Making $$$ with IOS apps

0:00There'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 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.

0:46This is the sort of stuff that 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.

1:25Are 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 get there relatively quickly. All right, well, show me how, my friend. Yeah, so first, a bit of social proof for why you should listen to me. 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...

2:16One of them's 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 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 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 um 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.

3:40That was the idea. And your idea, it should be simple, have 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. 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. There's one thing missing from that, in my opinion.

4:19So you use the examples of WrestleAI, CalAI. I mean, the question we have to ask ourselves is, what are ideas that now AI has unlocked? So people have been building mobile apps since 2008. And it became increasingly harder to build something that people were 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 better than the existing experiences. Like Cal AI, you can take a picture of your spaghetti and it'll tell you how many calories it has. And then the second thing is, well, obviously, that's actually the main piece.

5:16It's just like you're creating more value for the customer, right? So it's like, how important do you think that is to the idea? I think that's huge. 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 a wrestling app having any sort of success.

6:09You know what I mean? So it allows people who are more niched down into things to create good products for these more niche communities without needing a ton of capital investment. Cool. All right, let's continue. Yeah. Like wrestling. I 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 the video, I would ask myself the question, who watches this type of video?

6:48What 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 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.

7:33So 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 Wrestle 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 like have a good idea and be passionate about the idea.

8:13And I was like, I'm just going to make this AI Riz style app and it'll make a lot of money because 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 at this app and just going like, okay, maybe it's because my marketing wasn't creative enough.

8:57Maybe 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 when I made the decision, I'm only going to be working on ideas that I'm passionate about and 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 about the TikToker, what was his name, Young Cantaloupe?

9:33how were 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 multi-million follower account to partner with you on an app that has no validation or anything. Yeah, I'm a DM wizard. So 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 WrestleAI 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.

10:21I was in physics. I was scrolling on my like TikTok for you page and I saw an ad for Rourke 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 for 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 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 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.

11:33That's what got him. That's a good pitch though, right? 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, 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.

12:08So 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 are people would be interested in this. Let's partner up. And what do you propose? I don't know if you're able to say this, but what sort of deals can you propose? 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 the 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.

12:42And 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 see what happens. And sometimes you could also best equity. I know a lot of people do it in different ways or some people best the person's equity. To be honest, I was in college. I just needed my first win. I would give them 50 % up front and see what happens. That was kind of my idea with it. You're saying for your new apps, you're not finding influencer marketing to be helpful? Is that what you're saying? No, no, no. Not that influencer marketing isn't helpful, but the draw you get from just one influencer isn't as big.

13:34So it's easier to 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 i really want to response with an influencer because it was an easier jump start right but if you do have the capital to throw a bit of money at some influencers i would suggest just very 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.

14:12But the right influencer is a game changer. Like if you look at, you know, I think, you know the manifest app, Stella? Yeah. Just her alone. I mean, you can check it on Sensor Tower, so I'm not going to be doxing her. Just her alone brought in like 300K a month to that app, right? 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 net ads 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.

14:53Like 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 do that if you have no ethos. so maybe get e-mail first and then do that that's my idea one thing you can do is 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 worked 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 that's a good way to do it if you have the capital Yeah, or you could probably use that idea to negotiate cheaper rates with them as well.

15:42So you'd be like, look, I'll pay you. I know your typical rates are like$2 ,000 a video. I'll pay you$1 ,000. 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 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 i was gonna 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 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.

16:35I 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 functions? And if she can't, which a bunch of times she's been like, oh, it's too cluttered. You know what I mean? So I've been like, okay, 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. All my apps have been created with AI. I've built all my apps through Rourke. And my framework for building is I dedicate like 14 days to actually building out the main functionality of the app.

17:19What'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 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 after I add in RevenueCat 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.

17:57So as I was saying earlier on 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 Cal AI, 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.

18:33So if I took one of my influencers, let's say Corey Zader, right? 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 video 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 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?

19:22Cal AI, 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. This is a really important feature that you need to nail. This is 90 % of distribution. Another way to think about that gotcha feature, which I agree is so, so important, is you're reverse engineering the TikTok or the Instagram reel. Yeah, exactly. And you're building the product around that. That's one framework that I use when I'm trying to come up with startup ideas, especially in the consumer mobile app space.

20:06I'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 kind of 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. Think about it, right? What is Hinge? Or what is Tinder? You swipe and you find 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.

20:56These 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. 100%. I fully agree. I think about it very similarly. there we go all right onboarding but yeah anyway onboarding um so so many people overthink and overcomplicate the process onboarding has four functions right three main functions one optional educate the user what what is your product and why do they need it right uh 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 the ad better and also increasing the time commitment they have to your app.

21:55So 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 WrestleAI. 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?

22:33So 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's your weight? What weight do you wrestle at? And then you get hit with a paywall, right? that mock film analysis is super important to increasing conversions. But that's pretty much it. I also wrote a docs in docs.roarke.com where I kind of 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.

23:10And 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. 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. But I first bought the amount of followers. 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. 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.

23:46Pay 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 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 WrestleAI, if I watch one of my favorite wrestling influencers, I see WrestleAI is tagged in the caption and I'm like, whoa, that seems like a pretty cool app.

24:36I then click on the tag in the bio, in the caption. It gets me to my WrestleAI page, let's say. I'll then watch four more WrestleAI videos 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 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?

25:18So 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 I probably wouldn't even answer. And if I do answer, when we hop on a call, you won't have any ethos or credibility in the conversation. So you lose all your authority. So you have to pay whatever insane rates he asks for. However, if I have a brand account and I'm showcasing that I'm working with tons of influencers, now the influencer sees it, they go, okay, he's working with a ton of influencers, so he can't be paying zero dollars.

26:00He has to be paying something. 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 high authority Instagram account. They're going to 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 is 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.

26:38So 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 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 don't always listen to me you can do what you want this is what you've done yeah exactly but i mean wrestling is actually not bought it um 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 gets 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.

27:59So 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 try to 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.

28:35And 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 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, 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.

29:12So 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 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 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?

29:58Hop on the phone with these people and just pay them whatever you want because they're not going to ask for 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 800 a month just pay it 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 to him that's that's literally what I don't, right?