A 30-day challenge
Ship an iPhone App in 30 Days
From half-baked idea to the App Store in a month, with an AI tool doing the typing.
Kirk Kaiser
Built from an actual 21-day build of a real app, stretched to a month and paced so a person with a job can do it.
Every day is one short, concrete session — write the idea page, make it compile, put it on your phone, press submit — and one short clip to prove it happened. The AI writes the first draft of everything; you learn the part it can't do, which is deciding, cutting, and shipping.
- Exercises
- 35
- Total time
- 8h
- Difficulty
- 1–5
What you'll be able to do
- A real app I can tap through on my own phone
- My app on TestFlight, with friends actually using it
- My app submitted to the App Store for review
- An app with a working paid upsell
Wherever you're starting from
- I've never really written code — I'll lean on AI the whole way
- I can code a bit, but I've never shipped anything to users
- I've shipped web or backend software, never an iOS app
- I've shipped an iOS app; I want to see how fast AI makes it
What you need
- A Mac (that's it for now)
- A Mac and an iPhone
- Mac, iPhone, and a paid Apple Developer account
A few of the days
- Find three apps that each nail one piece of yours
- Write the half-baked idea on one page
- One screenshot for the build album
- Re-read the idea page and cross one thing out
- Say what the app is in one sentence
The rest are dealt to you after the quiz, sized to the time you actually have.
Nobody starts on camera
Getting started
Seven days free. One short exercise a day and a short clip to prove you did it, built around your time, your gear and how you feel about a camera.
Homework is an iPhone app. Install it and this challenge is in the list.