About a month ago I got fired from my corporate software engineering job, so I set a pretty aggressive goal: build my first ever iOS app without knowing Swift, ship it to the App Store, and document the whole thing—idea to launch. Like always on this channel, I wasn’t doing this “for fun” only. I wanted to see if I could turn it into real revenue and eventually scale it toward five figures in monthly recurring revenue, so I show the messy parts too: the bugs, the dead ends, and the stuff that made me want to quit. The app idea was a polished clone of something already making bank, but with a twist. I’m into fitness and running, so I built an AI calorie + macros tracker where you snap a pic of your food, and I focused on how different foods impact energy (not just the numbers). I avoided expensive $100/month APIs, used a pay-as-you-go microservice for image analysis, and built an MVP first—then worked on identity and design. I integrated analytics (PostHog), monetization (RevenueCat), auth, onboarding, and a paywall, and ran head-first into Apple Dev Program and App Store Connect chaos. I also share what happened after launch: Apple rejection, a brutal paywall bug that blocked paid users, the resubmission, and the app’s first-week revenue from organic traffic. Next step is marketing it myself (Instagram Reels) and pushing MRR up from there.