A great app idea doesn’t have to be the next Uber or TikTok to sit next to their icons on phone screens.
Nor do you need to invest $30,000 and 6 months just to launch your app, or bring in 10,000 paying users for it to start turning a profit.
All a profitable app idea needs to do is harness the features and conveniences of mobile devices to create valuable experiences worth paying for. That’s something anyone can now do with a no-code app builder like Passion.io.
Here are just some of the app ideas you can launch to start making money in days💡
1. Coaching App for a Better Client Experience
If you sell coaching services online or in-person, a coaching app can set you apart from the competition while making appointment booking and other resources available to clients in just a few taps.
By creating a client portal app for your coaching business, you can:
- Go from hourly rates to monthly subscriptions with perks like on-demand courses, in-app chat, and goal tracking to offer clients more value in between your 1:1 sessions.
- Use mobile push notifications to broadcast messages or openings to your entire client base or remind clients it’s been a while since their last session.
- Onboard new clients with in-app quizzes to understand their unique needs.
- Offer group and 1:1 coaching, bringing YouTube Live and Calendly into your app
⭐️App Inspiration: Slice Squad
Slice Squad is a Passion App launched by Hairstylist Nikki Bianco to help other stylists “slice their hair color appointment times in half and double their income.”
By offering on-demand courses and high-ticket coaching calls by application only through her app, she was able to earn over $290,000 in a single month.
2. Language Learning App —Like Duolingo With Better Results
If you can do, you can also teach. And if you can teach, you can earn recurring revenue with your own mobile learning app.
Traditional online courses aren’t designed for the way we learn today, and only around 10-15% of all online courses are ever completed.
Instead, you can build a Passion App that offers a monthly subscription to learn on the go, complete with:
- Ongoing private tutoring through in-app chat
- Cohort-based courses with live streaming to practice speaking with others
- Learning community channels where students can teach and support each other
- Quizzes and worksheets available in one place, surfaced at the right time
- Offline mode for truly on-demand courses and content, even without an internet connection
- Goal trackers for logging practice sessions
You can even create content drips to unlock new lessons as old ones are completed, or a certain amount of time has passed—to keep people engaged with fresh content delivered automatically.
Mobile learning apps are a great way to teach anything, not just languages. The more specific, the better.
⭐️App Inspiration: Learn Swahili Now
Learn Swahili Now, an app for busy Swahili learners, was launched on Passion.io and now has over 800 users with a 5-star rating in the app store. Beyond the library of language learning resources, the app also offers a learning community with 1:1 support from a Swahili coach and a public leaderboard for friendly competition.
3. Accountability App With Community Challenges
An app is always within arm’s reach, making it the perfect companion for anyone trying to build better habits. The goal could be getting in shape, meditating, quitting smoking, learning a new instrument, a daily photography challenge—anything!
By bringing together community channels, features for easy check-ins, and automated reminders in a mobile app, you can sell your app based on a promised outcome and actually deliver on it.
Using Passion.io, you can launch an app that offers:
- Automated daily challenges that bring users back to the app to participate.
- A safe space to connect with a supportive community going through the same experience together.
- Habit tracking features for members to monitor their progress privately or through a community leaderboard.
- Real-time alerts whenever you or another community member engages with a user. You can @channel your message to broadcast an alert to all members.
⭐️App Inspiration: Journey to Rise
Makinsey Chilcote is a mother of four who managed to scale her life coaching business to 100+ clients while realizing her dream of a 1-day work week. All by launching her own app that helps people live better lives: Journey to Rise.
Her app offers guided mediations, nutrition plan temples, communities for different wellness journeys, and trackers to monitor emotions, time spent meditating, and more.
4. Customer Community and Education App
An engaged customer community is one of the best moats you can build for your brand. But hosting your communities and content on social media alone makes them vulnerable to ever-changing algorithms and constant distraction.
Instead, you can extend your brand into an app to create more value post-purchase for customers (and your business) beyond the core products you sell.
You can:
- Share knowledge, courses, and tutorials to help customers get more value from your products
- Create a private network to connect customers with each other
- Deliver structured product onboarding through your app (great for SaaS and other products that benefit from ongoing education)
- Give user-generated content prompts to customers to gather social proof for your website, Instagram, and other public channels
- Get to know your customers personally with in-app chat (just be clear about your community guidelines if you don’t want it becoming a place for customer support)
- Introduce high-value digital and subscription products into your business model to expand your revenue streams
- Ask for feedback and ideas from your most loyal customers to inform product development plans
That’s how we use our own app, Passion Academy, to offer coaching and a network of experts to a community of 11,000 creators and entrepreneurs. You can download it on any iOS or Android device, or access it through any browser via the web app.
⭐️App Inspiration: SmartWorkout Pro
SmartWorkout is an ecommerce brand that migrated its workout tutorials from a PDF and YouTube channel into a more engaging mobile app. Now customers can learn how to get more from their resistance bands in an ad-free workout experience they can take anywhere (just like their bands).
Over 25,000 customers have downloaded the app and can access these tutorials on-demand while feeling even more connected to the brand.
The app subscription is offered as an optional add-on for customers purchasing their flagship resistance bands through SmartWorkout’s Shopify store. At just €5 for lifetime access to the app, adding it to cart is an easy decision for customers, resulting in a 72% upsell rate for this new digital product.
5. On-Demand Content Subscription App
You don’t need to be Netflix to create your own content streaming service.
With Passion.io, you can launch an on-demand content subscription to offer a growing library of original content to your subscribers like exclusive videos, courses, podcasts, downloadable files, live streams, and more.
Your content is accessible only through your app, ensuring your intellectual property—your content—is fully protected.
The benefit of an app versus website here is true portability, enabling your subscribers to:
- Consume interactive content experiences, ad-free and on the go with their mobile devices
- Get push notifications the moment new content is available
- Cast content from their phone to any screen using AirPlay or Chromecast
- Use offline mode to consume content later, even without Wi-Fi
⭐️App Inspiration: ORA Guide
ORA Guide was launched using Passion.io to offer a library of guided meditations, as well as regular spiritual reports and monthly live streams based on your subscription plan. The app has a ton of 5-star reviews about how much more connected they feel with Nicola Behrman, the creator behind the app and in front of the camera.
6. VIP Community Membership App—Your Own Private Social Network
There’s no shortage of ways for creators to monetize their talents and audiences. You can partner with brands on sponsored content, promote affiliate links, or sell products.
One of the most under-used monetization methods is selling memberships that include exclusive access to you or your network.
Your personal brand is why people follow you and having exclusive access to your expertise, creativity, network, or voice is value many audiences would pay for.
Membership websites like Patreon can be a helpful way for creators to crowdfund their work or for experts to host their own private social networks. But it’s a hard sell for audiences when it never feels like it truly belongs to the community when there’s a another brand’s website always in the middle.
That’s why creators are launching their own mobile apps, giving themselves a new channel to create experiences and connect with audiences that puts them in control.
Exclusivity sells and mobile apps can provoke FOMO like nothing else with:
- Teaser content that gives free members a sample of what’s on the other side of becoming a paid member.
- Read-only community channel previews where they can see the discussion but can’t. contribute to the private social network.
- Push notification about upcoming virtual events to boost attendance rates.
- Countdowns and time-locked content that build anticipation for upcoming drops.
⭐️App Inspiration: Beauty Boss
Brittne Ash launched the Beauty Boss app to host a private coaching community for independent beauty consultants and professionals who want to take their businesses online. With a 7-day free trial, people can experience the community first-hand before signing up for a paid membership.
7. Fitness App for Busy Lifestyles
Whether you’re a personal trainer, run a martial arts studio, or work as a part-time yoga instructor, launching your own fitness app can transform the way you work with your clients.
It feels like people today have two options for investing in their fitness: attend in-person gym sessions or exercise at home over Zoom.
A fitness app can offer them more options with the ability to:
- Book 1:1 sessions, both in-person and virtual, through the app
- Complete fitness routines anywhere with an app that’s on their phone and comes with an offline mode
- Buy monthly subscriptions and/or personal sessions based on their needs
- Stay on track with built-in timers and exercise sequences that enhance every workout
⭐️App Inspiration: Fit in Twenty
Fit in Twenty is a workout program in app form created by Ellen Decker “to provide women with the motivation and confidence to transform into the best version of themselves”.
Customers can get access to the fitness programs for less than the price of a monthly gym membership and, for even better results, opt in for a personalized meal plan. Ellen’s app has a 5-star rating in the Apple app store with over 90 reviews.
8. Employee Onboarding App
Whether it’s a fast-growing startup or a Fortune 500 corporation, a week of onboarding is never enough for new employees to get all the context they need to thrive.
An app can be part of a much smoother employee experience by unshackling onboarding from the start of a new job and making it a part of an employee’s entire tenure.
Learning management systems available only on the web are destined to gather dust. An app, on the other hand, can let employees:
- Listen to your internal podcast while going on a walk
- Provide structured onboarding dripped out over time to let new team members internalize the content
- Cast recordings of company town halls on their TV to watch while working from home
- Take structured courses and learn at their own pace to level up their skills
- Consume internal content securely
⭐️App Inspiration: Our Own Onboarding App for Passioneers
Using the custom plan options within our Passion Academy app, it also doubles as an onboarding app for Passion.io team members—or Passioneers as we like to call them.
Through it, we’re able to create a more structured onboarding experience than a checklist and a bunch of links in a Google Doc.
What’s more, anyone can create their own onboarding “course” that repurposes existing content from other courses to structure the experience around the specific role.
What’s your big (or small) app idea?
Your app could have 100,000 paying users, but it doesn’t need to in order to be a success.
By combining digital products, coaching calls, interactive features, courses, communities, and the “anytime, anywhere” value of a mobile app, you can design the ideal business model for your app.
You could sell $50 monthly subscriptions to 100 people, $200 courses to 15 people in a month, $500 coaching services to 5 people per month, all of the above, or something else entirely.
It all depends on the app idea you decide to bring to life.
