Making $9k/mo with a mobile app until platform risk took its toll

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Emanuele Di Pietro had a stable 9 to 5, and he more or less forced himself out of it. He wanted freedom from a mundane routine, and the satisfaction of building something entirely his own, in his words, his own little kingdom.

He started web development in 2022 with a basic HTML and CSS course. From there he applied to the Apple Developer Academy for 2023 to 2024 and began building iOS apps, drawn to the idea of people carrying something he made around in their pockets.

He has now built ten iOS apps. Monthly revenue across the portfolio has swung sharply in recent months: a best month of $9k, followed just a couple of months later by $1.5k. He still lives with his parents, which keeps his expenses low, and he earns enough to keep his own costs off their hands. He occasionally freelances for extra cash, but most of his income comes from X and from his own products.

Here is the story behind that swing, and the two products, Remodex and Synara, carrying the portfolio forward.

Most of Emanuele's revenue has come from Remodex, and he is upfront that it was never meant to last. It was, in his own words, a temporary solution.

Remodex became the most used viral tool for running Codex from a phone. Then OpenAI released their own version, exactly as Emanuele expected they eventually would, and that release is the direct reason behind the revenue decline. Even so, the app was genuinely valuable in the interim, and he is still trying to keep it alive with an update on the way. Even now, it holds a handful of useful features that OpenAI's own Codex app does not have.

His current focus outside of that maintenance work is Synara, an open source GUI and agentic development environment for serious agentic work. It lets someone run every coding agent in parallel without losing context between them. It is still free today, with a mobile app and subscription on the way.

Version 1.0 of Remodex took one to two weeks to build, just Emanuele and his PC. He did not sleep much during that stretch, lost a fair amount of weight, and pushed as hard as he could to get the app out as fast as possible.

Getting it done that quickly was as much a mental exercise as a technical one. Some days motivation carried him. Other days it was pure momentum. And some days it came down to a simpler fact: if he did not do the work, nobody else was going to do it for him.

The stack behind it:

Emanuele grows all of his apps organically through X, where he has nearly 11,000 followers, a real asset for a solo builder shipping consumer apps.

He started with detailed, carefully considered posts aimed at growing an audience and going viral in a genuine way, not a manufactured one. He used Grok to find viral posts within his niche, then used Claude to reshape his own posts into something more interesting to read.

Eventually he shifted into daily videos documenting his process and what he was learning along the way. As of today, that is 352 consecutive days of recording, without a single day missed.

Growth on X has not been a straight line. There were stretches when the algorithm shifted and he went effectively invisible, and it felt as though all the earlier progress had evaporated overnight. He describes it plainly as a rollercoaster. But it has paid off, both for his products directly and because he earns as a creator on the platform. X changed his life, and he says it keeps changing it, mostly for the better.

His specific tips for growing a following:

Beyond X, he launched on Product Hunt, Tinylaunch, Uneed, and a few similar platforms. He tried promoting on Reddit once, found the moderation rules too strict for his approach, and chose not to keep pursuing that channel.

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Emanuele is candid that his most difficult challenges have been mental rather than technical. Indie hacking, in his framing, genuinely messes with your mind.

You are alone, competing against companies many times your size. You are the only person who can push the thing forward, and the only person who can let it sink. That takes real nerve. There will be sleepless nights, and there will be moments that require an honest conversation with yourself to keep going.

Especially at the start, you have to push yourself deliberately. You need to prove to yourself that you can actually do this, and build the confidence from there. It takes a great deal of work, but in his assessment it is entirely worth it.

A few things that helped him through it:

Emanuele's core advice is direct: go all in on AI. In his view, that is clearly where things are headed, and there is little upside in resisting it.

His suggestion is to let AI guide what you actually need to learn to become an indie hacker. Let it help you understand the pieces, and then let it help you build. From there, watch YouTube videos, talk to people with more experience than you, and actively ask for feedback rather than waiting for it to arrive.

And share your progress publicly, even when it feels like nobody is paying attention. Soon enough, someone will care, and that response will motivate you in a way that building quietly never does.

Emanuele's goal is straightforward: a good life, a nice car, a nice house, financial freedom, and location freedom. That is the plain reason he keeps pushing this hard.

You can follow along on X, where he shares his process and his daily video streak, and check out Remodex and Synara directly through his profile.