Going from Designer To Mobile App Founder - Sound AiSleep

At a Glance

Coco Shellim, the founder of Sound AiSleep:

• Saved $65,0000+ in development costs
• Built and launched a native mobile app with no technical background using Thunkable
• Iterated instantly without reliying on developers

Before founding and building Sound AiSleep, Coco Shellim was a designer and creative in her day-to-day work. A few years ago, she found herself living overseas and missing her family in the US, especially reading bedtime stories to her nieces and nephews. 

While Shellim’s solution of sending long voice recordings of herself reading sufficed, she was looking for a way to build something more sustainable, approachable, and engaging. She wanted to make it so that not only herself, but parents, relatives, and loved ones could continue to read stories to whoever they wanted to, near or far.

The Challenge

Shellim had a vision and a clear idea of what she wanted her app to look and feel like, but did not have the technical skills to make it come alive. 

• Affordability: after speaking to freelancers and agencies, the lowest quote Shellim received was for $65,000 USD, which was prohibitive for a bootstrapped founder. 
• Timeline: on top of the significant costs, Shellim was told her product would take 6 months or longer to launch. 
• Agility: like most startups, Shellim was looking to be able to test, break, and pivot at a high velocity. Many people said that her idea would be impossible to build without a full dev team. This meant additional costs every time the app needed to be iterated on. 

Why Thunkable? Choosing the Right No-Code App Builder

Shellim began looking for ways for her to build and launch her mobile app on her own without developers. She eventually landed on Thunkable as her solution. The key benefits of Thunkable: 

• Ease of use: the intuitive builder and AI tools gave Shellim the freedom to create the exact app she envisioned without writing code. 
• Direct App Store publishing: Thunkable allows creators to publish directly to Google Play and Apple’s App Store.
• Hands-on support: Thunkable provided prompt, real human support to help whenever Shellim got stuck. 
• Robust API integrations: these made it possible to connect external services that were essential to building Sound AiSleep. ‍
• Pricing: Thunkable plans start from $0 and go up to $99/month, a far cry from the $65,000 Shellim was quoted.

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“Thunkable made it possible to develop a scalable, professional, mobile app on my own without knowing any code or paying the high upfront costs of traditional development.”

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Building a Mobile App Using Thunkable 

Shellim’s journey building Sound AiSleep was not without its challenges. While any app will have a lot of moving parts, Sound AiSleep utilizes a variety of different APIs and integrations. It took many hours of testing different workflows and debugging for Shellim, a one-woman dev team.

With a lot of perseverance and the unwavering assistance from the Thunkable support team, Shellim worked through the learning curve, which ultimately gave her the foundation for understanding workflow logic, APIs, and data structures that make up Sound AiSleep. The benefit of being such a lean team meant that she could go into Thunkable and fix any usability issues she spotted whenever she wanted. No extra costs or long timelines to worry about. 

What’s Next for Sound AiSleep

By using Thunkable’s drag-and-drop interface and robust API integrations, Shellim turned a simple two-minute voice recording into a scalable, production-ready app.

Sound AiSleep has been quickly gaining momentum and attention - first by winning the Thunkable App of the Year in 2024, and then winning the Children’s Sleep & Wellbeing Innovation of the Year in 2025. Shellim and her small but mighty team are looking forward to making stories even more personal, providing the option for stories to include the names of children, their favorite friends or pets, and their favorite teams. This has been a highly requested feature amongst the current Sound AiSleep users and Shellim is looking forward to building it out using Thunkable. 

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