Coding 3 Days, $20K Revenue — The Real Secret Was 40 Pieces of Content a Day

Hey, it's Jenny.

Today I want to talk about a tool I built. But before that, let me share a case that inspired it.

A Non-Developer Built a $20K/Month App in 3 Days with AI

Mau Baron. Finance major, zero coding experience. He built an app in 3 days using just Cursor and ChatGPT.

The app is called Prayer Lock. It locks your phone, and the only way to unlock it is by praying. No database, no sign-up, everything stored on-device. As Mau puts it, "Making users sign up is friction. And I save on DB costs too."

6-month results? 58,000 downloads, 6,700 reviews, 4.9-star rating. Revenue went from October $10K → November $15K → December $21K. That's over 50% month-over-month growth.

But the real story isn't about the building.

What Actually Made the Revenue Was Distribution

Mau didn't know what would work at first. So he posted 40 pieces of content a day across 12 accounts. Pure volume.

After 40 posts, he finally found a hook that worked — UGC girl reaction videos with an app demo. He asked his girlfriend to film reaction clips. He was broke, so hiring wasn't an option.

That format consistently hit 10K views per day, getting him to $1K/month in revenue. Then he extended his onboarding from 5 minutes to 15 minutes — this single change 3x'd his organic conversion rate.

Then TikTok ads. He threw his entire savings — $4,000 — into ads. Went into debt, poured another $6K. Currently spending $360/day on ads (~$9K/month), cost per trial down to $1.88. With $20K revenue and $9K ad spend, net profit is roughly $11K/month.

The last thing Mau said really stuck with me:

"Building is easy now. But distribution is still hard — and that's where you need to spend your time."

Coding took 3 days. But the revenue came from 6 months of content after that.

So I Built a Content Production Tool

After reading this case, one thing kept bugging me. 40 pieces of content a day? Every single day? Then production speed is everything.

Making a TikTok carousel ad manually takes about 40 minutes per 3-slide set. Open Canva, pick a background photo, place the text, design the CTA slide. If you need 5 sets, that's 3 hours and 20 minutes just on design.

If you want to post like Mau — 40 pieces a day — that speed is simply impossible.

So I built /tik2.

/tik2 "MONEY TALKS"

One line. 3 slides come out as PNGs. Photos auto-selected, body copy AI-generated, CTA slide included — all automatic.

Want more?

/tik2 --batch 5

5 sets, 15 slides total, generated at once. No duplicate photos, every quote different.

How the Slides Work

Slide 1 is a 3-word hooking quote like "THINK BIGGER" or "YOUR MOVE" over a luxury photo.

Slide 2 is the real message. Something like "97% of people retire broke. Not because they didn't earn enough — because they never learned how money works." Key words get a yellow highlight.

Slide 3 is the CTA. Phone mockup with an app screenshot and a "Start learning free" gold button.

Under the Hood

Three HTML templates with swappable variables.

Playwright runs a headless browser to capture HTML at exactly 1080×1920 (TikTok portrait ratio). Since CSS controls all shadows, gradients, and typography, consistency is actually higher than Canva.

Photos are pre-curated — 10 money/luxury themed shots from Unsplash. In batch mode, already-used photos are automatically skipped. The past/ folder tracks the last set number so numbering continues seamlessly.

Before generating, a plan preview always shows up — you confirm the quotes and photos before anything gets created. No accidental bad outputs.

Results

Real Output Examples

Here's an actual TikTok carousel published using /tik2:

And here are 4 sets of carousel slides generated in a single batch run — each set took 30 seconds:

Set 1

Set 2

Set 3

Set 4

Takeaway

Here's the one thing from Mau's case.

Coding 3 days, $20K revenue. But between those two numbers were 6 months of 40 daily content pieces. It wasn't the app quality that made the money — it was the speed of content production.

But if you're making 40 pieces a day, design speed becomes the bottleneck. At 40 minutes per carousel, you can't even make 10 a day.

That's exactly why I built /tik2. 80x faster production — from 40 minutes to 30 seconds per set. When an idea takes 40 minutes to execute, you think "I'll do it later." But 30 seconds? You make it the moment it hits you.

Building is easy now. Distribution is hard. And the core of distribution is production speed.

Jenny

Get the Skills

Want to try this skill yourself? Here's the full source file:

• /tik2-carousel — TikTok carousel slide auto-generator (swap text + photo, infinite production)

How to use

1. Click Raw on the Gist page and copy the entire content
2. Save it as a SKILL.md file in your project:
   .claude/skills/tik2-carousel/SKILL.md
3. Open Claude Code and type /tik2 to run