Case study, independent product
Earnling: a kid's first business, minus the guesswork
A playful, parent-guided mobile app that shows kids exactly when their earrings, cookies, or pottery start turning a real profit. It is my first mobile app, designed and built end-to-end on my own.
- Role
- Sole designer and builder
- Type
- Consumer mobile app
- Built with
- React Native, Expo
- Status
- Live on the App Store
The idea
Lots of kids sell something: beaded earrings, lemon cookies, little pottery pieces at a craft fair. What they rarely see is the math underneath it. They spent money on supplies, they took money in, and somewhere in the middle is the moment it actually became a business. That break-even moment is the whole lesson, and it is usually invisible.
Earnling makes it visible. A child logs what they make, what they sell, and what their supplies cost, and a meter fills as they earn back what they spent, then turns green the moment real profit begins. It is a money lesson that does not feel like a lecture.
What I built
- Designed three steps a kid can actually run: add what you make, log each sale and supply cost, and watch the profit grow.
- Built the break-even meter, so spending reads as something you earn back and the click into profit is something a child can feel.
- Added a PIN-protected grown-up zone with the real numbers and a talk-it-over prompt, so parents and kids learn together.
- Made sale logging fast enough for a kid at a busy table, capturing what sold, how much, and where.
- Added location tracking on each sale, so kids can see which spots actually make money: real strategy, kid-sized.
- Took it through TestFlight beta and launched it on the App Store, following a waitlist of 175 people.
The product and the story behind it: a kid's progress toward profit inside the app, and how the landing page explains it to parents.
Why it works
- It teaches one clear idea, the break-even moment, and builds the whole experience around making that idea felt.
- It keeps parents in the loop by design, so the app is a shared conversation rather than another screen.
- It meets kids where they really sell, fast to log and honest about which choices made money.
- It is a real, shipped product: my first mobile app, built end-to-end and now live on the App Store.
Takeaway
Earnling reflects how I build: take one real moment that matters, the instant a small business turns a profit, and design the whole product to make it clear, motivating, and shared.
Tooling
- React Native
- Expo
- Supabase
- Claude Code
- TestFlight
See it for yourself, or read the next case study.