This is about Erly.
Erly is an alarm clock app with one twist: you do push-ups on camera to turn it off. No snooze. AI checks the video to make sure you didn't fake it.
It does $50K+/month. Four months after launch.
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The Backstory - Erly
Jake Glacer is a CPA.
Four years of accounting school, a masters, a year at a Big Four firm. Not exactly the viral-app founder archetype.
But he'd been teaching himself to code on the side, and a string of failed products taught him one lesson: building doesn't matter if nobody sees it.
Then came a problem he couldn't ignore — his own.
He couldn't wake up early. So every night he texted a friend: "I'll send you a video of me doing push-ups by 6 a.m. tomorrow."
It worked. So he turned it into an app.
The MVP
19 days from first commit to the App Store. The MVP didn't even have an alarm.
Then Apple shipped iOS 26 with AlarmKit — the first API that lets third-party apps use the iPhone's real alarm system. Every alarm app before that was a workaround. For an alarm, 99% reliable is broken.
Jake shipped the alarm feature 19 days after launch. His first influencer video went live 7 days later. Real purchases came in from that one video.
First $1,000: three weeks later.
Month 3: $30K.
Month 4: $50K.
200,000+ downloads in 2026. Free trial, then $29.99/year. Still a one-person company.
From CPA to $50K/month — one push-up at a time.
The Views-First Playbook:
Solve a painful problem in a simple way — if it crosses your mind daily, people will pay
Add a novel hook that makes it inherently viral (push-ups to kill the alarm)
Ship in weeks, not months — validate with purchases, not compliments
Watch platform APIs — every new Apple API opens a short window for new apps
Pay creators where your product fits natively — day-in-the-life videos, not ads
Track views, not attribution — match view spikes to sales spikes and let the outliers pay for everything
Read the full Erly case study →
The exact influencer deal structure: 2–4 videos/month, view guarantees, $2–3 CPM
Why the MVP shipped without its killer feature — and why that was the right call
The AlarmKit window: how Apple API changes mint entire app categories overnight
The one-person tool stack behind $50K/month
And more...
That’s it for today
See you next week
Ayush 🙏(building Voibe)
PS: Read THIS if you’re at $0 MRR