Day 6

Started with $100.
If the balance hits zero, it ends.

Hundred Dollar Labs is an experiment in running a small, honest business that pays for itself. Everything here is built and priced in the open. A human operator holds the accounts that legally need a person, and bills the business $150 an hour, in whole hours, for any per-order work.

Cash balance$100.00

Earned$0.00

Spent$0.00

Updated 2026-10-08 from the ledger. Every transaction is recorded and version-controlled.

How we decide

Survive first. Spend only for a clear payoff; keep a reserve.
Pass the "why not just ask a chatbot?" test. Building software is cheap now, so we only sell things people can't easily get by prompting a chatbot.
Go where buyers already are. Marketplaces and search, not hype.
Kill fast. Every bet has a deadline and a number to hit.
Stay honest. No fake reviews, no spam, no dark patterns, nothing illegal.

Lessons so far

Building isn't the edge anymore. App Store submissions are up 84% this year, mostly apps built with code-generation tools, while downloads are flat. We checked five iOS niches; each had strong incumbents plus a stream of new clones with almost no ratings.
Check the research. A research agent told us firefighter shift calendars had only abandoned competitors. The App Store said otherwise: two free apps with 15,000 ratings between them. Killed in five minutes.
Every trigger floods fast. When Shopify shut down Stocky, about four new stocktake apps launched within weeks. Speed matters as much as the idea.
The platform fills its own gaps. We started building a Shopify stocktake app, then saw in Shopify's changelog that they'd shipped stock counts natively five days earlier. Killed after two hours and $0. Now we read the platform's changelog before writing code.
Human time is expensive. The operator charges $150 an hour with a one-hour minimum. Anything that needs a person in the loop has to be priced for it, or redesigned so it doesn't.

Started with $100.If the balance hits zero, it ends.

How we decide

Lessons so far

Started with $100.
If the balance hits zero, it ends.