Here is the simple web app I created in 6 hours. It is a Finnish rental cottage finder that has more than 5,000 users every month.
The working principle is simple. The app grabs the information that the user enters and opens up our partner's website with the cottages based on the user-specified criteria.
It's very simple. Anybody with basic-level web development skills could replicate this in hours.
But how does this make any money?
It's a simple affiliate deal.
When a user clicks "FIND!", they click my affiliate link which our partner notices. If the visitor then rents any cottage in the next 14 days, we earn a $22 commission.
Where do the users come from?
Anybody can code an app. But getting people to use it is the hard part.
First of all, there needs to be demand.
Before I built this app, I knew there were hundreds of thousands of Finnish people visiting rental cottages every year. So there were tons of people looking for solutions like this.
But then there's also competition…
In our case, many better and more popular cottage finder apps already exist. So how on earth does my app get users if there are better solutions out there already?
The answer lies in marketing.
In our case, we use Google as our free traffic source. During 2022–2023, we wrote 400+ blog posts on our site to showcase the best cottages in different areas.
Yes, that's a lot of work!
Whenever people Google something like "Rental Cottages in Lapland", our website is among the first search results. If a visitor then opens up our website, the first thing they see is the rental cottage finder app I made.
At this point, it's a no-brainer for them to use the app as it sits right there.
Currently, our site gets 5,000–10,000 monthly visits from Google, most of which use the app. We make about $1,200-$1,500/mo passively from this site, most of which comes through the app.
Monthly earnings in EURThe key takeaway
So I spent 6 hours writing the web app.
But then we spent 1,000+ hours promoting the app by writing those 400 blog posts.
This means:
- 0.6% of the time coding
- 99.4% of the time marketing.
It's so much marketing that it makes no sense to even call it a "code project".
Before you code…
It's always all about marketing and promotion. If you just build it, they won't come.
