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- [00:00]
A
There's this 19 year old guy, George, and he used to work at TJ Maxx and today he quit TJ Maxx because he's making hundreds of thousands of dollars building mobile apps using AI. We go through how he does it, 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 going to 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 going to 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, it could be some passive income, and it could just be a cool little app that you build that doesn't make money but is 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 going to tell us how to scale your mobile app to 10k a month, easy mode. You've got my curiosity piqued, George. By the end of this episode, are people going to learn how to do this? Are you being for real?
- [01:27]
B
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.
- [01:49]
A
All right, well, show me how, my friend.
- [01:53]
B
Yes. So first, a bit of like social proof or like why you should listen to me. I scaled, I built my first app, or second app, technically, wrestle AI completely in public. It got over 100,000 downloads and made 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 other's on track to hit its first 10k month this month as well. And I've been working cumulatively about three to four hours a week on each of them. So it's not always time in that gets you the results. It's by following a Basic playbook that can get you there fast. Okay, so the three things that make a successful app, in my opinion, are a good idea, a product that matches the idea, and then 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 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'm really big on creating a product that you're very passionate about. For me, it was 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. The sport 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 my for you page on my phone to be only wrestlers.
- [04:04]
A
So.
- [04:04]
B
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 solution today.
- [04:16]
A
There's one thing missing from that, in my opinion. So, yeah, you use the examples of Wrestle AI Calais. 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 build something that people are going to download and pay money for. Until two things happened, actually, AI came. Anyone could create something. But even more than that, you can create these AI first experiences that just are, like, better than the existing experiences, like Calai. You can take a picture of your, you know, your. Your spaghetti and it'll tell you how many calories it has. And then the second thing is, 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, how important do you think that is to the idea?
- [05:25]
B
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 in your apps. Like, when I was telling people my idea, they were like, okay, but how many wrestlers 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.
- [06:22]
A
Cool. All right, let's. Let's continue.
- [06:25]
B
Like, wrestle AI never needed to be a billion dollar company anyway. Yeah. So here's kind of my process. If I wanted to. 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 watched a video, I would ask myself the question, who watches this type of video? What problem does this influencer's 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 day in a life wrestling influencers, and they did great for us because of that. So why is a good idea important? So many people, especially on Twitter, 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 you're 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 Russell AI, I was also working on this other idea on the side. Now wrestle 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 frank, but I had an influencer who had 2 million followers that was willing to partner with me. So this is where I kind of like, threw away my 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, Wrestle AI 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 Wrestle AI 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 probably because the idea just sucks and everyone's seen this before, and that's why we're not really driving conversions while wrestling. AI is very unique in this niche. So that's what I made the decision. I'm only going to 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.
- [09:29]
A
I have a question. I have a question about the TikToker. What was his name? Young Cantelope. How are you able to convince someone with 2.1 million followers? I mean, just like a year or two ago, you were a cashier at TJ Maxx, and then all of a sudden, you're convincing this multimillion follower account to work on you, to partner with you on an app that has no validation or anything.
- [09:57]
B
Yeah, I'm a DM wizard, so I'll like. If you look at my Instagram account, I was sending, like, probably like hundreds of DMs a day to. To just anyone who's willing to build an app with me. And before Wrestle AI and this app, Green, I also had this app called fightai. 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 TikTok for you page, and I Saw an ad for Roark and it said, build an app in minutes. And I didn't really believe it. I didn't know what vibe coding was. So that was my first step into vibe coding. And I built this app called fightai. 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 to manually grow from 0 to 1k, 0 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 able to sell a bit. Especially for influencer marketing. I always say influencer marketing is like 90% sales. You're like convincing people 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 the way I convinced this guy is I was literally showing my wrestle AI conversion rates and I was like, if I could do this at a small scale, imagine what I could do if me and you partner up. That's what got him.
- [11:35]
A
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 I basically built an incredible mousetrap. And when you're building products, like, that's ultimately how you want to think about it. 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 mousetrap 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, 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?
- [12:27]
B
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 anymore, Typically, because I feel like this strategy kind of. It only really worked for like wrestle AI. 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. But what I did basically was I would be just 50. 50. I would be like, look, you take half, I take half and got. It happens. And like sometimes like, you could, you could also best equity. Like, I know a lot of people do it in different ways or some people best the person's equity. To be honest, I was, I was in college. I didn't. I just needed my first win. I would give him 50% up front and see what happens. That was kind of my idea with it, you know.
- [13:16]
A
You're saying like for your new apps, you're not finding influencer marketing to be helpful, Is that what you're saying?
- [13:25]
B
No, not 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, 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 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 verit 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. But the right influencer is a game changer. Like if you look at, I think, you know, the Manifest app, Stella.
- [14:21]
A
Yeah.
- [14:22]
B
Just her alone. I mean, you can check it on Sensor Tower. So I'm not gonna be doxing her. Just her alone brought in like 300k a month to that app, right?
- [14:30]
A
Yeah.
- [14:30]
B
Like, she's an absolute killer. And she worked with like a dev shop. Just her alone is driving like 99% of that business. And now they're getting into metads and maybe other influencers. Right. So the right influencer could be game changing, but you should probably have some system where you could like maybe test out their content prior. 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. No ethos. So maybe, yeah, first and then do that. That's my.
- [15:09]
A
I mean, one thing. 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. Worked better than expected. Or as expected, or 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.
- [15:37]
B
Yeah. Or if you could probably. You could probably use that idea to negotiate cheaper rates with them as well. So you'd be like, look, I'll pay you. I know your typical rates are like 2000 a 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's gonna be the next big thing. You know what I mean? That's at least been my experience when building products that I genuinely resonate with.
- [16:13]
A
I was gonna say, like, what else? What else do you want to show?
- [16:16]
B
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 litmus test. If your mom's technical, maybe don't do this. My mom still doesn't even 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 app's for? Can you tell how it, like, functions? And if she can't, which a bunch of times, she's been like, oh, it's too, too, like, cluttered. You know what I mean? So I've been like, okay, that's like. That's insanely valuable feedback. So if your mom can't use your app, you have to redesign it and you have to make the UI look a lot more simpler and easier to use. 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 Roark and My framework for building is 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 the app 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, 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, what would happen if they don't have your app. And then I would spend. And then. And then after I add in revenue, cat and backend integrations if needed. Okay, so this is one of the biggest things your app needs, and this is 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 gotcha moment or the gotcha feature, right? So Calai, it was taking a picture of your food and getting the calories for Wrestle 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 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 Corey Zader, right? This kid was an influencer. He posted Day in the Life videos and he would always subtly integrate our app into his content. If I saw that the return from his video started lowering, and I would then tell them, okay, push this feature instead, right? To see if we could re get the uptick, even if it's like 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 5 seconds instantly understands the entire thesis of your app. Right? Calais, it's three seconds. Take a picture of your food, get the calories, Wrestle AI it was 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 90% of distribution is nailing the gotcha feature.
- [19:47]
A
Yeah. I mean, another way to think about that gotcha feature, which I agree it's so, so important, is you're sort of like reverse engineering the TikTok or the Instagram reel.
- [19:57]
B
Yeah, exactly.
- [19:58]
A
And you're building the product around that. So that's one 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 there's a bunch of different primitives or product ideas I can go after. And sometimes I use AI to help me brainstorm these ideas. And I say, what would be a TikTok that would go viral? What is that one feature that it would show? And what's beautiful about these gotcha features, as you call it, is it's the best products you can explain in a sentence or less. Like, 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 doordash? You press a button and food comes to your door. Right? So it's like, these are the gotcha features that I think that when you're creating mobile apps, a lot of us have this tendency to overcomplicate the product suite when it's just one core feature. That is what's going to help stop the scroll.
- [21:19]
B
100%. 100%.
- [21:22]
A
Yeah.
- [21:22]
B
I fully agree. It's exactly. I think about it very similarly.
- [21:26]
A
There we go. All right. Onboarding.
- [21:28]
B
But yeah, anyway, onboarding. So. So many people overthink and overcomplicate the process. Onboarding is four functions, right? Three main functions, one optional. Educate the user.
- [21:38]
A
What.
- [21:39]
B
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. And then you want to personalize the experience. The point of personalizing the experience is making the app 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, is you Want to institute FOMO right before the paywall. So let's say I have, like, Wrestle AI. 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 fomo. 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 weight? What weight do you wrestle at? And then you get hit with a paywall, right? That. That mock film analysis is super important to increasing conversions. But that's. That's pretty much it. I also wrote a docs and docs.org.com where I kind of go, go over everything in this presentation in much more detail. So now the most important part, what everyone's here for, is distribution. Here's my actionable 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 in stealth, 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 a designer in Fiverr if you need to, or just design it yourself. 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 page serves two functions, right? It's a sales funnel for your user. Because if I'm looking at Wrestle AI, if I watch one of my favorite wrestling influencers, I see Wrestle AI is tagged in the caption and I'm like, whoa, that seems like a pretty cool app. I then click on the tag in the bio, in the caption. It gets me to my restful AI page. Let's say I'll then watch four more wrestle AI videos on my. 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 app Store description, they're going to click the app Store link, download the app. They're then going to go through the onboarding. 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 and I click on the page and I see that they have two followers and no posts, right? I'm gonna 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, they go, okay, he's working with a ton of influencers, so he can't be paying $0. He has to be paying something, right? So I'm gonna then respond, yeah, what are your rates? Blah, blah, blah. The influencer will hop on the call with the person who has the high authority Instagram account. They're gonna get on the phone, and then as the brand owner, if I propose low rates, if I'm proposing like a $2 cpm, right, which is really low rates or really good rates, if I'm proposing a $2 CPM to this guy without the brand authority, he would originally think, okay, this guy's trying to, like, rip me off with the brand 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. The other thing is what I must say.
- [27:02]
A
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.
- [27:13]
B
Yeah, yeah, don't always listen to me. You can do what you want.
- [27:17]
A
This is what you've done. Yeah, exactly.
- [27:19]
B
But I mean, wrestle. AI is actually not bought it. This account is blacked out.
- [27:24]
A
So I mean, you don't need to bought it too. You can also just.
- [27:27]
B
Yeah, you could also. Yeah, you could also do that great
- [27:30]
A
content that gets shared and, and do it the good old fashioned way. It's just gonna. It will take you longer, right?
- [27:36]
B
Yeah, 100%. And this is something I've only really been doing on newer projects. Although I will say it does have a slight high roi. Another thing I would do is I would tailor your. 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 ad, 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. I would get in, I would like try to like hypnotize myself to be my ideal customer. And for me it was easier because I was a wrestler and 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, like a lead 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 ten times easier than having to go through like Instagram search and finding the right perfect influencers. So for my next thing, outreach, outreach, outreach. Everything in like 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 and 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 2,000 bucks to start this app, I would take like 800 and just pay a VA for a month. 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 leaves you more mentally clearer. So what you do is you basically now that you have a system of scrolling and outreaching, you can literally just hop on a call with a VA from Fiverr Upwork Founders arm, 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%. They ask for like 800amonth. Just pay it. They're going to be working like you're going to get way more than 800 bucks in value. So when you hop on a call with them, show them the process of literally just be like, hey, when I scroll, like, just go through my for you page scroll. If the Guy has over 25,000 views on average, outreach to him, that's literally what I tell him, right? You could also make like, you could also give a really good SOP for them. And that's pretty much the whole process. Then when a creator responds, get. Hold on, sorry, this is like misspelled. When a creator responds, aim to hop on a call with them immediately, right? So if, let's say, let's say I'm the brand, I text paid promo for XYZ. And if you, if you want to DM scripts again, docs.rook.com you could find like all my DM scripts, my SOPs, basically everything I've done. 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 you're 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 are $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 a 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 they can see that you're not selling snake oil, they'll be much more unlikely to do cheaper rates for you. They'll give you like the homey 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 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, like, we have a lot of fighters. So people who are 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. Then after you finish the call, try to get their WhatsApp. I like WhatsApp because it's easier to keep them separate, right? So when I go on WhatsApp, I know I'm going to 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 wanna, I. I used to pride myself on my ability to respond to people fast and efficiently. And so I was like, okay, let me just separate the two so it's easier.
- [33:01]
A
Your mom could be giving you precious UX feedback and you're asking, you'll never know.
- [33:09]
B
Plus, I love my family. I would never want to miss their cars. 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%. The hardest part is basically getting on the phone with them and pitching them the idea. Then your app, your. Your app, if your idea is good enough, should sell itself in their content. Okay. Paid ads. To be honest, I've 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. Past A certain point, right? Influencers are great if you have not a crazy budget and you need to 10x your revenue like you need to 10x whatever money you have. But if you don't mind consistently 2 to 3xing 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 100 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 paid ads are pretty good. So another method is if, let's say you're working with multiple creators, you take five to 10, five to 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 is 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 what Meta Ads Library looks like, right? So this is Strava. So let's say I'm making a running app. I would 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 too, right? So it's like, okay, why is this paid ad converting? Why does 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 does 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 him the video and say, hey, can you remake this video one to one with my app? And that like I 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 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 super high quality content all the time. As long as it's real and authentic, it'll drive decent conversions. Now let's say after all of 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 going to want to start looking at your conversion rate after you have some decent traffic, right? So if you're consistently getting over, I'm going to say 100 downloads a day. Now you have some rough metrics to look at your conversion rate and see where you could optimize your onboarding or paywall, right? Maybe start a B testing pricing to see if you could boost your conversion rates. I would also look at your arpu. This is also a really important statistic. Depending if you're. Depending how you market. So people who do like this really top of funnel, UGC girl on screen with text, you know what I mean? Their ARPU is going to 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 influencer posts, your ARPU 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. So look at your ARPU, aim for a $2 ARPU at least in month one and then ARPU basically being like how much revenue you're making per download. And then look at your retention. So now that the month's like starting to be like close to being over, see how many people unsubscribe. And then if your retention'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 Wrestle AI. In the first month, our 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 our churn 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 app's helping them keep on track with their weight and stuff like that. So we just added. Then 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 churn like that solved our retention problem. And at the end of the day the TLDR is good product and good creatives and that makes your life so much easier. So my newest project, 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 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, and it's solely because the products actually, in my opinion, the product's actually cool and really useful. 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 a video. And we have a four video deal with four stories for 2,500 bucks. That's like, like our CPM is going to 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 that's basically the TLDR of how to make a successful app or semi successful app.
- [39:52]
A
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 thousands of dollars, hundreds of thousands of dollars, sometimes millions of dollars with vibe coded apps. But here you are, someone who's non technical. How old are you?
- [40:13]
B
I'm 19.
- [40:13]
A
Just turned exactly like young guy and no real background in this. And here you are in the field proving otherwise. So what do you say to people who say that it's not possible?
- [40:34]
B
Yeah, it's so funny because people really hate on vibe coding. They call it AI slob this and that. And as you've seen in the slideshow, I'm actually very big on product as a vibe coder, which is 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? I really love Roark and I talk very highly about them. I'm also, like, now working with them too, because I was like the first power user, so they brought me on.
- [41:10]
A
But.
- [41:11]
B
But with. With Swift and with these new AI models, there's no, in my opinion, there's no such thing as a 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 and 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 apps built by some of these, like, Roark users that, like, I've downloaded just, like, see what they were doing. And I actually used this one workout app, Coreos. 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, it auto tracks how much time you spend in the gym. And I'm like, this is one of the coolest apps I've downloaded and it's fully made by AI. It's like, it's like, insane. So I'm very big on. I'm very. I'm very against AI slop. 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
- [42:26]
A
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 going to 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 going to have to rebuild the whole thing.
- [42:49]
B
So I haven't hit it yet. Maybe it's because I'm not big enough, 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 there would be 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'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?
- [43:27]
A
Yeah.
- [43:28]
B
So I'm going to say it honestly depends, maybe if you're building a social media app, but personally I haven't seen any of that.
- [43:36]
A
So 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, how do you see it playing out?
- [43:53]
B
100%. So this is, this is like, in my opinion, this is the drop shipping boom. This is like the E comm boom, right? Back in the day, meta ads, you used to boot them up for E comm. I was never involved. I actually like failed at E comm and then went into apps. But back in the day, like 2015, people used to boot up these e comm sites, drop shipping, whatever, through a little bit of money into metads and would see like 4-5x ROAS, right? Today with apps, it's very similar. If you make an app, and again, if it's 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 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 it'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? Marketed it since, since July. 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? 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'm finding adoption is still pretty slow. Like, you get caught up in this, like, Twitter mindshare, where you're like, everyone's building an app. In actuality, 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 still uses, still hasn't even. 15% of the world, like, only uses ChatGPT. Like, compared, like 85% of the world still doesn'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.
- [46:06]
A
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 gonna be valuable for anyone who's interested in building a mobile app with AI?
- [46:23]
B
1 tip.
- [46:26]
A
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 that you know you want to share?
- [46:35]
B
Yeah. Oh, yeah. Really focus on being able, like learning how to sell things. So all, like my, the ability to close influencers came from when I was like 16 and I had to do like door to door sales for power washing or 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 called, the guy was Greek, right? I spent 90% of the call talking about Greek, like Greece. And like me and him were just vibing about both being Greek. And then at the end I go, okay, so look, your content, your views vary a little bit. To not gyp you out, why don't we do like a $2 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, which is why Vibe coding is great, because the people who used to build apps didn't really have the craziest social skills.
- [47:45]
A
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. I'll include links for where to follow George in the show notes in the description. I'll 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.
- [48:08]
B
Yeah, thank you so much.