He rebuilt a Skype clone in a weekend and makes $17K/month
by Jason LeeWelcome back to Breadcrumb. Your weekly digest of people building real profitable businesses with simple AI tools.
☎️ Yadaphone
- WHAT
- Yadaphone
- FOUNDED
- 2024
- REVENUE
- $17,500 a month
Back in early 2024, Microsoft said it was shutting down Skype.
Most people read that and moved on. A guy in Vienna named Denis Yurchak read it and saw a huge opportunity.
Here's the thing he noticed.
A lot of people used Skype for one simple reason: making cheap phone calls to other countries. Think of someone living abroad who calls their mom every week. Or a freelancer calling a client overseas. When Skype said it was closing, all those people were about to lose this ability to make international calls.
So Denis decided to build them a new one.
He vibe-coded the first version of Yadaphone over a single weekend. And it does just one thing. You open it in your web browser and make cheap calls to phones in other countries.
Then he shared it in a couple of Reddit and X posts.
After one month he had about 300 users and $4,000 coming in. By month three it was $10,800. By month six, $13,300. Now, a little over a year later, Yadaphone makes around $17,500 a month and has more than 20,000 users.
And I want you to notice who this guy is.
Denis is not some famous tech founder. He studied international relations in school, not computer science, and taught himself to vibe-code over one summer. Before this, he built about ten other things, and none of them really went anywhere.
This was the one that hit. And a big part of why it hit was simply good timing.
How he got people to find it
He didn't jump immediately to running ads.
He went looking for old blog posts and articles that talked about Skype. Then he emailed the people who wrote them. The message was basically: "Hey, Skype is shutting down, so that link in your post doesn't really work anymore. Want to swap it for Yadaphone?"
A lot of them said yes.
That gave him links from real websites pointing to his app. And those links are a big part of how Google decides who to show first. Over time, he started showing up when people searched things like "Skype alternative." That's a person who really needs to make a call right now.
He also got one Reddit post that more than 100,000 people saw, plus a few local news and startup write-ups.
One more thing worth knowing. About a third of his revenue now comes from businesses, not regular consumers. Around 30 businesses pay him to make international calls, things like background-check companies and travel agencies.
💡 Key takeaways
1. Watch for big companies closing things down. When a company kills off a popular product, it leaves behind a bunch of people who were happily paying for it. They still want it. They just need a new place to go. Those are the easiest customers you'll ever get.
2. Free links beat paid ads when you have no money. Denis didn't spend a dollar on ads. He found websites already talking about Skype and asked to be the new link.
3. Boring stuff makes money. Cheap phone calls are not exciting. But people need them all the time, and they're happy to pay a little to keep calling.
Sometimes, you don't need a brand new idea. You need good timing. Skype shutting down was huge and Denis was just the one who actually acted on it that same weekend.
I hope you enjoyed today's issue.
See you next week,
Jason Lee
Want ideas like this every Tuesday?
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