute steps down to ~$40/mo.</li> </ul> <p><b>Return on investment</b></p><p>At the asking price, a passive owner who does nothing but ship the pending build recovers the purchase in roughly three years on today's MRR. Nobody should buy it to be passive. The payback lever is posting: the account has already shown it can put 100K+ views on a can, and at the run-rate I had in August (~400 installs/week, 84% activation, 33% paywall reach, 44% trial conversion), MRR was compounding at roughly $10–15 a week.</p><p>A buyer who restores that cadence and gets MRR to $250 clears the purchase price inside a year; a brand or creator who uses it as their own channel gets there faster, because the scan data and the collecting loop are the marketing.</p><p><b>Startup assets</b></p><ul> <li>iOS app, full SwiftUI source (~180 files), live on the App Store as v1.6 with 9 shipped releases</li> <li>App Store listing with 3,361 lifetime installs and 33.4% page conversion, transfer-eligible, all 6 IAPs approved</li> <li>2,825 registered collectors and 40,526 scanned drinks in the Supabase database, transferred as a project</li> <li>RevenueCat project with 24 active paying subscribers and $97 MRR</li> <li>Clerk auth project with all user accounts (email, password, Apple, Google)</li> <li>PostHog analytics project with ~1M events and built dashboards for payments, acquisition, and retention</li> <li>TikTok account: 1,408 followers, 139.8K likes, four videos over 100K views</li> <li>Instagram account handle</li> <li>The domain plus the Netlify edge functions that render share cards</li> <li>Hand-curated caffeine catalog (brand canon + barcode-to-mg pins) built from 290+ user requests</li> <li>Live Orka brand partnership and a finished, unshipped creator-code system</li> <li>Android port started in Kotlin (scanning and core loop; social and premium not ported)</li> <li>All documentation, migration SQL, and 30 days of handover.</li> </ul> <p><b>Risks</b></p><p>Usage is down from its August peak (weekly actives 1,968 → 1,029) because I stopped posting; retention is flat across every cohort, so this is a top-of-funnel problem that posting fixes, not a product problem.</p><p>No subscription has renewed yet, so "zero churn" is an untested claim until the first renewals land 9/21–9/23; five subscribers have auto-renewal off, and I'd budget for 21 paying rather than 24.</p><p>Hosting costs more than it should until the next build ships; the fix is written and I'll ship it before or during handover.</p><p>Sign in with Apple identifiers are per-team, so Apple's user migration has to run during the transfer window or Apple-login users lose account continuity; standard for app transfers, and I'll do it with you.</p><p>The caffeine catalog is bundled in the app, so adding drinks needs a release; a buyer who wants it server-side has the migration path documented. It's a solo codebase, well documented but one person's conventions. Apple review is a dependency for any consumer iOS app, and this one has passed nine times.</p><p><b>Summary</b></p><p>You're buying a finished, monetizing consumer app with the hard parts already done: the product loop works (84% of installs scan, week-4 retention 37–45%), the monetization is built and Apple-approved (six IAPs, a tuned paywall, $97 MRR three weeks in with zero refunds), and the distribution channel that built the audience comes with it (a TikTok account with 139.8K likes and a proven 100K-view format). The only thing it's missing is someone posting. For an operator, that's a three-week-old subscription business at a price that a few months of content can pay back. For an energy-drink brand or creator, it's a branded collecting game aimed squarely at the people who buy your cans, with scan data and a creator-code system built in, for less than one influencer campaign.</p><p>✅ $487 TTM revenue</p><p>✅ 24 customers</p><p>✅ Business model: Freemium</p><p>✅ Built with Netlify, Swift, SwiftUI</p>