A Habit Tracker Made $112K in One Month
Here’s the simple pattern you can copy.
In January 2025, a software engineer in Germany made $112,000.
In one month.
From an app that is, more or less, a grid of squares you tap to fill in.
That’s more than he earned in an entire year at his old software job. He says he stared at the number convinced it was a bug.
It wasn’t.
Twenty-five thousand grown adults pay every month to fill in little squares.
The dumb part is I get it.
So what is this thing
The app is called HabitKit. It’s a habit tracker. You add a habit — drink water, go for a run, stop eating cookies like a raccoon at midnight — and every time you do it, you tap it and a little square fills in with color. Do it enough days in a row and you get a wall of colored squares that looks like a GitHub contribution graph.
That’s the whole app.
No AI. No social feed. No backend doing anything clever. A grid of squares that change color.
I’ve seen spreadsheets with more ambition. The spreadsheet is broke.
Hold onto that, because the “this is too simple” reaction is the whole point of the story.
The part nobody puts on LinkedIn
Here’s the version you won’t see in a motivational carousel.
In 2022, Sebastian Röhl was a burnt-out software engineer in Germany. He quit his job and gave himself a hard 12-month deadline to build a profitable app business. Romantic stuff. Big leap.
His first app, a workout tracker called Liftbear, took a month to build and six months to go nowhere. He was pulling in maybe two new users a day. Revenue was around $150 a month — enough to cover his Apple developer license and absolutely nothing else.
By his own account, he was demoralized and starting to think quitting his job was a mistake. The thing that turned it around wasn’t a growth hack. It was his girlfriend telling him to drop the workout app and try something completely different.
The most important product meeting was apparently one conversation with his girlfriend.
No Notion doc.
No roadmap.
No “customer discovery sprint.”
Just: maybe stop polishing the app nobody wants.
That nudge became HabitKit, launched in November 2022.
And it still didn’t work right away. By April 2023, the apps couldn’t pay rent, so he went back to his old job part-time. The real turning point came in May 2023 — he was at a friend’s wedding when his phone started buzzing nonstop with sales notifications. HabitKit had finally cracked the top 10 in App Store search for “habit tracker.” People could finally find it.
So the failed app and the deadline weren’t the obstacle. They were the training. Liftbear taught him exactly what to stop doing.
What actually made it work
Strip away the story and here’s the machine underneath. Five things.
1. Distribution was App Store search, not ad spend. He barely paid for marketing. He built in public and ranked for the keyword “habit tracker.” Think about who types “habit tracker” into an app store — they’re not browsing, they’re already reaching for their wallet.
His growth strategy was being the exact thing people typed into the search bar. They don’t teach this at Stanford because it is too useful and has no framework name.
2. The look is free marketing. That contribution-grid design is pretty. People screenshot their colored squares and post them. The product markets itself because it photographs well.
3. The price is low enough that paying isn’t a decision. Around 25,000 paying subscribers, most of them at one or two dollars a month. Tiny price, massive volume. And he’s still running pricing experiments years in — it was never one lucky guess.
4. He uses it every day. He tracks his own habits in his own app. He even trained for and ran his first marathon while building the thing.
He actually uses his own app every day, which in this industry is basically a magic trick.
5. Speed over polish. Liftbear was six months of polishing features nobody asked for. With HabitKit he flipped it: short deadline, ship fast, build the rest from what users actually requested.
The numbers, told honestly
This is where most posts lie by leaving things out, so let’s not.
That $602,000 figure floating around?
It is 2025 revenue from HabitKit — not profit, not salary, and not passive income.
Still insane.
Just not magic.
The real timeline is slower and more useful:
HabitKit launched in November 2022.
It did not work instantly.
By 2023, App Store search started doing the heavy lifting.
In 2024, he quit his job again.
In 2025, HabitKit hit $602K in revenue.
January alone brought in $112K.
And it’s seasonal. Summers sit lower. Then New Year’s resolution season hits and it spikes, because a habit tracker in January sells itself.
Every January, the entire planet decides to become a better person, panics, and downloads his squares. He’s the only man alive rooting for your resolutions.
The 2025 chapter: he had already quit his job again, for good. HabitKit kept climbing, got a boost from public exposure, and then January stacked the resolution rush on top of everything else.
The number everyone screenshots is the $112K month.
The number nobody screenshots is the first one: two users a day.
Or $150 a month.
Or going back to work part-time.
The “overnight success” took years, one dead app, one return to employment, and a lot of squares.
What you can actually take from this
A boring, simple product that solves one real problem can out-earn the clever stuff. Simple isn’t the weakness. It’s the moat.
Distribution beats features. Be findable where people are already looking for exactly what you made.
Price low, sell volume, and build something that’s pretty enough that users market it for you.
Build the thing you’d actually open every day.
And the timeline is real. Patience here isn’t a poster on a wall — it’s the literal mechanism. Sebastian says it himself: the longer you’ve been making money, the calmer you get about it.
You don’t need an $80M acquisition story to copy. You need one simple thing people are searching for, and enough stubbornness to not quit before year two.
Overnight success, roughly one thousand nights of it.
That’s really inspirational!