If you're trying to build a profitable app right now, you have two options…

Option one: spend hundreds of hours researching ideas, bingeing coding and marketing tutorials on YouTube, and end up quitting because you don’t know how to start or who to take advice from.

Option two: study these seven people who are actually in the arena, shipping apps, running profitable companies, and posting what works in real time.

Here's seven underrated founders worth learning from that are more valuable than any course or YouTube video you’ll consume:

1. Eric Seufert: the marketing economist

Seufert ran growth at Wooga and Rovio (the Angry Birds studio), wrote the book Freemium Economics, and built and sold a marketing analytics company. 

His blog Mobile Dev Memo is pure gold for understanding how mobile advertising actually works post-privacy-changes. 

If you want to understand why your paid acquisition isn't converting (and what to do instead) he's one of the deepest thinkers in the space.

2. Jacob Eiting: the subscription whisperer

Eiting is the founder/CEO of RevenueCat, which powers in-app subscriptions for 30,000+ apps and gives him a god's-eye view of what's actually making money across the entire App Store. 

He grew it from $400/month to $2M ARR by writing content that answered the exact questions developers were Googling (an elite distribution lesson in itself). 

When he talks about pricing, paywalls, and conversion, you should listen because he's reading from the largest subscription dataset on earth.

3. David Barnard: the indie veteran

Barnard has been building apps since the App Store launched in 2008.

He's shipped 30+ projects, sold four, and survived every algorithm shift along the way. 

As RevenueCat's Growth Advocate and host of the Sub Club podcast, he extracts tactical playbooks from the founders behind the biggest apps in the world.

His own war stories (about everything from launches that flopped terribly and how to actually A/B test) are worth your time.

4. Thomas Petit: the distribution mechanic

Petit is an independent growth advisor who's consulted for 20+ apps including Deezer and Babbel, and won the 2022 App Growth Award for contribution to the community.

He's the rare person who'll tell you the hard truths nobody else will, like the fact that even when you target hundreds of keywords in Apple Search Ads, most of your downloads come from just five to ten of them.

If App Store Optimization and paid search are your bottleneck, he's the operator to study.

5. Adam Lyttle: the portfolio machine

Lyttle went from $200K in debt to a reported $800K+ across a portfolio of 50+ simple apps (proof that you don't need to build the next Instagram to win).

His entire approach is a repeatable system: find a niche, build simply, optimize for App Store discovery, and repeat.

He posts his ASO tricks, rapid-build sprints, and revenue numbers openly, which makes him the most actionable follow on this list if you're a solo builder.

6. Josh Mohrer: the zero-to-code solo founder

Mohrer helped build Uber's New York operation from zero to billions in revenue, then taught himself to code using ChatGPT and solo-built Wave AI to $4M ARR in eight months (with no employees or co-founder).

He's living proof of the new "solopreneur" reality where one person with AI tools and business sense can build a real company.

Follow him for the playbook on shipping an AI app with a tiny team.

7. Sylvain Gauchet: the insight miner

Gauchet runs growth at Babbel and "mines" the best tactical insights from hundreds of growth podcasts, webinars, and talks into his Growth Gems newsletter.

His specialty is onboarding and the early user experience, the exact moments that determine whether someone churns or becomes a paying subscriber.

Think of him as a curated filter that turns thousands of hours of content into the 5% that actually moves revenue.

Pick any two of these, read everything they've published, and you'll know more about building a profitable app than 95% of people calling themselves founders.

The barrier to building has never been lower, and the barrier to learning from the right people just dropped too.

Go follow them, their accounts are linked below.

- Jake