My app makes $41K/month

Joe Rozek built Weightley, a wait list and reservations platform that generates over $40,000 per month in revenue.

Background and Origin Story

• Worked as a software engineer at Shutterfly after college, eventually moving into management
• Missed the coding and building aspects of his job, so he started looking for a side project to learn iOS development
• In 2017, went to brunch with his wife and got put on a wait list
• Received a text with a link to check his wait time, but the link required downloading Yelp and creating an account just to see the wait time
• By the time he signed up, his table was already ready
• His wife suggested he could build a wait list app instead
• Spent six months building a working prototype, then about a year and a half more before launching in the app store
• First week got only 10 downloads
• Launched in-app purchases about two years in and started growing the business

Products and Offerings

• Weightley: a wait list and reservations platform for businesses with waiting customers
• Allows businesses to add guests to a wait list with name, party size, estimated wait time, phone number, and seating preferences
• Customers receive a text message with a link to view their wait time without downloading an app
• Businesses can notify customers when their table is ready with a second text message
• Flat fee of $100 per month to unlock all features
• Offers onboarding through Zoom, staff training, and promotions for trial users

Metrics and Financials

• Year 1: $0 (free version)
• Year 2: $14,500
• Year 3: $116,000
• Year 4: $186,000
• Year 5: $307,000
• Year 6: $354,000
• Year 7: $445,000
• Current year: on pace for over $500,000
• Over 15,000 businesses have tried Weightley
• Currently has 700 paying customers in the US and Canada
• Over 59 million parties have been waitlisted on the platform
• Customer acquisition cost: $130
• Customer lifetime value: $750-$1,000

Strategy and Growth

• Primary growth driver: Apple Search ads on relevant keywords
• Email nurturing campaigns with tips and quick start videos
• Customer service as a differentiator—someone answers the support line immediately
• Competes on price: $100/month flat fee versus hundreds per month for Yelp and OpenTable plus cover fees
• Competes on simplicity: focused solely on wait lists and reservations, which works for multiple industries
• During COVID, pivoted to retail chains needing wait lists for limited capacity, expanded to over 700 locations and 10xed the business that year

Tech Stack and Infrastructure

• Built on Google Firebase for hosting, authentication, and database
• Backend services written in Node.js
• iOS app written in Swift
• Web version written in ReactJS

Costs and Margins

• Firebase: $700 per month
• Business text messages: $2,500 per month
• Revenue Cat (subscriptions): 1% of revenue
• Apple Search Ads: approximately $500 per month
• Stripe (payments): 3% of revenue
• SurveyMonkey: $35 per month
• Hive (project management): $25 per month
• Freshdesk (customer support): $40 per month
• Claude Code: $200 per month
• ChatGPT (email content): $20 per month
• Calendly (booking demos): $12 per month

Lessons and Advice

• You don’t need a completely new idea—find problems that have been solved and improve upon them
• Use AI to build a minimum viable product quickly, potentially in just a couple weeks
• Get feedback from early customers
• Expect the unexpected and be ready to adapt
• When self-doubt creeps in, keep going—doubts have no basis in reality because you cannot predict the future
• Launch your product and see what the future holds