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Monkey Taps surpassed $10M+ ARR
Boring business and App Studios are the new sexy.
Monkey Taps hit $10M+ ARR
Today, a post on X from Leopold with just 800+ followers attracts me. He mentioned that the app Motivation had surpassed 1 million ratings on the US App Store — No investors, just 11 years of shipping, tweaking, and learning.
I find the post was from the founder of Monkey Taps, the App Studio behind Motivation.
Monkey Taps has mastered simplicity. Their philosophy: build simple apps that promote positive thinking and personal growth. Motivation, for example, is essentially a beautifully packaged affirmation delivery engine — pairing feel-good quotes with aesthetic backgrounds. Users can share them on social media or get daily pushes to uplift themselves.
They monetize primarily by selling premium background images and customization. The current ARR for Motivation is around $4M, and interestingly, it’s a rebranded version of an earlier product I am, which itself generates about $5M ARR. Combined, just these two apps bring in nearly $9M per year.
The studio now has 6 apps in total, with over 50 million downloads. Their core themes are self-care, self-love, and self-growth, and their overall ARR has comfortably exceeded $10M.
They have no physical office. The team works remotely, spread across Spain and the U.S. East Coast. Communication happens mostly via Notion and Slack.
They’ve created a flexible work culture with benefits like fully paid parental leave and free English lessons from native speakers for non-native team members — perks that would make most startups envious.
This reminded me of another remote-first product I’ve followed: Ghost, the publishing platform behind many top newsletters and websites.
Ghost: One Product, $8M Revenue
Ghost has followed a completely different trajectory. Fully remote with a virtual HQ in Singapore, the team spans 13 countries across 5 continents.
When I first learned about them two years ago, their ARR was $6M. Last September, it reached $7M. Today, it has surpassed $8M in ARR.
Founder John O’Nolan shared that since its Kickstarter launch 12 years ago, Ghost has helped independent publishers earn over $ 100 million.
Fun fact: OpenAI’s original site was built using Ghost, and around the time of ChatGPT’s release, Ghost-generated traffic for OpenAI exceeded all their other publisher partners combined.
The App Studio Movement
Over the past year, I’ve profiled many app studios and venture studios — each taking different approaches:
They all share certain traits — but their origins, strategies, and product bets vary greatly.
