Making $$$ with IOS apps

There's this 19-year-old guy George and he used to work at TJ Maxx and today Quick TJ Maxx is he's making hundreds of thousands of dollars Building mobile apps using AI We go through how he doesn't all the sauce all the tactics and he explains it in just a really simple way That by the end of this episode you're gonna really understand how you can build a consumer mobile app that makes hundreds sometimes thousands of dollars a day With AI now. I'm not saying that everyone's gonna be able to do it But I think that what you'll learn from this episode that it is that we are living through a time when it is possible now to come up with ideas Mobile app ideas that have AI integrated into it and build using AI that could actually generate real money This is the sort of stuff that it could be a side hustle could be some passive income and it could just be a cool little app That you build that doesn't make money, but it's just fun to build so enjoy this episode with George I thought it was really interesting and I'll see you at the end of the episode George is on the pod and he's gonna tell us how to scale your mobile app to 10k a month easy mode You've got my curiosity peaked George how by the end of this episode are are people gonna learn how to do this? Are you being for real? Yeah, so the goal is to give you the basic framework on how to get to 10k a month as easy as possible 10k a month all it really is when you break it down is like 333 bucks a day So to get there all you really need to do is do one to two things right and you should be you should get there relatively quickly All right, well show me how my friend Yeah, so so first a bit of like social proof for like why you should listen to me I scaled the I built my first app or second app technically Restly I completely in public it got over a hundred thousand downloads and made it all close to 200k in revenue And now I've been building two other projects in stealth and both of them are on track to hit their first One of them is on track to hit 15k this month the others on track to its first 10k month this month as well And I've been working cumatively about Three to four hours a week on each of them So it's it's not always time in that gets you the results It's if it's by following a basic playbook that can get you there fast Okay, so the three things that make like a successful app in my opinion are a good idea A product that matches the idea and then dis distributing that idea to other people So the idea is really important and my advice to everyone is always solve your own problems and create something you're passionate about Because when you're sitting there and working for like 10 hours on your your app, you know what I mean You want it to be something that you actually genuinely resonate with Otherwise you won't have that same like when when you're talking to influencers when you're talking to people about your app They can tell whether you truly believe in your own mission And if you don't it becomes harder to convince these people to kind of join you for cheaper rates Let's say So I I'm really big on creating a product that you're very passionate about for me who's wrestling I was I wrestled for like All my high school career and my middle school career before it got cut short by covid I love the sport sports genuinely changed my life So I wanted to build an app for myself when I was a freshman in high school What would I have loved to have on my phone? That was the idea and your idea it should be simple Have one career one clear problem one clear solution It should be specific built for a defined audience This way once you know who your audience is you could then reverse engineer how to find them For example like I knew my audience was wrestlers So I reverse engineered by for you page on my phone to be only wrestlers So I knew exactly who I had to sponsor to get in front of the right audience And number three is it should be sellable people should be willing to pay for this pay for this solution today Oh there's what there's one thing missing from that in my opinion so yeah You use the examples of wrestle AI Cal AI I mean The question we have to ask ourselves is what are ideas that now AI has unlocked Right like so you know people have been building mobile apps since 2008 and it became increasingly harder to um To build something that people are going to download and pay money for until Two things happened actually AI Came anyone could create something but more even more than that you can create these AI first experiences that just are like better than the existing Experiences like Cal AI you can take a picture of your You know your your spaghetti and I'll tell you how many calories it has and then the second thing is um Well, obviously it Well, that's the main that's actually the main piece. It's just like you're creating more value You know for the customer, right? So it's like um how important do you think that is To the idea I think I think that's huge like I think AI has created so many Creative ways to make engaging features And another thing I think it is is the fact that to create an app in the past You used to need like I don't know like tons of developers you either needed a lot of capital or stuff like this But now that AI has kind of democratized creation You could also get super niche Yes, your apps like when I was telling people my idea they were like okay, but how many restless are there actually And it turns out there was a decent bit But most people would have kind of scoffed at the idea of like a wrestling app kind of Having like any sort of success, you know what I mean So it allows like people who are more niche down into things to create Good products for these like more niche communities without needing a ton of capital investment Cool. All right, let's let's continue like wrestling. I never needed to be a billion dollar company Anyway, yeah So here's kind of my process if I wanted it if I was like sitting there and I was like I need an app idea today How I would reverse engineer a viral app idea is I would literally just open up my Instagram or open up my TikTok I would scroll for like 15 minutes and every time I watch the video I would ask myself the question who watches this type of video What problem does this influencers audience face and how could an influencer promote this app seamlessly? So if you looked at like the wrestling content creators I would say how could they implement my app For five seconds within the first 30 seconds of their video and have it not feel like an ad So I would actually target a lot of Dana life and Dana life wrestling influencers and they did great for us because of that So why is a good idea important so many people especially in Twitter I love talking about this idea of distribution versus like product and I'm really big on Having a solid idea because all your distribution is is your distributing the idea and the mission of your product So if you have a bad mission It won't go far even if you get a lot of eyes on it And my one kind of proof towards this idea is a real-life experience I had So in September, October-ish when I was launching wrestling I was also working on this other idea on the side Now wrestling AI I'm a wrestler. I'm super passionate about wrestling and I was really excited by the product I made And this other app I kind of hated to be like to be frank But I had an influencer who had two million followers that was willing to partner with me So this is where I kind of like threw away my like have a good idea and be passionate about the idea And I was like I'm just gonna make this like AI Riz style app And it'll make a lot of money because like this guy gets millions of views In that campaign in the first month wrestling I got around a million views And in the first month this app green Which was like an AI Riz dating assistant Got 1.8 million views And wrestling I in the first month did 17k And green in the first month did 35 bucks It was five weekly subscriptions That's all we got from 1.8 million views And I was sitting there looking looking at this app and just going like okay Maybe it's because my marketing wasn't creative enough maybe it was because this and that And then I really sat there and got true to myself and I said it's it's probably because the idea just sucks And everyone's seen this before and that's why we're not really driving conversions Well wrestling AI is very unique in this niche So that's what I made the decision. I'm only gonna be working on ideas that I'm passionate about and I have fun I have fun actively working on So I just completely cut this app I regret ever building it But it did teach me a valuable lesson to just really go after what you're passionate about I have a question. I have a question about the tiktokker I was his name young cantaloupe How were you able to Convince them on 2.1 million followers. I mean Just like a year or two ago you were a cashier at tj max and then all of a sudden you're convincing this multi-million You know follower account to work on you to partner with you on an app that has no validation or anything Yeah on on the DM wizard So I'll like like if you look at my instagram account I was sending like probably like hundreds of DMs a day to just anyone who's willing to build an app with me And before wrestling I in this app green. I also had this app called fight AI So what got me really into apps was I was in chemistry class or not chemistry physics I was in physics. I was scrolling on my like tiktok for your page and I saw an ad for Rorak And it said build an app in minutes and I didn't really believe it like I didn't know what vibe coding was So that was my first step into vibe coding and I built this app called fight AI And it made me like 2k in the first month just from me posting about it and like paying a meme page 50 bucks So that gave me proof that like apps are the new way to make money And from there I was like okay, let me find like a creator to partner with 50 50 This way I don't need a manually grow from zero to 1k Zero to 10k. That was my first idea So in that process I talked to this guy I got on the phone with him and you have to be A bit like outgoing you have to be you have to be able to sell a bit especially for influencer marketing I always say influencer marketing is like 90% sales you're like convincing people like To take cheaper rates than other people because you're selling them the idea of a long-term partnership With a product that should be genuinely good So with the way I convinced this guy is I was literally showing my rest of AI conversion rates And I was like if I could do this at a small scale Imagine what I could do with me and you partner up That's what that's what got it. That's a good pitch though right like it's basically like all I need is More fuel on this fire I just need more top of the funnel people to come and use this thing because exactly I've basically built an incredible mouse trap and when you're building products Like that's ultimately how you want to think about you want to you don't want to build a leaky ship You don't want to bring in a lot of people and they're not converting. They're not retaining It's not valuable for them You want to build something that's a most track that keeps them in that brings them in every day that they see so much value that They can't get away with it So you're basically going to this guy and you're like hey, I built an incredible product for this niche You have this big audience and I think a part of your audience Uh Our people would be interested in this Let's partner up and what do you propose some you know, I don't know if you're able to say this but like what sort of deals Yeah, I usually do and a lot of people get on me for this like if I would partner with an influencer Which now I don't and anymore typically because I feel like this strategy kind of It only really worked for like wrestling eye the rest of the apps I tried it with never it kind of didn't work and it usually had me manually having to grow it a lot more um but What I did basically was um, I would be just 50 50 I would be like look you take half I take half and uh, what happens Um, and like sometimes like you could you could also invest equity like I know a lot of people do it in different ways or some people Best of the person's equity to be honest. I was I was in college. I just needed my first win I would give them 50% upfront and see what happens Um, that was kind of my idea with it You you know, you're saying like for your new apps. You're you're not finding Influencer marketing to be helpful is that is that what you're saying no no no why that influencer marketing isn't helpful But the draw you get from just one influencer isn't as big So it's easier. It's easier to like boot up a nice Instagram account And just run Instagram marketing yourself and sponsor just tons of creators if you have the capital right For people who don't have the capital. I always suggest because I didn't have the capital back then So I well, I really wanted to sponsor with an influencer because it was an easier jumpstart, right But if you do have the capital to throw a bit of money at some influencers I would suggest just bear like we'll go deeper into it and how to set up an Instagram You like a decent amount of responses But I would suggest you just do it like that without even tying up so much of your equity to an influencer It's a great influencer is a game changer like if you look at um, you know, I think uh, you know the manifest that Stella Yeah, just her alone I mean you can check it on sensor towers. I'm not gonna be doxing her just her alone brought in like 300 damn month to that app Right, yeah, but she's an absolute killer and she worked with like a dev shop Just her alone is driving night like 99% of that business and now they're getting into that ads and maybe other influencers right So the right influencer could be game changing But you you should probably have some system where you could like Maybe test out their content prior like uh I'm like I know a lot of people who do this where they test out the person's content see if it converts high And then they decide maybe they want to bring them on as equity partners But it's hard to have no ethos so maybe get first and then do that That's mom. I mean one thing you one thing you can do is like Literally just ask them what their ad rates are and be like hey, I'll pay Your ad rates whatever it is and then you test the content and then based on that you're like, okay That worked really well work better and expected to work as expected or it didn't work at all If it didn't work at all, it's like great you just saved yourself whatever percent equity I think you know, that's that's a good way to do it if you have the capital Yeah, or if you can probably you could probably use that idea to negotiate cheaper rates with them as well So you get like go look, I'll pay you I know your typical rates are like 2000 video I'll pay you 1000 but if it goes well, you'll have the opportunity to get equity in this project And as long as it goes back to this as long as you're building something cool and you're building something you're passionate about It should be very easy to convince people that your product is going to be the next big thing You know what I mean That's at least been my Experience when building products that I'm genuine that I genuinely resonate with How's your say like what else what else do you want to show? So design and UX is very important as well You should be able to hand your phone to your mom and she should understand how your app works without you having to tell her how to use it This is kind of my limit mistest if your mom's technical maybe don't do this but my mom Still doesn't know like how Siri works, right? So so this is my test. I literally text my mom my app and I go can you figure this out, right? Like can you use it can you tell what the apps for if you tell how I like functions And if she can't which a bunch of times she's been like oh, it's it's too like cluttered You know what I mean? So I've been like okay, that's like that's insanely valuable feedback um So if your mom can't use your app you have to redesign it and you have to make the Uh, UI look a lot more simpler and easier to use Uh, how to build I personally don't know how to code. I've all my apps have been created but with AI I built all my apps through Rork um And my framework for building as I dedicate like 14 days to actually building out the main functionality of the app What's that what like core functionality and branding what's that going to do? How's it going to look? Then I spend a few days perfecting the onboarding, right? So like the onboarding is really like uh, I go more into it later, but it's Educating the user on what your app does Personalizing the experience and then causing FOMO what they would do if they don't have your app Uh, what would happen if they don't have your app um, and then I would spend it and then uh, and then after I add in Revenue cat and back end integrations if needed Okay, so this is one of the biggest things your app needs and this is one of one of the features that you should spend Probably 90% of your time on so as I was saying earlier and how to make a good idea and a good product You need to have a clear solution to a clear problem, right? This is what I like to call the gacha moment or the gacha feature, right? So cal ai it was taking a picture of your food and getting the calories for rest of ai It was throwing your wrestling match into the app and it told you what you did right and what you did wrong in your match right These were the only two features that we were pushing and 90% of the time and if we had other features We wanted to push we would basically push it after we began saturating an influencer's Audience so if I took one of my influencers. Let's say Cory'sator, right? The this kid was an influencer he posted day in a life videos and he would always subtly integrate our app into his content If he if I saw the return from his videos started lowering I would then tell him, okay, push this feature instead, right? To see if we could re-get the uptick even if it's like a less than the original, right However, the biggest uptick from your app should get should come from marketing this feature This feature is what should easily convince everyone to come join your app and what you need to do with this feature is You need to this feature needs to be so simple to understand That anyone who looks at this feature for five seconds Instantly understands the entire thesis of your app, right? Cal AI it's three seconds take a picture of your food get the calories Restly eye it was throw you throw your wrestling match get the feedback, right? And within three seconds of looking at the phone displaying that Users understood without it having to be said, right? So this is a really important feature that you need to nail This is this is 90% of distribution is nailing the gacha feature Yeah, I mean another way to think about that gacha feature, which I agree it's like so so important Is your sort of like reverse engineering the tiktok or the instagram reel? Yeah, exactly And you're building the product around that so that's one like framework that I use when I'm trying to come up with startup ideas especially in the consumer mobile app space. I'm like, okay Here's my niche and I've you know, there's a bunch of different primitives or product ideas I can go after But you know and sometimes I use AI to kind of help me brainstorm these ideas and I say like What you know what would be a tiktok that would go viral like what is that one feature that would show That it would show and what's beautiful about these gacha features as you call it is It's The best products you can explain in a sentence or less think about it right like you know What is hinge or what is tinder like you swipe and you find you know someone to date or what is uber you press a button and A car comes and picks you up or what is door dash, you know you press a button and food comes to your door right so it's like These are the gacha features that I think that we We you know when you're creating mobile apps a lot of us have this tendency to over complicate the product suite when it's just one core feature that is what's going to help Like stop the scroll 100% 100% yeah, I fully agree. It's exactly like I think about it very similarly There we go. All right. I'm boarding. But yeah anyway onboarding So so many people overthink and over complicate the process onboarding his four functions right three main functions one optional Educate the user what what is your product and why do they need it right Social proof. This isn't 100% needed But if you do have social proof, it's nice to show Um, and then you want to personalize the experience the point of personalizing the experience is making to add better And also increasing the time commitment they have to your app So if I go and answer 20 questions in your app making the best experience for me And then I'm going to get hit with a paywall I now have like the sunken cost fallacy, which is like I've already spent so much time on this app Let me at least get the free trial and see what it is and maybe I'll cancel it right And finally as you want to institute phomo right before the paywall. So let's say Um, I have like wrestling eye I'm uploading my wrestling match. It's going through this like analysis animation right where it's like Targeting XYZ calibrating XYZ and then after it finishes It then shows you the paywall and it says like unlock your rating now, right? So now they have a ton of phomo. What was my score? What was this? What was that and it drives them more to convert Rather than if I just personalize the experience like okay, what what's your Wait, what weight do you wrestle at and then you get hit with a paywall right that add that Mach film analysis is super important to increasing conversions Um, but that's that's pretty much it I also wrote a docs and docs. Rock.com where I kind of go go over everything in this uh presentation in much more detail So now the most important part what everyone's here for is distribution Here's my action most plan to 10k a month and I think it's relatively easy If you just nail a few things right one of the more important things to nail is your instagram page Right you need to set up your IG and you need to make it clean So the way I go about this is this is blacked out. This is one of the projects. I'm working on now. That's kind of instilled Right, but I first bought the amount of followers right you go find one of these sites that you could buy followers for What this does is it gives you a ton of social proof, right? And then if you can get it verified I would pay for that And then I would get three product demos right here try to make them as clean as possible Pay it as designer and fiber if you need to or just design it yourself Um, so have your three product demos right here and have like a really good bio with a cta right This is 90% of what you need to do and then the other 10% is anytime you work with an influencer have them Like in the beginning every time you work with an influencer have them collab post because now Not only is your does your brand account look professional But it also seems like you have a lot of motion and you're working with a lot of people right This way, so this this page serves two functions, right? It's a sales funnel for your user because if I'm if I'm looking at wrestling i if I if I watch one of my favorite wrestling influencers I see wrestling i is tagged in the in the Caption and I'm like well, that seems like a pretty cool app. I then click on the tag in the bio in the in the caption It gets me to my wrestling i page, let's say I'll then watch for more wrestling i videos on my inst on the instagram page, right? And now we've went from a user who's slightly curious to very educated on the product, right? Now they're primed to convert then they're going to see the cta in the bio They're going to click the apps or describe they're going to click the apps or link download the app They're then going to go through the on boarding so an already pretty primed user is going to get even more primed And then that's what should give you really good conversion rates, right? So your instagram is both a sales funnel and social proof for other influencers to join, right? So on the other end if I'm an influencer and I see a DM from some brand, right? And I click on the page and I see that they have two followers and no posts, right? I'm going to be like, okay, this is some like app that no one uses, right? And like I wouldn't even I probably wouldn't even answer and if I do answer when we hop on a call You won't have any like ethos or credibility in the conversation so you lose all your authority So you have to pay whatever insane rates he asks for, right? However, if I have a brand account and I'm showcasing that I'm working with tons of influencers, right? Now the influencer sees it and they go, okay, he's working with a ton of influencers So he can't he can't be paying zero dollars. He has to be paying something, right? So I'm going to then respond, yeah, what are your rates blah blah blah The influencer will hop on the call with the person who has the, you know, high authority instagram account They're going to get on the phone and then as the brand donor if I propose low rates if I'm proposing like a $2 CPM Right, which is really low rates or really good rates Um, if I'm proposing a $2 CPM to this guy This if without the brand authority he would originally think, okay, this guy's trying to like rip me off With the brand of authority it's okay, this guy's kind of trying to rip me off But everyone works for these rates. So maybe these are just the rates, right? It's much easier to convince someone to do something if they see that 10 other people also did it So it's really important to just nail this Instagram page for closing influencers and using it as a sales funnel for your other for your other consumers customers Um, the other thing is what I must say like you know, I think I think botting your account is against terms of service. I'm not I think I could be wrong So do your own research. Yeah, yeah, you don't always listen to me. You could do what you want This is what you've done. Yeah, exactly But I mean, rest of the eye is actually not bought it This account is blacked out. So I mean you don't need to bought it too. You can also just yeah, you could also Yeah, you could also do that 100 great content that get shared and And do it the good old-fashioned way. It just gonna it will take you longer, right? Yeah, 100% Um, and this is something I've only really been doing on newer projects Um, although I will say it does have a slight higher ROI Um, another thing I would do is I would tailor your this is this is arguably even slightly more important than the Instagram page is I would tailor your FYP to be your ICP So what I mean by that is I would go on Instagram And I would scroll like your app like your ideal customer You should have this detailed image of who your ideal customer is in your mind Right, and you should think how would they act on Instagram? So I would literally just scroll comment like share as my ideal customer Get into I would like try to like hypnotize myself to meet my ideal customer And for me it was easier because I was a wrestler and I knew what I knew what type of content wrestlers watch That's another reason you should build for what you're passionate about So I'm scrolling through Instagram. I then make my entire for you page only wrestling content only wrestling influencers And then what you effectively just did is you now created a lead generation But like a like a lead uh generating thing right so while I'm going through my for you page I could scroll outreach scroll outreach scroll outreach It makes the whole process 10 times easier than having to go through like Instagram search and finding the right perfect influencers Okay, so for my next thing outreach outreach Everything in like this this game is a numbers game How many influencers can you like send messages? How many content can you make how much content can you make? It's all numbers So and like the more you do the more you'll get out eventually So now that your FYP is fully tailored to your ICP you can literally just scroll in DM as many influencers as you possibly can to be honest I would replace yourself in this process though as soon as you possibly can right if you had 2000 bucks to start this app. I would take like 800 and just pay a VA for a month I think I think I would be willing to do that I would be willing to spend almost half of my budget just on the VA Because they're pretty integral to the process and it also leads you more mentally clearer Um, so what you do is you basically now that you have a system of scroll and scrolling and outreaching You literally just hop on a call with a VA from five or upwork founders arm Which whichever service you want to use right hop on the phone with these people and just pay them whatever you want Because they're not going to ask for like outrageous rates typically right and you don't want to be like You don't want to be negotiating for cents on the dollar for you. You know what I mean 100% yes They asked for like 800 a month to pay it. They're they're going to be working like You're going to get way more than 800 bucks in value um So when you hop on a call with them show them the process of literally just be like hey Um when I scroll like just go through my for you page scroll If the guy has over 25,000 views on average Outreach them. That's that's literally what I tell him right you can also make like you can also give a really good SOP for them and that's pretty much the whole process um Then when I create when I create a response get uh get uh Hold on. Sorry. This is like misspelled What when when a creator responds in to hop in to hop on a call with them immediately right so if let's say uh Let's say I'm the brand. I text paid promo for XYZ and if you if you want to DM scripts again docs. I work.com You could find like all my DM scripts my SOPs basically everything I've done um So once a creator responds try to get them on the phone immediately say like hey are you around for an intro call With someone from our team, you know what I mean From there you could then once once face to face with them It's much easier to sell them than over dms because over dms if I'm an influencer I could be like my deliverables or $10,000 a video It's much harder to say that to someone when they're right in front of you and they're basically like you can basically show them on $10,000 a video for a creator that gets like 20,000 views of video is not like ideal and you can't work long-term So like there's so many sales objections you could kind of use to get good rates And as long as you're really passionate and and they can see that you're not selling snake oil There'll be much more unlikely to do cheaper rates for you They'll give you like the homie discount You know what I mean? If you're just a charismatic like if you try to be like nice to them try to be friends with them and uh with with all my creators I try to be as close as possible like I'll pay attention on their Instagram if they have any important events coming up And I'll text them like like we have a lot of fighters. So people were going to fight. I'll text them. Hey good luck Like I'll try to be very on top of having really good personal relationships with my creators Um Then after you finish the call try to get there WhatsApp I I like WhatsApp because it's easier to keep them separate, right? So when I go on WhatsApp, I know I'm gonna be dealing with influencers or my VA But I know on text messages. I'm not gonna lose like my mom's text when she texts me You know what I mean? Because that was like a big problem when I started. I would like not be I was like never responding to like my family or my friends and I was like I was like this kind of sucks like I want I I used to pride myself on my ability to respond to people fast and efficiently And uh, so it's like okay, let me just separate the two. So it's easier. You're your mom could be giving you precious UX feedback and you're asking They'll never know Uh plus like uh, you know, I love my family. I would never want to like miss their course Um, and then get them on a contract and then the rest is kind of have them subtly integrate your app into their videos try to subtly integrate your app into their most viral content style After that, it's pretty much smooth sailing 90% like the hardest part is basically getting on the phone with them and pitching them the idea Uh, then your app your app if your idea is good enough should sell itself in their content Uh, okay paid ads to be honest Only just recently started running paid ads, but I'm starting to fall in love with them And I'm starting to understand why everyone says that influencers aren't scalable pass a certain point right influencers are great if you have Not a crazy budget and you need to 10x your rabbit like you need to 10x whatever money you have But if you don't mind consistently two to three xing your your money, right paid ads are amazing So once you get about five to 15 creatives make sure they're quality creatives Throw them all in a testing budget run them at a hundred bucks a day And then after the first week I'll separate the winners from losers again I'm not super optimal with it like Take everything I'm saying about paid ads with a grain of salt but It's paid ads are pretty good So another method is if let's say you're working with multiple Multiple creators to take five to ten five to 15 creatives from them throw them all in a testing campaign Right that's one end, but if you don't have five to 15 creatives from let's say like let's say you don't have five to 15 Creators right if you want what you could do is you could pick one of your creators You could pick one creator overall right as long as he has high agency and it's like cheap Have him basically not post content on his page But have him just make paid ads for you and the way you could find winning paid ads is you go to meta ads library Look for people in adjacent niches or in your or like one of your competitors if you have any right Look at their ads understand why their ads work. So here's here's what meta ads library looks like right So this is Strava. So let's say I'm making a running app. I'll look up Strava I would go through all these paid ads. I'd be like, okay, why is this paid ad you could filter by high to low impressions to right? So it's like, okay, why is this paid ad converting? Why is this have so many high impressions? Why are they spending basically so much money on this paid ad? They're probably getting a return, right? Why is it work? How can I replicate it? Those are like the two questions you need to ask yourself Then if you have a creator that has high agency literally just send them the video and say hey Can you remake this video one-to-one with my app and That like I'm doing that that's literally been my only growth channel with one of my new projects We've only been running paid ads I have one creator who has high agency and he just makes all of our creatives for you And you'll be shocked at the paid ads that like make you a lot of money. It'll be like Literally a video of him saying like go download the app like paid ads don't need to be this like super High quality content all the time as long as it's real and authentic. It'll drive decent conversions Um now let's say after all this your first that your first month in business is starting to end That's when you'll probably want to do this a little bit earlier actually But that's when you're gonna want to start looking at your conversion rate after you have some decent traffic Right, so if you're consistently getting over I'm gonna say a hundred downloads a day Now you have some rough metrics to look at your conversion rate and see where you could optimize your onboarding your paywall Right, maybe start ab testing pricing to see if you could boost your conversion rates Um, I would also look at your arpo This is also a really important statistic Uh, depending if you're depending how you market so people who do like this Really top of funnel ugc like like girl on screen with like text, you know what I mean There are poos gonna be a lot lower because they're getting millions of views right but the quality of the content isn't crazy But if you're doing like influence or post your arpo should be pretty high You know what I mean because it should be kind of Directly explaining what your app does and it should be like high converting content Uh, so look at your arpo aim for a two dollar arpo at least in month one And then arpo basically being like how much revenue you're making per download Um, and then look at your attention So now that the months like starting to be like close to being over See how many people unsubscribe Um, and then If your attention's really bad It's probably because your app's not useful enough So try to figure out how you can make it more useful for rest li in the first month or attention sucked And what we did was we literally just added a calorie tracking feature because a lot of wrestlers are always managing their weight They're always cutting weight So once we added the calorie tracker, we saw a turned cut in half And I was like, okay, wow, that's insane So people are coming for the viral feature And then they're staying because the apps helping them keep on track with their weight and stuff like that So we just added then after we after that we started adding a ton more Adjacent features that are just strictly useful and non viral And then what we saw was our turn like that like solved our attention problem Um, and at the end of the day the like the TLDR is good product and good creatives Um, and that makes your life so much easier. So my newest project It's it's really fun working on it. I'm having a blast actually working on it and What we've seen is we've seen people actually hit us up to work with us So they've seen like one of our creators videos this guy 20k followers. Hey, I want to collab with you This guy has 1.8 million followers and he hit us up We didn't even outreach to him and it's solely because the products actually in my opinion In the products actually cool and really useful Um, we had a creator with like 50k followers make videos for us for free Just because he wanted to actually try the app. He gets insane We had another creator with 3 million followers who averages like 400k to a million views of video And we have a four video deal with four stories for 2500 bucks That's like two like our cpm is gonna be maybe a dollar or something like you only get these rates and this like And people hitting you up if your products actually cool So if you could just make a good product and really focus in on that it makes the whole Other side of the distribution problem much easier and uh that's basically the deal They are of how to make a successful app or semi successful app so a lot of people Hear about these vibe coded mobile apps and they're like there's no way that people can make Thousands of dollars tens of thousand dollars hundreds of thousands of dollars sometimes millions of dollars with vibe coded Apps But here you are someone who's non-technical how will do um i'm 19 just turn exactly like young guy um and You know no no real background in this and here you are in the field like Like Proving otherwise. So what do you say to people who who who who who say that like it's not possible? Yeah, it's so funny because people like really hate on vibe coding to call it a i-slop this and that and like as you As you see in the slides are like i'm actually very big on product as a vibe coder which is like funny enough You know what i mean and it's because At this point with AI models opus 4.8 right especially if you're building apps in Swift too I saw the difference between Swift and react native like vibe coding as like night and day And that's why that's why i really love work and i talk very highly about them Um, i'm also like now working with them too because like i was like the first power user so they brought me on but uh but With with Swift and with these new AI models there's no in my opinion There's no such thing as a i-slop there is though under prompted right if you keep prompting that's why i said 14 days i'm not like sitting here and like you're not sitting there in one shotting these apps right But if you consistently manually tweak each thing at the end of the day code is code right So with enough prompts you could really make these really cool products like there's some of apps built by some of these like Work users but like i downloaded just like see what they were doing and I actually use this one workout app core os they just launched this guy I actually use this app every day because it's like one of the sickest health and wellness apps out there It's like it tracks your sleep tracks your workouts like when you walk in the gym at auto tracks How much time you spend in the gym and i'm like this is the one of the coolest apps i downloaded and it's fully made by AI It's like it's like insane um So i'm very big on uh i'm very bit i'm very against AI slob and like this Like doomer look at vibe coding because not only did it change my life But you can genuinely build really great products with enough prompts And you know with vibe coded products like have you ever encountered scalability issues like you know That's another thing that people say is that like okay, you're gonna use AI Maybe it's good enough to get to a prototype with a few thousand users But once you start scaling and actually getting hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars a year in revenue You're just gonna have to rebuild the whole thing So i haven't hit it yet Maybe it's because i'm not big enough But um But i personally haven't seen any scalability issues It's also because i'm making a consumer app So Maybe if i was making a social media app it would be different and it would be like stuff like that But like people always come at me like oh What about the security issues right I don't have access to any of your personal data i'm not collecting that I wouldn't i'm not putting myself in the risk of that happening to me because i'm not Collecting any of the data to put you put my customers at a security risk right yeah So i'm gonna say it honestly depends Uh maybe if you're building a social media but personally i haven't seen any of that So in your in your opinion is this the heyday of building mobile apps do you think Like there's just so much opportunity right now so many different niches and You know it's a window of time before it just gets too competitive like how do you how do you see It play out 100% so this is this is like the in my opinion This is the drop shipping boom. This is like the econ boom right back in the day meta ads You used to boot them up for econ i mean i was never involved I actually like failed at econ and then went into apps But But back in the day like 2015 people used to boot up these uh e-com sites drop shipping whatever Through a little bit of money into med ads and would see like four to five x row ads right Today with apps it's very similar if you make an app and it's again it fits cool the idea needs to be cool But if you make an app and just start posting about it yourself This is what sold me on apps. I made an app had no app experience with a fight AI I made this app. I literally would just post myself talking to the camera Guys i'm making like the future of mma. You could throw your like Videos into this app and i'll tell you what you're doing right and at first I just made it for fun because i wanted an internal tool I was like screw it. I'll try making a few tiktoks about it right The fact that i was able to make like almost 2000 and by the way It's still consistently to this month does a thousand every month which is insane right because i've been marketed it since July oh So it's like i love seeing the subscriptions it like makes my day Like i'll see a guy who's been subscribed for like nine months. He was like active like a week ago I'm like what could this what could this guy possibly be training for Anyway, uh So the fact that you could sit there and still make five tiktoks and get like 10 sales right Shows that the industry is not saturated even though there are more people making apps than ever I don't believe it'll be saturated until Three more years probably And i i'm finding a adoption is still pretty slow like you you get caught up in this like twitter Mindshare where you're like everyone's building an app and actually i'll be no one's building an app People still think you need to know how to code like no one knows vibe coding exists 15% of the world you still uses still hasn't even uh 15% of the world like only uses chat to be tea like compared to like 85% of the world still didn't even use AI They don't know AI can actually build software so Yeah, get started best time to get started though is today like get on it like right away And you know last question You know is there one tip Piece of sauce that you didn't share today that You know you want to share that you think is Going to be valuable for anyone who's interested in in building a mobile app with AI one tip I mean you've shared you shared around paid ads you shared around creators You shared around choosing an idea But is there anything else that you haven't shared today? They you know you what you want to share Yeah, or yeah, really focus on Being able like learning how to sell things so All like my ability to close influencers came from when I was like 16 and I had to do like door-to-door sales for powerwashing Oh Like I was running garage sales So if if you have good social skills it does make selling to influencers just so much easier Because you could spend like I'll give you an example of my last influencer call the guy was Greek right I spent 90% of the call talking about Greek like Greece and like me and him were just bliving about both being Greek And then at the end I go okay, so Look your content reviews very a little bit to not jip you out Why don't we do like a two-dollar CPM and since me and him were already kind of like buddies He now doesn't want to say no to me You know what I mean? So it just makes it ten times easier to close stuff So social skills are very important Um, which is which is why vibe coatings great because the people who used to build apps didn't really have the craziest like social skills George Thank you for coming on the podcast sharing all the sauce with us Appreciate it Can't wait to see what you build next all include links for where to follow George In the show notes in the description also include a link to the docs that he he had if people want to check that out And George thanks again for coming on yeah, thank you so much