# A gym app did $160K last month, 500K downloads from a side project, and $25K from one social media API — retained record

> Retained news record from news:ml-startups-fyi.

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source: [news](https://highsignal.app/data/news) (news:ml-startups-fyi)  published 2026-10-06 11:08 ingested 2026-10-24 10:03

[original source ↗](https://startupsfyi.beehiiv.com/p/a-gym-app-did-160k-last-month-500k-downloads-from-a-side-project-and-25k-from-one-social-media-api)

## retained text



```
- Startups.fyi
- Posts
- A gym app did $160K last month, 500K downloads from a side project, and $25K from one social media API
A gym app did $160K last month, 500K downloads from a side project, and $25K from one social media API
Hey! It's Chris & Daniel.
A fresh batch of submissions landed this week, and the best of them are in the Spotlight below. One of them is already doing $25K a month.
Want your startup in next week's issue? Skip the line here and we'll feature you in front of 15,000+ founders.
New here? Subscribe free for every past edition.👋🏾
Let's get into it. 👇
Startups FYI Spotlight
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New AI tools launch every day. A few will change how you work. The rest will be forgotten by next month.
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🎨 IMFFX ($300/month): Type a description and this easy to use tool will create AI digital art, illustrations, or photo-realistic images in seconds.
🔗 SocialCrawl ($25,000 MRR): Pulling data from Instagram, X, YouTube, and LinkedIn used to mean stitching four APIs together and maintaining all of them. This founder was doing exactly that for her own accounts, so she built one API that returns structured, real-time data from all of them.
— Want your startup in next week's issue?
👉 Use this link to share your project with 15,660 startup founders, entrepreneurs and indie makers.
Startups FYI Roundup
📱 $5K MRR and 500K downloads while still freelancing
Shaun hit 500K downloads and $5K MRR with Personal Best, a fitness app he built on the side while freelancing. He kept the client work going the whole time so he never had to bet his rent on it, and the app slowly grew to 50,000 monthly active users.
Love seeing a slow build that actually pays off, especially from someone who ignored the "quit your job" advice.
📈 $48K MRR solo after one positioning change
Ali took Instatus to a $48K MRR solo.
Growth had stalled, and the obvious move was to ship more features. He did the opposite: narrowed who the product was for and repositioned it around that customer, then growth came back.
Sending this to every founder who thinks the next feature will fix things, because it usually won't.
🚀 A/B tested his way to $160K a month
Mauro's gym app made $160K last month.
He runs a product like a lab: every feature gets an A/B test before it gets built, and anything that doesn't move the numbers gets killed, no matter how good the idea sounded.
Honestly the discipline impresses me more than the revenue. Most of us build what we're excited about and hope it grows.
(Tag @ChrisBulen to get your project featured in next week’s roundup)
Advertise with us!
Promote your product in our newsletter and reach over 15,660 of the most ambitious and inspiring startup founders and indie makers on the planet.
That’s it for this time! See you again next week.
— Chris (@ChrisBulen)
```



document fetched 2026-10-24 10:03