I Built a $17K/Month App While Working Full-Time as a Backend Engineer
Aleksei Rozhnov builds Evelize, a teleprompter app doing $17K/month, while working full-time as a backend engineer at a trading firm in London. The real story of balancing a 9-to-5 with a growing app business.
Evelize is a teleprompter app doing $17K/month across iOS and Android. No VC. Built entirely through paid ads. And both founders still haven't quit their day jobs.
Who is Aleksei Rozhnov?
Aleksei Rozhnov is a backend engineer at a trading firm in London who builds a $17K/month app on the side. He started programming as a kid and built Android games that never shipped. Not one or two. A whole folder of them. He moved to London for university, got a job at Cisco, then a commercial bank (full of politics), and landed at a trading firm where he does generic backend work for good money. He doesn't know how to trade. He just builds auth systems and data storage for the people who do.
The whole time, he kept trying to build things on the side. And kept not finishing them. He was obsessed with clean code, doing things "the right way," iterating on small details forever. At some point it clicked that none of that matters if you never ship. Cutting corners isn't lazy. It's how things get out the door. He started planning in stages, setting fake deadlines for himself, and actually pushing stuff live even when it felt unfinished.
That's what made Evelize possible.
What is Evelize?
Evelize is a teleprompter app. You write a script, the text scrolls on screen, and the app records you at the same time.
The interesting part is who actually uses it. You'd assume content creators and influencers, but most of their users are people who never wanted to make videos in the first place. Business owners who realized they need to do marketing. Care home workers recording stories. People with zero video experience who just want something to make the process less painful.
The idea came from Maksim, Aleksei's partner and childhood friend. Maksim built a random demo for a developer conference, and then came to Aleksei with the idea to make it a real product. That was 2023. Maksim does iOS, Aleksei does Android. Both apps are native, no cross-platform framework.
How much does Evelize make?
Evelize generated $17,000 in the last 30 days across both platforms, as Aleksei shared on the Tap & Swipe podcast (April 2026). Growth comes from paid ads, mainly Google Ads for iOS, and they're now scaling Android too.
They ignored Android for two years because they believed the "Android users don't pay" thing. When they finally ran a proper test, they realized they'd been wrong. Android attribution works better than iOS because there's no ATT lockdown, so ad algorithms can optimize faster with less data. The tradeoff: you get more one-star reviews from people who are angry about the paywall. That's real. But the revenue is also real.
How competitive is the teleprompter app market?
Teleprompter apps aren't trendy. Nobody's writing Twitter threads about the teleprompter market. But the category is mature and competitive. Both stores are packed with established options backed by strong marketing.
Evelize's advantage is being ultra simple and intuitive, while fully native on both platforms. No cross-platform shortcuts. Proper video quality settings (4K, 60fps) and a built-in video editor so you don't need a separate app to trim and crop.
What did Aleksei learn building a side project?
"Marketing is a pseudo-science"
Aleksei comes from a technical background where problems have clear solutions. Marketing is nothing like that. He talked to three different experts about running Meta ads for iOS apps and got three contradicting answers. All of them were right. All of them were wrong. His takeaway: stop expecting things to make sense.
"No one truly understands how all of these big marketing machines work, especially with the algorithms that change all the time. You just got to try things without overthinking."
The math on quitting doesn't work yet
He did the math with Maksim. They're not fresh out of uni. They're mid-career engineers in the UK with real salaries. $17K/month split between two founders, minus ad spend and taxes, doesn't replace what they have.
"If our business is not doing a few millions per year, there's no reliable way of us going into it full time."
He's honest about the peace of mind a paycheck gives you too. When you're fully in your business, every day feels like a roller coaster. The job is the opposite. Stable, boring, and that's exactly why it works as a foundation.
"I'm pretty lame and boring"
When asked how he handles 70-80 hour weeks between his job and Evelize, he just shrugged.
"I'm totally happy just being at home, glued to my laptop, doing stuff."
He doesn't separate work and life. For him they overlap all the time, and working on weekends is a pleasure, not a burden. He knows not everyone is wired like that. "Luckily, my wife is also okay with this. At least for now. Maybe that will change over time."
"Forget everything you've learned"
His advice for engineers who want to build on the side: all the clean code stuff, the best practices, doing things properly? Doesn't matter. Get it over the line. Then figure out distribution.
"Product is okay. Often product doesn't even matter that much. Distribution is the game."
And for technical people, paid acquisition is the closest thing to a solvable equation. It's a decent starting point if organic content feels too vague.
Google Ads can just run for years
While everyone talks about creative fatigue on TikTok and Meta, Aleksei pointed out that Google search ads are different. No creatives involved. Just text and links.
"You can set up one ad campaign and it can run for three years just fine."
Less exciting than viral content, but way more predictable when you're bootstrapped and can't afford to gamble your budget.
Where can I watch the full episode?
We also talked about A/B testing paywalls (and why most people A/B test too early), why they built their own analytics tool instead of using RevenueCat, and why Aleksei thinks diversifying across ten products is smarter than betting everything on one.