Welcome to Fully Baked, our Sunday newsletter where we take one of our Half Baked ideas and validate it faster than a Stanford dropout can raise $50M 💸
In today’s edition:
💡 Solving a problem plaguing 30% of apps
🔬 We validated this idea - here's what we found
🚀 The go-to-market playbook for this idea
🤑 Can you make any money doing this?
⚔️ How the competitive landscape looks
❓ Our verdict: is this a go or no-go idea
Let’s goooo 🚀
📱 App Store Submission Simulator
App-roved
Original Edition: Half Baked #461
The Problem: We’ve mentioned it a few times in the newsletter, but we’re big fans of “one-chart businesses”. The term, which I think was coined on an episode of My First Million way back, basically describes any business that can be explained by a single, compelling data point or chart. For example, if you wanted to start a creatine supplement business, this chart would explain why. So a few months back, in edition #461, we covered an idea based around one single data point - the dramatic rise in App Store submissions. That’s because vibe coding is making it easier than ever for anyone to design, build and ship an app…but there’s a problem. Apple reviews millions of apps every year, but roughly 30% get rejected on the first submission. So why not build a simulator to make it easier for developers to catch any pitfalls before they submit? Here’s what we’re thinking.
The Solution:
💡 The Idea: An AI-powered simulator that runs your build against Apple's 200+ App Store Review Guidelines before you submit, flags likely rejection reasons, and suggests fixes.
🛠️ Product:
Upload your app and its store listing. The simulator checks it against Apple's 200+ review guidelines and flags anything likely to get rejected - missing permissions, misleading copy, off-brand screenshots, age-rating mismatches.
For the trickier issues that need a human touch (app descriptions, marketing copy, privacy disclosures), the simulator writes a cleaner version you can copy in one tap.
Plug it into your dev workflow so it runs automatically on every new build, not just when you're about to hit submit.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Google AI Studio Demo | Remix this build
🤖 How To Turn Claude + Apollo into an AI Sales Machine
Most founders still run sales by hand. You don't have to. Apollo's new MCP integration lets you run the whole motion from inside Claude, and in 45 minutes we'll show you how. No code required.
Join us and watch a real prospect list get built, enriched and turned into outreach copy live: an afternoon of list building done in ten minutes. Andy from Apollo and Jasper from Sniproleads will share their exact setup.
Free, live, and not one to miss.
🔬 Validation
🌐 Desktop Research
The global mobile app development services market was worth ~$236B in 2024 and is growing at 13.8% CAGR. Apple reviews around 5M apps a year. The pain is also accelerating - Apple's Review Guidelines have doubled in length since 2020, and new disclosure rules (App Tracking Transparency, the Digital Markets Act, the EU Cyber Resilience Act) keep stacking on. This is a big problem…
🔍 Subreddit Pain Mining (r/iOSProgramming + r/iOSDev)
Search "rejected" r/iOSProgramming (310k+ members) and you'll see fresh posts on the front page every day with people complaining about rejections. Five guideline violations account for ~70% of first-round rejections: 4.3 minimum functionality, 5.1.1 data collection, 2.5.4 permission strings, 2.1 information needed, 4.0 design.
📞 Cold Outreach (We spoke to 5 app developers)
All 5 had experienced rejections in the past 12 months. 3 said they were already using ChatGPT or Claude to pre-check their submissions manually, like using this Claude skill. This was a super important finding. Couple this with the fact that all of the developers said that, while the submission process was a pain, their biggest pain point by a mile was finding ways to grow their app. This led us to rethink things…
⚠️ The Pivot
After speaking to some users it was clear that growth, not submission, is where the real pain sits. So instead of building a standalone pre-flight tool, the play here is actually to create an AI-native app growth platform built for indie and mid-market developers that helps them with App Store Optimization, localization, review monitoring and analytics…basically the whole growth stack in one product. The submission checker stays as a lead magnet (it captures the highest-intent moment in a dev's lifecycle), but it's the funnel to the growth platform. The developers we spoke to were much more bullish on this idea.
🚀 Go-to-Market
👥 Early Users
Organic distribution via dev communities: Drop the free tool on r/iOSProgramming, r/iOSDev, Indie Hackers, Hacker News (Show HN), and Product Hunt. Reply to every "got rejected for guideline X" post with the free tool. Once they’ve used the free tool you can upsell to a paid plan for the growth product.
iOS dev Twitter: Build in public, share weekly dashboards of which rejection reasons got caught. iOS dev Twitter is small and tightly-knit - five well-known indie devs posting "this saved me" and you're done on awareness.
📈 Scaling Acquisition
Paid Ads: Start sending paid traffic to the free app store simulator tool to acquire users relatively cheaply, then upsell to the paid growth platform once the unit economics are strong. It’s basically pouring fuel on the organic distribution fire.
B2B outbound to studios: Outbound mobile studios shipping 20-50+ apps a year (Voodoo, Lightricks, Mistplay, Playrix) are the big LTV unlock. Cold outbound at $499/mo per seat. These accounts are worth 100x indie users.
🤑 Business Model
🏷️ Pricing
Free forever: Submission checker, basic growth dashboard, single-app limit
Indie ($49/mo): Full growth platform - ASO + keyword tracking, localization (3 languages), review monitoring, analytics, unlimited apps
Studio ($499/mo per seat): Everything in Indie + team accounts, 20+ languages, ad management, API access, priority support
🧮 Unit Economics
Target CAC: $5-15 indie (mostly organic via the free tool), $200-500 studio (outbound)
Indie LTV: ~$350-400 at 12 - 18-month retention and 40% gross margins
Studio LTV: ~$10,000+ at 30-month retention and 60% gross margins. SaaS economics that really work.
⚔️ Competitive Landscape
🏷️ Primary Competitors
In the app performance insights space these are your main competitors:
Sensor Tower: $40M+ raised, enterprise-focused, $1k+/mo pricing. Focuses more on app data intelligence, less on growth tools for indie devs.
AppTweak: $25M raised, $79+/mo, mid-market ASO platform. Tracks where apps appear in AI search results, focusses less on providing a broader suite of growth tools for app developers.
AppFigures: Bootstrapped, $9.99+/mo, the closest to indie-friendly today but heavily focussed on analytics, not general growth.
🎯 The Gap
Nobody has built an AI-native, agent-driven growth platform for indies and mid-market devs with a free top-of-funnel acquisition engine. The wedge is using the highest-intent moment in a dev's lifecycle (about to submit, or just got rejected) as the on-ramp to a recurring growth-stack SaaS they need but no one's currently selling to them.
✅ Verdict: GO
We came into this space with one idea - an AI App Store simulator. But after speaking to users (which is why that step is so critical), we realized that there was a much bigger opportunity hiding in plain sight.
Building an AI-native growth platform for app developers while using the free submission checker as the on-ramp is the move here. That's a real business with a clear moat, a cheap way to acquire users and a real product need.
The scope of this is much larger than the original idea, but it’s what the market wants. So…for a technical founder who can ship the free tool as a weekend project and has the patience to layer a growth platform on top, this is worth a shot.
👋 That’s All Folks!
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